A Chance.

My blog is looking quite lonely and empty, so I decided it was time to pop on briefly to give it an update.

I received a notification in the mail yesterday about a new knitting competition that is being run by the Australian Country Spinners. Monetary prizes aside, one lucky entrant will be selected to partake in designing a limited knitwear collection for Autumn/Winter 2012 with ACS. How exciting is that?! Being a knitwear designer is one of those things I've fantasised about, but knew it would probably never eventuate; so this competition, if anything, is a good outlet for my crazy, creative side to go full-out wild with designing (probably not something I would have thought about being able to do in the past, but I think I've exposed myself to sufficient designs, actual completed projects, and endless inspiration from knitting mags in the past year or so to boost my knitting confidence a tad), and gives me the opportunity to say, 'hey, at least I've tried', even if I fail. And I will end up with an original design of my own at the end - so there's no loss really :)

I've got until the end of July, but with all the assignments and exams coming up, it might just be enough time for me to pump out an original design - hopefully! So I'll have to put all my knitting projects on hold.. I've just finished knitting my 8th premmie beanie last night, after not being able to knit for several weeks due to assignments :( My target for this Autumn/Winter is a minimum of 20 beanies to donate to the hospital, so I'm *almost* half-way there! This year, I've decided to knit a few different sizes to accommodate for the different head sizes, and so far I'm sticking with the floral theme.

I've also recently received some Sublime extra fine merino yarn in the mail, which is to knit a cute bear-ear-beanie for one of my music teacher's 11-month old. I was going to start that last night, but I haven't quite decided whether I should knit the size for 6-12mo olds or the size for 1-2yos. Any ideas how fast baby heads grow? I will probably end up knitting the bigger size, as the baby has a pretty big head and I'll want to extend the wearable period of the beanie.

Over the past few months, I've been receiving quite a bit of yarn in the mail - online yarn shops are both a blessing and a curse :P Knitting addiction aside, how easy is it to spend past your budget with this sort of convenience at your fingertips? Obviously, as mentioned before, I'll have to put my projects - both queued and in-progress ones - on hold for the time being, but I cannot wait to finally knit the adorable 'Beauty' puff-sleeved cardigan by Purl Alpaca Designs; the Gatsby dress from Interweave; and I am really wanting to finish the shawl I've started knitting from one of my regular UK knitting mags. I recently bought another knitting magazine, also a UK published one, for the Parisian-inspired designs advertised on the cover. Gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous. It also made me realise that if I could possibly ever cut my addiction to buying knitting magazines, I would save more than $50/month!

Reading the introduction to Joanne Chang's "Flour" cookbook has inspired me to follow my baking dreams again. I was on the verge of signing up to a Wilton Method cake decorating course, but the distance for travel required was a big deterrant for me. Then there's also the option of doing the baking and pastry course at Le Cordon Bleu interstate. But that would require a total change of environment and lifestyle for at least 9 months, plus they require you to do 2 years of work experience afterwards before you can attain the diploma. I've gotten so used to my current work place and grown to like all my colleagues, that to start all over again at a different place, in a different state, would be quite a big thing for me. Not to mention that it would mean quitting my current studies and moving away from family. The main thing though, is that when I first thought of doing the diploma, it's for interest-sake only... I don't intend to make a living out of it. Although the thought of being able to make a living out of creating delicious cakes and pastries that people will thank you for is lovely indeed, I don't think I have the guts and perseverence to make such a radical lifestyle/career change, like Joanne did (Harvard degree in maths and economics to pastry chef! Respect.) so I don't know if this going-back-and-forth with knowledge attainment in different areas is really worth the time and money. When you hit a certain age, every year - nay, every day! - really starts to count. If only I could be given a sign to let me know what path I should choose to follow! So many interests; so little time in life.

Knitting in the round!

Success! I have finally gotten my head around knitting with dpns! Well, actually, it's not like I ever had problems with it per se. I've always just been so scared of knitting-in-the-round and the prospect of failing that I've always been deterred to try my hand at it. My purchases so far this year have included the deluxe set of KnitPro Symfonie Wood interchangeable circulars and a set of their sock knitting dpns - I was determined to overcome my irrational fears. But it was knitting for the premmies that gave me that extra push to try working with dpns, because I wanted to knit seamless beanies for them this time, so that they'd be more comfortable to wear. So yes, yesterday I said to myself, "This is it! You're going to knit a beanie right now in the round!" - and that was that. It's not so bad afterall! The lesson learned is that I should not let the 'what ifs' in life stop me from doing things that I want to do. The next barrier to be overcome is cooking with meat! As much as I love baking, I feel like I should be able to cook a whole meal. I'll set myself a deadline of 8 months :P

Thoughts.

I'm in the middle of writing an essay, but I was clicking around on Facebook and for some reason decided to click on the page of a friend's friend who passed away in recent months. Someone had recently left a message on his wall, telling him that he still feels that he's there, and that he misses him everyday. His sister commented on the post. She must always check his page. She must miss him very much.

I had been to the same school as them both for a few years, quite a few years back, and although he seemed like the type of person I'd like to befriend, it never happened, because I'm the passive type when it comes to socialising. Fast forward several years and we were all at the same university, with mutual friends. Although we all recognise each other by face, none of us acknowledge the other even with a smile. I guess I am guilty of looking through or past people who I am not officially acquainted to. Gone are the days when strangers meet the eyes of passersby and smile - society has changed, and I have simply changed with it. I figured that since we have mutual friends, we were likely to cross paths in the future. More years passed by, and one of them married a friend of mine. How small the world is, I thought. Surely it wouldn't be long until we were finally introduced to each other. A few months later, he was.. gone.

How strange life is. How short and fragile. Two siblings of mine had at least one friend who passed away in recent years. My own aunt has terminal cancer and the doctors are just hoping she'd see it through to her birthday this year. They aren't optimistic though. Her birthday is on March 21. I almost died myself on two unexpected occasions in the past 2 years, but managed to pull through. I'm sure a part of me had died though. Misery and despair does that to you. It ages you a lot too. I feel like a grandma already, and according to people around me, I act like one too, with my old fashioned ideals, attitudes and hobbies, as well as my love for the fashion of the 1800s and vintage styles in general (that has always been true for me though).

I guess the point I'm trying to make is that in this unpredictable world that we live in, where anything can happen at anytime, we have to be constantly prepared. To do that, we must dig deep inside ourselves, and identify what really is important to us. Only then can we be at peace with ourselves and know how to live with no regrets.

Okay, back to my essay now. Giving a sermon was not my intention, sorry!

As 2010 is drawing to a close...

...I thought I should post a little update of what I'm up to. Right now, I am studying - or trying to study! - for an exam I'm sitting in a few months' time. It's make or break time, and I'm really hoping it'll be the former, so I will keep this post short and sweet, so that I can get back to studying!

I started knitting the vintage top from issue 47 of Knit Today before I went on my Hawai'i trip at the start of December (details about that will have to be in a later post, I'm afraid!) and took it out again on Boxing Day to work on, while everyone else was out at the shops, battling it out with other crazy bargain hunters (I don't go Boxing Day shopping as a rule, because I don't like being pushed and shoved, and having my toes treaded upon). I am very bad at keeping focused, when it comes to studying from books, and recently read the intro of Knit Fix in which the author writes that she picked up knitting to keep herself from looking at her watch all the time in meetings. Hoping this could work for me, I have been knitting intermittently, and I'm halfway done with the back piece of the garment already! Ahem, not much progress with the studying though..

The garment is categorised in the magazine as an intermediate knit, but it's really quite simple (yay, I'm an intermediate knitter! :D) and pretty straightforward, with no shaping required at all so far. Initially I was going to buy a green alpaca yarn to knit with, like the one used in the pattern, but in a different brand, but I couldn't get past the only shade of green that was available - a gross bright moss green. I ended up using the deep magenta Patons Zhivago yarn from my yarn stash, which I had initially bought to knit a shrug from one of the Patons Zhivago knitting books I have. I didn't really realise it's almost the same shade of magenta that I bought in the Patons Mist for that other shrug I posted a picture of! I'm not a particularly big fan of magenta, so I'm not quite sure why I chose the colour. Maybe it looked good with the lighting at the shop at the time. Or maybe it was because it's the colour used to knit the garments in the pattern books. Yeah, that's probably it actually.

I also recently purchased the deluxe set of KnitPro interchangeable Symfonie wood knitting needles online, as well as the Patons Serenity DK yarn needed to knit the pretty pink daisy sweater from an issue of Let's Knit. I haven't received either parcels yet, but I'm really excited! No doubt I'm going to be very distracted from my studies though! :P

Anyway, back to my essays!

Summer is only 3 days away... really??

It seems like not too long ago when I was flipping through my stash of knitting magazines, trying to pick out Spring patterns to knit. Fast forward to the present, and Summer is just around the corner! And Spring knits? Well, only if you count the projects I've already talked about in past posts. One of them was a tabbard-style top - the knitting's completed, but it's still waiting for the 12 large buttons (yes, that's right, TWELVE!) to be bought and attached to fully finish it off. I'd like to think that the addition of the buttons will be enough to make the top more fitting, so that there is more shape to it (coz tabbard style really = 2 rectangles sewn together at the edges); but I don't know... I don't even know if it's worth spending the money on the buttons for a project that I probably won't end up wearing. Plain big black buttons are about $5 for 3 buttons or so, so it's not cheap. But I guess I spent a lot on the yarn already (Debbie Bliss Donegal Luxury Tweed: 15% angora/85% wool), and as they say, if you're gonna get your hair wet, you might as well go swimming. It's not high on my list of priorities at the moment though.

You might recall that I was also working on a 3/4 sleeve V-neck top with Sublime Bamboo and Pearls. I have actually been trying to finish that one lately, and have gotten as far as finishing knitting all the pieces, bar the bow feature, which I am knitting at the moment, and which can wait until everything is assembled anyway, and even finished the neck edging. I stopped working on it after that though, because to my horror, I found that picking up the stitches at the very edge led to unsightly little holes along the neck edging, where the stitches were picked up. This is the first time something like this has happened, (but do note that I haven't done too many full garments in the past) so I'm not sure if it's just because of the drapey nature of the slick yarn, the thinness of the yarn, or whatever else. I could go through sewing the holes up with the same yarn, but that's so much effort, and I guess I'm just too disheartened by it to be honest, to go on. Oh well, since Summer is fast approaching, I probably won't be able to wear it anyway. So I think I'll leave it until the end of Summer, to prepare it for Autumn wear.

One of the projects that had been fully completed and had worked out nicely was the bell-sleeved cropped cardigan by Jenny Watson, pictured below:

Project: Short-sleeeved cropped cardigan
Source: Noro Flowers Book 4 by Jenny Watson

Yarn: Noro Silk Garden Lite

Overall, I quite like the look of the cardy - it's different, it's funky.. I was rather pleasantly surprised that it fit quite well too. But - there is always a but, isn't there? - I don't like how the edges flick up a bit. I'm not sure if blocking would have helped, but, not being the most patient person in the world, I couldn't be bothered. Also, I don't like how the flaring of the lower bodice is so pronounced on the sides. Maybe it would look nicer if less stitches were cast on, and if there were no decreases made at both the end sections, so that the sides would sit flatter and not puff out so much. If you keep your arms down, it looks fine, but once you lift them up, poof! When I took the cardy into a haberdashery store to find buttons to match, the shop assistants asked, "Is it for a boy or a girl?". HA! They liked it, but were very surprised when I told them it was a woman's fit. In my quest for buttons to magically transform the garment into a 'younger-looking piece' (I was told by some people that the colour of the yarn made the garment look 'old'!) I ended up finding bright coloured 'gelato' yellow-orange-green buttons to use. I think they fit the bill, don't you think?

Feels like a bird trapped in a cage. Hanging from a high tree branch. With its wings clipped off.

...is it a good thing or just plain cruel to unlock the cage door, when, even if released, the bird cannot fly away? To watch others fly freely around, having complete control of their own lives; knowing there is so much out there to see and do, while also knowing this will never be possible for oneself is almost too much to bear. Happiness will only ever be a dream. Could you blame me for being bitter and resentful?

Food, glorious food!

I made myself Eggs Benedict for brekky this morning. I don't know why I've never made this at home before, because it's not hard to whack together, and it tastes so much better than what you get at a lot of cafes. I went to a cafe with a friend the other week, which I had read some good reviews about, and was shocked when my caesar salad arrived - the poached egg was unrecognisable. It was basically an egg yolk with a thin layer of rubbery-looking egg white twisted around it. The salad was like, almost $20 by the way, so you'd think they'd atleast get a poached egg right. Oh well, atleast I know it's not frozen from a packet (I was told that one of the popular local cafe chains use ready-made poached eggs - how lazy can people get?!). But anyway, back to my eggs benedict! - the recipe says to make the hollandaise sauce in the food processor, but because my kitchen is tiny and cluttered, my food processor and blender is stored in the garage, which I'm sure you'd agree is too much of an effort to lug to the kitchen when a single recipe calls for it (okay, PLUS I'm too lazy to manouver heavy things around). So anyway, I thought it would be the same if I used my electric hand-held beaters to do the job. My goodness! I beated the mixture for aaaaages! I thought the sauce would never thicken up! It did eventually, but it was rather thick, and was probably more like super soft lemon and herbed butter than hollandaise sauce! It still tasted alright though. I wonder what I did wrong? In the old days, people didn't have food processors and made all their sauces by hand, so surely it's do-able!


I love poached eggs, because it's easier to achieve an oozy egg yolk than with other cooking methods. This dish, by the way, is a recipe by Bill, from his latest cookbook! Same with the roasted tomatoes (which is featured in his previous books), which I always make, because they're sooooo juicy and yum!

This arvo, I tried making macarons. I've made macaroons before with success (in that I achieved the characteristic 'feet', or pied. This time, however, I followed a recipe from a macaron book to the T, and didn't manage to get any 'feet' on any of the macarons! :'( I don't know if it's because of the extra mixing, what the author calls 'macaronnage', which may have toughened/dried the mixture, or because I left the circles of batter for too long to dry before baking them. Or I guess it could also be because I didn't use 2 identical baking trays, one on top of the other, to bake them... They ended up hollow in the middle, but they still tasted good! I was out of butter, so I made a chocolate ganache to sandwich them together instead of buttercream.

I sprinkled cacao nibs on a few of them just to try it out. The cacao nibs taste quite unpleasant raw, but after toasting in the oven, they're actually quite palatable, and I love the extra crunch it imparts! And let's not forget how good these are for us! An excuse (though probably a bad one) to eat more sweet almond biscuits! haha!

They may not look like the proper things, but they're still quite tasty! So tasty that before I knew it, I had overindulged. I felt really guilty when I looked at the two cooling racks, and saw that it had like only a quarter of the batch left!

While I'm talking about baking, here's what I made yesterday:

Chocolate chip and pecan cookies (also from Bill's Basics by Bill), and...

Iced Cinnamon Snail Rolls (from Bill's Sydney Food). The cookies are delish! I've never made cookies so crisp before! Yum! But these are best eaten on the day of baking - I stored these in an airtight container, but when I tried one today, it was not quite as crispy as it was the day before. Definitely a recipe I will use again though! The buns tasted quite good yesterday - moist, soft, sweet and sticky. Not quite the same story today though. But I guess that's the same for most baked goods. My dad said that he microwaved a bun today for lunch and said it tasted really good. I wonder if this will still be the case tomorrow...

A few days ago, I tried the savoury version of Bill's scone recipe - cheese and chive scones. They didn't rise as high as the plain ones, maybe because of the cheese content..? They would have probably tasted nicer had I buttered them with salted butter, instead of unsalted, since the scone batter does not use any salt at all. Maybe next time I could try sprinkling some Maldon salt flakes to the tops before baking, to enhance the flavour.

Enough about cooking, here's an update on my knitting projs!

I went to a yarn sale the other day and bought the following:

Actually with the Patons Sorrento, I only bought the mauve coloured balls - the others I bought some time ago. I bought the mauve, because I thought it would also make a nice Spring/Summer scarf, which is what I intend to make the other colours into. I was never big on accessories, but there's always a time to start. The other yarn is to make 2 garments from the Patons Mist pattern book.

I actually made this bolero in black, to match a dress I wore to a friend's wedding in September this year. Because it's a midnight black though, you can't really see the lace pattern, which is a shame, since that's the part you have to really keep focus on when knitting! So I've decided I will knit it again in the colour used in the book - deep magenta. It's not a colour I am particularly fond of, but it works very well with this bolero. One of the haberdashery shops I went to a few months ago had this same bolero displayed on a manequin in the shop's front display window, in this same colour, and it looked fab. That was probably when I decided to get the pattern book and knit that bolero. Anyway, here's some pics of the bolero I made. The length seems a bit different from in the book - I wonder if it's because they knitted at a looser tension than me... or maybe it's to do with how they slip-stitched the collar on? I thought about maybe knitting at a looser tension for my next bolero, but since the sleeves fit perfectly, if I do that the sleeves might end up too baggy. Oh the dilemma.

The white yarn is to knit this other pattern at a later stage. Maybe closer to Autumn next year. I seem to wear a lot of black, so the white would be a nice contrast.