Finally a Sockapaloooza Update

Well, after a period of crazy knitting plans for everyone in the world, I sort of burnt out. I started working on the Baby's First Tattoo sweater from SnB, and it just looks like hell. I mean serious hell. So since the anti-baby shower is in a week and the sweater sent me into a fit of 'fuck this knitting shit!' for a couple of weeks, I'm going to whip up a couple pairs of wee baby socks. Meh.

So unfortunately, I've not yet started knitting my sock pal's socks. I've been seriously planning on knitting the Simply Lovely Lace socks from the latest issue of Interweave (the daintier ones with the pretty picot hemmed edge), and I even bought the yarn for it (a lovely bright, fun blue shade of Fortissima Socka), but I'm just not sure if I'm up for something as potentially challenging as lace socks right now, so I'm not sure if that's what I'm actually going to do. I want to make something really really awesome, but I want to do something that's going to be satisfying for me too, you know? So I think as soon as I'm done with the baby socks, I'll start in on the first lace sock and see how things go. I fully reserve the right to change my mind and suck it up and buy some thicker wool and make the picot-less edged version if my gauge drags me down to size 1 needles. I dig size 3s--I do--but I feel like I'm knitting on uncooked spaghetti with the 1s, and it kind of weirds me out a lot.

Egads, I'm whiny about this all. I wanted to be cheerful and enticing about the socks (and I am in a relatively chipper mood), but I think I'm just really frustrated with my lack of knit-fu lately. As soon as I'm done with the socks for my pal and the three pairs I've got going as gifts (one of which is for the wee one), I am soooooo not knitting anything for anyone else for a while so I can do some mindlessly mindful knitting. Yea!

Ever so Briefly

I'm having a break-even end of week. Yesterday, I got offered a job and that means I get to leave the Crimson Assurance in two weeks time. Jolly, jolly yea! And then I wake up this morning with a tummy ache and feeling generally nasty. I finally broke my no vomiting in 12 years! streak, and though it sucks, it is not the mythical, antichrist type thing that I had remembered. Certainly horrible, but it could have been worse. So I spent today lazing about trying to get warm and then to cool down, and in about half an hour, we're on our way to NYC for Sarah's birthday. It's all so much excitement!

Anyway, I thought I should offer up something good for a change. Have a lovely weekend!

Podly Casts

I'm really, really tired tonight (must be all the sucking of my soul that occurred between 8am and 4pm...), so this shall be short. I've recently fallen in love with listening to podcasts at work. I've made it through like 6 episodes of Cast-On, both episodes of Pointy Sticks, and an episode of The Mosh Knit, but I'd really like to listen to some non-knitting podcasts. Preferably ones that are more talk than music but not hella crazy political. Does anyone have any recommendations? Even if the cast doesn't fit that criteria, but you think it's awesome, let me know about it, because they really make my day go a little faster.

By the by, if you're interested in a really, really great knitting podcast, totally check out Cast-On. I think it's absolutely awesome, and I am just loving it to pieces.

Adventures in Vegan Cooking: 5 March 2006

Since I'm pretty new to the vegan cooking thing, and because I've sort of taken this change as an opportunity to try out all kinds of new things, I'm thinking it would be pretty cool to chronicle some of my culinary exploits around here. I've been cooking vegetarian for probably ten years now, and while that was totally easy, I'm finding that vegan cooking is actually really cool. There are all of these techniques and substitutions to make things work without eggs (especially--those fuckers are great binding agents) and dairy. Mostly, I'm cooking stuff just for me since Sarah hasn't freaked out and gone all herby on me, and that affords me the opportunity to make lots of exciting ethnic cuisine because if all the curried foods are for me, what does she have to complain about? (aside from the overpowering aroma that wafts through the apartment for the next two days...)

*Disclaimer*
From the get-go, I'd like to make it clear that I am not vegan. I'm a strict vegetarian, and I have no issues with using honey or using foods that might contain vitamin or mineral fortification that may or may not be animal derived. I do my best with what I know, and I'm really more interested in just avoiding the very obvious sources of eggs and dairy.

This evening, I decided to try out a new recipe from VegWeb (which is turning out to be the best recipe source I've ever found online in terms of quality and good feedback). As I mentioned, I've been venturing into ethnic cuisine, so today, I attempted my very favorite Indian dish, chana masala.


What an amazingly simple recipe! This took perhaps twenty minutes all together, and it was nothing difficult technique-wise. I really love the way that curries come together. You sauté some onions, add some spices and let the two marry for a bit, then add your other ingredients, and after a few minutes, you're done. It's really the spices and onions that get me though. I love the ingenious way that the spices are allowed to ripen while the onions are softening and such.

I just finished eating, and this one is a definite keeper. The flavors were so much richer and smoother than they are when I order take-out or go to an Indian restaurant. I'm not sure why that is, but I much preferred this to the chana masala I've had in the past. I'm thinking that it was probably the dollop of 'butter' added at the end to bring it all together that smoothed it out and made it taste so rich. It was spicy, but pleasantly so, and nothing was really overpowering, so I am absolutely pleased. If anyone wants to have some tasty Indian food with me sometime (Jimmy, Rebecca--I'm lookin' at you), this will definitely be on the menu. I highly recommend the recipe. It was filling, and enormously flavorful and satisfying. Mmm!

Finishing Objects

No, I did not forget to blog last night, nor did I simply get lazy. I attempted to go to blogger several times yesterday evening, and I kept getting the 'connection timed out' error. And since I was also unable to visit all the blogger/blogspot sites I usually go to (Caitlin, Rain, Rebecca, Rosie's, etc), I figured it wasn't just my blog. So nyeh.

I was going to tell you all about how excited I am because Sarah reserved me a spot to go to the Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival in May with the crew from Rosie's Yarn Cellar. Woo-hoo! I loves me some animal watchin', and the prospect of inexpensive Koigu mill ends just has me giddy. Giddy, I say! I'm very very much looking forward to being able to go. Yea!

My big plans for the weekend pretty much involved finishing some knitting projects. Well, since they're all 2 part projects, I planned on finishing parts 1. The first two will be finished by the end of tonight, and the third one will hopefully be done by tomorrow evening. I've been working on a sock this past week out of some Fortissima Sockotta that I bought last summer when Rosie's had a sale on sock yarn, and I finally finished that this afternoon. I grafted my first toe close, which was pretty cool, I have to say, and I much prefer the look of a grafted toe to the look of a pointy toe. The other piece I'm finishing right now is the lavender-ish sock for Sarah. I'm on the last little bit of it (the big toe), and I successfully grafted the rest of the toe closed, so yea for me again! I'll post pictures of them both tomorrow.

The other thing I'm working on was requested by a friend. She rides a scooter or a motorcycle or something that makes your hands cold in chillier weather, so I'm making her a pair of glittens.



When I usually think of glittens, I think of those fingerless gloves (the ones with part of each finger) that have a flappy mitten top that you can fold over to cover the fingers or fold back to button on the top of the hand. These ones are a little weird because they're mittens with a pointer finger. And since she said I could use whatever colors I wanted, I decided to do some stash-busting and try out a cool pattern at the same time. It's meant to look kind of like a NYC taxicab, but I fucked up the fair isle in the cuff...mostly because I totally shouldn't have tried doing fair isle on ribbing. It makes the coloring all wonky, and it makes the ribbing much, much tighter than stockinette. Oi. Anyway, it's pretty decent overall. I'm generally pleased with it.

Since there was no posting today, I shall extend the forty days by one day to make up for the pitiful lack of postage. Forty lashes with a wet noodle and all.

(Boxer-)brief

When I decided to blog daily, I thought to myself that this time around, I wouldn't possibly have a day where I couldn't think of something to discuss. And yet here I am, on day three, with nothing to discuss. I could tell you about the various homeless people I've seen around town who've remained in my thoughts (and I'd like to, but I can't think of a way to do so without being patronising or glib), or I could post more pictures of my knitting (which I will do later as I have many to post, and there's so little else that I do with my time), but instead, I will just say what Sarah told me to say:

I am going to go fold socks.

Mostly Knitting News

I was in an inexplicably good mood all day today. And there's no but to ruin it in the end. We had a huge (dull) meeting this morning, and since it was over at the company's main building, I dressed a little nicer than usual, and I wore Sarah's kitty cat mary jane shoes, which are super cute. So I felt young and cute, and you know that's always a good feeling.

After work, I hobbled over to Rosie's (because by then the newness of the shoes to my feet had totally rubbed them the wrong way). The yarn I've been waiting for isn't going to come in, so I picked something else to make a baby sweater. I'm going to be knitting Baby's First Tattoo from Stitch 'n Bitch: Nation, and I wanted to make it a little more punk and a little 'fuck gender stereotypes!' by making it an awesome, punchy bright blue with black details, but Dale of Norway has discontinued my fun, fabulous blue, so I settled on a dark lavender instead to go with the black. And I snatched up the last two skeins of blue because I lurves it so. I plan on starting on the sweater this weekend, and I'd like to whip through it pretty quickly, honestly. Though it just occurred to me that the entire thing is knitted on size 3 needles, and if you're a slowish knitter who's ever knit anything on 3s, perhaps you understand my newly considered concerns...

As I mentioned yesterday, I managed to finish my project for the Knitting Olympics. I took a late lunch on 10 February so I could cast on at 2p with all the other (5000!!) knitting olympians across the globe. I had decided to make use of the purple Cascade 220 Superwash I had left over from the socks I knit for my secret pal, and I knew that I wanted some well-defined cables in my socks, so I started out doing 4 cables. I got about 2 inches into the first sock and rethought my decision because the cable pattern I had devised was really a joke because it involved purling about 3/4 of the stitches in each round. Fuck that! So I frogged it and started over on the following day with two cables, one running down each side, and plain stockinette between the two. The cables were a modified version of the ones I had just used in the hat I knit for a friend--a braided cable. All in all, both socks ended up taking me a little over a week. Whoops. Ah well. I managed to get a lot of other stuff done by the end of the Olympics on the 26th. Below is a pretty so-so picture of the socks. It's a damned difficult task to take a good picture of cables in dark yarn. Ah well.


Anyhow, 'tis nigh time for sleeping, and I am a big fan of the sleeping these days. It's nice to enjoy something so important.