We’re being very, very quiet here for the passing of 2007. It’s just Mom and my brother and me. We had quite the domestic day. In the morning we did all the shopping for groceries in the next village over and joked with the butcher. In the afternoon, I put on a stew for tomorrow, then dyed some recycled sweater wool in food coloring dye, then prepared the upside down apple pie for the evening meal.

I have enjoyed quiet New Year’s Eves several years running — big parties in the streets are not my type, I have a deep phobia of the sudden popping noises of firecrackers — but this one might take the cake with its exceptional calm.

We were done eating our wonderful roast duck meal at about 9.30, and an hour later the pie had been gleefully consumed, too. Mom dozed in front of the TV while me and my brother puttered each at our laptop for a while.. It’s now just gone over into 2008 and Mom’s in bed already!

I might follow soon; I got up after a mere 5 hours of sleep last night. I only wanted to post this recipe I improvised for my stew, because I think tomorrow it’ll be the yummiest start of the year, along with the New Year Concert of Vienna.
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Wah, I am still really bad at updating this, uh. Let’s do it in reverse chronological order, shall we?

In culinary news, yesterday I tried this recipe for experimental dark chocolate chip / bacon cookies.

I messed up and put the bacon bits and chocolate chips in the dough at the same time as the flour.. So the whole thing ended up less bit-heavy that it should have been: the chocolate and bacon got chopped fine fine fine by the food processor. Still, an interesting experiment, and I will know better next time! I like the result a lot. It was also my first time ever making sugar icing, which is easier than pie! Yay for icing.

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One (picture-less) FO! A day to remember, then.

Yesterday I dragged my brother back to Le Comptoir, and bought a second skein of yarn for the odd shoulderette object. The lighter blue I’d picked was all sold, so I settled for a darker, petrol blue. Yes, my FO is made out of two - no, actually, 3 - different colors. I did wonder how silly it would look, and I thought perhaps I would even frog and knit it back up while striping all the while… Since the ridged design even naturally lends itself to that.. But I decided against. This was to keep me warm now that winter-y temperatures are there, and I needed/wanted it sooner rather than later.
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No pictures this time, I’ve missed the right daylight window to snap up the new yarn I bought in Nantes. I was away for a weekend of professional networking, which I am unused to, and it made me feel strangely afloat and vulnerable. Obviously the way to regain my footing and manage some semblance of control over my surroundings was to buy yarn! And needles - I needed big circs for some of the more bulky threads I’d bought recently, and I managed to acquire both 6mm and 7mm circulars. Too short, yet useful anyway.

I used them already, knitting a sort of shoulderette thing from the blue 100% wool I bought at Le Comptoir in October. It’s inspired from the Noro Hat from Saartje de Bruijn (Ravelry link). I knitted two of those last year, one in Kureyon #165 for me and one in Iro for Mom, and I love the effect of the horizontal faux-rib so much, I used it for this shruglet-noname blue experiment. It stope right after covering my shoulders so far, and I think I’ll go back to the shop for a second skein and lengthen it some.

I might even manage to take a picture of it, too! I’m wearing it right now, it’s nice and warm.

I uploaded some of the works in progress on Flickr and had to stop because I have reached my upload-limit for the month. Gotta be careful about that til I can afford the pro account, and not rush to upload the fullsize originals when I can do with resized…

Anyway, for those interested, the woven choker experiment-in-progress and the last of the 3 knitted necklaces, as well as a badly lit picture of the bambbo scarf, are up over there.

I’ve let a long time pass without posting! I get easily overwhelmed, is the thing, and this sudden birst of inspiration and life has translated into many projects I’ve tried to tackle at once, a full rehaul of my life, several websites brewing, and of course more crafting than I can actually tackle along everything - especially with a heatwave and the world cup upon us (yes, I watch football!).

Anyway, to catch up somewhat with color week, here is the (off)white i-cord I knitted yesterday from a single-ply ball of pure wool passed on to me within Mom’s stash - which is to say, I have no clue when and where this was acquired, but you can be sure it is in some way “vintage” wool.

I felted it today, simply threw it in the wash at 60 [celsius] degrees with a pair of jeans, and it shrunk from an overall length of 350cm to barely 305cm.

Now I need to procure the necessary veggies to attempt some more natural dying. So that’s it for Monday White… Before the rope becomes safran Yellow or some kind of orange (I have high hopes).

And for the Thursday Blue, here’s a better picture of the blue knitted necklace, which I am still so happy with that I think I’ll enter it at whiplash for the “recently completed item” thing they have going on for the month of June.

I’m slowly entering this online world of crafting goddesses, delurking and so on. I’ve started an overhaul of my Flickr account and I’m well determined to using the service fully from now on, probably paying for a pro account soon. I’m ogling better digital cameras than my 4 years old tiny one: it’s very sturdy, and I like it a lot, but it has no macro mode… I have no money for that right now though. Dreams for later! First I need to blog more, among other things. It’s a very exciting time…

Speaking of art and craft and manufactured handmade series of things (yes, we were speaking of those, in my own head anyways)…. Because I am nothing if not easily amused by ‘meta’ stuff, or, um, era-commentary, let’s say, I bought something today: one of these.

The 842, to be precise. See, I am broke, so I had to pick a high number to spend less on it — check the formula and you’ll see what I mean. This one seemed more appealing than most possibilities though, because it’s all 2s. 2×2x2-2×2-2, is what it is. I like that in a number.

Unrelatedly, I picked up from where I had stashed it a happenstance, unfinished project based on yarn, and finished it!

I’d started making a large swatch in seed stitch with this thick (8mm needles) pure acrylic yarn I bought, the day I bought it. Which was some time last year, but please spare me; I am slow.

When I had taken the needle and slid it away from the knitting to start unraveling what was, after all, only a warm-up tryout knit, I’d noticed how the knitting curved to form a perfect hemisphere, and how gorgeous the knitted seed stitch band looked.

The texture and stitch definition was just… eye-catching. I decided then and there that I should try to make it a necklace, a neck-plate-ish thing like I’ve seen in museums except you know, in yarn and not in bronze.

I did think, though, that it would require something more than what I had so far, beads to weight it down and give it a more refined shape perhaps, something to put it more firmly in a ‘jewelry’ category instead of ‘wearable, supple accessory stuff’.

Don’t ask me where that line is and why it seemed important to me at the time; I doubt that’s a permanent state of affairs.

Anyway, today I realized I had the right beads for the job, and I finished it. I blurred Mom and her interior fleece-y robe here, because I know she’ll be unhappy with me otherwise. I already had to push to have her let me take the picture.

I have more of that yarn in that great blue - that I already knitted a fun pointy not-quite-beret with - some in grey, and some in a pale green I like very much. It’s pure acrylic, but it has the feel of a felted wool of some kind; I think the thread itself, so thick and round that you can weave it in other ways (I plan to, as well), is actually a knitted icord of very fine thread, felted chemically, or something like that. Anyway, it has a very interesting texture, I feel there is more to explore with it (and someday I will find and post the label / brand / numbers etc, perhaps).

Edited on June 16: I put a somewhat better, later picture of the necklace up on Flickr here. I think it does a better job of showing the detail, despite being perhaps too heavy on the contrast. It’s the same picture inserted in the next entry of the blog, too.

It would be dishonest not to share the result of yesterday’s fumbling with onion skin.

So that’s the result, after a wash and a night of drying. Amateur yellow, irregular in places… Not too bad.

Except for the stains here and there made by the close proximity of - you may say rubbing against - a few crushed blackberries.

Oh well. Colour experiments are fun no matter what!

After doing little more than reading on the internets for a good long while, I made a break for cooking and eating. Today was chickpeas + chicken breast marinated with lemon juice / olive oil sauce mit crushed coriander seeds and, of course, saltnpeppa. Then I returned to my reading, exercised for ten minutes, whined some in my livejournal.

I don’t know if it’s a seasonal [dis]order or not, but inspiration and desire for doing things are rising like sap; the only problem is that some winter-y physical ‘ennui’ remains, coupled with indecision and some material-waste related angst.

The inspiration bit is a strong tide though; it makes me do things like take pictures of the bottom of a new pan just because of the colour and shapes on it.

Seriously. I love bronze, and I love bronze offset by greens. Isn’t this all so cool looking?

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