By Jenn, on April 25th, 2012
- Leading with the awesome – I won second place in the Juniper Moon Design contest. Thank you for your votes! The good news about winning: Yay! Yarn! Yay! Pattern getting published! The bad news: They get to decide when the pattern gets released into the wild, not me. So, if you liked it and wanted a copy, watch this space, because I’ll be yelling from the rooftops when it comes out.
- I have signed up for another test knitting gig. This will be bad for blog posts, because all my free time will be devoted to knitting like mad until
the end of April who knows when, since I don’t have a pattern yet, even. I may have bitten off more than I can chew with this one – it’s a doozy!
- Just before I did that, I sat down at my wheel for the first time in a year and a half and I made some yarn. That deserves its own post, really. But I was so happy to get back to it, I need to include it!
- My office has started stocking soda in the fridge again. This is really testing my no-more-soda resolve. I gave it up right around the time that they stopped stocking it, it was a lot easier to say no when I had to pay for it in addition to finding the willpower. It’s been a couple weeks, and so far, so good, but those Dr. Peppers are starting to look awfully good.
- Wednesday is over, we’re more than halfway to the weekend. It is my anniversary today, and Hannah is in New York, so we are going out to dinner. And we’re meeting her in New York on Friday (because it’s her birthday!) and doing fun stuff. All these things are making me happy.
- I am still riding the high of my vacation last week and I bought tickets today to see Bruce Springsteen, which I have wanted to do since I was about Hannah’s age.
Because I am in such a good mood, I want to share some joy, and give someone some lovely luscious yarn.
 Spirit Trail Fiberworks, 100% silk, crimson gorgeousness That yarn, right there. It is fantastic and wonderful, and I want to share it with one of my (few) blog readers. Leave me a comment between now and Friday morning at 11 AM, tell me something that is making you happy right now, and it might wing its way to you.
By Jenn, on April 24th, 2012
We spent last week at the farm, sleeping in a yurt in the sheep pasture, and it was just about the perfect vacation.
By far, the best moment was watching triplet goat kids being born. Susie asked Hannah if that was her first time seeing something be born, and sounded surprised that it was, but I realized later that other than Hannah, it was the first time I’d seen something be born – at least in live action. Growing up in suburbia, dutifully spaying and neutering our animals means there’s not a lot of opportunities to see that happen. The transformation from dead-looking floppy thing to frolicking bouncy goat was astonishing.
The funniest moment was when I learned just why the phrase “goat rodeo” was coined. Hannah had to go out to feed the two bottle-baby goats. I remembered that the three milk goats where shut in the same stall, and I went with her to make sure they didn’t cause her any trouble. Because, clearly, it was just fine if they caused ME trouble, which they most certainly did. As soon as we opened the stall door, all three of the big goats rushed the door and escaped into the barn. I wrestled one back in, got the second one, opened the door to get her in, and the first rushed right back out. The next ten minutes were like a Keystone Kops movie – one goat in, one goat out, around and around, all with Hannah yelling and jumping around in the background updating me on what the goats I wasn’t wrestling were doing. For the record, it is remarkably difficult to convince a goat to go where you want her to go, but I finally managed to get ALL the goats back in their box.
The bummer was not having a camera for an entire week – because one of my bags got left behind at the hotel in Harrisburg. We got it back on the trip home, but there are no pictures from our stay to share.
The farm is another place of profound soul quiet; long stretches of time to do nothing, but with the routine of caring for the animals that drawn you back into the world of the here and now. Suffice to say, it was a deeply restorative week.
Re-entry has been easier than usual, probably because we came home on Friday night and had two days to get back into the swing of things. And there are always good things about coming home from vacation – which brings us to this week’s Ten on Tuesday.
Ten Good Things about coming home from vacation
- Sleeping in your own bed. Even when the vacation spot has comfortable beds, nothing compares to mine.
- Seeing your pets again, and laughing at their efforts to express their displeasure at your abandonment. There’s little funnier than a cat desperate for loving, yet intent on making sure you know you’re a jerk.
- Cooking for yourself again. This trip had the benefit of delicious home-cooked meals for most of it, but I love meals I cook myself.
- Having the proper space to store your stuff – I hate living out of suitcases.
- Having all my stuff – while I have no problem with traveling light, after a week or so, I get tired of not having all the things I might want close to hand.
- Not spending 13 hours in the car.
- Surprises that came in the mail while you were away.
- (Specific to this trip) Having a bathroom right next door to the bedroom, and not in the house that’s 100 yards away. In general though, being back in a space where you know exactly where everything is and can navigate it in the dark.
- Telling everyone about your awesome, wonderful trip, and sharing their stories that your tales bring to their minds.
- Getting back to the normal routine. I’m happiest when I know what’s coming and how things are going to happen. Vacations aren’t conducive to predictability.
By Jenn, on March 16th, 2012
This starts with a story about Dave and some delicious yarn. Dave is one of my co-workers, one of the guys I work most closely with every day. Last summer, I was knitting a sweater for the JMF trunk show and whenever Dave would come into my office, if my knitting was on my desk, he would pick up the ball of Chadwick and pet it. He loved it – how soft it was, the gorgeous color, how warm it seemed. I was charmed, because most of my co-workers seem to regard my knitting as just a weird thing I do (and I don’t even tell them about the spinning!).
Dave really is an all around great guy, and his appreciation for my knitting told me that I had to knit him a hat, out of the Chadwick that he had spent all summer petting and admiring. Because he was an artist in another life, I knew I wanted it to have some colorwork to make it interesting. Since he’s a guy (obviously), I didn’t want it to be TOO interesting. When I went looking for just the right pattern, I couldn’t find it, so I decided to make one up for myself.
Here is what I came up with:
 Picket Fence on a Country Road And he loved it! He was so excited when I gave it to him, I was really touched – there’s nothing better than having your work really appreciated by the giftee, you know? He wore it around the office, he told everyone I had made it for him, and the best part was that he was completely surprised. I loved it.
I decided that I would write the pattern up and it is available from Ravelry as a free download, and I am really happy to be able to share it with everyone.
Fresh on the heels of finishing Dave’s hat, JMF announced that they were doing a design contest. Folks in the group on Ravelry encouraged me to enter Picket Fence in the contest, but there was a catch – the rules said you could only use two balls of yarn. Although I hadn’t used more than two balls worth of yarn, since I had three colors, it was out.
I’d had such fun designing Picket Fence, though, I decided I would try another design for the contest. I just squeaked it in on the deadline and I learned a LOT from the process.
I was really pleased with how it turned out (there’s more pictures on its Ravelry project page:
 Geometric Hat, modeled by Miss Hannah And I’m pleased to say that tonight, when they announced the finalists for the contest, my hat was one of the ones they selected! There are a lot of amazing, gorgeous patterns in the running, and you should definitely go and vote for your favorites. Of course, I hope that one of them is my pattern, but I will not feel bad at all if I lose to any of the other patterns up there – they are all that good. If I win, KFI gets to keep my pattern, and hopefully they will make it available. If I don’t win, I’ll be publishing it myself and will let you all know when that happens.
By Jenn, on March 11th, 2012
Shani and I got together yesterday for our semi-monthly canning day, joined by Miss Hannah. Since we’ve done about all we care to with citrus fruit, we decided we would work on some pickled vegetables and a trial batch of making our own mustard.
Our morning was spent hitting three different stores in search of our ingredients, during which we committed the grave error of walking into Whole Foods hungry (and walking out with $50 worth of bread, cheese and olives for lunch as our penance) and never found the daikon we wanted for one recipe.
Prepping the vegetables and processing them took the entire afternoon, but for the first time ever, we were finished before midnight! We were even finished before (an admittedly late) dinner. Hannah was great as our measurer of spices, as these recipes wanted you to measure your spice into each jar instead of mixing them in with the brine. Undoubtedly this makes it a lot easy to make sure the spices are evenly distributed, but it also makes prepping the jars a more complicated process.
We found the pickling to be far faster and easier work than jam making, and got nearly the same amounts of yield in nearly half the time. In the end, we had about 20 pints of cauliflower, 7 pints of asian spicy carrots, 5 half pints of baby corn, 4 half pints of bread and butter jalapeños, and 2 half pints of Oktoberfest Beer mustard, plus a couple of wee sharing jars of peppers and mustard.
 Carrots, baby corn, cauliflower, peppers on top. Are they not beautiful? We had recipes that called for brown rice vinegar – which we did find at Whole Foods, but which was quite expensive. We bought one bottle of it, which was not nearly enough for our plans. But it did allow us to do a taste comparison so that we could figure out reasonable substitutions. We knew that the kind of vinegar we used wouldn’t matter, as long as they were equally or more acidic than what the recipe calls for, but we wanted to keep our flavor profiles as close as we could. Imagine, if you will, the three of us standing in the kitchen, with spoons, taking wee sips of all the vinegars we had on hand, trying to find the right combination. We found that the brown rice vinegar had a very malty flavor, and that a combination of apple cider and malt vinegar was likely close enough to get us what we wanted.
The mustard proved to be incredibly easy, and if it tastes anywhere near as good as it smells, I may never buy mustard again. It still astounds me how easy some of this stuff is to make for myself.
Now, we wait a week or so to let the flavors really settle in before cracking open the jars and trying them. The jury is still out whether I will make it that long.
Recipes: Bread and butter jalapeños came from a local restaurant, Octoberfest Beer mustard can from the Ball preserving book, and the cauliflower and carrot recipes came from Tart and Sweet. We did the corn in the same brine as the cauliflower recipe.
By Jenn, on March 2nd, 2012
It’s no secret that I might be am completely and utterly a fangirl for all things Juniper Moon Farm. There’s a lot about the farm to be fangirlish about, after all.
The biggest reason, though, is the inspiration I get from Susan and the community that has created itself out of everyone else who has found a connection to the farm. When Susan started hinting a month ago about big giant news on the horizon, I was wildly curious, wondering what it could be.
She hared the big news this morning, and I was completely blown out of the water. She’s launching a magazine! She announced it this morning on her blog, and I’m going to steal some of her words to describe it:
Juniper Moon Farm is starting a magazine called By Hand. By Hand will be a lifestyle magazine for people who make, with departments for cooking, crafting, DIY, gardening, and do-gooding, with a bit of travel and profiles of makers every month.
The idea is to celebrate creating things with our hands, and to explore the motivation to make things in a world where there are cheaper and immediate alternatives. It will be both practical (patterns, DIY projects, etc) and thoughtful, with a lovely and gentle aesthetic.
I cannot wait to get my hands on this magazine. .cannot. wait.
But before they can launch it, they need a little help getting it off the ground. And that’s where you come in. They’re running a Kickstarter campaign from now until March 23rd to raise the money they need to make sure that this project is as amazing as they want it to be. They’ve got some fantastic rewards for their backers, so, please, go check it out! I am thrilled to be able to back the project and be a part of its creation.
By Jenn, on February 28th, 2012
Or, as they became known around my house this fall, the baby blankets that would not die.
Twins, it turns out, make a lot more work for everyone, even the knitters in their lives. This should not have surprised me, that knitting TWO blankets in the time normally allotted to one, would be a whole lot more work, and yet, I remained firmly in denial and happily planned that OF COURSE I would knit blankets for the twins and it was no big deal, really, I could sample knit and test knit at the same time. NO problem!
Oh, the pride that goeth before a fall and that means the babies get their blankets at 5 months old instead of before they are born. I do believe, though, that these blankets were totally worth the wait.
When Carrie’s older daughter Katie was born, we didn’t know if she was going to be a girl or a boy, so I knit her a blanket in bright, cheerful gender neutral colors. It was one those fantastic patterns where the effect far exceeds the effort, and I loved it. Katie loved it too, and she still uses it for her dolls.
 Katie's blanket - it was slightly less eye-poppingly bright than this photo, but only slightly. When we got the news of twins and then found out that she was cooking a boy and a girl, I had the inspired idea to knit two more of that same blanket, in coordinating colors for the new babies. What I forgot from the first time around was just how long it took to knit and then sew down the binding on this blanket. It takes a REALLY LONG TIME, and when you multiple it by two, it starts to feel like it will never, ever end. The forgetting is why I should be forgiven for thinking that I could commit to sample knitting and test knitting projects in the same time frame as I needed to be blanket knitting, and the ENDLESS is why I should be forgiven for the overdue delivery.
But, finally, last week I finished them and gifted them, and they are as gorgeous. I used the same green I used for the original blanket and then found two colors schemes I loved for the new ones – pink with a purple-y grey and blue with a deep chocolate brown.
 Ella's blanket on the right, Sam's blanket on the left And as much work as they were, it was worth every minute to give these two dear babies gorgeous blankets to keep them cozy and warm. Even when I had to knit the border of the blue blanket twice.
By Jenn, on February 23rd, 2012
It used to be that I didn’t really care about the Oscars. I love movies, but the whole awards thing? Could not have cared less about who went home with the silly statues. When my dear friend Carrie moved to Boston and invited me to her Oscars party, I went because the party sounded fun.
That was more than 10 years ago, and since then, I’ve gotten just a little more into the whole thing. There were years I participated in the mad Oscars “Death Race”, trying to see as many of the nominees as possible – leading to some poor decisions, like going, alone, to see The Hours while struggling with my own rocky transition to motherhood (not something I would recommend) to sitting through the entirety of Gangs of New York (also not something I would recommend, although my companions seemed to enjoy it, I think?). I learned from that year, and now I give myself a pass for the movies I really think I’ll hate (so, no, I didn’t see No Country for Old Men, nor did I see There Will Be Blood). It’s also led me to seek out movies that I have deeply loved, but might never have made the time to go see without the pull of the Oscars to draw me in. Last year’s Biutiful stayed with me for days and days, I loved it so much and I would never have seen it if I weren’t trying to see all the Oscar movies.
But my favorite, favorite part of Oscar season is going to see the Shorts programs. They put together the nominees for Animated, Live Action and Documentaries into three programs, so you can see them all in one place, and I love them.
When we first started going, they played a single night, at one theater in all of Boston, and it felt like an awesome secret – something neat and fun that almost nobody else did or even knew about. Now, they’re more popular and more widely available (you can even download them from iTunes, if you want to), but it still feels like this oddball thing to go do, and I would be incredibly sad to miss it.
This year’s crop of movies was only disappointing in that there were not any really wacky entries – you know, those movies that just make you stare at the screen, not quite believing what you’re seeing (there’s almost always at least one or two of those), but I really enjoyed them all, especially the animated ones. A Morning Stroll, with its take on a random city dweller’s encounter with a chicken; Dimanche, crudely drawn (and the weirdest of the bunch) with a child’s eye view of a small town Sunday; La Luna, a lovely fable about how the moon changes its phases and about finding your place in the order of things, Wild Life, a visually gorgeous story of a British emigre to the Canadian frontier and how unsuited he was to the life on the prairie and The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore, which was beautiful and whimsical, depicting how much richer the world of books makes our lives.
As always, the documentaries were sad and traumatic – it’s saying something that the one about the American civil rights movement was the most uplifting one of the bunch – and they didn’t have the one I really wanted to see about the starlet turned nun.
The live action shorts were a good mix of funny, poignant and downright heartbreaking. I loved was Time Freak, mostly because I think that’s exactly what I’d do if I had a time machine, obsessively try to fix every little stupid thing I did, over and over and over. Raju just broke my heart in about twelve different ways.
I won’t even begin to make a prediction about which one will win – I’m never right, whether I try to guess based on what I think the Academy wants to reward or based on which one I liked the most. I can never even manage to pick a favorite, never mind the winner.
If you want to see more, you can see trailers and find showings here.
By Jenn, on February 18th, 2012
If you just read the blog, you might come to the conclusion that I rarely knit, since I so rarely post projects up here.
Lately, though, I’ve been working on a lot of gift or otherwise secret knitting, so I’ve had nothing I could really post up!
It’s all finished now, and except for two pieces that need to be gifted, I can finally blog about them. Hooray for that!
First up is a test knitting project that I did this fall for Juniper Moon Farm, for their Spring / Summer collection.
My piece was Finch’s Wings, done in Findley Dappled, color Summerfield.
 Photo copyright Joel Eagle, used with permission There are not words for how much I loved this pattern and, even more so, this yarn.
To be honest, when it first appeared on my doorstep, I was underwhelmed. Purple and orange and green? For a detailed lace pattern? I was convinced that calling the resulting project a dog’s breakfast would be insulting to the dog. But, since I didn’t get to pick, and I wasn’t going to be that test knitter, whining that I didn’t like what I had been assigned, I settled in to work. Even in the raw, untested state, was charmed by the pattern. The lace pattern looked intimidating, but it was one of those that once you moved through a repeat or two in your swatch is made sense and was easy to read in your knitting, so you couldn’t really lose your place.
 Photo copyright Joel Eagle, used with permission And the yarn was such a wonderful surprise. The colors were so much more subtle than I expected and they didn’t complete with one another. More than that, every time I pulled the next length from the ball I found something new that I hadn’t noticed as the colors blended into one another. Even as I was nearing the end of the sweater, I had conversations in my head as I knit – “Wait, there’s brown here. I don’t remember there being any brown before, and it’s a pretty shade, too. Cool.” I was completely in love with it by the time I was finished, and I cannot wait to pick some up to work with, now that it’s in stores.
I found the test knitting process to be a whole blast in itself as well – working with the designer to iron out wrinkles, making suggestions on how it might be improved, getting to peek inside the design process and then having gorgeous pictures of my finished work. All of it, even the frenzy of mad knitting to hit deadline, was something I would love to do again.
You can see more of the Findley Dappled patterns on the Juniper Moon blog here, and more about the whole Spring collection here. They are definitely worth checking out.
By Jenn, on January 14th, 2012
Last weekend, my canning buddy Shani and I kicked off our planned year of canning (commitment to get together at least every two months to have a day of preserving stuff) with a date to make some marmalade. She’d gotten me a new recipe book Tart and Sweet for Christmas and I’d spied a recipe for candied kumquats that looked very interesting. Since we knew kumquats were available right now, we knew we needed to get moving.
Of course, when I went to the local grocery where I’d seen the kumquats, they didn’t have any more. Which meant that on Saturday morning, I was shopping at my favorite fancy pants gourmet shop looking for some. Found them and realized that fancy pants shop had a whole lot of interesting citrus. After a quick back and forth, I walked out with kumquats, meyer lemons, and bergamot. If you have never sniffed a bergamot, you should seek one out and try it – they smell SO good. All morning, we would circle back to the bowl holding them until we were ready for them and breathe.
We started with the kumquats, which were fiddly but not difficult. Blanched them the three times the recipe wanted and then packed them into their syrup full of vanilla, star anise and cinnamon. Shani had prepped lemons for marmalade the night before (a lot of the recipes we’ve found want the citrus to soak in water overnight before you use it) and we did that next. It was pretty simple; combine the lemon slices, some sugar and a little vanilla and cook it down until it was nice and thick.
After a quick break for lunch. we moved on to prepping the bergamot. After reviewing the recipes we had for it, we settled on a roughly half and half mix with lemons. We decided to add some teabags to the initial simmering – since bergamot is used in Earl Grey, Shani thought that some tea would give the jam an interesting depth. While the bergamot were simmering in their first round of blanching, we made what I thought was the most interesting preserve of the day – preserved lemons.
To make these, you cut the tips of your lemons, then cut deep Xs in each end, not quite deep enough to go all the way through, but close. Then you pack each lemon with as much salt as you can fit into the cuts and press them into a hot jar, squeezing out juice to cover the lemons. About 7 or 8 lemons fit into each jar by the time we were done, and now we have to leave them to sit for about a month. After that, they’re reportedly good in anything you want to add a salty, lemony kick to. I’m very…interested to try the finished product.
By the time we finished that, the bergamot and lemons were ready for their start turn. Given that both the fruits we were using were fairly bitter, we added a little more sugar than our recipe called for and cooked it down until it was this beautiful deep honey brown color. We accidentally mad more than we thought we were, so we had to break the last bunch up into two different batches.
Just like our last couple of times out, we might have overestimated how much we could get done in a single day, and we didn’t finish up the last batch until after 11:00. I think we’ve agreed that we need a pound limit on how much we should try to process in one session.
Next time, we’re going to try pickling some carrots and some cauliflower, and if I can find all the right spicy bits, we’re going to try making something called fire vinegar, which is going to make an excellent Christmas present for my spicy food loving brother.
By Jenn, on January 9th, 2012
It’s the first week of January, and that means registration for Squam opened today. I was at the Post Office ten minutes after they opened, handing over my envelope.
It’s still a long time and a lot of waiting from January to June, but once you know for sure you’re registered, the going becomes more real, and for me it feels like something small I can take out of your pocket and pet when I need a reminder that there are good things coming up.
If all goes as requested, I am taking a photo class and knitwear design class. Those both fit snugly into the path I am trying to build for myself. We’ll see when my registration gets there if it is meant to be.
As always, I am looking forward to my time in the woods. This year will be different – although the friends I have gone with many time are still going to, I’ve chosen to share a cabin with other friends, ones that I met there in years past. Although I love my friends to pieces, I am finding the thought of changing things up to be profoundly exciting, like I am shedding a protective shell that had grown a little too confining, and stretching out to embrace a new experience. I am a little afraid that I will have hurt my friends’ feelings with this choice, and hopeful that they will recognize that it has less to do with them and more to do with me, and wanting to grow into something new.
Far more than simply rooming with new people, I am taking an even bigger leap with my Squam experience this year. For the first time, Elizabeth is taking the Squam experience to foreign shores (Can it still BE Squam if it’s not AT Squam? I guess we’ll find out!). In October, Squam takes a vacation to Italy, and I am going there too!
All by myself. And I’ve spent all day moving back and forth between being wildly excited and completely freaked out at the thought of going to a workshop all on my own. This is all the funnier if you know that I’ve spent the past three years convincing people that it would be just fine for them to do the very same thing and join us in the woods of New Hampshire without knowing a soul in the camp. Yet, when it is time for me to do it myself, I am a giant ball of anxiety.
But Italy has been at the very top of my travel list for years. It’s been there for so long that it was starting to intimidate me – that only the “perfect” vacation would be right, that if I couldn’t go for long enough or visit the right places or stay in the right kind of hotel, that I just wouldn’t go because it wouldn’t be everything I’ve hoped and dreamed. How damn crazy is that? So, despite having a million reason that it might not end up working out, I added Italy into my registration envelope last night and popped it off in the mail this morning, before I had a chance to have second thoughts and use my fear as an excuse to keep myself small.
And it is going to be awesome.
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