52 Reasons I Love You

Some things happened today!

Clue #2 of my MKAL was released today, and I got to look at the cable pattern.  I'm sort of pleased because it's as complex as promised, and sort of unhappy with it.  It's a wave pattern, not a "knot" pattern.  The cables won't spiral so much as wiggle, because the same threads of the pattern are always "on top".  Even more disappointingly (and the wiggling thing makes this twice as bad because it'll be really obvious) the socks are identical rather than mirrored.  That means, basically, that they'll both look like left socks.  I'm trying to decide whether I want to keep knitting them (as I'm already five rows in) or whether I want to frog back to the beginning of this clue and figure out how to mirror the pattern on the second sock (I think perhaps reversing the chart would work, but this requires more thinking).  I'm leaning toward frogging and reknitting, because dammit mirroring is important to me.  Identical socks are annoying.  Symmetrical socks are nice.

I'm a little OCD with my crafting.  Just a bit.

In other news, I finished something!

Tada!  It's that cowl I was working on yesterday!  It's lovely and snuggly, and it also works weirdly well as an earwarmer.  I have blue eyes and red hair, so if I put it where the blue end is around my face and the red end is around my hair, it looks amazing.  I love it a lot and will probably wear it a lot.  It's also completely flat because of the moss stitch (UK: double moss stitch), with no curling at all and plenty of texture.  Moss stitch is my favorite right now.  For some reason the "k1, p1" pattern doesn't bother me in this particular stitch.

My bread from yesterday was delicious, and I did make my soup today.  Aside from the cup of beans, I added two carrots, two sticks of celery, one small onion, one baby zucchini, and half a yellow squash.  After I cooked them in butter and oil for about a minute just to give them a little buttery flavor, I filled up my pot the rest of the way with water (I think it was a 3 quart pot?) and let it simmer a good two hours.  No need for broth, because the vegetables did it for me.  It did need salt at the end, and I should have added some spices when I cooked the veggies initially (but I know for next time).  It was delicious though.  If you don't like smooshy vegetables it would not be for you, but I happen to like them all soft and smooshy, so it was great.  I have a ton left, so I'll be eating it for lunch for the rest of the week.

Okay, time to explain the title.

Yoga And Bean Soup

Today's been a bit of a quiet day.  I got up at a regular morning time (which resulted in my mother inquiring if I was accompanying her to the park this morning; ha, ha) and pulled out my yoga mat for some sun salutations.  I haven't done that in over a year, and today reminded me exactly why I signed up for a yoga class: I love it to bits.  It's so relaxing and energizing.

I spend the better part of the middle of the day (11-3 or so) with Ian.  It's the last week he'll be here before school starts again so there were a lot of really tight hugs.  Both of us started crying at different times, which made the other one cry.  (His was really disconcerting; he just stared at me from about a pace away for a good thirty seconds before finally saying "I'm going to miss you," which is when I realized he was trying really hard not to cry and failing.)

The afternoon was quite a bit more productive.  I started making a cowl from some gradient merino handspun I did over a year ago.  It's a really nice skein and I'm sorry there's only 66 yards of it.  I dyed the fiber in five sections in ratios of red to blue: 100/0, 75/25, 50/50, 25/75, 0/100.  Those ratios don't give a perfect red-purple-blue gradient (especially not on grey and brown fiber), but it's actually gorgeous.  In the spinning and plying the transitions got even more muddled than they were already, which makes it very gradual indeed.  I'm knitting the thick-and-thin mostly-worsted yarn on 10.5mm needles, so it's pretty loose, and it's in moss stitch to give some texture.  It's turning out quite nice and I look forward to finishing.

Red, red-purple, purple, and the very beginning of purple-blue.

I also took some time to make a strap for my yoga mat, since I expect to be hauling it to school twice a week (then back into my house for practice).  I still have some ends to weave in somehow, but it looks excellent and functions perfectly so far.

I used the brightest rainbow variegated yarn ever, but held it with black to tone it down a bit.  It worked wonders!  

In addition to the fiber-type crafting I did today, there was some food-type crafting as well.  I've had a bit of a craving for both the process and the finished product of homemade bread, so I finally just went to the kitchen and did it.  I was a bit freaked out by the refusal of my dough to rise in the pan, but a bit of poking around on the internet informed me that it was probably just too cold, so I put it in a warmed (but not on!) oven and it promptly puffed right up.  See?