Joyce Makes Art

I Am Off To Renew My Car Tags

I'm off to renew my car tags this morning.

You might not think this would be a major event, but where I live, one has to go in person and the lines are four to five hours because we are currently unable to register online.  There is only so much email traffic and document review a girl can do while standing in line for that period of time, so I'm going to take along this handspun:

and turn it into these wristwarmers.

I haven't knit with handspun before, so I'm really excited about this project.

I also considered using this yarn to knit a basic hat from the Stitch 'n Bitch Book, or a Destroyed Cowl or some other version of an infinity scarf.  But I settled on the wristwarmers, because they look like something to wear on cool winter morning walks or late nights at the computer (because the Judge likes to set our thermostat to the setting that says "Pretend to be in Siberia" at night during the winter months).  I can't wait to see how this yarn swatches up.  And, I'm sure I'm going to have PLENTY of time to see that this morning.

Mermaid's Tail

I finished my Mermaid's Tail shawl (also known as the Storm Cloud Shawlette) today.  And I'm in love.

It's loveliness incarnate.  A fabulous pattern and an easy, but altogether fun knit because of all of the intentionally dropped stitches that form the elongated garter stitch.

I love its little ruffle and its graceful drape.  I think this one is going to be my constant companion!

How to Make a Birthday Cake

Although this is not a cooking, or even a baking blog, I sometimes like to dream I'm a famous kitchen blogger.  I don't seem to have gotten the Julie/Julia gene though, so I content myself with knitting.  Nonetheless, I'm going to stray into kitchen territory with this post and show you all the cake I made for my second child's 19th birthday.  He wanted a cake that was both chocolate and white (but not marble) with vanilla frosting.

He got this.

The secret to all good cakes, as I imparted to Ellie, who most decidely thought I had lost my mind, is using a recipe where you separate the eggs. 

Adding whipped egg whites at the end to a custardy batter mixture produces light moist cakes.  So I mixed up my white cake (actually a yellow cake recipe from The Joy of Cooking) and my chocolate cake (Devil's Food Cockaigne from the same book) and baked two white layers and a thick chocolate layer.  The chocolate custard that went into the batter was a crowd pleaser, with spoon tasting all around called for.

The cake layers turned out perfectly.

The only thing left was to put the layers together using Pastry Cream filling that I had made the night before and then to crumb coat the cake with this delicious Caramel Icing, which went underneath the Boiled White Frosting you can see in the picture above after Teddy blew out the candles.

A cake like this is a day-long labor of love, but oh so much fun to make!  I'm off to see if there is a slice left for a mid-afternoon snack.

 

Almost

I am almost done with my Symmetrical Braided Gauntlets.  All they need is the thumb on the right hand knit up -- you can see the sleeves for the thumb on the strand of white waste yarn -- and some end weaving and blocking.

And, I'm almost done with my Mermaid Tail, knit from the Storm Cloud Shawlette pattern.  It doesn't look like much on the needles, but I've only got four rows left before I cast off and get to see it unfurled.

It is also ALMOST Teddy's birthday.  A birthday that makes me incredibly happy and proud.  Tomorrow Teddy turns 19, an almost unimagineable joy for us.  He is still as excited about having me bake his birthday cake as he was at 8 or 9.  I have almost accepted the fact that he is all grown up.

The Best New Knitted Thing in the World

With a tip of the hat to Rachel Maddow at MSNBC, I'm introducing a new occasional feature on this Blog -- the Best New (Knitted) Thing in the World.

You know how we all stumble across things that are so fabulous that we want to share them with all of our fellow knitters?  It happens to me all the time.  From now on, when I run across them, I'm going to share them as Best New Knitted Things.

The impetus for this bold move was this yarn, which I discovered in, of course, Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

This is Lorna's Laces Shepherd Bulky, dyed specially for Serendipity Needleworks in Tuscaloosa in the "Crimson Pride" colorway.

Serendipity Needleworks survived the tornadoes that hit Alabama and decimated parts of Tuscaloosa in April, and it's a good thing. They are a gem of a knitting store with an incredibly nice staff.  And yarn that practically screams "Roll Tide Roll" at you.  Crimson Pride.  Really.  Best New Knitted Thing in the World!

 

Recent Dyeing

I've done some dyeing over the last few weeks and thought I would give you all a peek.

This is a wonderful Superwash Merino/Mulberry Silk blend from a new undyed yarn supplier (or rather, new to me) called Polika.  I like this yarn a lot; not as much as Moth & Goat which is a Cashmere/Silk blend at about the same weight, but this is a slightly more economical version that is still very pretty.

The colorway, Perseid, is actually the result of some experimenting with dyeing and overdyeing that gave me results I was looking for with some more somber colorways.  This picture is a lot brighter than the actual dyeing, but the picture below, which is Perseid on Blue Faced Leicester, is a bit truer.

I've also been experimenting with a yarn that has a bit of silver sparkle in it -- I'm tentatively calling this Silver Sock, but if you have any ideas, I would love to hear them.  Several skeins of this yarn have gone out to friends for their opinion and I'm searching for a project to devote my skeins to.

I've got two skeins in the colorway on the bottom, Wendy.  Although socks seem like the right choice for a yarn with so many colors in it, I'm also going to look around for some other ideas since I've got two full skeins.

Ollie's Sweater Is Finished

This is Ollie, wearing Ollie's Ragman Sweater.  As you can see, he is pretty pleased about it.

I am too.  It's the first time I've set aside some Elliebelly Crayon for myself, and the bulky yarn, Talia Merino, made it a quick knit.  It would have been quicker if I hadn't had to stop to dye trim after running out of yarn, but a girl can't be too demanding, right?

This is the most accurate picture I have of the colorway.

And, the buttons are very sweet.

This pattern gets a high recommendation from me -- it's simple but not boring and the result is an eminently wearable sweater; a perfect knit for a perfect little boy.  This officially concludes my project for the Elliebelly Knit Along!

This Week's Knitting

I always seem to wrap up my knitting for the weekend at some point on Sunday.  This week has been a busy one, and I don't have a lot of progress to report.  But I do have this:

I wove in what seemed like a million ends (I switched skeins every couple of inches on both the body and the sleeves) and Ollie's Crayon Ragman Cardigan is now happily blocking in the first cool fall day we've seen.

In case you can't tell, it's very colorful.

That's Elliebelly's Crayon colorway, and I'm more than pleased with how it knit up for this sweater.

I'm continuing to make progress on my Storm Cloud Shawlette, which I'm calling Mermaid's Tail, since a good friend said that's exactly what it looks like.  It's still an amorphous blob on the emails, but when you gently straighten it out you get some sense of how it will fan out after blocking.  I'm looking forward to wearing this one -- it's all mine, baby.

I've acknowledged before that I have a bit of an ADHD tendency as a knitter.  It's really more of a "so many patterns, so little time" syndrome, and as I do tend to finish most of them sooner or later, I don't worry about it much.  So, when I got an email Friday night from Knit Purl with a great looking ribbed scarf knit in Noro yarn, I immediately tossed my stash and started knitting.  I couldn't wait.  I'm knitting it as a K3P3 rib (with three knit stitches on each outer edge) and because of its simplicity, it is my "car knitting" project-I like to have something on hand for carpool lines and traffic jams.

I already know two things about this scarf: (1) I am deathly allergic to mohair, and this yarn has a small mohair content.  It makes me sneeze and make my nose and eyes itch.  I nonetheless like this yarn enough that I will finish this scarf despite all of that.  (2) Two skeins is not enough yarn to knit this scarf as long as I would like, so I am going to have to start hunting a third skein.  If anyone happens to have  Noro Silk Garden in colorway 276, Dye lot A, please give me a shout!