The Best Gifts Are You

So, at the holiday party at Nana's Knitting Shop on Friday, in between collecting bribes to buy me a senate seat, Tricia gave us all these lovely kits.


















I say Tricia gave them, but actually it was her husband The Prince, dressed in a beautifully knit red sweater and a custom knit white beard. (Yes, Trish, the sweater is beautifully knit. Forget about that teenie row error on the back. It's a design feature.)

This is a kit with instructions to make felted cherry blossoms as pictured on the pattern card. I love the yarn -- Cascade Lana D'Oro -- and have decided it's far too soft and decadent to felt. It wants to be a neckwarmer. Or underpants. It's that soft.

Then at the SnB annual holiday shindig -- a party for the oldtimer SnB crew, many of whom don't make it to our weekly gatherings any more, but all of whom are still definitely part of the team -- we did our annual gift swap. This year's swap was supposed to be gag gifts and white elephants. I had a neatly wrapped package sitting on my dresser and walked out of the house without it. Pout! So I thought I wouldn't get to play along as Knifty Red read her little story about Mrs. Purl Right knitting gifts left and right. (It's one of those stories where you pass the gift to the left or right every time the word left or right is used, and it's really fun.)

I wasn't the only one who forgot her swap gift. Two of us forgot our gifts, and by coincidence, two people brought extras to compensate for the boneheads among us. Ahem. So I got to play along, and look what I got!




























That's two precious, shiny skeins of Knit One Crochet Too Souffle -- perfect for a drapey scarf -- and a skein of Fannie's Fingering -- or as we think of it now, sock yarn for dirty girls. Did you know that in certain parts of the world, "Fannie" refers to a woman's girly bits? Fannie's Fingering, indeed.

But the best thing I got for Christmas this year, without question, was the chance to enjoy the company of my knitting buddies. Twice. When I first moved back to the creative wasteland known as "my childhood neighborhood," I knew I would have a hard time finding like-minded people around here. Creative class members are in short supply in these parts. And always have been. People like me tend to run away from places like this, you know, and congregate in areas where like-minded people won't scorn work that's done for something other than money. (Or worse -- activities done to improve the work that's done for something other than money. Try explaining that one to an accountant sometime.)

So I thought I was in for a few years of loneliness when I came back here. Family reasons drove me to do it, and I dreaded it in many ways. The first few years were every bit as isolating and frustrating as I expected.

And then I met the knitters. I was shy of joining this group at first. I knew about it long before I came to that first meeting, but I hesitated. I was afraid I would find nothing more than a group of crafty housewives -- you know the type, the women who do these things because their friends are doing it or because they heard about it at the mall. They are driven by different needs -- the need to be part of the group, to be popular, to fit in. And that's fine, but that's not what drives me.

But I took a chance and went to a meeting and found a mix of people that really does feed my heart and soul. And from there, I met some more knitters, and some more knitters, and pretty soon my weekly calendar was formed around knitting events with two different overlapping groups of people, all of whom delight me every time I'm in their company.

I love yarn. Jeez, everyone who knows me knows how much I love yarn. But what I love even more than yarn are the people around me who also love yarn.

Happy holidays to all of you.

When Looks Deceive

These may look like rather ordinary, lumpy cookies. But the taste is really something special. Several of you who participated in the cookie exchange asked for the recipe. It started off as a recipe ripped from a magazine, but -- this may come as no surprise -- I tend to tinker with recipes. Yeah, that's right. I cook the same way I knit. Recipes, like patterns, are never made as written. I may only fool around on the margins, but I always read a recipe and think, "Ooh! That sounds good. But it would be better if...."

In any event, this started off as a recipe for a sandy cookie with jelly swirls. And now it is...

::drumroll::

Raspberry Chocolate Chip Cookies

5 T butter
1/3 c dark brown sugar
1/3 c white sugar
1/3 c raspberry jam
1 egg
1 t vanilla
1 1/2 c flour
1/2 t baking soda
1 t baking powder
1 generous cup dark chocolate chips
1 1/4 cup chopped pecans

Cream butter, white sugar and brown sugar. Add egg and mix well. Add vanilla and raspberry jam. (Jam will be easier to stir in if you nuke it for a few seconds. Be careful not to overheat it, but just warm it slightly.) Add flour, baking soda and baking powder and mix thoroughly. Mix in nuts and chips.

Drop by spoonfuls onto well-greased cookie sheets and bake at 350 for 9-11 minutes. Don't overbake. Allow them to cool for just a couple of minutes on the pans before transferring to racks. They need a bit of a rest before handling.

Just fwiw, I like the Girardhelli 60% dark chocolate chips. They're nicely shaped and have a good flavor and are very easy to find. The combination of tang from the raspberries, sweetness from the pecans, and richness from the chips is a real treat.

Hence, the Name

Here is the craptastic, crapalicious, craparrific crapghan. If you put on sunglasses, you might be able to look at this picture closely enough to see that I'm just beginning to apply the border. Warning: Viewer beware! I won't pay your medical bills if your corneas are burned.

This is a Red Heart afghan for my oldest nephew, The Teenager Who Drives. He's military-mad and his bedroom is decorated in American flags, video game boxes, dirty clothes, and White Sox paraphernalia. So, when it came time to make his special blanket in grandma's "single" pattern, we picked out this insane variegated yarn named, appropriately, Stars and Stripes. I hate the yarn -- there are too many imperfections, too many variations in spin and thickness and loft and color -- which gave rise to the nickname. Crap + afghan = crapghan.

My grandmother crocheted bed-sized blankets for all of us -- her kids, their kids, and in some cases, their kids. In 30 or so years of crocheting, I'd be willing to bet she made 150 of them. When she ran out of beds to blanket, she started making enormous "throws" (actually, also twin bed-sized) for the backs of couches. She also made a good number of crib blankets, but she preferred the bigger ones because they would take her longer than ten minutes.

If you were reading the blog this spring, you know I pulled out her special "double" pattern to make a crib blanket for my uncle and his wife, who had their first baby this July. That double pattern and the single pattern I'm using for the crapghan were the only two patterns she ever used to make afghans. No granny squares for her! She taught me the patterns one day sitting at a picnic table in her backyard, under an enormous old oak that we all referred to as "the shady tree." Many of my happiest memories developed under the shady tree, and that's certainly one of them.

I get wicked nostalgia whenever I think about this, and making the blankets is a way of honoring her memory. The crapghan is number 3 of 5 for the nieces and nephews. Number four will be a forest green one for Danger Boy, but I'll finish a sweater or two before I cast that on.

And it looks like this one will be done in time to pass it off to the teenager at a family gathering on Sunday. Whew!

Getting Closer!

Today I finished knitting the back yoke of Catherine Parr. This was knit in the round to the armholes, split, and the yokes are knit separately. I've already threaded the live front stitches onto the needle, and it's ready to go.

My original hope was to have this done by the end of the year. But I've also been working hard on the crapghan -- I'm into the last 6 oz. ball on that, and believe me, 6 ounces is nothing when the whole thing tips the scales at 84. Yeah, that's right, it's a seven-pounder. I want that thing done so bad I can almost taste it. It's too big and heavy to lug from room to room, so I keep ducking into the back bedroom, where it lays on the couch in all its eye-killing glory, to add a few stitches.

If I can finish the crapghan this week, I still have an outside chance of finishing Catherine Parr before the end of the year, which is another one so close to the finish line that I can hardly stand it. Much depends upon my job. We keep having these odd production issues due to technical/software problems, and every time that happens, I lose several hours trying to repair things. And I don't have spare multi-hour blocks of time laying around just waiting for a technical disaster to claim them.

Take Saturday. Case in point. I rarely take a whole day off -- I'm almost always reading or editing for at least a few hours each day. But I planned to take Saturday off and wrap gifts, do some cooking, and, of course, play with my yarn. I'd bought a new movie some weeks ago and still hadn't watched it. (Marie Antoinette, the "new romantics" version.) And you know, a day off once every few months or so doesn't make me a slacker.

But then one of our books came back from the typesetter loaded with major errors due to this technical glitch, and I spent 10.5 hours in my chair, fixing the manuscript. Pissed me off.

I'm starting to give some serious thought to goals for the New Year, and much of my thinking now revolves around time management. Change begins with me. It may affect others, and they may resist it, but I have to initiate it or it won't happen. And you know, I'd like to actually wear Catherine Parr someday.

One of my favorite time management tricks is the kitchen timer. I keep one on my desk. Set it for 45 minutes or however long, and buckle down on a project. Then when the timer goes off, I stop. No matter what. I get up, walk around, refill my mug or water bottle. Throw a load of laundry in the machine, wash the dishes, anything that keeps me on my feet. I usually set the timer for between 5 and 15 minutes during this stage, and when it goes off, I stop, return to my desk, and dig back in to my task for another timed sprint.

It may sound counterintuitive, but it's a technique that can keep me fresh throughout the course of a day, alternating desk work (in long sprints) with short bursts of physical activity. And there's something mentally satisfying about portioning out my tasks -- so many turns of the timer for editing, so many for submissions, so many for management tasks. As an added bonus, I always know exactly how much time I've put in on any particular project. (It's an old lawyer thing -- tracking time per task and project for billing and productivity purposes.)

So do you have any time management or productivity tricks that you can recommend?

Nom Nom Nom

I've had a frustrating day, one of those days where bewildering things pile on top of you all day long. My windshield wipers wouldn't work this morning, but started working again on the way to the mechanic. My neighbor had a flat tire, and I helped her change it and got all dirty. Euw. The family business has been slammed with annoying paperwork, and another neighbor, not the one with a flat, inexplicably told me that I have the voice of a five-year-old. WTF?? My doctor's office billed me for tests that I paid for the day I was in the office. I tried to cancel my old dial-up service (which I was keeping strictly for use at the lake house), and the very kind gentleman from Whatthefuckistan kept me on the line for twenty minutes insisting that I need some other package which would be free for the first 30 days only. Every time I told him, "No, thank you," he would go right to the top of his script and start reading the whole thing over again. Every. Damned. Time. How much you wanna bet it shows up on my bill?

Oh. And a check I've been waiting for -- I did some extra freelance work a while back -- still hasn't showed up. Every time I follow up with the payor, she tells me, "I just mailed it today." I wouldn't normally fuss over delayed payment, but she's going to screw up my taxes if she doesn't cut the check in this calendar year.

So I knit for a while, but it wasn't quite taking the edge off.

I needed something more ninja.

I needed to use a knife. A sharp one.

So I made my trusty stir-fry, an easy and dependable dish I've been making since college. Everyone who's tried this very easy recipe has raved about it. Well, it's probably a stretch to call it a recipe. More like a blueprint.

You'll need:

• 3 c. or so chopped fresh vegetables, dealer's choice (The above was made with cauliflower, broccoli, and red radishes, but really, there are no bad choices -- this is a great way to use up leftovers)
• equal parts toasted sesame oil (or peanut), soy sauce, and rice vinegar (roughly a tablespoon or two of each)
• a few of drops of tabasco
• a generous dash of five spice powder, maybe around an eighth of a teaspoon, or to taste
  
• a good sprinkle of garlic powder, or one clove minced
• 1T sesame seeds (I'm out at the moment, so there aren't any pictured)
  

Put everything except the vegetables and sesame seeds in a deep skillet or wok and stir to mix. It won't mix perfectly because of the oil, but it's better if you mix the spices to dissolve them a bit. Heat the sauce until the garlic is just starting to sizzle. Add the hardest vegetables first and let them cook a bit before you add the softer ones. (Soft ones cook faster -- asparagus, radishes, summer squash, eggplant, and the like -- so you want to give the hard ones a head start.) Cook over a high flame, stirring frequently, until all the sauce is absorbed and vegetables are at desired tenderness.

If you're using sesame seeds (strongly recommended), dry toast them in a nonstick skillet for a minute or two, then sprinkle them on top of the vegetables before serving.

Leftovers reheat beautifully. Serve with rice or noodles. If you don't have any aggression issues or time for chopping, you can use the precut bags, baby carrots, canned water chestnuts, even frozen (though the texture will be different). You know those salad and dip platters you get at the grocery store for parties, and then have mountains leftover? Now you know what I do with mine. Into the wok!

My mom uses leftover cooked beef and chicken when she makes it, adding the meat when she adds the soft vegetables. My sister uses uncooked chicken or shrimp and adds it with the hard vegetables to cook thoroughly. Really, it's an anything goes kind of recipe. The sauce is both basic enough and versatile enough to dress up just about anything.

And all that chopping sure does restore a gal's equilibrium. Or if it doesn't restore her, it at least arms her.

Pondering January

Oooh, look at that purty purple. So yummy. Torino feels every bit as soft as, say, Malabrigo, but it's plied and perfectly round.

Round enough for good cabling?

Thanks, Knifty Red, for the reminder in the comments. Honestly, I've been so focused on other things -- like finishing other knitting, and creating that interactive e-book, and let's not forget the mumblety-mumble holidays and the way they hoover up huge chunks of life -- that I'd completely forgotten about our new team project set to start in January.

We're knitting St. Brigid. And I think mine might just be in the purple Torino.

I purchased this Torino several years ago at Kool Knits in Naperville. I think this predates the opening of Nana's Knitting Shop in my neighborhood, because Nana's carries Torino and if Nana's carries something, I buy it there.

I'm actually getting much better at self-control while breathing that delicious nectar of yarn fumes at Nana's. Used to be, I couldn't get out of there for less than $100. These days, it's often under $50. Rumor has it that I've been witnessed leaving after open knitting with no new purchases. But my stash closet doubts the truth of these rumors.

Financial self-discipline has become a pressing concern for me lately. I have enough money to live on, but I'm very worried about the economy, as are most people. This past week, though, in back-to-back explosions known around the publishing world as "Black Wednesday" and "Gray Thursday," the axe fell on many heads at many houses. Editors, artists, sales specialists, managers -- at one house, I hear an entire production department was laid off.

Publishing is a small industry and requires a specialized skill set. It's not enough to know where to put the commas. You have to also be able to predict the future and know what people will want to read a year or two from now, which cover graphics will be more appealing, which topics will be hot. It's not guesswork, though gut feelings do come into play.

The people who lost their jobs this week, a staggering number of people, have demonstrated abilities to both predict the future and get the commas in the right spots. They were smart, talented, capable people, folks with track records of creating best-sellers and prize-winners.

And now they're out of a job, and frankly, this is probably just the beginning of an whole-industry contraction in publishing.

My job is safe. For now. And for the foreseeable future. But, to be perfectly candid, I can foresee less of the future than I used to. And in a job that requires a fortune teller's ability to see the future, this troubles me more than I can express.

I was going to use the purple Torino to knit a FLAK aran according to Janet Szabo's instructions. I bought extra yardage to allow for all the sample swatching she recommends, and if I use this yarn for St. Brigid, I'll have around 500-600 yards leftover.

But, with the future so uncertain, I might just hang onto my cash and use the stash. It's a tough decision.

What do you all think? Have you changed your shopping habits even though your income is unchanged? Am I being overly panicky?

There has been a bit of knitting. Not as much as during a typical week, because work and the holidays shook up my schedule, but there has been knitting.

On Sunday, I read submissions and finished this sock. The second is cast on, but barely so.





















And here's the latest view of Catherine Parr. I'm knitting the back yoke now. It's at roughly 6 inches, maybe a touch more. Once it reaches ten inches, I'll probably put it on stitch holders and knit the front. Or maybe -- brace yourselves -- I'll take the time to figure out just what I'm going to do about the neckline before knitting the front yoke. My current thinking is V-neck with colorwork bands to match those at the sleeve cuffs.

My second choice might just be a turtleneck with no colorwork.

Then again, that colorwork is nice, and it would feel so toasty warm around my neck, and it would be easier if I didn't have to do any math. So maybe I'll just follow the pattern.

(Yeah, right.)