I’ve also been working on my Goodale on and off. I started it one day before I got the yarn and cast on for Ruffaluffagus, and then I got so excited by the baby tunic and writing up the pattern as quickly as possible, so I set Miss Goodale aside for a bit.

The pattern is a breeze. It’s a top-down raglan. As long as I check myself every now and then to make sure I’m increasing as I should, it’s no problem.

It also has a pretty little i-cord edging. I think it makes it look polished and lovely.

I’m really enjoying the Frogtree Pediboo. It’s the first time I’ve worked with this yarn. It did feel like it was taking forever to get through the increases to separate the arms, but I think it will go much faster now.

I have a couple of other things on the needles that haven’t gotten a Ravelry project page yet. I’m knitting Ruffaluffagus in a 2 yr old size. I’m also working on something for Matt that’s semi hush-hush for now. I also desperately want to cast on a giant shawl to take to work with me. I have Litchfield in my queue and some alpaca blend yarns earmarked for it in my stash. My office is so cold sometimes! I’m talking 60 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s too much air conditioning for me.

Too good to be true, right? I’m sure many of you have some gorgeous sock yarn stashed away. Go grab the pattern and cast on!

Last night, I decided to play around and do a little prep ahead of time. This is what I ended up making:

It’s sort of a cross between bread pudding and French toast. I’ve been obsessed with cardamom lately, and I wanted to include that in the breakfast, so this little baby was born.

If you want to replicate this, here are some general guidelines. I’m not much of a measurer when it comes to cooking, so this is my best guess about the quantities:

The dish holds slightly more than 3 cups of liquid and is oven safe. If you have a larger dish, bread puddings in general seem flexible enough to alter ingredients to suit any size dish, so you could add an egg or two, use more bread, and increase the liquid to fill your dish.

Cardamom French Toast Bread Pudding

6 slices whole wheat bread (about 2 cups when cut into 1″ pieces)

3 eggs

1/2 cup half and half

1 cup whole milk

1/4 cup agave

3 tsp cardamom

2 TBS turbinado sugar (raw sugar)

Cut bread into 1″ cubes and place in dish. With hand mixer or immersion blender or by hand, mix half and half, milk, eggs, agave, and cardamom until smooth. Pour over bread cubes. Sprinkle raw sugar on top. Leave in refrigerator overnight, or at least for several hours. Bake at 350 for about 45 minutes, or until it slightly wiggles, but a knife poked into the center comes out clean.

If you’re feeling really decadent, you can also make an optional blood orange icing to go on top. I’m sure any orange would be delicious, but I happened to have one little lonely blood orange on hand that wanted to be involved.

For the icing I used 2TBS of butter, 1.5 TBS juice from the blood orange, and about 1/2 cup powdered sugar. I melted the butter, added juice and sugar, and stirred till smooth. Drizzle over the bread pudding and enjoy.

Hope you have a lovely Friday!

*Edited to add agave

It will be available in 3m, 6m, 12m, 18m, 24m, and 4 yr sizes. 

She’s crawling, mostly on her belly, but she can MOVE. And she wants to pull up on lots of things. Naturally, this made for a good way to capture the back of the sweater.

This is the Ellybob Cardigan. Click the link for more details. If I made it again, I think I would start with more stitches and increase less at the neck. It has a fairly high collar and I wish it were a bit wider. It was fun to make, and the back and forth Fair Isle wasn’t as difficult as I anticipated. If I made it again, I might go up a needle size overall, and up a needle size from that on the Fair Isle portion.

I have a feeling that Zooey is going to have eyes like Matt’s that seem to match whatever blue or green item they’re wearing.

I absolutely love how Matt and Zooey’s sweaters have turned out.

I may have to re-block Z’s sweater, or take out the bottom and add to it a bit. The width is great, but I think it would be better with one more stripe repeat at the bottom. She’ll be taller next fall when she’s likely to wear this the most.

I still need to get some pictures of just Matt in his sweater, to capture all of the essential details for the pattern, but you can see lots of it right now. I’m also debating redoing his collar to make it wider. The Cascade 220 Pyrite Heather color looks great on both of them. I hope it looks as good on me. Zooey is in a Neighborly pullover, and Matt is in a sweater of my own design, in case you haven’t been following the matching family sweater journey.

I feel so grateful to have such a wonderful family, and great friends that feel like more family. My first Mother’s Day was amazing. The afternoon went a little like this:

I hope everyone had as wonderful a day as I did.

The two closest guesses came from Jocelyn and Damaris: 

I will be contacting you ladies to find out where to send the yarn to Jocelyn, and how to get a pattern to Damaris. Thanks for playing! Reading all of the guesses was really fun. 

Then, I was listening to Episode 128 of Stash and Burn and they were discussing their total yardage of stash yarn. Nicole mentioned she had over 45,000 yards of yarn in her stash. Well, that sounded like a lot, but I felt more like those ladies understood me. I hadn’t realized before, but tabulating your total stash yardage is something you can easily figure out in Ravelry. How exciting!

There is a handy little button that lets you import your stash into an Excel sheet and download it. Then you can just sum the column to find out how many yards you have! I found out how many. It’s a lot… so I’m going to do a giveaway because it seems appropriate that I get rid of some yarn.

Leave a comment on this post your guess for the number of yards of yarn I have in my stash. This is just for fun, so please don’t go and do anything crazy and try to add it all up. That’s cheating. Whoever guesses the closest number without going over the amount (like The Price is Right) wins this lovely yarn:

A second runner-up will receive one of my patterns of their choice for free. I will choose a winner on Saturday morning at 9:00 am, so you have until then to make a guess! Take a look at my stash, but please just make a guess. One more hint, the Excel spreadsheet will not include anything up for trade or sale.

Happy guessing!

I’m too excited to  wait until Z is over her cold to post the finished object. I plan on photographing her and Matt at the same time, since they will be wearing their matching family sweaters out of the Cascade 220 Pyrite Heather.

I picked the button up at my LYS. It’s a Dill brand button. I used this kind on my Larch Cardigan also. I really like them.

I knitted a contrasting color for the hem, just because I like the look of it. Knitted hems are so satisfying. I even like the rhythm of sewing them down. Shhhh. Don’t tell anyone that I like finishing sometimes.

The inside of the sleeves has a little contrast too. This might end up making the sleeve too thick when she wears it. If that’s the case, I might undo it later, but for now I really like it. The cream color is some stashed Creative Focus Worsted, back when it was made by Nashua, not Rowan.

For now this lonely little sweater can just wait in the closet and anticipate all the future joy and play that its occupant will enjoy.

]]> http://knitthehellout.com/2013/05/07/a-lonely-sweater/feed/ 9 knitten neighborly-5 neighborly neighborly-3 neighborly-2 http://knitthehellout.com/2013/05/06/another-embryonic-sweater/ http://knitthehellout.com/2013/05/06/another-embryonic-sweater/#comments Mon, 06 May 2013 16:03:20 +0000 Cassy http://knitthehellout.com/?p=5453 ]]> Inspired by a comment from Ledra on my last post, I’m inclined to think of this yarn as an “embryonic sweater” rather than just a hank of yarn.

This is some Luna Grey Fiber Arts fingering weight yarn that I received last week for pattern support. This color is so lovely in person. It’s a smoky blue-grey bit of gorgeousness called Harbor. It’s her Astro sock yarn, which is 75% superwash wool and 25% nylon. I think it will be perfect for a baby garment: durable enough for play and machine washing, but soft enough to please the wearer too.

I really want to try the Aquila yarn as well. It has merino, cashmere, and nylon. Mmmmm. I think Jackie and I have similar color tastes, because I want every single color. I also got a cute little hemp project bag. Even though I have at least 6 small project bags, it seems that they’re all missing when I try to leave the house, so I’m grateful to have another one.

Well, this embryonic sweater will become a baby dress/tunic. I could wax poetic about the virtues of baby dresses because they eventually become tunics, but I think I’ve done that already several times on this blog, and if you knit for little girl babies, you probably already know this. I plan on writing up the pattern, and right now the picture in my head is too adorable for words, so you’ll just have to be in suspense for a little bit. I hope it turns out the way I plan.

I have been meaning to get some photos of the three sweaters I finished last week (two for Z, one for Matt). I re-blocked Matt’s sweater to lengthen it a bit, because it somehow lost an inch or so after I seamed it and he wore it for a few hours. It’s a mystery. I think re-blocking has solved it (I hope) because the length was originally there… Z has had a nasty cold for a week, so I’m less inclined to try for a photo shoot since she’s sniffly. She’s still in good spirits, but she hates when we wipe her nose, so I’ll just wait a bit. The pictures are coming. The cuteness will not be stopped.

*updated to add color name above