a late Happy New Year (and a coupon code)!

I'm always running late...but here's a sincere wish for a happy new year!

As a thank you to all of my customers, and to those who read my blog, please use code "blog5" (but without the quotation marks) for $5 off any order at Pumpkin Pie Baby. This will even work on sale items. The code will be good through 2010.

if only i could knit and read at the same time

There are people who can knit and read at the same time. I'm not one of them.

I signed up for a book group through my library that starts this Thursday. I've known about it for weeks, but given that I'm almost always scatterbrained, I didn't pick up the book until yesterday. So now I'm faced with reading A Passage to India by E. M. Forster by Thursday. It's 362 pages long, and I have three children ages 5 and under who won't tolerate listening to a book read aloud this long without pictures. I don't know how I'm going to make this happen. I've been reading East of Eden by John Steinbeck since November and I'm only on page 280.

Now I'm an adult, and this is just a reading group. I won't be graded on this. But it's being led by a professor. And I imagine myself and how I felt 15 years ago when I used to sit in my undergrad English classes and hope that the professor wouldn't call on me because I hadn't managed to read the book. I can remember this anxiety so well that this morning I briefly entertained the idea of taking No Doz and staying up all night Wednesday.

I only did this once by the way, taking No Doz that is, and while I managed to read an entire book on Anais Nin in one night, by the next morning I couldn't remember a thing I had read, and I felt like a tape running in fast forward. This was also a time period where I indulged in making mix tape upon mix tape...but that's another post.

So I wish I could read and knit at the same time, because I have this compulsive need to knit something new right now. And I get itchy reading--wishing I could be knitting--and I get itchy knitting--wishing I could be reading.

So I looked up a pattern for a bookmark and found this lovely pattern. I don't have any sock yarn that isn't being used right now, so I cast on in worsted weight cotton and figure I'll make my mother a dishcloth out of it. And since the library gave me a perfectly fine paper bookmark, I figure I've got that base covered for now.

Now I don't know what to do with myself--finish the book or the dishcloth--but I'm planning an all-nighter tomorrow.

I almost kept this one.

One of the things I love about knitting for others is that I get sent all kinds of beautiful yarn to knit. Last month a customer sent me a large bag full of wool scraps to be knit into pants and a hat for her son. I had made my husband a stocking cap a couple of years ago so I offered to make her one, scaled down to size for her son.

This is the resulting hat:

I absolutely love this hat. I'm not entirely sure why, but I wanted to keep it for my own children. I have girls, and the older girls are into be "girly," so neither of them would have worn it. But it's got the sweetest shape and I love the mixture of colors. I wish I had taken a photo after I had attached the pom pom, but I forgot.

These are the pants I posted about last month. They are now on their way to their new home, and I did send the hat along too.

a custom in progress

I'm currently working on a pair of custom mixed longies. The mama sent me over 10 colorways and the challenge is to blend them together so that there aren't any big blocks of one colorway. I sent her progress pictures last night and she loves them! Her reaction is such a relief to me because there are a hundred different ways these longies could turn out, and I hoped my vision matched hers.

Here they are so far:

I'm hoping to have them done by this weekend. 12" inseams here I come!

I should have read the signs

Peanut brittle is just one of those things that reminds me of Christmas. My grandmother made it every year when I was a child and I loved it. I successfully made it last year even though I didn't have any experience making candy. I used my candy thermometer (which I had purchased two years earlier to make homemade marshmallows) and it came out perfectly.

I want so badly to make it this year and it's not happening. I don't know why I decided to mess with a good thing. I've made two mistakes so far:

Mistake #1: I changed recipes. I took the perfectly good recipe I had and tossed it out the window for one that got reviews for being super easy (it wasn't for me).

Mistake #2: I tried to make this new recipe while so overtired that I'm just not functioning well. (The day started off poorly when I woke up during my baby's third feeding of the night at 3am to stand up from the rocker, and I fell to the floor because my leg was asleep. The baby wasn't hurt.)

I tried to make peanut brittle on Wednesday only to discover that the brand new jar of peanuts I had were "roasted" with MSG and a long list of other chemical additives. I hate throwing food away, but I dumped all those peanuts in the trash. I was too tired to make a trip to the store with my kids, so I just gave up that day.

Yesterday I made a special trip to the store to buy everything I needed for all my Christmas baking. Having checked my peanuts carefully this time to make sure that they were just peanuts, I got home feeling optimistic that I'd get a lot accomplished.

Let this be a lesson as to why I'm usually a pessimistic person. Expect the worst and, if the outcome is good, then I'm pleasantly surprised. Expect the best, and when my peanut brittle burns so badly that it'll take me days to clean the pan, I'll be very very disappointed.

All signs pointed to failure: I forgot to add one of the main ingredients. I then turned on the wrong burner and stirred the pot I was cooking in for at least 5 minutes wondering why nothing was happening until I noticed the pan next to me was blazing hot. Then I tried to make a phone call even though the directions called for me to stir constantly for 20 minutes and I had two children playing in the kitchen who kept asking me questions. Then my house filled with smoke and the brittle suddenly turned dark brown and some of the peanuts burned. But throughout I remained optimistic thinking it would only be a little burnt and no one would notice. When my husband asked me if I had made chocolate--it was that dark brown--I started to worry a little.

I remained cautiously optimistic until I tasted it. Imagine chewing on a piece of burnt wood that has the consistency of a stale Baby Ruth. That was my peanut brittle.

I ended the day in a good mood having made some cookies with my daughters and I was able to knit for 2 hours. The knitting project is turning out beautifully. I'll post pictures of it soon.

reverse rice stitch cowl

Here's the back story for my cowl. This past August, something happened that made my husband feel badly for me. I honestly cannot remember what that something was. I'm going to guess he felt badly that I was sleep deprived and overwhelmed as a new mother of 3 because that was how I felt just about every day last summer (and now).

So, my husband came home from work with a beautiful skein of hand dyed alpaca yarn from a local farm. He had stopped at a farmer's market during the day and had bought me a little treat to make me feel better. If I'm remembering correctly, I believe he also brought me home some lobster, and at the time I was too embarrassed by his generosity to tell him that my parents had already taken me out for lobster earlier in the day. But I got over my embarrassment quickly and enjoyed the dinner he brought me.

On to the cowl: I wanted to make sure that I knit the yarn he gave me into something special. I spent some time looking online at different stitch patterns and came across the rice stitch. What I liked about rice stitch is that the right and wrong sides of the fabric are different but equally beautiful. I designed the cowl to be worn with either the right or wrong sides facing out. Either way will work. In all honesty, though, I find myself liking the "wrong" side of the cowl more.

This is one of the first knit items I've ever designed myself, and I'm really happy with the results. The picot edge was a last minute decision as I was binding off and I think it adds another layer of texture to the cowl.

The "wrong" side first:

The rice stitch:

I will post a pattern for the cowl as soon as I get it written up.

"make me something delicious"

My kids are tired. I don't know if it was the long weekend for Thanksgiving and the traveling and visiting with family, or whether it's something else entirely, but my kids looked like they were ready to fall asleep yesterday at 4pm. Neither of them has napped in years, so a nap was out of the question. Today, both girls were up much earlier than usual. So by the time I picked up my preschooler from school today, she was running on empty.

Her: "What are we having for lunch today?"
Me: "Turkey pie."
Her: "I hate turkey pie. That's not delicious."
Me: "OK, you can have peanut butter and jelly."
Her: "Why don't you make delicious meals? I want delicious meals."
Me: "We're going home now."
Her (standing just feet outside of the preschool with other children and parents around): "I'm not going home. You're annoying me."

I'd like to think that I responded in a way that means that she'll never talk to me that way again, but I know I didn't and I know she will. My daughter can be pretty sassy, especially when it comes time to eat. She informed me just last week that the meal I served her was "the most disgusting meal she'd ever had in her whole life" of just 3 and a half years.

So back to her being tired: she took a 3 hour nap today. That's unheard of for her. But now it's almost 10pm and she's still up. I knew that the few hours of quiet I had this afternoon would be paid back this evening.

I think that we've fallen into a pattern where even if I served donuts for dinner--one of her favorite foods that she gets only once every few months--she'd complain that they were disgusting.

So here I sit crocheting donuts for a custom order thinking it would be nice to have a real one right about now.