Mostly knitting, most of the time, Ivete’s knit blog

Here’s my favorite of Anne, dancing like crazy as usual:

The whole Seattle group is here, if you’re interested. There are 3 sets: Wedding, Aquarium, and Market.

Man I love my new camera.

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Pike Place Market, my favorite thing in Seattle.

My best friend Anne got married on Saturday in Seattle, so we spent the weekend there, returning yesterday morning on the redeye (remind me next time that a redeye from the West Coast does not equal enough sleeping time to make it reasonable to go straight from the airport to work). I haven’t uploaded all the photos yet, but figured this post needed SOMETHING visual to show you where we were.

Neither Adam nor I had ever been to Seattle before, so I was really looking forward to this wedding for more than just the event itself. We wandered around Pike Place market a LOT, and I often thought to myself that I’d love to live within walking distance to it . . . until we wandered a few blocks away from it and found ourselves in a none-too-nice-neighborhood. It was strange, there were nice hotels next to total dives, in front of which plenty of scary-looking people were hanging out. Coming from NYC, you’d think I wouldn’t even notice scary people on the sidewalk, but they looked different in Seattle than they do here. Or maybe I just wasn’t expecting to see that at all given the beautiful surroundings . . .

Anyway. The market was full of gorgeous fruits, veggies, crafts, you name it. We had awesome clam chowder from 2 different vendors, and I bought some spices to bring home (gotta add to my new kitchen!). I also checked out a lot of the prices and it seemed to me that buying stuff at Pike Place, even the fancy organic stuff, still costs less than going to a regular supermarket in NYC. The most egregious example was chanterelle mushrooms — I saw them in the market for $10/lb and almost fainted. I seriously considered buying 10 pounds to bring home and resell! There’s really hard to find in the city, and I’ve never seen them for less than $40/lb . . . and just yesterday I spotted them at Dean and Deluca (granted, an expesive place) for $45/lb. When I pointed it out to Adam he couldn’t believe any mushrooms could cost that much!

Although I just checked the price of saffron at Fresh Direct and it seems that I paid too much at MarketSpice . . . oh well, it’s a souvenir!

I’ll link to pictures once they’re all up. There are, like, 40 just of the otters at the Seattle Aquarium . . .

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As I mentioned before, our old apartment’s “kitchen” left plenty to be desired (namely room). The new apartment has a nice-sized kitchen with plenty of cabinets and counter space . . . which means I get to cook! I made pot roast with mushrooms and potatoes for dinner on Sunday night, along with strawberry sorbet and basic Italian bread. It was so good! I didn’t take any pictures though, sorry. Playing with all the new kitchen stuff we got as wedding gifts has really been fun so far, I used the new stand mixer and its ice cream attachment for the first time and was really surprised how easy it was! Kind of like the first time I tried baking bread and thought, “This is it? Really!?!?” The sorbet didn’t set well but it tasted fantastic, which to me is definitely more important than texture. Next time I’ll use more fruit with the same amount of sugar/water.

Then yesterday my big baking supplies order arrived from King Arthur and I just had to make something.

These cookies came from the Chocolate Espresso Cookies recipe on King Arthur’s site. I substituted regular semi-sweet chips for the chips they called for because I didn’t have any fancy ones on hand, but the cookies came out very well! They’re not too sweet and everyone at work loved them. The recipe says it makes 4 dozen cookies, but I made extra-large ones and got 2 dozen out of it.

I haven’t made cookies from scratch since I was a kid baking in my grandmother’s kitchen, and I was again surprised at how little work it actually took. Besides collecting the ingredients and washing the dishes, I really don’t think baking these from scratch took that much more effort than using a boxed mix, from start to finish I spent only about 30 minutes making these! Makes me wonder what other impressive things I can make without actually trying too hard . . .

BTW, best tip I’ve gotten so far on this baking thing: Parchment paper! Absolutely no cleaning of the cookie sheet or loaf pan, and no scraping anything off of anything! The King Arthur page says to just keep reusing it until it falls apart, which never occurred to me before but is brilliant and makes this barely an added expense.

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(links to Shopbop where the image is from)

Another designer piece to copy? (and grey again, maybe that’s the trend I’m really drawn to . . . ) This scarf has pockets on the ends, which is nothing new to us knitters, and a hood in the middle, which has also been done but is far from commonplace — and I’ve never seen a knitting pattern for one that I actually wanted to make. Considering I’m knitting my 4th cowl right now, I guess I have winter accessories on the brain!

I think what makes this hooded scarf particularly effective is how thin the material is and how oversized the proportions are (it’s 10″ wide x 8′ long).

What say you?

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The apartment’s coming right along — our couch was delivered today and the cable and internet were hooked up yesterday. The TV/internet is especially good news, because a few days without either led to a lot of voyeuristic behavior I didn’t know I had in me . . . although it started innocently enough when we discovered we could clearly see our neighbor’s giant flat panel TV across the way, it quickly deteriorated into trying to figure out if he was wearing any pants as he did the dishes . . . see for yourself:

Hum, I just noticed you can see a second TV at the bottom of this shot, too! But those people have blinds, the shirtless guy doesn’t have anything up in his windows! If you’re curious it did turn out he was wearing pants, by the way.

Anyway. With hopes of getting everything unpacked, I spent a few hours last night setting up my desk and trying to put the yarn away. Trying being the operative word. This is what I have so far as my office/yarn area in a corner of our bedroom:

What you can’t see in this shot is the 2 giant bins full of yarn that are on the floor with nowhere to go, and the pile of extra yarn that didn’t fit into these cubes or the bins. I guess I need to knit faster.

Since I had to decide where to put each thing, I decided to think it through and put things in logical places; the summer yarn, which I know I won’t be touching until next year, went into the extra bins. The almost-done projects went into the tops of the cubes, with not-as-done ones lower down and not-yet-started-ones at the bottom. I figure if I can see this stuff more easily, I might just work on it! Which would definitely be a step in the right direction . . .

While watching Project Runway last night I finished a super-boring scarf in 1×1 rib for Adam, to replace an identical one that has angora in it that he wears even though it sheds all over him. He seemed really happy with it when I handed it to him, we’ll see whether that translates into submitting to an FO shot wearing it (I really doubt it)! I am also almost finished with the 2nd cowl, and would have been done already had I not bought a book that I then couldn’t put down . . . I’m aiming to finish it tonight.

Which reminds me that I owe you guys a picture and pattern for the feather and fan cowl. I will try to get that up this weekend, sorry for the delay! Who knows, maybe I’ll even do the same for the second cowl . . .

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Looks like there is going to be tons of knitwear in the stores this fall! I just saw this awesome dress from Marc Jacobs:

Doesn’t this look like the perfect fall dress? I have some very thin cashmere in the stash that might just be perfect . . .

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The move’s done!

We’re in our new place, the old place has been cleared out, swept clean, and the keys were handed over to the new tenants on Sunday (poor, stupid students who accepted an apartment that hadn’t been painted or updated in any way, I felt like shaking some sense into them but just wanted to get the hell out of there!). Our furniture is all here and mostly all set up, the new bed was delivered today (yay for a mattress  without a giant person-sized dent in it!), the new couch is coming Thursday, Ikea storage stuff next Tuesday . . . we’re almost all set up. We even installed blinds in the bedroom already (had to, it is damn bright on the 10th floor! yay!), but the living room curtains haven’t gone up yet, hopefully we’ll do that this weekend.

There are still boxes and boxes of things lying around, mostly books (who knew I had so many books? Adam’s the aspiring writer, yet I easily have 5x as many books as he does (and only half of those are knitting books)), we have no cable or internet access yet (I’m stealing a neighbor’s wireless right now), but the kitchen is almost completely set up. So much so that we went to Fairway and stocked up (they deliver for only $8, I wish I had known that 2 years ago!!) and I made the new place’s first food:

Roasted Tomatoes!

I’ve been wanting to make these ever since I saw the post about them on Smitten Kitchen, and I knew that my new apartment’s full-size oven (as opposed to the toy-sized one in the old place) was just begging to be broken in! They came out so good I couldn’t help but eat a bunch right out of the baking sheet, and will definitely be using them in some pasta dishes this week!

Here’s a closeup:

Sigh. I love my new camera.

The new apartment’s not half bad, either.

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According to our moving plan, last night was the time to pack up all my yarn into garbage bags and take it to the new place. I rationalized that the yarn is so bulky yet so light-weight that it would be silly to have the movers take it, so decided to move it myself beforehand. I estimated I would have about 6 garbage bags full of yarn once I condensed it all . . . yeah, try 9 bags. Heavy, overly-full, large size garbage bags.

There was an entire garbage bag full of just sock yarn.

And one of odds and ends.

The moment of truth last night went something like this: Hi, I’m Ivete, and I buy too much yarn.

So I’m declaring a moratorium on yarn buying until the new year. Four months seems like a completely-doable and yet slightly scary length of time to commit to, yet completely appropriate given just how much yarn I have. Deep down I know I probably won’t make it the whole way, but I will count my Diet a success if I do a good job of finishing some outstanding projects and, more importantly, publish some new patterns. Hopefully those two goals will lead to a shrinking stash, too!

In all honesty, the amount of yarn I have isn’t the real issue. If I were being productive and releasing patterns at a faster rate, this quantity of yarn would seem reasonable, even appropriate. But considering how far short I’ve fallen off my self-publishing goals, it’s easy to see that I make myself feel better by buying more yarn, which then distracts me from the almost-finished designs and then makes me feel bad again. It’s a vicious cycle and I don’t like it! I blamed my lack of production during the last 6 months on wedding planning, but the truth is that I could have been more productive than I was, I just didn’t know how to motivate myself to do it. I’m not sure I know the answer now, but I do know that shiny new yarn is a gigantic motivator!

So here’s to more output and less buying. Hopefully the blog, and all you faithful readers, will benefit from my Diet as well.

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In the interest of making this move as stress-free as possible, I went through my entire stash and pulled out a few things I don’t need to bring with me to the new place. Lucky you, you guys get first crack at these way-below-retail deals! I’m listing everything here at no more than 50% of the retail price. Here are the rules:

1. Paypal only.
2. Domestic shipping: Flat $5.00 no matter how much stuff you want. Packages will go out the next business day and will be mailed Priority or First Class, depending on weight.
3. International shipping will be the actual cost for Global Priority. I will email you the shipping cost and you can approve it before paying for the item. Please do not ask me to lie on the customs form, I won’t do it.
4. Leave a comment on this post letting me know what you’re interested in and whether you’re domestic or international. Everything is offered on a first-come basis. Once you comment I will send you a PayPal invoice. Payment is expected within 24 hours or your item goes back up for grabs.

Everything from a smoke-free, pet-free home.

Now onto the goods! If you have questions feel free to email me or comment, I’ll see a comment just as quickly as an email.

9 balls Tahki Bunny in color 7 a gorgeous dark navy (darker than it appears here). 50% Merino/25% acrylic/25% Alpaca. 81 yds/50 gr each. Some skeins missing labels. One skein has been partially knit but the knitting’s still attached. All same dye lot. Retailed for $9 each. $40

4 balls Karabella Margrite Bulky in color 7, tomato red. 20% cashmere/80% extrafine Merino, 77 yds/50 gr each. Enough for a scarf. Retails for $15. $30

That’s all that’s left as of 6:05 pm on Saturday night! Thanks to those who bought so quickly!

Comment or email away for what’s left, thank you!!

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