pepperknit

This weekend marked a first for me. My first venture into real-life interaction with knit bloggers!

I was heading to Columbia for a short visit with my parents, for no particular reason at all and thus no timetable. So I emailed Lolly and suggested we meet for some knitting. She opened the get-together up to her knitting group, and happily several people were able to join!

Though Lolly has mentioned folks in her knitting group, I’d only ever clicked on a few of their blogs. But now I have five more blogs to read! Check out the picture of all of us here (I’m too lazy to download it and upload it right now).
Jen was knitting a bag out of hemp and the Icarus shawl out of Misti Alpaca. Coleen bonded with one of those ginormous balls of yarn, worked on a pair of not-watermelon socks that are going to be fraternal twins. Diane worked on a pair of socks with yarn she had dyed herself; I wondered to myself if she had made the great bag she carried, and it turns out she had! Sarah provided me my first glimpse of someone knitting two socks on two circs (ok, I’ve seen photos, but never in real life). And though Heather couldn’t join us for knitting, she was with us as we pawed at the wares at All About Yarn.
My mom had given me some money to spend on yarn, but I walked out of the store empty handed–despite the abundance of skeins, nothing spoke to me. We left and headed to a coffee shop (I worked on my calf-high socks; there isn’t enough yarn to make them as high as I wanted!), and when the cafe closed, Lolly, Jen, Sarah, and I found an outdoor spot to go instead.

It was so nice to connect with fellow knitters, to spend a few hours outside my day doing something that’s usually solitary along with others.

Thanks, guys!

Apology in advance: I’ve been listening to the Cast-On podcast pretty much nonstop for the past few days (on my walk to work, on my walk home from work, sometimes for small stretches while at work (as an editor, it is next to impossible to do my actual work while listening to a podcast, so I’ve been using this as “breaks”), while knitting on the couch, and for the past 3 hours, because I took the day off of work), which means I’m starting to talk a little like her. That is, I’m using phrases like “that is,” and I’m pausing in particular ways–though perhaps that isn’t so apparent in the written word–and I’m using parenthetical comments, and long series of things in one sentence; you get the idea. So I don’t know how I’m going to be writing this blog entry . . .

Today’s eye candy is also mouth candy. Uh, wait, that is a really weird way to put it. What I mean is that not only are the photos nice to look at, but the subjects were tasty to eat. Yes, a food-related eye candy. Nothing absurd or found on the ground on South Street, I promise.

Two pies, both made by me. The top one is clearly the prettiest of the two (and the lighting and time of day more photogenic), but the taste was, well, -less. At the top we have a peach pie with cardamom, using elements from several peach pie recipes but which I could have made up myself: peeled peaches, some sugar, some cardamom, some cinnamon, and then some butter. The bottom pie is a raspberry-blueberry for which I used an actual recipe. It calls for tapioca as the thickener and I went with it despite extreme reservations–and the result was really quite nice. The crust for both pies is the same cream cheese pie crust (not the crust the berry pie calls for), which I’m currently in love with. It’s a time-consuming pie crust to make, but please don’t let that stop you! Especially if you have a food processor. I think if I were forced to do it by hand I would have purchased Pillsbury dough. But really: make this pie crust next time you’re making a pie. It’s rich and flaky and luscious.

I made both of these pies with a pie contest in mind. My aunt and uncle have this annual Rib Fest, in which they provide some chafing dishes and you bring the ribs. Bring your favorite recipe and all the guests get to vote on the best. My mom came in 2nd last year. This year, they were going to add a pie contest, and I decided that would be my game.

So a week before the event, I made this peach pie as a test. Oh, man, was it gorgeous. I had thought there might be separate prizes for best looking and best tasting, and while this one would have earned something for its looks, it was severly lacking in taste. The peaches were ripe, bought at Whole Foods for an arm and a leg, but they didn’t pack any peach punch.

The raspberry-blueberry caught my eye and sounded nice and summery. So I made it a week later, one day before the contest, with no time to test (I’d planned on testing it, but had no time). On Friday it came out of the oven, and it looked like crap. You are not seeing a photo of that pie. I tried to do the top crust the same way I had for the peach pie, overlapping stars, but they sunk into the berry juices and looked just horrid. I debated. And just as I will frog my knitting at the first sign of imperfection, I decided that that pie could not be entered into a contest.

The only solution was to wake up really early Saturday morning, the day of the picnic that was two hours away, and start a new pie. Because of the time-consuming nature of the pie crust, I had to get up, put the ingredients in the freezer (part of the recipe; they need 30 minutes to freeze up), dash to the grocery store (which is about an 10-minute walk away), make the dough, get it in the fridge (it needs an hour), set up my mise-en-place, kill some time, then make the pie with a more conservative top crust, slam it in the oven, give it its 45-50 minutes, and then dash out to yoga class. From there, I was picking up the rental car and getting on the road, so there was no other time to do it! (In retrospect, I should have skipped yoga, as I was still recovering from the cold and not at my best, but I really wanted to go.)

I’ve really rambled on about these pies. The ending of the story? More people than anticipated decided to compete in the pie contest, and with 16 other pies vying for the top spot, I didn’t even make the top 3! No talk of a prize for best looking (I swear I would have won). Due to the number of entrants, my aunt designated 3 judges who made the ultimate decision. There was also a “popular vote,” and when I went around and sampled the pies, I got a bite of a sweet potato pie that I almost gave more points than my own, it was that good. In the end, I gave it and mine the most points you could give and essentially gave a 0 to all the others. I’m happy to say that the sweet potato pie did win the popular vote–and it really was just that good.

So feast on that eye candy!

A dear friend from college, for whom I was a bridesmaid, just had her first baby yesterday! I knit the (secret from the blog) purple sweater for her, but I am still at work on the pattern and haven’t mailed it off yet. (It wouldn’t fit her yet anyway.) I couldn’t resist posting the photo that was sent around, however, of Linnea in her adorable knit hat–what a fabulous pattern. I didn’t knit it, and I don’t know who did, but is this not the cutest thing!?

:Turns out it was the baby’s own mom who knit it! (See the comments.) I taught Erin to knit back in college, and I’m happy to see that she’s knitting for Linnea! Congrats again, Erin! (btw: your knitting tension still seems to be as perfectly even as ever.):

The final Amazing Lace challenge is to find an unlikely model. I didn’t participate in the last challenge, due more to forgetfulness than anything else, and I have been racking my brain to think of a good unlikely lace model. I thought about statues, colonial people (though I didn’t see any the day I went looking), etc. Eventually, I went with this:

This is unlikely for two reasons, not least of which is that cars do not wear socks. The other reason is that cars do not factor into my life much. That is, it’s unlikely that I have a car to hang my socks on! But I went out and rented a car, just for this photo.

OK, not really; I was headed to a family picnic in north Jersey. But it is the last thing I would have thought to put my socks on! They hung out inside, too:

The other day, our computer’s hard drive was looking dangerously full, and in a somewhat brash move I decided to delete all of the music I had on the computer. In truth, this was not a horrible decision, because all the music I have was already on the ipod, and I don’t burn CDs ever. But this meant that when I opened my iTunes to listen to Tim Gunn’s Project Runway podcast, it was the only thing in my iTunes! Since it was feeling lonely, I decided to investigate the whole world of podcasts more.

Naturally, I went looking for the premiere knitting one, Cast-On by Brenda Dayne. I’d heard about it before, of course, but I still wasn’t qute sure what it would be like. When I downloaded all of the podcasts, which go back to Halloween of last year, I was shocked to see that so many are around an hour long. “What in the world could she be talking about for that long?”

Well, I listened to the first one while I was baking a pie, and I discovered that I had been missing a true gem all this time. Her podcast is like all of the blogs I like best: A perfect balance between meta-discussion (about podcasting), life stories, and good knitting content. She’s introspective but also light and funny, and in fact her Snow Day episode, which has no knitting content at all and is really just an audio interlude, made me cry. It was so beautiful! It was about Thanksgiving, which is my favorite holiday, and it had me remembering so vividly where I was last Thanksgiving, when I was in Portland with my closest friends cooking and celebrating (and even celebrating my birthday). And speaking of those friends, there’s something about Brenda’s cadence and emphasis that reminds me so very much of one of those friends, EL, who has some radio experience, and it’s very comforting to listen to.

A note about the music in the podcasts–because for those who don’t know, the format is some talk, a song, some more talk, another song. It’s like a radio show in which the DJ is focused more on knitting than anything else. I was skeptical that I would like this aspect of the show, but I’m finding that I love her music choices. The music all comes from the podsafe music network, which must make music available for free from the artists, and though they are not signed with music labels the quality is excellent.
So if you were like me and hadn’t given these podcasts a try, please go take a listen! You can find them and subscribe through iTunes, or you can go to the Web site and download them individually.

Does anyone have another knitting-related podcast that you listen to regularly? She’s mentioned a few others, but I haven’t downloaded any yet. Recommendations?

Is it really Friday already? This week’s installment of Eye Candy Friday will be less odd than last week. Nothing absurd, just out of the ordinary: Wild nature in the city!

Sure, it’s true, you see plenty of pigeons and squirrels, plus an occasional mouse or rat out and about in Philly. But a few weeks ago, I came across a chartreuse caterpillar!

He was a speedy little guy, and capturing a nonblurry shot was a challenge. When I was little, I remember camping in the Catoctin Mountains with my family and family friends. The kids would climb every rock we could find, exploring new heights. We encountered loads of caterpillars. We’d catch some, put them in a bowl or something with some twigs, and watch them a bit before losing interest. (Or, we’d wave them under the nose of my friends’ mom, who was deathly afraid of them. Such brats we were!) We never saw one like this, however–we only saw more standard, less poisonous-looking ones.

Needless to say, this brightly colored caterpillar warranted a stop on the way to work. Again, as I am wont to do, I pointed it out to a woman passing by. Except the woman who was passing by was a “hello” friend I’ve made, from crossing paths every morning for a few months. She eagerly stopped to look as well, and we marveled at the presence of a caterpillar as exotic as this in Society Hill.

I wonder what kind of butterfly it will be. Google to the rescue! Searching “yellow fuzzy caterpillar” yielded this blogger, who found a similar caterpillar and did the research for me! It grows up to be a completely uncolorful moth. Still a cool sighting, though!

We here at Pepperknit strive to serve the public. So as of tonight, you can download the pdf patterns for the Anastasia Socks or the Zokni Socks all by yourself! No more middleman (i.e., me). No extra step. A loss of personal touch, of course, but you can send me an email (mintyfreshflavor at gmail dot com) to say hi if you want. Any time.

One HUGE, ENORMOUS, I-cannot-stress-this-enough reason I got the patterns up and ready to go was the HUGE, ENORMOUS I-cannot-believe-I-did-this error that Laura found. I had the wrong number of stitches in my chart! Purely an oversight, but a pretty bad one. The file that is on the site is correct and updated as of this evening–please download it to replace the file I emailed you, if you already have the pattern. Thanks so much for mentioning it, Laura!

Because you’ll get to the toe, and you’ll be merrily kitchenering along, doing a fabulous job keeping tension even and the like, and you’ll get to the end and discover you have quite a few more stitches on one side than on the other.

Seems that when I decided to drop my final stitch count by another leaf (4 stitches), I forgot to subtract 4 from my total. And then I just moved what I thought was half, but I never counted the other half, and . . .

I’m all for fudging the end of a kitchener row, but I think this is going to be too wonky. And I’m not sure if I like the wider heel or if I should go back and redo that, too. Instead of worrying about this or even attempting more math, I think I’ll try to go to work today. Let’s see how that goes!

It turns out that what I thought was an allergy attack on Saturday was a full-blown cold. I feel like crap; yesterday I stayed home from work and today I thought I’d go in in the afternoon, but since I get out of breath walking to the bathroom, it’s not looking good.

When last I wrote I was trying to figure out how to make a single leaf. Part of the complication was that I didn’t want the background of the work to be reverse stockinette, and I wanted the appearance of shaping on the leaf on both sides of the leaf. Late on Sunday, I finally made it work.

My plan is to make a pair of trouser socks; up to the calves with calf shaping. I hit upon sheer brilliance (in my not-so-humble opinion) when I developed my leaf pattern to have more decreases than increases in it, resulting in 4 stitches decreased with every leaf. So I could scatter some falling leaves down the side of the sock, and they would do the calf shaping for me! I’m very happy with the results:

( It’s a little blurry, sorry. See a clearer shot with more detail here.) When looked at from above, the leaves have too much depth and look weird (and even from the side, my boyfriend doesn’t like the look). In fact, let me back up: I was taking the pictures just to show that I made a ton of progress while sick, but to lament that I was going to have to take it out and rethink. Instead, after seeing the shot in the camera, I’m newly in love with what I’ve created.

I randomly placed the leaves along just the outside of the sock (I’ll have a right and a left sock). I will place the leaves randomly on the other sock, too, so the two won’t be an exact match. If you notice, the leaves aren’t all the same size, either, to give it some additional visual interest.

The yarn (Hill Country Yarns) is so amazing: soft to the touch, but holds up to being worked and reworked many times over. The striping was particularly appealing to me back when I had 92 stitches, and though I’m not thrilled with the combination pooling/striping that’s happening now that I’m at the final count for the sock (72 stitches; I get 9sts/in on size 1s), it’s certainly not ugly.

One perk of still feeling sick is that I might finish the first sock soon!

Perhaps it’s a side effect of the allergy medication I took this afternoon, after hanging out at a cat house last night sent me into a sinus frenzy all day. I slept for 4 hours this afternoon! So tonight I was trying to catch up on my planning for this next pair of socks.

Here’s the deal: I want to make a leaf. Just a single leaf, on an angle. This delightfully soft sock yarn, from Hill Country Yarns, is called “Indian Summer” but has me thinking of leaf-peeping and falling leaves. I’ve been in the mood for pumpkin pie for days now. I decided the “easiest” way to figure out how to make one nice leaf would be to find a pattern and steal a single leaf from it. But of course, I needed to chart the whole pattern in order to pick out the single leaf and still keep all the decreases and yos even. So I did that. For a few different leaf patterns. Then I decided I needed a straightforward swatch before I tried experimenting with leaves.

“Hmmm, this is nice and all, but it would be much more fun to just work on the leaves. Let’s stick a leaf in the middle of the swatch. But I’m going to need stitch markers . . .”
Naturally I could only find one marker, and the rest weren’t where they were supposed to be. So I tore apart the knitting bag that sits next to the couch, which has been a mess anyway. “I should really clean this thing out.” I sorted everything, and even found the stitch markers.

But then as I was putting things back in the knitting bag, some of those skeins that I’d played with were kind of a mess, so . . .

And now I’m too tired to continue with any kind of knitting!