Stuff Steph Does

music monday: going Irish

February 6, 2012

What a great weekend spent with friends and tying up loose ends on projects. You’ll be hearing about all of that in upcoming posts this week, but not until we do music monday first!

I think Brandon and I are one of the few people left in the universe who do not have a netflix account. We still get in the car and drive the local video rental store, which, by the way, is getting further and further away. There were two in our neighborhood within walking distance when we first moved here which have since both closed. Now we drive a good 20 minutes to get a movie, and every time we get there we stroll up and down the rows trying to decide which one to get.

Long story short, we’ve realized that there are a ton of older (older meaning 80s-early 2000s) movies out there that we haven’t seen, so we’re starting to watch movies that we’ve heard people say over and over again how good they are and we could never join in on the conversation. This week we watched The Boondock Saints. I guess I’ve just been feeling Irish with all this Guinness I’ve been ~~trying~~ cooking with. Although we had never seen the movie, we both already knew the theme song…so that’s the music for this week; I’ll be back soon with more finished projects and tasty treats!

see stuff

kitchen FAIL

February 3, 2012

I’m sorry if I’ve disappointed you by not resolving the cliffhanger from my felted loops pillow post today, but honestly, it isn’t done yet. It’s one of my goals for this weekend, so next week I’ll fill you in on how it came out!

I think I said a couple weeks ago that it would be possible to blog about one food thing a week…that the odds were in my favor for making at least one blog-worthy food item a week….heh heh…apparently not.

After making that delicious Guinness Stew a few weeks ago, I still have 3 cans of Guinness sitting in the fridge because neither Brandon nor I like it. Correction: We don’t like to drink it. It’s quite tasty when cooked or baked!

So last Sunday I was pumped to make another Guinness inspired treat and browsed the internet to find some delicious recipe to try. I came across a Guinness Stout Ginger Cake recipe that sounded really good. I had almost everything except eggs and cardamom.

I do my usual Sunday Grocery errand to get food for the week but then also get the two extra items for the new recipe. When I get to the spice row I start looking for Cardamom. My usual (less expensive) spice brand doesn’t have it…could this be? I search through the rows again convincing myself that the spices are alphabetical and it would be between the bay leaves and cayenne pepper..*sigh* I move over to the “other” brands and quickly find it in its properly alphabetized place. My eyes move down to the price tag…$11.79?! Oh my gosh…how ridiculous…I go back to my staple brand and search for it again hoping that this cannot be the only option.

No such luck. I suck it up and put that expensive spice jar in my cart. I think my next food mission will be finding recipes that require cardamom…

After I get home I mixed it all up, put it in the oven, and came upstairs to blog. Within 20 minutes I can really smell it which I thought was odd because it was supposed to be in the oven for an hour! 5 minutes later I start to smell burning and I think, this can’t be good.

I come downstairs to this:

Terrible!

I immediately go back to the recipe and try to figure out where I went wrong…too much Guinness? nope. not enough flour? not at all. I can’t figure it out! So then I go to the reviews and I find out that quite a few people ended up with terrible messes in their ovens. And they advise putting it into two 9×5 pans.

To add salt to the wound, a lot of other reviews were along the lines of “I didn’t have any cardamom on hand, but the recipe was so good, it didn’t need it” gahhh!

Word to the wise: read the reviews before buying for and baking the recipe.

So what am I doing this weekend? finishing my crazy hard pillow and trying out this recipe again. That’s right, I’m going to brave it a second time. For one thing, I still have two cans of Guinness and a whole bottle of cardamom! Plus, I tried some of the cake that had actually baked after its short oven life and it was really good! I can’t wait to try it when its successful.

Thats all for today, enjoy your weekends! What are you up to? Any fun adventures?

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WIP: felted loops pillow

February 1, 2012

I saw this pillow in the lion brand catalog and immediately fell in love. “I must make it,” I thought, and promptly pinned it to my things I want to make board on Pinterest. Well, turns out, easier said than done….waaaayyyy easier said than done. This has turned out to be quite the process. I’ll bring you up to speed with my felted loops pillow process. The pattern is free on Lion Brand Yarn’s website, you just have to sign in with a free account to access it.

I loved that pillow in the picture so much that I opted not to alter at all. I got the exact yarn it called for, color and everything. It calls for three skeins…not a lie, you need all three.

The back of the pillow is pretty simple, just two solid knit pieces. I did those by hand no problem and continued on. However, the next step says to knit 5 strips at 6 yards each (yup, 6 yards…18 honkin’ feet each) Each strip is only 6 stitches wide. When I started I felt like all I was doing was turning and turning and turning and my first 18-foot-long strip was barely getting there.

Ugh. There had to be a better way.

And sure enough, there was.

When I moved out of my parents’ house. My bedroom turned into the “ultimate craft room” complete with tons of yarn and two knitting machines. (how perfectly amazing is that?! My room, in my absence, is reincarnated into a knitting shrine…totally meant to be.)

My craft extravaganza a few weeks ago with all the projects I highlighted was mainly for two reasons, the knit berry hat baby gift, and to make 30 yards of yarn rope for this project.

So, Saturday morning, I wake up and my mom is starting to set up the knitting machine to get this yarn rope started. By the time I’m out of the shower and ready to go, I see this on the floor:

Holy cow, so much yarn-rope, so little time! And trust me, I’m not very high maintenance…I didn’t even wash my hair that day… this rope was made uber-fast.

Throughout the weekend we did shifts of 500+ rows of yarn rope…you can work up a sweat moving that knitting carriage back and forth! I thought I was going to be sore the next day…I was (very) relieved that I wasn’t. Come Sunday morning, we had this massive pile o’yarn:

Total tally: 92 feet! I came home after the weekend boasting to Brandon all of our accomplishments and showed off this tangled mess of yarn. I don’t think he felt the same sense of satisfaction…

Next step, pin the yarn into loops on a foam board.

The first time (and second, and third) I just winged it. I tried to guesstimate how big the loops should be, but then get half way through and realize that there was no way I’d have enough to get to the end.

So then I got smart. I drew a grid on the board, 13 x 13, so I could pin the loops at all the intersections.

Because I’m an archi-nerd, and I know my archi-friends reading this thought the same thing when they saw that photo, I have to bring up the similarity to Superstudio’s Continuous Monument project…however I highly doubt the idea for this project stemmed from a knitting project…

Yup, that’s an architecture project.

I digress.

I also divided the 92 feet into 13 equal segments and marked each row with a pin so I would know how much rope I could use per row of loops.

***If you decide to venture into making this project, make sure you do this from the start…it will save you time!

All pinned and ready to sew together!

The next step is sew all the loops together.

My strategy was to sew every individual loop together and then a “lattice” strategy of sewing the rows together.

Whew! Finally all sewn together. It’s time to felt! I was super nervous to do that after all this work! Tossing it into the washing machine just seems so daunting and permanent. There’s no going back once you add some hot water and detergent!

Needless to say I had a slight “felt freakout” before putting it in the washing machine.

What happens next?! Talk about a cliffhanger! I guess you’ll just have to come back to find out how the pillow turns out! Be sure to subscribe (if you haven’t already) to not miss out on the action!

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knit berry hat baby gift

January 31, 2012

Remember this?

click here if you don’t remember, want a refresher, or love it so much you just can’t get enough.

Anyway, I always had bigger plans for this little knit hat. I just had to find the time to finish its counterparts! I wasn’t able to go to a baby shower for my good friend from undergrad back in October, but still wanted to get her something for her new baby. I knitted these hats with her in mind from the get go.

On positive side, being fashionably late with this gift allowed me to wait until I knew the baby’s name. Last weekend my mom and I completed the gift with some more personalized additions. So here is the completed knit berry hat gift:

How adorable is that!? The baby’s name, by the way, is Abigail, so the A’s are more than appropriate.

My mom has a fancy schmancy embroidery machine (I can talk about that more in a later post) which made the applique pretty easy to do. I basically said “I like that A, this fabric, with this thread” and watched the machine do its magic.

Same for the strawberries:

The burp cloth is my mom’s specialty. She gets all the credit for this. Like with the embroidery machine I said, “I like this A and this fabric” and she did her magic. Thanks, Mom!

They’re made from cloth diapers. She’s made these before and even has her own label for all of her fun creations.

This all makes for one happy, stylish baby!

monday musings

Fox in Sox on Knox on Box

January 30, 2012

Oh Dr Suess, Who knew some twenty years later I would use you to title a blog post?

Music Monday this week is fox themed. Let’s cut to the chase and start with the music and move on to more fox fun.

Cue Fleet Foxes, an Indie folk band from Seattle. A friend told me about them this past week and turns out I’ve heard some of their songs before. Have a listen for yourself and see what you think.

Now onto the foxy goodness! My final studio in grad school was “fur themed” where we investigated different types of fur and figured out different ways of representing and drawing fur in a technical sense. A requirement for the studio (which we didn’t know going into it) was to acquire an animal hide so we could study the fur qualities and manipulate it hands on.

I chose a fox. For some reason I was interested in the fur’s “poofiness” and the fox was one of the poofiest hides I could find. We had a whole slew of animals in the studio ranging from a muskrat to a springbok to an elk, it was quite a sight.

I’m not going to get into all the tiny details of this project, because that’s not really what this blog is about, but I will show some of the drawings and the final “model” that was produced.

Architecture school can be so weird, right?! This was by far the most outlandish thing I did in school. I not only left that studio with an interesting conversation piece to have on my end table, but also a slight bias toward the fox.

We can move out of the fox-in-architecture-school-realm and move into the fox-in-craftiness-realm. Since that studio, I have been very aware of all of the fox paraphernalia that exists out there and have seen tons of fun foxy things. Here’s some highlights I found on Etsy. (the images link to the sources, so if you find something you simply cannot live without, go check it out!)