Scawl

Is it a scarf? Is it a shawl? Who knows!

If you’re on ravelry, it’s this pattern here. I started this one on our way to Winnipeg over christmas, and then mostly finished it over a couple of drives to Montreal and back around New Year’s. Yes. As in 4 months ago. Then it sat forlornly, waiting for me to finish it. You see, the problem was that once I tried to stretch it to block it out into a much larger shape, so the lace pattern could be seen, I ran into a problem – it wouldn’t. The semi-circle side of it was just too taut. My solution was to snip the thread that was going through all the loopey bits (which would give the semi-circle its shape), join it up with the remaining tiny ball of thread, and painstakingly weave it through to increase the length. I’m fairly happy with how it turned out, although one day I’d like to figure out what I did wrong at the cast-on stage.

Still, I’m happy with it. It’s my first attempt at knitting a lace pattern, it used up a lovely yarn from the christmas gift exchange, and I got to actually block something for once. Like. 🙂

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Cake decorating course

Oops. Look at the time, how it flies! The lack of blogging hasn’t been for lack of things to write about, but rather for lack of time to do so. Probably the most exciting thing over the last few weeks has been my cake decorating course – more on that below! The less exciting, but much more time- and brain-power-consuming, has been a busy time at work. Hopefully, that’s mostly under control (for now).

Now, for the really exciting part – the cake decorating course! I’ve been thinking/talking about this for a while, and after New Year’s I finally convinced Charissa to join me. I may have done that by signing both of us up for the course… but who’s counting?

The course is a Wilton cake decorating course offered through Michael’s. Basically, it’s a vehicle for them to peddle as much Wilton stuff as possible, but there are lots of useful skills to be learned as well. It starts with having to buy a course kit (thank you Michael’s for 40% off coupons, because at $50 I wouldn’t see much value in this kit), but it does come with most things you’ll need for the course. You also need to make both the icing and the cake/cupcakes, but for me that’s the easy part.

First week was introduction and practice on cookies. Meh. I kind of wish we’d gone right into decorating a cake (or even cupcakes as in lesson 3), because honestly, I just don’t really think cookies and icing go together that well.

Second week was icing and decorating a cake, as well as learning a few simple patterns. A big cake seems more intimidating than cupcakes, so I struggled a bit with ideas. The cake itself was delicious, though – a white lemon cake filled with lemon curd. YUM!

Last (third) week was cupcakes, and I thought that was the best class so far. We learned a whole bunch of new techniques, and having multiple cupcakes to practice on meant I could try different ideas out on each one.

I think my favourite one is the all-blue one in the picture above, although I love the shaggy mums (the fluffy yellow ones) as well.

One thing I’m not the biggest fan of is that the class seems a little bit too free-form – we learn the technique for a few icing tips, and then are left to go to town with the item we’re supposed to be decorating. For me, the problem with this is that I’m not so much the arty-creative type. I’m not very good at coming up with random swirlie patterns that magically look good when put together. One of the reasons I took the class was to get lots of ideas for design/decoration, and I have to say it’s falling short in that respect. Which, I suppose, means that it’s Internet to the Rescue for next class, when we’re supposed to come up with our own design for a fully-iced cake.

But overall, the course must be going reasonably well, because when I told my coworkers this week that next week will be the last time (for a while) that I’ll be bringing decorated baked goodies, there was some joking around that maybe they’ll all pitch in to send me on the next level of the course. Sounds like a fair trade to me!

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Knitting

Remember how I’ve said before that sometimes the kitties fight over who gets to lie on my lap? Well, they’re at it again!

I can’t remember who was there first this time, although usually it’s Shakey trying to wedge himself in when BB is already on my lap.

They’re both pretty good craft companions. If they’re in a playful mood, they will swat at the yarn periodically, but usually quiet down if I turn around the yarn/them in such a way that they can’t see the yarn. With respect to crafts, BB is also hilarious because she’s terrified of absolutely everything – and yet when I’m sewing, she’ll inevitably come and curl up on my lap, despite a big loud machine clattering away less than 2 feet from her head.

What was I working on, you may wonder? A scarf for Dan’s niece! In all the madness before Christmas, I forgot to take a picture – but this was the inspiration. Now, I’m working on another scarf – for myself this time, and using the awesome new circulars from the Addi Click set I got for my birthday.

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Christmas tree skirt

Finally – a craft to talk about!

I had started this project over a year ago, after reading about it here. I actually got about halfway – sewing the strips of fabric together (the first time).

And that’s where I got stuck – because I didn’t have the magical contraption known as a “wedge ruler”, and I didn’t feel like buying a $20 gadget for the sake of one project. It took me a year to pull myself together and dust off my trigonometry. And today, the three sheets of fabric strips sewn together became stacks of two types of alternating wedges.

At around 12:36 PM, the final key component made an entrance, and things really started rolling.

Isn’t she purdy?

If I were to do it again, I would make a few process improvements – mostly to make sure that the strips, when flipped, line up better. I still need to put a few finishing touches on it, like hemming the unfinished edges and sewing on some ties so I can secure it around the tree. But overall, I’m pretty happy – and even more excited for two weekends for now, when we’ll be going to hunt our Christmas tree, and I get to start using the tree skirt.

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Halloween decorations!

With Halloween (and trick-or-treaters) arriving tomorrow, I thought I would finally put some effort into the decorations. I picked up a few supplies last weekend, but didn’t get to it then – and with how early it’s starting to get dark now, didn’t get a chance to do it during the week, either.

I’ll have to take pictures of the outside tomorrow, since I forgot to today (oops), but instead you get to learn how to make ghosts.

Go and pick up some sheets at the thrift store. I’m not made of money here (and it’s not like I’ll be sleeping on them), so the two sheets cost me $3 and $4.

While you’re out, also pick up some balloons and elastics. I already had the elastics on hand, though.

Inflate the balloons. Decide you’ve discovered a homegrown method for measuring your lung capacity.

Cut the sheet in 3 parts (that’s the size that seemed to work the best), wrap one of the sections around the balloon and secure with elastic. Go search for images of ghosts on google to decide how to draw their faces. Repeat from the top.

Line up the little dudes on the couch, to wait for husband to hang them up tomorrow. Pat self on the back. Not bad for less than half an hour worth of effort. 🙂 I think I like Googly (middle) and Angry (far left) the most. Who is your favourite?

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Homemade

It’s been a busy few weeks, but at least I have a whole bunch of homemade things to show for it.

First of all, I’ve started a bottle of vanilla extract going. I would have loved to make it with vanilla beans from some far-off tropical country, purchased from a roadside vendor with a life story to tell – but I had to settle for vanilla bean pods from Bulk Barn. But if you’re going to a far-off tropical country, you know what I’d like you to bring back for me. 🙂

This little glass bottle of Absolut seemed perfect for this project when I saw it at the store. The quality of the alcohol is not important, just the fact that it’s alcohol (thus the use of Absolut). According to the different sources, I’m supposed to let it sit anywhere from 2 to 6 months. Now, just over 2 weeks later, the extract has developed a light brown colour – similar to medium-strength tea. I’m pretty excited for the 2-month mark!

Continuing with the homemade things, I also… decanted my orange cleaner solution. Vinegar is an environmentally friendly cleaner, but let’s face it – it doesn’t smell very appealing. The idea behind this cleaner is that you soak orange peel in vinegar, thus giving the vinegar an orange-y smell. You add a few more basic ingredients – and voila.

What are my impressions 2 weeks later? It’s pretty good. I’m still at the point where I wouldn’t use it on more sensitive surfaces, for fear of damaging them, but I use it on glass/counters a lot. It seems to be a bit more watery than commercial cleaners, leaving a bit of a spotty film when you try to wipe it off, but seems to dry well. I think next time I would also use more oranges, because while the vinegar smell is certain subdued, it’s still a bit too strong for my taste. Overall – it’s definitely staying in my cleaning arsenal, but I’m not rushing out to throw out all of my existing cleaning supplies, either.

Finally – the planting season is upon us!

With the new greenhouse, my setup is a bit more sophisticated this year. I couldn’t find a properly sized light, so am unfortunately stuck with a light twice the size of the one I need. Hopefully, this I”m growing more seedlings this year than I’m used to, the shop light will ensure they will all get the proper amount of light.

Do you see your seedling in there? 🙂 Thanks again to all those who supported my fundraising efforts – you guys are amazing!

And the much spoken-of cardigan/sweater I was knitting? I got to the point where all the pieces were done except for the collar, and had even sewn it together. Except that when I tried it, I hated the way it looked. So, back to the yarn room with that yarn. Until I find another pattern I like, I’m moving on to another project. Sorry, awesome yarn (as Dan would say) – I guess you were just too awesome for that project.

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Crafty (and other) adventures

Another somewhat relaxing weekend. No big projects tackled, because yoga is still taking up a lot of my time. Luckily (but also sadly, on the other hand, because I have gotten used to it), my pass expires on Tuesday, so hopefully I’ll have more time after that.

I did get up to a few things in the kitchen, though. First, I finally got around to making my own breadcrumbs! We don’t eat a lot of bread in the winter, so anytime we buy bread and only eat half of it before it goes bad, I feel guilty. Well, finally a few days ago I had the time to dry the stale bread in the oven to turn it into crouton-like chunks of dried bread, and today I stuck it in the food processor. Fresh, crumbly breadcrumbs emerge! I think this calls for pork chops to test out the breadcrumbs.

I’m also trying my hand at making my own sauerkraut. I’m pretty excited, and hope it turns out!

In another half-hour, when the cabbage starts releasing its juices with the help of all the salt it’s stewing in, I”ll cram it into a jar and let it sit in a warm spot for a few days so the fermentation process can work its magic.

Finally, on the project front – my long-forgotten cardigan project is flying along! The main holdup was from the fact that I had made one half of the front, and forgotten to write down how I did my decreases (let’s just say the pattern I’m using is more of a list of suggestions than a pattern… not very well organized at all!). When I went to make the second half of the front, of course I got stuck, worrying that it will look funny if it’s uneven. It took me a good couple of months to force myself to sit down, and just work through the decreases so it looked somewhat like the first half. I think it worked out ok… but don’t judge! 😉 I’m not halfway through the back – after that, just two short sleeves and a nice puffy neck, and I’ll be done! Woot!

It’s definitely helped that we now have a pattern where Dan will put on one of the shows we watch while he does dishes, and I’ll have a good 40-45 (commercials are much shorter when you’re streaming) minutes of sitting in the kitchen chair and knitting while watching the show.

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Christmas tree!

Yet again, we headed off to a tree farm on this first weekend of December. Unlike last year, there was no snow on the ground, but the cold and wind more than made up for it in terms of the atmosphere. I don’t have any pictures from the tree farm because I was so cold. We waited around for a while for the tractor-driven cart to take us to this year’s cutting area, which worked out to our disadvantage. First of all, it was maybe a 4-minute walk away, so we froze more waiting for the ride than we would have had we just simply walked. Second, we ended up picking a different type of tree (a blue spruce) than our awesome fraser fir last year – because there wasn’t much choice for the fraser firs in the area where we got dropped off. However, of the drive back, we noticed a whole stand of tagged Fraser firs that we would have walked through had we walked – bah! Don’t get me wrong – the blue spruce is gorgeous and just barely fits in our living room – but as I was decorating it, I already missed the feather-soft needles of the fraser fir. Luckily, I hadn’t packed my gardening gloves away, so those certainly came in handy.

We started out with the tree away from the wall, since it’s a lot easier to wrap lights around it that way. Here is it before we did anything. The gap on the left side is going against the corner in the wall, so we didn’t worry too much about this imbalance in the tree when we picked it.

Dan helped me put the lights into the tree (although I’d like to buy a whole lot more strings for next year), and then took a nap.

I started with the larger individual ornaments, which I’ve been aquiring at 60-80% off post-boxing-day sales over the last few years. I love not being in a rush to get christmas ornaments! Refreshed from his nap, Dan even got up to help me with the last half of ornaments…

Oh wait, no, how could I forget – he kept napping, and by then Shakey had joined him too.

I filled in the gaps with more generic ornaments, and ta-dah! I was too lazy to pull out the tripod to show off both the lights and ornaments, so I’ll have to play with that later in the season. Notice that our tree is so tall this year (there is maybe 3-4″ between the top and ceiling?) that we opted to go without a tree topper. I kind of want to put a bird’s nest or something similar on top, but I think Dan will nix that idea.

By the end, I was feeling a little bit lazy, so I didn’t get much done in the way of trimmings. I got a few things up, and hopefully some trips to Michael’s will inspire me later this week.

I hope your decorating is going well, too!

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Shelves!

I realize I’ve been pretty absent lately, but I’ll chalk that up to being too busy actually doing the projects to write about them. Well, that, and a serious case of “fall is coming, it’s so miserable outside, woe is me, I can’t do anything but curl up on the couch  and mope”ies. Seems like a couple of weeks later, I’m finally over it.

Funny how with the holidays approaching and everything getting busier, I’m actually finding more time to work on other projects, too. Yay for being forced to be organized!

My big new projects is spice shelves. Nearly half a year ago now, I got very excited about spice bottles that I saw online somewhere, and proceeded to order them. My mom even dutifully brought them up on her last visit! 🙂 And since then, they’ve sat in boxes, eliciting longing gazes and sighs from me anytime I walk past the stack (given that I put one of the boxes on top of the toaster oven, you can imagine how often that happened).

About a month ago, I decided I’d had enough, and started trying to rearrange my kitchen to find a good spot for them. Except that nothing worked! Anywhere I tried to put them, it wasn’t accessible enough, or large enough, or … So I set my mind to building myself some spice shelves, given that I’ve already given Dan half a dozen projects, and felt that this was the one I had the best chance of getting done “on my own” (see the reason for the quotes below).

I looked around online for ideas, and was very happy when I remembered about Knock-Off Wood. Indeed, they had just the pattern that would work perfectly. Nothing fancy, but sturdy and functional. We headed off to Home Depot to buy the wood, and in my excitement to finally get started on this project, I forgot that I should let the wood sit in the house for a bit before building my shelves. I compromised by cutting the pieces to size on the first day, and letting those dry out in the basement. I sanded all of them on another evening a few days later (I’m starting to really appreciated projects which can be broken up into weekday-evening-sized steps). Unfortunately, I had to wait for a weekend to do the last step, since I didn’t think our neighbours would appreciate us running the compressor at 9 p.m. Yesterday, we were finally at home, and I was able to finish the project by nailing the pieces together, after some routing to make them fit together and for a nice finish.

Now I only need to sand down the wood filler and put a few coats of clear stain to seal the wood, and I’ll be done! And what do you know – I don’t have any other big commitments on my calendar all week! So maybe I can start using my wonderful new spice bottles next weekend – so excited! This will be the first real project that I’ve done (mostly) on my own which required multiple power tools. Did I have to keep asking where his tools were? Yup. Did he feel the need to supervise me anything I was near the power tools (ok, the sander I was given free rein with)? Definitely. But now that I haven’t drawn any blood with my woodworking project (although I dock myself major safety points for forgetting to put my goggles back on when I was finishing the last shelf with the nailer), I’m looking forward to doing more!

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Getting ready for Hallowe’en

Hope you are too!

Earlier in the week, I thought I would get a few more Halloween decorations up before we hit the deep freeze (which was a good idea, since we have snow on the ground right this minute, and it’s still snowing). I’ll definitely have to think things through a bit more next year, as this year I just grabbed a bunch of stuff at the Dollarama and ran, since they had the most loud and annoying alarm start up while I was there. And no, the alarm wasn’t because I grabbed stuff and ran – I did pay, thank you very much! Try digging around for change while trying to cover up your ears to prevent them from suffering permanent hearing loss, though.

Even more unfortunately, when Dan came home that night he informed me that the skeleton had fallen down. Boo. I think it would’ve upped the “creepy” just a bit more to have a skeleton glaring at you from the ceiling.

I spent this morning getting some garlic into the ground, which turned out to be a good idea (see reference to snow above). One nice side effect of redoing the vegetable garden was that the soil is nice and fluffy from all the digging I had to do to transfer the soil back and forth. I think I might turn this into an annual fall exercise, because the soil is just beautiful now. I got a few varieties at the garlic festival this year, and I planted them each in its own row, made by poking holes in the ground with my fingers.

And, of course, the main event of the evening was carving pumpkins. Dan and I chose to do two pumpkins each, from the pumpkins I had picked up a few weeks ago. Lucky for us, our squirrels didn’t take a liking to them – a coworker was telling me that she’s repeatedly found her squirrels gnawing holes out of her pumpkins. While I wouldn’t want that, a while ago I saw a pumpkin that I just had to replicate.

Husband was hard at work, too.

We ended up with four carved pumpkins – Dan’s are on the outside, mine are the middle two. My second pumpkin is a little pumpkin in a big pumpkin jail.

How was your pre-Halloween night? Happy candy-distributing tomorrow!

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