I’ve had a few requests for a current photo of me, now that I’m 8 months pregnant. So here you go (with my 24-week shot for comparison):
Progress is definitely being made, but I’ve still got at least a month to go…
Also of potential interest, our registry information (work in progress that it is) can be found here.
I was one of the lucky 2,000 who made it into the 2007 Rockin’ Sock Club from Blue Moon Fiber Arts. We received our first yarn pack at the beginning of March, and the club got off to a good start.
The yarn, STR Medium Weight in the custom colorway Monsoon, was absolutely gorgeous. I had been wanting to make some socks in a green colorway, and the greens, browns, and grays in this yarn were perfectly suited to the end of an Oregon winter. I liked the pattern a lot also, a reversible cable cuff with ribbed insteps and short-row garter toes and heels, knit toe-up.
The problem, though, was the fit. I started off knitting this pair of socks on #0s, thinking I’d make the pair for myself. However, it quickly became clear that they were coming out too large for my tiny feet, and the suggested to go down a needle size on the foot was complicated by the fact that I don’t want to have to use 8″ long #00 DPNs. Why in the world don’t they make shorter laceweight (00, 000, etc.) DPNs? At any rate, I decided to just go with the flow and gift these beautiful Monsoon socks to someone who’ll fit into them.
My second problem came when I started knitting the cabled cuffs of the socks. After 3 false starts for various reasons, I finally made it through the top of the cuff on my fourth attempt, and tried the sock on. I could get it on, but it felt awfully snug, and I hated the way the large cables made my ankles all lumpy and bumpy. I can’t even imagine how they’d feel if I wanted to wear them with boots that come up over the ankle. So I ripped out attempt #4 to the heel and did the socks with a half-sized cable instead. I still like how they look, though they sacrificed some reversibility, and the ankle is much less lumpy and tight, knit on #1 needles. I also added some ribbing for balance before casting off.
Our second kit was the gorgeous, and brand-new, Socks that Rock Silkie in the Walking on the Wild Tide colorway. The yarn is fantastically soft, and I was excited to make the pattern, a pair of lace knee-highs, to wear with skirts in the spring. Pretty soon, though, reports began coming in about sagging socks, and I got discouraged. I really want to do this yarn justice both pattern-wise and texture-wise, and I really was enamored of the lace knee-high idea, so I’ve been kicking around some ideas and not really making any decisions about what to do.
The June kit was less in my color palette, but that’s partly why I joined the club, right? STR lightweight in the Firebird colorway, lots of reds, oranges, yellows and pinks. The club pattern didn’t really do it for me either, but I’ve recently started a pair of socks using this yarn and the Fawkes pattern at Socktopia. Several other people in the club did so also, and I liked the results; plus, the colorway and pattern seem meant to go together.
It was the August kit, though, received just over a week ago, that really got me wanting to knit again. I’ve laid off almost entirely over the summer, in part because of the puppy, but when I saw this month’s kit, I pulled out the needles right away. The yarn is STR lightweight in a colorway called Flower Power, and the pattern, Summer of Love Lace, is an anklet with a cute little lace cuff.
I got the yarn on a Friday and had the first sock finished by Sunday evening, the second sock by mid-weed. Of course, it’s way too warm out here for me to cover my feet in wool. Even cotton socks are a bit much at the moment. But they’ll be darn cute a bit later in the fall and next spring.
I made the small size and didn’t need to make any adjustments at all for a perfect fit. My kind of pattern! In fact, I was so pleased with the outcome that I will definitely consider knitting this pattern again (and again).
Two more kits to go!
This is just a heads-up for those of you who are interested in cooking or food in general. I’ve been collecting recipes that we particularly like for some time, mostly for my own benefit and future reference. Recently, though, I’ve starting adding photos and narrative to the recipes, and posting more frequently, and lo and behold, I seem to be writing a food blog.
So come check out The Persnickety Palate from time to time to see what we’ve been eating and why (also when, how, and whence). We’ve also added a link to it from here, in the Links box at the right. A taste for you: Last night we had wild sockeye salmon, broiled and served with a roasted red pepper sauce and sauteed snow peas, and homemade cheesecake ice cream for dessert.
…are too good not to share. An example of this is the lamb kefthedes I made for dinner last week, which came out to be the best meatballs I’ve ever eaten, bar none.
The photo doesn’t do them justice: They were perfect fresh from the skillet (crisp outside and succulently moist inside), tasted just as good at room temperature, and held up admirably in the form of reheated leftovers, warmed in a 350F oven for 15-20 minutes. I served them with a mound of sauteed spinach and the Greek roasted potatoes here (which also reheated nicely in the oven).
Since my recipe was an adaptation of several different meatball recipes, I’ve written it out for you. We’ll definitely be making them again soon.
We’re having a beautiful warm spring day here in Salem (I have to gloat while I can; the rain comes back tonight), but I know much of the country is still locked in bitter cold. I was particularly concerned about the toes of my delightful cousin Heather in Ohio, so I sent her a little care package last week: two pairs of cozy wool socks. Maybe they’ll help usher in some relief from the deep freeze…
The reason I chose the yarn for the first pair of socks will be immediately apparent to anyone with Ohio ties: it’s Claudia sock yarn in the Buckeye colorway. This was my first experience with Claudia yarns, and I must say it was a pleasant one. The yarn was very soft and beautifully dyed. The skeins are a little on the skimpy side, however, so I took the precaution of knitting this pair of RPM socks toe-up. Other specs, mostly for my own benefit: I used the Easy Toe from Sensational Knitted Socks, starting with 12 sts, short-row heels; knit on #0 needles over 63 sts for the foot; worked the spirals in opposite directions for a matched pair.
The second pair of socks was knit because Heather is a big Harry Potter fan; of course she needed to have a pair of Gryffindor socks! I decided to do a stripe more along the lines of the scarves from later movies for this pair, and carried the yarn inside to avoid weaving in a bazillion ends. I used more of my lovely Lang Jawoll yarn for this, and I couldn’t be happier with the colors. Since I knew I had plenty of yarn, I knit these top down. And some specs: #0 needles, 64 sts cast on, modified long-tail CO from Nancy Bush; 2” of 2/2 ribbing for the cuff in red; traveling jogless jog; stripe pattern: 5 rounds yellow, 3 red, 5 yellow, 11 red; short-row heels and standard toes in red.
Enjoy them, Heather, and stay warm!
Jeremy’s birthday was this weekend, and it was really great to be able to spend it with him, since he was away in New York for the past two. I’ll let him write a post about his presents himself, once he can take some photos. We started out the day with Jeremy jogging for 50 minutes while I got some ricotta praline pancakes on the griddle for him. Then our good friends Tara and Loren came over, and we went out to lunch at Roadhouse Grill, where they sang to Jeremy and made him wear a coffee filter on his head and a toilet paper cover as a collar in order to receive a bowl of ice cream. After that excitement, we had a quiet afternoon catching up with Tara and Loren, which was really nice.
When our guests left, I got started on Jeremy’s birthday cake: German chocolate, naturally! I got the cake in the oven and discovered that there was less coconut than expected in the cupboard, so I made a quick dash over to Safeway for that, and ended up lugging home a bunch of inordinately heavy stuff: short ribs, sunchokes, potatoes, rice, and so on. Thank goodness we had enough flour and sugar. Good exercise, though, I suppose. Jeremy got in some painting while I was gone… hopefully he’ll post updated photos of what he’s working on before too long.
Anyway, while the frosting finished up (this recipe involved making dulce de leche in the oven, a lengthy process), Jeremy helped me with dinner, which was masaman curry. Jeremy loves curry, but I don’t care for it, so I would probably not have considered making it if it weren’t for Curry Simple. Their Thai tea syrup was recommended on one of the food blogs I read, and when I saw their packets of masaman curry sauce, I knew Jeremy would appreciate it for a special occasion like his birthday. Everything arrived really quickly after I ordered it, and dinner was as easy as sauteeing chicken and then vegetables while I boiled some new potatoes, and mixing everything together with the sauce packet. We served it over jasmine rice with Thai iced tea to drink, and the surprising bit was that I actually thought it was pretty good, not too spicy. I ate a small plateful, Jeremy had two huge helpings, and we still had plenty of leftovers, so I think it was an all-around success. Good thing too, because I ordered some pad thai sauce at the same time. So we’ll probably continue ordering sauces from Curry Simple from time to time.
Once Jeremy had time to digest his dinner, we tried out the cake, and it came out really well also. It was actually the inside-out German chocolate cake from Epicurious, but I don’t have any way of storing layer cakes, so I converted it to a sheet cake and left off the ganache layer because it seemed plenty sweet and rich as it was. It was very tasty, and perhaps even better the second day, after a stint in the fridge.
Looks like 2007 is shaping up to be the Year of the Sock, Part 2, and I finally have pictures to prove it. I got off to a cracking start by finishing up the Conwy Socks I was knitting in December.
As I mentioned previously, these socks are knit from Socks that Rock Lightweight, in the Downpour colorway, perfect for a wet Oregon winter. They came out nicely, and this is definitely a pattern I’ll use again, not least because they needed no adjustment to fit my tiny feet. As for the yarn, I love the colors and the way they striped without too much flashing; the wool is warm and squishy without being too itchy.
Next I whipped out a very quick little pair of anklets from a leftover skein of Lorna’s Laces Shepherd Sock in Vera. I tried out several different pattens with this yarn and ended up doing a simple checkerboard/basketweave pattern. I think the came out really cute, and will make good spring socks.
While making the anklets, I also started (and finished) a pair of Chain Link Socks. This pattern was from the SixSox Knitalong, and I used my leftover Trekking #67 and some white Lang Jawoll, and didn’t come close to using up either one. A visually interesting pattern, but verrrry simple to knit, and I was shocked to note that the stripes in the Trekking came *this* close to matching up, without any intentions on my part.
Finally, I finished my first pair of Trekking knee socks, to be worn with skirts and/or boots. I used a traveling clock pattern from Folk Knitting in Estonia for some visual interest on the sides, and did them plain otherwise. They were knit toe-up so that I could make the most effective use of the yarn, and I ended up with a tiny bit leftover, so I think I did pretty well.
Over the weekend, I started a new pair of socks for Jeremy, still pending his approval. No pics yet. They are Spey Valley Socks in Trekking XXL #90, which is coming out much more green and gray than brown, oddly. I like how they look, though, and because Jeremy said the last pair, also made from Trekking, felt bumpy under his feet, I’m doing these with a reverse stockinette sole.
So between all the driving around in the snow, what did we do while visiting Littleton? I’ll break it down into a few categories, ‘cause that’s just how my brain works…
1. Animal watching
We had great fun watching the flocks of sparrows, house finches and juncos swarming over the bird feeder out the back windows. They persisted in coming throughout both of the storms, and after the first few hours of the first blizzard, my mom went outside to refill the feeder and put out a new one (read: old perch of my parrot, Pogo’s) so even more birds could get in on the fun. You can see some of them in most of Jeremy’s bird feeder photos. We also had visits from several blue jays on several occasions, always readily apparent because they shrieked out warning calls to the little birds to get out of their way just prior to arrival. After the second blizzard, there were flickers hanging out both in the backyard ash tree and on the feeder, and even a little downy woodpecker, who incited a lot of photographic action in the house.
The other stars of the backyard show were the squirrels. We watched them in fascination, as, every time it stopped snowing, they would forge a path through the snow in a brave effort to reach the feeders. We think they were staying in the big evergreen tree in the back corner of the yard, and would virtually swim at top speed through the surface of the snow to the ash tree, after which they had a big decision to make: drop down from the branches of the tree to the roof of the feeder or wade through more snow and climb up? We saw them go both routes, though the former was more entertaining, especially with several feet of snow on the feeder’s roof. It took us a while to realize what had caused the big hole in the middle of that pile of snow.
And I can’t talk about animal watching without mentioning my parents’ cats, Addie and TooCute. They were just as fascinated by the birds and squirrels as we were, and when there was a lull in the wildlife activity, we entertained the cats. TooCute really hated Jeremy and me, and would hiss at us and strike at us whenever we tried to pet her, but she was also constantly hanging around and sometimes even rubbing up against our legs, strangely. The most we could do with her was dangle a gold string in front of her to play, but that was good for hours of entertainment for both cats. I guess we were all easily amused.
2. Knitting
I got in some knitting time over the course of the two weeks we were in Littleton. I was knitting myself a pair of socks from STR Lightweight in the lovely Downpour colorway, using the famous Conwy pattern from Nancy Bush’s Knitting on the Road. The first night there I started the cuff of my second Conwy sock, but after that I concentrated on Christmas knitting. I had ordered a skein of STR Lightweight in Petrified Wood to make socks for my dad (and maybe a skein of the Meteorite colorway for myself, down the line), and it arrived just before we flew out. So I wound up the skein and set myself to knit those socks in the week before Christmas. I didn’t bring any sock knitting books with me due to space constraints, but I had been happy with how Jeremy’s Gentleman’s Fancy Socks came out, so I decided to go with that. The pattern was fairly easy to remember, aside from calf shaping, which I made up to no detriment. I used #1 needles and started with 84 stitches, eventually decreasing to 72 to accommodate my dad’s petite ankles. The colorway received fatherly approval and held up beautifully against the texture pattern and the changes in circumference with no flashing. I used a short row heel and a standard toe, and used up virtually every scrap of the skein, down to the last yard. It was a little nervewracking there at the end, but they came out perfectly, and seem to fit Dad well. I finished them up by the Friday before Christmas, no sweat.
While doing some of our Christmas shopping the Tuesday before the first storm, we just happened to go in a yarn store in downtown Littleton, A Knitted Peace. My mom got a pattern and some needles to make hats, and a little kit for me to knit her a pretty scarf, along with a bagful of Rowan Silk & Wool DK in a gorgeous silver color they call clay, earmarked for the Ogee Tunic in Norah Gaughan’s Knitting Nature. I worked up the scarf, which uses a strand of Kid Silk Haze and a strand of Katia Sevilla held together and worked in a simple garter/drop stitch pattern, after I finished my dad’s socks. That took all of a few hours to polish off in an evening. Then I went back to my Conwy socks, and got the second one finished off the night before we left for Oregon. Not a bad way to bookend the trip, though I had a skein of purple Trekking all lined up to (hopefully) do a pair of knee socks for myself. I’m working on those now with #0 needles and a simple clock pattern from Folk Knitting in Estonia for some visual interest.
3. Cooking and eating
We made some lovely meals over the course of the trip, including both old standbys and some new recipes on the menu. I didn’t write everything down, but here are a few mentionables:
• Our favorite pork loin with leeks from Cooking Light: We’ve made this many times and it came out great, as always.
• Braised lamb shanks with porcini: This was a meal just for me and Jeremy, as my parents had a Christmas party to attend.
• Zinfandel-braised pot roast with glazed carrots from All About Braising: The meat was very tasty but the carrots were awesome and we didn’t make nearly enough of them (this coming from someone who doesn’t care for cooked carrots under normal circumstances).
• Rice-asparagus soup with pancetta and pepper from Zuni Café Cookbook: This was a light, tasty soup that we served with a grating of parmesan and slices of fresh bread.
• Vietnamese braised scallops from All About Braising, served with a whole grain asparagus salad with soy-ginger vinaigrette from Once Upon a Tart: I’ve made the scallops once before, and made them here at my dad’s request. My fish-wary mom bravely ate a scallop and didn’t think it was too bad. The barley-wild rice salad with asparagus went well as a side for the scallops, though the amount of dressing called for was excessive, in my opinion. This was our Christmas Eve meal.
• Leg of lamb stuffed with feta and chard: This was our Christmas dinner. It came out so well the first time we made it that Jeremy and I both really wanted my parents to try it, and I think it was a success. We had a beautiful fresh piece of lamb, and leftovers for days. We kept the sides simple and went with mashed potatoes, fresh steamed broccoli, and the red wine jus from the lamb.
We also did quite a bit of baking, though we had planned to do more, and got cut short a bit by the abruptness of our flight on Saturday. Mostly we did Christmas cookies, but a few other items as well:
• Chocolate chip cookies: I used my favorite recipe, which tweaks David Lebovitz’s fantastic cookies with the addition of toffee bits for a subtle extra hit of flavor. These didn’t last long.
• Sugar cookies: These came from a can, but sugar cookies are really just a vehicle for frosting anyway, right?
• Pumpkin cookies: These are one of my favorite cookies of all time, and we made them partly because we had a partial can of pumpkin left from a batch of pumpkin waffles (very tasty, served with maple pecan syrup). They have chocolate chips and almonds in them, and an almost cakey texture from the moistness of the pumpkin.
• Buckwheat cookies: I’ve made these a bunch of times at home, and they are one of my favorites with tea. This was the first time I’ve made them with a mixer instead of a food processor, though.
• Harvest squash bread: My mom had a butternut squash on the counter when we arrived, waiting to be made into bread. We tried it out with this recipe from Macrina Bakery and Cafe Cookbook, and it came out well, after burning a batch of walnuts and pecans based on the amount of time indicated in the book for toasting them. If I made this again, I’d used hulled pepitas instead of the whole pumpkinseeds we had on hand, as the hulls were not the greatest eating, though a good source of fiber, I’m sure.
Jeremy did a great job of keeping the blog up to date as far as our spectacular winter weather in Denver this December, but he hasn’t quite finished the story, so I’ll chime in to wrap things up in a bit more detail. (Jeremy took lots of lovely photos as well, so hopefully he’ll add some pictorial punctuation to this otherwise very long block of text….)
The first storm that hit the area, several days after our arrival, dumped 24″ of snow on our area. Fortunately, we were able to get the bulk of our Christmas shopping done the day before the snow started, and we stocked up on food too, though my dad and I ended up making a trip in the blowing snow on Wednesday afternoon, to get flour and a few other essentials for Christmas cookies. We weren’t in the grocery store for very long, and when we came out, there was at least half an inch of snow accumulating on the windshield, if that gives you some idea of the rate of snowfall. But we stayed in happily, making Christmas cookies and braised meals, and enjoyed each other’s company, especially since my dad got quite a few unexpected snow days off of work. We lost television when the satellite dish filled up with snow, but we watched movies on DVD and spent inordinate amounts of time staring out the window at the birds and squirrels in the back yard (nearly as much as the cats did).
Once it stopped snowing, we and the rest of the state struggled to dig out and go about our holiday activities. This was no easy task, as the snow plows never did make it into the residential areas of Jefferson County, where my parents live, so every time we left the house, it was like an off-road excursion to get out of our neighborhood and onto the bone-dry main streets. My dad’s 4-wheel drive truck got stuck in the snow just a few blocks from home; the roads were full of wheel ruts, but they only accommodated one car at a time, and when we pulled off just slightly to let another car pass, we were doomed. (Well, maybe doomed is a little strong. Mom and I gingerly walked home for a shovel, praying for cleared sidewalks and not always getting them, and by the time we got bundled up and changed into snow boots for the return trip, the guys had managed to muscle the truck out of the snowbank without us.)
We spent the Saturday before Christmas downtown Denver at the art museum, which was especially fun because a new wing was recently opened. Christmas Eve was mostly taken up with some last minute shopping for Christmas dinner and presents, and the traditional candlelight church service. It snowed another inch or so in the evening, but Jeremy was too depressed by the situation to take a fresh picture of the bird feeder. We had a lovely quiet Christmas with french toast and roasted leg of lamb (I’ll write a separate post about the food, I think) and lots of lovely presents, and got out of the house to watch The Nativity Story in the evening.
After Christmas we started hearing more reports about the second blizzard heading our way. The weathermen didn’t seem to know how much snow we were in for this time, or if it would even hit the Denver area, but we strapped in for another dumping and ended up with at least another foot of snow in our area. This was not great news for our Saturday flight home, especially since, as I mentioned earlier, the snow plows never came around to our neighborhood to dig us out of the last storm. We kept trying to shovel the driveway clear, but once the snow on the sides of the drive reached head-level, there was no place to put it; we were carrying shovelfuls of snow down the sidewalk to dump. My crazy mother convinced me to put on snow pants and boots and wade around in the snow in our yard on Friday. It was over my knees in our front yard and I still wasn’t touching the ground—a lot of work to walk in, and nearly impossible to get up without help after a fall. Where are snowshoes when you need them?
Despite the vast amounts of snow, a plow finally came through on Saturday morning to dig out a few low spots in our street and compact the rest. This second blizzard dumped really varying amounts of snow on the state: we had about 17” of new snow; Golden, where we ate a really lovely dinner on Wednesday, got 28”, and the airport only got a few. The main roads got plowed really quickly, and we started wondering if it had been a good idea to change our flight from Saturday afternoon to Tuesday night. A call to Frontier on Saturday morning at 9:00am confirmed that the airline was functioning at full-steam, but our original flight had filled up. We were offered a flight leaving at 12:30pm or nothing, so we ended up packing everything up on a moment’s notice and rushing off to the eerily uncrowded airport. Having thought we were getting an extra few days to spend at home, this was particularly hard on me, and I spent most of the day with teary eyes. Jeremy was more than happy to get back home and in his studio, though, and the ferrets more than did their part to cheer me up. Now if only I could get over the fact that the vacation is over and it’s time to get back to work…
It’s time again for my Lessons and Carols post. As you may or may not recall, for the past 3 years, I have participated in the choir for our university convocation’s Lessons and Carols service. The choir is composed of volunteer staff and students at Willamette, and we get about 4 hours of practice to learn 5 or 6 songs for the performance. This year we did “What Child Is This,” “In the Bleak Midwinter,” “It Came Upon the Midnight Clear,” and “Sing Gloria,” plus the usual battery of traditional Christmas hymns associated with Lessons and Carols.
The twist, at least for me, occurred at practice on Tuesday afternoon, when the choir director looked at me, and said, “Julie, why don’t you do the solo for ‘Once in Royal David’s City’?”
I hemmed and squirmed, and belatedly tried to make myself look small and inconspicuous, as if doing so would make her forget she had asked at all. When that was unsuccessful, I managed to squeak out, “I don’t know, I’ve never done a solo before.” That was taken as consent, and I suddenly found myself responsible for doing not just a solo, but an a capella solo of the very first verse of the first song in the entire program, complete with high D’s in the last two lines.
Since Tuesday, I’ve been nervously humming “Once In Royal David’s City” anytime I don’t think anyone else will notice, trying to find my pitch and hit those high notes cleanly. The service itself was today, and I think I did alright. I was wearing a new dark green corduroy blazer and plaid skirt, so I felt appropriately Christmas-dressy, and I am told that I could be heard on the other side of the chapel, which is a good sign. I got in a little warm-up time before the program, too, so I was able to hit those D’s and not sound like a squeaky clarinet in need of a fresh reed. After the solo trauma, the rest of the music just flew, and by the last hymn, I was singing so exuberantly that I strained my voice a little.
Considering my Lessons and Carols posts of the past two years, I should mention that I will yet again be going home and doing some Christmas party baking this evening, though I also baked a batch of peanut butter cookies last night. I used a Moosewood recipe that claimed to make big and chewy cookies, but though I ended up with the right number of very tasty cookies based on the recipe, they were definitely not big, and more crunchy than chewy. I’m tempted to try making ice cream sandwiches with some of them, since I think Jeremy was a little disappointed.