Busy Day

Today we just chilled around the house, so I was able to do a lot of little projects (and the dishes, and the laundry...).

I made caramels for Christmas gifts this last December and they turned out pretty well, but they weren't very chewy, at least not until you had sucked on them for awhile. So I tried again with a different recipe. They have the great caramel consistency I was going for, but didn't taste nearly as good as the last batch. But I wrapped some up and put some of them into chocolate. I'll try again with the other recipe but use the temperature directions of this one. Here's my slab o' caramel ready to cut. The recipe that tasted really good is located here: http://readymademag.com/printarchive/index.pl?id=1234



I had been working on a baby blanket and sweater for little Wolfi, but, of course, I ran out of yarn just 4 rows away from being done. So I finally picked up more yarn yesterday and finished it off.


Then I took the matching sweater that looks like a little blanket-gone-wrong and sewed it up into the Wolfi's baby sweater. This pattern is by my favorite knitting pattern maker, Elizabeth Zimmerman. Her patterns are intelligent and avoid the things I don't like to do (like sewing too many seams, or purling...). This amorphous blob shown on the right becomes this very cute sweater which, because it was done in garter stitch, should grow with Wolfi. If you look closely at the top of the picture, there's Dugan's face in there. He always wants to be in the middle of whatever we're doing...

One of my goals for this year was to learn intarsia knitting, the use of multiple colors to make a pattern. When I pulled out the yellow sweater/blanket set, I realized that I had finished it except for tucking in all the ends (which I always put off as long as possible). So perhaps when I'm ready to gift it i'll finally get around to finishing it.