so many things to knit

Back in January i was browsing knitting websites. lots of patterns, hats, toys, leg warmers, random things to knit. so many projects :)

but had made Blaise a promise not to start something new until the scarf was finished.

learning a technique wouldn't count as making something new so i decided to learn how to use double-pointed needles (DP).

so 4 needles, 3 containing stitches and one working needles. in my reading i had discovered that the most common newbie frustration was that you get a ladder or a loosening of stitches when you switch from one needle to the next. so borrowed a set of DPs from Rachel, grabbed a ball of wool and gave it a go.

i'm either totally lucky or i have a natural talent for DP needle work, not a gap or ladder to be seen.

Binary Scarf

in December 2006 Blaise approached me with a request to knit him a scarf. not any scarf, a scarf knitted with a binary pattern. he had found it off one of his sites and it came from a knitting website known affectionately as Knitty.

there was 2 new skills to learn: knitting in the round and using 2 colours.

the two colours was pretty easy to figure out, you just picked up the colour strand you needed as it comes up in the pattern.
-as an aside, learning binary was fun, making the message was even more fun ^^

the knitting in the round sounded simple enough, all you needed to do was knit and the round needles turned it into a stockinette tube. seemed hard though, i struggled to make 6 rows (which was one set of numbers). progress was slow, birthday 2007 came and went, as did christmas 2007, then 2008 passed.

it became the family joke, "what am i getting for Christmas?" he'd ask with a big grin, "A scarf would be awesome."

skip forward to 2010 and to New Zealand. the scarf came with us, still not a lot of work being done. then one day i went Knitworld where a lovely lady finally pointed out my round needle was TOO FREAKING LONG!! all the struggling to knit and slow progress because i was uing the wrong tools.

a shorter set of rounds and suddenly we were making progress.
finally in July of 2010 it was finished.

The binary scarf December 19, 2006 - July 5, 2010 - HUZZAH!

the on again and off again love of knitting.

I learned to knit at a young age, i was 5 or 6 and mom and grandma taught me how to knit. to this day in the family photo album is pictures of me sitting staring with great intensity at the knitting needles and my work.

i made grandma a tea cosey. it wasn't fancy, it was a varigated white/yellow/green wool, i had two green metal knitting needles and i knitted 2 sides which mom helped me sew together with holes for the spout and handle.

i still have the green needles. they have traveled with me forever. knitting fell off my radar for a long time. on occasion in high school i picked up the needles and knitted squares. eventually i put together a blanket for my grandpapa and that took a couple of years. never anything fancy just a knit stitch.

i suppose the next big push came when we hit New Zealand in 2005. at the Agrodome in Rotorua Blaise and I were blown away by the hand-dyed wool. we each bought a set of wooden needles and a ball of wool. i knitted up a scarf, still a simple knit stitch but with a neat twist where you wrap wool around the needle and then drop the loops off next row.

back in Canada i made a couple more scarves in this pattern. then in December 2006 Binary Scarf reared its head.

Success i grew a tomato

ok its tiny, very tiny. but hey its the first one and i have yellow flowers like no ones business at the moment. hopefully i shall soon have so many tomatoes that i will give them away to neighbours and make new friends.


incidentally while watering tomatoes this morning i looked down to see a man of asian descent looking up at my plants. he pointed to the plants and gave me a thumbs up. i said hello and was talking about the plants when he smiled and said "no engrish". ah well at least he liked my garden.

"cookies taste better in shapes"

in the grand tradition, and because i wanted cookies, i made a batch of my no chill sugar cookies. turns out i had forgotten all my cookie cutters; blaise is still confused on how that one happened.

so i purchased a rather functional but scalloped circle set, simple yet efficient. i was making lots of cookies when my official taster walked out of the office to perform his role.

he munched quietly on the still warm sugar cookie and said "its good but cookies just taste better in shapes". well i was off school, had a morning to kill and a desire to make blaise happy. with a paring knife and a toothpick and a laptop for visuals i made "shaped" cookies.

baby steps to bento

so bento in simplest terms is a japanese box lunch made up of a variety of foods, usually involving a base of rice and some veggies, pickles and meat. they can be simple like an everyday lunch or they can be over the top in design and complexity.

well i have to start somewhere so i figured Onigiri and one-day pickles might be a good start.

Onigiri are the rice ball, made hot out of the rice cooker, shaped with salted hands and having (usually) a filling. Things i learned from this first onigiri: rice out of rice cooker extremely freaking hot, when doing filling for onigiri it is not necessary to prep an entire can of tuna. they do look the right shape though, i even got the seaweed hand holder on there.

The pickles were also an experiment, i took the recipe from here http://www.justhungry.com/sweet-and-sour-cucumber-and-wakame-pickles
i didn't have one of the types of seaweed and i used chili powder in place of a whole chili pepper.
i left them over night in the fridge and ... they're really good!! they only last a week, two tops but they won't be around that long.

so bento baby steps was a success.

yummy salads

The plants...they won't stop growing. i expected growth, the climate alone would support that. and the lettuce i expected quite a lot of lettuce. i was right on that count; we've had 2 delicious salads so far and the lettuce keep growing. i'm just harvesting the outer parts and letting the middles keep growing.

The herbs are doing great too, lots of leaves. but man the tomatoes...
ok so back home before we moved i had planted a dozen heritage tomatoe plants but we had a really wet summer and they never grew well. we had lots of green tomatoes by the time we left but nothing ripened (i'm sure the new owner of our house is quite pleased though). i forgot how fast tomatoe plants grow given the right conditions. take a look at my plants. we are at 4 weeks for some of them and 3 weeks for the others. i'm a little worried about lack of bees being on a balcony, i think i'll have to look up how to hand pollinate the yellow flowers that are showing up.




look at my corriander