Moving house!

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www.spoonfully.com/blog

I've fledged and now have my own server. If you are among my faithful readership (hi Mum!), then please don't be scared. Just pop on over to that there URL and check out my new digs. I think we'll be happier there.

See you after the jump!

Old and New

I said I would finish things, didn't I? Here we go: a pair of cashmere footlets. This is part of my 2008-Let's-Make-More-Socks campaign (I'm looking for a catchier title). Also, I know I used this pic before, but taking pictures of my feet is a bit too difficult for tonight. Maybe later, darling.


And let me tell you, bub, these were extreme knitting to the end! The first sock ended without incident, but the second one was so short of yarn that I had to find my Little Blue Box, in which I kept scraps from the Kitchener bind off (from when I made the Desert Monkeys). I used some sneaky yarn attachment techniques and didn't cock up the colour pattern, and only just had enough to finish. See how much I've got left? See that?


That's hardc0re knitting: I didn't think I was going to make it to the end, I thought I was going to crash and burn and have to frog both socks to reduce the length and make them match -- but dudes, I totally did it.

Details:
Yarn: The last of my Jojoland Quartette, in desert colours with a hint of sky blue. I'm sure the colourway has a less lengthy title, but that's good enough for me.
Pattern: A simple toe-up sock, on DPNs; I used Judy's Magic Cast On, which is just so fantastic I can hardly stand it. Worked the length of my foot, worked a short row heel, then some simple stockinette, ribbing and a Kitchener bind off. It's really worth doing the Kitchener bind off on toe-up socks; I haven't seen its equal for springiness and smooth prettiness.
Verdict: Delicious. I'm wearing them now, and they're infinitely better than any other sock in the world.

One thing off the needles means one thing on:

While tooling around trying to find a pattern that would do justice to my newly-dyed, now-ruby-and-amethyst Angora Supreme, I remembered that I had a few balls of white Angora Supreme in the stash. The idea of a contrasting pattern entered my tiny brain, and, a quick Ravelry search later, I decided that Exchequered was for me. I loved this scarf when it first came out, but put it in the 'too hard' basket -- so strange to think I used to have one of those.

It's double knitting, which is so clever and cool that it makes me feel like a genius while I'm doing it (the feeling fades as soon as I put my coffee cup down on the edge of the coaster and it falls over and spills everywhere, but never mind). Put simply, you're working two layers of fabric, back to back -- a tube, essentially -- on straight needles, by working the stitches with alternate balls of wool. This is a really good pattern to learn on, for two reasons: one, you're working with contrasting colours anyway, which makes it really easy to keep track of which stitch belongs to which side; and two, because it's a scarf, it's not the end of the world if your two layers of fabric end up stuck together. (Apparently, it is possible to work two socks at the same time using this technique, but if you make a mistake, or twist the two balls of yarn, they're stuck together and you have to rip out both of them.)

Good old Ravelry: I love that pattern search facility, and I nearly always find something that delights me, excites me, or generally has me in a knitter's foam. I did a little bit of extra research after I decided to cast on Exchequered, because I wanted to learn a bit more about double knitting, make sure there's no pitfalls I hadn't thought of. There's a Ravelry group on double knitting (natch), which was of tremendous interest and use.

And good old Knitty, too. I love Knitty. It really got me hooked on knitting, back in the day, by offering fantastic patterns -- not just the ones I wanted to make, but patterns that inspired me and got me thinking -- and all for free. I still get excited when I know Knitty is due to come out, checking every couple of hours. I have resisted signing up for their mailing list for ages, because I prefer to stalk it in the wild, but they had such a fantastic competition earlier this year (oh my GOD the prizes were unbelievable) that I caved in. Sometimes an issue contains more patterns that aren't to my taste than patterns that are, and that's always a shame -- but lately, I've found that I rediscover those patterns on Ravelry and think "wait a second, that would be perfect for so-and-so" or something like that. It rocks.

It never ceases to amaze me that people, when given an vast resource like the Internet, will create such fantastic things to share with people, out of passion and intellectual drive.

Why My Life Rocks (an essay with pictures)

One of the finest, most pleasurable things in my life is to come home in the chilly evening and hear the noisy whir of the fan in the oven. I get home early, and if M's home and the fan in the oven is whirring away, that usually means the oven's being pre-heated for pizza. The oven will be cranked all the way up to eleven, for maximum tastiness.

M's pizza-making skillz are elite. He obtained a couple of pizza stones a few years ago, and has been gradually refining his technique. We make batches of dough in the breadmaker, and when a batch has risen, take it out, divide it up and freeze it. They freeze really well. When the oven is really, really hot, we take a ball of dough and roll it out very thinly; you don't quite want a cracker for a base, but nothing too bready either. The base is then cooked briefly on its own:

In this pic, you can see the base has been briefly sealed, then flipped: that way, there's a slightly cooked surface directly under the sauce when it's put on, which slows down how much is absorbed by the dough, which reduces sogginess.

When this is just cooked, pop on the lovely tasty toppings. We've only got four here, including the sauce, and I don't want more than that. Actually, the most delicious pizza I ever had was sauce, cheese and olive oil drizzled over the top. The key concern is not an abundance of toppings, but high quality ones. If you use fantastic sauce and good quality olive oil, you're pretty much set. The pizza, suitably topped, is then slid back into the oven and allowed to cook further: it doesn't take long, because all you're really doing is heating the ingredients through and browning the cheese.

Here's the finished result: it's not the best photo ever, chiefly because I was seizing up with delight over my forthcoming meal. Although in this picture you can see a freshly-toasted pizza, still sizzling as the cheese bubbles and the oil on the olives spits, you can't see M hovering over the breadboard, pizza cutter in hand, insisting that I hurry up so he can cut the pizza and we can finally eat.

And that's why my life rocks. Sweet-arse pizza. (Which is infinitely better than sweet arse-pizza, let me tell you.)

The Great Dyeing Adventure, Part 3

It's been a while since I touched on the Great Dyeing Adventure, and I don't quite feel like I got to wring all the juice out of that particular episode. Actually, this has been a string of episodes; a saga, if you will. To be honest, it's still going: right now, there's a big pot on the stove, with yarn cooling in it. Tomorrow I'll drain it and see what it has brought me.

The dyeing that we spoke of earlier, where I dyed Peach Twist and Cream Twist so that they came out a hideous zombie khaki. Remember that? Ugh. Yeah, we all remember that.

Well, the reason that all this dyeing came about was that I bought some Angora Supreme on eBay. I bid fiercely and won eight balls of purple, and five of white. The purple, when it arrived, turned out to be too...too, as the saying goes. It was too something, and I didn't want to wear it all over me as a sweater. The realisation that I had a buttload of yarns I didn't want to wear got me thinking, and I decided I would either have to swap it on ravelry (eh, too much hard work to get to the post office) or adjust the yarn to suit my taste. Here's a pic of the yarn, pre-dyeing.

My first goal was towards the blue spectrum: I thought I could deepen the purple and move it into the indigo spectrum through the judicious application of blue dye. So I skeined up two balls, and into the pot they went. Then, after a strangely lengthy conversation with M about the values of teal as a colour, I decided I would try to push some purple yarn in teal's direction, as well: into a pot of green dye, with just a little blue to bring it closer to the purple yarn. Here are the results, side by side:

Pretty, but still not quite there for me. I love rich, gem tones, not cookie-monster blue and vaguely-darker purple (the purpler one on the right is the 'teal' dye job -- yeah, I know, really green, huh?).

I then decided it was time for some hardcore dye. My Mum, a childcare worker (Hi Mum!) suggested Edicol, a heavily-concentrated food dye powder used by childcare staff to make playdough, paint, and other craft supplies. Completely non-toxic and damn near impossible to get out of your clothes. Seemed perfect. Thusly equipped, I thought about pushing the purple angora in the other direction, towards the red end of the spectrum. I used a full bottle of red dye, as well as a few generous spoonfuls of red Edicol powder. Et voila! Isn't it gorgeous? I urge you to click in order to embiggen the picutre, because there's a whole lot of awesome red/purple variegation that really tickles me. So cool.

Actually, I was so pleased with the intensity of the redness in this dye job, that I'm now redyeing the skeins that I had previously overdyed with blue. I think I should be able to push those blue skeins from spring blueish-purple to a full indigo, which will be very, very pretty indeed.

The Angora Supreme says 'hand wash' on the label, which means I've been very careful about not shocking the yarns when moving them between waters. Well, sort of. The first few skeins, I made sure the washing water, the soaking water, the dyeing water and the rinsing water were all about the same temperature. The next few, I was a bit more lax. The skeins cooling on the stovetop, er, may be felted: I actually forgot they were there, and they reached a pretty cheerful boil before I remembered. Still, I'll see how they look tomorrow. I'm letting them cool slowly, gently, overnight.

And if they come out the deep indigo that I'm praying for...well, I'll have a crack at overdyeing the other skeins, the ones I had planned to come out dark teal. If I can get a pretty, variegated, dark teal with undertones of purple, I'll be one very happy snail.*
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* Rule Number 84 of the Internet: Don't tell people the wistful hopes you have, especially when you know you'll have to blog about the outcomes later.