Getting Knitfaced

Cup Cozy

I bought to-go cups at Sam's club to take my coffee to work in, but it's been burning my fingers between the parking lot and my office. Plus I needed some knitting instant gratification, so I made a cup cozy this afternoon.

I realized yesterday that it had been a while since I had posted anything here. There are multiple reasons for that. First my end of the semester, trying to get papers wrapped up craziness has transitioned directly into studying for comprehensive exams craziness. Second, I won't be making any more beer until I dispose of the majority of beer I have already made. Because of the end of the semester, there have been a lot of functions that involve drinking beer at the bar, which has cut into the consumption of my homebrew dramatically. I have managed to pawn some off onto the other PhD students and my husband's co-workers. In fact, a week ago Tuesday I was out in the partking lot behind my academic building at 5 pm handing out beer from the trunk of my car. That's right folks, I'm nothing if not classy. Finally, I have embarked upon two never ending knitting projects.

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The first is the Lady Eleanor shawl. This one has actually been moving along at a relatively fast pace. In fact, I was pretty excited last weekend because I was within 4 tiers of the pattern specifications. I then tried to wrap it around me and realized that it's still too short. I should have expected this since I'm using a lighter weight yarn than the pattern calls for, but I miss the obvious sometimes. Anyway, I have plenty of yarn to keep going and make it long enough, but the disappointment of not being almost done with it was pretty crushing. The second project is a Hokie scarf for my daughter using the 1st/2nd year Harry Potter scarf pattern.

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I never paid much attention to the scarves in the movies, but these things are basically a long tube of stockinette stitch. In fact, it's 361 rounds of it if I make it to pattern specifications and I'm making the small size. Now to be quite honest, I sort of like stockinette stitch in the round. I know some people find it terribly boring, but I find it sort of soothing. I would like it better if I could knit this on circulars rather than double points, but it's still not too bad. The big issue with this project is that it's going to be either a birthday or Christmas gift for Mara, so I can only work on it when she's not around, which generally means that I can only work on it between 9 pm when she goes to bed and whatever time I go to bed. The time restrictions have really slowed down my progress. 

Hopefully I'll finish one of these projects up soon because I've been itching to move on to something else. If not, I may take a break and knit a couple coffee cup cozies one evening just so I can enjoy the sense of accomplishment.

I had just decided to put a hold on yarn buying until next fall when I saw a WSJ article about this little yarn csa called Martha's Vineyard Fiber Farm. How cool is that? I'm weak. I bought a fall share. I wish there was more information how the average amount and type of yarn that you got with your share, but I figured it was worth trying it out. I'll report back when I get my share next fall. 

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I have a handful of the honey oatmeal stouts left from this winter. We were eating smores the other night, and I thought a stout sounded good with them, so I cracked one open. This is another example of my carbonation woes. While my nut brown ale ranges from being undercarbonated to well carbonated, this batch ranged from being well carbonated to being way overcarbonated. I have no idea.

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On the recommendation of my friend Salt, I repurposed the blue and green Malabrigo from the Holding Hands, Feeding Ducks scarf that I wasn't happy with for a One Row Scarf, and I have to say it was a very good move. It's actually a very normal length scarf, but when I told my daughter I was making a One Row Scarf she said "That will be a very short scarf if it's only one row".

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The colors in the Malabrigo made a very nice diamond pattern except for right at one end where it sort of pooled together in one spot.

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This pattern is great. It's simple and adds some visual interest to the yarn without being too busy or complicated. Following Salt's lead, I cast on 34 stitches and knit on size 10 needles. I used just shy of 2 skeins of Lime-Blue Malabrigo worsted weight. I wasn't sure what I was going to do with this scarf when I started knitting it, but I had one man in the family that I hadn't decided on a scarf pattern for Christmas yet, and decided this would be a great scarf for him. I didn't feel like modeling the scarf myself, and I didn't figure Dave would go for modeling it for me, so I got Mr. Dog to do it.

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I love this scarf. It's so simple and so soft and squishy. Even when I started this scarf, I still thought I would go back to the Holding Hands, Feeding Ducks scarf for my Malabrigo Oro Y Vino yarn, but I've been won over by this pattern and will be making a One Row Scarf with it instead.   

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My knitting friend is moving away at the end of July and taking her swift and ball winder with her, so I gave in and bought my own a few weeks ago when JoAnn's had them on sale. I think this might be a sign that I'm hopelessly addicted to the knitting thing.

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This is a nut brown ale (hence the NBA cap mark) that I brewed during March, so I have unofficially dubbed this one my basketball beer. I probably would not have chosen a nut brown ale, but I was given the kit as a christmas gift, so it was basically free beer, and you can't beat that. The kit was the Smooth Nut Brown extract kit from Midwestern Brewing Supply. The kit I received had the Munton's dry ale yeast in it, which I ended up using to save my Vienna Lager, so I upgraded to a vial of White Labs British Ale Yeast.

The actual brew day on this beer was probably the smoothest one I've had. It was a beautiful day and we had no problems at all. I started out with just over 6 gallons in the brew pot and ended up with just at 5 gallons in the fermenter. Original gravity was 1.041. We pitched the yeast at 70 degrees. I made a yeast starter this time and fermentation took off pretty quickly. I must have had some sort of small leak around the air lock somewhere because I could never see any bubbles in the airlock, but I could see the yeast activity on top of the wort, so I knew it was fermenting. It fermented at about 68 degrees for 14 days and finished up with final gravity of 1.015.

If the brew day on this one went extra smooth, bottling day was extra rough. I was extra stressed out with school and my in-laws were coming for a long weekend visit, so I had to get it bottled before they got here. I kept forgetting to do things and then having to back track. It was sort of a mess. I primed this one with the priming sugar that came in the kit.

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I like this beer more than I expected to. It's really not that different from the Vienna lager ale that I made last. They both used the more British and German style hops and I used a British style yeast in both of them. This one is maltier though, and it doesn't have the same kick of bitterness at the end that the Vienna has. One thing that I have noticed is that the priming is real uneven in this one. Some bottles are nicely carbonated and some aren't carbonated enough. The ones that are on the flat side are also a little too sweet. I'm assuming that's due to the fact that there's more priming sugar left in those bottles.

I've had the uneven priming problem before and I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong. I boil the sugar or malt in a couple of cups of water for about 15 minutes and let it cool. Then as I'm siphoning the beer into the bottling bucket, I slowely pour the cooled syrup into the bottling bucket. After the beer is completely siphoned, I stir it gently with a sanitized spoon. Some day I will again live in a real house instead of a townhouse and I will have a basement with a second refrigerator and a couple of cornelius kegs so that I don't have to mess around with this priming and bottling stuff.

Now that the weather is starting to warm up, I'm really feeling the itch to do something like a hefewiezen. Right now though my house literally resembles that old song... 100 Bottles of Beer on the Wall, and all of my bottles are filled, so I need to empty some bottles before I can brew again.

Okay, so this is actually called the drop stitch scarf, but I kept calling it the drop knit scarf. I wanted a scarf to give as a gift to a friend who lives in a warmer climate than me, so I needed it to be less about being warm and more about being pretty. I thought this pattern would do the trick, but it took me forever to find a yarn that I liked for it. When I spotted the Manos Del Uruguay Silk Blend in colorway 3109 at my local yarn store, I knew it was the perfect yarn for this scarf.

The pattern took a little getting used, but was very forgiving. I tend to be a pretty tight knitter and since I wanted this scarf to be really loose and lightweight I knitted with the dk weight yarn on size 8 needles. Between the needles that were too large for the yarn and all of the dropped stitches, the knitting was pretty loosey goosey. I kept picking up and dropping stitches that I wasn't supposed to. I would just correct somehow and move and on and you could never tell. I was going to do a full two skeins of yarn, but stopped just shy of that. I'm glad too because this I swear it doubled in length with blocking.

I'm very pleased with this project. And of course I had to take a picture of it in my traditional camera in front of the mirror, I just finished another scarf pose.

So now that I've started down this road of posting regularly again, I've started to feel obligated to post something. Also, the blog has been a bit knitting heavy of late. I had planned on rectifying that by posting about my Nut Brown Ale today, but I sampled one last night and it's still not carbonated yet. Why I feel like the beer has to completely ready to go before I post about it, I have no idea, but I do. I started two new knitting projects late last week, both of which I'm so far very happy with, but real life and *gasp* school work got in the way this weekend and I didn't make very much progress on them. The one thing I did manage to do this weekend is catch up on some of the podcasts that I like to listen to, so I thought I would tell you about the two beer podcasts that I really enjoy.

When I first discovered podcasts mid-summer last year (yeah, I know I was a little behind the times on that one), I subscribed to any beer podcast I could find. I quickly found that a lot of them were not that great. Many of them were about 10 minutes of good information and about 50 - 80 minutes listening to the hosts sit around bullshitting. As a parent and a graduate student, I just don't have time for that. Two really stood out from the crowd and they are the only ones that I still listen to these days.

The first one is Basic Brewing Radio. As the tagline says this one is "all about homebrewing". Basic Brewing Radio is hosted by a guy by the name of James Spencer out of Northwest Arkansas. It's broadcast weekly and the general format followed is to read and address email he has received and then conduct an interview with an expert on some homebrewing topic. A lot of the times the topics get way more advanced than I ever plan on being with my homebrewing, but even as a simple extract brewer, I have learned tons from listenting to this podcast. If you are interested in homebrewing, I highly recommend checking out the archives of this show.

The second one is Your Next Beer. The description of this one on itunes goes something a like two college friends talk to you about beer. I braced myself for it to be two guys talking about the frat party they went to last night, how crazy it got, and all of "The Beast" that they drank while there. I was pleasantly suprised. The two guys, Jim and Jake are their names, who host this podcast, are friends from college, not friends still in college, which is an important distinction for me. This podcast runs about 10 - 15 minutes an episode. They start off with beer news, then they address the beer of the week, first giving a little history about the brewery and then talking about how the beer tastes. The beers are covered in series, so they'll spend several weeks talking about IPA's, then several weeks talking about Pale Ales, etc, etc. It's designed to be an introduction for people to new styles of beer and is pretty basic, but I still enjoy it. I wish it would have been around a couple of years earlier when I first got really interested in trying new styles of beer. As it is, it has exposed me to some breweries I probably wouldn't be aware of otherwise, and I really enjoy the background information about the different breweries. If you are interested in this one, the episodes are short, so it's easy to catch up if you don't want to jump in the middle. Even now, I generally let 3-4 of these build-up on my ipod and then listen to them all in one sitting.

Happy Listening!

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Unfortunately, this is not a post about the lovely spring weather. It is instead about failed knitting projects. I started these two scarves on Sunday, worked on them all week, and then gave up on them today.

The black one was the Men's Cashmere Scarf from Last Minuted Knitted Gifts. Of course, I wasn't using cashmere for it. Instead I was using Cascade 128 Chunky Tweed. I liked this pattern and it was certainly easy to knit if a little bit boring, but it curled like mad.

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I checked on Ravelry to see if other people had had the same issue with the scarf and they had. Some said they were able to block it enough to get it to stop and others weren't so lucky. I was making it for gift, so I didn't want to chance it. I frogged it earlier tonight. I'll probably make a seed stitch scarf out of this yarn instead.

The other scarf is the Holding Hands, Feeding Ducks scarf. I'm knitting it with Malabrigo Worsted in the Lime-Blue colorway. I had a horrible time getting this one started. At the wider widths the colors pooled in a way that I didn't like at all, but when I got the scarf narrow enough for the colors to vary the way I wanted them to, the scarf was way too narrow. This stitch pattern is hell on the hands. The first couple of nights I worked on it, I went to bed with a heating pad wrapped around my right hand. It's worth it though. I love the stitch pattern. I also really like the yarn. The Malibrigo is so soft and wonderful, although now that I'm kntting with it, I'm not sure I love the Lime-Blue colorway. I don't love the stitch

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 pattern with this yarn. And I really don't love the narrow width. I had planned on giving it to my sister-in-law, but she is very tall and fairly large framed so I figured the narrow little scarf would look wimpy on her. At the same time, I don't know who else I would give it to and I don't think I would wear it myself. I don't know. I'm not ready to frog it, but it's definitely going into hibernation for a while.

I've ordered some Malabrigo Worsted in the Oro Y Vino pattern (orange and maroon, otherwise known as Hokie colors) which was backordered. If I ever get it, I might frog the Lime-Blue and restart the scarf for me in the Oro Y Vino. We'll see.