Tea Time

My mother’s birthday was yesterday and I made her a tea cozy with some sweaters that I bought at a thrift shop and felted in the washing machine:

I’m really happy with how it came out.

However, I am not happy at all with any of the computers in my house. Never try to put a 160 GB hard drive into a several years old machine unless you have hired someone to do it. Apparently, the machine is too old to see the whole hard drive, and I’ve been trying to jump through hoops to get it to work ALL WEEK LONG.

Hilde posted about a knitted video from a band from Montréal called Tricot Machine. I discovered them last week, and I ordered the CD. I am really excited about this band, they are really fun (at least the songs that I have heard), and their name means Knitting Machine…how cool is that?

Dino-mite

(Once again, for anyone keeping track of the daily posting thing, it is still 14 November here in my time zone.)

I have finished the dinosaur sweater except one underarm seam (note stitch holder in photo). It was just way too late last night so I have to finish it today.

Christmas knitting count: 2 things finished. Want to make doll clothes for my niece, but the pants by themselves don’t count as a finished gift.

The pattern is by Ewe Can Knit. I only modified the construction, since she had you do something a little weird with the seaming, and I did it like a standard lopapeysa. The yarn is Brown Sheep Naturespun Worsted.

When we were at the liquor store the other day, we picked up Ommegang Chocolate Indulgence Stout. I like stout beer, I like chocolate, it had to be good. Umm. It wasn’t. So I had to find something to do with leftover beer and I came upon this recipe for Chocolate stout cake. It is SO AMAZINGLY GOOD! It’s worth buying beer (any stout, not microbrewery beer necessarily) just to make this cake. It doesn’t taste like alcohol, it’s just moist and amazing. We left the beer out of the frosting to make it family-friendly. Only caveat: use a springform pan like she suggests. I have only one springform pan in that size, so I tried a springform and a regular pan, and I ended up with one pan of crumbly chocolate cake bits and one pretty looking cake. Also, making half the recipe makes a decent-sized cake, there is no real reason to make it two layers.

Not Brown Bag

So we have a little sun (not much) and I was able to take a better photo of my bag. The clasp was a fun find, because I used a star pattern on the front of the bag and then the clasp has it as well.

Around the top of the bag I did a flower pattern, you can see it on the back here:

The yarn is mostly leftovers from this sweater (which incidentally happens to be one I washed the other day). I had originally planned to do the whole body of the bag in the lighter blue, the bottom and the strap in the medium blue, and the flap like it is, but since it was odds and ends of yarn, I ran out of yarn as I was going along, so that’s why there’s the pattern on the top of the bag and I did the strap in three colours. Also, I wanted to use the lighter blue more in the flower and star motifs but I didn’t calculate and save quite enough, so there is just a bit in the centre of them. I still am happy with how it came out.

The inspiration for the bag was Brown Bag on Knitty. I obviously changed it quite a bit (although the stitch count is all the same). The yarn is Álafoss Lopi. The strap is made with a slip stitch double-knitting technique. It’s intended to be a bag to bring lunch to work (like the originally Knitty pattern) so now I can stop using plastic bags.