Knit is a Four-Letter Word

My current obsession is Wishy Washy Fishy Tawashi.

So far, I’ve made approximately 30 of these wee little beasties.

Brilliant thing about these – they use truly miniscule amounts of yarn. All those scraps from making other washcloths? Perfect!

Candy Corn Tawashi! (For those non USAns,

In a tea bag swap, I received a garter stitch knitted tea bag bag, i.e tea bag holder. This is my version – adapted from the ballband pattern. My first ones used velcro, but it gets caught on the cotton, so now I use press studs (aka snaps).

These bags fit approximately 5 or 6 tea bags. This is part of a package of washcloths and Tawashi that I donated to a Breast Cancer fundraiser. I neglected to take pix of the rest, but left this one at home in error – added a tea bag and neglected to put it into the package with the rest. I’ll be delivering it to the winner soon.

Another favourite washcloth pattern is the Waffle Knit I adapted the pattern to make a soap sack, using Breast Cancer fundraiser yarn. It’s a surprise for the daughter of a friend who’s just been diagnosed.

The tie is a 3 stitch i-cord through eyelet holes. It takes a tiny amount of yarn, and knits up so quick, I can see making more of these. I even did a crochet ruffle edge – found that in a magazine and added it on.

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Free Association, once a week from Unconscious Mutterings.

First responses, thoughts?

1. Yacht :: Ocean
2. Paula :: Deen
3. Delete :: Command X
4. Auto :: Pilot
5. Obsolete :: Redundant
6. Dedicated :: Loyal
7. Old :: New
8. Convince :: Persistence
9. Poster :: Heart-throb
10. Erase ::Purge

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Today was a beautiful day, one of the lovely fall days with a bit of that later than Summer sun, and a bit of a warm with undertones of cool breeze.

Yesterday was the last family outdoor thing for this year, next weekend is the last CSA Farm share pickup. Back to supermarket vegetables for a while, sigh.

I have a couple of eggplants left, and plan to make this recipe but first needed to make some oven dried tomatoes (scroll down to the end of that Eggplant recipe).

Our Farm Share is a medium sized bucket – usually a bit more than we can eat, but we don’t drop back down to the mini sized basket because of the tomatoes. Every year, the tomatoes are wonderful, and we fill the base of our basket with several layers of organic heirlooms – green zebra, red zebra, brandywine, roma, cherry, pear, pineapple, peach, plum, and red and yellow.

Yesterday’s house smell of chilli has been replaced with roasted tomatoes and capsicum.

Other seasonal traditions are happening – Jeff and I went to our favourite local icecream place, the Custard Corral. During the summer, they’re open until 10PM, now they’re winding down and closing at 9PM. Their last event will be something Halloweeny around the end of this month, and then they’re done until March or April of 2010, weather depending.

Our traditional icecream is a small cone, chocolate and vanilla twist. We had an old person moment, when we compared the price of icecream over my 12 years in the US. When I first got here, for two of those same small chocolate and vanilla twist icecream cones, we’d have had change from $US3.00, and tonight it was $4.07, with the tax. Not a complaint, just an observation.

The icecream quality has not changed, despite a change in ownership. The new owners own another rival, across town icecream place, but smartly changed not a thing about the Custard Corral. They understand, in Millville, everyone has *their* icecream place, messing with that would be business suicide. From my informal survey, it’s mostly geographic – people like and go to the icecream place closest to where they live, with the added wrinkle of going to place nearest to where they first lived, and continuing that patronage, despite moving into a different part of town.

The Custard Corral is my icecream place, it’s the first place I went to in my first visit (1997) to the US. I will buy the banana soft serve from Blinker’s Custard (the other side of town) because it’s made with real bananas, and I will buy the strawberry/banana twist from Flipper Custard because it is very good, but in both cases, it’s a speciality that only they carry. My small chocolate vanilla twist cone is Strictly Custard Corral.

Another marking of the season – we closed some windows in our house. I love the cool nights, and also love the cross breezes our house manages in the Summer. I’m not as keen on the cross breezes going through the bathroom in the morning – makes the morning ablutions a little more Spartan than I’d like. It’s early autumn, so the windows will be opened again, for that brief warm weather blast that lulls me into thinking for a moment that the cold is done.

We like to acclimatize to the weather. First tuurning off the ceiling fans, and then closing the windows. Then wearing more clothes around the house, more blankets on the bed. As late as we can push it, usually after at least one hard frost, then we eventually succumb and put the central heating on. It’s a nice setup with the timer Jeff installed a few years back – cool during the week days when we’re not in the house (Mon-Thur) other than a quick lunch, warmer for our at home evening and morning hours. Back down to cool (55F/13C) overnight, around 11PM on weeknights, later on the weekends.

No time this weekend for a favourite season ritual – to Sunny Slope farm for their apple cider. It’s really good, some of the best cider I’ve ever had. They wait until the middle of October, until they have a good blend of apples, including our favourites, Winesaps. It’s very tasty, cold out of the fridge, or warmed through. Not to mention all of the apples they sell – we don’t buy apples the rest of the year because we’re spoiled by the best seasonal apples in the autumn.

Driving around after dark, the sound of crickets blanketed all other sounds. Another signal that Autumn is now in full swing. The peeps are long gone, not to be heard again until the Spring.

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Tonight was the last outside family event for 2009 – Cathy’s annual Harvest Feast. Everyone brings food, and we eat, sit around the bonfire, watch a movie on the shed wall, and then make s’mores.

Jeff made his famous chilli – not as hot as usual, but great flavour, and honey crackles (my recipe, but I ran out of time today to get them made, so Jeff stepped in.) I had a bowl of the chilli, and also had chicken and dumpling soup, carrot and raisin salad, hot dogs, hot chocolate with pumpkin spice creamer and a good dozen marshmallows (I like a bit of hot chocolate with my marshmallows!), palmiers and a good handful of cheese puffs. I didn’t get to try at least a half dozen other good things – split pea soup, irish stew, gnocchi with tomato sauce. Everything was good, but extremely filling.

After the movie (Xmen – Wolverine – basically just a litany of reasons to see a majorly buffed up Hugh Jackman wearing not a lot), I was introduced to S’mores. I’ve heard of them, I knew they involved marshmallow chocolate and sweet biscuits (aka cookies called Graham Crackers – for those non-USA’s, these are pronounced Gram Crackers) , but was not completely clear on the consolidation of these three ingredients. As was evinced by my first attempt, where I set the marshmallow on fire, but didn’t get the center melty enough to melt the chocolate bar when smooshing it between two graham crackers.

I ate it anyway – chocolate! marshmallow! Bikkie! What’s not to like? Jeff demonstrated the correct technique on the second one, which I attempted to eat. Only to discover that while one s’more is quite sweet, two s’mores are more sugar than I can handle. Most of the second s’more hit the rubbish bin, while I redressed the overly sweet balance by downing another good handful of lairy orang Cheese Balls.

Many jokes were made about my potential upcoming technicolour yawn, but I went to boarding school and flatted alone on a very tiny budget, the flora and fauna of my digestive system are pretty much iron clad.

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34 days from start (8/28) to finish (9/30), whoosh!
Check out how truly truly close it was between first and second place.

Glory 2009

The team that came (just barely) second was the Chronicles of Yarnia, and they also did a kick arse job.

It’s great to have a group like that to compete against – it’s like when I’m swimming laps, I always, always go faster when there’s someone in the lap next to me.

A photo post will follow, wanted to get this up on time for October 1st. (I also need to work out why I have five of the “You might like this!” buttons across each post, it’s edging over into the navigation and I do.not.like.)

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