Farmer’s Market

There hasn’t really been all that much time for knitting lately, and what has been knit hasn’t been photographed. But I did start the sweater! I’ve knit 4 1/2″ already.

I also finished the first of the “Composed (or not so composed?) Mitts”, but alas, photographs lack there as well. I’m about halfway through the second mitten, so when I finish up the pair, I’ll take some pictures.

However, what has been lacking in knitting has been made up for in baking. Last weekend, my friend and I tried selling baked goods at a Farmer’s Market. It went really well — so well that we’re doing it again tomorrow!

We baked A LOT. We had molasses cookies, pumpkin loaf and pumpkin muffins, cinnamon-cardamom cookies,

And last, but most certainly not least, croissants.

I still kind of can’t believe that I actually made croissants. Good ones, too. Now I feel like I can really call myself a baker!

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Swatching, Really!

Despite all my excitement about knitting a yoke sweater, and despite the fact that I’ve had the yarn for nearly a week now, I’m only just about to cast on. Because what have I been doing? Swatching! (No, not for the entire week.)

First, I decided to wind the yarn. Not in my usual ball-winding way, but as a center pull ball wound on a nostepinne. Admittedly, this wasn’t for any particular reason, save that I’ve never done it before. My eagerness to try this was only slightly hampered by the lack of an actual nostepinne in my life. After a thorough search for suitable stand-ins, I found a paintbrush. Problem solved.

Once I had some of it wound, I began the swatching. The whole concept of “proper swatching” is, I have to say, quite new to me. I’ve swatched in the past — swatched quite a bit, in fact, but the entire 4 inches or more has always seemed a bit extreme. And I’ve never washed swatches before, either (I know, I know. I’m terrible). But this time, I decided, I was going to do it right.

I’ll admit that I was partially inspired to do this by Ysolda’s post on swatching, where she explains an easy way to swatch stockinette in the round. So I did it. I tried three different needle sizes, just to be sure on which I liked the best. I’m glad I did, because I initially thought I’d be using size 8s, but in the end, I think I’ve settled on size 7s.

So it should begin soon. I’m definitely planning on and looking forward to casting on tomorrow night, so we’ll see how far it gets this weekend!

By the way, I also made some cookies the other night!

Oatmeal Chocolate Chip. They’re really good, but the only thing is that they got stale really, really quickly. They were in plastic and everything, but by the second day, they’d become very hard. It’s a mystery, but I guess it’s not that bad of one — they’re just a bit crunchier now.

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Odds and Ends

There are so many little odds and ends that I finished up this weekend, and not enough time to post about them all! I spent some time starting the mittens,

They’re really fun to knit. So far, I’ve pretty much stuck with the chart from Interweave Knits, but I did a picot cast on instead of ribbing with bobbles. We’ll see where they go — I think soon I might change the chart a bit and just make my own pattern.

Mainly, though, this weekend I’ve been finishing up a couple WIPs that had been nagging me from my knitting basket. I finished a cowl/neck tube/pointless but interesting thing I’d been knitting from some of my handspun, and I bound off a sock I’d been working on.

Around last Thursday, the sock was at this stage of its life:

But, through the usual time spent knitting during class (Physics has proven especially effective for knitting time), while waiting on line, and then with the newfound addition of knitting whilst reading for AP US History, it quickly progressed to this:

For its future mate, I’ve reserved its knitting time to classes and the like. For my reading knitting, I’m going to begin something I’ve been thinking about for a while now — something very fitting for the coming autumn. Something that is mindless enough to deem it reading knitting for a while, but interesting enough that I’ll want to keep knitting it and wear it when I’m done. And finally, something big enough to keep me knitting while reading for a good while.

What could it be? Simple. A yoke sweater.

I’ve already got the yarn.

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Spinning Away

When I first got the fall issue of Interweave Knits, there were so many things I wanted to knit in it. The first thing I cast on for was the Tyrolean stockings, then the hat part of the Nomad Hat (maybe I’ll post pictures of these later). But there was something else I wanted to knit, desperately. These.

The Composed Mitts. But then, at the same time, not the Composed Mitts. It wasn’t the mittens themselves that I was enamoured with, but the idea of them. I wanted mittens with lots of colorwork that I could just sort of make up as I went along.

So what to do, but start spinning?

I had, conveniently enough, the perfect roving for the mittens. I’d gotten a bag filled with little dyed batts of Merino roving from Mielke’s Fiber Arts when I went to Wisconsin this summer.

I also had some roving from another fiber farm I’d gone to, so I spun up some of that as well. I’m dying to know what kind of wool it is — the woman wasn’t completely sure, but she thought it might be shetland. It doesn’t really feel like any shetland I’ve ever seen before, but maybe it is? I guess I’ll just have to settle on its being wool. (By the way, I’m excusing the woman her lack of knowledge of her own fiber due to the immense joy of seeing a house with a pen of Angora goats out front and 25 acres of sheep out back. To say nothing of Larry, the eggroll-eating Llama. But then, that’s a whole other story.)

Now that I’ve gotten all the wool spun up for the mittens, I can’t wait to start on them!

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Danish Oat Loaf

This past Monday I decided that I wanted to do something to celebrate the last hours of summer. So as a last hurrah before school started up again, I decided to bake some bread. Usually I’m more a fan of bread that needs to rise at least overnight, but since I wasn’t going to be home the next day, I went for a quicker bread. After some deliberation on what should be the bread for my veritable last supper, I settled on the Danish Oat Loaf (Havrebrød), from The Great Scandinavian Baking Book.

It turned out really, really well! Almost half the loaf was eaten before it even cooled down.

It’s all gone by now, unfortunately. But perhaps… Maybe I’ll go preheat the oven…

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Why, Hello!

Well, the time has finally come when I have to write this entry. I’ve put off writing this first entry more times over the past few days than I can say. It’s not that I’m not excited about starting a blog, or that I don’t have anything to say, because in fact, I have everything to say. I just don’t know how to say it. And I know that in a few months, I’ll come back and read this entry and be embarrassed by how idiotic it will sound, and that by then it will be too late to change it. But hell, something has to be said, so here goes.

I love knitting. I knit in spare moments, I knit for entire afternoons, I’ve stayed up half the night to finish a project with a looming deadline. I bring my knitting on the subway, only to be stared at more intensely than the tattooed man with a tricolor mohawk sitting next to me. I have knit sweaters, hats, mittens, vegetables (long story), nosewarmers, more socks than are healthy, and more. I try to spread the word about knitting whenever I can. I even taught a friend how to purl on two sporks (a combination of a spoon and a fork, for those innocent in the knowledge of mangled, crossbred utensils) for lack of knitting needles.

I also like to bake when I can. Breadmaking especially, is something I love. There’s nothing better than the smell of baking bread, or bread hot out of the oven. But as it tends to be a bit inconvenient to bring an oven on public transportation and as baking isn’t generally something you can do while standing on line, this blog will probably show more knitting than baking in the everyday sense.

Autumn always feels like a fresh start in a way. The weather is changing, school is beginning, and the leaves are turning. It’s only the start of September now, so I have some time to eagerly anticipate Autumn before it arrives, but that should make it all the better when it comes.

So what better time to start a blog than this? I’ll post as often as I can, keeping anyone who’s reading this updated on what I’m doing, and should no one end up reading it, it can just be a record of what I’ve knit.

Phew! The first entry’s over with. I’m excited to start keeping this!

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