No time or energy for a lot of words today, so just a quick pictorial review of where we are. I've divided into two halves: Non-Yarn (or mostly pictures of Carol) and Yarn.
Non-Yarn
On Friday nights, we have pizza and movie night. Carol and Tommy make the dough and create the pizza from whatever sounds good. For Carol, that's often shrimp and goat cheese. I love that, too, but tend toward veggie. Sometimes, I ask for the old standby of Canadian bacon and mushroom, which Tommy easily accomodates with a trip to the store. He likes lots of meat on his pizza, whatever kind it is.
Here's Carol making dough a few weeks ago:
Since she also likes to bake so much, we made gingerbread cookies a few weeks ago. She loves to roll out the dough and cut out the shapes. While I sort of insisted that we stick with the Christmas shapes of men, stars and trees for the batch I took to the office, I did allow her to go hogwild with the cutters and leftover dough. She made dog bones, jack-o-lanterns, hearts, and even a few men and stars.
Here are the ones we delivered to work, and the recipe, which is the best I've ever found for ginger-snappy cookies.
If you need to make something for Santa, these are the ones!
The day after we made the dough, we did some more cooking when we tried the Krispy Kreme Copycat Recipe. I've had this recipe in my file for awhile and only decided to try it when the cookie prep work took longer than expected (forgot about the whole chilling the dough thing!)
Anyway, I swore I would make something that I've never made before because it's the only way I can eliminate any of the recipes that I keep in my binder. This is the place I organize the magazine tear-outs and internet prints and email sharings. It's too big, so sometimes I just go through and purge recipes that I suspect I will never try. On this occasion, though, my intention was to evaluate and eliminate.
Instead, we found that the doughnuts are GREAT and that I should definitely make them again. Only, they should really be a dessert item rather than breakfast, because 1) I had to get up at 6 a.m. to start the yeasty process; and 2) seriously, doughnuts are dessert; they so are not a nutritional start to the day.
But aren't they pretty?
Sunday night, Carol and I went to "The Nutcracker" here in Seattle, where the sets are unlike any I've ever seen. They were designed by Maurice Sendak and are just incredible. If you are in Seattle and have not seen this production sometime in the last 20 years, make time to go. If you're not in Seattle, make plans to visit us next year and we'll go. Beautiful.
Oh, and Carol loved the ballet. She got a little squirmy toward the end, but she paid attention, was very quiet while asking questions, excited at all the right places and followed along. We read a book before going, but the storybook is only minimally part of the show. Carol really did well for her first performance of this kind.
Here is Carol before heading out to the performance, in front of our tree.
And just one more picture of Carol for you. She got some practice opening presents Sunday night when I decided I didn't like the way I wrapped a gift and needed to change it. Tommy asked her to imagine she was excited and she had a great time exclaiming, "oh, my goodness, a watch!" I won't tell you who the watch is for, but someone will love it.
You can see the new baby on the ottoman beside her. That is Clara, who Carol chose as a souvenir from the ballet. The name, of course, is to help her always remember "The Nutcracker," she says. She really loves this new baby and even chose Clara to be the doll who rides in the airplane with her when travelling to Texas.
Yarn
Just a few things in progress right now! OK, there's actually quite a bit, but I'm making great progress and love everything I'm working on so far. Last night, I knitted for eight hours and stayed up too late, but I just love it so much. I can't believe I never learned to do this before, and I really wish I had crocheted for Carol when she was a baby, even if I didn't know how to knit back then. To make up for it, I'm planning to make the first sweater I knit for her, but in the meantime, I've got to finish all the knitted and crocheted gifts for Christmas.
Below, a picture list of everything I've done in the last three weeks:
- a hat for someone who's moving to a cold place who probably doesn't read this blog anyway, but will know it's him if he does! This is the A&F Knockoff Hat in Sundae. Used almost the whole skein even though I added four stitches to the cast-on. Tommy thought it needed to be a bit bigger around.
- Ruby Slippers from "Vintage Knits for Modern Babies." Delivered to a new mommy today along with a hat from the same book. These are so cute! The buttons are from my Granny's button box, so they are quite vintage themselves. Granny gave me ALL her buttons many years ago so I rarely buy buttons for anything. Nice pattern, can't wait to try something else out of this book.
- These are the Christine's Stay-on Baby Booties, which I showed you in progress in a prior post. They came out pretty cool, if a little big. The pattern is fairly easy, but I didn't read the directions properly and so did not change to a smaller needle size after making a matching rolled-edge hat. Oh, well.
- Caleb's Snowboarder Hunting Hat. Grrr... I still can't believe I'm making a hat so Kayla's boyfriend can have a warm and camoflauged head while out hunting Bambi, but I'm nothing if not a good sport. Plus, they are going skiing in January, so I think I'll make them a pair of matching Texas Tech red and black snowboarder hats. Maybe the lack of violence associated with those hats will cleanse me of this one?
- Isn't this yarn so beautiful? It's Plymouth Alpaca Grande Hand Dyed in the orange-brown multi and I love it SO MUCH! I'm going to make myself a vest out of it as soon as I finish all these other projects. I can't wait to wear it myself, but this is a One Row Scarf for someone else who is moving to a cold place. She's getting a matching hat, too, but I haven't started that yet.
- Kayla's Alpine Frost scarf in Raider Red. She requested something in red, so I picked up this super-tiny Silky Alpaca Lace and started crocheting. I should finish it sometime in 2012. Doubtful this will make it into any Christmas wrapping this year.
- A much quicker Alpine Frost scarf done in a worsted weight with just 27 chains to start. Done in about two hours and just needs to have the ends woven and be blocked. Again, this is for one of these three people I know who are moving to a colder climate.
- Here's the matching hat. I learned to do cables and am so happy to see that it's not as complicated as expected! Should finish quickly as soon as I get back to it.
So, not a lot going on around. Move along now; there's nothing to see here.