Monthly Archives: September 2009

Doing Things

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I have been doing a lot lately, I just haven’t had time to write about the things I’m doing.

I’ve been knitting away on my work project, making pretty good progress, but I don’t really have the time or desire to work on anything else, be it knitting, weaving, or spinning.  I have been knitting all day, from about 10am until after midnight, only talking breaks to eat or cook or do other little things around the house.  Not that I’m complaining, it is pretty great to knit all day and get paid for it, but some variety would be nice.  There just isn’t any time for anything else right now.  All the knitting does give me a lot of movie watching time, though, so I’ve been voraciously watching Chinese movies.  The project I’m working on is something I have to pay attention to so I end up missing a few of the subtitles, but I’ve found some really good movies. Here’s a little list, the links go to IMDB.

These are just the movies I’ve watched this week, I have a pretty big collection of Chinese martial arts movies (that’s something a lot of people don’t know about me, I love kung fu movies, especially of the Wuxia genre) but I’ve been branching out into historical dramas lately and Shinjuku Incident (which stars Jackie Chan as a Chinese gangster living in Tokyo) is more of a modern ganster movie, it takes place in the ’90′s.  They were all really good movies but I think my favorites were The Warlords and Shinjuku Incident.

The weather has cooled down and it’s really feeling like fall now.  This weather makes me want to eat lots of warm, hearty soup, so I made a huge pot of Stormy Black Bean Soup from the FatFree Vegan Kitchen Blog.  The soup is delicious, very filling and has a great, spicy taste.  I used the minimum recommend spices and it’s still got a big kick to it.  I also used one can of diced tomatoes with cilantro and lime juice instead of two cans of plain tomatoes.  You can really taste the lime before the spice hits and it just gives it an extra layer.  We’ve been eating cornbread muffins on the side (I use Jiffy cornbread mix, not vegan, but tasty).  I also made up a batch of butter pecan cookies from Baking Bites.  They are so good, like a crispy pecan shortbread.  I really love all the cooking I’ve been doing, it’s so nice to have a real hot meal instead of something like a grilled cheese sandwich or a veggie burger for dinner.  Tomorrow I’m going to heat up some pre-made cheese tortellini and sauce since the soup is gone.

I’ve been craving tea and hot lattes, too.  I made some pumpkin spice syrup (1c sugar, 1c water, 2 Tbsp pumpkin pie spice.  Heat on the stove, stirring until the sugar has dissolved and store it in the fridge) so i can make my own pumpkin spice lattes since I can never get to Starbucks.  I also ordered a bunch of tea, since I’m down to one bag of chamomile.  I thought I would try a bunch of different teas, so I got some samples from Adagio, since their samples are huge and cheap.  I picked out some blood orange herbal tea, which tastes just like blood oranges, a little sour, a little sweet, very citrus-y.  It would be good iced.  I wanted to try some white tea, so I got some silver needle, it’s very earthy tasting but the taste is really subtle, it’s very good.  What I really wanted was some chai, so I got the chai sampler.  It came  with six teas:  a masala, chocolate, bengal green, spiced apple, rooibos, and thai chais.  I haven’t tried any of them yet but they smell really good.  And I got a free sample of their Scorpio tea which is a blend of sweet vanilla rooibos, mango, and chocolate chip tea, it smells heavenly.

So that’s been my week.  All working, obsessing over Chinese movies, cooking, eating and drinking tea.  I can’t really complain.  Oh, the picture at the top?  That’s my dad and his 1941 Ford rat rod that he built.  I felt like a post this big needed a picture and it’s the best I have right now.

Neglect

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Herringbone Sweater 

My new KnitPicks project is keeping me so busy that I feel like I’m neglecting everything else.  I haven’t had anything to blog about, I haven’t been knitting on my Herringbone Sweater (that’s the beginning of the front, there), I haven’t started the scarf I want to weave, I haven’t touched my punch needle embroidery.  I’ve just been knitting on that work project but it is one of those where you knit and knit and knit all day and it never seems to grow, like a yarn black hole.  I would love to be able to set it aside and pick the Herringbone Sweater back up but I don’t dare take a break, my deadline is too close.  I shouldn’t complain, I’m being forced to spend my day knitting.

Leaves are Changing

Fall is really here, isn’t it?  It’s been cool enough to wear long sleeves (I’ve even been wearing my Wonder Cardigan around the house some) and the leaves are changing on the trees outside.  It’s been cloudy and dark and rainy.  I’m loving it, fall is my favorite season.  Last year we went straight from hot summer to cold, snowy winter and I just want a nice long autumn.  I want to watch the leaves slowly change and fall, I want Pumpkin Spice Lattes from Starbucks (the only thing I drink there), I want to sleep with the window open and not wake up with a damp bed from the humidity.

Sally

And I want cool, sunny evenings, perfect for playing outside with Sally.

Out of It

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Sweater Beginning

I’ve felt a little out of sorts this week.  I haven’t been sleeping good, it is cool here but extremely humid so I stay cold and sweaty all night, doesn’t make for good sleeping.  There’s a crew replacing the gas lines on my road and they start working (right outside my bedroom window) at 7am, so I’ve had, maybe, four hours of sleep the last two nights.  Yesterday I made my second trip to the dentist (hopefully there’s only one more to go) and he drilled and filled one of my teeth.  He did it with no numbing or pain killers and I didn’t feel anything while he did it but it is sore now.  I’ve been taking Advil and eating soft food but I hope it stops bothering me soon.  So I’m tired, I have a sore tooth, I’m hormonal, I’m cold and sweaty, needless to say I haven’t felt like doing much.

But, I have been knitting.  I said I wasn’t going to knit between my work projects (got the yarn for the second project today and it is so pretty, can’t wait to try it out) but I decided I wanted a Hollywood Herringbone Pullover, from the Fall 2009 Knitscene, so I bought the yarn for it, with the intention of waiting until my work project was done to cast on.  Well, I got bored Sunday night and started the back and I’m already doing the shoulder shaping now.  I’m going to set it aside once I start working, though.

Band

Keeping with all the weaving I’ve done lately, Friday night I warped my loom with some crochet cotton to try my hand at doing a small warp-faced band.  By Saturday night I had almost two yards woven and it is mostly straight and even but I seem to have misplaced the band so I can’t take a picture of it.  I really prefer tablet weaving to weaving on the loom like this.  I had a harder time keeping my tension even on the the loom than tablet weaving and you can do much more complex patterns with tablet weaving.  It was neat to try and I can see doing more warp-faced weaving in the future.

When I did some shopping Saturday, I also picked up some yarn for a woven Shibori scarf, like this article from WeaveZine, and I got a punch needle and some weaver’s cloth to try out punch needle embroidery again.  I bought the Punchneedle Handbook and the moon pattern from Planet June a few weeks ago but I need to find a small pattern to play around with before I attempt the moon (I wish Planet June had a Beagle in her dog patterns).  I may draw out something simple and try it.  I used to have a nice punch needle set, I had two adjustable needles and a fancy embroidery hoop and a book of patterns, I bought it back in the early 90’s but I never got the hang of it and packed it away.  I’d never be able to find it now.

Another Bookmark

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Another bookmark

I whipped up another little card woven bookmark today.  This is, again, about a half inch wide and around eight inches long.  It’s size 10 crochet cotton in a light blue and beige and I got the pattern from Card Weaving by Candace Crockett.  If you could really see it close up, this bookmark is much better looking than the one I posted yesterday.  The tension is much more even, the weaving itself is neater and tighter.  The design actually showed up the way it was supposed to, always a good thing.

My time the past few days has been divided up reading (I finished A Thousand Splendid Suns last night, amazing book), weaving, and mending some dresses for my sister and hemming pants for my mom.  They are going on their annual cruise tomorrow and will be gone for a week.  I had a big rant here, but let’s just leave it with me saying that I don’t really appreciate doing their mending and running errands for a vacation that I was told I wasn’t welcome to go on.

A Little Weaving

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Card Weaving

My work project is done and on the way back to KnitPicks, there’s another on the way now, so between projects I thought I would do some weaving.  I’ve been really wanting to get back into card weaving again so I got my cards and some crochet cotton, picked out a pattern and sat down to to weave.  For some reason my pattern didn’t work out, the cards were threaded right and I followed the directions in the pattern but it is way off, I must have missed something.  The funny thing is, this is some of the best looking weaving I’ve done.  The band in small, a bookmark, it’s about six inches long, excluding the fringe, and about a half inch wide.  I used fourteen cards and size 10 crochet cotton.  The top picture is the back, the bottom is the front.  I’m partial to the back, it reminds me of a vine with flowers and leaves.

Card Weaving

Next week I think I’ll make a new set of cards, mine are pretty beat up, and get out my book, Card Weaving by Candace Crockett, and try a few more little bands.  I wish there was somewhere around here to take a class.

I made a trip to the library yesterday and picked up A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini, which I’ve wanted to read since I read The Kite Runner a couple years ago, and Custom Knits by Wendy Bernard, I’ve heard some good things about it.  I read half of A Thousand Splendid Suns last night, it was so good that I just couldn’t put it down, it’s a great book so far.  I’ve only flipped through Custom Knits  today and none of the patterns really jump out at me, but I want to read the parts of the book about fitting and designing your own sweaters.  I have a huge list of books that I want to read but didn’t want to buy and I can’t believe that I never thought about going to the library, it sounds dumb now that I think about it, but my local library used to be very tiny and only had a few shelves of fiction, most of what they had were reference books and I could never find anything I was interested in.  We have a new branch near my house and it is huge, tons of books, lots of computers and seating and tables to read at, and nice wide isles and good lighting.  I think I’ll be spending quite a bit of time there from now on.  And now that they do interlibrary loan, I might be able to knock a few off my reading list.