Jaywalker #1 is done!

Yippee, 1 down, 1 to go. I made sure to take really clear notes so the second one turns out perfect. The toe is a little tight, I'm going to try blocking it first and may end up ripping back and adding a few rows. I'm not sure yet. But I looove them. This is such a fun pattern!

I have created a salsa I could eat with a spoon...

And yes, the girl who hates tomatoes really did type that! This stuff is so yummy. Even fresh out of the food processor, it's amazing. I think I've found tomato love...

Roasted Salsa

Ingredients:

• 2 lbs tomatoes - I used fresh early girl and yellow plum from the garden, about 6 early girls and a handful or two of the plums. I'm guessing it's around 2 lbs.
• 4 cloves garlic, skin on
• 1 medium sweet onion, roughly chopped
  
• 5 chipotle chilies in sauce - adjust up or down for your own heat level
• juice of 2 limes - add another if your limes are small, hard, or you really like lime
• Salt to taste
• Cilantro to taste - I didn't have any, so mine is without, but it would be great with

Directions:

1. Under a high broiler, broil the tomatoes and garlic in a lightly oiled glass pan. This took about 20 minutes in my oven, just broil until the skin is turning dark and crispy.
2. In a food processor, combine the chilies, lime juice, onion, and roasted veggies. Take off the garlic skins before adding. I also squeezed out about half of the seeds & juice in my tomatoes. It still made a pretty loose salsa, so if you like chunkier, squeeze out even more juice. Pulse to combine. If adding cilantro, add after the tomatoes and onions start to break down. Taste & add salt accordingly. Store bought tomatoes might also need some sugar added, though the broiling should bring out the natural sugars quite nicely.
3. Let cool and enjoy! You can use this hot, but the cooling time will bring the flavors together nicely.
   

I got a package, I got a package!

Thank you, Vicious Circle! Thank you! It is just amazing... So much fun baking things to play with. Tea, spices, specialty chocolates, yarn, and cooking gadgets!
So Cute! Such Cute little cutters!
And a tea bee infuser! I've never seen anything this fun for tea!
And yummy, yummy alpaca is luscious colors.
You do know my weaknesses, Circle. Food, tea, yarn. This package was just intoxicating. I can't stop sticking my nose into the different spices. Thank you again!

FO: Tofutsies Socks

Basic Toe-Up socks, a blend of a few different patterns that I use, with toe-up sock flap, size US1 needles. I love this yarn! Love it! It works up so light and soft. It doesn't stretch too much and the cast on is a little splitty. But once past the first row or two, it is so nice to work with. And it comes in such fun colors! I love it so much that I started a pair of Jaywalkers out of another color:

The green is pooling a lot, not sure why. None of the other colors are pooling, but the green is. I've figured out that if I play with my gauge a little (one or two tight rows, followed by a few looser rows) helps to cut down on the pooling. Because I have midget feet, I'm sizing them down. I cast on 68 and took 2 stitches out of each repeat. I'm still not sure they'll be tight enough around the foot, but I can tighten them up a little in the gusset if that becomes a problem.

It Rained!

Or, I should say, It's Raining! We haven't had rain in MONTHS. But it's raining today. And it's only 59 degrees outside. I feel right at home. It's cold, gray, and wet. At least this will make me do inside work. I have about a metric ton of laundry to do and about 3 hours of ironing to do. I have 2 pairs of pants to shorten and Steven is bugging me to finally finish seaming the last curtain for our bedroom. Yet all I want to do is sit around and knit and wear warm clothes. Because it's raining for the first time in MONTHS (literally, I'm not kidding here. It was May or June the last time I saw it rain). Oh yes, and I have to go grocery shopping. Yuck.

I did finish My So Called Scarf though. I only used one ball and I'll turn the second one into a hat, in all likelihood. Or maybe a second scarf for a Christmas present. Or maybe I'll incorporate it into a felted bag. We'll see. But I liked the length on it with one ball. So it needs to be blocked and then photoed. I'll try to get you pictures later this week.

Guess what I did this weekend?

We went camping! Here:
It was so pretty! There had been bear sightings though, so I got all freaked out and didn't sleep well. But overall, it was a blast. We got one of the last sites in the campground and set up our tent for the very first time since we got it. It was a wedding present - so 2.5 years later we finally got to use it! We had a great time.



I still haven't taken knitting pictures. I love how the ballet tank turned out. Coachella, I'm not so fond of. I'm not sure what happened with my gauge, but she's not fitting. I can't seem to get the fabric to collapse down and relax like it did in my swatch. I am going to do a last ditch attempt to fix it by tossing it in the machine, but then it'll be sent to my ridiculously skinny relatives in Cali if it still doesn't fit.

I have started the Airy blah blah wrap sweater from Fitted Knits. (I don't remember the whole name, it's very long). I'm doing it out of the Habu lace weight that I hand-dyed a while ago. The colors are a little too pastel for me, so I'll be over dying it when it's done. I'm loving it so far though. I started it on Friday and I'm almost through the body already. It's a great, fast, knit. I'm making a few mods on it so I'll write those up when I post it.

Oh yes, the class. It went ok. 3 girls and 1 boy showed up. They were all 8-9 and LOUD. The boy was very very loud. The boy and one girl caught on quite quickly. The other two are struggling a lot and didn't want to be shown the correct way to do things. So we'll see how they end up doing. They were utterly exhausting and tomorrow I am teaching from noon straight through to 3. One adult intermediate followed by the kids. And then Thursday is the kids again. And Friday is the day that all the classes are done. Freedom.
No big plans for the upcoming weekend, just relaxing, cleaning, and cooking. Joy.

It's been a bad morning...

But it didn't start out that way. I woke up early, and well rested. Ate breakfast, took a landscape design test, played with the dog, made a dent in the mess on my desk, put together my next downstream SP package, re-sized and uploaded a bunch of pictures (for a post to come sometime soon about this weekend). I was being productive.
Then I got in my car. And took nearly 5 minutes to turn out onto the main road to work. And got stuck behind someone going 25 in a 35 with no passing zone. And almost got hit by speeding cars on 3 our of the 4 crosswalks I take during my 4 block walk to work, even though I HAD THE RIGHT OF WAY. And learned that I have to teach 5 little girls how to knit because the normal teacher is terribly sick. And I'm hungry. And I'm cramping. And I just want to go back to bed and start this day over. I don't like teaching kids classes of more than 2 or 3. It's exhausting and overwhelming. They are fun and sweet - most of the time - but it wears me out. And I'll be teaching back to back and kind of overlapping classes tomorrow. I can't wait for this week to be over. Ugh. Ugh. Ugh.

Must go work now. Wish me luck...

I got new Shooooooes!

Aren't they pretty? I used some of my birthday money to get these for myself. And they just got here yesterday. I love them, so far. I wore them all evening yesterday (except for playing with the dog) and I put them on first thing this morning. They are the Pirouette 2 by Earth Shoes. They have this fancy insole that shapes itself to your foot to provide maximum support. They are just yummy. I got them from Planet Shoes, who had fantastic service and free shipping! Yippee! They will be great for showing off knit socks this fall. For now, they are great without socks.

August 7, 2007 Project list!

1. Oasis Tank - based off of the Ballet Tank from MagKnits, Done! Blocking tonight, pictures later this week.
2. Mountain Colors Socks - no new progress to report
3. Tofutsies Socks - #2 ready to turn heel.
4. MountainColors Jacket - No new progress.
5. Coachella: Done! Blocking tonight, pictures later this week.

6. My So Called Scarf: Nearly one skein in. So almost half done. Such a fun project!

So what is that? Only 3 or 4 real projects on the needles plus one or two examples for work? That's nothing! Apparently I need to get started on Christmas knitting. Boo.

(See that space up there between 5 and 6? Yeah... Blogger and I are having issues. Pretend it's not there.)

What I did on my summer vacation...

It obviously wasn't much knitting! This is "My So Called Scarf" done in Manos Del Uruguay, color #109 I believe. The tags are around here somewhere but I can't find them at the moment. I bought the yarn in a fantastic little shop called Nestuca Bay Yarns. I had shopped there when it was Dharma Yarns, but they never had a very good selection. But the new owner has really upgraded the selection. There's so much more than previously. And I had my first run-in with Manos. I stood in front of the display in utter bliss. It took me nearly 20 minutes to pick a color - there was just too too much to choose from. I also picked up a little something for my downline SP9 while there!

After the yarn store, I met up with my aunt and cousin at the Oregon Coast Aquarium. I hadn't been in at least a year and it had been much longer for them. We had so much fun! It's always been one of my favorite aquariums. I also picked up a few things for my pal here. There are lots of pictures of OCA on my flickr page (Click the scarf picture to go there). I also got to meet a fellow knittyhead while down south. I took a brief detour down to her sweet shop (SR Fudge & Stuff) and picked up some AMAZING brownies. They were so very good.

We celebrated my birthday at least 3 times, with two different cakes. I got sunburned. The beach was hot and muggy on Saturday, which was so strange. It was always so cold when I lived there! We drove back, stopping at Woodland Woolworks - where I spent all together too much money (fiber pictures will be up later this week). We also stopped at Multnomah Falls on the way back.

All in all, it was a fantastic trip. Coming back to reality has really sucked. It's the first time that I've ever wished that I could stay longer. Normally I'm drained and sick of the coast by the second day, but this trip went so very well that I wanted to stay longer.

But it had to come to an end, so I'm back here in the desert wondering when we'll be able to move. We looked at an area to move to on our way back up here. This next year may be really interesting... We keep saying we're going to move, but it might actually happen this time. I don't think I can spend another summer here. It's too bloody hot.

Yummy Dinner :D

No pictures, but just had to share. While we were on the coast, we didn't get a chance to have any chowder. Steven doesn't like clams and the like, so he hasn't even tried clam chowder (in spite of growing up just minutes from Mo's!) and I always, always get sand in my mouth when eating clam chowder, so we both avoided it this trip. But watching my family eat it and listening to them talk about eating it made me crave a really good seafood chowder, sand free! I don't normally cook any meat at all in our house, not even seafood. But I do occasionally make an exception for really good fish. We recently, within the last year, got a wonderful fishmonger in town, one who flies in fish from all over and it's all super fresh. Today he had some wild Coho Salmon, never frozen. It looked perfect. So I just had to indulge my craving for a wonderful seafood chowder. Here's what I came up with!

Salmon Chowder

Ingredients:

• 1 lb, give or take, of very fresh fish, we used Coho Salmon, cubed
  
• 3-4 Large potatoes, cubed
• 2 Medium Carrots, diced
  
• 1 Large sweet onion, diced
  
• 2-3 Stalks Celery, diced
• 1 box (32 oz) stock, I used chicken
• 1 Pint Half & Half, Whipping Cream, or whole milk
• 3 Bay Leaves
• 1/4 tsp Dill (add more if you like dill, I don't really)
• 1/2 tsp cayenne pepper or smoked paprika, depending on your heat preference
  
• 1 tsp Seasoned Salt
• 1 Can Creamed Corn (use fresh, frozen or canned corn if you don't want it as sweet)

Directions:

1. After dicing all the ingredients, saute the onions in butter or olive oil until translucent. Add the vegetables, spices, and chicken stock. Bring to a boil over medium heat. Reduce heat to low and simmer until potatoes are soft. Remove the bay leaves at this point.
   
2. If you like really thick chowder, lightly puree the soup at this point with a hand blender. Leave some chunks, just break up the potatoes enough to thicken the soup.
3. Keep the chowder at a simmer and add the fish. Simmer until the fish flakes easily.
4. Add the dairy and the corn. Simmer until heated through.
5. Serve with warm, crusty bread or in a bread bowl.
   

I'm still alive...

I had a grand trip. Back to reality now. Vacation photos up on Flickr. I'll make a real update as soon as I get some fiber pictures. Did a lot of yarn shopping. Spent way too much money. Had a blast. Best trip to the coast that we've had.