Ooh, what's for dinner!

It is a yucky, dreary, chilly rainy day here today. I thought I moved away from Chicago to get away from things like SNOW in MARCH! In any case, days like this make me long for comfort food - things that I ate growing up, which in my case usually means Chinese food. And not the junk that you get from the take-out place either. Home cooking, which they don't really serve in most Chinese restaurants. Unfortunately, my rice cooker died an unfortunate death recently, so I've been a bit lost without it.

This morning in the shower though, I had a stroke of inspiration. I can't believe that I didn't think of this before, but I'm going to set up a "hot pot" tonight, also known as shabu shabu. You'll see why this is on the crafty blog when I get some pictures going. Yay! I'm all excited now!

Getting closer

All of my obsessive-compulsive behavior has paid off. I finished the main portion of the needle roll and felted it over the weekend, and I must say, I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. Here are the before and after pics:





I threw the pen on there to give some sense of scale, and as you can see, the felting process shrank it up quite a bit, although most of the shrinkage was in the length, not the width. It went from being approximately 24 inches long to just over 17. After I took this picture, I also stretched and pulled it a bit to get it to be more squared off in shape.

Now I just have to knit the cables to stick the needles through and then sew on buttons and it's done! I'm just hoping I have enough yarn.

BAH!

I'm trying really hard to stick to a project from start to finish with this Knit Along thing. But because I had to divert from the pattern, it's getting a little complicated. The needle roll so far has come out way wider than I thought (always a problem because I seem to knit very loose compared to gauge). Normally, this wouldn't bother me because this thing is supposed to be felted anyway, but now I'm starting to run out of yarn and it's not quite as long as I'd hoped. Also, my friend Mee just told me that when you felt, your piece shrinks more in length than width. Doh!!

Anyways, here's what I have so far. I'm too anal retentive to just start tacking on whatever other yarn I have on hand. It has to follow the pattern I have in my head. Since I took the picture, I've run out of the green, so I unravelled and picked out stitches from the bottom and am adding more on that end. I guess we'll just have to wait and see what happens when I felt. I'm hoping to finish this main part tomorrow night when I have people over for a Knitting Night.

Happy Valentine's Day!

I love any excuse to bake something crazy. Lucky for me, today was my turn to host our weekly playgroup for E and her little friends, so I decided to go all out and make some fancy schmancy Valentine cookies. The iced sugar cookies didn't quite turn out as nice as the picture in my head, but considering how rusty I am, I was pretty happy with them. These were more or less the best of the bunch: And the shortbread hearts up top (from the Barefoot Contessa Cookbook) were really tasty, even though the dough was really hard to work with. I was so fed up with how crumbly it was that instead of re-rolling the scraps after my first cutting, I just tossed everything. I had enough for about 15 cookies (top and bottom), which I figured was more than enough for 7 moms and babies. And I was right: there's a ton of leftover. I guess I know what T & I are having for dessert tonight. I'm not complaining.

A few more pics. Here are the ones that came closest to what I originally wanted:
And here are the rest of the cookies, including the reject ones that in my typically OCD manner, I deemed unfit to put out.

Another hat

I made this as part of a crafty exchange with a friend. I guess I'm sort of ruining the surprise if she sees this post, but I'm really happy with how this turned out and just couldn't wait to share. I have to give another shoutout to Ravelry, which is where I came across the pattern. It was much much easier to make than it looks. I think I may have to make one for myself, even though it's warmed up quite a bit here, and I probably won't wear it till next year.

I'm all sewed out

I ordered a whole bunch of knee socks last month so that I could make a batch of babylegs to sell. Man, I really did not know what I was getting myself into. I think this may be the first and last time I try to do something like this for money. I've been sewing on and off, working at them sporadically for the past few weeks, but today I finally got a bug in my butt about it so I spent most of the day sewing, and finally have the last pair almost done. The worst part is, I've been waiting to put them up for sale until they're ALL done, so they've been sitting here, cluttering up my table, and just generally in my way and taunting me.

Now onto the selling, which I should note that I'm terrible at. I have a really hard time being all rah-rah, especially about my own stuff, because I'm so incredibly anal retentive that I get all worked up that people are going to notice every tiny little defect. *sigh* I think I should stick to knitting.

My very first Knit-Along!

After the knitting night last week, I decided to take the reins (or be Julie the Cruise Director, as my friend Meighan likes to call it) and organize a knit-along on the mom's board I'm on. I thought I'd post it here too for anyone else who happens to randomly come across this and wants to join in. It's a felted needle roll. The cool thing that I really like about the pattern is that instead of pockets for the needles, there's two bands of cabling. Here is a link to the pattern:
http://www.berroco.com/exclusives/kable/kable.html

If you actually do this and finish it, send me a picture, and I'll post it!