Things have been a little bit busy around here lately. My Mom has moved cross country and has a cute little cottage in our neighborhood that we've been working on (you can see it here), so the move has taken up a lot of my attention. A little knitting eye candy up above — I hope to be back to knitting and dyeing within the next few weeks. Happy new year!
There hasn’t been a lot of time for knitting lately, but I have managed the first sleeve for Ellie’s not-so-tiny tea leaves cardigan. The goal was a 3/4 length sleeve with a slight bell shape, and we seem to be pretty much on target. Hopefully I can knit a second sleeve that matches the first!
I finished my Mermaid's Tail shawl (also known as the Storm Cloud Shawlette) today. And I'm in love.
It's loveliness incarnate. A fabulous pattern and an easy, but altogether fun knit because of all of the intentionally dropped stitches that form the elongated garter stitch.
I love its little ruffle and its graceful drape. I think this one is going to be my constant companion!
Although this is not a cooking, or even a baking blog, I sometimes like to dream I'm a famous kitchen blogger. I don't seem to have gotten the Julie/Julia gene though, so I content myself with knitting. Nonetheless, I'm going to stray into kitchen territory with this post and show you all the cake I made for my second child's 19th birthday. He wanted a cake that was both chocolate and white (but not marble) with vanilla frosting.
He got this.
The secret to all good cakes, as I imparted to Ellie, who most decidely thought I had lost my mind, is using a recipe where you separate the eggs.
Adding whipped egg whites at the end to a custardy batter mixture produces light moist cakes. So I mixed up my white cake (actually a yellow cake recipe from The Joy of Cooking) and my chocolate cake (Devil's Food Cockaigne from the same book) and baked two white layers and a thick chocolate layer. The chocolate custard that went into the batter was a crowd pleaser, with spoon tasting all around called for.
The cake layers turned out perfectly.
The only thing left was to put the layers together using Pastry Cream filling that I had made the night before and then to crumb coat the cake with this delicious Caramel Icing, which went underneath the Boiled White Frosting you can see in the picture above after Teddy blew out the candles.
A cake like this is a day-long labor of love, but oh so much fun to make! I'm off to see if there is a slice left for a mid-afternoon snack.
I am almost done with my Symmetrical Braided Gauntlets. All they need is the thumb on the right hand knit up — you can see the sleeves for the thumb on the strand of white waste yarn — and some end weaving and blocking.
And, I'm almost done with my Mermaid Tail, knit from the Storm Cloud Shawlette pattern. It doesn't look like much on the needles, but I've only got four rows left before I cast off and get to see it unfurled.
It is also ALMOST Teddy's birthday. A birthday that makes me incredibly happy and proud. Tomorrow Teddy turns 19, an almost unimagineable joy for us. He is still as excited about having me bake his birthday cake as he was at 8 or 9. I have almost accepted the fact that he is all grown up.
With a tip of the hat to Rachel Maddow at MSNBC, I'm introducing a new occasional feature on this Blog — the Best New (Knitted) Thing in the World.
You know how we all stumble across things that are so fabulous that we want to share them with all of our fellow knitters? It happens to me all the time. From now on, when I run across them, I'm going to share them as Best New Knitted Things.
The impetus for this bold move was this yarn, which I discovered in, of course, Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
This is Lorna's Laces Shepherd Bulky, dyed specially for Serendipity Needleworks in Tuscaloosa in the "Crimson Pride" colorway.
Serendipity Needleworks survived the tornadoes that hit Alabama and decimated parts of Tuscaloosa in April, and it's a good thing. They are a gem of a knitting store with an incredibly nice staff. And yarn that practically screams "Roll Tide Roll" at you. Crimson Pride. Really. Best New Knitted Thing in the World!
I've done some dyeing over the last few weeks and thought I would give you all a peek.
This is a wonderful Superwash Merino/Mulberry Silk blend from a new undyed yarn supplier (or rather, new to me) called Polika. I like this yarn a lot; not as much as Moth & Goat which is a Cashmere/Silk blend at about the same weight, but this is a slightly more economical version that is still very pretty.
The colorway, Perseid, is actually the result of some experimenting with dyeing and overdyeing that gave me results I was looking for with some more somber colorways. This picture is a lot brighter than the actual dyeing, but the picture below, which is Perseid on Blue Faced Leicester, is a bit truer.
I've also been experimenting with a yarn that has a bit of silver sparkle in it — I'm tentatively calling this Silver Sock, but if you have any ideas, I would love to hear them. Several skeins of this yarn have gone out to friends for their opinion and I'm searching for a project to devote my skeins to.
I've got two skeins in the colorway on the bottom, Wendy. Although socks seem like the right choice for a yarn with so many colors in it, I'm also going to look around for some other ideas since I've got two full skeins.