Archive for December 2007
Corked out
Posted on: December 29, 2007
I’ve been knitting for a long, long time. Mom taught me the basics when I was twelve — cast on, knit, purl, bind off — and for years that was it. I never adventured beyond the never-ending afghan, a project which would take months to complete, even though it was the most stupid simple pattern ever: CO 4, K2, yo, knit to end, until it was wide enough, and then, K1, K2t, yo, K2t, knit to end.
I’ve been knitting for a long, long time, but it was only this past year that I became adventurous enough to break free of the stupid simple afghan. At the Capt’n's urging, I made a hat, and then a sock, patiently following instructions posted on the intarwebs and learning that there was more to the craft than just using two pointy sticks. I started hitting up the local yarn store, bypassing the big box acrylics for real live, honest to god wool. I made a cardigan from a trendy book on knitting, hated the end results and went back to knitting hats and gloves.
I found Knitty.com and Village Wools and became obsessed with knitting with DPNs and cabling. I started altering other people’s patterns — big person socks shrunk down to little person socks, better fitting gloves — but I was still dazzled by the artist who could pick up a hank of yarn and design something new.
And then, about the time my mother gave me a battered copy of “A Second Treasury of Knitting Patterns” by Barbara G. Walker, the Capt’n asked for gloves of his own. He was impressed by the Fetching pattern, but it was too girly. I showed him the complementary pattern, Dashing, but he wasn’t into it. He wanted something cooler, something with cables going up the length of the garment, something awesome.
It’s amazing how much of this new hobby has been the result of the Capt’n gently urging me to expand my horizons.
These gloves are based off the “Cork” cable pattern found in the Second Treasury, but the design, with the cables offset, is my own.
I’m hesitant to post the pattern right away — it feels like my baby, and I’m not quite ready to send it out into the world. Hell, I’m half expecting some anonymous crafter to pipe up and tell me that it isn’t original, that I’ve basically plagiarized a popular pattern that I haven’t stumbled across yet, that I’m a talentless hack, a knitting dilettante, a waste of perfectly good wool.
So the pattern’s not going up quite yet, but if you really, really want it, leave a comment, and we’ll work something out. It’s my baby. I’m sure you understand.
capped off
Posted on: December 17, 2007
- In: d'oh!mestic! | knitwit
- 4 Comments
The Capt’n asked that, maybe, if I could get around to it, could I possibly knit him a hat? For Christmas?
Well, that was a big ol’ “heck, yeah.”
I dug out a skein of Debbie Bliss Alpaca Silk out of the stash basket last night and went to town. It knit up fast — I had it finished within six hours of of casting on, and the pattern will follow at the end of the post. (I also want to note that I have joined Ravelry, in case you want to skip all the opinions and recipes offered here, and just look at my projects. I have the same name — dohmestic– and all of my patterns will be cross-posted there.)
It was a big ol’ weekend in D’oh!Mestic land, all the way around. There was the gingerbread of last post, more ginger cookies, (because, as I might have mentioned, I am a touch obsessed with the ginger), truffles (more on those goodies later this week) and bagels, because the Capt’n and I both forgot to pick up any sort of bread product at the grocery store.
And the hat. The hat. The hat that I swore would be the last Christmas item I knit, the hat was finished and now I’m working on a pair of gloves. God, I am a sucker for punishment.
I’d say it was an ultra productive several days. We had dinner at my parents’ house this evening, and as I was half-bragging about what I got done, I started listing off what I have on tap after I finish the Christmas presents — gloves on commission for a co-worker, a hat for a co-worker, socks for myself — when the Capt’n asked if I’d considered setting up an Etsy store.
The short answer is yes — a D’oh!Mestic Etsy store will probably come about in the New Year. When in the New Year is up for debate, but I will probably start knitting with an eye towards stocking a shop. But if I could figure out how to ship off the goodies as well, that would be gravy.
Anyone have any advice?
The Capt’n's Christmas Hat
Cast on 96 stitches on size 6 DPNs. Divide evenly, careful not to twist
K2 P2 for 12 rounds
K until piece measures about 6″ from edge
Shaping the crown:
Shape the crown:
Slip last stitch off of needle three and onto needle one.
K2tg, K6 to end, slipping last stitch to next needle.
Knit round
Slip last stitch from needle three onto needle one.
K2tg, K5 to end, slipping last stitch to next needle.
Knit round
Slip last stitch from needle three onto needle one.
K2tg, K4 to end, slipping last stitch to next needle.
Knit round
Slip last stitch from needle three onto needle one.
K2tg, K3 to end, slipping last stitch to next needle.
Knit round
Slip last stitch from needle three onto needle one.
K2tg, K2 to end, slipping last stitch to next needle.
Knit round
Slip last stitch from needle three onto needle one.
K2tg, K1 to end, slipping last stitch to next needle.
Knit round
Slip last stitch from needle three onto needle one.
K2tg, K2tg to end, slipping last stitch to next needle.
Knit round
Slip last stitch from needle three onto needle one.
K2tg, K2tg to end, slipping last stitch to next needle.
Break yarn and thread through remaining six stitches.
a trifle obsessed
Posted on: December 15, 2007
I think I might be having an issue with the ginger. Specifically, I’m a touch obsessed. I say this, because when I woke up this morning and saw that it was snowing, I decided — after breaking out the extensive profanities — that I’d make gingerbread cookies.
Actually, I think I said, “Oh, boy! It’s snowing! Now I can make gingerbread cookies!” Which I then envisioned eating with a cup of ginger tea — and then I had trouble deciding which ginger tea, because I’ve amassed several lately.
Problem.
(Oddly enough, my beautiful tin of powdered ginger didn’t make it into the shot)
I used Martha’s gingerbread recipe, because it was at hand, and I have to say it turned out well. As per my MO, I swapped out the black pepper for fire engine red cayenne to bring out the latent heat in the ginger, and really, I could have stood an extra yolk’s worth of moisture (the eggs I used weren’t as large as they could have been), but the cookies rolled out and baked up nicely, so I’m counting this one as a win.
However — and there’s usually that “however,” isn’t there?
When I got to the cutting phase of the recipe, I decided to forgo the usual shapes and just slice rectangles. I was inspired — the color of the gingerbread was an exact match for a paper bag, and while it might sound rather odd to some of my friends, paper bags are very much a part of Christmas in these parts. No New Mexican Christmas is complete without a string of luminarias marching across a snow-covered adobe wall.
( A quick primer on luminarias, or, if you’re from northern New Mexico, farolitos. Same/same.)
So I cut rectangles, and dreamed up an icing scheme.
The icing scheme didn’t quite work out the way I planned. It’s less paperbag-y and more rhombus-y. Sigh. I did figure out — after I had managed to toss the extra icing, mind you — that if I pressed the cookies into raw sugar, I got a lovely, lighted brown effect similar to a luminaria. I smacked my forehead good after that. A quick-thinking genius I am not.
But next time, next time, I will remember to smear the cookies and dip them in sugar, and maybe, if I’m really ambitious, I’ll do a stained glass version with melted butterscotch centers, to give them that lit-from-within feeling of the real thing.
Or not. I’d like to think my obsession has its limits.
(Tomorrow! I’ll do it tomorrow!)
what i’ve been up to
Posted on: December 14, 2007
I don’t care that I had a four day weekend two weeks ago, I needed some extra time off, time to decompress, catch up on some creative projects (pictures! knitting! writing!), y’know, get back to the business of living.
This hat is, I hope, the last of the Christmas knitting. After wallowing in the HDTV goodness of a recorded U2 concert, The Capt’n requested an Edge skull cap, and you know I am all over that. It’s another experimental pattern, using the fancy schmancy Noro wool blend– 60% wool, 30% Cashmere and 10% Nylon — the Revoltech of yarn. I hope that it turns out, but even if it doesn’t, I’ve got some swank hanks to add to the stash basket.
And hell, I even got a little work in on the book.
almost there
Posted on: December 10, 2007
- In: ::crick:: | d'oh!mestic! | experiments | half-baked
- 4 Comments
When I was eleven years old, my mom got tired of listening to me beg for treats and chucked (okay, handed) the Joy of Cooking in my general direction and told me to figure it out on my own.
Except, she said it nicely, because my mother is a very nice woman.
Still, at the age of eleven — or maybe I was nine — I was expected to suck it up and do it myself. And on the day I was ushered into the kitchen, I was taught the basic rule of baking: use what you have, and for god’s sake, pay attention to the measurements called for.
I have a vague memory of my mother telling me to pick a recipe by what we had at hand, because she was not going to make a special trip to the store just so I could burn a batch of cookies. I remember that she suggested brownies, because we had everything for them, and I remember how she got down the tin of Hershey’s cocoa powder special and then left me to my own devices, just me and the cookbook and an overwhelming desire to make something good.
And I remember how, spurred on by my initial success and establishing a pattern that still holds later in life, I made brownies every day for weeks afterwards, and even after I had branched out into other treats — oatmeal chocolate chip cookies or pumpkin pies, say — brownies were the old standby, a quick way to pass an hour on an endless Sunday afternoon.
I’m sure that in a parallel universe, this would be the point in the narrative where I would talk about spending my teenaged years in the little kitchen of my childhood, making the transition from pedestrian bake sale fare to elaborate Asian-inspired pastries, thus setting a course for my future glamorous side project of baking and writing about it on the intarwebs. However, in this reality, I didn’t hoard back issues of Bon Appetite, and I’m sorry to say that by the time I finished high school, I had stopped baking completely, and with the end of my baking came the end of my brownies.
I lost the magic. I have lost the magic. In the intervening years since graduation, I haven’t been able to make a single decent batch of brownies.
A couple of times during my college years, I took a crack at making pan, but they’d always come out weird — the cocoa would be off, giving the end product a color more similar to creamed coffee than, y’know, brown, or, if they were brown, it would taste like I’d dangled a single packet of sugar over the mixing bowl. Sometimes the squares would have the consistency of wet cement, or sometimes they’d resemble baked adobe bricks. It didn’t matter how faithfully I followed the recipe, I could not reproduce the earlier successes of my childhood.
I blamed many factors — decrepit rental ovens, faulty memory, altitude — but when I got into this house, my house, and I started baking in earnest, I still could not produce a single batch of edible brownies to save my life. I hate to bring up the Kate Hepburn incident again, but the proof (as it were) is in the pudding. I suck at brownies, which means I fail as an American.
Seriously. In a piece which appeared in the April 11, 2007 edition of The New York Times, Julia Moskin speculates on the decidedly American origins of the simple brownie and its evolution from deflated chocolate cake to a chocolate-heavy soul food and status symbol among hip French pastry chefs and talks about how simple, how easy they are. Why, even a child can make brownies. And hell, any food that a moderately stoned hippie can make (with added, grassy ingredients) can’t be anything but simple, right?
Failed. American.
But there I was this afternoon, hanging about the kitchen, bummed out for other reasons, needing a distraction. I didn’t even know what I was going to make when I started pulling things out of the pantry, it was just whatever came to hand.
What came to hand was fine, unsweetened chocolate, sugar, eggs — the idea started building — pecans, heavy cream, flour, vanilla. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. I started mixing without giving name to what I was making. I just melted the butter and the chocolate, added a little more, beat a few eggs, it needs more sugar. This was baking by feel, something I thought was impossible. It was part muscle memory and part invention. And by god, when the experiment came out of the oven after thirty-five agonizing minutes, I was pleased to say I succeeded.
Sort of. I added a half bag of pecans to the batter, thinking it might liven things up. The Capt’n, who claims not to be partial to brownies, shunned this batch when he discovered the nuts. I’m not sure he’s wrong, either.
Still, it’s a success, and damn it, I’m going to post the recipe.
Almost There Brownies
12 oz. 100% cacao unsweetened baking chocolate (1 1/2 baking bars)
3/4 pound butter
3 eggs
2 1/2 cups sugar
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/4 cup heavy cream
1 Tbs baking powder (yeah, I know, but damn it, it’s over a mile up in altitude here)
1 Tbs baking soda
2 Tbs vanilla
1/4 tsp salt
1 1/2 c flour
Pecans (really, really optional)
Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.
In a heavy duty saucepan, melt chopped up chocolate and butter over medium-low heat. When all the lumps are out, remove from heat and set aside.
In a large mixing bowl, beat the three eggs and add in two cups of sugar. Continue beating. Add brown sugar and final 1/2 cup of white sugar. Continue beating. Add the bicarb, baking powder, vanilla and cream, and mix until everything’s combined. Pour in the buttery-chocolate mixture and mix until just incorporated. Add flour and mix throughly. Pour into whatever pan you have at hand and bake for 35ish minutes, or until a toothpick inserted in the middle comes out mostly clean.
This could be revised later, but it kind of made my day.
baking and other things
Posted on: December 9, 2007
I read this article and couldn’t stop nodding. Baking. Depression. Martha Stewart.
I’m not alone in this particular brand of Middle Class White Girl Nuttiness. That’s rather comforting.
seasonal affective disorder
Posted on: December 8, 2007
Less than three weeks until Christmas and I am preternaturally calm.
Actually, “calm” is a bit misleading. “In serious denial” is more accurate, though still misses the mark. The tree is up, we’re worked through the gift list — I’ve even got most of the loot wrapped — so it’s not like I’m plugging my ears at every jingle bell or falalalalalala. It’s just that I’ve been stricken with a severe case of holiday impotence, and I have no idea how to shake it.
It starts with the question: didn’t we just do this? I was unboxing the kitchen decorations (cardboard box three of six) thinking that I had just put these knick knacks away. The usual joy of unwrapping and rediscovering the Capt’n's childhood Christmas train or the satin dove my grand mother gave me just wasn’t there. Somehow, the proceeding eleven months compressed, leaving me to say, “What, again?“
And then it slides into a list of things to buy and things to make, with the realization that the made things will probably be put aside for the purchased items, which is almost enough to propel me face-first into a plate of Christmas cookies, which can only lead down the road of ten pounds gained and a bleak January devoid of warmth and full of recriminations.
Wow. What an ungrateful little scrooge I am.
So I’ve slipped into holiday survival mode, decorating but not going balls out to have a color coordinated tree or draping the walls in clear twinkle lights. I’m not planning a party this year, or taking careful pains in the gift wrap aisle at Target. While the other shoppers were fighting over the coordinated metallic gift boxes wrapped with velvet ribbons, I reached for the garish, primary colored penguin-and-snowman paper. I’m going through the motions this year.
The Capt’n thinks that if we could just skip Christmas one year and let twenty-four months elapse between bouts of holiday cheer — really let the anticipation build — we’d be totally down with the holiday spirit. I’m thinking not so much. We’ve sort of tried that already. In 2005 we skipped the month-long production at home to participate in the holiday orgy that is midtown Manhattan in mid-December, and it still didn’t feel like Christmas. The trend continued into last year, though I think spending two weeks on sunny beaches in Hawaii might hold some of the blame.
What was I saying? Oh, yeah. It still doesn’t feel like the damn holiday season.
I’ve decided that if, when Black Friday 2008 rolls around and I”m still not feeling the jingle bell vibe, I’m going to pack up the Capt’n and the cat and head for points north, with a plan to stay put until the inauguration. Damn it, this malaise can only be shaken with with cold and snow and pine trees. Damn it.
My dad’s a little more philosophical, saying that it will never feel like Christmas, not the way it used to, but it’ll pick up a little bit when I have a kid and can view the season through that naive wonder, when it’s Santa Claus and not crass commercialism, which makes sense. It stopped feeling like Christmas about the time I stopped getting toys.
Anyone got a quick fix?
television
Posted on: December 1, 2007
The downstairs television has gone gently into that good night. We settled in to watch another Audrey Hepburn movie, and the sucker just wouldn’t turn on.
It’s dead, Jim.
On one hand, I’m glad that if something had to die this week, it was only the television. On the other hand, I’m a whimpering, twitching mess, because I am a cheap bastard and hate to shake loose money for things, especially when I had been carefully planning and saving towards a big-ticket purchase that wasn’t a 47″ flat panel.
Oh, MacBook Pro. It just wasn’t meant to be.
If I was the superstitious sort, I would swear here and now that the television heard my hippie-fied comments at Thanksgiving about how, oh, with the writer’s strike, I don’t really watch all that much television, and well, maybe if we ever managed to get a little one into this house, I might just get rid of television all together, and that the television decided to make me put my money where my mouth was.
Well, here’s the thing. While I do enjoy reading, writing and keeping myself entertained without television’s gentle glow, I get the most knitting done if I’m plopped in front of an old movie, and dammit, I still have miles of Christmas knitting to finish. Plus, I am married to the Capt’n, who has been jonesing for the LCD goodness since before we bought the last set some five years ago.
So tomorrow, we will do the one thing I swore I wouldn’t do this holiday season. We’re going to a big box store to look at the sets the Capt’n's already researched online. I think it’s come down to either the Samsung or the LG — whatever. We’ll have a new set by this time tomorrow evening, I’m told.
I’m sure I’ll report back. The winter’s going to be long, and I have a lot of wool to get through.
