Knitting up VK LIve 2013: Lights and Lichens Shawl

I don't know how this yarn is created, but I had to have it. I'd seen similar yarns on Etsy and Ravelry, like Kauni, and was determined to someday get some. Before I could hit the PayPal button, though, I ended up at Vogue Knitting Live 2013 in NYC, and THERE IT WAS.

Knitwhits Freia. OMG. A whole booth of amazing color.

I bought lots. Well, I bought 7 skeins, at any rate. That counts as lots, when most of it is lace-weight.

First project was a lovely lacy shawl, that I still haven't photographed properly.

Second project was this very simple scarf-sized shawl, another free Ravelry pattern. I've come to admire simple arrangements of solid/eyelet knitting, and quite liked how the banded colors of this skein fell very naturally into the pattern's bands. Alas this skein of fingering weight only has 322 yards, and so the shawl came out quite small compared to other versions. But it's quite nice to wear as a scarf. And the weird gray and yellow combo works quite nicely with my spring wardrobe.

Chocolate Chip Cookie Pie..

Chocolate Chip Cookie Pie has been in my extensive personal recipe database for a long, long time. And I have no idea at all where it came from. Fifteen years ago -- when I got married -- I started collecting recipes from cooking magazines, newspaper columns and backs-of-boxes, because obviously several dozen world-class cookbooks were insufficient to draw upon to feed our giddy new household. Collecting recipes, in those dim and distant pre-Internet days, consisted of ripping pages and then scanning them into WordPerfect documents, which I then proceeded to organize and format exactly as I wished, eliminating directions I would not need and paring down steps and ingredient lists to my liking. I always included the source...but the Cookie Pie is an orphan. 

Preheat oven to 325 degrees F. 
Have ready a 9-inch pie pastry shell. 
(I use frozen shells from my local gourmet store, and let them thaw while I prepare the filling. Do what you need to.)

Beat together, in this order: 
2 eggs
1 cup sugar (regular cane sugar, I've not tried brown but it might be too moist)
1 tsp vanilla extract
1/2 cup melted butter (1 stick, cooled a bit)

Stir in: 1/2 cup all-purpose flour until NEARLY mixed in.

Stir in: 
1 cup really good chocolate chips (Ghiradelli or whatever causes you intensest pleasure)
1 cup walnuts or pecans 
(I suppose slivered almonds or some peanuts would be OK but I've never tried that. I should try peanuts sometime. We like peanuts.)

Stir some more until flour vanishes. Pour into the pie shell.
Bake 60 minutes, until a lovely golden brown. 
Let cool a bit before cutting. 
Ideally, the top is firm and crisp and the middle is puffy and tender.

In the past, we've served this with ice cream and whipped cream. A few raspberries might be a nice touch.

Knitting up Rhinebeck 2008: The Original Stash

 

Despite the fact I've finally been digging deep into the immense yarn stash I've accumulated over the past 10 years, I seem to have forgotten to remind myself just how fast the stuff can accumulate...as it did in 2008.

I did not approach my first Rhinebeck, NY Sheep & Wool Festival thinking I would find bargains. I wanted the amazing artisianal stuff that would inspire me as I fingered and smooshed it and sighed over it. I happily paid the dyers and spinners what they asked and deserved, and I loved what I got.

Oh boy. I went nuts. I always went nuts at yarn sales before, buying 10-skein bags at crazy prices and thinking always in sweater quantities. But this was different. Intoxicating in different ways. So I filled up a couple of bags with yarn yarn yarn yarn YARN and then I went home and took the picture above.

Then life got busy, and though I wound a lot of the yarn into ready-to-knit balls I was a bit slow to work on them. I didn't have a lot of hat, scarf or shawl patterns lying around. I had to find one-skein projects for my wonderful new stash. (Not too hard really, as some of those skeins were BIG.) Fortunately I had just joined Ravelry a couple of months earlier, and so the world's greatest database of knitting patterns was at my fingertips. Bwa-ha-ha!

Recently, I was quite pleased to realize that most of the 2008 Rhinebeck yarn is actually used up! I still have a few skeins of navy blue lace-weight (a couple of shawls are queued for this), 8 hanks of orange and green-grey rayon blend (really still no idea), some very neon-bright purple/green/turquoise worsted that really better become a sweater someday, and a couple of random, very colorful sock yarns.

Knitting up Rhinebeck 2008: Sliver Moon Rose Garden Shawl

Knitting lace shawls is endlessly entertaining. I credit my visit to Rhinebeck Sheep & Wool in 2008 for starting me on my shawl odyssey. I picked up a lot of sock-weight and lace-weight yarns mostly because ooh pretty but I really did intend to stretch my knitting horizons, one skein at a time.

This very pretty orchid-purple fingering yarn from Sliver Moon Farm was completely irresistible, and so much of it for so few $$! I first envisioned a sweater. As time passed and I became addicted to shawl-knitting, I decided to use it for that instead. So 1/2 the skein became a pretty Rose Garden Shawl (free pattern, yay!) for my friend who recently completed grad school. (She hadn't completed it when I started this, but I had faith!) Even the name fit...her younger daughter's name is Rosie!

The rest of the yarn is destined for a shawl, too. Haven't quite decided which one.

Fuente del RITMO

Finding a great new wine is always a thrill! The shop nearest my house now has a refrigerated walk-in room with all the white wines in stock, and for some strange reason I always feel more adventurous picking wine from there instead of the regular shelves. Maybe it's the idea that I could drink it right away...?

Discovered a Spanish white called "Fuente del Ritmo", Centro Espanola, La Mancha, 2012. Made from a grape I never heard of, Airen. I feel kind of silly about that. My explorations of Spanish wines clearly leave something to be desired, well beyond Tempranillo and Albarino!

It turned out the wine was absolutely perfect for a quick throw-together meal of green veggies, roasted potatoes and smoked trout fillets with capers. Another bottle went great with sashimi.

Cool, refreshing, semi-dry, full-bodied. The overwhelming flavors were tropical fruit -- lychee, pineapple -- with a strong peach element. Reminded me a bit of peach schnapps or a great Moscato! Nice acid on the back of the tongue too, which is why it was sooooo good with fish.

Imma buy MORE.

Clowesetum Raymond Lerner

It seems hard to believe I've been growing orchids under lights alone for 20 years now. That is to say, for twice as long as I grew orchids on windowsills. And I still have so much to learn. Changing over from T-12 to T-8 light fixtures is going slowly, but excellent results so far. More light for the same $$, and the plants really seem to enjoy that wider-spectrum boost.

I picked up this Clowesetum Raymond Lerner not long after I was forced into all-lights growing. I absolutely love Catasetums, and desperately wanted to try growing one even though bringing a large deciduous plant into a limited space setup was, frankly, crazy. I knew Catasetum pileatum could get quite large, but hoped the Clowesia russeliana parent would keep the plant size down. I totally lucked out...not long after I got mine, I saw one at an orchid show that was ENORMOUS, with two really long spikes full of flowers that looked very much like the Clowesia. But my plant stayed pretty compact.

For 10 years, it bloomed with a couple of flowers every 2 years. It piddled along, growing but not really thriving. Repotting definitely helped. Feeding helped. But then the next 10 years were sad. Even while other orchids were making me happy, the CRL was not happy. It only bloomed three times, and one time the spike blasted. I was not happy. The back bulbs shriveled, as they will in this genus. Repotting time again.

And a big rethink of the rest period. Warmer and brighter, as Fred Clarke and other Catasetum geniuses say, is better. So after the leaves died, I stuck the plant, still in only a 6" pot, on the bottom shelf of my lights off to the side a bit, instead of on the Windowsill of Exile and Doom. Watered it every 7-10 days to keep it alive, as the winter humidity is root-puckeringly bad. Watched

This spring, the second year in the "new" mix, I saw nice upright aerial "basket" roots forming, on a really nice fat new bulb growth. Yay! I decided to keep it where it was, as the leaves seemed quite OK from the amount of light they were getting -- near the center of the T-12s, but a couple of inches away to the side.

I was being really good about feeding my plants this spring. And I spritzed everything like mad, once a week, with MegaThrive, including the Catasetum.

And then the spikes appeared. TWO of them. This happened.

Needless to say, I'm going to be really nice to this plant from now on.

Knitting up Rhinebeck 2012: Red Hypernova Shawlette

It's not easy being a yarn magpie. Well, the shopping part is easy. But then deciding what to make of each skein, or set of skeins...and figuring out where to put them in the meantime...those are problems we usually don't think about when we're doing the shopping.

I did try to be mindful, when shopping at Rhinebeck Sheep and Wool Festival 2012, of what I already have and why I have it, and therefore avoid duplication and fill in gaps with things in my current taste. Because as I've been playing with my stash over the past year, rearranging the storage bags roughly by Do These First, Do These Next, etc., I realized that a whole bunch of older yarns had fallen out of favor. Stuff I really wanted to work on last summer, suddenly not so much. Which is great, because now I just have to relocate them to a new Giveaway bag and re-prioritize everything else.(And the trouble is, all this playing with stash takes time away from actually knitting any of it. But really that's another post.)

While my absolute favorite colors remain dark turquoise, leaf green and deep purple, preferably all together in one yarn (indie dyers all over seem to agree), I'm not committed to having all my yarns be just variations or combinations of those. I like black, hot pink, orange, red and dark blue too. Even gray. Even brown, if it's delicate and toasty and warm. I think the color least represented in my stash has to be red. Several friends of mine are fiends for red, and it suits them, but putting it too close to my fair skin doesn't work all that well so I learned over the years to avoid it (despite the bright scarlet sweater dress I wore in my 20s, among other experiments). I certainly wouldn't knit a red sweater for myself.

But a shawl? In exotic shades of red ranging from chestnut to pink? Well, there it was, hanging on the wall at Persimmon Tree Farm's booth. 2 skeins of unique Piggy Toes merino sock yarn, luscious squoooshy soft 560 yards of pure awesomesauce. 2 skeins was enough for a cropped cardigan, but really one skein just cried out to become a Hypernova shawlette. The destiny of the other skein awaits, but it certainly will become some other shawl...one of the couple of hundred patterns in my Ravelry queue.