Zero Zilch Nada None

A very rare and curious thing happened over Christmas vacation--for 4 whole days I had absolutely no works in progress. It's been several years since I could last say that I had absolutely nothing on the needles, and I must admit that there is something very special about having no current projects to burden you so that you are free to dream about all of the possibilities of your next project.

The very last project to come off the needles was the Swallowtail shawl that I was working on in November. I'm really happy with the way the shawl came out, but I'm swearing off Mohair for the rest of my life. If I find one more little green fiber in a place it shouldn't belong, I might just go crazy. Still, this shawl is doing an excellent job of keeping me warm at the moment (which makes up for having to take a lint roller to my clothes later).



With the shawl done, I'm on to dreaming up new projects and a few original designs. You saw some of my swatches in the last post and I'm looking forward to knitting these projects up and telling you about them in future posts!

Thoughts on Blogging in the New Year

I'm not good with New Year's resolutions. We're not even going to talk about how last year's negative-stash-flow resolution turned out, because the results aren't pretty. So instead of new resolutions in 2011, I plan to continue focusing on something that occupied a lot of my thought in 2010: improving this blog.

Since the New Year is a good time for reflection and I'm sure that a number of my readers also have blogs, I thought it would be worthwhile to share my thoughts on blogging and a few blogging resources with you in this post. I hope that you will find something interesting in my musing that can help you also improve your blog in 2011.

I feel that I've made a lot of improvement here at 'Briney Deep Designs' in 2010 by simply focusing on three central goals:

• Posting on a regular schedule
  
• Taking better photos
• Trying to put up more original content

(If you want evidence of the improvements, just check out the posts from my first year of blogging; they're not pretty.) I think that these three goals are pillars on which to build a good crafting blog, but there are other resources that have helped along the way, of which the following three have been most helpful:

• The Craftypod blog - I can't recommend this sight enough as the go-to place on the internet for information on improving your craft blog.
• Google Analytics - A site that allows you to track what people view on your blog, where that traffic is coming from, and more. There is lots of interesting stuff to be learned here.
• Google Reader - Every member of the blogging community should have a way to easily follow other blogs and Google Reader is great for managing and organizing a lot of RSS feeds.

All of these resources should help you focus on improving your blog by examining the content that draws people to it and understanding how your blog fits into the larger community.


My goal for 2011 is to continue strengthening the three pillars of my blog, specifically working on better photography and more original content. With the help of my new DSLR camera and some good ideas, I'm hoping that 2011 with be the best year yet for 'Briney Deep Designs'!

On Wisconsin!

We're big University of Wisconsin fans at the Briney household. It's hard not to be when we've been living in Madison for over 5 years and both have degrees from the University. And seeing as we're in the Rose Bowl and it's Christmastime, I thought my husband could use a new piece of clothing to show off his Wisconsin-love to the world.


This hat was constructed as a two-stripe helix from some leftover bulky yarn (for more on helical knitting, see this post). If the colors were not enough to shout 'On Wisconsin!', I cut out our 'motion W' logo from two pieces of felt and used embroidery floss to sew them to the hat. I really love the look of the felt on the knitted fabric.


It's really not that difficult to add a pretty little touch of felt to a knitted item. Here are a few notes on what I did:

• I cut the W freehand, though you could easily trace a shape onto the felt before cutting.
• Use a pair of sharp embroidery shears to cut with as they make clean cuts in tight spaces.
• Use pins to secure the felt to the knitted fabric as you sew.
• Work with 3 of the 6 floss threads at a time.
• Sew through both pieces of felt and the knit fabric using backstitch, working about 1/8" from the edge of the top piece.

With a little extra effort, I was able to produce something that both the husband and I love. U-Rah-Rah Wisconsin!

Season's Greetings!

I'm currently on the road, visiting family for the holidays, but I wanted to stop in here and wish everyone a very Merry Christmas!


My original plan was only to say hello and point out the pattern for this awesome little Christmas light. However, after talking on Twitter about some delicious jam doughnut mini-muffin that I baked, some of my Twitter friends asked me to share the recipe. So here is a Christmas gift for them and for you!


Jam Doughnut Mini-Muffins

Adapted from Nigella Lawson's How to be a Domestic Goddess

1/2 cup milk

7 Tbsp canola oil

1 egg

1/2 tsp vanilla extract

1 1/4 cup flour

1/3 cup sugar

2 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp salt

3 Tbsp strawberry or raspberry jam

4 Tbsp butter

1/2 cup sugar

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.

Line mini-muffin pans with paper liners.

Beat together the milk, oil, egg, and vanilla. In a separate bowl, mix together the flour, 1/3 cup sugar, baking powder, and salt. Pour wet ingredients into the dry and stir until just combined; lumps are okay.

Spoon batter into muffin liners, filling 1/3 of the way up. Add a dollop of jam (about the size of a bean) to each muffin. Fill remainder of muffin liner with batter to just below the top of the liner.

Bake for 15-17 minutes.

After removing muffins from the oven, warm up the butter and place 1/2 cup sugar into a shallow dish. Dip muffin tops into butter followed by sugar.

Makes 24 mini-muffins.

Sewing and Spinning

Do you know that throwing a 30-lb sewing machine out of the window is difficult? Not that I really tried, because even imagining it made me tired. Needless to say, my attempts to sew up little globes and start on my PhD quilt are being foiled by tension issues on my old Singer machine. At least I finally located my owner's manual, so hopefully some cleaning and readjusting will fix this problem.


Instead of reminding me of this frustration, let's talk about something that has gone well for me recently: spinning up 8 skeins of sport-weight handspun totaling over 1700 yards of yarn. This yarn is from the 1.5-lb bag of fiber my mother gifted me in May and was one of my big projects this Fall. While the resulting yarn is beautiful with enough yardage to make a sweater, I think it needs to be dyed before any knitting is done with it; a sweater in this natural color will only succeed in reminding everyone how deathly pale I really am.


So now I have to decide what color this yarn will be in addition to planning what pattern to knit. I have half a mind to design something, though we'll see if that ends up happening. In the meantime, I'm searching Ravelry for nice sport-weight sweater patterns. How I love planning sweater projects!

Yogurt 101

I'm doing a little experiment today, not only in the form of this blog post as a pattern plus recipe but also an experiment in microbiology--culturing milk to make yogurt.

It's worth making your own yogurt for two reasons: (1) it is fairly easy and inexpensive to make yogurt at home and (2) yogurt has a number of health benefits. Milk becomes yogurt by encouraging friendly microbes to multiply and breakdown lactose and other molecules in milk. To do this, you simply combine a small amount of yogurt (from the previous batch or from store-bought yogurt) with milk and heat everything up to encourage the microbes to grow.


So how does this all relate to knitting? Well, the yogurt/milk mixture needs to be kept warm for several hours during the culturing process. Wrapping a towel around the culturing container is one way to keep the liquid warm, but as a knitter I find the idea of using a jar cozy to be much more appealing. Both in terms of the cozy-factor and the cute-factor.


My Yogurt 101 lesson goes through both how to make yogurt in a standard one-quart canning jar as well as how to knit a cozy for that jar to help with the culturing process. Do try this at home!

Making the Yogurt
Using directions from The Curious Cook

Ingredients:
1 quart whole milk
2 Tbsp store-bought or homemade yogurt

Recipe:

Slowly warm milk to just below boiling (180-190 F), being careful not to scorch it. Allow the milk to cool to 115-120 F. Whisk in yogurt and pour mixture into warm one-quart canning jar. Cover jar with cozy and let sit undisturbed for about 4 hours or until the yogurt sets up. If you want your yogurt to be thicker, strain it through a cheesecloth. Store yogurt in the fridge.

Making the Jar Cozy


Requirements:
- 75 yards Cascade Eco Wool (or another bulky wool yarn)
- Set of five US size 10 [6 mm] dpns

Gauge:
15.5 stitches and 22 rows = 4 inches in stockinette

Pattern:
Cast-on 48 stitches. Divide stitches evenly over 4 needles (12 stitches per needle).
Join to work in the round, bring careful not to twist.

Work in [K1, P1] rib for 2 inches.

Work in stockinette (all knit) for 5 inches.

Decrease for bottom as follows;
Work [K to last 2 stitches on needle, K2tog] a total of 4 times.
Repeat this row 9 more times until 8 stitches remain.

Break yarn and pull end through remaining stitches.
Weave in ends, put jar into cozy and make yogurt!

A New Tool

My husband decided to buy his own Christmas present this week--a lathe. Normally, I don’t pay attention to the tools that my husband brings home, but as a knitter and a spinner the prospect of having access to a lathe is very appealing for the following reasons: drop spindles, nostepins, darning eggs, and even knitting needles.


Not that I'm going to be turning out piles of darning eggs anytime soon; I only have about 8 hours experience using a lathe. But that hasn't stopped me from ogling spindle designs in the Ravelry groups SpindleCrafters and Spindle Candy. I particularly enjoy the lovely hand-turned supported spindles by Gripping Yarn.


So if you had a lathe, what knitting-related item would you make first? I'm leaning towards a drop spindle, though a nostepin might be an easier place to start. That's assuming that I can drag my husband away from his new toy for long enough to let me make something. Maybe I'm try that after the holidays.