CiR: WWII Era Men's Knit Cap and Matching Scarf

Dear Readers, having born with me through part of my winter craft-a-thon, it's time I let you in on some of the other projects I enjoyed. To be frank, I'm still working on some of these. Knitting takes time, people! I decided that I wanted to make matching scarf/hat sets for my family, and am impressed that I finished as many as I did. Now I have a few of these ready to mail back, but not before I get a good blog post out of them, darnit! I did a few google searches for guy-appropriate patterns, when I found one that seemed perfect, especially for my nephew. It's a WWII Era pattern distributed by a yarn company in a pamphlet of knit hats to be made and sent to soldiers. The pattern was simple enough that I was sure the men in my family would not object, but nice enough that they wouldn't look sad next to the fancy ladies' sets.
Here's the link to the pattern!
I used the beanie pattern on the top, which I found to be simple and easy to follow if you're used to working with double pointed needles. The only complaint I have is that the pattern does not provide a gauge swatch. I made an entire hat on size 4 needles, as recomended, and came out with something fit for a retro-inspired toddler. That said, I switched to size 8 needles, still using regular acrylic, I Love This Yarn brand yarn, and the hats came out perfectly man-sized and comfy. It took less than one skein, but I would recommend buying two so you can make a matching scarf! The I Love This Yarn brand is great for guy-knits because it's super soft without being visually and texturally overwhelming.
To make a scarf that will go with these hats, I figured I would use ribbing as a tie-in, but also to make them thicker and warmer. This pattern is super simple, and great for a generic "guy scarf"- not too stylized, but without the shabby or rustic look that some simple knits can end up with.

Matching Guy Scarf:
I Love This Yarn acrylic yarn on size 8 needles
Cast On 32 stitches

K2, P2 across each row.
Continue until you have 60 inches or so. You might have the recipient try it on so you can make sure it's long enough to not look silly, especially if it's for a taller guy.
Cast off.

Wasn't that simple? :)

Cinnamon Apple Crepes

I've had a dreadfully unorganized couple of weeks, friends, so I apologize for my long absence. Happily, this time involved the boy and I finding a new kitty to come live with us, so it hasn't' all been stressful! Anyway, to ease myself back into things, here's a recipe I made almost a year ago. I actually learned to make crepes before I ever made my own pancakes, so this is one of the very first recipe I was comfortable enough with to start changing. Hope anyone who tries it enjoys it!

Cinnamon Apple Crepes:

Ingredients:

2 cups all-purpose flour

1 tablespoon sugar

1/2 teaspoon baking powder

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/2 teaspoon cinamon

1 pinch of nutmeg

2 cups milk

3 tablespoons margarine or butter, melted

1/2 teaspoon vanilla

1 egg

1/4 cup apple butter

some extra butter for the frying pan

Directions:

Mix dry ingredients in a large bowl.

Add all other ingredients (excluding butter for frying pan) and mix with hand mixer until smooth.

Heat about 1/2 tablespoon of butter in your frying pan on medium.

Pour about 1/2 cup of batter per crepe into pan. Immediately lift pan and tilt all around so crepe is nice and thin.

Flip when edges start to golden.

When both sides are golden, remove from pan and set aside.
Add more apple butter, smear with nutella, cover with strawberries and whipped cream, or whatever your favorite crepe filling is. Roll them up and om nom nom!

Crepe Paper Bouquet

Hello once more, friends. This post has taken a while due to the tragedy of me losing the cord that connects my camera to my computer! Luckily, just as I typed those words, I remembered where I had left it. So huzzah for that. Now I'm going to stop writing for a moment so I can actually upload and sort the images.

. . .
Back!
So, as you may know, earlier this month some young man and I got engaged. The wedding's over a year away, but that's no reason to put off the DIY elements that will keep. So, for the last two weeks I've been shopping around to figure out what is worth the cost to buy and not have to worry about, and what would be easy to make myself. When I got around to looking at floral arrangements, I decided the universe was just messing with me. Seriously, $100 for a simple bouquet I would use once in my life? Seriously? So, like any crafter, I started looking around for ways I could make this happen without investing in ready-made.

First, I looked at tutorials for arranging bouquets. This tutorial and video on theknot.com, a site with lots of great wedding resources DIY and otherwise, was my favorite. But then, I ran across something I had never heard of, although now I see that it's rather a common project- crepe flowers! Martha Stewart has a great tutorial up on making very realistic crepe flowers, but I was really inspired by this Mother's Day Corsage tutorial, which incorporates painting the flowers to add color variety. So I set out to combine the beautiful, articulated petals of Martha Stewart's creations with the depth and detail of painted crepe. Here's what happened.

Crepe Paper Bouquet

Materials:
Crepe streamers in petal color and stem/leaf color

scissors

wire cutters

20 gauge floral wire

acid-free glue stick

gouache paints

paintbrushes, size and shape depending on what you want to do with your flowers

water for mixing with gouache and cleaning your brushes

palette or plate or something for holding/mixing your paint

Optional:

plastic bag to cover your paint-space

coffee

Star Trek: DS9 on netflix as background entertainment

Since there are a few steps to this project that tend to spread out, you'll want a work space that's free to be taken over by this project for a while. Like this.

To start a flower, fold one end of your crepe paper over about 1.125" - 1.25", then continue folding it in a flat roll 20 times. Now cut that flat roll into your desired petal shape, making sure to leave the bottom ~.25" of the petals connected at either side. The aforementioned Martha Stewart tutorial has some good petal ideas, but unless you're going for total realism, I would use them as ideas and not strict rules.

Now unroll your petals. The ones that were furthest inside the roll might need a bit of extra shaping, so go ahead and do that now.

Time to play with paint! If you're wanting your flowers to look more real, go ahead and google whatever type of flower you're making and see what sort of color variations happen in nature. I noticed three color schemes that I really liked and used for the three flower types I tried: a lighter color at the center/base of the petal, a darker color at the center/base of the petal, and a color edging the petal.

Gouache is my paint of choice for this because it is as easy as or even easier to use than regular water colors. Use water to thin it out a bit on your palette, and have fun mixing the tones. For my roses, I made half-circles of an interesting mix of bright yellow, flat gold, and light salmon at the base of the petals. My carnations received creamy white edges around each petal. I painted thin, bruised-purple lines up from the base of my quasi-dahlia petals. You can also mix colors down to a thin consistency and use them to tint your petals so that each flower isn't identical to the next, or to make your flowers a better color match to another decoration.
When your petal strips have completely dried, it's time to assemble your flowers. Begin by cutting your floral stems down to a manageable size if necessary. Then, bend about a half inch over 180 degrees at one end. This gives your flower a larger area to glue onto than just the straight end of a wire. With 22 gauge wire, I didn't even need pliers to make this bend.

Now run your glue stick along the bottoms of the first two petals and wrap them around the bent end of the wire. Continue applying glue to the petal bases one or two at a time and layering them around the flower. If your crimp and pleat the bases as you go, this will help your petals fan out a bit, so your flowers won't all be tight buds.

To cover your stems so that they aren't bare wire, cut a length of crepe about 1.5x the length of your wire. If you don't like the color of the crepe, take a moment to tint it with your gouache and let it dry completely. Now fold an end of your stem crepe so that two inches or so of it are pointing 90 degrees away from the rest. Cover the crease with your glue stick.

Roll the crease around the base of your flower, making sure to let the two inch end stick out above the rest of the crepe, as this will be your leaf. Continue wrapping and twisting the long end around your wire. Crepe likes to stick to itself well enough that, aside from the top crease, you probably won't need any glue to hold the rest of your stem crepe in place. When you reach the bottom of your wire, just pinch or cut off any excess crepe. Cut the leaf-end into a leaf-shape and you have a beautiful, unique, painted crepe flower!

Savory Flax Seed Drop Biscuits

Reader. Dear reader. I am doomed. Any time I make my own recipe for something, it comes out delicious to the mouth, yet heinous to the eyes. Perhaps I should take some sort of class on making pretty foods. I don't know. Anyway, I'm sharing another original recipe this week, and I wanted to warn you just how ugly these might be if you try them. I promise that they taste wonderful and will be eaten by you or your guests in a trice! This ugly duckling is a swan of flavor.
Anyway, now you know why there are no pictures with this post.
In other news for the week, I got engaged! That boy and I have been together for six years. I'm pretty stoked.
But back to the real reason you're here.

Savory Flax Seed Biscuits:

Ingredients:
2 cups flour

3 tsp baking powder

1 1/2 tsp seasoned salt of your choosing

3/4 cup milled flax seed

1/4 cup butter (room temperature, or melted in the microwave if you're impatient like me)

1 Tbsp maple syrup

3/4-1 cup milk

Instructions:
Preheat oven to 450 Fahrenheit. Mix dry ingredients together in a large bowl, including flax seed. Add maple syrup and cut in butter. Add milk until dough is slightly sticky. Drop biscuit sized spoonfuls onto a baking sheet, and bake approximately 10 minutes or until peaks start to golden.

I served these with red beans and rice and a side of bacon roasted potatoes. We were happy nommers.

Salsa con Carly

Friends, this Christmas I received three small kitchen appliances, and it made my heart merry. Very merry indeed.
Two of these presents were coffee makers. One is a little Keurig contraption, which I have dubbed R2-D2 and whom makes me delicious and fanciful drinks. The other is a Mr. Coffee, who shall forever be known as C-3PO. Threepio is programmable and makes me large quantities of coffee before I am even out of bed. They are delightful, and perfectly compliment each other in every way.

The third gadget, however, fills a serious deficit in my life as a kitchen user. His name is HK-47 and he is my food processor.

The boy and I were invited over to a friend's place last Friday for board games and whatnot, and I knew that it was the perfect excuse to play with the new toy. My ambitious goal for the future is to follow Sunday Dinners' example and make a fanciful hummus. However, I had time to either look up recipes and do my research, or go to the store and just buy things that looked good. I figure the latter works better when you have any idea what actually goes into something. So I made salsa instead!

Salsa con Carly:

1 large can whole, peeled tomatoes

2 cans original Rotel

1 can large ripe olives, drained

1 can black beans, drained

1 pepper (I used an Anaheim pepper, and made sure to take all of the seeds out.)

1/2 large sweet onion

3-5 cloves of garlic

a generous squeeze of lime juice

1 Tbsp salt

20 turns on a peppercorn grinder (or pepper to taste)

1 tsp cumin

1 tsp ginger

Blend until awesome.

This recipe does make a huge batch, so it may work for you to dump half of the ingredients in a bowl and only have half in the food processor at a time. I had to go back and forth between two pitchers, but that's okay because HK-47 has three separate containers each with their own blades. He's awesome like that.
Be prepared for another recipe next week. You won't even need fancy tools for it!

New Year's Break

Happy Almost New Year!

So I know I managed to make a post last week, the day before Christmas Eve, while in another state visiting family. Turns out this week is even more hectic than that.

I'll be back next year, though, with an exciting melange of projects including, but not limited to:
Funky Honeycomb Hat and Scarf

WWII Era Hat Pattern Review and Matching Scarf
Patchwork Wall Art

and

Tea And Relative Dimensions In Stitchery

So have a happy and safe New Year, and I'll see you all next Friday!

Postcard from a Six-Pack

It's Friday! It's Friday!

I am five states away from my residence, having traveled 16 hours in a sedan with two dogs, an eighteen-year-old cat, and three adults. I honestly didn't think I would be posting this week, but sometimes things just turn out that way.
I am also taking my final college course of ever right now, which has been compressed to four weeks and is an online course. Wish me luck.

Now, when I moved so far away from my family, I took up sending mail. I always wanted to get mail when I was a kid and e-mail just isn't the same! So I badgered friends and family alike into sending me letters, and then, because I have no end to my free time, I scrapbooked the letters. When I wasn't writing letters, I was making stationery. I also sent postcards, generally as a cheat to send a letter that wasn't two pages. Then my friend, SarahBee, turned me on to Postcrossing. In case you didn't click that link, it's a magical site where you sign up to send and receive postcards from around the world. So then I had even more use for postcards. So then I made my own. And what did I have on hand? Something with a cool design? Something that I could easily recycle? Something that would return to my kitchen again and again, a

renewable resource, if you will?

Six-Pack Postcard

First, cut the broad sides off of your six-pack. I start by cutting around the edges, then snipping the inner pieces that separate the bottles. You won't use the entire side (unless you want a really huge postcard?) so you can be messy. This is a little tricky, so if you've just emptied the six-pack, you might want to find the safety scissors.

When the piece is safely removed, decide what placement you want for your postcard. I like to drink Blue Moon, and they have a very pretty design that gives me easy to follow lines. The one downside is that it makes for an "oversized" postcard, so I have to use letter priced stamps. If you want a standard size, for the US of A you can make the sides 6"x4.5". I like to use an existing postcard as a stencil to check size, and they're handy for the next step too!

Now that you have a lovely postcard shape, peel any excess waste off of the back from the part of the pack that separated the bottles. This can leave a slight marred spot, but no one will complain.

When you have a nice, neat surface on the writing-side of your card, use your existing postcard to draw a dividing line between the letter-area and the address-area. If it's as impossible for you to write a neat address as it is for me, I recommend also drawing four lines for the address. Your spare postcard which has been so handy till now will also make a lovely straight edge and right angle. Verily, it is the best of tools.

Finally, write a lovely letter and mail it to a friend. Or, you know, sign up for postcrossing and mail it to a stanger. Whatever you want.