i am a butterfly…

Posts Tagged ‘ABC-Along’

H is for husband, and here is mine, enjoying a fantastic Mexican breakfast of meat, meat, and more meat!

Pattern: February Baby Sweater
Source: Elizabeth Zimmermann’s Knitter’s Almanac
Yarn: KnitPicks Simply Cotton Organic Sport
Colors: Malted Milk w/ Ginger trim
Needles: US4

I love this little sweater so much! It was just shipped off to its recipient yesterday, so it will be waiting for her when she makes her big arrival.

I made a few small changes to the pattern to personalize it. For the tie closure, I just used a yo k2tog tow to create eyelets and then threaded a contrasting color  icord through them.

The cuff edging is a basic crochet shell edging. I really stretched my crochet skills here with such fancy stitchwork.

The rest of the sweater is edged in a simple single crochet edging, in the same contrasting color.

Yes, I somehow managed to screw up garter stitch. That little mistake is a lot more glaring than I thought it would be, but I’m mostly okay with it. I’m going with the idea that it was a purposeful mistake because only the gods can create perfection. Yeah, that’s it.

The great thing about cotton yarn is that it’s machine washable and dryable.  For babies, that’s essential, so this organic, undyed cotton seemed like a perfect choice. It will only get softer with washing.

I love how this turned out, and I can’t wait to see photos of Baby C wearing it. If I could change one thing, though, it would have been to knit it in DK instead of sport weight yarn. It ended up super tiny, so she won’t get to wear it for very long, sadly. That’s alright, though, because I’ll just have to knit her a bigger one as she grows.

As in new ones, I has them. It’s been years and years since I got a new pair of glasses. Fortunately, my prescription hadn’t changed much so the old ones were fine, but it was time for something new. I loved these instantly. The little blue flowers with the rhinestone centers did me in as soon as I saw them.

Let me begin by saying this: I do not collect decorative spoons.

For the 2008 ABC-Along, I wrote about the cow cookie jar we bought on our honeymoon in Aruba. I briefly mentioned that the cow was purchased on the last day of our trip, when we suddenly realized that we hadn’t bought any souvenirs the whole time we were there. It wasn’t until I was cleaning out a drawer in the kitchen last week that I remembered that we also bought this, the decorative spoon.

Have I mentioned that I don’t collect decorative spoons? I just grabbed this thing in an act of desperation so that I would have some record of our honeymoon. Some proof that we actually went to Aruba, since we also weren’t really photo-snappers in those days and have very few photos from that trip. I’m sure that I thought it was some sort of ironic purchase somehow, but looking back, it was just stupid. Now I have this decorative spoon cluttering up the kitchen and I don’t know what to do with it. Maybe I should display it with my ironic collection of shot glasses.

And also for make ahead.

Chocolate chip cookies, scooped out onto a parchment covered sheet pan and ready for the freezer. When they’re frozen, I just toss them all into a zipper bag and keep them frozen. A very easy method for keeping cookie dough around, and I’m not faced with dozens of baked cookies all at once.

Ironically, as my camera has gotten better, I’ve become less likely to actually bring it to shows with me, so these photos are mostly pretty old. I don’t want to have to worry about the camera when I go out.

I didn’t learn how to bake bread until college. My college was a small, very crunchy school in Bar Harbor, ME and instead of a caffeteria, which would have been entirely out of place considering the culture of the place, we had a room in the main building, overlooking Frenchman’s Bay, called Take A Break. (As an aside, TAB worked on the honor system: food was put out with little signs with the prices, but no one manned the table collecting money. It was expected that everyone could be trusted to put the correct amount of money in the till and not to take any out except the change you were owed. This system actually worked very well, and I don’t recall there ever being a time when I was there that the TAB till came up short. In fact, it often came out over.) Being the hippie, crunchy, granola school that it was, the food served at TAB was all natural, never processed, and freshly prepared. The bread for the sandwiches was whole grain and baked daily in the fabulous TAB kitchen by a student as part of the student employment program. For a couple of years while I was there, the student in charge of the bread-baking was my boyfriend, Paul.

Bread for sandwiches had to be done the night before, so Paul would usually go into the kitchen around midnight to start working on whatever bread he’d chosen for that batch. I often accompanied him to keep him company and nibble on little bits of bread dough when I could snag them.* During rising periods, we both usually worked on something for class or we’d write or we would just sit and chat in the warm kitchen. I have really fond memories of those nights we spent together and even though Paul went on to break my heart multiple times, I can still think about him with kindness when I think about nights spent baking bread and a few other things.**

That was when I learned how to knead bread dough. Paul would usually make one more loaf than TAB needed, and we would share it, hot out of the oven. It was on those small, extra loaves that he taught me how to knead. It wasn’t all melodramtic and ridiculous like that scene with the clay in Ghost. Kneading bread dough is hard work – as is throwing pottery, which makes that scene even more stupid – and while it’s earthy and spiritual and homey and lovely, it’s definitely not sexy. But I loved it and I started making my own bread and after I was out of college, I kept it up for a few years.

And then somewhere along the way, after not baking any bread for a few months or a year or however long it was, I got the idea that it was just too much work. Somehow, I got the idea that the only way I would ever have fresh-baked bread in the house was if I had a bread machine. So I bought one and I loved it for a long, long time.

It wasn’t until earlier this year that something switched inside me and I got the yen to bake bread by hand again. From the first batch, I was hooked. My hands took up the motions of kneading so easily, remembered motion, like riding a bicycle. It was calming, and contemplative, something my hands did without the need for my brain to engage, freeing it to wander and think and ponder. A moving meditation. How was it that I ever stopped doing this and declared it too much work?

I am so glad to have rediscovered this, and if I ever again say it’s too much work, someone should just kick me.

The two photos in this post are of my variation on Susan’s Farmhouse White. My changes from her recipe are to use milk instead of water, butter instead of canola oil, and white whole wheat instead of the all purpose flour. The batch picture here also has KAF’s Harvest Grains Blend, which turns a good loaf of bread into an epic*** loaf of bread. The batch here used about 3T of the grains per cup of flour.

* I still love raw bread dough and will occasionally pop a small piece into my mouth while kneading these days. I’m also crazy for raw biscuit dough.

*** Epic. Ha.

Down but not out. I will catch up, yes I will.

This photo is sort of an embarassment to me, because the comment I get from the most from friends about my photos is some variation of “wow! your food shots are great!”

This is not one of those great food shots. It is, in fact, a very crappy photo of an amazing piece of steak. A good testament to its amazingness is that I didn’t even think to get any photos of it until I was nearly done. So don’t let this photo fool you: this was one of the most amazing steaks I’ve ever eaten.

When we got to Lyons, we stopped at a tiny little grocery store to get some food for the cottage. The main reason we stopped, aside from this place being the only option as we later found out, was the hand-lettered sign outside that said “Colorado Beef.” What you see here is the remains of an almost 2-inch thick rib steak, hand-cut in store a few hours before we purchased it.

Barbara cooked them on the grill until they were browned on the outside and bloody on the inside. I made a really simple tomato and cucumber salad to go on the side, and we dug in. This was an incredible meal, and I get hungry even looking at this terrible photo. The steak was flavorful and delicious and juicy and wonderful.

J is, indeed, for Juicy.

Yeah. So the I’s were for April 26 – May 9. I’m a little behind. But I hven’t given in just yet, and I still think I can catch up.

I’m so far behind on the ABC-Along that it’s ridiculous. I think they’re on M or N now, and here I am posting an H. But what an H he is!

We went out to NJ on the 4th for a BBQ with friends at their wonderful new house and for a visit with Hank, the most adorable dog in the world. I’m not even biased. I mean, look at him.

Hank definitely deserves pride of place as my H.

Now to find an I. And a J. After that, I have it plotted out for a while.