The Sweatshop of Love Blog

My only real goal this past weekend was to finish my second Slouchy Beret for the Heather, the second blog giveaway winner. I mailed the first one out Saturday morning, well ahead of schedule, so I was confident I could knock the other one out.

I got some Lion Brand Wool Ease Thick N Quick and knit it all afternoon. I blocked it on a plate, put it on the radiator so it would dry faster, and in the morning I had a cute pink hat!

Pink Slouchy Beret

Or, that was how it was supposed to go. Sunday morning I checked on it and about died.

BURNED!

It got torched on the radiator!

My Poor Hat!

I have put projects on the radiator to dry since the beginning of time and this has never happened before! I throw my wet mittens, socks, hats, and scarves on the radiator when I come in from a snow storm. So what the hell happened?!

I told my mom, who said, ‘Oh man, the woman you are sending it to is going to be so disappointed to see that.’

New Hat

Don’t think I didn’t think of it! But of course I can’t send someone a hat that looks like I used it to clean up cat puke. The second hat, however, is going a little slower. Once you finish a project it is hard to get the motivation to start the same exact thing over again.

Have you ever had a similar knitting disaster?

But I’ll finish it this afternoon, NOT block it on the radiator, and hopefully it will be dry by Thursday.

Breakfast Makes it Better

I always turn to pancakes when I’m feeling sad/sick/like I want to kill someone, and these pancakes with my mom’s apple  butter and potatoes made me feel better.

Homemade Tuna Helper

So does Homemade Tuna Helper. I don’t know what it is about shell shaped pasta. It just makes me feel so good. And I love when my food pictures have yarn in them.

Cabled Belt

The yarn next to dinner is from the Cabled Belt from the 2008 Winter issue of Vogue Knitting.

Picture in the Magazine

I have been lazily knitting it because I don’t plan on wearing it until New Years Eve. How fun is it to plan an outfit around a belt?!

The only people on Ravelry to knit it have used gold or grey yarn, but when I saw the picture I knew it had to be in a bright color. The cable pattern is very intuitive and it is knitting up quickly despite the size 5 needles I’m using.

And yes, I’m keeping this belt as far away from the radiator as I possibly can!

PT had to work all weekend; luckily he could work from home, in front of football, but still. He spent the entire weekend in front of his computer, doing fancy TV producer work. In order to make that less sucky, I had a food plan.

Lentil Sloppy Joes!

It Tastes as Good as It Looks

A food plan that started with Lentil Sloppy Joes! I saw this recipe at No Meat Athlete. He’s got a lot of great vegetarian recipes that he tries and works through on his site, and this one had been on my radar for a while. The recipe, lovingly called Snobby Joes, is really easy and I basically just emptied my pantry into my wok. Some peppers, onions, lentils and spices! They were amazing! PT had two of them for lunch and another for dinner. I thought they were really flavorful; it’s easy to kick up the spices to make them spicier, or tone it down, and it can sit on your stove top all day for repeat visits.

Pizzas for Football Sunday

Pizza Goodness!

A pretty standard meal on Sundays are these little homemade pizzas. Maybe standard isn’t the right word, because it implies a fall back. Our homemade pizzas are so delicious! Homemade crust, homemade sauce, caramelized onions, pineapple, roasted red peppers (and olives for PT) with a sprinkle of Parmesan! I still think we should go into business.

Baking Up A Storm

I went into crazed baking mode last night! I got an extra little gig helping organize the office of a restaurant in Wicker Park (oh the life of a freelance knitting teacher?) and I got home and decided I needed to make two batches of granola bars, more Tigers Suck Cookies (even though they had an off day yesterday! They kinda sucked it up this weekend), a loaf of pumpernickel bread, and zucchini pancakes!

Holy Baker!

I saw the zucchini pancake recipe at Sarah’s blog, and I’m so glad I did! I didn’t have the crystallized ginger, and I only used about a half a cup of olive oil and moistened it up a little more with some water, and these were so great!

Potatoes and Zucchini Pancakes

They were so much sweeter than I expected them to be, being made of zucchini. But just like zucchini cakes or muffins, I don’t really know what the zucchini adds other than an excuse to eat more of them! Because it’s VEGETABLES!

And now I don’t have to bake again for the rest of my life. I’ve got cookies and granola bars enough to last me a while! I love that feeling.

Goldfish? On My Toilet

After putting this project on a mini hold for about a week and a half, I was reminded that Part One of the Goldfish Toilet Lid Cover Class is next week! So I buckled down and finished it and isn’t it hilarious?! It makes me entire bathroom happy.

The cover part is an easy knit. There are some short rows in there towards the bottom, but for the most part it knit up quickly and wasn’t boring.

The Goldfish Toilet Lid Cover pattern (a free knitpicks.com download) calls for dk weight yarn and size 6 needles. I thought knitting a toilet seat cover with dk weight yarn was completely ridiculous, so I rewrote the pattern as I was knitting it to use worsted weight yarn and size 4 needles. It’s a little snug on my seat, but I think size 5s would be perfect.

Fish? Kinda?

When I first looked at the pattern I just assumed that the fish would be intarsia-ed on. I hadn’t ever heard of duplicate stitching, much less done it before. I even googled it.

Duplicate stitching is just like cross stich! You just follow the stitches that already exist, and sew over them. It was easy!

The problem, however, is that when you use orange yarn instead of blue, and when you use whatever yarn scrapes are laying around instead of fish colors, the fish doesn’t end up looking like a fish. I thought when I started the pattern that it looked like Wilson from Cast Away, and PT thought it looked like Pikachu. The consensus now is that it’s a dog-like Pokemon. So I have a dog-like Pokemon toilet lid cover. I’m ok with it.

There is still room in the class! Interested? Sign up! Email me.

Fruity Lunch

There Are Oats in There Somewhere

I’ve been talking a lot about all the vegetables in my house, but I’ve got a lot of fruit, too. PT and I got half a bushel of apples, 1/4 a bushel of peaches, grapes and pears while we were in Michigan!

I had the most amazing oat bowl for lunch today, with peaches and grapes and apples, my mom’s granola, extra raisins, and a piece of the pumpernickle bread I made with crunchy peanut butter.

Those peaches are out of control.

Peach Pancakes and Potatoes

I made peach pancakes the other night. Peaches baked into the pancakes, with peaches sauteed in butter and brown sugar on top. Peaches can go in anything. And thank god because I’ve got a million of them!

Elizabeth and I met at Adrian College our freshmen year. We were both there for only one year, but the year highlights include strip monopoly, Optical Illusion Boy, me living off cookies and coffee for 9 months, Cripple Boy, Brad playing Oasis and Travis nonstop, Dreamy Matt Rife, Chelsea and I becoming drummers, The Gloworm, and a WHOLE lot of boy drama. Elizabeth, Chelsea, Lindsay and I, while recapping our weekends one Monday at lunch, discovered that between the four of us we made out with enough boys in the past 2 days to field a baseball team.

Elizabeth and I hadn’t seen each other since my 21st birthday party four and a half years ago. You know, like the Olympics.  She lives in Columbus, just far enough away from Chicago to make that an inconvenient drive. But she did it Friday! And 7 hours later she was in, and then we were out, of Chicago.

Colleen's Birthday

We had to drive out to St Charles for Colleen’s birthday party. After Elizabeth’s drive, and I had just gotten back in the city a couple hours before as well, we weren’t exactly pumped about the two hour drive through traffic to the burbs, but we had to do it for Colleen.

Well, I had to do it for Colleen and Elizabeth was a trooper.

Blueberry Pancakes and Potatoes with Fresh Dill

Saturday morning we made blueberry pancakes with the abundance of blueberries I brought back from Michigan, and potatoes with fresh dill.

It was hot and sunny and beautiful in Chicago Saturday, so Elizabeth and I walked around Logan Square and Wicker Park for a while with iced coffees before heading to Handlebar for a late lunch.

Elizabeth is PUMPED

We walked over to The Clipper for drinks after some Saturday night baseball (that Elizabeth was also a trooper through).

PT Ready to Ride

Beers and the Band

Gil and Martin came with a friend, and PT rode over despite having a Tastee Freeze-for-dinner tummy ache (Elizabeth and I didn’t seem to have a problem with it!).

Clue on a Rainy Afternoon

Sunday was rainy, so we played Clue! PT looks like he is really concentrating on the game, but it was a massacre. Elizabeth won twice and I won once.

BORED

Pudge thought we were the lamest people in the history of the world.

Look Out!

So she made us some drinks! The combo of the night? Aloe vera juice and coconut rum. Well done, Pudge. Well done.

Beet Salad and Fresh Corn on the Cob

They went very well with the beet salad and corn on the cob we made for dinner. Elizabeth has never eaten beets before, and she gave this a thumbs up! Naturally.

Night Beach

After dinner it stopped raining enough for us to drive over to North Avenue Beach, something we had been talking about all weekend, but with the Air and Water Show and it being 90 degrees, it was crowded and loud all weekend.

Water? 0 Degrees

Of course, without sun the water was a little cold! This was about as far as we could make it.

But the city was beautiful and the beach was empty. There was even a storm over the water we were watching for a while.

I think we showed Elizabeth a good time. I mean, who doesn’t like blueberry pancakes, clue, and the night beach?

It was nice to be back in the city for me, too. Sleeping in a bed was sweet! Seeing the kitties, and PT, was much needed. And those four pounds I didn’t gain while home I sure gained this weekend!

I’m looking forward to seeing Elizabeth again in four and a half years for my 30th birthday party! We planned this one out well, actually.

Finished Sock, and Pudge

I’ve had a rough weekend. I fled to Michigan where I finished these socks, which Pudge Rodriguez really likes. Actually I think they just smell like my mom’s house full of animals. So, she doesn’t like them. She is confused about how they smell. I’m often confused about how socks smell.

… what was I saying? Right; I had a rough weekend. Then I came home and PT and I broke up for realzies.

Blueberry Pancakes, and Potatoes

So we made blueberry pancakes and potatoes and onions. Because, well, you eat pancakes when you are sad. And my mom sent me home with a ton of blueberries. And blueberry pancakes are one of the best things ever. And we ate them.

Comfort Socks

Needless to say, we didn’t make it to Duck Soup. I was really bummed because I was looking forward to it. I love that movie, and I had the best time last week. But there would have been tears and crap. So I knit this sock, with the nice striping yarn, and watched the Tigers, who eked out a win for me. It’s really the least they could do.

I can’t stop knitting this sock. I’ve memorized my pattern so I’m just knitting and knitting. I’m just knitting and thinking and enjoying the quiet of the apartment. The Chicago quiet, so car alarms and people laughing and cars cars cars. If it were warmer, like it should be, there would be yelling and screaming and kids fighting in sprinklers, which I like. I miss being miserably warm.

I’m going to knit this sock some more. And make myself a dinner I will hopefully have an appetite for. I want zucchini pasta, with zucchini my mom sent me home with. The produce box just came so I can dig around in there, too.

Deep breath. Cooking for one.