Oh my!

Started out my morning attempting to get the setup done for the lower body of the Hitofude. I re-did the bind off for the neckline three full times. That includes un-doing it twice, but it seems like I did that three times, so it gets confusing. It was definitely too many! The first time was because I just by rote fell into doing a standard bind off when I had read, but not fully read (should have had a cup of coffee before starting!) that the suggested bind off was an Elastic one where she was having you keep in pattern so purl one, knit one, then knit through the back loops those two stitches.

So what amounted to two finished rows took 974 estimated stitches. Doing 71 stitches six times really does add up! Didn't get any further than that because it took me a couple of hours just to get that done. Oh my!

Was asked to be feast steward again for Yule this year. It's a combined one with the Barony of Three Mountains. Cooking meat and helping to organize the potluck foods as they come in. The Baroness of Three Mountains said that its one event that they don't want something special for the high table, so that makes it easy on me.

Came up with the idea of getting the roasted chickens done by Safeway in St. Helens, where the event is going to be held. I talked to the deli manager and she said to come in today to pay for it because they were going to be $5 instead of the regular $6.99. Save $24 by driving there and back? Sure! I can spend it on other things. I have bone-in pork butts and roast beef ordered through Ponderosa Purveyors. There will be pulled porked, chickens, beef and still debating on the turkeys. They are currently in the plan to get a couple, but I may see if I can get a deal on goose or ducks. The plan is to cook the roast on site, it smelled really yummy cooking last year. I did a fresh rosemary, marjoram, garlic, salt and pepper with olive oil thing. Rave reviews by people who usually don't like the meat at events.

Dawn-Marie tagged along with me, so after we were done there we stopped at JoAnn's with my finished Spatterdash mitt. I hoped to find some pretty green, rose and white buttons to finish them. I did find possible ones in white and rose, but might be the wrong season for the spring green. To get the needed 28 buttons, would have cost $9. Thought that was a little spendy, and seems like a reason to take a trip into Portland and visit The Button Emporium.

There was a 50% off coupon burning up in my email, so found a nice lighter weight white linen that I can try making a St Birgitta Cap. Which can then be used under the basis for the more interesting German head coverings. We had also spotted that there were some picture frames that were 60% off and I had recently found the pictures we had done last year that still needed frames. They'll finally find their way into the frames and I can hang them up with all the other family photos. We picked up Brandon from work then took him back to confirm that the approved of the frame style.

Dropped off stuff back at the house and then decided that we would do a sit down dinner since we were early enough instead of picking up fast food. Opted for Izzy's since its a buffet and we'd all find something that we liked. It has been YEARS since we've gone to an Izzy's to eat. Very noisy. The grilled salmon that I had was tasty and so was the salad. The pizzas and desserts were disappointing.

Stopped at the Burgerville for a pumpkin milkshake before they are out of season. I had a Jamba Juice Pumpkin Smash a couple weeks ago. I must say that I preferred the Pumpkin Smash over the Burgerville shake.

Revels was festive with preparations of Yule decorations, new people, Eulalia in garb sharing some smoked pork with a mustard sauce and some rose tea. Conrad dropped by with a couple paper bags of fabric donations. I brought some home and Dawn-Marie did as well. Made sure that Susan took some home for herself and towards dressing bears at Yule, a munchkin event she's helping with. I also got a Dragon's Mist patch to put on my haversack that the Baroness had made me as my 'favor' I posted about.

It's just resting on top of the bag. I still need to stitch it down very carefully! That will be fun to learn how to do. 

Looks like a sweater!

Spent time today on the Hitofude cardigan. There was a crochet chain provisional cast-on. Must have done something wrong because undoing the chain and slipping the stitches on to the needle is the way its supposed to go, that's not how it went. I had to undo each chain by pulling out the strand. For the left sleeve that was 60 stitches and then doing the three needle bind-off before moving the stitches off of the other provisional cast on (192 stitches.)

I was curious why a three needle bind off, but since the pattern author is trying to limit having to attach yarn and doing it as one swack, I guess it makes sense to use this one. It makes it so the seams are nice and neat and have less stress. If you haven't done one before, Jimmy Beans has some nice instructions on how to do it.

From there it was getting all the stitches on one needle and knitting in the round for eight rows to work the neckline and the fitting in the back. I got all those done and now working the skirt of the cardigan. Whew!

My handy spreadsheet says that I have 31,227 stitches towards the 50,000 goal and am 62% complete towards that goal. I don't think I have to worry about meeting the goal and hopefully will exceed it. I know happy to exceed. ;-)

Sleeves!

Showing the ribbing that goes around the neckline and around the back

Three needle bind off, seaming up the sleeves

There's more binding off in the next step, then back to knitting flat. The math will get a little more interesting shortly, but I think I have a couple more days of knitting before it gets to that point. 

Half done things and some more fall pretty

I have one of the fingerless mitts done. Need to weave in a couple of ends and find buttons. I cast on tonight for the second one and have 26 rows done while at the Barony Business Meeting. Having my fingers wrapped up in needles and yarn didn't keep me from active participation, much to the chagrin of some people I'm sure. ;-)

My Spring Green Mitts(you'll get to see what Ravelry is like, if you aren't a member):

Pre-soak and blocking

Blocked out. I did it at an angle and now, looking at this may have to re-do it.

I'm also more than half way towards 50,000 stitches on my Hitofude. I do have pics, but I'll save that for tomorrow I think and another update.

While letting Leeloo outside this afternoon, the sun shining through the remaining leaves caught my eye. Their glow. I don't think the camera fully caught it:

Caught a squirrel in this one ;-)

Give them bread!

Okay, the first of the month budget was such that grocery shopping didn't happen, so we ran out of bread. Looked in the pantry and yup, in the back corner of a shelf was the breadmaker. Collecting dust and neglected.

Pulled out one of those half books on bread machines and found a recipe that I had all the ingredients for, thankfully there was also bread flour in the pantry!

I did the medium loaf of white bread and forgot that it was a 2lb bread machine. It seemed kind of small when done and medium gave it a dark brown crust. The bread was still good!

This morning I decided to try out the oat bread. Went for the large loaf and was happy with how it came out. Tasty too!

Dough in the breadmaker, think its been mixed and rising

Forgot to take a picture before cutting into it!

Inside

The boys like the bread, and I love fresh bread. I might be playing more with this over the next few weeks. I have a few pages marked in the recipe book. The holidays are coming up and those seem like good times to have breadstuffs.

There's nothing like the smell of bread while its cooking, makes you hungry!

Do you have a favorite bread machine recipe or where you get your recipes?

Sometimes a slow learner ;-)

I know that when I'm in a migraine cycle its better if I don't do a lot of activities, but Friday, day two of the migraine cycle I was in, I didn't listen. I decided to defrost some chicken breasts and make a couple dinners. I boiled three small breasts in water with a couple cloves of garlic and a handful of baby carrots. I didn't have any celery on hand and didn't want to include onions. Once they were cooked through, I took everything out so they could either be cut up into bite size bites or shredded.

I've found that shredding chicken really makes a breast go along way. Much more chicken seems to be in what is being served than bite sized bits. Plus I had to us more chicken to make it look like everyone was getting enough chicken. So shredding really helps extend your chicken!

Half of the chicken, the carrots, broth water, and cloves went to this recipe, my South of the Border Chicken.  I think I blogged pics of it last year, if you don't want to go visit the Tasty Kitchen web site. If you don't want to go there, why?! It's a nice place to find some great recipe inspirations.

The other half of the shredded chicken went into a bottle of Vodka Chicken. They sauce this bottle now. Brandon loved getting it at Macaroni Grill when they still existed. So the half a box of linguine noodles and some Chardonnay with the chicken and we had dinner.

The soup went into the refrigerator and has been lunch and dinner since, and a couple in the freezer for lunches. I even had some leftover Vodka Chicken sauce and that went into the freezer. I'm sure I'll have some leftover pasta noodles that it can go with in the near future.

While all that was going on, I had some little tomatoes that I'd gotten from Carla as green ones. They sat on the counter in their plastic bag ripening. Rinsed them off, de-stemmed them and popped them into a pot of boiling water to blanch. Into a pot of cold water to stop the cooking and help slide the skins off and soon I was de-seeding. Once their skins were off, seeds removed it was into a pan to cook down. I only ended up with a pint of tomato sauce, but it can be used for anything.

Still had the headache that night and in fact I think it was a little bit worse, so I stayed home and didn't go to Revels that night. :-( There was a fabric swap I missed too! No one else brought fabric, but she'll bring it another time, and hopefully I can exchange some of mine too.

Jimmy Kimmel slams knitting

I don't usually watch late night television, but happened to catch this. Was a bit shocked to have my hobby slammed. Thanks Jimmy. Won't be watching you again.

I had actually tuned in and watched a bit of that episode. It was interesting seeing the different wheels, ages, the techniques being used. I have spun from the grease and while I don't care for it, I thought it was cool they were trying to break a record.

One frogged, one started - fingerless mittens in November

I tried to make a pair of fingerless mitts for Bailey. Out of some pretty purple alpaca with a little bit of glitter. The pattern was CanCans. I was disappointed with how the stitch definition came out with the yarn. Wasn't happy, so frogged and found another pattern for the yarn.

Can you see the blue sparkle?

I had seen Spatterdash being queued and thought they looked fun and thought they were also in my queue, until I looked. I had in mind at first one of the de-stash Happy Feet yarns from Friday, but then remembered this odd ball skein of Shibui Staccato that I had gotten in the Rose City Yarn Crawl as one of the 20 first people in. 

The green tones and the splash of pink just not colors that I'm normally attracted. The skein flashed into my mind when I looked at someone's finished project. So when the Cancans failed and before finding the pattern for the yarn, I jumped in and started my pair of Spring Green Spatterdash:

I don't normally want to knit something flat that you're going to wear in the round, but this has been interesting to do. There's a bit of shaping with decreases in the stockinette portion. Adding in the thumb gusset was different. Definitely nice tidy little increases without big holes. I'm a fan of those! 

There's five more of the fan patterns to go, they go quickly, so hopefully one will be done soon. 

Who gets these?  Haven't decided yet. Depends how they come out and if they shout out they go to a particular person. ;-) I need a pair of fingerless mitts for the season, but are they these?

Oh! Had to refresh my memory on a stitch - SSP. I am constantly doing a SSK with the Hitofude pattern, so doing a purl version was a nice twist. How to do it isn't as fast as the SSK that I learned from Lucy Neatby at that first Sock Summit back in 2009. I can't find a good explanation of it. I'll see if I can get Brandon to video me doing it tomorrow.