Last post of 2007

Can you believe the year is over already? In just a couple months, my baby girl will turn 5 and my darling boy, who seems like he was just born yesterday, will be 3. So much has happened in the last year - we visited Japan and went on the inaugural Sea Socks cruise. I attended my first TNNA shows and had my first patterns published in Interweave Knits. It feels like Gardiner Yarn Works has moved forward by leaps and bounds, and I can't believe I'm exhibiting at TNNA next week. Yowza! I was elected to the board of the Association of Knitwear Designers, attended Cat Bordhi's self-publishing retreat and have continued to meet amazing people and make wonderful friends everywhere I go. I can't wait to see what 2008 has in store for me!

I'm finally starting to feel like I've got my legs under me as far as TNNA goes. I photographed the last of the designs this morning and finished up the new catalog. Patterns are madly being formatted and tech edited (but fortunately that doesn't have to be done before I go). I've got an 8' banner being printed to hang in the booth, and Donna and I are getting together to make our final plans before we meet up in Long Beach.

Looking back, I have to say that attending the TNNA shows was one of the best things I did for my business. It got me ready to exhibit, and it was such a great networking experience. Apart from all the knitting celebrities I got to ogle, it's wonderful to meet up with people I would never see otherwise. I can't wait to see them again in Long Beach as well as meeting up with new folks. It really does help to have connections in this business. I've gotten so much help from so many generous, thoughtful people along the way, I'm excited to finally be at a point where I feel like I can pass the favor along. I'm also totally psyched that I get to meet the famous, fabulous Jess and Casey of Ravelry at TNNA. Yee-haw! Being on the board of AKD does have its advantages...

Here's my favorite picture from this morning's session, courtesy of my hubby:



This is my new Ballerina Slipper design and I'm going to have to knit up a pair for Sydney, and fast - it's all I can do to keep her from running off with the sample pair. She was a great model, holding her feet perfectly still in all kinds of funny positions while we took the shots.

Now I'm off to pick up toys and load the dishwasher so we can start 2008 off on the right foot. Happy New Year, everyone!

Help!!!

No, I have not been blogging lately. It has finally hit me that TNNA is a mere two weeks away (I fly out on the 11th) - how the heck did that happen? I've been procrastinating like crazy, so of course I'm an insane person right now. Add to that the fact that Bill's building walls in the basement so he can move his office down there (and is trying to soundproof it as much as possible so he can be on the phone without hearing the kids screaming their fool heads off right above him), and things are in complete chaos around here.

I'm working desperately on my new patterns and updated catalog. The kids are being incredibly unhelpful - despite all the new toys they got for Christmas, their favorite game is tormenting Mommy while she's trying to work. I'm completely disgruntled about the fact that there's no school for yet another week! I hope we all manage to survive.

Fortunately, my most helpful friend Donna came over Monday morning to help me get my photography done. I forgot about three designs, so I'll have to do another short photo session in the next couple days, but we got the majority of the work done. Phew! Here are a couple of my favorites (designs will be out by Feb):







And these are just a few of the new designs I've got coming out next month! I hope to have the website updated soon with pictures for all, but first I've got to get all the pictures taken. Yes, I work best under pressure, but this is ridiculous!

I was not helped by the obsessive toy knitting I did for the kids before Xmas. The results were awesome, though. Sydney got mommy and baby fairies along with a very cute unicorn, from Claire Garland's Dream Toys book:



Owen got a trio of the cutest dinosaurs ever from the Knitting at Knoon Prehistoric Pals pattern:



My mother-in-law got a crocheted dishcloth and goat's milk soap in the shape of a sheep (she gave me a little sheep sculpture, so there was a lot of sheepy goodness happening on Xmas!):



And now I'm back to my desperate knitting and pattern formatting. And Sydney has just informed me that Owen just dumped an entire bottle of bubble soap onto the couch. Super. Anybody want to offer up their services as a volunteer full-time nanny and housekeeper for the next two weeks? Please? I'll knit you a Triceratops...

What's that? Knitting?

And a little bit of crocheting! I finally remembered to bring my camera to the shop, so I've got some pictures of samples I've worked up (and a couple of Xmas presents that are almost ready).

First up, the Knitting Needle Bag from Bag Style:



This is made out of RYC Cashsoft Chunky and uses the awesome polka-dotted Artviva needles. As soon as I saw this bag design, I knew it needed to be made with these needles...

Next, the Sand Dollar Pullover from Knitting Nature by Nora Gaughan along with the tam-whose-name-I-can't-remember, also from that book:



These are made from Fleece Artist Scotian Silk (wool & silk blend). Here's a close-up of the top of the tam:



All of the above items can be found at Dublin Bay (in-person or on-line)!

My personal Xmas knitting has been coming along as well. It's a bit of a challenge since the kids' projects can only be worked on when they're not around, but I managed to get the first of Sydney's dolls done:



Isn't she cute? Her hair is a combo of Rowan Kidsilk Haze and Artyarns Silk Mohair. Her body is Debbie Bliss Baby Cashmerino, and her dress is Classic Elite Waterlilies. This is a perfect stash-busting project since it takes about half a ball of each (much less than half for the hair). Today I'm going to try to finish the baby fairy. The patterns are from Claire Garland's book Dream Toys. Dublin Bay just got a big order of books in, and how delighted was I to find another book by Garland, this one filled with all sorts of fun crocheted toys. It's called Toys to Crochet (boring title for such a great book), and Tricia gave it to me as my Xmas present from the shop. Woot! I can't wait to make a little cow and calf, and a pig and piglet, and Sir Waldorf the Walrus (I'm making one of these for the shop, too!). Too fun!

I'm also crocheting gifts for Sydney's teacher and assistant, to be given with little bars of goat's milk soap (also from Dublin Bay - they're in the shape of little sheep!). Since Sydney goes to Catholic school, I thought these little angel dishcloths were appropriate:



I made them from this pattern and they only take a couple hours to make. So cute! I think I'm going to make soap savers as well since these only took up about a third of a ball of Ecoknit Cotton (you'll never guess where I got the cotton - I love my employee discount!).

After I finish all the Xmas stuff, it's back to my deadline knitting. The sweater that I have due at the end of the year is about half done, and it turns out I'll have an extra week. My extremely helpful friend Donna is going to help prod me into getting my TNNA stuff done. It doesn't help that I realized I don't actually need to have final copies of the patterns complete by TNNA - I just need to have a fair representation. I only seem to be able to perform when my back is up against a tight deadline. I am the world's worst procrastinator.

To top it all off, I'm sick yet again. I even had to cancel my sock class tonight because I don't want to be dripping and coughing all over my students. I felt bad for the folks at knit night last night - it was the kind of thing where I was okay in the morning and then progressively got worse throughout the day. I was up most of the night last night with a horrible scratchy throat and a kiddo who greeted me when I got home by almost barfing on his sleeping sister's head! Fortunately he didn't repeat his performance, but I was waiting all night for the pyrotechnics to begin again...

When good gingerbread goes bad...

On Friday, my newly minted domestic urges finally got the better of me. In the spirit of homemade bread (and butter), I decided to attempt that tricky holiday tradition, the gingerbread house. I got a gingerbread recipe link from my domestically-blessed friend Chris and found plans for a little house made from two pans of gingerbread. We mixed, measured, rolled and baked two big pans of dough. I stole a little corner out of one of the pans after they came out of the oven, and it was so yummy, I made a third batch of dough to make cookies out of. I was on a roll.

Once the gingerbread slabs were cool, we started construction. The first challenge - getting the slabs out of the pans in one piece. Next time we will line the pans with parchment paper to make it easier. This time, we had to cross our fingers and hope for not too much stick. The first slab (on the right) came out pretty well, but the second (on the left) - not so much.



There was still plenty of gingerbread, so we laid out our paper templates and decided to use that center piece that remained stuck to the pan for our foundation. I left Bill to cut everything out while I made some mortar (frosting) with which to stick it all together. The kids were having their own fun with the cookie dough...



We then set to work on the "gingerbread-raising" portion of the evening. I didn't get photographic evidence of the process because I was too busy trying to hold disturbingly fragile pieces of gingerbread together while Bill spatulaed on the icing mortar and tried to help the situation with toothpicks. It wasn't looking good, but we persevered. We gently repaired broken walls and doorways (Bill cursing the stupidity of a plan with so many wall-weakening windows the whole time) and ended up with this:



A house of cards, for sure, but we were proud of our little creation anyway. We had about three minutes to enjoy it before it started to sag dangerously. The windowed wall started to look angry...



How I wish I would've had a video camera to record the effects of gravity on this poor little house (along with the screaming and carrying on by me, the kids, my mother-in-law and Bill). I did capture the aftermath.



D'oh!



At least the gingerbread was super tasty. Lessons learned:

1 - Listen to the directions when it tells you to use bread flour or all-purpose flour. Do not assume that you can just substitute whole wheat flour without ramifications. It needed that extra gluten to hold itself together.

2 - Make sure the gingerbread is good and baked before you take it out of the oven. Despite what the recipe says, 18 minutes will NOT adequately bake two pans of 1/4"-thick gingerbread meant to become load-bearing walls. If it still looks squishy when the allotted time has passed, leave it in the oven a little longer rather than blindly following the recipe.

3 - Parchment paper in the bottom of the pan. See the first photo above if this is not self-explanatory.

4 - You know those kits that they sell in the kitchen-supply stores? Looking more and more like a good idea.

We now have about three pounds of gingerbread sitting in pieces on our counter. At least our disaster is tasty! I had a bit more success with my latest cookies - these are the candy cane cookies I'm taking to Amanda's cookie exchange party this afternoon. Good old Betty Crocker combined with a bag of that evil white flour came through in a big way.



At least I managed to do these up right! I feel about white flour the way I feel about acrylic, but I guess I need to admit that maybe each really does have a place in the world if used appropriately...

Oh, and that no-knead bread I attempted on Friday? It didn't ever rise. I'm not sure what I did wrong (but I suspect that I didn't give the yeast enough time to proof before I mixed in the flour, or else the water wasn't warm enough to get the yeast going), but I ended up with a little brown ball of extremely dense bread. It tasted pretty good, assuming you got a piece you could actually chew. Today I'm back to regular bread with white whole wheat flour. I added some vital wheat gluten to this batch in an attempt to get some fluffier, moister bread. I'm still having trouble making whole wheat bread that isn't dry and dense, but I tweak the recipe every time and I know I'll get there eventually. I'm strongly resisting adding all-purpose flour in place of some of the whole wheat, but that might be my next step if I can't ever get a 100% whole-wheat dough that I like.

I might need to start kneading by hand, again, too. I had my mixer smoking this morning after kneading my two-loaf batch for a couple of minutes with the dough hook! Yikes! Or I could take Chris's lead and buy myself a new 700-watt Bosch super-mixer for breadmaking... Santa? A little help here?

Goodness!

Where the heck did the week go? I'm back to my bad blogging habits already, it seems. So much for NaBloPoMo...

It's just hard to do everything. My new obsession with cooking things from scratch is eating up much of my free time, along with my new organization/cleaning kick. Bill's theory is that anything that you can manage to do consistently for three weeks becomes a habit, so it's looking good that a clean house (relatively, anyway) is now habitual for me! It's really nice, although I wish I could get the kids to help clean up their toys. They have a very bad habit of dumping their toy bins out all over the floor as soon as they wake up in the morning. If it's not all out by the end of the day, their day has not been a success. I've tried everything to get them to clean - coercion, bribery, threats, trying to make a game out of it - but nothing works. They're smarter than I am.

The newest thing that's eating at my brain while I sit in traffic is trying to figure out something creative to do with the kids' clothes that are too stained, ripped, or just generally too worn out to consign or give away. Every piece has some good parts on it, so I've been thinking about quilting, or making some kind of crazy rug out of it all - I just can't decide. It doesn't help that my sewing machine has been sitting in its box, unopened, since I bought it three years ago... I used to sew a lot as a kid, but I just barely remember how these days.

All these new domestic pursuits are again forcing me to reevaluate how I spend my time. I'm currently trying to get all my new patterns ready for TNNA, but my heart just isn't in it for some reason. I keep asking myself why I feel compelled to have my own pattern line when I've been able to keep myself plenty busy teaching and submitting to books and magazines. Do I need to do it just because it's there to be done? I think the TNNA show will give me a good indication of whether or not I really have it in me. I'm also wondering if going to wholesale-only was the wisest choice. I have been getting bigger orders, but they're extremely few and far between right now. We'll see how TNNA goes, and perhaps I'll go the complete opposite extreme and switch over to only selling downloadable pdfs. After all, the grass is always greener... One of these days I'll figure out the right mix.

Tomorrow, my mother-in-law is coming over for the afternoon and we're going to make gingerbread houses. Yes, that's a plural. I find myself overly uptight about letting the kids help me in the kitchen (my mom was like this, and I think that it contributed to some of my issues surrounding cooking and the kitchen...), so I'm hoping that making gingerbread for me to make a "Martha" house in addition to gingerbread for each of the kids to make their own smaller houses will save us a lot of grief in the long run. I'm quite certain that Sydney and Owen will each have a very different take on how a gingerbread house is supposed to look. We'll see how it goes.

I've been going nutso in the kitchen all week - I made applesauce, which I then turned into applesauce muffins. I also made bread pudding, meatloaf and mashed potatoes, and chicken in the crock pot. Tomorrow I'm going to attempt chicken cacciatore in the crock pot along with more mashed potatoes. I found a recipe that uses sour cream, cream cheese and garlic salt - it is just unbelievably good! Right now, I'm attempting some of the famous No-Knead Bread. I mixed it up around noon, and it's supposed to rise for at least 8 hours and preferably 12-18. Well, it looks about the same right now as it did right after I mixed it up. I'm hoping that I'll come downstairs tomorrow morning and something miraculous will have happened... The recipe says that it's pretty much idiot-proof, so that would indeed be the bread that I'd manage to screw up.

And now it's back to deadline knitting for me. I'll talk to you again next week, if not before! Hopefully before - this weekly blogging is extremely pathetic, even for me.

It's like buttah...

Guess what I made today:



Yup! Butter. It's the coolest thing, and here's how I did it (you can too, really). First, I followed this great tutorial on making your own butter as well as directions in a little cheesemaking booklet that Storey Press puts out. Yes, the same Storey Press that publishes the Yarn Harlot books. They also published my favorite backyard chicken book - they've got some very cool books!

Anyway, armed with the information from these two sources, I felt ready to proceed. I got a half-gallon of heavy whipping cream from Costco and left it out on the counter for a few hours to warm to room temperature. Then, I poured about half of it into my handy dandy Kitchenaid mixer and put the whisk attachment on. I turned it on and waited as the cream got progressively thicker.





I know both of those pictures look the same, but the second is of the cream as it's in heavy-duty whipped cream mode. Once it starts to look like the stuff that comes out of a can, it's time to turn the mixer back down because the magic is about to happen. All of a sudden, the butter forms and the mixture gets all watery and will splatter you if you're not careful. It's the coolest thing. One minute you've got Redi-Whip, the next you've got milky-looking water with yellowish chunks floating in it, like in the next picture. Craziness!



Once the chunks form, you've got butter and buttermilk. When I lifted the top of the mixer so that I could drain the buttermilk, the butter easily separated itself...



I put the precious buttermilk in its own container (we are making pancakes this weekend, baby!) and set to work rinsing the butter. We'll see if I did a good enough job, because apparently butter will go bad very quickly if you don't get all the buttermilk out of it.

It starts out looking like this (this is my butter in its first cold-water bath - appetizing, eh?):



I used this wooden kitchen tool that we have (I have no idea what it is, but it's flat and works perfectly as a butter paddle) to smoosh the butter against the side of the bowl and squeeze the water out. A large wooden spoon would work very well for this process, too.



I rinsed a good six or seven times in fresh cold water each time until the water looked like it was rinsing clear. I had a hard time telling exactly since it seemed to look a little milky against the side of the bowl but when it ran into the sink it looked nice and clear. I guess we'll find out if the butter's bad in a few days! Anyway, here are the fruits of my labor. Not bad for about a half hour's worth of work (much of it standing next to the mixer gleefully waiting for chunks to form)!



I also made bagels today, but that's a story for another post. I'm going to go eat some of that butter on one of those fresh bagels right now!

Wild weather

My quest to get to Seattle for a kid-free weekend with my hubby is in great peril. It seems like a big swath of Washington between here and there is underwater, and conditions are not improving very quickly. The freeway may be closed through the weekend, and it's hard to say how train travel will be affected. The detour is 400 miles out of the way. It's really bizarre to be so completely cut off from a city that's so close.

The crazy weather has me thinking about climate change, and this brings up some stuff I've been meaning to post about for awhile. I haven't gone of on one of my crazy political rants for quite awhile, so it seems like it's about time. Or maybe I just need to go find some cheesy Lifetime movie to watch for the next hour...

The Book (i.e. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver) had quite an impact on me. It has directly affected the way I've been living my life recently. Its message was something I've been hungry for, which might explain my fanaticism. And I think I mentioned before how I've got sort of a messed up relationship with food that I do not want to pass on to my kids.

The Fly Lady has also been helping. Getting my life organized has helped keep the kitchen clean and a menu planned. This in turn has helped motivate me to actually cook for the family. The Barbara Kingsolver book has motivated me to try to use fresh, local, season-appropriate food in as much of my cooking as possible as well as starting from as basic ingredients as I can. For example, this week I made us a quiche (with frozen Spelt pie-crust, four eggs, some frozen spinach, cream, milk and cheese, Canadian bacon and garlic) which was relatively basic but not entirely. The next night I made a pot roast in the Crock Pot out of meat, water, garlic, celery, carrots and potatoes with a little rosemary, salt and pepper thrown in for good measure. It was so incredibly delicious and it's hard to get more basic than those ingredients! Tonight I made the kids some play dough out of flour, water, salt and oil. I didn't have to worry about them eating it (except maybe for some extra salt intake), and it didn't have that weird Play-Doh smell. And I can compost it when it all dries out.

I am also becoming very fanatical about shopping locally at small businesses instead of the big chain stores and restaurants. I still need to work on my Starbucks habit, but that's a problem for another day... The benefit to shopping at local businesses is that around 60% of the money spent at a local shop is recycled back into the community. Not true of the Wal-Marts and Targets of the world - the money goes back to corporate headquarters and shareholders all over the country. I fear that in our quest to only buy the very cheapest thing we can (and a lot of it), we're driving our country to unsustainability not only environmentally but also economically.

When Wal-Mart drives a bunch of small businesses to shut down in a town, what happens to all the people who are unemployed in the process? Sure a Wal-Mart opening creates some jobs, but are they the kind of jobs that can actually support a family? Wal-Mart is out for one thing, and one thing only - profits for their shareholders. The owner of Wal-Mart isn't going to be living in your community (unless you happen to live in Arkansas, perhaps), sending their kids to the same schools as yours. They've got absolutely no incentive to try to improve things for everyone in the community like the owner of a small business would. So the small businesses shut down, forcing everyone to shop at Wal-Mart because it's the only game in town. The owners of Wal-Mart get richer and people may feel better because they're getting a few things cheaper, but what is the ultimate cost of those businesses shutting down? The newly unemployed families (because these are usually family businesses) may have to leave town or work for someone else for a lower wage (and the same goes for their employees).

Barbara Kingsolver talks about local farmers a lot in her book, and it really scratched that "support local business" itch. She goes so far as to quote someone who believes that buying local and supporting small businesses is the most patriotic thing you can actually do. The only thing that's going to keep the middle class in this country middle class is if we're willing to pay a little bit more to buy things from people who contribute to more than a corporate bottom line. The current system is ensuring that the rich continue to get richer while the rest of us struggle and amass lots of debt while being told it is our duty to spend money to keep the economy going. You know what would help keep the economy going? A massive influx of tax dollars from the wealthiest people in the country! We could use it to pay for that war we've been charging on the national credit card.

Does my reasoning get faultier as the wine in my glass gets lower?

Anyway, I appreciate that The Book has made me think about these kids of things. We have a great range of small businesses, from coffee shops to restaurants to used clothing stores, all within walking distance. The other day, Bill decided that he was going to get his new pair of running shoes from the store around the corner instead of ordering them online. He ended up with an entirely different pair of shoes than he would've ordered because he got fitted and took each pair being considered for a test run. I try to check our local hardware store, which is family owned, before heading off to Home Depot, which is not. I shop exclusively at our wonderful natural foods store New Seasons instead of sussing out the deals at Safeway or Winco, because I figure we can spend a little more on groceries and a little less on takeout. New Seasons is an amazing company which supports local growers and is great to their employees. And they're locally-owned.

All right, time to go find that cheesy made-for-tv movie. Rant complete! Thanks for listening!

Oh, the humanity!

Never mind the fact that a group that I'm involved in has managed to whip up some butt-kicking drama, we're nearly floating away here in the Pacific NW! It's finally stopped raining, but for awhile there, I was starting to wonder if it ever would. There are numerous roads shut down, an entire town stranded and we're completely cut off from Seattle! Normally I wouldn't much care about the Seattle thing, but Bill and I were planning to spend the weekend up there, alone! He was driving up for a conference tomorrow and I was going to take the train up on Friday. Well...the only way to get to Seattle right now is by air since the freeway is completely shut down and the train tracks are washed out. It's quite strange to have someplace so close be so completely inaccessible. The freeway is supposed to open Thursday night, and we'll see about the train tracks. Our romantic weekend may need to be rescheduled.

My December deadline knitting is going relatively well (apart from the distraction created by the Christmas toy knitting). I've got two and two-thirds socks done well before their ultimate deadline (the only thing stressing me out about them is the fact that I might not have enough yarn to finish them and the yarn co doesn't have any more of that dyelot to send...). One sweater to go. And a bunch of pattern formatting. But I don't even want to think about that yet. Can't talk, knitting...

Waiting for the bread to rise...

Bill mentioned that I haven't done a blog post in a few days, so I thought I'd whip one up while waiting for the bread to finish its first rise. Yes, I'm still making bread! Go figure. I also made applesauce this morning - yummy!

Anyway, I've been working on some toys while waiting for yarn and needles. Yarn arrived in the mail on Thursday and I got my needles at the shop yesterday during my shift, so now I have no more excuses for putting off my work knitting. But in the interim, I made Bronty:



This was a fun little knit, but I'm waiting anxiously for my Prehistoric Pals booklet to arrive so I can make some dinos that are a little more substantial. Owen really needs a big fat T-rex in his stocking!

I've also been working on the fairy from the Dream Toys book.



I need to find some felt so I can make her face and then get her sewn together and stuffed. I also bought some yarn for her dress (RYC Natural Silk Aran) and hair (Artyarns Silk Mohair):



This is going to be one classy fairy doll! There's also a princess dress in the book that should also fit on this doll (depending on how much it would interfere with her wings), so I might make that as well so Sydney can play dress-up. And of course the unicorn will be made with pink mohair for its mane and tail...

It's so much fun knitting from someone else's pattern for a change - especially for these toys since 3-D knitting design is definitely not my forte.

Finally, here is my lovely new Jordana Paige knitting bag, which I bought last week at Twisted as a Christmas present to myself (and my new crochet book, too):



I love this bag! My only complaint is that I tend to stuff it too full, and that makes the clasp pop open when I set it down. But when I have a reasonable amount of stuff in it (my knitting and my wallet, as opposed to my knitting, an extra project or two, my lunch, a soda, a coffee mug and my wallet), it's great.

And now it's time to form my bread into a loaf and let 'er rise again. Happy December, everyone!