happy fall

made this earlier this month. it's a bit much up close, but looks much better from the curb :)

mark my stitches

a welcome excuse to dust off all my old beading supplies - stitch markers. found these super cute sheep charms from shipwreckbeads.com. thought i took a picture of my first attempt, but i can't seem to find it. it was for my summer swap partner from ravelry - she was into pentagrams so i found some beads on ebay and made earrings and stitch markers for her. i used tiger tail for the wire loops, but i wanted something more solid.

so this is my next attempt, made for my fall swap partner. i used half of a bracelet toggle for the loops this time.

i made these yesterday for a knitting friend who is leaving our group and moving to chicago soon. found my crimp tool so now the crimps are a little neater. i've been reading the ravelry suggestions and they suggested making a set of 5-6.

i think the dangly markers are super fun but not entirely practical. 2 reasons: removability (or lack thereof) and length.

for removability, i'm going to try out the leverback earring findings. some people use lobster claws, which is probably fine for small needles, but i do mostly stuff with medium size needles (6-7-8) so the size of lobster claw that would fit it would look kinda heavy and ungainly, i think.

length: they're a little unwieldy. i like them to mark the start of the round, but if you're flipping back and forth you have to watch that they don't get on the wrong side of the working yarn. i'm going to try making these as soon as i can get the ring size memory wire.

i'm going to make these for all my knitting friends!

all time favorite banana bread recipe

thought i'd post my all time favorite go-to banana bread recipe. i love it because it requires only 1 mixing bowl and your hands - no separate bowl for the flour, and no mechanical mixer required. so moist and tasty!

boo now helps with most of it. he helps me measure and is now doing a much better job of mixing - today he was careful to scrape down the edges and mix till the flour disappeared.

i usually make the following adjustments:
- substitute some whole wheat flour (lately i've been substituting a 1:1:1 all-purpose/whole wheat/wheat germ mix i learned from the sneaky chef cookbook)
- grind up some almonds so it's less apparent
- a bit less sugar. the amount less depends on how ripe (and thus sweet) the bananas are. i usually put in anywhere from 2/3 cup-3/4 cup and it's plenty sweet.

today i ran out of sugar, so i substituted some organic turbinado sugar that i had (sugar in the raw). a little crunchy and very tasty! the package said you could substitute 1:1. it seems a little sweeter to me, but perhaps you get a bit less because less crystals pack in the same volume.

i also applied a bit of advice that i learned from watching ming tsai the other day - tip your cuisinart as it's mixing. a vast improvement over needing to stop and scrape down the sides. i'd just about dismissed my small cuisinart as a cheapo return (i got it at marshall's for half price) but now it works much better.

Hawaiian Banana Bread

from the Seattle Times

1.5 cups all-purpose flour

1 cup sugar

1 tsp baking soda

½ tsp salt

½ cup vegetable oil (I use canola)

2 eggs, lightly beaten

3 ripe bananas, mashed

½ cup chopped nuts

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

2. Lightly grease and flour a loaf pan. (I like the new spray that has the oil and flour combined.) Set aside.

3. In a large bowl, combine flour, sugar, soda, salt. Stir.

4. Make a well in the center and pour in oil, beaten eggs and mashed bananas. Stir.

5. Add the nuts if you want.

6. Pour batter into pan. Bake about an hour, or until center is set.

trick or treat

trick or treating in our town was this afternoon. a beautiful afternoon! (it was positively balmy ... probably because i slaved all day yesterday in knitting a pair of matching mittens because i heard it was going to be 30-40degrees today. if i hadn't finished them, you know it would have snowed.)

boo's friend spidey came over to trick or treat too.


we got matching hats too and i made some blonde braids from some acrylic i had. (good use for acrylic, i might say.) what, you've never heard of a blonde asian viking?

i made the trick or treat bag out of felt and heat and bond and lots of glue. learned 3 things: 1, heat and bond doesn't hold very well if you need it to really hold (like the bottom of the bag). 2, make the bag smaller next time. 3, sparkly strands on felt (the black part used to have sparkly tinsel) will melt and lose their shine under a hot iron.

dixie's makeshift skunk costume ....

here he is with one of his good friends across the street.

yup, they definitely get the concept of trick or treating.

hats off

here are some hats that i made for a friend of ours ... she was recently diagnosed with brain cancer and is undergoing chemo now. dwelling on the details always saddens me so i'll just talk about the superficial knitting part here. she's a stylish lady so i'm not sure these will be her taste, but i thought it was worth a shot ... i'm also afraid that they might be a little small, i'm not sure how big her head is and i didn't want to ask because i wanted these to be a surprise.

the first one, made with the lace edge woman's hat pattern. made from kollage "yummy" yarn, an 80% bamboo 20% merino mix that really lives up to its name. silky soft and with a nice silk-like sheen.

the next one, made with rowan's "calmer" yarn, which is a cotton/acrylic mix that i saw on ravelry as being nice and soft and particularly good for chemo hats for those reasons. i got both of these yarns at stitches midwest, a fantastically large convention for yarn-lovers that i'll blog more about later. pattern is the belle starr hat. the color is a nice natural green - the second photo is a bit more accurate in the shade.

scary house

mental note: do not start a decorating project like this 1 hour before bedtime. especially when structural elements require drying time. and especially when instructions are not read first and the wrong structural elements are icing'ed together.

wedding gifts

thought i'd post pics of the gifts i recently made for a dear friend's wedding (the reason i went to seattle a couple of weeks ago).

first, the card i made for her wedding shower. recently i doubled my rubber stamp collection thanks to beth, who was getting rid of everything she had accumulated from her stampin' up demonstrator days. my cards are nothing compared to hers, but they're still fun to do!

here is the table runner i knitted for them. i used some noro aurora in the yummiest colors ever - it's a silk / polyester / wool blend, with just the right sheen / color intensity that i was looking for. i used the multidirectional scarf pattern from ravelry - i love the way the self-striping noro looks with this pattern! i'm going to have to make a scarf for myself with this pattern. it's really easy, too - just short rows, in the easiest sense of the term. i really need to get blocking wires, though. as i knit, the runner kind of got skinnier, probably because of the weight of the yarn pulling it longer. so when i finished, it was looking much more scarf-like than runner-like. i blocked it back to a more acceptable width, but the edges kind of scalloped because i was pulling it out so much.

here is the wedding card. i made my own envelope with instructions from a japanese papercrafting book that i'd picked up one day with one of those joann's coupons. the red paper is leftover from our wedding - i used several layers of funky handmade paper to make our wedding scroll (which was our guestbook).

here is a special little envelope i folded for the gift certificate we bought (we had also bought them part of their honeymoon from their registry on honeyfund.com).