New Year, New Projects

It's been quite a while since I last posted here.  Now that my holiday break is over, it's back to business.  I have a few (late) Christmas gifts to complete and one more order that I hope to finish over the weekend.

In the meanwhile, here's something really cool.  I posted my cotton dishcloth pattern on Ravelry and someone posted a picture of their finished product.  How cool!  Here it is pictured below.  I love the variation in color.  it turned out great!

Anyway, I promise to have more posts soon as I finish more projects.  Pretty soon I'm hoping to start on my first piece of real clothing!  I've got some great plans for 2013, so I'd better get started! :)

Happy New Year!

Baking Break: Lussekatter

Taking a break from knitting themed posts to share my most recent baking adventure: lussekatter.

Lussekatter is the traditional breakfast roll served on St. Lucia's day in Sweden.  Since I'm part Swedish, and hadn't made this since I was really young, I thought it would be fun to make it for my co-workers on December 13th.  It is a saffron bun, which I didn't realize at the time would be relatively expensive to make.  I don't bake with special spices very often, so I had no idea that I would be spending $19 on 1.7g of saffron when I set out to make them.

But, you know what, it was totally worth it :)

Anyway, I worked off a recipe from food.com.  The night I went to buy ingredients, I bought based on the mass necessary by the recipe.  The night I planned to cook, I had to calculate all the directions from measurements of mass to measurements of volume since I don't have a decent scale at home.  Since that calculation differs from ingredient to ingredient, I had to research each one separately.

Then I set off to work.  Since my team at work is having a bacon themed 12 days of eating, I had to cook some bacon to add as a garnish (instead of the traditional raisins) on at least half of the buns.  So that went into the oven.  While that was cooking, I measured out all of my ingredients at one time, so it would be easy to just grab and add as needed.  This included grinding down the saffron strands into powder and praying that I didn't add too much and ruin the whole batch.

Next step was what I felt would be the most difficult part: melting the butter, milk and saffron together to the accurate temperature of 100 degrees Fahrenheit.  Apparently, this is important.  I bought a cooking thermometer just for this step and started freaking out when the red line didn't seem to be moving.  My incredibly fast thought process went something like this:

"What a piece of junk!  Why would the store even sell this.  I should take it back... later.  Okay, what do I do now?  Do I just wing it?  I'm supposed to get it to 100 degrees.  The recipe says this is 'very important'!  Maybe if I set the oven to 100 degrees, I can see what that feels like and then see if the mixture is the same temperature.... No, that's stupid.  That's a ridiculous idea.  Seriously, why isn't that red line moving?  This is such a piece of crap, why do I even still have this thing sitting in the pot?  It's not doing anything...  Maybe if I move it, it will work better.  Nope.  Nothing.  Stupid 'good cook' brand.  I'll tell you something, 'good cook', good cooks don't even use your brand.  How's that feel? - OH HEY, IT'S MOVING!  IT'S WORKING!  YAY!"

After getting that mixture to what my thermometer told me was 100 degrees, I poured the mixture over the yeast I had placed into my roommate's KitchenAid, and then proceeded to add the other dry ingredients until everything was in and I could set the thing to start mixing into dough.  Once that's finished, you have to let it rise for 30 minutes.  That gave me a nice break :)

I couldn't help but take a little peek though...

 

Eventually, it looked like this!

So then, I got to knead the dough.  That was kind of fun.  Little bit of a work out for the arms.  Definitely needed after eating the extra bacon from the oven...

Then I separated them into little balls, which needed to rest some more.

Next was the fun, but tedious part: rolling them into long lines and creating the traditional S shape.

Added the raisins and/or bacon and then let them rest some 40 minutes longer...

Then, just before the oven, it was time for a quick egg wash!

After cooking just about 9-10 minutes, they came out looking like this:

I won't lie, I was pretty darn impressed with myself.  I really thought they were going to turn out awful.  But they were delicious!  And the bacon ones (pictured above), were especially fun.

I challenge all you Swedes and part-Swedes to try making it for your own St. Lucia's Day celebration next year!  Or, if you can't wait, or you don't really plan on ever celebrating St. Lucia's Day, try Christmas!  They go great with some morning coffee whilst sitting next to a roaring fireplace :)

Christmas Countdown

Christmas is just around the corner!  It's so crazy!

I think I have just about all my knit gifts either made or at least planned.  And, this might be a horribly naive statement, but I think I've actually got enough time to finish them all!  I've already completed my really complicated, time consuming projects that I need to finish before Christmas day.  I have one gift in particular that I'm now insanely excited to make and might take some more time, but luckily I have until New Year's Eve to complete that.  I can't post any photos here since the recipient often reads this blog, but I can give a hint to some of you Ravelry surfers - it's a popular hat pattern for a certain female wizard.  Hmmmmm.... :)

Meanwhile, I've also been working on several items for my work's craft fair which is in just 2 days... Well more like 1.25 days now...

Here's a sneak peek for any of my co-workers reading this:

 

And if you don't work with me, you can find some of these items at my online shop: starfishknit.etsy.com

Grab em before they're gone!

Holiday Sale!

Hey everyone!

It's now officially my favorite time of year!  To share the love, I'm offering 10% off at my Etsy shop when you use coupon code HOLIDAY10 at check out through this magical season :)

I've already sold quite a few things, but am planning to make more so keep checking for more fun, handmade stuff!

Hope you all had a Happy Thanksgiving and are starting off the Christmas season well!

Holiday Crunch Time

It's that time of year!  When everyone starts thinking of the holidays!

What does that mean for me?  Extra projects.  I have found myself full of special orders, ideas/plans for my work's craft fair, and on top of it all, I'm hoping to get some Christmas presents finished.  Luckily, I started working on Christmas gifts as early as last January, so I've already got a fair amount of them done.  Now I'm just on the last minute ideas.

Meanwhile, I have 3 orders I'm trying to finish up before Thanksgiving (if possible).  I know they are for Christmas gifts, so I want to try to have them completed early.  I'm feeling pretty good about them, as long as I get some time to finish them.  Gotta buckle down.  My friend Mary is in a similar situation, so we're going to hang out soon and have a knit night.  We did it once before and it was pretty fun.  Find some cheesy movie, catch up, and finish a project.  My favorite quote of the day from her: "If I wasn't married, I'd want to be your roommate so we could knit."  Apparently my certifiably insane work ethic provides great motivation for completing projects :)

Speaking of completed projects, I recently finished a pair of baby alpaca gloves, just like my gray ones, except this time in purple.  My friend Sam bought them on the spot the day after I finished them.  I hope she likes them :)  She's the sweetest cause she even agreed to purchase them through my etsy shop!

One last thing before I finish this post... I recently commissioned and purchased a tote bag from my co-worker Judy.  It's so absolutely adorable that I just had to post a photo of it here.  I've started using it to hold all my IP projects.  I needed a big bag to fit them all!

 

You can check out more of her work at her etsy shop and blog!

Organized Chaos

It's not a secret that I have more yarn in my possession than I know what to do with.  I have this awful habit of falling in love with some fiber and figuring that I'll have a project for it later.  Obviously, with such beautiful yarn, ideas should just come flowing, right?  Wrong.  I think projects take so long that by the time I finish one, I generally decide to start something completely different than what I originally had in mind when I bought some new yarn.  Usually that requires different yarn, so I buy yet more yarn.  The yarn section of my closet is a great example of "organized chaos".  Anyone looking at it would have no idea what they're looking at, but I know!  I know that there is a system!  Actually I think that's the general theme of my entire room and closet right now...

But lately, I've been trying to use up my current yarn stash.  One of my recent projects was a pair of striped fingerless gloves.  I love the combination of black, gray and red.  It's a great mix of cool neutrals and the red provides a nice pop of color.  These will be going up on my etsy shop once I can get some good photos.

I recently discovered I'm allergic to a particular medication, and I had such a bad reaction that I had to stay home from work.  Gave me some time to think of my next project, and I finally decided to unravel that purple scarf and create something new.  A friend of mine had been admiring my short cabled fingerless gloves, so I figured I'd make another pair of those.  The baby alpaca is GREAT for it.  So soft on the hands and it really is a dream to work with.  Here's a look at the IP project.

Still needs a thumb, but should look pretty good when it's done.  I am glad I made them again, I was able to improve on the last pair and take better notes to turn into a proper pattern.  I might try to post it on Ravelry soon.  After these, I believe my next projects will probably be Christmas gifts.  I can't believe it's already November!

Hope you all have a great weekend!

Open for Business!

Hi blog followers!

My etsy shop is officially open for business!  Click here to take a peek!

Here's a look at some of the items I have for sale:

 ...And that's just a couple of them.  I have some other items also for sale at the shop (including the one pictured on the right)  I also have plans for more items.  I'm in progress on some striped arm warmers right now.  I already have some pseudo requests for fingerless gloves.  I would have posted my finished ones on the shop as well, but they were bought before I could post them!  Haha!

Anyway, major thanks to my friend, Danielle, for helping me take all these beautiful photos.  We found a local park and then found some great locations to really make the colors stand out.  I especially love this one to the right of the Men's Rustic Scarf.  I loved this little bridge that was at the park and knew right away I wanted to photograph this item there.  We had a lot of fun trying to be creative in finding interesting photo spots.  A woman even came up to me asking about the Green Twist Infinity Scarf.  There was a kids' soccer game going on at the same park, so I'm sure it was eye-catching to see two girls carrying a dress form all around.

Lola (yes, I named my dress form) was the best prop.  We had a lot of fun taking photos near random signs.  We already have big plans for taking photos with some old soda pop signs and highway entrances.  I think they would actually be kind of cool if we could pull them off.  But that's for another day....