illicit diversions

I’ve been on something of a sugar binge, and nothing will do but for me to teach myself how to make the caramels I want. The first time I tried to make caramels, I used this recipe from 101Cookbooks, and they mostly came out okay-ish, but either due to the extremely high temperatures inside that apartment (that place was a sauna) or some other deficiency, they tended to melt at room temperature. My next try was these orange-scented caramels from the Craftzine blog, which came out like rocks. Hard sticky ones. My dad lost a crown to those suckers.

However, a little help from Google brought me to this recipe, from about.com of all places, and I have found my happy caramel place, where the caramels are perfect and wonderful (and don’t need corn syrup).

Time: ~30 mins to make, ~2hrs or so to cool
Cheapness: not bad.
Difficulty: pay attention and be bold
Meal: dessert
Servings: not enough for your entire Christmas gift list, but enough for that small party you are going to.

I’ve noted my modifications in itallics (and strikes).
Read the rest of this entry »

Mitchco taught me an amazing secret recently! Using Google Alerts to tell me when craigslist (or other sites) list the toys I want!

Specifically, I’ve been looking for a Roomba of my very own to help keep my apartment clean given my extreme unwillingness to clean on a regular basis.

At google.com/alerts. I entered the search term roomba site:CITY.craigslist.org and it gives me alerts any time someone posts a listing for a roomba in my city! I also did it for DealNews.com.

And lo, Dealnews.com told me about a roomba was being sold by Woot.com, and it was much cheaper than anywhere else, and I bought it! And I didn’t have to spent time checking all over the internet every day to find it!

True Story: I had completely forgotten that I had changed the layout on my blog, so I was pleasantly surprised when I visited just now.

To make this a slightly less worthless entry, I will also tell you that I am plugging away at my Anne Elliot Spencer. I recently finished the second half of the front, and I just cast on for the first sleeve! I’m … still not done!

But actually, the whole point of me posting is because I want to enter another Grosgrain giveaway.

The first thing is this lovely dress! I am in love with the buttons down the sleeves. Just-above-elbow-length sleeves are my favorite length for sleeves! And buttons! The other giveaway is for these rose earrings, right here! I don’t know if I would be able to do them justice, but I want them anyway! Either way, it’s an awesome idea, which I will have to remember for Christmas time. I bet my sister would love a set of ‘Rose’ earrings.

Grosgrain is doing another giveaway, for a dress from Shabby Apple, and while I don’t really want the dress they are giving away, I am really liking a few of their other dresses. I’m really sad that the first one doesn’t seem to come in colors besides fuchsia and black. The second one comes in black and houndstooth. I’m really tempted, but their sizing kind of freaks me out for some reason. I think I don’t usually buy such expensive clothing online.

I’ve finally finished one of my knitting projects! it seems like it has taken me forever and a day, but the handwarmers I wanted to give mitchco for Christmas are finally completed! Actually, I finished them and mailed them off about a few weeks ago. But I hear they were well-received!

Instead of the stripes called for in the pattern, I decided to make these babies solid yellow, with a sporty red stripe across the back of the hand. I also made them extra-long in both directions for increased warmth. The first pair of these that I made came out nicely, but I would have liked them to cover a bit more of my fingers.

I haven’t actually gotten that much better at making the thumbs, but I have gotten better at knowing which stitches to pull together to get the holes to close up.

I don’t think I’ve ever posted about this, but there is a lovely woman who makes beautiful clothes (mostly for her daughters, but recently she seems to be branching out into adult things), takes breathtakingly BEAUTIFUL pictures of the, and then gives the clothes away!

The whole reason I am posting all this is that to enter the giveaway, you have to post a link back to her blog.  And also, to show you what a pretty dress I’d like to win!

Isn’t it beautiful?!  For more pictures, see her blog here.

It would be just the thing for a jaunt downtown or down to Barton Creek.

I bought some beautiful Manos del Uruguray Silk Blend  from the Hill Country Weavers in a lovely moss color a couple months ago.  This is the first yarn I’ve bought that came in skeins instead of pre-wound balls.  Foolishly, I did not have them wind it at the shop, because that’s how I roll.  Instead, after some cursory research,  I purchased one of these, called a Nostepinde, from Ghstworks on etsy. After a fair bit of frustration (not to mention Real Life busy-ness), I found these instructions for using the Nostepinde that helped a great deal. I am now about a quarter of the way though winding my first skein.

In retrospect, it undoubtedly would have been more time-efficient to get one of the plastic ball winders, but I do hate to buy plastic things and it was cheaper, so I got the Nostepinde instead.  It is actually nicely medatative to sit and wrap the yarn around the stick.  But it does take forever.

A few months long time ago, when this movie came out, pretty much everyone was telling me how fucking hilarious it was.  Even the more feminist-leaning ones were apologetically liking it.  “Hilarious!” they told me. I finally got my Netflix up and going again, and it showed up last week a while ago, and I watched it and wrote this entry, and then promptly forgot to post it.

I… was not really impressed.
To backtrack for a moment, there is a trope, most often found in half-hour sitcoms, but can be seen in many other places.  It is the Hot Wife Married to Fugly Loser Dude.  In SitcomLand, all the women are HOTT, and they always marry fugly-ass losers who can’t wipe their own ass without help.  For (hopefully) obvious reasons, I hate this trope with the passion of a thousand burning suns.

Knocked Up has exactly this trope, and I just can’t get past it.  Katherine Heigle is gorgeous.  Her character is in the entertainment business, and is in front of the camera.  She is HOTT. Not only is she hot, but she is apparently (at least) moderately intelligent and has a career on the upswing. The dude who is played by one of those frat-boy comedy actors whose name I can’t be bothered to remember is not hot.  He isn’t completely fug, but he’s definitely not even in the same league as her.  Add on to that the fact that he is a skeezy-ass loser with no income, and no ambition beyond building a completely revolting website devoted to nudity in film, I completely FAIL to buy the premise that a) she would sleep  with him once, no matter how drunk, and b) that she would continue to associate with him once the pregnancy was discovered and she found out what a loser he was.

Add that COMPLETELY IRRITATING AND ENRAGING trope to the movie’s already repugnant handling pregnancy and the issues surrounding an accidental pregnancy, and Knocked Up is definitely not going in my list of classics any time soon.

According to the remains of this extra-old entry, there were some things that I thought the movie did well (perhaps the montage where Fugly Loser Dude halfway gets his act together), but I can’t remember what they were for the life of me, so I’m going to leave it at that.

I have been working hard on my Spencer, and I have just done the cast-off for the neckline on the first front piece!  I am so incredibly excited!

Have a wee little picture from my laptop’s webcam camera.  I’m too lazy to get up and get an actual camera.

I actually finished the back of the Anne Elliot Spencer the other night!  I just now measured it, and it is exactly long enough!

The pattern gave no directions about what exactly was supposed to happen (binding off, what have you), so I just threaded a bit of junk yarn though the loops and called it a day.

Now for the rest of the garment.

I decided that what I needed to do in order to conquer the clover pattern was to do a practice swatch thingie.  So I cast on as if for the cardigan again with some junk yarn I have hanging around.  That actually was a huge help. I figured out the pattern, and then practiced my increases until I felt like I knew what was going on. It has worked out pretty well, so far!

Because of the way the pattern is written, it took me a while to figure out if I was supposed to repeat the row of knitting only  in between the rows with the YO’s that create the holes.  The answer is YES, but I’m a dufus and had to read the section on the clover pattern a few times before I realized that.

FULL STEAM AHEAD!

I am now nearly done with the back piece, and I’m hoping to cast on for the front pannels soonish.  Pictures to come!

I found a few neat people recently.

Craftzine linked to The Ongoing Project’s crocheted collar, which looks beautiful!  It is going on my list of things to try out sometime soonish. I’m not exactly sure what 2-ply means, so I see some experimentation in my future.  I have some very light stuff I use to crochet snowflakes, but I’m not sure if that’s too light or too heavy!

I recently came across Whip Up, which I feel like I’ve seen before, but maybe not. At any rate, it is a great little collection of how-tos and tutorials for most things crafty.  I re-discovered a nifty little idea for reusing fabric scraps and old egg cartons.  *adds to list*

I finished the lower portion of the Anne Elliot Spencer, only to reach the clover patter, fuck it up, and rip the entire thing out and start over. I have once again reached that point, and I think this time, I will write out for myself what I think is going on, and move my stitch markers pre-emptively and *crosses fingers* it will go much better this time. I need to look up how to do the increases, which I think take place on each end of the pattern, and are not described within the clover pattern instructions.

I have two projects that I’m actively working on at the moment, despite my project list at ravelry claiming I have 4. (It took me a while to figure out the difference between queue, project, and favorites.)

The first is a pair of the Daisy Stitch Hand Warmers from Purlbee. This is actually my second time knitting them, and I like to think that making the first set taught me a lot about knitting. I’ve gotten a bit better at managing the tension so the knit-3-together part isn’t quite so painfully difficult. I’m also changing up the pattern in that instead of doing stripes of different colors, they’re going to be yellow with one or two red stripes across the back of the hand, above the thumb hole! It looks really cool in my head. I also need to go read some thumb/finger patterns, because I’m not quite convinced I’m doing it right yet. There is a lot of post-knitting tightening things up in that area.

My second project is Anne Elliot Spencer by Canary Knits. It is an adorable little cropped shrug thing, the technical term for which is apparently a ’spencer’. Who knew? I’m starting that in a the nasty cheap acrylic from Red Heart, as I feel like I’m going to do some serious fucking up before I get it right. Somehow, I feel like I shouldn’t use the nice yarn until I am confident in my ability to make the actual pattern. I did cave and pick up a beautiful orange yarn for my second go at the spencer. I have some amazing dinosaur buttons for Jo-Ann’s that I feel will really make it an amazing garment!

I also have a pretty bright pink that is just barely hot enough for me to want to wear. I want to make it into a super-hot-yet-somewhat-badass cardigan/shrug item, but I haven’t quite found the perfect pattern.

The Watch It Now thing from Netflix is actually pretty cool. You can watch those crappy movies and TV shows that don’t really seem worth the several day wait for the disc to be mailed to you, and you can see the things you actually care about in DVD quality with the regular mail service.

That said, the first thing I watched that way was kind of a dud.

The sad thing is, this movie has all the hallmarks of a story I could really like. Ridiculous plot? Check. Angsty misunderstanding? Check. Lies, more lies, and selfish deceit? By the metric fuckton. So, I will completely admit, I was primed to love this stupid piece of shit movie. Except then it all went to hell in a sexist hand basket. (Are we actually surprised? No, but a girl can dream.)

I actually kind of liked the first half of the movie. Ridiculousness, silly scenes, overblown conniving – exactly my cup of tea. It was how everything was tied up at the end that completely ruined it for me.

1) Hypocrisy. Okay, so yes, everyone does it. But I expect a little more from my fictional characters. She is upset because he was doing it on a bet that will determine his career trajectory? When she was doing it all for an article? When all is said and done, those who live in glass houses shouldn’t be throwing stones around that casually. Both of them get a giant FAIL here.

2) Him. They did a pretty good job of showing what she saw in him, but what did he see in her? The entire movie, we’re shown him time after time gritting his teeth and trying to hang on to her, all for the sake of a bet that will bolster his career. We get a little bit of what he’s feeling during the visit home, but I’m not convinced enough for it to counteract everything that has come before. So his mad dash to get her back when he thinks she really did love him didn’t do it for me. Plus, it’d be cool to see him liking something else about her besides her love of basketball and ability to use his relatives to cheat at cards.

Which brings us to the last and most egregious sin committed by this movie.

3) The Taxi Scene. This is me wearing my radical feminist hat again, but this scene completely ruined the movie for me. Instead of “Don’t go to a job interview in DC because I am here and not there”, the correct answer was for him to kiss her sweetly, wish her luck, and with a lusty look in his eye, tell her to hurry back. Later, they could discuss her applying for jobs in the city, or a long distance relationship (now that he’s making the even bigger bucks with his ‘awesome’ new add campaign, he can probably afford it), or talk of him finding a job there. None of this shutting down her career bullshit. That completely pissed me off, and ultimately makes this movie a complete FAIL.

Craftzine posted about a new embroidery pattern shop called PimpStitch (tagline: “Keep Your Stitch Hand Strong”), and after admiring the adorable patterns, the name finally registered and I could feel my jaw dropping.

Really? Someone thought that was a good name? I mean, they got racism, sexism, and domestic violence all in one go. I’m almost impressed.

Maybe I’m being a little hypocritical here. I am a slash fan, and I speak completely seriously of pimping music, authors, and fic to other fans. But this context is so completely unexpected and inappropriate! And unnecessary! The fandom usage of ‘pimp’ is to show other fans awesome things in a way that brings joy to everyone involved. This usage of ‘pimp’ is faux-cutesy and vomit-inducing. I’m not really seeing any use that either reverses or negates the negative connotations of the word or is subversive to the usual meaning of the word.

I realize that not all crafters identify as radical feminists, or even feminist at all, but I expected better of both Craftzine and their demographic. It’s too bad, really, because I would totally buy Tamie Snow’s adorable octopus pattern, except I cannot give money to any entity with ‘pimp’ in the name. Sorry Tamie, I’m just going to have to draw my own adorable octopus.