Embroidery Floss and My Family

Over the holidays, the unthinkable happened. My mom gave me her boxes of embroidery floss.

These boxes are full of at least 100 colors of embroidery floss, each wound on a card with that color’s number written on it in my mother’s beautiful, perfect handwriting. I honestly couldn’t believe it when she gave them to me. These boxes were the possession of my mother’s I most coveted growing up. I know for some it’s a piece of heirloom jewelry or furniture. Nope. I constantly climbed in her closet to grab these boxes and sort through the colors.

Usually I needed them to make friendship bracelets, which my mom wasn’t crazy about. Yards of embroidery floss haphazardly tossed about in a braid that was quickly abandoned. More than a few times she asked me not to use her embroidery floss. I don’t think I listened. How could I resist all the colors, all in one place? Maybe those moments are responsible for my total love of color to this day.

Around age eight, my mom’s mom taught me to cross-stitch. That was also frequently responsible for my raids of my mom’s embroidery floss collection — including for a secret project when I stitched my mom a pansy, her favorite flower, for Mother’s Day. I did the work all in the safety of my grandmother’s motorhome that parked in our garage for months during the winter when they visited. I guess you could say embroidery floss tied the women in my mom’s side of the family together.

So, these boxes and I have a bit of a history. I’d say it’s one-sided — me coveting and using the floss at my own discretion — but I’m tempted to think the colors benefitted from my use as well. Who else appreciates five vibrant shades of red more than an eight-year-old, needing to make the perfect friendship bracelet?

I guess the answer’s me, over a decade later, reinvigorating my love for embroidery floss, and my mom, who has always shared her colors with me. I hope she knows how much these boxes mean to me.

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Secret Embroidery Project!

Mischief is afoot in the form of some secret embroidery.

Stay tuned for further developments. Hopefully one of those developments will be the continuing improvement of my French knots…

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NORO: Not Optional to Resist Opportunity

Here’s a little logic exercise for you.

A. If it’s Noro and sparkly, then hell yes.
B. It’s Noro Aurora.
C. It’s sparkly.
D. On sale at the yarn store

Therefore: Hell yes.

Premise D wasn’t necessary, but sure was the deciding factor.

Behold the Multidirectional Scarf, knit in Noro Aurora on size 5 needles. I don’t think I’m capable of not loving this scarf.

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Vegan MoFo: Oven-Roasted Vegetables

Dinner last night was very pretty. Witness:

I decided to roast some vegetables in the oven. What you see is a mix of:
– Brussels sprouts
– Torpedo onion
– Carrots
– Red and gold beets
– Sweet potatoes (white and orange-ish)

Roasting vegetables is so easy and really quick! All you need to know about how to roast vegetables is:
– Cut them into roughly even pieces for even cooking. Sturdier things (like beets) can be a little smaller so they’ll cook more quickly.
– Coat liberally with olive oil. According to Alton Brown, this keeps moisture in the veggies and helps them not burn.
– Season as desired (salt, pepper, whatever) and toss in the oven for about 40 minutes at 400 degrees Fahrenheit. Veggies are done when easily pierced with a fork.

In addition to being pretty and rainbow-colored, oven roasted vegetables are also delicious. As the boy said last night, “How are mine already gone? I tried to eat them slowly!”

We also had artichokes with dinner. I love artichokes and should have been eating more while they’re in season! Each of them was a buck a piece at the farmers’ market. Soooooo good.

How to cook/make artichokes:
– Trip 1/2″ off top and pointy things with scissors
– Trim stem
– Toss in a pot of boiling water for 30-40 minutes. Done when bottom is easily pierced with fork.

These are good with melted margarine/butter, but also with some soy sauce and/or lemon juice. I think artichokes might be my favorite food.

Go forth and eat vegetables!

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Beans + Tomatoes + Yarn = Burgundy

Today’s blog post is brought to you by the color burgundy.

These are some cranberry shelling beans I bought at the farmers’ market. Check out the pods! I think they were referred to as “tongues of fire” beans, and I couldn’t resist. The beans have beautiful cranberry speckles when shelled. Unfortunately, the speckles disappear when cooked.

Pretty pretty. I cooked these for 20-30 minutes in boiling water. I mixed them with some cooked green beans, lemon juice, parmesan, and salt and pepper.

We had a fabulous vegetarian dinner last night, totally veggielicious:

Sorry for the picture quality! The beans are in the lower left-hand corner there. In the lower right is some spaghetti squash and yellow squash, with a little bit of Parmesan. The upper right-hand is the tomato salad I love to make, and the upper left is some red fruit: Flavor King pluots, raspberries, and strawberries. Nothing added!

Seems like burgundy is a serious color theme in my life lately. I made some “sun-dried” tomatoes in my oven — sliced up about 1/2″ thick, on aluminum foil, for 8+ hours. I’m looking forward to using them in the winter:

And hey! I’ve started knitting a February Lady Sweater, just like everyone else it seems. I was inspired by brainylady’s post about it, and could no longer resist. I’m not one for knitting sweaters usually, but I think this one might just turn out super cute! I was really drawn to the shape of it, which seems incredibly flattering, and the prospect of picking out really cute wood buttons for it. I’m using Cascade 220 wool:

I guess Autumn truly is here. I can’t wait for leaf-crunching season to really set in.

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Farmers’ Markets Make My Weekends Happy

Alarm clock goes off. 6 AM on a Saturday. Gross. I flop out of bed and manage to grab a hoodie and my keys through the fog of slumber. There are a few cats meandering the streets, but that’s about it. It’s early. It’s dark. I’m tired.

But I’m happy. Or I will be. Early Saturday morning can only mean one thing: I’m working the farmers’ market again!

This is a real tea towel that we had around, so we hung it up today. Love it. I feel almost as happy as they look. After some coffee and an apple.

Today was a great day at the farmers’ market. We had insanely sweet Gala apples, lots of our organic dry farmed Early Girl tomatoes (our main focus), giant Walla Walla onions easily six inches in diameter, and some beautiful purple bell peppers and Anaheim peppers:

Will someone get on it and make me some sock yarn in those colors? I love all the purple we ended up having today at the stand; between the bell peppers, our cabbage, the red Italian Torpedo onions, and our purple flowers, I’m in color heaven.

So, as I was saying, it was a great day to be selling at the farmers’ market. The sun came out about 7:30, and there were a lot of happy people walking around, looking for the last remnants of summer’s stone fruit, getting serious about beets (so many beautiful beet greens!), buying up summer squash and zucchini flowers… the vendor two stalls down brought his mandolin, so we even had lovely tunes intermittently throughout the day.

One of the best parts about the market is the kids. One kid came up to the stand with his mom, who was buying tomatoes. He told me and my co-worker we “looked funny with our aprons on.” “Oh?” I asked, “And what do we look like?” He thought a bit, and responded, “Tomatoheads!”

You know, there are worse things to be.

Check out these conjoined tomatoes! We usually snag the funny-looking tomatoes and put them on display near our scale. I thought these were just too cute, being joined at the stem and all.

I’m always impressed by how red our tomatoes are. And part of the reason they taste SO GOOD (and why any fresh tomato will taste way better than conventional tomatoes) is because they’re allowed to ripen on the plant. According to my hero Alton Brown of Good Eats (from whom I get much of my food knowledge), industrial tomatoes — those sold in big grocery stores, even if they are organic — are picked when they’re just starting to blush. They’re then put in a room with chemicals that make them redden. Now, they may get red… but their ripening, or sugar development, stops the moment they’re picked. They may get prettier, but they’ll never get tastier.

And that’s why tomatoes from your garden or local farmer are downright yummier — because they’re actually ripe. I thought I didn’t like tomatoes until this summer. What I realized was I do like tomatoes. Real tomatoes.

Speaking of tomatoes… and tea towels:

I’m not going to get into details right now, but I will tell you that the stains are from tomatoes, and that this probably saved us half a roll of paper towels today! Stay tuned for total crafty and veggie dorkiness.

P.S. Obtained new Mason-Dixon book. Overcome with sudden urge to add to my kitchen cotton yarn stash. Predict I will not be able to resist the appeal of more knit objects in my kitchen.

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I Love Purple (Or, Hello New Koigu Socks)

For the first time in a long time, I’ve finished a complete pair of socks.

These are totally going to be the socks I wear almost daily for a while, and probably with the shoes you see pictured here, too*. Don’t they look great together?

I bought this yarn while I was on vacation in New York, at Purl Soho. It’s Koigu KPPPM, color is 805 (I think), and the pattern is Anastasia.

When choosing a pattern, I wanted something that would showcase all the colors of the Koigu — the gorgeous mix of intense purple, lavender, black, and grey that I just had to have. I chose Anastasia because it would keep me interested and add some visual interest to the socks without obscuring the colors (or the colors obscuring the pattern). I chose to make the socks symmetrical, with yo k2tog on one side and yo ssk on the other. I love how the above picture shows their symmetry!

I knit these socks using the Magic Loop method on size 1 Addi Turbos. I have been choosing this method more lately because I don’t have to worry about stitches falling off my dpns or snapping them in two by accident. I love using the Addis because I can be finicky about the way metal sounds when it slides against itself, and these are lovely and smooth.

Another thing I love about this pattern is how one spiral gets to swoop near the heel before winding around the leg. There’s something very elegant and graceful about it and the way the yo’s open up more on the inside of my ankle. And check out that short row heel! I’ve been getting a lot better — the secret is just to pull a little tighter than you think you need to when you’re wrapping, and on the stitch after the wrap.

Perfect socks to start Autumn with, don’t you think?

*These are my lovely red Earth Vegan shoes. I love that they’re totally vegetarian and are shoes that look really cute with knit socks. They have a low heel in the back, too, so I can show off my worksmanship! A little more than I might justify spending normally on shoes, but they’ve been around for years and I love them.

ETA: It appears Earth doesn’t sell these shoes anymore, but I have a pair of their black Mary Janes that show off my knit socks well, also. Great company for shoes to wear with handknit socks!

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Noro Striped Scarf

Knitting content! As promised.

I recently completed a striped Noro scarf (brought to my attention in brooklyntweed’s blog), made out of a total of four skeins of Noro Silk Garden. I’ve always loved Noro colors, and this scarf didn’t let me down.

I was so happy to get a sunny day so I could get a decent shot of the delicious Noro colors! I love how the Morning Glory colors pick up on my favorite parts of the scarf. Colorways were two of the purple-ish color, one of the green-ish color, and one multi + brown color. (Sorry. Ballbands be damned.)

My favorite section:

I love patterns that let the beauty of Noro colors shine through and do their thing — I found myself questioning murky sections but kept going, and I think they let the brighter sections shine.

Yarn: Noro Silk Garden, 4 skeins
Gauge: Something squishy, on size 7 needles
Modifications: Nah. Straightforward and lovely.

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