Fiber Fool

Yes, the first Trekking socks are complete (a better FO report on Friday of course). I also cast on for another pair of Trekking seeing as how we’ll be doing a record Trek to Minneapolis this weekend. I have to have Trekking socks on the needles don’t I? This pair is for DH. Two for (or 2.5) for me and one for DH :-)
I do have a little contest up my sleeve. The first pair of Trekking, the completed ones (well the others will need a name too, so if you have inspiration for that as well please feel free), need a name. Some details you might like to know when naming them include the fact that one sock all the mini cables twist to the right and on the other sock they all twist to the left. There are twist all around the sock for about two inches at the top and over the top of the sock just before the toe decreases begin. I like naming my socks after places, though for the right name that can be overlooked (especially since I do have Dimple and Heatwave which are not places). If you provide the name for the new socks or a name that sparks the new name you’ll get a copy of the pattern for free! You have today and tomorrow, as I hope to have a new name to announce in my FO Friday post.

Also, for those musically inclined, what are your top five road trip songs? I’m prepping the iPod for the trip. We’ve ordered a charger and now I just have to decide what 4 GB of music I want to take with and I think I’ve decided to splurge with a *few* iTunes purchases so there is some fresh stuff on there. This part isn’t an official contest, but I may give away a few more of the new pattern if your selections turn me onto someone new I hadn’t really listened to or heard of before.

Okay, so my subject is a bit cliché. Sorry, it was all clichés in my mind this morning, LOL!

A couple of weeks ago we bought a small bag of apricots from a local vendor at the farmer’s market. They weren’t quite ready yet and as fruit is oft to do the entire bag was ready at once with little time to spare. Instead of eating the few that we’d get through before they spoiled I decided to whip together some jam. The week before I had made some strawberry rhubarb jam that I froze and I used the universal pectin that allows you to use as little sugar as you want (or honey or sugar substitute etc.) so I had some of the calcium water that you add to help the pectic set still in the fridge and it is only lasts for a month or so.

I was lucky and mango was also very affordable in the store so I cut 8-10 apricots into eighths and roughly chopped two mangoes and two jalapeno peppers and put them into the food processor to puree slightly. I then brought the mixture plus the requisite amount of calcium water to a boil for 3 minutes and added the sugar and pectin mixture and brought it back up to a boil for 1 minute. I then hot water canned for the first time by myself and canned up 4 half pint jars. We had one jar that didn’t can so that is the one we have in the fridge right now.

Both jams I’ve made with this universal pectin are setting much harder than I prefer. Next time I will use a little less of the calcium water and see if that helps. This apricot mango pepper is not nearly as spicy as I had hoped. Next time for a batch this size I could easily do 3 or 4 jalapeno peppers or use just 2 but use a spicier pepper like serrano or even perhaps a habanero. But it is good and makes for a great grown up sort of PB&J!

We’ve been enjoying alot of fruits so far this summer. I have about 4 cups of pitted pie cherries in the freezer. I was toying with making sour cherry jam, but decided it would be nicer to be able to have a couple cherry cobblers when it isn’t “cobbler season.”

Our raspberries are doing quite well considering the neglect of water they’ve had the previous two years. We won’t produce enough to make jam or really freeze any but it is nice to stumble out back in the morning and pick a small handful to have on my cereal. Anne’s mom has a huge patch and doesn’t pick her fruit and it is more than Anne’s household can go through as well so we have picked raspberries over there once already and came home with several cups worth. We made a raspberry peach cobbler with half and then some homemade raspberry ice cream with the other half. It was scrumptious!

It isn’t just fruit we’re enjoying either. We had a couple friends over to help us eat a lasagna that I made last week. One friend brought the garlic bread and Anne brought the salad and she totally outdid herself! She brought a bowl as big as the lettuce bowl filled with yummy edibles from her yard - violas, mustard, thyme, hyssop and all kinds of other great edible flowers and greens. They all had such distinct and strong flavors, but it was great to take a bite of something and then quiz poor Anne on what it was. She also brought with her some sprigs of the creeping lemon thyme so we can start our own patch of that. It grows like a weed and is great ground cover that doesn’t require a lot of water so we’re excited, though we haven’t decided on the right location just yet…

I don’t think you’d care to see a toe-less second sock since you already got to see sock one so instead, if all the purple pictures from yesterday aren’t enough for you I’m going to point you to a few posts worth checking out in blogland…

Firstly, did you see that Ann aka Purlingswine finished her Trekking Dimple Socks? Yes, the original pattern for Dimple is for DK weight, but it is easily sizable for any yarn and I have to say I may end up using that pattern on my next ball of Trekking too! If you need help resizing Dimple just give me a shout, I’m more than happy to assist you. Trekking just calls out for ribs because of the stripe effect of the yarn, yet I get bored with a standard rib so it may just be a Dimple or a Flatiron that is up next for me in the Trek-a-Long.

Did you know that Kirsten has been in Sweden? (start here and work your way to present day) *swoon* Check out all her great photos from the trip. And while you’re there, perhaps you’ll join the Baudelaire KAL?

Also, partially to toot my own horn and because it seems whenever I meet blogging people they always ask about the cheesemaking that DH’s does I want to send you over to his blog once again because he has posted a photo tutorial on how he made Stilton-style cheese this week! (Hello, run on sentence anyone, LOL!) I took many of the photos he used. It was tough as most of the steps took place after dark, but a good tripod and a long history with Photoshop got us some serviceable shots. Stilton-style is definitely not the place to dabble with cheesemaking, but I think I may have him convinced to do a photo tutorial on cream cheese on the cheap with ingredients you *should* be able to get at a local supermarket or perhaps a food co-op. But that likely won’t be until August or September as the milk delivery is officially on hiatus until then because the house gets too warm for the pressing stages and speeds up the acidification and aging process.

Well, it is about time for me to rustle up some PB&J for lunch and finish up my sock! :-)

It is another spectrum Sunday in July so purple abounds. However, I’m finding it much more difficult to find purple things around me that are not flowers than I have the other colors so far. Above you can see that we have an over the door set of hooks that hold primarily purple things. This is over our pantry door that is a converted coat closet in our dining room. Hanging on these hooks are our EcoSacs (two of which fall in the purple spectrum), Emma’s leashes, and my apron which are purple. The photos aren’t great because it has been raining all weekend so I had to resort to flash which I’m finding on this new camera really wash things out. But I will gladly sacrifice photo quality for these past two glorious days of drizzle, rain, and overcast skies. We were in desperate need of some moisture and the break from summer heat has been glorious. In fact, I even got to pull out my purple jacket that I got for my birthday (a 1X too) and I couldn’t recall ever needing a jacket here in the front range in July since I moved here in 1999!

This week I also recieved some Project Spectrum goodness in the mail. Shortly after Estes Park, Green Eyed Grrl had a contest using that meme of leaving a one word comment describing her and I won! Not only did she send some fantastic purple-goodness Opal sock yarn, but she shared a bar of the soap she, Katherine and Knitty Professor made. I adored the ribbon she tied around the sock yarn bag too! I have to wait a while to use the soap, but it smells heavenly!

Lastly, I got two more shots of purple flowers on Wednesday when we went to Anne’s mom’s house to pick cherries and raspberries (more on that later this week). This time I know the names, we have a petunia and a delphinium.

In reading, I finished Anne of Windy Poplars and checked out two mysteries from the library, the next William Kent Krueger, Boundary Waters, and a John Sandford. I’ve been exhasted and busy with DH’s five days off from work so the WKK hasn’t been going as fast as I would like it to, but I got to catch a bit last night while I was baking our lasagna and raspberry peach cobbler.

There has been an occassional movie viewing recently too, the most exciting of which was a trip to a matinee viewing of The Devil Wears Prada on Wednesday afternoon. It was a good movie with funny parts, some painful parts and a nice life lesson in the end. If you haven’t seen the previews, a top of the class journalist student from Northwestern interviews for an assistant position at a top fashion rag in New York City, but she is your home town midwestern girl and not into fashion and she manages to get the position. She works under the long-time editor of this rag who has the entire office under her thumbnail. Andy comes into her own in the nine months she spends at the rag and learns some valuable life lessons. Stanley Tucci was great and I enjoyed watching Simon Baker on the big screen. Meryl Streep did an amazing job playing an over demanding boss and Anne Hathaway was very believable as a naive midwestern girl new to the big city. This movie certainly doesn’t demand a big screen, but the fashions which play a huge role in this film certainly looked great on it. I would definitely recommend it as a fun fluff movie and I think most guys would tolerate it, DH liked it. There was even a group of four guys (sans women) at our showing on Wednesday.

Last week we also took in two films from the 1940’s. The first was Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House that I recorded off of TCM. It stars Carey Grant and Myrna Loy. It is a comedy about the frustrations of buying and building a home. It was almost a bit depressing to me given that we have several projects in progress on our own home that are now on hold until the financial situation improves. But it kind of made me of think of The Money Pit, but done better and not quite as over the top with the campy factor. Then late in the week we had SIL3 over before she headed to Italy for a couple of weeks of a master’s class in opera and we watched The Maltese Falcon. We own that one and I wasn’t so much in the mood for an old film that evening so I did a lot of knitting on that first Trekking sock and wandering in and out of the room. But it is a fun mystery movie.

In music, I wanted to point you to the Sources Collective’s blog. It is DH’s and he has started a podcast there as well and plans to post a new original song each week. He has started with two songs he did as part of an electronic music class he took in the late 1990’s and I’ve been consulted on the next song he’ll be releasing soon. So, go check it out, please and spread the word if you like what you hear. Oh, and all the stuff will not be electronica, the next piece he’s mixing right now is guitar. (EDIT: He is having some trouble with the RSS and some of the file access and may be doing some troubleshooting on that today, but it is my understanding that there is no trouble in listening to the files with the streaming player there on the site or to download by clicking on the MP3 graphic.)

For a more on-topic podcast that is new on the scene, check out the new Lime n Violet, a fun conversational knitting podcast from Lime and Violet of course!