cupcakes from scratch and faux weaving...

I love StumbleUpon set on just knitting. Because I stumble across wonderful little things like a tutorial on entrelac:

And of course I have to right then and there start a new project. Going to make a scarf. All the weaving is going to be of the same teal color, no alternating every other row here. Except there's going to be the occasional gray streak throughout. Just so I have a ridiculous amount of ends to weave in the end...

And after pining away to make cupcakes and cakes from scratch and never having baking powder as opposed to baking soda... we finally got baking powder and it took me about a month before I took advantage of it.

These here are peanut butter chocolate cupcakes. Which are delicious, but taste like neither chocolate or peanut butter, go figure. I experimented with melting some peanut butter into a typical confectioner's sugar/milk glaze mix, and that tastes more like peanut butter than the cupcakes.

And I've found that storing the cupcakes in the freezer makes them amazingly moist. I never knew cupcakes tasted so good cold.

And alas...

I still don't have any pictures of the finished Decimal Cardigan. It will even be featured in a student film, but it has not been still photographed. I will get on that... once I'm done:
- studying all weekend for a test for Egypt class
- forcing myself to attempt to learn Spanish not just pass the class this semester and be done with it
- memorizing the origins, details, and years of a dozen different specie of hominid
- and reading a repetitive ethnography (that really is redundant... aren't they all?) about transgendered Brazilian prostitutes.


I love college. At least it's interesting.

swift!

Wednesday night I got the materials for and built a swift, with the manual labor of Alex. I've grown up doing small odd projects (and normal big projects) with tools and am not helpless in any way when it comes to sawing/hammering/planning/etc. But it sure is nice to measure and mark pieces of wood, hand them off to Alex, and get them back cut. Like my own personal power saw, except this one feeds off caloric energy.

It didn't take too long to go from this...


To this:



Yeah, that's duct tape on the bottom. The screws we had at home (and so I did not buy any at Home Depot) turned out not to be long enough. I was going to use duct tape temporarily, but I like it for some reason and see no reason to change it.


It's so much easier than trying to get the computer chair spinning at a decent pace. I put two sets of holes on it, so it's still pretty small and portable. The first is 36" for measuring yardage, and the outside holes are 50" for winding post-dyeing yarn into cute little skeins.

Needless to say, there's a few new skeins of hand-dyed yarn up at my shop.

pulling out the tools...

I've been dying and recycling enough yarn lately that it's gotten incredibly annoying to sit and wind yarn around Alex's spinning computer chair. And so... I've decided I'm going to make my own swift. Which could end very disastrously, though the odds are with us on this one because Alex has all the handiness that other 20 year old males have yet to gain and I'm a determined little bugger that is addicted to drawing out plans and calculating angles and numbers.

Wish us luck...

In the meantime, my favorite thing I've dyed recently:




620 yds of "Earth," which can be found for sale (with more pictures of a sample of it knit... it's so pretty with all of the colors blended together) in my etsy shop.

flowers!

More sweaters to recycle! I think I'm addicted to the process.

After running out of yarn TWICE, I'm finally done with my decimal cardigan. The stitch counts in that pattern were a MESS, which is kind of odd because I knit the same size as the original the author made. Still completely doable and a decent knit, but annoying as all hell.

Unfortunately, my boobs seem to be too big for every knitted item. Either it fits and is lumpy and too big around my waist/stomach and looks horrible on me, or it looks slimming and fits my waist/stomach and will not button over my boobs.

Fortunately! I can just wear it open and it looks all artsy just like that. Which also means no button buying, thus money saving. Hoorah?


I'm anxious for spring to start and as a result have allowed myself to purchase 3 plants for my mini-wanna-be-garden, two different varieties that I've never seen before. Heard of them both, but not seen in person. Which is kind of a big deal for someone who worked for three years at a plant nursery and has looked through dozens and dozens of plant/seed ordering catalogues.

The front corner of my garden (the only semi-presentable part at the moment):



Cyclamen in such a gorgeous red:


And two different colors of primroses:

Sorry for the darkness. It was dark when we got home from plant/sweater purchasing but I couldn't wait until morning for these. I got some nasturtium and wild flower mix seeds, as well, which I'll wait until morning to plant.

I'm hopeful it won't freeze again. Those insane 10 nights of freezing weather that set a record here in Florida wiped out most of my plants that I got last fall. This time, however, I had the foresight to plant special plants (ie: anything over $2.00 a plant) in pots so I can bring them inside when it gets cold. We don't have enough of an established household yet to have old sheets/towels to use for plant coverings.


(Flickr is being an ass now and won't let me inbed my pictures in their full-size. Thanks for denying me the use of my own pictures. And we all know Blogger's picture uploader sucks.)