My name is Lorette. I learned to knit in 1999, and took up spinning in 2009. I'm a physician specializing in internal medicine, and live in the Pacific Northwest. Enjoy my blog!
And just like that, it is Sunday, and the last day of the festival. The theme this year was Bluegrass Beyond Borders, and we heard some wonderful bands from Brazil, Argentina, Ireland, Sweden, and Italy, among others. My vote for best of the festival goes to the band from Brazil, Trio Brasileiro. Look them up on your favorite music source, or try to hear them live. They do educational workshops in Port Townsend, so they do play regionally from time to time.
And I finished a sock. Here is the first of the pair.
And the second sock ready for the day’s festivities.
I might have accidentally managed to start the second sock at exactly the same place in the stripe sequence.
Yarn: Fyberspates Gleem Lace, 2 skeins, 1748 yards total. I used all but 14 grams. This was a gift several years ago from Jennifer AKA Major Knitter.
Needles: 2.75 mm
Started/Finished: 3/16/17-2/16/20
For: Me
Modifications: None
What I Learned: Patience. This is a huge shawl. None of it is difficult in the sense of technically challenging. There are several rows that have cables, but once I got it out of my head that cables in laceweight yarn aren’t any different than cables in heavy yarn, it was all good. I learned to fix some mistakes without tinking back multiple rows.
Pattern/Yarn rating: ***** for the pattern. It was formatted nicely, and no errors. **** for the yarn. It is gorgeous, but there is just enough variation in the color from one skein to the next to annoy me a tiny bit. In the finished shawl it almost looks a bit like a gradient. In over 1700 yards of yarn, there wasn’t a single knot or whacky bit that had to be spliced out.
I predict that I will wear this one a lot. I love the color, and I really like that it is such a generously sized shawl.
And now I get to pick one of the other four lace shawls I have in progress to focus on! I already have one chosen, since it will be a gift that has a “needs to be done” date.
I finally finished the Winter Solstice shawl today. It’s still drying on the blocking mats, but I couldn’t wait to show photos.
Well, actually, I did have to wait. I wasn’t able to log into the dashboard for my blog to get going with a post. It took me much of the afternoon, but I finally was able to fix the damned thing, which involved going into the actual wordpress file manager and renaming and deleting some things. NOT what I really planned to do with my afternoon.
Anyway.
This is pre-blocking. It got a good soak in the sink, and then blocked.
And I needn’t have worried about running out of yarn. 14 grams left.
Knitting whilst watching a movie with subtitles*, even plain garter stitch, is never a good idea. I managed to knit 8 or 9 rows, dropped a stitch somewhere, messed it up trying to fix it, ripped back 8 or 9 rows to get it all back on the needles.
I finished another couple of rows on the Endless Winter Solstice shawl. My remaining little ball of yarn is starting to look, well, little.
Out comes the trusty drug dealers scale.
After the previous row, I weighed it as well.
17 rows left, 33.4 g of yarn left
Now I have 16 rows left, and 32.3 g of yarn. So a little more than a gram of yarn per row. But remember, the rows get longer. I add another 28 stitches before the end.
I didn’t do the algebra, though it likely wouldn’t be difficult. 28 stitches isn’t going to weigh much compared to the 665 I already have on the needles.
I should be OK. But it wouldn’t be Chez Knitting Doctor without a bit of drama, would it?
And no, that isn’t salt in that shaker. I buy unscented talcum powder in bulk for my hands to use if things get sticky while knitting. This isn’t uncommon when knitting with lace weight, especially when it has silk in it. The big jar is unwieldy, so I put it in a mini salt shaker. It fits nicely in my knitting bag.
I’m finally getting close on this one. I have 19 rows left. The pattern has 344 rows, the last row has 693 stitches to bind off. The last section of lace has lace stitches (increases and decreases) on every row, not just the public side rows. So no easy purl rows to count stitches and make sure I haven’t screwed up.
Which I have, plenty of times with this one. Mostly I’ve caught them a few repeats later, and can either go back and fix them, or fix them on the return row. A few times I’ve had to go back a whole row, but at this point, I’d avoid that like the plague, given the number of stitches in each row. It’s taking me close to an hour to knit a row.
The yarn for this would cost over $60 plus shipping to replace. The pattern costs around $7. I have probably $30 worth of supplies that I’ve used with this, including needles, markers, scissors, etc. Of course those will be used again, over and over.
I have no idea how many hours I’ve put into this shawl. People ask me that all the time—“how long does it take you to make that?” Since I always have multiple things going on at once in the knitting sphere, it’s impossible to say. But I will say that if I got minimum wage for the hours to make this, the cost would be astronomical.
Sure, I can go buy a nice shawl for $70-80. But it wouldn’t ever be like this one, which will be one of a kind, made carefully by my own hands.
Someone remind me of that when I’m complaining about the 693-stitch bind off.
Which will be at least 20 knitting hours from now.
It’s time for another episode of Cooking With the Knitting Doctor. One of the things that is nice about being home is home cooking. The food was great on the cruise, but we usually eat a lot more simply at home, and eat way more plant-based meals. I had the urge to make beans and rice yesterday, and did so. They aren’t vegetarian, since I added some leftover sliced ham that was languishing in the freezer from Thanksgiving, but they were pretty loaded with other healthy things.
Generous spoon of cumin, ground (I use the whole cumin and grind it as I use it).
Pinch of cayenne.
Salt and pepper to taste.
Stock or water.
Can of diced tomatoes
I soaked the beans in water for most of the day. Drain.
Sauté the veggies in olive oil in Instant Pot container. Add everything else, then the stock or water to cover the beans by about 2 inches, more if you want it soupier.
Lock the lid, set on high pressure for 24 minutes. This really depends on the kind of beans you are using. I tend to underestimate a bit, unless I’m shooting for falling apart beans. You can always close it up again and cook for a few more minutes if they aren’t done. When the timer is done, release the steam, check the beans, make sure they are done.
This is one of those recipes that is easily modified. Leave out the ham, or add a different meat if you have leftovers to use. Change up the spices as you like. Some chopped greens would be great in this as well. If you want to use canned or already cooked beans, you could, and just do them on the stove top.
I promptly fell asleep last night after I did these, and missed dinner. My brain is still on east coast time. So we had them for breakfast today.
I took some of the beans, cooked them in a cast iron skillet with some olive oil, mashed them a bit. They were put on top of a heated corn tortilla, and topped with shredded cheese, a fried egg, chopped scallions, cilantro, and tomatoes. And a splash of hot sauce that we bought in St. Thomas.
Honest to God, these were so good that I almost cried. I think I’ve mentioned Rancho Gordo before, I joined their bean club a while back. I get a shipment of their lovely beans every quarter, and buy more in between as well. Their beans are heirloom varieties and are wonderful.
And just so you don’t think I’m kidding about being Miss Betty F-ing Crocker, here’s proof. I won the Betty Crocker Family Leader of Tomorrow award in high school. No lie.
Vacation is loads of fun. We just got off an 11 day cruise in the Eastern Caribbean. We went on Viking, which was our first (but not last) trip with them. I mostly posted on FB while we were gone. Although our shipboard wifi was included, it tended to be slow, especially once everyone was on board and using their devices, so I didn’t even try to do a blog post. The trip out and back was uneventful, and we had a great time, and a much needed sun break.
Despite the fun and sun, it’s really nice to be home. I got to sleep in my own bed last night, and had a cup of tea in my own kitchen this morning. The pets were all very happy to see us. We are fortunate to have found a lovely housesitter who takes good care of them and our home, but they missed us and we missed them.
We didn’t buy much on the trip. Not surprisingly, there wasn’t a single yarn shop to be found. Most of the shops at the ports are wearyingly the same, generally overpriced junk. I did find some nice handmade silk screened place mats on St. Lucia.
Those will be lovely on our patio table in the summer.
And we had to buy a bottle of banana ketchup, and some hot sauce. The locals swear that the banana ketchup is wonderful.
And sort of a blog fail. I finally finished all the Euroflax linen gift somethings yesterday. I had this grand idea to knit a bunch of them, finished four.
Now that they’re (mostly) gifted, I can tell what they are. Don’t be too excited, I spent all of December knitting garter stitch linen face cloths.
I know, right? Those shouldn’t be too hard. They are just big garter stitch squares. And I forgot to take photos of the first three (the green, pink, and lavender ones) before I mailed them off. These are for my sisters, I packaged them with some nice bath soap. Linda just got one, the yellow one was finished yesterday so I’ll get it in the mail when we figure that the crush at the post office is over.
I’m not doing a whole finished project thing for those. It’s Euroflax linen, sport weight. I used this pattern. It starts with 3 stitches, increases every row until it’s wide enough, then decreases back to 3 stitches. “Wide enough” for me was 89 stitches.
You would think that with as few things that I finish around here, that I’d remember to take pictures. Oh well.
I organized all my knitting projects today and got them out of the jumble that they’d turned into.
That is 4 lace shawls, 2 pairs of socks, 2 sweaters, a Hitchhiker, and another linen washcloth. And Ripley. My plan is to finish one of the sock pairs, one of the sweaters, and one of the lace shawls next. We’ll see how that goes. Ripley said she’d help.
Winter Solstice is one of my favorite days of the year. I’m not a huge fan of the cold and dark, so even though the days are barely perceptibly longer from here, I still know that they are indeed getting longer. For the last decade or so (twelve years actually), John and I have done a huge solstice sit down dinner for friends and neighbors. It always turned out to be a 5 or 6 course meal for a dozen people, that involved days of planning and cooking.
Last year, we just decided not to do it. And we’re not doing it this year either. I still love to cook for people, but it had gotten to be more about the production and less about the fun of being with friends. The winter months are also often a challenge for me. The “undertoad” starts to grab at my toes and try to pull me under if I get too much on my plate and start stressing out.
I pulled out my Longest Night shawl this morning and gave it a bit of love. I’ve been knitting Euroflax linen “somethings” for Christmas gifts all month, and my hands forgot how nice it is to knit with soft silk and merino lace. Next time I decide to do something like that for the holidays, somebody remind me that I should start earlier so it doesn’t turn into a marathon. I still have one left to finish, but it’s close enough that I can take a break from it.
I’ll leave you with a photo of one of the Christmas trees at work. It makes me laugh every time I walk by it.
I hope your weekend is peaceful, and that you don’t have too much busy stuff to finish before Christmas.
I haven’t made bread from a sourdough starter in quite a while. When we went to Poland in September, I forgot to take care of the starter before I left, and by the time we got home and remembered it, it was well past resurrecting.
I decided to buy a small starter from Breadtopia last week. It took a few days to build it up to a usable quantity. Here’s what it looked like this morning.
That looks like a fine healthy starter to me. I have bread dough in the works for a nice sourdough Pain de Campagne.
We had a little excitement with Arlo on Thanksgiving. We had a houseful of people, some that stayed overnight, and with one big friendly extra dog. Arlo disappeared, which isn’t unusual, but I couldn’t find him the next day still. I was beginning to think he had escaped and gotten outside, but he eventually came sauntering out of some hiding place.
He is starting to be a little more cuddly than when we got him earlier this year. He is now sleeping on our bed, and today for the first time he jumped up on my lap while I was knitting.
Speaking of knitting, that missing yarn finally showed up a couple days later, delivered to one of our neighbors. Fortunately Larry doesn’t knit, so he was happy to turn it over to me.
That’s all the colors that I now have of this*. Aren’t those pretty? It brings just a bit of springtime, which is quite welcome in these dark, rainy days of December. I only have one skein of each color, but I’m thinking a summer top out of that pale aqua would be lovely. Or the purple. Or maybe one of each.
