Are there more perfect shoes for a crafty person? I saw these Campers at my local shoe store, Gravity Pope, and I love them! Measuring tape! They had in them in this yellow, or a grey (which looks more mauve-y on their website). I just love the yellow though, it seems more like the iconic measuring tape in my mind. I love the metal finisher on the end of the strap – another great measuring tape detail. To me, in the summer yellow is practically a neutral! I’d wear them with my denim shorts, my yellow skirt, my blue skirt, cute sundresses of any colour….

I also really like Camper shoes, they’re always so comfy, even the heels. I have a pair of grey suede heels, and some grey/royal blue flats and both are very comfy, although I probably should have bought a half-size bigger in the heels for shoes I could wear for longer amounts of time.

I suppose a true crafty person would make their own pair, out of actual vintage measuring tapes, but while I’m happy to make myself clothes, I have (so far) drawn the line at shoes. Who wants to be halfway to work when the stitching on their shoes bursts?!

What would you wear these with?

Would a sundress in this fabric be just a bit too too much?

The fabric is from the Recess line by American Jane Patterns – it came in a few colourways from what I remember, but this is my favourite.

It helps me prioritize, because when I go to put something on the list I see all the other things on the list, and think about why I might want those things more (or less) than the new thing I’m putting on there. Sometimes it really gets me thinking… if I’m almost on the verge of buying something/putting on my credit card, but then I see the reminder that friends are meeting up in Chicago this summer, and I could buy the handbag/yarn/whatever, or save the money towards that…. I’ve crossed one thing off the list since I started it before Christmas: my camera, which I love and was totally worth it.

The current thing I’m obsessing over on The List is this purse:

It’s Fossil’s Mason Top Zip, and I love everything about it. The short chain handle, the long detachable strap, the colours, everything. But it is almost $200 here in Canada (and $168 on the US site, not that much less) so on the list it goes. The problem with this item is that I imagine taking it on all the (possible) trips that are on the list, using it every day in the summer…. so The List isn’t doing a great job as a deterrent right now. But we have a honeymoon coming up, and while P understands the need for many different pairs of shoes, he doesn’t understand the need for multiple purses. I’ve probably got about 6-8 and it confuses him. But a girl needs options, am I right?

Does anyone else keep a list like this? And how many handbags do you own? Is that number more or less than your shoe collection?

River Cottage Everyday Veg

It’s a really fun book by a UK author/TV chef, and it only has veggie recipes in it. The author is not a vegetarian, but wanted to get people excited about eating vegetables, something I can totally get behind.

Mum bought us the UK edition, so there’s a lot of converting involved in the recipes. That’s a little odd, considering that Canada and the UK are both using the metric system, but he calls for cans of kidney beans measured in grams, and all the cans I buy at Safeway are labelled in mL and oz. But it’s nothing a scale and/or the conversion app on my iPhone can’t handle.

We’ve made a few recipes from it so far, but I wanted to talk today about the Mushroom Stoup. Called ‘stoup’ because he couldn’t decide whether it was a stew or a soup, it is a super-thick, mushroom-y meal in a bowl.

I’ve never been a fan of mushroom soup, but then my mushroom soup experience so far has really only been the gloppy, gooey canned stuff, or worse: stuff cooked in the gloppy, gooey, canned stuff like it’s sauce. ew. Salt overload! The photo looked so enticing, and it used some of the veggie stock we’d made (also from the book) a double batch of and frozen, so we decided to give it a go. I also wanted to try out the optional dumplings included in the recipe – just self-raising flour, butter, and cold water rolled into balls and tucked into the stew to cook for the last 15 or so minutes of simmering.

One of the ingredients was 50-60g of dried porcini mushrooms. I got to Safeway and found that while they carried dried porcini mushrooms, they were sold in packets of 14grams each. Ok, so I’ll need 4 packets, which will cost…. $18?!

I did debate about buying them for a few minutes, and in the end decided to give it a go. It was our first time making the recipe, so I figured we should follow the directions fairly closely. You soak the mushrooms in hot water for a while, then strain and reserve the water, and put the mushrooms into the pot, along with fresh mushrooms too. As we’d splurged on the dried mushrooms, I just used button mushrooms for the fresh.

OMG this meal was so good! It was amazingly flavourful, and the dumplings were delicious. Why haven’t I been making soups and stews with dumplings before now? I ended up using dumpling directions from a Jamie Oliver book I have and love, just because of the measurement weirdness. Same basic idea though.

When I told people at work I was eating mushroom soup, someone looked in my bowl and said ‘no way is that soup, there’s no liquid. And you have a fork in your hand!’ so the ‘stoup’ label is appropriate. I think this is what mushroom soup is meant to taste like, and it is nothing like the canned stuff!

When does a soup cross the line in to stew for you? When is it not even stew, and just a pile of mushrooms?

I managed to stay in on Monday the 23rd, and forgot a photo on the 29th, but it was a pretty great week this week! Lovely and warm, as you can see by the complete lack of hats for the week.

Things to note: Jan 23 & 24 – no woolies, just my new favourite black work sweater!

Jan 26: A rare photo of me wearing both mascara and lipstick! It was opening night that night, so I wore those two bits of makeup, and painted my nails ‘Break a Legwarmer’ grey by OPI. The gorgeous pashmina/shawl thing is from Anthropologie, and was a Christmas present in 2010 from mum.

Jan 27: You don’t need a hat in this weather if you have a hoodie!

So as you can see, when it gets warm, you don’t see the knitted items. In that 5-day collage, I wore my Clapotis once, and Teale’s scarf once. Otherwise, nothing. I think I need to make myself a thinner pair of mittens, because I was still wearing gloves on those days, but both pairs I have already are super-thick, and featured in last week’s post, when it was much colder, and you could barely see me for all the layers. But that’s winter in Alberta. -40C one week, +4 the next.

Have you been documenting your winter wear? Let me know!

I’m hoping to have the pattern out (free!) before the end of January. I’ve got some deadline knitting I’m also doing, but I really want to get this pattern out there.

Let me say this this week. It was cold. Damn cold. At least at the start of it.

Jan 16: my day off, so I went grocery shopping. All the accessories (and the lack of scarf) are inappropriate for walking in the weather, but I as I was driving and only walking across a parking lot, I did it anyway. This is not recommended, what if your car breaks down/you’re in an accident and you have to get out and wait for police/emergency/whatever? But I hate being too bundled up at Safeway. Those fingerless mitts were my first knitting-in-the-round project, and sit low enough on the back of my hand that it is easy to pop my thumb out of the thumb hole and pull off the gloves underneath without taking them off.

Jan 17: This is what -50C with windchill looks like. My thrummed mittens (like wearing your largest pair of oven mitts out of the house, but so warm), my super-long-Bob-Cratchit-scarf, my warmest (and itchiest, sigh) hat, all topped off with the dreaded puffy jacket w/furry hood. Yes, I needed both hood and hat.

I take a bit of a perverse pride in saying that I continue to walk to (and from) work in all weather, but when I was done work at midnight and it was -50C with the windchill…. I wussed out and P came to pick me up. Unlike a co-worker who rode her bike home that night. Had we known that at the time, P and I would have stolen her bike and forced her to ride home with us in the car.

January 18 & 19: Much like the days before, but I switched up hats to amuse myself under my hood. I really like the black and white one, it is the Side Slip Cloche from Boutique Knits. I just wish I’d made it a little bigger, to fit my giant head properly.

January 20 and 21 the weatherman lied to me. Each day it was forecast to be warming up that night, and as I’m heading home around midnight, I dressed to be a little chilly on the walk in, but better on the way home. This is not the way to plan, because the weatherman lies! Thus my surprised (and red) face after my walk in on January 20th.

January 21: only 1 hand-knitted item! That white hat is one of the few storebought hats that has ever fitted my very large head. ‘Onesize’ hats do not fit. Ever. If I want a nice hat (like that one) I have to go to an actual hat store, where hats come in sizes, and even then most of the womens’ hats don’t fit. My Ulmus shawl is a nice big one for keeping the chin warm (or up to the nose, as on Jan 18th), and was the only pop of colour in this outfit. I hadn’t worn all those white things together before, I think I was a little afraid of being mistaken for Bonhomme or something.

Then, on January 22nd, Mother Nature proved just how exciting Calgary’s weather can be… we had positive temperatures again! From -50 to +1 in 5 days. I pulled out my Odessa hat, the lightest and non-wooliest hat I’ve knit myself in celebration. Only 70% wool, and knit by me in 2007! Although, the prize for oldest knitted project goes to the wristwarmers from Monday, knit in 2003. P and I worked at the same time on Sunday, so he took the photos for me. The first few were accidentally taken with the ‘Dali’ Hipstamatic lens. Fun, but not too great for details. The shots were too fun not to include though.

I think this ‘week in woolies’ thing would be fun to do with a bunch of other knitters! Let’s see all those carefully hand-knit items out in the world, being worn. After all, isn’t that what they’re for? You don’t need a camera phone, you don’t need to make little collages*, just post a photo of some sort! Let me know if you’ve done it, and I’ll include the links in next Monday’s Week in Woolies post! Heck, they don’t even need to be hand knit, just show us what you look like bundled up for winter every day!

*If you like the look of the collages, try FD’s Flickr toys for something free, or if you have Photoshop, check out Pugly Pixel’s photo layouts!

I chopped up a lot of cabbage. LOTS of cabbage, but the right amount by weight, according to Martha. All that cabbage filled my 3 biggest mixing bowls. Then I added a little salt and some caraway to each bowl and got squishing. I was very concerned that it wasn’t all going to fit in the 3 jars I had, but after a lot of massaging, I dumped one mixing bowl into the other. Then a bit later, all the cabbage fit in one mixing bowl. Then, it only half-filled that mixing bowl! There is so much water in cabbage! It all packed very nicely into my thrifted mushroom jars. Apparently I have a thing for mushroom kitchen accessories, my favourite vintage pyrex pattern to find is this one. You can see them in a bunch of my other food posts on the blog too.

I followed Martha’s schedule for letting sit and opening the jars every now and then to release the gas. One jar made a satisfying ‘psssst’ sound every time I opened it, which was reassuring. Then, I kinda forgot about them. I remembered about a week or two after you were supposed to put them in the fridge, then I put off checking on them because I was scared of what I would find. When I did get around to it, one jar had gone disgustingly, stink-up-the-whole-kitchen fuzzy. The other two though, were fine! I tried a little forkful, and then spent the rest of the day saying to myself  ‘Do I feel sick? How is my belly?’ but everything was ok.

Then I realized that while I had fun making sauerkraut, I didn’t know what to eat it with. I’m not a big sandwich person, so I found a recipe for sauerkraut fritters. They weren’t bad, with some goat cheese on top, but not amazing. I think I’m just not a huge sauerkraut fan (except when friends K&E put it in their stuffing at Christmas. YUM!).

Have you ever made something more to see if you could, than because you’d eat it/wear it/use it when you’re done?

Hello, friend…

A few days ago, someone decided to make it ‘international bring doughnuts to rehearsal day’, and one of our lovely actresses brought a huge tray of doughnuts from Jelly, a gourmet doughnut bakery.

Dee-licious.

I figured it would be fun because there are so many pictures of in-progress knits on this blog, but not many of things being really worn. Modelling shots of the finished object don’t count. We’ll also be able to see patterns in what I wear (I can already tell you I wear my blue/green Clapotis all.the.time.) and if I look like ‘that crazy knitting lady’ as I’m walking down the street.

Here we are, starting with the photo you saw last week.

As it was a new idea, I wasn’t too great with remembering to take photos, but I seem to have the pose down pat. I also thought it would be fun to put in the temperature range for each day, because you will see a definite down-surge in matchiness as it gets colder. I would rather my ears and fingers not freeze off than look cool.

The blue gloves on January 13th are great warmer-weather gloves. I bought them at The Bay a few years ago because they match that blue-green scarf I wear so often, and because they’ve got little conductive fabric patches on the index fingers and thumbs so I don’t have to take them off to operate my iPhone. It’s a little fiddly making sure you’re pressing with exactly the right part of your finger, but it is better than taking them off.

January 14th I’m actually wearing at matching hat & mitten set knit from yarn I spun myself! I use the term ‘matching’ loosely, you can’t see mitten #2 but it was a yarn that had loooong colour changes, so let’s call it more of a ‘coordinating’ set than a ‘matching’ one. The scarf I’m wearing there (which I also wore on the missing Jan 12th – didn’t take a photo because it was too warm most of that day and the scarf very soon moved to my purse) was my gift in Kimberly Michelle’s ‘Made By You’ gift exchange. It’s lovely and soft and warm, and goes pretty well with my new hat and mitts! It was made by new knitter Teale. Thank you so much!

January 15th the temperature took a nosedive and I was under-dressed in the hat department. And, truth be told, the coat department. The historical weather data on The Weather Network doesn’t seem to include the windchill, but on most days when it is that cold, there’s also the lovely biting wind that makes it feel 5 to 10 degrees colder still. Luckily, P dropped me off at work, and a kind coworker drove me home that day so I didn’t turn blue. Those pink and purple mittens though? Great for the cold, as they’re lined so they’re really a mitten inside a mitten.

Summary of the week: I felt fairly coordinated all week, up until the 15th when I made choices that were bad for both matching, and the weather.

Forecast for this week: The temperature is going to hover around -30C until Sunday or so, so I will probably be wearing my hated down parka for most of it, and the warmest knits I own. I try to deny the fact that I live somewhere where an down puffer coat is necessary, but when the windchill makes it -40C*,  I give up and just put the damn thing on. Until that point, I’m very happy to deny the coldness by wearing my regular wool-blend coats (the white one is Anthropologie {$45 on Boxing Day!}, the grey is Soia & Kyo) with various layers of sweaters underneath.

What do you look like all bundled up?

*fun fact: Celsius and Fahrenheit match up at -40. -40C and -40F are the same temperature: F-ING COLD.

They’re greenish, have 3 red ‘eyes’, and claws that will latch onto you and suck your energy. P wanted me to make him a toque (‘hat’ or ‘beanie’ for my non-Canadian friends) that looked like a metroid. As you saw before, we bought yarn together in appropriate colours. Cascade 220 comes in a great selection of colours, including a heathered collection, which I find just gives a bit more life to the colours.

(the greens are heathered, the red and white are regular)

Then I made a very technical sketch:

And then, I started designing my very first hat! I knew going into this that the hat part would be easy – it was the claws that would be the hard part.

Nothing comes up on Ravelry when you search for ‘metroid’. Searching for metroid hat comes up with a lot of pictures of fleece ones, and some crochet ones – crocheting the claws would be much easier, but I’m a knitter through-and-through. I also wanted to make the claws functional as earflaps – it gets really cold here, and I didn’t want to make P a hat that didn’t actually keep him warm! That’s why we bought wool to make it out of.

The big question is: Do I know enough about knitting to make the fabric match my sketch?