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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
