I finally finished the Keyhole scarf, tassels and all. I’d hoped that doing the second keyhole would seem so much easier after all the knitting I’ve done, but apparently I’m still not cut out for keyhole knitting.
Here’s a quick test: can you tell which keyhole was first and which was last?
Yeah, me neither!
Oh, well. The whole thing still came out pretty well as a whole scarf – even the tassels. 🙂
A rare occurrence – something to say about both of the topics of this blog at once. Alas, I have not yet figured out how to knit beer. BUT… Redbeard and I just took possession of a kegerator (did I just say that?) – thus completing our transformation from wine snobs in our 20s to frat boys in our 30s.
In hindsight, it was inevitable that we’d get a kegerator eventually. First, bottling is the least-good part of brewing, particularly because the yeast does insist on having CLEAN bottles to work with. So, now we can keg our own brews, which I am already looking forward to. Second, two of our three local breweries, including the one just a few miles away, don’t offer a lot of their brews in bottles. And our LBS (local beer store) stopped doing growlers recently.
No home brew yet, but you can’t leave a kegerator empty. Even though I’m new to this, I know that’s just not right. So, Redbeard went out yesterday and bought a keg of Swamphead’s Cottonmouth, which is one of my favorite summer beers. Light, but still full of tasty goodness. We made fish and chips for dinner, because, well – if there was ever a dinner that went with beer, this is it. But, we just got a lot of foam instead of actual beer. The crack team of experts we consulted (i.e. the tubes) suggested that the beer was too warm or over-pressured (perhaps this makes the beer too anxious?). The beer did seem a little warm, so we adjusted the pressure and will see tonight. With much willpower we resisted the urge to have beer for breakfast. Though, now that we have a kegerator, all things seem possible.
KNITTING! I have learned a very important new thing. Don’t tuck in your loose ends until you are 100% sure that you will not need them ever again. Which for me means do not tuck until 5 minutes before you give the project to its intended recipient. Luckily, I am a crappy tucker, and so it was irritating but not impossible to untuck as I frogged the handles on my felt bag project.
More happily, I have also just got Sandra McIver’s new Knit, Swirl! book and have been drooling over it, trying to maintain some sense of perspective on my knitting speed and free time (I found five sweaters in five minutes that I want to make for five people). I am torn between knitting one for myself first (selfish, but only I will have to suffer any mistakes) and knitting one for someone I love (who will thus have to love the sweater regardless of any mistakes). As far as I can tell the technique and pattern itself seems very straightforward – I will have to learn a couple new things, including how to cast on one billion stitches and how to join them into a round without twisting. But, this seems very doable, even for my meager skills.
So, I am knitting like crazy on my Magic Thief scarf (almost done!) so that I can justify starting a new project. Which I can do with an endless supply of beer to sustain me.
I’ve decided that knitting has some important similarities to baking. Actually, I’m sure that there are lots and lots of similarities, as I think about it just now. But, the one – the key one – that matters right now is that if you’re going to go off-recipe, you need to think through all the other things that might need adjusting to deal with your crazy off-recipe plans.
So – I’m making another felted bag and decided to modify the same pattern I’ve used before. I wanted to make the bag oblong instead of circular, though, and change the sizing a bit, so I knew that I’d end up with a different number of stitches. No problem. When I got to the point last week where I needed to start the handles, I got out a pencil, counted my stitches and worked out how to adjust the pattern.
The circular bag pattern calls for K25 and BO25 back and forth, so that you have four patches of 25 stitches awaiting four spiffy handle straps to be knitted on them, which will then be paired and kitchener stitched together for two handles. That equals (carry the 1, cross the ‘t’…) 200 stitches. But my oblong bag only had 152 stitches, so I dutifully recalculated – I wanted the handles to be the same width, so I shrunk the BO stitches to accommodate 150 instead of 200. I dithered a little about having the smaller gap, but decided it would be good. So, off I went…. I do the first the first handle strap. Ta Da! I do the second and then stop to think about whether I want to attach this strap to the one that I just knitted because… (anyone see where this is going?) I want the handles to be oriented like a tote bag, and so I need to make sure that the right… straps… are stitched… togeth- oh, crap.
Yep – I’d kept the equal spacing of the circular bag pattern. So, I’ve got bag straps that just sort of randomly sprout up around the bag. I have seriously considering just rolling with it, and having a crazy freak bag that only a mother could love. But, no… I’ll frog it back down the rim tonight and try again. This time I think I’ll use a calculator… (because that is clearly the problem here, nothing to do with my logic-type thinking abilities)
It came to my attention recently (when Untappd gave me a badge for being such a fanboy), that I’ve had quite a few different brews from Cigar City recently:
Vuja De (6/21)
A very dark saison, practically black. But still very light and easy-drinking on the first evening of summer. A collaboration with St. Somewhere (and it shows — this reminds me of their Pays du Soleil). Very tart, but balanced by a sweetness — but not malty sweet: the bottle mentions cane sugar, so I think that’s where it’s coming from. The sweetness provides a nice counterpoint to the very tart, cherry twang. A second drinking yielded more mixed results: we both soured on the blackcurrant flavor.
Tocobaga Red Ale (6/18)
Definitely hoppy, with a piney finish. Balanced with a smooth and mild malt. Wouldn’t have liked this a year ago, because of the hoppiness.
110k+OT Batch #4 Imperial Red Ale (6/17)
Very dark with highlights of dark red. Full malt with a strong balance of hops, both aromatic and bittering with a long smooth bitter finish.
I heard about the Sam Adams Latitude 48 Deconstructed pack a couple months ago — an IPA brewed with 5 kinds of hops coming in a 6-pack with the normal beer and then 5 versions brewed with just one of those hops. It sounded like a great way to try out the individual hop varieties, but I hadn’t been able to find it locally. Luckily, my wife is more resourceful, and gave me a pack for my birthday. So of course we had to do a 5-way tasting.
Unsurprisingly, they varied immensely. Both in flavor and in aroma, they ran the gamut. So on to the hops:
EKG: We both liked this the best, very mellow, earthy. Herby, with a definite Henna taste. Smells like wort, probably because we’ve brewed with these before. “The comfort food of beer”.
Zeus: This reminded me of Swamp Head’s BigNose IPA or Bell’s Two Hearted Ale, especially the aroma, which is very sweet and almost floral. Very strong start of citrus, sharpness and pine, but finishes more mild. “Punch-you-in-the-face”.
As part of American Craft Beer Week, our local brewery (Swamp Head) and Cigar City from Tampa had a “taproom takover” (I’d call it a “tasting room exchange”, but that’s not as alliterative). So we got our choice of eight CCB beers on tap.
The smallish tasting room was already packed at 5:00pm, so we got a pint of Florida Cracker Wheat Ale, and a growler of Table Saison. It took me nearly 15 minute to get those, and I almost changed my order halfway through to add another couple of growlers. I should have done that, because by the time I came back to get more growlers, the crowd was much worse, and three of the kegs blew while I was waiting to get a couple growlers, including both the beers I wanted. So I had to take my third and fourth choices (Jose Marti Porter and Maduro Brown Ale).
Luckily, I’ve never had a bad beer from Cigar City, and these were no exception. The Cracker Wheat Ale was a great cloudy hefeweizen, with just enough spice and citrus to make it interesting. The Jose Marti was inky and intense, with a little sweetness and not too smoky. The Maduro was a great brown ale, with a big malt and lot of subtlety to match it (and I found some 12 oz. bottles at Tipple’s, so we can get more). The Table Saison was not as sour and bold as their Sea Bass, but a more mainstream farmhouse, very light but with a definite sourness, almost like a kolsch.
We’re going to round out Craft Beer Week with Victory‘s V-12, which should be muscular enough to go well with chili.
I finally just wrapped up Project #2 from my mom’s visit – Morehouse Farm’s alligator scarf. This was too hard to resist, despite the already ridiculously hot weather. I bought the baby alligator version of the pattern, which is the perfect size for three-year-olds, such as my son. It’s also the perfect size for the moms of three-year-olds, as well as their sisters, dads, friends, and cousins. In fact, especially here in Gator-central, there is no actual limit to the number of people who this scarf is perfect for.
As an added bonus, it was shockingly easy to knit (so long as I was paying enough attention to actually count my stitches).
I found this cute flower pattern on Ravelry while I was looking for a project to make for my mom and Redbeard’s mom for Mother’s Day. I couldn’t resist, even though I wasn’t quite sure what to do with the flowers, once completed.
Inspiration struck halfway into the second one – add a thin stem and make it into a bookmark! Both of our moms are avid readers and have not (yet) succumbed to the siren’s call of the Kindle, so cute and functional – perfect! Then, I just had to figure out how to add a stem. This is one of those obvious-in-hindsight things, but I admit at first I was at a loss. I tried knitting a three-stitch row garter stitch, which twisted. That surprised me, which I guess reflects my rookie-knitter status. It worked for the part of the stem near the flower, though. For the rest of the stem, I ended up braiding three strands of yarn, which worked even better!
Dinner did not get off to a good start. I was going to make lasagna, but for some reason that didn’t seem like a good idea when walking home in 90° heat. So I decided I’d take most of the ingredients and make a pasta bake instead, since that seemed like it would be lighter. That was going OK until I knocked one of my Guiness glasses off the counter, sending shards of broken glass all over the kitchen.
Then we decided we’d rather have beer than wine, so I opened a bottle of Lectio Divina. When I opened the last bottle, the cork blew out of my hand as soon as I looked at the wire cage funny. So this time I carefully held the cork down with one hand and loosened the wire with the other. But then I had trouble getting the wire cage off and forgot to hold the cork down for a second, and it exploded out of my hand, sending the cork into the next room and cutting my thumb with the wire as it zoomed by.
And then I stained my favorite white shirt with the pasta sauce (that’s my own fault, I should’ve changed my shirt…).
At least the beer was good and all but one of the kids liked the pasta bake.
I made another batch of beer bread today, using a leftover bottle of Sam Adams Double Bock. It was basically undrinkable, but it makes for tasty bread.
The bread is the simplest I’ve ever seen: mix flour, baking powder, sugar and salt, pour in a bottle of beer, mix until combined, knead just enough to get a ball formed, turn it out onto a baking sheet, brush with egg, and bake. And it’s good (got rave reviews last time). The sickly-sweet double bock makes for a great bread, not too sweet, but goes very well with honey.