pepperknit

But this woman I was walking behind on my way home yesterday was doing just that.

What is up with this? The footwear is like that of a hippie, and yet she was wearing a short skirt and was altogether not a hippie. I saw them and immediately thought, “I have just got to take a photo of these.” So I got out the camera and tried to be as subtle as possible. But it’s kind of hard; you need to stop moving so the picture will come out, and so you take a few steps up to get closer so that when you stop and she keeps moving you can still get some good detail. Took me quite a lot of shots. Which is even more ridiculous, when you think about it, because it means I was taking a few steps, stopping, then taking a few more steps. I can’t believe she didn’t turn around! I’m quite pleased with the end results, but I’m still baffled by the garment. I can’t even express how out of place this was here in Philly.

I actually have a fairly small stash of yarn, though if you were to ask my boyfriend he’d have something different to say. I haven’t forced him to sit and look at bloggers’ photos of their stashes as a comparison, but trust me: I don’t have a ton of yarn that was purchased with no project in mind. For the most part, I decide on a project and buy the yarn. So I have lots of leftover bits, but never enough to make an entire something.

Until a week and a half ago, when I was inspired to buy some sock yarn “just because.” Just because it was so reasonably priced. Just because the colors were so pretty. Just because I could.

Two skeins of Sock! Merino from Lisa Souza yarns. On the left we have the color “pumpkin” (which is a lot more brown than orange, even in real life) and on the right we have “peacock” (which is a perfect name for this color). The ordering and getting of these skeins was a bit of a comedy of errors—I ordered them both and they arrived a few days later. I was psyched to have gotten them so fast. But then I looked at them more closely, and they didn’t have that yummy “pebbled” look. The labels said they were plain old Sock! yarn, not the merino version. I checked my confirmation email: I had ordered the merino. But she had charged me for the nonmerino. I emailed her to ask about it, and she quickly apologized, put two skeins of merino in the mail with a return envelope, and told me she’d just charge me the additional $4. No problem. In the interest of not making her worry that I was going to keep all the yarn, I even walked up to work on a day off so I could turn it around quickly. All good. Next week I get an email from Lisa, that she forgot about the details of our exchange and credited my account entirely for the cost of the Sock (meaning I hadn’t paid anything at all!). She realized the error and recharged me the amount. It’s all come out correctly, but it was kind of funny how many steps it took. What’s most amazing is that within one week it was all resolved—even if I had ordered the yarn with a specific project in mind, the wait was totally minimal. I’ve played a bit with the Peacock, on my new KnitPicks circular needles (!), and have enjoyed it. I’m designing a new pair of socks to use with that yarn. There’s 560 yards of yarn in each skein, so there’s more than enough for a nice long pair of socks.

The other yarn I bought for a very specific reason: EH’s baby. The baby is due August 24 (my dad’s birthday!). Unfortunately, I’ll be down the shore with family at the time of the shower, so I asked EH’s sister if I could mail my gift to her. Which means: Must. Finish. Sweater. In less than 2 weeks. I can do it, that’s a reasonable timeframe, but I decided to make this pattern up, too, so I’m kind of knitting without a safety net. The only glimpse of this I will give to you is the yarn. Checkit: PURPLE!

So if I finish this piece before the end of July I’ll have officially knit something purple during the purple month of Project Spectrum. Only, if it comes out well I’m going to be submitting this design to someone, so you won’t see it for a while. We’ll see though!

Many thanks to Jeanie for pointing out an omission from the Anastasia Socks pattern.

When working the pattern from the chart, odd-numbered rows are knit.

And I just noticed this, which I will also fix.
Under “Heel,” it has directions for dealing with the instep versus the heel stitches, but the text is leftover from the Zokni socks (top-down socks, not toe-up), and actually makes no sense whatsoever, though you would probably figure it out. It should say:

If using Magic Loop or two circulars, needle 1 will have the instep and needle 2 will have the heel stitches. If working on dpns, rearrange the stitches so that the heel stitches are all on one needle. Put instep stitches onto another needle or waste yarn while working the heel.

The pattern file will be updated; if you received the pattern on or before July 19, 2006, the pdf is missing this information. If you would like a new copy of the pattern, just let me know. It will be ready tonight.

Project Runway has been my favorite reality show (ok, along with The Amazing Race) since it very first aired. But that was back when our (free, inexplicable) cable had Bravo. Over the last year and a half, channels have disappeared one by one. We’re down to the most basic of basic cable, which is fine for channel-surfing a bit, and provides for all the Seinfeld, Giada de Laurentis, and Sex and the City we could ever want, so I’m really not complaining too much.

Last season of PR, I either went to a coworker’s apartment or another coworker taped it for me. Because it airs so late, going to my friend’s was becoming a little unwieldy (and a little awkward, imposing on him every week), and since last season, my VCR-enabled coworker has left the company. So I had resigned myself to my sad little fate, since none of my friends who live close by have paid-for cable with Bravo in the lineup.

I lamented this to Laura. And she reminded me that iTunes sells TV shows. I crossed my fingers and: yay! I’ll willingly pay $1.99 an episode—it’s a ton cheaper than paying for cable. Hooray! It’s going to be a good day after all.

Edited to Add
To Annie: SHUT UP! How did I not think to check if NBC was reairing episodes! How did I manage to not flip channels at all on Monday night, to discover this myself? Hallelujah! Can this day GET any better!!?? I can download the two episodes I missed, and be all caught up (if perpetually five days behind). Thank you, thank you, thank you! (Boy, am I exclamation-happy today.)

I’m going to just go ahead and post my Project Spectrum post for July now, even though the month is only half over. Because there’s no way I’m going to discover any purple or even knit with it. It’s not that I dislike purple, don’t get me wrong. It’s a perfectly nice color. But I’ve discovered that it’s practically nonexistent in my life.

I’m sitting here on our first floor, a long room that is living room, dining room, and kitchen. This is our primary living space. I spend probably 99% of my waking at-home time in this space. I’m looking around . . . looking . . . no. No purple. Wait! the spine of that Moosewood Cookbook is purple (New Classics). I never realized that this color was so absent for me.

So I looked through all my old photos. I had to go back to my trip to Taiwan from more than a year ago, to a trip to New York in April, and my time down the shore last summer.

Sorry purple. I tried!

(I love love love my photo of the table of amethysts; this was in the Jade Market in Taipei. You can pick a size/shape of stone and tell them you want a strand of whatever length and they’ll make it for you. I took another photo of pearls all layed out like that, too. See that photo here.)

I’d, uh, well, actually, um, I’d have a pair of socks. Anastasia Socks, that is.

When the Amazing Lace administrators posted asking us to come up with what our projects would be if cast off right then, the only thing I had left to do with these socks was decide on a cast-off.

So I did, and used the oft-recommended Elizabeth Zimmerman sewn cast-off. Conveniently, Knitty just came out with directions, so you can easily find directions to do it yourself. I had never used it before, but I’m convinced: It, quite simply, rocks. Stretchy, easy, looks good—awesome.

These socks, as I’ve said, are intended as a Christmas present for the boy’s eldest sister, whose middle name is Anastasia. But I’m also a huge Anastasia Krupnik fan, so they’re also an homage to that brilliant children’s series of books. The socks are also my first completed pair for the official Summer of Socks (though for my personal summer of socks they’re pair #3).

The pattern for these bad boys is available via an emailed pdf. E-mail me (mintyfreshflavor AT gmail), and I’ll send it to you! (It’s ready!) Specify the pattern name (or describe the socks) so I don’t send you the Zokni pattern by mistake!

Some additional down ‘n’ dirty details:
Yarn: Koigu KPPM
Skeins: 2
Needles: 2.5 mm Addi Turbos
Started: Wednesday, June 21
Finished: Wednesday, July 5 (? I think. I can’t remember at all. It was last week.)
Basic details: Toe-up socks using a short-row heel. I mirrored the pattern so that the two coordinated but weren’t exact matches.

I’d hoped to cast all of my Amazing Lace posts as Amazing Race posts, as I’ve done before, but I’m sorry, I just lost some steam and it didn’t make much sense with either this challenge or the poetry one (which, you’ll notice, I opted out of!). So in the end I couldn’t keep it up the whole time, which is too bad because they were fun to write.

My new haircut, which is actually a month old, is still taking getting used to. Honestly, I hate it. Detest it. I can’t keep it out of my face, and it never sits quite right. I get lots of compliments, but I think mostly people are inspired to say “ohmigod, you chopped off all your hair!” and then they have to say something nice. I guess I don’t really hate the way it looks, I mostly hate living with it. I’m just twiddling my thumbs until it grows out enough to start cutting to a consistent length, and hopefully someday I’ll have a normal haircut again. But in the meantime I’m making prodigious use of bobby pins to hold it back.

It’s nice to have a little variety, though, so this weekend over the course of a few short hours, I made up this little headband.

Lace Headband
Yarn: Schaefer Yarn’s Anne, originally used for my Pomatomus. Ended up with a nice striping effect with such a narrow band. Used up a miniscule amount of yarn; I don’t know exactly how much.
Needles: 2.25 mm for the I-cord, 2.5 mm for the band
Stitch: Vine Lace, picked out of my gal Barbara Walker’s first Treasury of Knitting Patterns; I believe this is the lace used in the Orangina top so many bloggers have made, but I haven’t ever seen that pattern, just pictures of the FOs.
Started: Saturday, July 8
Finished: Sunday, July 9
Total time: 2 hours? 3?
Pattern: So easy it doesn’t warrant pdf treatment . . .

Cast on 3 stitches. Work I-cord for 5 inches.

Working in stockinette, increase on every knit row until you have 15 stitches. (I did “Make 1″s, M1R on the right hand side [one stitch in], M1L on the left [before the last stitch], but you could just increase into the first and last stitch. Makes no diff.)

Change to slightly larger needles and begin pattern.
Row 1 (WS): Purl
Row 2: K3, yo, k2, ssk, k2tog, k2, yo, k4
Row 3: Purl
Row 4: K4, yo, k2, ssk, k2tog, k2, yo, k3
Repeat until desired length, about 20 inches, or until the band almost meets around your head while being pulled a bit. Depends on the size of your noggin.

Change to slightly smaller needles and begin decreasing.
Decrease at beginning and end of all right-side rows until you have 3 stitches left. (I ssk’d on the right hand side and k2togged on the left, one stitch in, until I had 5 stitches left. The last decrease row went like this: ssk the first two stitches, k1, k2tog the last two stitches.)

Work I-cord for about 5 inches, or to match length of I-cord at other end.

Bind off.

Draw ends into the I-cord. Block it to get it to sit flat.

Wear!

I like to think of food as having a place on this knitting blog, if only because it and knitting are the two passions in my life that use my hands. This weekend was a food-focused one.

My dear friend came in for a long weekend visit on Friday—we immediately went to dim sum for lunch. Saturday was devoted to this:

Yum. We transformed 20 ounces of Ghirardelli chocolate, plus some cocoa and flour and eggs, into a 4-layer chocolate cake. We considered some more complex recipes but ultimately wanted a basic, good, decadent, “sinful” chocolate cake. We found it here. (We used 2 eight-inch pans instead of 3, then cut each layer in half.) It became denser and more chocolatey upon refrigeration, but I didn’t take any pictures after that. We ate it for breakfast and dessert every day of the weekend (there’s just a little bit left).

On Sunday, we did this:

(Two batches, one for each of us. Happily, they came out identically. She’s showing the incorporating of egg into flour, and I’m an example of kneading.) Which became this:

After 6 hours of intense work, we had made a ton of our own pasta from scratch. I forgot to take any photos of the spinach-filled ravioli that we made first. Then it was beet-filled tortellini, and we finished up with straight-up fettucine and angel hair. While the dough rested, we made the fillings and cooked a tomato sauce from scratch, using farmers’ market tomatoes and even the food mill.

Dinner that night was a 3-pasta affair: Spinach ravioli with cream sauce, beet tortellini with butter, and fettucine with tomato sauce. Everything was awesome.

Monday night we went to Alma de Cuba, which rocked. Last night we heated up leftovers and noshed over the course of hours. (”The pork course” will now be a running joke, after we reheated the remaining half of her pork entree from Alma de Cuba and devoured it.) And throughout the whole weekend, we ate tons of really good cheese and olives. Yay for cooking, and especially eating, with good friends!

My friend who was the intended recipient of these socks arrived for a long visit, and the first order of business was to have a photo shoot with her new socks!

They fit her perfectly; I was so relieved and thrilled. She also loved them, though she couldn’t wear them for long because they were making her feet hot. She was a trouper though, and let me take a zillion pictures of her feet, in all different areas of the apartment.

We’ve decided on an official name for the socks: the beautifully redundant Zokni Socks. My friend’s heritage is Hungarian, and zokni is the word for socks in Hungarian. (We used an English-Hungarian online dictionary; she doesn’t know any Hungarian besides the names of foods.) We considered adding the word for leafy, but there comes a point where the name just starts to get confusing or weird, so plain ol’ Zokni Socks it is. I suppose they should rightly be called “lace leaf socks,” or “elm leaf socks,” but let’s hope that people still find the pattern even with this nondescriptive title.

I finished the pattern this morning and can send it out via email. As I say in the pattern, I’d love, love, love to get photos of any finished pairs e-mailed to me. I can make a gallery of shots.

For now, the pattern will be available via e-mail only (mintyfreshflavor at gmail). Don’t feel weird e-mailing me to request it, please! I will be able to send out the pattern almost immediately so there shouldn’t be a long time from wanting it to getting it.