Knits of 2017

At the beginning of the year, I like to reflect on the prior year's crafting. Not only does this tend to inspire me for the year to come, but it greatly appeals to the data analyst in me. You can find all of my knitting-related posts by clicking the "knitting" tag in the sidebar, or peruse the 2010, 2011, 2012, and 2016 lists here. Ravelry, which allows me to easily track my progress and record my projects, reveals the following yearly yardage totals that are 100% predictable when you consider how residency went:

• 2014: 851 yards
• 2015: 1,988 yards
• 2016: 5,159 yards
• 2017: 5,909 yards

The second half of 2017 was particularly productive, as residency was over and I had a bunch of cross-country drives during which to knit. The tally for 2017 is as follows:

• 2 pair of mittens/gloves
• 3 scarves
• 4 hats
• 9 baby sweaters 

The baby sweaters continue to dominate the knitting focus, and I anticipate that this will continue into 2018!

Quick updates!

It's somehow suddenly very late on Sunday, so here are some updates on the posts from the past few weeks.

The baby barrage: The neonates have started to arrive, and my list of knitting to-dos grows. They are all so cute, and so far have come with only the expected amount of drama. The combinations and permutations of yarns and patterns is increasingly overwhelming...

The cycling craziness: Last week was a cycling failure. Abject failure. I'm back in the saddle as of this morning, and aiming to increase my mileage pretty significantly this week. I'm planning to register for both rides shortly, and you all can anticipate desperate fundraising pleas to come!

The pet prancing: It continues. Need I say more? This week's feature is Aleks, who is shown below snuggled into his cave bed, nuzzling the squirt gun that has quickly morphed from a disciplinary tool to a game, and with his head stuck in a bag of caramel corn.

A little holicrazy?

Cross-posted on Dose of Reality:

I think I’m not alone in occasionally feeling on the edge of hypomania around the holidays...


Clinical definition: Hypomania is an episode of at least four days of elevated or irritable mood different from the individual’s normal mood that does not cause marked impairment of function or hospital admission, and which includes at least three of the following

• gradiosity
• decreased sleep
• more talkative than usual
• racing throughts or flight of ideas
• distractability
• increased goal direct activity or psychomotor agitation
• excessive involvement in pleasurable activities even if they have a high potential for negative consequences.

Although oftentimes my family and friends' extracurricular expectations of me are low, I love finding, wrapping, and giving gifts, and have been known to go a little overboard sometimes. This year I think it was brought on by the realization that I hadn’t handmade any gifts for anyone. Usually I knit like crazy during the summer, fall, and early winter to make sweaters, socks, hats, and scarves for friends and family. I knew that wasn’t an option this year, with the clinical calendar as it is, but decided to make small gifts for my extended family members. This blossomed from a well-intentioned little craft project into a bit of a crazed mission involving large volumes of chocolate and Martha Stewart branded craft materials.

(Another note: This gifting is not the extent of the holicrazy. I also made squash soup from scratch, which included roasting the squash seeds as a snack, and was posted earlier this week… Also, I drafted all of these holiday posts in a single morning when I was feeling particularly productive…)

Since they were all mailed last Saturday, and should have arrived already, I think it won’t be spoiling anything for anyone to post some pictures and the recipe here…

Chocolate Bark
adapted slightly from Seriously Good Improvisational Chocolates by Sally Schneider
Chop up 1 lb (or more, or less, depending on how much you want) of really good chocolate into 1-inch or smaller pieces. I used Callebaut chocolate, which they carry at my bulk food store, and Ms. Schneider recommends Valhrona, which I’ve seen at Whole Foods, or Sharfenberger. You can use either dark semi-sweek chocolate or milk chocolate. Cover a baking sheet with parchment paper. Melt 1/2 of your the chocolate in a saucepan floating in another saucepan of water on the stove (or use a double boiler if you have that sort of fancy equipment). When half the chocolate is melted, remove it from heat and stir in the remaining chocolate until it’s all melted. Use a spatula and spread it into the parchment paper so that it’s about 1/8”-1/4” thick. Let it sit for 3-4 minutes to set a bit, and then sprinkle with the toppings of your choice. I’ve listed the festive holiday options I chose below. Let the chocolate sit for a few hours or until it’s firm. Break it into shards, and package it up! Per Ms. Schneider it will keep for several weeks in a sealed container at room temperature.

For Mexican hot chocolate: Vietnamese cinnamon or other very fragrant cinnamon, and cayenne pepper. Sprinkle the cinnamon liberally, and go easy with the pepper.

For candy cane: Crush candy canes in a plastic bag (I used a rolling pin) and spread the shards over the chocolate. This is pretty!

For fleur de sel: This may seem obvious, but it’s just fleur de sel. It can be as coarse or fine as you’d like to grind it.

For gingerbread: This was (I think) the best one. Smash up some gingersnaps or other gingercookies in a plastic bag until the largest pieces are about 1/2” across. Sprinkle these over the chocolate, preferably dark chocolate and spicy cookies, and enjoy.

Sometimes over-ambitious + under-prepared = good enough…

As some of you know, I’ve become a devotee of the Design*Sponge blog feature called Before & After. In this feature, wildly talented designers transform thrift store, basement, and dumpster finds into beautiful works of art. Some of them are quite pricey makeovers, but many simply use a yard or two of beautiful fabric to reupholster a chair, or a coat or two of paint or wood stain on a dresser. There is also a less frequent feature called Before & After Basics that demonstrates a wide range of techniques. Turning old (and often unattractive) pieces of furniture into beautiful things you’d want in your home appeals to me for so many reasons: it’s crafty, thrifty, and does not take 8 years to complete. Imagine my excitement when this lamp-and-side-table-combo showed up next to the dumpster in my apartment complex:

I initially grabbed the shade, thinking that it would work for a lamp I already had, and then when it became clear that it would not, I pulled the whole lamp inside. This is the point when I engaged in a healthy (?) dose of suspension of disbelief. In my head, a few short hours with some paint stripper, leftover bedroom wall paint, and some poly-acrylic finish would yield a table that was pale shiny finished wood with a delicate yellow border, with a matching base. Flash forward to the lamp and I in the bathtub, with me doing my darnedest to neither expose myself nor the municipal water system to the most eco-friendly paint stripper I could find. It became abundantly clear that I was not patient enough to get all of the paint off. Also, it seemed that the wood stain on the base of the lamp would have taken multiple applications of the stripper to remove. Tired and a little sore from hunching over and under the table, I cleaned everything up and let it all dry. Dreams of encountering a beautiful wood table dashed, I resigned myself to a yellow table with a yellow base. Three coats of paint later I was exhausted and it was time for bed. In the morning I applied two coats of water-based poly-acrylic finish, with only a little bit of dust and impatience leading to a less-than-perfect tabletop.

I set it next to my bed and am quite thrilled with the result, even if it’s not exactly what I dreamed.

Walter enjoyed snuggling in the blankets and pillows while I finished the lamp:

And then promptly posed for a photo when I tried to get a good picture:

Things that distract me…

I have a few things I’ve been saving up to blog about, but none of them are very long, so it made the most sense to combine them into one larger post. When I sat down to consider how to unite them, it was almost too obvious: things that distract me. There’s even an additional meta element here, because writing the blog also distracts me…

1. Walter: This should be obvious to anyone who has spent more than 15 seconds looking at the blog. I got a new tiny, tiny video camera from the Point Foundation and, of course, tested it out with Waltini.

2. Crafting: Though last week wasn’t exactly the Valentine’s Day I’d always dreamed of, I had a really good time crafting cards for friends. Design*Sponge (also high on the list of distracting things – this one is thus a two-for-one) had previously posted some really, really cute fruit sticker templates (stay with me here folks), and so I dutifully printed them out, obtained a punch, and stuck them to some delicious-looking oranges to share around. I gave all of the oranges away (they said “Orange You Glad You’re My Valentine”), but here is a shot of the apple sticker:

I would encourage you to print some of these yourselves and put them on fruit in your own lunches, or those of people you care about, because they are funny and cute, and only the orange one is really specific to Valentine’s Day.

3. Reading: Motivated not only by the large number of good book available, but also by the calming effects of reading something unrelated to my dissertation before I go to bed, I’ve been slowly working my way through a variety of fiction and non-fiction books this past year. The most recent was Killing Pablo: The Hunt for the World’s Greatest Outlaw, which Ruti recommended after Alicia and I decided to go to Colombia for a vacation after I defend. It was quite a disturbing read, both in terms of the drug violence and the shady US involvement in Latin American politics, but gave me a much better sense of the history of the drug trade in Colombia.

4. Random stuff: These kinds of distractions are impossible to avoid, and occur all to frequently in the world. The latest:

That’s right, the translation of “Peppermint to the max” is transliterated back into English as “An explosion of peppermint”! This seems less funny now that I’m actually writing it down, but I’ll leave it here as an indicator of how punchy things are getting at my place as the dissertation defense draws near.

Oh distraction...

Finals: Work vs. Knitting

The title here really says it all…  Although I really only have one final exam this semester (and it is today!), I have other big end-of-semester deadlines (for example, a complete dissertation draft).  As always happens, I have also added to my list of holiday knitting at what is relatively at the last minute (considering that I started in May).  These two things have resulted in another battle in that time-honored struggle: work vs. knitting.  Luckily, thanks to a really awesome suggestion from a friend, I have been reading The Monday Motivator and am working on scheduling in my to-do list so that I make sure to do the things that are actually important to me (rather than the things that seem most urgent/doable at any given moment).  I’ve been creating the hourly schedules that used to indicate tragic finals stress levels, but now reflect that no one else is scheduling my time, so I might as well do it, and have met with some success.  My conclusions from the first week include:

• E-mail is a massive time suck and should be scheduled (and limited)
• Stata takes longer than you think, no matter how long you think it will take
• Thinking about what kind of crafting I want to do during a given week makes me feel productive and awesome, even if I do not follow the craft schedule (!)

All told, the scheduling is going well, and I am feeling that in the eternal fight between work and knitting, I, in fact, am winning.

Winter of Detroit, Part III

Detroit Urban Craft Fair and The People Mover

We headed down to the Fillmore Detroit last weekend to check out the Detroit Urban Craft Fair, and afterward I convinced Alicia that we should ride around the People Mover once, as it is only $0.50 to ride around the entire loop.

The Craft Fair was really quite good. They filled the lobby, the main floor, and the stage of the theater with booths for (mostly) local crafters and artists. I was impressed with the range of goods, though it was, I think, pretty typical of a good craft show: jewelry, textiles (dishcloths, knit and crochet items, pillows, potholders, etc), ceramics, and soaps, among other things. In addition, there were a few somewhat surprising booths filled with glass mosaics, little robot sculptures made from old flash bulbs and other electrical oddities, and dog collars. I must also note that there were some hand dyers there with yarn, and that I was good and did not purchase all of it… I found some great gifts, and would highly recommend your local craft show for stocking stuffers as well as bigger items that friends and family members don’t yet know that they need.

After we headed out into the bitter, bitter wind, I grabbed my camera and we headed up to the People Mover station. I think the last time I rode it all the way around was in elementary school when we got off at every station to learn about the art featured there. It's worth making the trip just to see the murals and other art pieces! Here is a pictorial tour of a round around the People Mover starting at Grand Circus Park Station.

Alicia with the uncannily realistic-looking statue at Grand Circus Park.

Looking down Woodward toward Comerica Park and the Fillmore Detroit.

Riding the people mover!

General Motors International Headquarters, The Renaissance Center

The river, looking particularly wintery and cold.

The bridge to Windsor.

Part of the mural at the Michigan Ave. Station.

Winter of Detroit, Part I

You may recall the 2009 Summer of Detroit, and our escapades on Belle Isle, the Grosse Pointes, Hamtramck, and the fantastic finale that was the Tour de Troit. This was a great time, and provided the impetus to see some lovely parts of the city. Looking back at these posts, however, it is clear that while we did spend some quality time in the D, we ended up hitting a lot of the immediately adjacent suburbs, a city within a city, and things on the fringe of town. Enter the Design*Sponge Detroit Design Guide, a lovely list of lots of nice restaurants, shops, and museums, conveniently divided by neighborhood with a linked Google Map showing most of the attractions. I had already read about many of the restaurants and museums mentioned in the guide, but lots of the shops were new to me. In addition, my Detroit geography has never been particularly good (or any local geography, for that matter), so I was always lacking a real sense of how to “make a day of it” if I wanted to go into the city. I declare this the beginning of the 2010/2011 Winter of Detroit. Last weekend was the first excursion.

We started with an area that is already pretty familiar, the Midtown/Cultural Center area around Wayne State University and College for Creative Studies campuses, and tried out some new spots.

Leopold’s Books was a wild success, with me finding some surprise holiday gifts and Alicia picking up a new book about revitalizing Detroit. They stock a small but thought-provoking range of books, magazines, some gift items (like books of postcards), and an impressive collection of graphic novels published locally as well as from outside the city.

Located in the same building, The Park Shelton, we found Goods. They feature local handmade items, and also print t-shirts, bags, and baby garments with custom designs. I particularly enjoyed browsing the array of hilarious and snarky holiday (and other occasion) cards.

Somehow this photo of The Park Shelton looks more like a pencil or pastel drawing than a photograph, but I promise I didn't do anything to change it. Same with the photo at the top...

Although we had planned to walk from the shops (which were next door to the DIA) to lunch at the Motor City Brew Works, we were only able to find a meter that was good for an hour, so we drove. That was really the only disappointment of the day… We shared a great pizza, Alicia had a beer, and I, in my still cold-medicated state, had some locally made ginger ale that was tasty.

Right outside the restaurant, we stepped into the Bureau of Urban Living, another small shop filled with housewares and gifts. They had an amazing print of a map of Detroit with all of the neighborhood names written in that I’ve seen before, and coveted no less this time. Maybe next time I’ll finally pick one up…

Just down the street, City Bird was like stepping into a real world Etsy. In addition to their in-house designs, they stock a wide variety of things (and I mean really wide, from dish towels to leather jewelry) made by other local crafters and artists. I found a few (secret until December!) items I couldn’t live without, and will definitely make it a regular stop on my gift-buying excursions.

While we were shopping, I overheard discussion of Open City Detroit, an organization with which (at the very least) both the Bureau of Urban Living and City Bird seem to be involved. It looks like a useful resource for small business owners in Detroit, and I wanted to make sure to link to it in case anyone is inspired to pick up and move…

It was a great afternoon, and I can honestly say I’m looking forward to winter. Now I just have to get work done instead of perusing the guide to pick the next neighborhood to explore.

Sewing success…

When I was visiting Ash in Vermont we went to a fancy little yarn and fabric store called Nido in Burlington. They had some beautiful (relatively) local yarn from Maine, a nice selection of high end and organic yarns, and really amazing fabrics, as well as some inspiring books. I haven’t sewn much in recent years, except for a few odds and ends, but was drawn to an Amy Butler pattern for a really beautiful bag. It was so pretty, and looked so functional. Before I completely took leave of my senses, I started to notice the details on the bag that would be new techniques for me: things that are not straight lines, piping, making something nice enough that I want to carry it around as a fashion item rather than having it sit around the house (mine or someone else’s). It occurred to me that there were many more things that I did not know how to do than things I did, and that perhaps this was not the pattern to start with. We left the store, but I kept thinking about the pattern and wondering whether I could do it.

Thankfully I didn’t buy the pattern, as I would have mangled some poor piece of fabric until I was so frustrated I stashed it in a bin in my closet for years to come, unable to finish it but unable to throw it out/donate it/repurpose it. I was, however, motivated to do a little sewing to assess my skill level. When I got home I promptly made a cover for my sewing machine, and then earlier today I crafted a cover for a pillow that has plagued me for years. It is really squishy and wonderful, but was a shade of electric blue that didn’t really fit with my design sensibility. I had attempted to knit it a cover at some point, but it was so ugly that the pillow sat in a bin in my closet for several years waiting for me to figure out what to do with it. (Yes, that was experience talking…) I’m quite happy with the result now, though I think I still have a lot to learn about sewing things in tubes…

I’m definitely not ready to make that amazing bag, but maybe over the next few years I’ll be able to sew a few more things and finally work up to it. I don't know that I really need any more long term goals, but I do know that I like being able to start and finish something in an afternoon or a few days!

As an aside, posting these pictures made me realize that I could probably also stand to learn a little bit about ironing, but who has time to iron when you're crafting???