Cobblestone Pullover Completed

I recently finished knitting the modified Cobblestone Pullover fro my sweetie. I use Cascade Ecological Wooland overall, I was quite happy with it.  It's not super soft, but it has a manly, outdoorsy look and feel.  I like the sweater a lot and am considering knitting one for myself.  Here is the Ravelry link.  You'll nitice that the handsome devil is holding the still attached yarn in his left hand. I did cut it off and he wore it around the house.  I did not weave in the end for a good reason.

But the more I looked at it, I wanted the neckline to come up a bit higher. My fiber group met and they concurred, including the husband of the woman at whose whom we were meeting.  Genuine guy feedback.  No sense in knitting a great sweater but falling a bit short.  So last evening, I pulled it out & knitted 2 more purl bumps and am finishing the knitting.  New pictures to come...

Working in the Etsy shop, adding knitting needles, new medleys of mohair locks. Back to destashing?

The Bon Appetit 6 Hour Cake - and yes, it's that good!

In honor of my sweetheart's birthday, I baked a cake.  Not just any cake, but the Bon Appetit Almond Praline cake with Marscapone Frosting and Chocolate Bark.  I will confess up front that it was a special request and at first I thought  - "What, are you nuts!?!"  Now I like to bake, but this a bit beyond the pale.  With about 5 separate recipes to assemble and more than a few ingredients that aren't the kind of thing that usually jump into my shopping cart, it seemed that it was not the kind of thing I usually bake.  Cookies, sure.  Scones, yum!  Doctored cake mixes, of course.  But really!  What the heck - his birthday comes but once a year! 

The first component was the pralines, which were a complete failure.  So I threw them out and tried again.  Complete and total failure again.  Loud, swearing failure.  So what if I skip them? What if I just use chopped almonds and chocolate bark and skip the added sugar?  Will anyone actually notice? hmmm....

I gotta say, no one noticed.   Any 3 layer cake that looks this good and tastes this good - no one is going to notice if I leave out the pralines.  After all, there was the dense almond cake, the rich ganache filling, the mosaic of chocolate bark, and the fluffy marscapone frosting that makes any standard cream cheese frosting pale in comparison.  We had a few friends over for cake, ice cream and bubbly and my friends were properly impressed and will now be inviting me to all their birthday parties, with a cake of course.  Great for my ego, but not so much for my waistline!

btw, the Cobblestone pullover - not finished but so what. Still coming along and I'm on the upper yoke, time for the final decrease and a few short rows.  Some thinking and measuring is in order, so it was not the knitting to do last evening when I was tired and rather baked out.  Besides it's not Olympic knitting! Final pictures coming soon.

Connecting Children with Children

I am writing this from the NC Social Studies Conference in Greensboro, NC where my colleague and I presented our work teaching through the experiences of children.  We are using primary sources and children's literature to teach American history.  We collaborated to develop a number of  resources (lesson plans, primary source sets, annotated bibliography, etc) and shared them with our audience.  Want your students to learn about westward expansion, we have diaries for that!   How about child labor? Lewis Hine took lots of pictures. What was school like back in the day - check out the photos, books, etc.  The young man you see here is a great example of child labor.  But since he is selling the Chicago Defender, we want to know more about his experience in the the Great Migration, when many African American moved from the rural south to the cities of the industrial north.  We could go on for a week - that's the summer institute or just an hour like we did yesterday.  It was a good thing!

Making progress on the Cobblestone sweater.  I am about 4 rows from the 2nd decrease, though for session knitting, I brought a hat.  The sweater is just too big to lug around and the chairs are small and set together tightly.  But this means I'll get  Mike's hat knit - finally!!  I just cast on and I'm ready to go. 

Charging Along

The Modified Cobblestone is beginning to look like a sweater  At about 7 inches of ribbing and tummy (and lower back), I am knitting around and around and around.  I will be for the next several knitting-hours.  At this stage they are a lot like light-years.  Seem rather endless, but we will get there.  I think I'll mark the starting point of this evening's knitting and see what a one hour dramatic episode of Grey's Anatomy high toned public television knits up to.  An inch?  That's my guess.

Since the Classic Lines Cardi was knit on size 5 (3.75 mm) needles, these big, honkin' size nines (5.5 mm) are flying!  Love it!  I like the rich brown color too.  Looking forward to putting it all together! 

Not the labor saving device in the lower left corner.  I finally wised up and did the first 4 rows of ribbing back and forth and then and only then joined them into a ring.  Much harder to twist your stitches if you have enough to see. 

What Does this Tiny Bit of Knitting Mean?

In short, it means that I have completed 2 sweater sleeves and have started in on the waist ribbing.  A weekend at home with books to read and videos to watch means that I got a lot of knitting done.  'What,' you say.  'No Olympics?'  As I cast on 2 days early and could not justify an entire sleeve as a swatch, I am not qualified to declare this Winter Games knitting.  It would be totally amazing were I to finish the modified Cobblestone Pullover in 17 days,  but with my history, that is a rather unrealistic goal. And perhaps not as challenging as it could be.

I live a somewhat TV-deprived life.  I have a TV, in fact a small flat screen, but no cable, satellite or even much broadcast TV.  I get the local affiliates for ABC & PBS, Fox when the wind is blowing just so.  In the interest of not watching any more TV that I already do, I have decided to remain cable-free.  I was TV-free for about 3 years and I somehow survived, but I just choose what I will watch based on only a few choices and that's okay.  I prefer to get my news from NPR; I have the internet and occasionally watch a TV show via the network sites or Hulu.

I have found the Olympic site that shows me what I need.  I actually would like to watch the Olympics, but I don't want to see only US athletes and the 3 winners for the events.  I do not want to watch the 'up close and personal' stories.  And seeing the same dozen or so commercials over and over gets on my last nerve.  About 20 years ago (yikes!), I pieced a quilt while watching the Winter Games.  Loved it!  But that may have been the last time that I watched a LOT of the games.   And I must admit, I pieced most of an entire quilt top.

So, knit on, I say!   Join a team (or not).  Watch the sporting events (or not).  Set goals (or not).  Have fun!

Pushing the Envelope

Knitters know about the 'Curse of the Boyfriend Sweater.'  You knit him a sweater - he's gone!  Although the esteemed source notes that this curse is not backed by a controlled study, few myths are.  But throwing cautions to the blustering winds, I decided last birthday season that a sweater was in order.  I will not complete said sweater before the 2010 birthday season later this month, but we have a start.  The start of a sleeve that is.

Although sweaters have been known to morph as they are being creative, think 'Cobblestone.'   But with ribbing, not the seed stitch borders as the intended wearer can be something of a traditionalist.  But when the pattern was first published in Interweave Knits (Fall 2007), the comment was, 'I would wear this.'  High praise, indeed!