Tuesday Tube: How It's Made

Check out this awesome time-lapse amigurumi video:

Double the Pleasure

I brought my double-knit scarf along with me on a recent trip. Even though it involved 2 balls of yarn, they were of course incredibly light and compact to pack. I didn't need to bring a pattern because it's easy to memorize. Even if I had forgotten, I could easily "read" the pattern repeats I had already done like a chart.

Once I got back into the rhythm of knitting this scarf, it was pretty fun. I held the 2 yarns in separate hands. While it's not necessary to do this, it was easier to shuttle them back and forth without getting them tangled and stuck to each other this way, especially given the nature of Kidsilk Haze.


I'm enjoying the finished scarf! Details are on Ravelry.


There's an idea that's been bubbling around in my head for a different scarf design ever since I took Lucy Neatby's double knitting class at Madrona 2 years ago, but I haven't worked on it at all. Since I have plenty of KSH left over, I might swatch something. We'll see.

Inspired By

Inspired by Disney Family.com, via Margo Tantau, to make apple smiles:


It's not the best picture, but it was still dark when I made this, and I might have still been a little out of it! Since the treats were going into a lunchbox, I used lemon juice to keep the apples from browning and added a toothpick to keep things intact till lunch time (my daughter reports they held up well!). The directions called for cutting the apple into 8ths, but I cut it into 16ths, and that made for more reasonably-sized "lips." You're supposed to use peanut butter to hold the marshmallow teeth in place, but since we can't use that around here, she got Nutella instead. It is very helpful to dry the surface of the apple before spreading on whatever you're using as the glue. I tried to keep the Nutella away from the edge of the apple slice because I didn't want a "betel nut" appearance, but you can see a little of it anyway.

Tuesday Tube: Lego my Knitting

Okay, this machine is not going to set any knitting speed records, but it's made of Lego blocks, so it's automatically so geeky that it's cool!



Check out Thomas Johnson's other Lego creations too.

Spring Has Sprung

Happy Spring, Everyone!

Congratulations to Jill B, who won my little contest! I've send you a Ravelry message. (You were really close, Betty...just a smidge over).


I'm very happy to have finished my Snow Valley Top. The weather here is on the warm side for an alpaca blend yarn, but it's perfect for me to wear to work in the mornings while it's still cool and be able to survive the air conditioning in my office all day. Without further delay, here it is:



More pictures, along with details on my mods and corrections to the pattern are on Ravelry.

Fair Play

My daughter realizes she made a mistake. She regrets sharing with me that her teacher often says "fair is not always equal." This phrase has become a new favorite of mine and has supplanted my previous favorite mommy phrase: "that's a privilege, not a right." Believe me, it is a handy way to settle disputes about unequal portions of dessert, discrepant chore charts, and all matter of "how come she can do that?" complaints.

There are times, though, when my daughter readily admits that fair really is not always equal. After Janet made my little one a pair of mittens, she wanted to make a pair for my other daughter as well. But keen observer that she is, Janet had noticed that the older one is sooo not into pink and has a characteristically tween aversion to wearing things meant to keep you really warm. So she came up with these (Rav link):


They were a surprise to me, too, since I thought they were socks when I originally saw them. As you can tell from the shirt my daughter's wearing, this Regia colorway really captures her current color favorites really well, and she loves them. Brilliant!

The Big Chill

Hey, remember my KSH double knit scarf? No? Don't feel bad. I barely remembered it myself. I stuck this thing in the freezer back in November because I had made a mistake on it and knew from past experience that that helps a bit.


Here we are 4 months later, and I finally took it out because I needed an easy travel project. The time spent in the cold may have made it just a little easier to frog, but mostly I think it just made the yarn smell funny!

Tuesday Tube: Blowing in the Wind

I love Merel Karhof's wind-powered knitting machines. I couldn't decide which video to share, so since they're short, I'll show you both. The first is an installation at South Kensington Station in 2008, and the 2nd was at the Royal College of Art in 2009.

Inspired By

Inspired by Serious Eats to make pie pops for a Pi Day celebration at my daughter's school:


While I'm a huge fan of sweets, I'm not a huge fan of inundating kids with sweets at school. However, this was a day in which we knew that lots of kids would be bringing in pies to share. My daughter has a severe food allergy, though, so she can't ever eat things that don't have clear ingredient listings, for fear of contamination. I didn't want her to feel left out, so I decided to send her along with something we knew for sure would be safe for her to eat. We were really busy the evening we had to make this, so I took major shortcuts here. I used refrigerated pie crusts and canned apple pie filling. All I had to do was put it together with my daughter's help. Voila! One package of pie crusts (they come 2 to a box) yielded a dozen pie pops.

Happy Pi Day! Now go do something geeky.

Inspired By

Inspired by Saltwater Kids to assemble a fort-building kit to give to a friend for her kids:


This came from a sheet set that included its own carrying bag, so I didn't even have to sew one. I did borrow another genius idea from Saltwater Kids, which is to print out your tag at a photo developing place. Yes, there is that writing they put on the back of the photo that helps identify the time, etc., but no one is going to notice because the front of the tag looks amazing. I customized her tag design with my friend's name.

Weighty Matters

I had prepared a post for today, but when I got online to publish it this morning, I saw the news coming out of Japan and wasn't really in the mood. I've decided tonight to queue up some posts since I'll be out of pocket for a little while, but I changed it up a bit. Stay tuned for a something a little extra at the end.

I have known for some time that weighing yarn is a useful way to estimate the length. Lots of people talk about it, and it was even a Car Talk Puzzler! But I'd never actually done it before because I didn't have a kitchen scale. Well, I finally got one a fewl months ago, and it's definitely been very handy.

For example, when I was finishing up my Snow Valley top, I saved the sleeves for last. I had already knit one and had to figure out if I had enough yarn left for the second sleeve. Before the scale, I would have just fretted a lot. But with the scale...



...I figured I'd be okay since my sleeve and the remaining yarn weighed exactly the same. Turns out, the scale did not lie. Whew! I was able to finish my top, but you'll have to wait for awhile before I can show you a modeled shot.

In the meantime, you might have noticed that you can't read the weight in the pictures. This is not a defect with the scale. It's because I decided to delete the reading and let you guess the number. The yarn is Alpaca Silk by Blue Sky Alpacas. Guess the weight shown on the scale (in grams), without going over, and you'll win 2 skeins of Alpaca Silk of your own (I'll give you a list of colors to choose from). If more than one person comes up with the right answer, the winner will be chosen randomly from among them. For each entrant who leaves a comment here with their answer, I'll add another $5 to my Red Cross donation. Make sure I have some way to contact you--email, Ravelry, or blog. Contest closes Friday, March 18th, at 10 PM Pacific Time.

Tuesday Tube: Bit of Biscuit

Here's a lovely Etsy portrait of knitte Lynn Garret, aka Biscuit Scout. You've probably seen photos of her large knitted aran chair slipcovers, especially if you've hung around Pinterest.

Inspired By

Inspired by The Girl Who Ate Everything, via Craft, to make green eggs.


And what would greens eggs be without green ham? These were made using marshmallow fondant because I'm not a fan of regular fondant.


We also made Cat-in-the-Hat-like white chocolate-covered pretzel sticks to round out our little Dr. Seuss celebration.

Inspired By

Inspired by a pin by Stacy KSW on Pinterest to make pancake appetizers. Pinterest traces the pin to a Flickr account, but I didn't see it there. I did see the image on an Examiner.com article that referenced Instyle Weddings. (Whew! Tracking these inspiration bibliographies is sometimes harder than I had thought!)


While these look pretty when drizzled with syrup, I left the syrup on the side so guests could decide how much they wanted. Each pancake is made with 1/2 tablespoon of batter. It sounds tedious, but actually it went really fast. I suppose if you wanted them even faster, you could use Eggo mini waffles or mini pancakes. Or, you could make a bigger pancake and use a small cookie cutter to get some cute shapes. The possibilities are endless!

Baby, Baby

I have a little project to share with you. Here's a baby blanket based on a simple garter stitch design over at the Purl Bee. The original calls for 7 different colors of yarn, but when I saw it, I immediately thought of examples of yarn blending, such as on the Traveling Scarf (Rav link) from Knitalong or the California Dreaming sweater (Rav link) from The Ohio Knitting Mills book. I've been itching to use that technique, and this was a great excuse to do so!


This is 6 stripes using a combination of 4 different colors of Cascade 220 Sport, held doubled. There are 2 additional permutations that I didn't include (white+white and white+blue) because I didn't like how those affected the transition. More details are on Ravelry.

Inspired By

Inspired by Martha Stewart to make a pink ruffled cake.

The Swiss Meringue Buttercream icing is also from Martha Stewart, but what really made this possible was the tutorial video from My Sweet and Saucy.


I etched little guidelines 1-1/2" apart onto the crumb coat layer of icing using a toothpick. This helped give me some confidence and allowed me to make my columns of ruffles a little more even. It wasn't perfect, but it was much easier than I feared. In case you're curious, I used a Wilton #103 petal tip.


The inside of the cake was inspired by Sweetapolita's neapolitan cake. My daughter doesn't like chocolate, though, so she asked for just vanilla and strawberry layers. I used Duncan Hines cake mix, and it turned out really yummy and not too cloyingly sweet.

Inspired By

Inspired by One Charming Party and an image on Etsy to make a clothespin doll cake topper for a certain little girl's very pink ballerina-themed party:

Tuesday Tube: Have a Heart

Continuing the anatomical theme from last week's Tuesday Tube...