Rusty Coast's Next Top Model...NOT!

It’s been another one of those whirlwind weeks. I’m in Victoria, chaperoning DH for a surgical tweaking for his shoulder. So far, the tweaking is taking and he’s recuperating very well, thanks to a good dose of rest between rounds of Civilization IV on his PC. His arm is going to be in a hammock for at least a month so I’m playing Florence Nightmaregale for the next while.

I finally got to sit down and knit for a while yesterday while waiting for the DH’s shoulder to get overhauled. I’m near the end of the body of my ‘Broken Brocade’ sweater. I’m not sure what to do for the sleeves. I’m thinking a moderate dolman. The Rococco diva in me wants puffy sleeves trimmed in velvet and lace. I picked up a set of #0 Addi Turbos to do this up and it seems to be going a bit smoother. It definitely makes a difference for smaller needles. I don’t know if I would break the bank for anything larger than a #4. But then again, I’m knitting a bloody sweater for a full grown me in #0. I’m not the sharpest or smoothest needle in the knitting bag :p

I finally managed to get to take some photos of me in my latest round of knitting projects, at least the ones that I got to keep for myself. I never seem to have a camera around when I’m wearing my FO and I feel kinda goofy playing supermodel. So here’s some of the stuff I’ve knitted up this past winter with moi doing my best Zoolander. ( I had to edit out my face, my Blue Steel is so powerful that it would have taken away from my FO)

The Midsummer Night's Dream sweater. It's basic design is Knitty.com's Tubey Sweater. Then I have a few too many glasses of red wine....
















Zee back of the MSND sweater. The middle panel isn't perfect but I don't have to look at it :P


















Zee sleeve detail. I feel like Puck in this sweater!

















The Arachne capelet.
I worked in some tailored shoulder shaping. Not evident here but it does sit nicely on my shoulders ;) The spider is BW's Spider design.











Zee back. The lace is a couple of Barbara Walker patterns. It's supposed to resemble wolfbane leaves. I said 'supposed' to, not that it actually does...









The Honeymoon sweater!!! I've been living in this sweater ever since I've finished it. It's so much fun to wear! I still haven't found the perfect button. It's out there somewhere...












Da back of da sweater. I love Noro! Thank goodness I held onto all those Noro leftovers over the years. I knew they'd come in handy!

With DH’s arm out of service for the next several months, we spent this last week stuffing in as much climbing and outdoor fun as possible. Thank goodness I finally got a slow cooker. We’ve been living off of slow cooker dishes for the last week. We get to go off and play in the mountains and come home to a wonderful, hot dinner. Why didn’t I think of this before???

One more snow day!

Here’s a buffalo stew with Pete’s homemade noodles. I just browned the meat, cut up a bunch of local veggies and threw it into the slow cooker with some broth and some leftover Phillips Black Toque Dark Ale that had gone flat. About 20 minutes before serving, I dumped in the leftover noodles. So good. So easy.

Pete and Nat made one more pass through town on their way to a kayaking adventure in Clayquot Sound. They dropped off a couple of bags of stinging nettle that they had gathered. Such lovely muggles!

Nettles are out in force right now. Be careful, they do have a sting to them. Boil them for at least 10 minutes to neutralize the toxins. Use them as you would spinach. They also can be dried and made into a tea.

Gotta go. I’ve got my sister and her fancy man dropping for a visit this evening so I’d better get home and rustle up some dinner. I wonder if those UVic bunnies would be in a stew?

Have a great bunny zombie messiah weekend!

Happy Eating & Knitting!

A drippy week

It’s been a crazy week filled with a drippy faucet, a phlegmy husband and sweaters that never end! Thanks to the plumbing prowess of a good friend, the faucet has been replaced, the husband is slowly drying out thanks to more medication (I guess my ginger tea voodoo wasn’t strong enough), and one never-ending sweater actually found an end!

Of course, with all this silliness happening, I was in a mad swirl of baking. It calms me and anyways, a happy working oven makes the chilly winter days cozy and lovely. All my goodies were made with locally milled organic Red Fife wheat flour from True Grains bakery in Cowichan Bay, organic fair trade cane sugar from Level Ground, local fruits, nuts, milk and eggs.

I started with a rhubarb-blueberry-plum jam oat bars I made with jam I canned over the summer. When you're elbow deep in canning, wondering why you're going through all this trouble in final sweltering days of summer and you're thinking to yourself, "I'm never to going to use all of this up." Middle of January seems like a long way away but it eventually does creep up and man, it's like Christmas when you start digging into these fruity jewels.

I also whipped up a batch of cranberry hazelnut muffins with local cranberries excavated from my freezer and local hazelnuts from Footes farm. It was made with my usual muffin recipe.
















Finally, I whipped up some bagels for DH who is a bagel fanatic. I used the Montreal bagel recipe in Jeffery Alford and Naomi Duguid 's "Homebaking: The artful mix of flour and tradition around the world". They weren't much more work than making regular bread. The bagels were so good that DH did the cutest little happy bagel dance in the middle of the kitchen. Oh, I guess I shouldn't have told you all that ;)
















Now onto other things (warning! Knitting rant ahead!)
Remember this twinkle in my eye:

Well, it’s finally done!

It took 2 months but I did manage to finish it with a few balls of yarn leftover for a small shawl or a couple pairs of mitts or socks. BTW, the next time I pick a pair of 2.75mm needles and say, ‘I think I’m going to knit a sweater with these’, just smack me upside the head. It will cause me less brain damage than all the noggin against the wall action that occurred when I was in the middle of umpteeth day of working the second sleeve. The torso looks long but it shrinks up when I put it on. I’ll have DH take a photo of me in it as soon as he wakes up from his mucous-lined sleep.

As mentioned before, the construction was inspired by this simple design for Knitty.com.

Of course, I took one look at that wonderfully, simple and elegant design and said, ‘Oh, that doesn’t look stressful enough. No, let’s throw in a cabled back panel and I must use absurdly, thin yarn with a very loose ply. Let' s have the sleeves narrow off smoothly and end in a leaf point that sits exactly over the top of my wrist. Yes and I’ll wait until the very end to decide on how I’m going to finish it all off so I can have the masochistic pleasure of frogging and reknitting through the same 3 inches seven times before I decide to finish off with the simplest and most obvious edge for the bottom of the sweater. Yes, that ought to drive me sufficiently batty for a few months.”

That said, I love it. I absolutely, positively love it! It's much warmer than I though it would be. I dubbed it the "Midsummer Night's Dream" sweater. Ironically, summer would probably be the only season I won't be able to wear it because it's so snuggly warm. Oh well, I will wear it during the rest of the year and have a puckish forest wrapped around me.

That’s one never-ending sweater done. I’m now feverishly working to finish up my MIL’s sweater. I even brought it with me on our Winter Adventure trip. Here’s a pic of me working on it. It was taken inside a picnic shelter turned winter cabin at Waterton Lake National Park. It was quite luxurious compared to our usual winter climbing accommodations. It even had a wood fired stove. I was feeling very Little House on the Prairie working my knitting by the light of a gas lantern with the winds howling about outside and a wood fire smoking us out inside.

Here’s how the wonderful winter world looked the next day:

Here's DH and I on my Happy Birthday climb!















That's it for now.

Happy Eating!

Jen

Weekend whirlwind

Another wild and burly weekend. I bopped about from craft fair to beachcombing (you never know what these storms will wash up onto the shore) to my back garden to some knitting to Gabriola Island with some friends for more craft fairs, beachcombing and a couple of awesome nurseries where I saw the most gorgeous eucalyptus tree (koala not included) and then back home for more knitting.

It was also the arrival of the Beaujolais Nouveau . Since BN is not a local wine, I decided that for every bottle of BN consumed, we would have to consume a bottle of local wine. I chose Blue Grouse’s Gamay Noir since it uses the gamay grape that the BN are made from. As much fun as the BN is, I blissed out on the summery tones of the Blue Grouse wine. Build on the fertile slopes of the Cowichan Valley, Blue Grouse vineyards puts out some of my favorite wines. Their Black Muscat is the perfect intense red wine to go with your favorite dark organic chocolate. Thanks to its great location and soil, the vineyard doesn’t use fertilization or irrigation.

We celebrated wine, local and not so local, with a couple of intimate dinners and a couple of not-so-intimate dinners. Here’s what we had for one of our dinners:

Local buffalo sausage, caramelized onions, roasted veggies and a butternut squash gratin. Pretty much everything was grown locally from the sausages to the veggies to the cheese in the squash. The caramelized onions are your basic recipe of sliced onions brown in butter and braised slowly. I used a glass of Blue Grouse wine to deglaze and braise the onions. Yep, it was divine.

The veggies included local purple & golden carrots and Saanich potatoes tossed in EVOO and dumped into roasting pan. The sausages were simply browned and then tossed on top of the veggies to finish cooking. The butternut squash gratin was leftover roasted squash dumped into a pan with some EVOO, Little Qualicum’s raclette cheese and a couple of cloves of roasted garlic. I drizzled some balsamic vinegar over it once it was done.

Everything roasted away in the oven at 350F for about a 40 mins while Kevin and I watched Harry Potter’s Goblet of Fire and drank too much BN and Blue Grouse’s Gamay Noir.

Here’s what we had the following morning to quietly move us into the day:

Blueberry pancakes with blueberry/blackberry syrup and scrambled eggs. I finally have started dipping into my hoard of frozen blueberries picked from a local u-pick this past summer. A sweet, summery visitor to our breakfast table, along with very egg-elicious scrambled eggs courtesy of Cedar Valley Poultry. This picture is Kevin before he stuffs that huge chunk of egg into his gullet.

I also roasted up a batch of local hazelnuts. These are from Foote’s Hazelnut farm in Chemainus.

They have a stand open on their hazelnut farm. Just go along the Island Highway to the big yellow and green Antique barn building on Henry Rd and turn in. Follow Henry along it’s mellow, winding limb for a couple of kilometers until you get to the green metal gate. Push the button for an ‘Open Sesame’ (or Open Hazelnut in this case), drive on through the orchard. You’re aiming for the big, brown house in the back. The hazelnuts are by the front door and it pretty much runs on the honor system.

I’ve found Foote’s hazelnuts also at the Quist meat market in Duncan. Nanoose Edibles also carries local hazelnuts.

To roast, simply dump the nuts onto a baking sheet in a single layer and toss into a 350F oven. After 10 mins, give the pan a shake and return it to the oven for another 5 or so minutes. Let the hazelnuts cool and then crack away!

They can be kept unroasted and in their shell for a few months in paper or mesh bags on the shelf or a couple years in a sealed plastic baggie in the freezer. Considering that hazelnuts in the stores are going for $1.50 to $2 for a 100 grams, buying them this way is a great deal. Especially since nuts go rancid once shelled, these are also tastier.

Warning: Ramblings about knitting ahead!!!

I’ve started on another sweater. I know I just finished one but I’m waiting for my lovely mum-in-law to drop off yarn for her sweater so until then, I’m working on this:

It’s the sleeve for what I’ve named the Midsummer’s Nights Dream sweater. I’ve been wanting to do a MsND sweater for ages. Here's the yarn I'm using:

The colouring is going to make it more of a Tri-seasonal Night’s Dream sweater but I can live with that.

My design ideas have taken several turns from a lace weight cardigan with bell sleeves (what the heck was I thinking? I can barely knit a lace weight dishcloth) to a cape and vest combo to an updated version of EZ’s Moebius sweater. Over the summer, I picked up a batch of Phildar Auteil yarn that struck me as very MsND sweaterish and decided to let the yarn tell me what it wanted to be. The yarn was uncooperative all summer long and wouldn’t confess it’s innermost desires. So I threw it into the darkest corner of my yarn stash and hoped imprisonment would loosen up its tongue.

While finishing up my kimono shrug, I heard whispers and sly riddles coming from that corner of the yarn stash. Or maybe it was the end-of-the-project itch. When you’re near the end of something and part of you is delighted that it’s finally going to be finished but the rest of you is wondering ‘What will I knit next?’

Finally the yarn betrayed its intent and I began doodling out scratchings and scribbles. So far I have a lot of scratches and scribbles in my knitting journal. I still have no idea what the body of this is going to look like. I’m hoping a couple glasses of Cherry Point’s Bete Noire will give me the inspiration I need when I get to that point.

I’ve usurped this construction idea from Knitty.com. Simple design of tubes and there’s no seams! Yippee!

Of course, leave it to me to completely morph a simple and brilliant design into a monster of mayhem. As you can tell from the above picture, I’m not working the sleeves in a tube. I’ve decided I want the sleeves to decrease down into a leaf point at the wrists. Yes, a leaf point. Right over the top of my wrists. I don’t know how I’m going to do it. I don’t even know where the idea came from. I blame it on that 2nd glass of Beaujolais Nouveau. That will teach me to drink non-local wine.

I know that I could be working the sleeves on dp needles and be able to maintain the tube structure of the sleeves. However I hate working with dp needles. Also, there’s a high chance of my forgetting to count my rows, or mess up the decreases (or both) and turning this lovely pattern into a briars patch.

I am 2/3^rds through the 1^st sleeve. I haven’t done a swatch. I have no idea if I have enough yarn for this. On the good side, the yarn is machine washable and I’m loving that Aran pattern. It looks like dragon scales from certain angles.

I’m also playing with the idea of doing most of the torso with ribbing. Maybe a twisted rib. Not sure how I’m going to play the remaining two colours together. Maybe something intarsia, maybe I’ll just do panels. Not sure.

One of these days, I’ll actually design a whole sweater BEFORE I start knitting it.

Yeah, right.

Anyways, we’ve having our friends Karin and Dave and his parents over for a curry dinner tonight. Karin is coming over early for a refresher course on how to make naan. I have to make sure the house is in some sort of civilized order. I also have this annoying thing called a job I should get to...

Later,

Jen