Crafts and Cooking

Here is pattern one complete of my knit lace sampler. It’s a simple diagonal eyelet pattern, with garter stitch below and above and along the sides. You can see that I didn’t quite have the pattern down for my first few rows and the eyelets aren’t as sharply diagonal as I would like. But, I’m approaching this in the legitimate spirit of a sampler, something to demonstrate my skill but also to develop my skill. If I get a pattern entirely wrong, I’ll re-work it, but I’m going to let the hiccups in my learning process be apparently along the … Continue reading Knit Lace Sampler: Pattern One

Having just finished a pair of socks (except weaving in the ends, goodness how I hate weaving in ends), the current “stay at home” order has found me without any sort of craft project in progress, which clearly had to be remedied. So, after organizing my supplies, I decided to make another attempt at a project I tried to tackle a few years ago but got derailed on: knitting a lace sampler. Specifically, I want to make the 91-pattern lace sampler from Knitting Pace: A Workshop with Patterns and Projects by Susanna Lewis. The sampler recreates a early/mid-19th century lace … Continue reading Knit Lace Sampler: A New Project

I keep a moderately updated Pinterest board of recipes that I’ve made or want to make. Some of my memorable cooking of the decade is there, but a fair bit isn’t. For example, I got a smoker this decade, and now smoking our Thanksgiving turkey is an annual tradition that, if I believe what they say, my whole family looks forward to. Homemade smoked salmon, slow-smoked brisket, and even the half dozen extra chicken breasts I throw on the smoker whenever I use it and then freeze for later – this is my absolute favorite way to cook meat, though … Continue reading Best Cooking of the 2010s

It seems like 90% of the time, I skim through my Lifehacker feed without clicking a single link and question why I stay subscribed. And then I come across a post like this one that instructs you to Sift Out the Crumbs in a Cereal Bag with a Kitchen Strainer for a Better Last Bowl and they have me sucked back in for another month. The best thing is, you don’t actually have to follow the link since the whole “hack” is pretty much there in the title – if you have ever eaten cereal you get how it works.

This knitting the weather project, wherein one selects a range of yarn colors to represent different types of weather, and then knit a row a day in the appropriate color, really appeals to me. I could see doing this for other types of record keeping as well, such as knitting a row each night for the number of hours I spent working that day, or how far I ran, or just a general quality-of-day-to-color mapping. But the low-tech data visualization aspect of it really tickles me. But I already have an obsessive knitting project going – I am working through … Continue reading Innovating Knitting

I am unreasonably excited that King Arthur Flour is coming out with an unbleached cake flour. I love their bread flour, and my entirely-uneducated-bias is against bleached flours. I’m really hopeful that this shows up in my local food store. Sadly, I cannot even find regular cake flour in my local food store, so my hopes are not too high. Anyone who live around me have suggestions of where I can get cake flour around here? My Cake Bible has been pouting at me every time I use regular all-purpose in a birthday cake, but I cannot bring myself to … Continue reading Same low protein, less chlorine

I have been trying to get into the habit of taking a real lunch to work with me, and making up a batch of brown rice for the week that I can top with stuff seemed like a good idea – it would be filling and easy to throw together in the morning. Unfortunately, while I know brown rice is much better for me than white, I have not yet come around to liking the taste as much. So I decided I needed to make something aggressive enough to put on brown rice, while still being compatible with its flavor. … Continue reading Not really a recipe

I always get overly ambitious with holiday baking, because while I enjoy doing it my first instinct is towards things like pies (for Thanksgiving) or cut out and decorated sugar cookies (for Christmas) that are yummy but fussy and time consuming. So I need to remember that there are recipes like this out there as well. It’s not as fancy as a pie, but this Chocolate Chip Pumpkin Nut Bread is both easy and delicious. A single recipe really will make three bread loaves so don’t double it up unless you have an insanely large mixing bowl and want to … Continue reading Holiday Baking

I did not do as well in Sock Wars as I would have liked, in large part due to its unfortunate timing in the midst of finals (what time I gained in knitting while proctoring I lost working against the deadline for final grades). So I was excited to see that there is also a Hat Attack competition, which conveniently starts September 16th, which tends to be as much of a slow spot in the academic semester as you are going to find. Plus, hats are way quicker to knit than socks.And in this competition last knitter standing wins $500 … Continue reading Reentering the competitive knitting circuit

My goal for the summer is to end it with fewer projects, not more, but there are so many cute crafty projects out there that I keep running across. You can never have too many fun summer dresses, and I really like the shape on this jersey swing dress. The pattern is a bit vague though – I need to print it out and think about it before I try it. I like patterns that are more guidelines in theory, but there is something nice about the pin and cut on the lines types. If you aren’t the sewing type, … Continue reading Too many projects