Crafty Kim

February craft round up

Ah, another month has flown by. A summary of my February crafty pursuits:

Clearly February was all about accessories!

Gift knitting + cables = good match

I made Tim a pair of Dashing mitts (with added fingers) for Valentine's day - raveled. I'm fairly certain I messed up the cable placement on one of them but honestly, he doesn't mind and so I'm not obsessing about it... much. I made some fairly heavy modifications to the pattern, adding fingers and using a gusset for the thumb. I also made Tim's dad a Habitat hat for his birthday - raveled. I loved the Habitat pattern - it took me a while to get back into the swing of cables, but it was such a well written pattern that it was fun to knit. Both the mitts & the hat were using up leftover Debbie Bliss Cashmerino Aran. That yarn, which definitely has a few issues, is hands down the best yarn for cables that I've ever used. The cables just POP because of how the yarn is constructed.

Two pairs of socks!

I finally knit myself a pair of Malabrigo socks, using some yarn I received as a Christmas gift from Tim (the solis colorway, if you're wondering). The sock pattern is the Summer 2008 Sock from Wendy Johnson - raveled - a super simple lace pattern. I'm not terribly fond of how badly the finished knit biases, but the socks fit fine and are perfectly comfortable to wear. I also knit myself a pair of Leyburn socks in some Yarn Pirate merino/tencel yarn - raveled. For the first time ever, I put the in-progress sock on and discovered that it wouldn't fit over my heel. The stitch pattern is incredibly non-stretchy and, when paired with an inherently less stretchy yarn (due to the tencel), there were fit issues. I made some modifications (see description in ravelry) and now they're perfect. Possibly my favorite hand knit socks ever.

Spin, spin, spin

I was a spinning fool during February. My wheel and I have finally become good friends :) The blue/brown yarn is some lovely merino from Enchanted Knoll (raveled), spun up in January and turned into a 3-ply using Navajo plying in February. I love love love this yarn. Thinking of appropriate pattern ideas. Perhaps a hat? FYI, Enchanted Knoll has some lovely hand-dyed yarns in addition to fiber. The pink/brown yarn is part of my Wooly Wonders club shipment from A Verb for Keeping Warm (raveled). I love having the opportunity to spin all different kinds of wool fibers from the club. This particular fiber is Finn. The Finn fiber came in two different complementary colors & it's been fun seeing how different club members have spun this yarn. I decided to keep the two colors separate. I'm brewing up a special project involving this yarn plus several other months of club fiber. Not giving away the details yet though!!! I'm currently working my way through some Blue Face Leicester and also some Targhee - no photos yet though.

ps

Remember this handspun hat & mini-cowl that I finished back in late December/early January? Tim's mom's birthday is also in February, so that was her gift. Not strictly a February craft project, we'll call it a bonus project :)

Next up?

March is, of course, Malabrigo March! I'm participating in a month-long KAL with other members of the Malabrigo Junkies group on ravelry. I've got lots of projects planned - probably more than I can possibly finish. Regardless, expect lots of Malabrigo goodness for the month of March. Also, I need to get my sewing room cleaned up a bit - tons of great sewing projects out there, lots of fabric in my fabric stash, just a messy room keeping me from working on it.

Hope February has been a good crafty month for you!

The best ever roasted butternut squash soup

The main reason I'm posting this: so that next time, when I want to make my favorite butternut squash soup, I won't have to spend an hour paging through a stack of printouts from the internet, searching google, and consulting cookbooks to try to reproduce this recipe. This is really a blend of about 6 different recipes from all over the place, so it seemed worthwhile to write it down this year.

I'm also posting this because this is mind-blowingly awesome and you should make some like... right now. I apologize for not having any photos but we ate this so fast, there wasn't time for pictures :)

ETA: We made the soup again and I managed to get a photo this time!

ZOMG! The Best Evarrr Roasted Butternut Squash Soup!

Ingredients

• 2 butternut squash, peeled and cut into chunks
• 2 small yellow onions, peeled and cut into quarters
• 3 carrots, well-scrubbed or peeled, cut in chunks
• 3 small apples, peeled, cored, and quarter
• 2 heads garlic
• 3 shallots, diced
• 1/2 tsp dried sage
• 1/2 tsp dried thyme
• 1/2 tsp dried oregano
• 5 cups chicken or vegetable stock
• Butter
• Olive oil
• Salt
• Pepper
• Walnuts, toasted
• Sour cream
• Sagey croutons (see recipe below)

Instructions

1. Place in roasting pan: butternut squash, onion, and carrots. Spray with olive oil and top with salt and pepper. Roast at 400€ degrees F for 40 minutes. Add apples to the pan and roast for 10-20 additional minutes or until everything is tender, for a total of 50-60 minutes roasting.
2. Roast garlic heads wrapped in foil for the same 40-60 minutes at 400 degrees F.

3. Saute shallots in butter over medium-low heat for 5 minutes. Add sage, thyme, and oregano and saute for a few more minutes.
4. Add broth.
5. When squash and carrots are tender, add squash, onions, carrots, apples, and garlic (removed from skin) to the broth mixture.
6. Cook broth mixture for 10-15 minutes over medium-low heat.
7. Puree broth-squash mixture with immersion blender until smooth (or however smooth you prefer). Add salt and pepper to taste.
8. Top with walnuts, sour cream, and sagey croutons.

Sagey Croutons

While not an absolute requirement, these make a nice contrast to the smooth soup.

Ingredients:

• Whole wheat bread, cut into 1/2" cubes
• Olive oil
• 1/2 tsp sage
• Salt
• Pepper
• 1/2 cup shredded parmesan cheese

Instructions:

Place bread cubes on pan with edges. Spread bread cubes with olive oil. Top with sage, salt, pepper, and cheese. Bake in 350 degrees F oven for 15-20 minutes.

Dark Days Challenge Update

I've done a terrible job blogging about our Dark Days experiences. I would say overall, we were doing incredibly well through December because our usual CSA farmers (Bugtussle Farm) were doing occasional deliveries of fresh produce to the Nashville area. We've been relying on our freezer and lots of eggs for the last few weeks and that's been rather unexciting :) Our more exciting butternut squash soup dinner tonight used lots of local ingredients: butternut squash, onions, apples, garlic, and walnuts, plus chicken broth we made from a locally-raised chicken.

January wrap up: scarfs, socks, mitts, handspun, oh my!

Despite my best intentions, blogging really got away from me during the month of January. I decided instead of doing a bunch of little posts to catch up on all of my January knitting, I'd do one big round up post.

Here's a collage of my crafting FO's for January (click on the photo to go to flickr, where you'll find links to photos of each project):

January was a phenomenal knitting month for me, my needles were on fire. I started out committed to trying something new: knitting with my own handspun yarn. I was surprised by how challenging this was for me, as I adapted to variable and very much non-standard yarn gauge. You know when you're knitting with Cascade 220 that it's going to be, well... the same through the entire skein. I'm not quite at that point with my handspun yet. The start of the skein might be bulky, the middle worsted, the end DK - just not consistent yet (although I'm getting better!).

My first handspun knitting attempt was a cowl (upper left of the collage) knit from 2 ounces of BFL from A Verb for Keeping Warm, which has shaped up to be my favorite online source for fiber. A basic mix of garter stitch and stockinette, it's just big enough to cover my neck. Now, this is normally the kind of thing that would take all of an hour to knit up but it took something like 4 days because I would knit the cowl, discover it was too big, rip it out, start over, repeat, repeat, repeat. Once I figured out the right gauge, it zipped right along. (Ravelry project link)

I was more successful with my second handspun knitting project, a pair of Elizabeth Zimmerman's mitered mittens (upper right of the mosaic). All last year, I was inspired by the beautiful mitered mittens from Grace and Alice of kathrynivy and I knew I was going to knit some of these simple but fun-looking mittens at some point. When I finished spinning this Shetland roving from A Verb for Keeping Warm (colorway: Fruit Loops, from the AVFKW fiber club) I knew it was the perfect yarn. I finally started getting the hang of knitting with handspun with these mittens: I only had to rip them out once :) I love love love the finished mittens, they're so comfy and warm. (Ravelry project link)

Both projects in the middle row of the mosaic were knit with yarn that was a gift from Tim. The socks, which are a pair of Show Off Stranded Socks, were knit from a local fiber dyer named Jan (Daily Fibers). Tim got it for me for Christmas 2008 and I cast on for these socks the day after Christmas. I used my standard toe-up, two-socks-at-once, slip stitch toe and heel approach. This sock yarn is great, very soft and smooshy. (Ravelry project link)

The project on the left, a Montego Bay scarf, was knit from what people in the Ravelry Stash Knit Down group call The Shrine of Precious Yarns - yarns that are so special that you just can't bear to knit with them. Tim got me this yarn as a Christmas gift the year that I started knitting (2006? 2007?) and I was instantly intimidated by it. The yarn is La Luz from Fiesta Yarns - a gorgeous 100% silk handpainted yarn that's a total joy to knit with. I'd made several previous attempts to knit something, anything with this yarn and just never found the right pattern. Of course, it turned out the perfect pattern match had been sitting in front of me all along - the Montego Bay scarf from Interweave Knits. A great match between a yarn and a pattern PLUS it has a cool finge... does it get better than that (for me, at least)? (Ravelry project link)

In addition to knitting from my handspun yarn, I also did more spinning in January. I feel like I'm really getting the hang of the spinning process and most of the time, I'm ending up with some usable funky yarn. After I took this photo of the singles, I used Navajo plying to turn this into 3-ply yarn - which is drying right now.

My final project for January was probably my favorite knitting for the entire month. I'm a happy member of the Yarn Pirate's Booty Club, but I was totally thrown a curveball by January's shipment. We usually get a fingering weight yarn, which I generally knit up on #1 needles. This month's yarn, in a gorgeous colorway called Hope (very appropriate for the times) was DK weight. I'd be miserable wearing DK weight socks because they'd be too warm for Nashville, but DK weight is perfect for some fingerless gloves. I had two things in mind with these gloves. First, I've had the idea of elbow length gloves on my brain for weeks. I don't know why, I just thought "Elbow length gloves, that's totally what I need". It was turning into an obsession. Second, turtlegirl made some super-cool Leyburn socks as part of a Socks That Rock KAL and I decided the stitch pattern was the best thing ever for hand-dyed yarns. I'm totally going to make a pair of Leyburn socks but in the meantime an enterprising person applied the stitch pattern to fingerless gloves to create Mahayana Flying Gloves, to which I just added length and a bit of shaping to make them longer. I love it when multiple obsessions converge! (Ravelry project link)

Just because I love how it looks, here's a close up of the stitch pattern:

Also, it turned out to be a really smart thing to knit both gloves at one time on a single circular needle since I almost ran out of yarn!

That's it for January crafty projects. I've got some fun projects on the needles and the wheel so far in February, too! Happy crafting everyone!

A re-cap of 2008's crafty pursuits

I don't know what happened to 2008 - it flew by at an alarming rate. I rely on crafty pursuits to deal with stress related to school-related stuff, and there was certainly a need for plenty of craft in 2008. I put together one of those photo collages everyone seems to be doing this year to summarize my 2008 crafts:

(Click on the photo to get links to all of the individual photos.)

Themes in my crafting for 2008:

• Socks, socks, and more socks: after totally losing my sock-knitting mojo for most of 2007 and the first half of 2008, I had a hard time knitting anything other than socks for the second half of 2008. A bit part of this change of mind was when I joined the Yarn Pirate's Booty Club - her yarn is so beautiful and the finished socks are so wonderful to wear that I was inspired to pick up the sock needles again. I've settled into knitting socks toe-up two-at-a-time on one circular needle and it's working marvelously for me.


• Combining knitting and sewing: sewing linings into knit bags, backings onto blankets - 2008 was a year for combining crafts.


• Collaborating with others: two good friends (Laura & Steph) and I worked together on a baby blanket for our friend Judith's baby. I've never worked on a craft project with others before, this was a nice change and a lot of fun.


• Colorwork, colorwork, colorwork: colorwork definitely emerged as my favorite type of knitting in 2008. I've limited my colorwork knitting to accessories like bags, mittens, and hats because it really doesn't get cold enough here in Nashville for a colorwork sweater to make sense. There are so many wonderful colorwork accessory patterns out there that I don't see getting bored with them any time soon though.


• Travel knitting: I feel like knitting makes me a much better traveller, less fidgety and more fun to travel with. In 2008, I knit a clapotis during our trip to Japan and socks on shorter trips to Wisconsin, Philadelphia, and Washington DC.


• A new craft: I certainly didn't plan on starting to spin when 2008 started. It just sort of happened. While it hasn't been as easy for me to pick up as knitting was, I feel like I'm getting the hang of spinning and am starting to make some really usable yarns. More importantly, I'm enjoying the process.

I don't know what 2009 has in store from a crafting perspective, other than more socks :) One thing missing from 2008 was any kind of finished sweater and I've got my eye on several ideas for 2009. I'm also participating in the Stashdown group on ravelry - choosing to "shop the stash" before purchasing new yarn, fiber, or even (gasp!) fabric. I feel like my stash of craft supplies has gotten a bit out of control and I need to step back and use some of the fabulous supplies I already have. I've already found a couple of types of yarn I had totally forgotten about! I'm still going to stick with the Yarn Pirate club and also a second club I belong to, a fiber club from A Verb for Keeping Warm (AVFKW). I'll hopefully have some finished items knit from some of AVFKW fiber to share soon!

Best wishes to you for 2009!

Dark Days Challenge: Wishing I loved greens

Fall and winter here in Tennessee are dominated by a lot of foods that I just don't like. Mostly involving greens - turnip greens, collard greens, mustard greens, and more. I've been told that cooking any of these greens long enough (along with some salt pork) makes them tasty. I've never found that to be true. It never fails to surprise me though because I love spinach - it makes no sense to me that I dislike the taste of all of these other greens so much. Local vegetable alternatives to greens? Sweet potatoes, potatoes, squash - some of my favorite vegetables to cook with. I predict you'll be seeing a lot of them in my Dark Days posts over the next few weeks.

Our CSA farmers are true experimenters, with peanuts being the big new crop for this year. The crop was apparently fairly successful too - we ended up with a big bag containing 2 lbs of unroasted peanuts. We roasted the peanuts in the oven for an hour at 250 degrees and then I shelled them. I've never had freshly roasted peanuts before. As with most locally-grown food, the flavor was amazing, nothing like peanuts you buy at the store!

We were also lucky this year to get some fresh ginger that was grown locally. Now, this isn't ginger for the faint of heart - this super fresh, locally-grown ginger has a ton of zing. In fact, it's so strong that it's been a bit of a challenge to use. I thought that sweet potatoes could probably stand up to the ginger flavor though and so we came up with our local meal for the week:

Sweet Potato, Ginger, and Peanut Soup
1 tbsp butter
1 onion, diced
4 cloves garlic, coarsely chopped
3 cups vegetable or chicken broth
2.5 lbs sweet potatoes, peeled and chopped
1/4 cup fresh ginger, minced or grated
1/2 cup smooth peanut butter
1 cup milk
Nutmeg, Cayenne Pepper and Salt (to taste)
For topping: chopped cilantro, peanuts, and crystalized ginger

Melt butter in a Dutch oven or other large size pot. Saute onion and garlic in butter until onion is translucent. Add chicken broth to the pot and bring to a simmer. Cook chopped sweet potatoes in the broth until soft, 20-30 minutes. Blend mixture until smooth using a stick blender. Stir in ginger, peanut butter, and milk. Season with nutmeg, cayenne pepper, and salt to taste. Top with chopped cilantro, chopped peanuts, and crystalized ginger.

We served this with a hearty slice of bread from Twin Forks Farm and an arugula side salad. We followed it up with an apple crisp made from locally grown Arkansas Black apples.

The local tally here:

• Onion, garlic, sweet potatoes, ginger, peanuts, cilantro, arugula: all from Bugtussle Farm
• Chicken broth: made from scratch with a chicken from Peaceful Pastures Farm
• Milk: from Rock Springs Dairy (available at the Produce Place)
• Bread: Twin Forks Farm

Big lesson for the week:
Making chicken broth might be more effort than opening a can but it's not that much more effort. Also, it tastes better, you end up with cooked chicken that you can use in other recipes, and you don't have to worry about what's in the broth (because you know everything that's in it!). A total win.

Dark Days Challenge: A (mostly) local Thanksgiving

We had a quiet and fairly peaceful Thanksgiving. My sister Kathy drove down from Wisconsin. She only stayed for Thursday and then headed home on Friday, after a busy day of cooking, hanging out, and playing Gloom and Ticket to Ride. I failed to get any photos of our Thanksgiving dinner!

Our (mostly local) Thanksgiving menu:

Turkey
Sweet potato gratin
Mashed potatoes
Bread stuffing with apples
Green jello salad
Olives and pickles
Cranberry sauce
Pumpkin pie

Our turkey came from a local food co-op that does a vegetable CSA and a meat CSA - Avalon Acres. This is our second year with a turkey from them and both years we've had moist, flavorful, and incredibly tasty turkey. We used the same cooking approach as last year: we roasted the turkey breast-side down until the last hour. This protects the breast from the heat and keeps the breast meat moist. Then we flipped the turkey breast-side up (infinitely less scary to do than it sounds!) for the last hour of cooking. Delicious!

Tim made his "only allowed on Thanksgiving because it's so unhealthy" specialty - sweet potato gratin. Layers of thinly sliced sweet potatoes, cream, brown sugar, dried cranberries, and pecans.

We even managed to put a more local spin on the green jello salad, by using local cream and pecans. We talked about skipping the jello salad this Thanksgiving (to go totally local), but it's Tim's grandmother's recipe and he loves it dearly. Wouldn't feel like Thanksgiving without it. My non-local "must haves" for Thanksgiving were black olives and whole berry cranberry sauce.

Thanksgiving local ingredient breakdown:

• Sweet potatoes (gratin), potatoes (mashed potatoes), onions (stuffing), pumpkin (pie) - Bugtussle CSA
• Bread for the stuffing - Twin Forks Farm
• Pecans (jello salad) - Nashville Farmers Market
• Cream (jello salad, gratin) - Hatcher Family Dairy
• Milk (mashed potatoes) - Rock Springs Dairy

Thanksgiving non-local ingredient breakdown: Celery (stuffing), Pineapple (jello salad), Green jello (jello salad), Sage & thyme (turkey and stuffing), Sour cream & cream cheese (mashed potatoes), olives, cranberry sauce, pickles

I was actually really surprised and happy to see how much of our Thanksgiving dinner could be sourced locally. The highlight? Making Dorie Greenspan's Sour Cream Pumpkin Pie using fresh pumpkins from our CSA. We roasted the pumpkins in the oven and then pureed them. The pie needed extra cooking time because of extra moisture in the pumpkin, but it was so delicious that it was worth the extra work.

Dark Days Challenge Gets Started!

Tim and I were doing the whole "locavore" thing long before it was the Oxford American Dictionary's 2007 Word of the Year. For the past three years, we've been part of a CSA with Bugtussle Farm. We love our farmers! We also have the good luck to live just a few blocks from the Nashville Farmer's Market and on top of that made the East Nashville Farmer's Market part of our weekly routine all summer long. Nashville is also the home to two great small markets: the Produce Place and the Turnip Truck. In almost too many ways to count, Nashville is an amazing place to live for fresh produce.

The challenge, of course, comes when the chilly days roll in and several of the farmers markets close up for the year. How do you eat locally when you can't just walk over to the market and pick up 20 different kinds of lettuce? This year, we're going to try to get over this challenge by joining the Dark Days Challenge hosted by the Laura of the Urban Hennery.

Here are our rules for the challenge:

1. Once a week we will cook at least one meal with 90% local ingredients
2. Our definition of local: grown or produced within 150 miles of Nashville
3. For items like cheese and pasta that are produced locally, we will find out where the producers are sourcing their ingredients and promote use of local ingredients whenever possible
4. Outside of our once-a-week local meal, we'll try to eat as locally as possible the rest of the week and keep a list of the local ingredients we're using
5. We will try to find local sources for grains. Our search for this has been futile so far, but we'll put some extra effort into it this winter. If you're in the Middle Tennessee area and know of some place to get local grains, let me know!

Here is our first effort for the Dark Days Challenge: Flannel Hash. This dish almost feels like cheating because we've had most of it in our freezer for a couple of weeks.

Red Flannel Hash (for two)
Adapted from The Big Book of Breakfasts

Ingredients
3 potatoes, peels left on
1 sweet potato, peeled
2 beets, peeled
3 slices of bacon, diced
1 small onion, chopped
2 eggs
Rosemary, chopped finely
Chives, chopped finely
Salt and pepper to taste

Instructions
Coarsely chop the potatoes, sweet potato, and beets trying to make the pieces approximately the same size. Steam until they're the right cooked texture for you - that's about 12 minutes for us.

In a large frying pan, cook bacon and onion over medium heat until onion is translucent. Mix in the cooked potatoes, sweet potatoes, and beets. Add the rosemary, salt (if needed), and pepper. Cook undisturbed for about 6 minutes, then turn and cook undisturbed for an additional 10 minutes (this will help give the hash a nice crust).

Divide mixture on two plates and top each serving with a fried egg. Top with chopped chives.

Where were our ingredients from?

• Beets - some super nice farmers from the East Nashville Farmer's Market, but I totally failed to get their farm name and info
• Potatoes, sweet potatoes, onions, eggs (check out how yellow the egg yolks are!) - Bugtussle Farm
• Bacon - Peaceful Pastures Farm
• Chives, rosemary - our own herb garden

Blogging By Mail and 6 random facts about me

I'm totally remiss in posting about the wonderful package I received from Maria for the Blogging By Mail 10 Items or Less swap, hosted by the Happy Sorceress. The package came right before I left for a conference for school, so I didn't even have a chance to check everything out until I got home. Here's the package:

Maria is a quilter and the red item in the center is a lovely little quilted purse. I've actually repurposed this already - it's holding miscellaneous spinning supplies, a perfect size! There's a nice-sized piece of purple fabric (already plotting how to use that), a handy peeler, a mini-Sudoku book (which Tim stole immediately), licorice coins, a loofah, and my personal favorite - a tin filled with all kinds of tasty chocolates (including some little Daim bars, which I love)!

Thank you so much for the wonderful package, Maria!

My package went to Emma of Adirondack Vegan.

And...

Judith tagged me and, since I sit across from her at school now, I decided I should focus on six habits that I have that might irritate other people.

• I sometimes knit while I'm writing. It's one of those reward/motivation ideas - "If I write for 20 minutes, I can knit for 5 minutes"
• I drink lots of looseleaf tea. I'm a bit concerned that it looks like I'm running some other kind of "herb" operation out of my desk drawers, but really... it's just tea.
• I'm an Apple fanatic. Right now as I'm typing this on my iMac, there are also a MacBook Pro and an iPhone sitting on my desk. This makes me happy. I try not to be a Mac evangelist, but really... can't help it.
• I have pictures on my cubicle walls of things that I've done are more fun than sitting in a cubicle and I spend too much time daydreaming about them: backpacking, sitting on a beach in Tahiti looking at a sailboat, hanging out with family, and skydiving. Actually, I spend time daydreaming about all of them except the skydiving. That's really on my wall as more of a cautionary tale, not to do anything that stupid ever again in my life.
• I'm the world's worst person for overdue library books. I doubt there's been a point in my life since I got my first library card that I didn't owe a late fee. I'm very ashamed of this, but that doesn't mean I've gotten any better at returning books on time.
• I've been trying very hard to go paperless for many, many years. I still print things out on occasion, but then I try to get them off my desk and into the recycle bin as soon as possible. I even have a little scanner on my desk to help me with this goal.

I've been writing all day, so I'm lacking in brain cells to tag anyone else today!

Socktoberfest FO: Caterpillar Socks!

Geesh, it's getting dusty around the old blog! I can't believe I haven't posted for almost a full month. That's embarrassing. I've been busy as always at school all October, with just enough time to knit and spin and cook to keep me from going crazy. Here's my sole Socktoberfest FO: Caterpillar Socks! (Raveled if you're interested in the knitty gritty details)

When I saw this pattern on knitspot months ago, I knew I needed to have it RIGHT AWAY. Something about the color and the pattern seemed perfect for me. I ordered the Monarch colorway kit from Yarn Nerd - I don't think the kit is available right now, so I'm definitely glad I ordered it months ago. The colorway is perfect for the pattern.

I don't think I could go overboard in describing how much I love these socks. In fact, I'm wearing them at this very moment. The yarn is everything that sock yarn should be: smooshy, non-pooling, and fun to knit with. The pattern itself was easy enough to knit on the bus but with enough variation to keep me engaged and interested.

I really liked how the colors ended up in the socks - definitely not pooling, not really striping, but not totally random. That's easiest to see on the bottom of the socks:

I knit this pair once again on my #1 Harmony circular needle from KnitPicks. I love that needle and am definitely going to have to get a few more sets for when this one wears out! As usual, I knit both socks at one time and knit toe up instead of top down. I definitely feel like knitting both socks at once makes the whole sock knitting process work much better for me.

I've got a ton of other projects on the needles right now and even more that I'm planning on knitting soon, but more details on all of that in future blog posts. I promise it won't be a month before I post again this time. Happy knitting!

FO: Totally Autumn (er... blue?) throw

I have a confession to make: every single time I give someone a handmade gift, I'm nervous. What if they don't like it? It's not like they can return it to a store. With this particular project, I'm even more nervous than usual because I don't know the recipients all that well. I probably wouldn't have even attempted a handmade item in this case but Tim (who has known one of them forever) kept saying that it was a perfect idea for this couple.

Without further ado, here's the finished throw that I've been working on for the last couple of weeks:

Project Stats:
Pattern: Totally Autumn by Anne Hanson (knitspot), free from Knitty
Yarn: Malabrigo Chunky in Oceanos (variegated blues)
Needles: #10 Addi Naturas
Started: 13 September 2008
Finished: 28 September 2008
Modifications: nothing other than yarn selection
Raveled

I think the variegated yarn makes it insanely difficult to get a good photo of this throw. The lace pattern does show up really nicely in real life, but I feel like it's obscured in photos. Here's a close up that might show off the pattern a bit more:

Other than having a hard time getting a good photo, I have no complaints about this pattern or the FO. The pattern, as with all of Anne's patterns, was well-written and clear. I've discovered that I really enjoy doing lace patterns in heavier weight yarns - this retains the challenge of lace but keeps the project moving along at a brisker pace. This particular lace pattern was easy enough to work on while watching TV or talking to people.

The blanket is so soft and snuggly, it's hard to give away! This is my first time using Malabrigo chunky and it's certainly every bit as warm, soft, and smooshy as Malabrigo worsted. One minor complaint about the yarn is that it felt to me like it had a lot of breaks and knots, certainly more than the worsted version. While this didn't cause major difficulty, it was a little irritating at points. Super snuggly:

I also found these cute tags on etsy, perfect for with knit gifts:

Back side of the tags on flickr.

And one final photo, the required "sort of like the pattern photo":