Gaufrettes

Tonight Caro came over and we played Scrabble and made gaufrettes. It's a family recipe that came down from my mom's mom's Belgian side. It's a frenchy sounding name for a cookie, but we pronounce it goo-fritz.

You make them on a special iron - the "proper" iron is square and heated over the stovetop, but I use a plug-in pizzelle iron.

Today my sister asked me, "do you have just one iron?" My family's figured out what heirlooms to offer me, and taken advantage of my gemini nature to give me multiples of everything - Two china cabinets, and every Virgin Mary statue they've got. Do you want Grandma Margie's fry pot? Um, no, I've already got Grandma W's.

Anyway, here's gaufrettes. They're simple and delicious - try them hot off the iron and slathered in butter. There's some butter scarcity gaufrette story I seem to remember - if any aunts and uncles are tuning in and want the world to know it, tell me and I'll add it on. Here's what you do:

1/2 # Butter
3 C Sugar
5 Eggs
2 Tbl Vanilla
5 C Flour
1 tsp Salt

Cream the butter and sugar, add the eggs and vanilla, stir in the flour and salt. Heat up the iron and grease it by "cooking" 2 pieces of buttered/margerined bread. Drop by teaspoons or with a cookie scoop and close the lid. Cook a couple minutes - just until they stop steaming. If you let them get a little on the brown side they develop a compelling caramelized-sugar taste. If you use too much dough, some will ooze out of the sides - a delicious mess. My mom makes them on the small side and pretty thin. I like to make them on the thick side by letting the weight of the
iron flatten them slowly.

We poke holes in them and hang them on the tree, too - a week later they're subtly pine-tree flavored sugar cookies. My "tree" this year is a little old rosemary bush, so I wonder how that's going to turn out...

The Atlantic Northeast Xmas Tree Jellyfish Tutorial

This year I signed up for a great holiday ornament swap - Thanks again Nicole and Kathleen for organizing it! There's a flickr pool of all the awesome stuff people have made here. And to spread the holiday love even further afield, here's how you can make a tree-jellyfish of your very own!

2009 Update: I've moved the pattern over to MoltingYeti.com, my pattern website, here: Forkfull the Jellyfish, or the Atlantic Northeast Christmas Tree Jellyfish Tutorial.

Pulpo is go!

Just off the needles, here's the knitted octopus!

Radial symmetry, pleating, and googley eyes - oh yeah!

Pattern coming soon - hopefully faster than the last time I said that... stay tuned!

The Squid Has Landed!

The honeymoon of two eloping star-crossed squid is suddenly fraught with danger when disapproving aunt T-Rex finds them and gives chase. Run, squids, run! They thrash their trusty giant land-grub into a lather....

....which is my roundabout way of announcing that I've finally finished the squid pattern! It's rather gratuitously illustrated (there's 16 snaps, showing how to do just about every step), and you can get it the pattern in the shop.

...and, of course, it's also my roundabout way of offering a first peek at another big thing I've been working on lately - my giant grub! More squid lovelies:




Hooray!

Lili Marleen!

Bad news in the inbox yesterday - Knitty decided not to publish my boa pattern, so my dream of finding true love, escaping the drudgery of my day job and ultimately moving into a solar-powered hovering castle, all by designing and knitting fabulous objet (while simultaneously vermicomposting, fixing bikes, finding found art, cross-stitching pithy quips onto old paper bags and, of course, finally learning to tat!) has been deferred until at least the spring issue. My loss is your gain, fan club! I knit brushed alpaca in August just for you!

Meet Lili Marleen!

What if a feather boa could keep you warm at night? I’ve been obsessing over fringes for a while now, and came up with this stitch while goofing around -- why fringe the edge and not the center? Frills in all directions make this scarf wickedly fun to twirl yet seriously warming when wrapped, and bulky as a lion’s mane. Perfect for the glam gal or brave boy you adore.

Yes, this is knitted! It’s basically a big tube of I-cord worked in alternating colors, with periodic rows of fringelets. The fringe is similar to a picot bind-off, only without binding the whole way off – you use a third needle to make each fringelet by casting on and binding off stitches mid-row. It’s really fun and addicting to make. About the yarn – I used a bulky brushed alpaca (I love it, it feels like butter only fuzzy!) but anything bulky with some fuzz to it will do the trick.

The pattern is available as a free download at my website - www.moltingyeti.com.

I'm also ironing three knitting scouts badges onto my sash - the I got turned down by Knitty badge (obviously) the I will crush you with knitting-math badge (for anemone) and the Knitting got me through my divorce badge (for penelope - close enough)







Update June 11 '08: Knitty published Autogyro today, so I'm ironing my new knitty-published-me badge over my old knitty-turned-me-down badge. Yay me!



p.s. if you couldn't tell, that rambly bit at the start was bravado - leave me a comment and cheer me up!

p.p.s. the model is Beyonslay!

p.p.p.s. if you like my boa, check out my squid!

Belated Hooray for Doris

I finally got around to watching the youtube of Doris Lessing learning she'd won the Nobel prize. "oh, christ!" and plonk go the shopping bags. I'm still too technically inept to embed video here, but here's the link. If she weren't already my hero for writing such awesome, honest, emotionally frank novels and managing to maintain and hone her trademark, new-to-the-world shock at the varieties of human cruelty, she would be just for her response to this befuddled BBC fellow.

Update 12-18: Enthusia has posted the text of Doris's acceptance speech - read it here.

Centered Double Decrease (sl 2, k1, p2sso) Tutorial

Here's a step-by-step of my best fave decrease. It pulls both sides towards a central raised stitch, which looks super neat-o. It's featured heavily in the squid pattern (this'll be in the stitch dictionary when I finally put it all together), but here it is for all. I knit "british," so that's the way the tuturial goes.

Step one: slip two stitches together as if to knit:
step 2: enter next stitch after the 2 you just slipped ...
... and knit it.
step 3: With the left-hand needle, pick up the two slipped stitches and pass them together over the stitch just knit.
The result:

Again with the Squid

Hey kids - here's the squid again dolled up in a Santa hat for the Holiday Softie Awards! Wish me luck! (Or wish yourself luck as the case may be...)

Signs that living alone is getting weird...

I just took a bath with a bucket.

Here's a peek into my world -

I've been volunteering with Recycle a Bike lately resurrecting old bikes and teaching other people how to do it, too. Today I went on my first Ride Club with them. Recycle-a-bike is great. A herd of 10-to-14 year old kids and various and sundry grown-ups rode from Long Island City to Prospect Park and back again. 23 miles - that's a lot even if you're not a kid! It was lots of fun, but a really long day... I left my house at 9 to ride to the ride, and didn't get home until 5.

Living alone is still so new to me that it feels like a project. As I rode home through the park I planned my evening out - eat dinner, take a bath, then watch tv and work on knitting squid number two, photographing the tricky moves as I go this time for the pattern write-up. My head is bursting with projects lately - squids, octopi, starfish, kraken, then finally some mammals ... most everybody on my Christmas list is getting knitted softies of some sort or another this year (sorry for the spoiler, relatives, but it's not like it would suprise you!), plus I'm cogitating on playing along with NaSweKniMo, and making some mobiles, and finishing the baby quilt I started for Mathea before she turns one, and I promised somebody a poncho, plus I have this idea for sewing a shower curtain, which would also involve decorating my brown-tiled bathroom with pink everything, except it's impossible to find a pink toilet seat that doesn't have hellokitty on it, and I wish I could find time to cross stitch, because a nice subversive sampler would go great next to the kiki smith poster...

And also I have plans for this bucket. It's not just any bucket, it's an old Japanese water bucket my mom picked up at a shrine sale when we lived in Japan. It made of pieced wood, and it's in fine shape, but there are some gaps where the wood pieces meet. But a couple years ago I heard a story on the radio about the people that make New York's ubiquitous water tanks - they leak like crazy for the first couple weeks after being installed - the wooden tanks suck up the water and swell, and that's how they hold together. There's something I love about this - form and function mixed together where function comes first - you have to do the verb to become the noun. I've been keeping the bucket next to the tub to remind me to see what happens when I get it wet.

So I set the bucket under the tub spigot as I filled up my bath. But the cracks between the wood slats are big enough that it really won't hold any water at all, and then what am I to do with this soggy bucket? So the bucket and I took a soak together. Here's what I learned: Thirsty, dried-out water buckets make a really great noise when you put them in the bathtub with you. If you've ever forgotten to water a spider plant for a month or so and then remembered, it's a sound kind of like that - an alive, squeaking, rice crispies kind of sound.

At some point it will probably bother me that I'm multi-tasking even in the bathtub, but for now I'm really happy.

Knitted Squid - Yippee!

Here's the squid I knit this weekend while visiting my folks and sis - some version of the pattern has been kicking around in my head for months now, but I'm still amazed at how quickly it came to life once it hit the needles ... I cast on the first stitches of the mantle on Thursday, and by tonight I was weaving in the yarn-ends! Made on the subway, in the airport, and on mom and dad's couch. Though I confess, the family does watch a awful lot of football when we get together. Pattern available here!
Marjojo points out that I have a thing for arms - she's right, this one has 20!

Prototype Tuesday - Jumbo Knitted Octopus

I'm usually not one for showing works in progress, but it's killing me that I can't show the other thing I've been up to lately since I submitted it to knitty (everybody cross your fingers and hop on one foot for me), so here's one - it's my most recent attempt at designing a knitted octopus! It's not 100% there yet, but it's getting close - this is the rough draft. And can I just say I love radial symmetry?

This is worked completely in the round with (ta daa!) no sewing whatsoever. Which means it's totally scalable (by the time I do the pattern write-up, there'll be two or three sizes - a whole octo family), and you can make a snuggly cephalopod of your very own with any gauge yarn you want. I'm planning to self-publish this one in the etsy shop, and I'm writing up the pattern super-deluxe, with step-by-step pics of all the tricky moves. Watch this space for some small-scale circular knitting tutorials in days to come.

There's a squid in my head that will be made much the same way and follow hot on the octo's heels... or tentacles, tee hee! And did anybody see the creatures of the deep on the cover of Smithsonian magazine this month? Yipes - it's got me trying to figure out how to make a see-through plushie!

Representing for the fellas...

Not that I've ever claimed to be representative of my sex, or that my new crop of facial hair has resolved all of my gender stuff, but...

Ariadne found a somewhat spooky youtube featuring knitting fellas. Hey dude, what're you making? A hammock. With sharpened pool cues. Yipes.

Not to diss the pool-cue guy (I mean c'mon, it's kind of awesome), but it brings to mind the Dave Cole stuff from the Radical Lace show - hey! look at me! I'm a man! and I'm knitting! with back-hoes! (or whatever you call those things). So that makes it art!

I mostly knit on the subway, and I don't have a knitting circle. I've met plenty of knitters on public transit, but only a couple of knitting men. Knitting breaks the NYC subway rule - strangers talk to you. Here are a couple of random boy-boy knitting encounters I have to share...

(one) More than a couple times, I've had people ask me if I went to Waldorf school. Subway conversations always start in the middle of things - "Waldorf school, huh?" "Um... no? Why do you say that?" "Oh, all the Waldorf school kids learn to knit, even the boys..."

(two) Last year I met a teacher on the subway. I was knitting penelope, and she was wearing a sweater she'd made herself. She told me her dad started knitting during world war II - he was on a submarine. There's lots and lots of down-time on a submarine, and in between it's pretty hectic, so knitting sounds like a perfect stress-relief and time killer. Her dad got everybody knitting by the end of their tour. Better than scrimshaw, that's for sure.

(three) The last time I went to a punk show, (Mastodon & Against Me! this spring) the bouncer checked my bag. I was carrying the cotton and sticks that became the anemone blanket. He said, oh, man, I'm learning how to do that! Who knew?

I know the knitting fellas out there in the ether have more to add... to be continued...

Doilies and Dresser Cloths!

I named this blog Tatting my Doilies 'cause it's about all my little arts and crafts projects. It's also about the self-deprecating way I usually talk about my little arts and crafts projects. What are you up to lately? "Oh, you know, riding my bike, tatting my doilies... " The first stranger that found me through the interthing was Lady Shuttlemaker - a real life, bona fide tatter and maker of fine ceramic tatting shuttles besides.

Then last month when Grandpa died I inherited two real life lace doilies, made I think by my great grandma (his mom). I asked Lady S if she knew how it was made, and she asked her lace people, and then pointed me to this website. Apparently it's needle lace. I did some more poking around and found this honkin' bibliography, too. Wow. So thread and a needle, and a little scrap of cloth in the middle is all it's made of. I find needlework totally bewildering. It's so tiny! Lots and lots of little tiny knots. I can't really think about how she made it without feeling the urge to squint my eyes up. Anybody else out there in the ether made needle lace? Does it take absolutely forever?



I also inherited three lace-crocheted dresser cloths - basically big rectangular doilies just the right size for the tops of the dressers in grandpa's bedroom. I haven't figured out what to do with these yet, but tracking down the pattern (and learning to crochet) is somewhere on my list...

Penelope Pattern

The divine (tee hee) Ariadne officially put the bee in my bonnet to set this one down in writing. So after a couple weeks of doing other stuff and spending some time re-creating the border to figure out how I made it in the first place, here goes... I'm super-new to writing patterns down, so please if any of this doesn't make sense, let me know!

Finished Measurements: 6" (10" including edging) by 9 feet

Materials: Karabella Zodiac in orange, lots and lots of it (I think I used 8 balls)

Size 5 needles.

Gauge: 21 sts and 28 rows per 4" in st st as worked on size 5s

Concept: A really, really long scarf of fishnetty lace. Diamonds grow and shrink in the center. The diamond pattern makes it like to fold in half vertically, which works out great when wrapping this multiple times around your neck. I finished the piece, blocked it, and found that it still very much liked to curl... the sawtooth lace edging is applied at the end and counteracts the tendency towards curliness somewhat.

Body:

This is a 32-row repeat

Cast on 30 stitches using open cast-on (I didn't do this, but in hindsight, I should have).
Row 1: k1, *yo, k2tog*, end k1
Row 2 and all WS rows: purl
Row 3: k1, *yo, k2tog,* 6 times, yo, k2, k2tog, *yo, k2tog* 6 times, end k1
Row 5: k1, *yo, k2tog* 6 times, k4, *yo, k2tog* 6 times, end k1
Row 7: k1, *yo, k2tog* 5 times, yo, k6, k2tog, *yo, k2tog* 5 times, end k1
Row 9: k1, *yo, k2tog* 5 times, k8, *yo, k2tog* 5 times, end k1
Row 11: k1, *yo, k2tog* 4 times, yo, k10, k2tog, *yo, k2tog* 4 times, end k1
Row 13: k1, *yo, k2tog* 4 times, k12, *yo, k2tog* 4 times, end k1
Row 15: k1, *yo, k2tog* 3 times, yo, k14, k2tog, *yo, k2tog* 3 times, end k1
Row 17: k1, *yo, k2tog* 3 times, k16, *yo, k2tog* 3 times, end k1
Row 19: repeat row 15
Row 21: repeat row 13
Row 23: repeat row 11
Row 25: repeat row 9
Row 27: repeat row 7
Row 29: repeat row 5
Row 31: repeat row 3

Repeat until you've reached the desired length. 17 times, in my case.

Edging: Use a double-point and a single-point

PU: Pick up st from body of the scarf either using left end of LH double-pointed needle or end right left end of RH needle as appropriate.

S&W: Slip first st purlwise. Wrap the yarn around it counterclockwise 1 1/2 times, ending with yarn in front.

BO: Use wrapped bind off: K first st. Wrap the yarn twice around the stitch just K, ending with yarn in back. K next st and pass first st over second. Wrap the stitch just K before knitting the next.

Row 1: PU 1 st, CO 4 more
Row 2: S&W, *yo, k2tog* twice, PU1
Row 3 and all WS rows: K
Row 4: S&W, *yo, k2tog* twice, yo, PU1, k2tog
Row 6: S&W, *yo, k2tog* 3 times, PU1
Row 8: S&W, *yo, k2tog* 3 times, yo, PU1, k2tog
Row 10: S&W, *yo, k2tog* 4 times, PU 1
Row 12: S&W, *yo, k2tog* 4 times, yo, PU1, k2tog
Row 14: S&W, *yo, k2tog* 5 times, PU1
Row 16: S&W, *yo, k2tog* 5 times, yo, PU1, k2tog
Row 18: BO 8, *yo, k2tog* twice, PU1

repeat rows 3 through 18 the whole way around the scarf. It will take you an eternity, but it may keep those pesky suitors at bay.

From the vaults: diamond lace scarf

Here's some pics of my really, really long orange scarf.

I made this during a particularly heinous couple months of my life, and it took forever, and even when I was done with it I decided it needed a border which took forever all over again, so I think of it as Penelope's shroud. Not that Odysseus came back to town and killed my suitors and maids and then went off wandering until he found somebody who called his oar a winnowing fan or anything, and I doubt Penelope had access to such fabulous, high-tech orange cotton, but still.


If you get plain old yarn-over k2tog lace, that's what this is, only with a diamond that builds up and diminishes in the middle, with a sawtooth lace border applied after the body is finished.

I'm working on writing up the how-to of it for pattern-writing practice, but right now the counting is making me dizzy. So here's the snaps. Somebody bug me for the pattern and I'll reconstruct it for everybody.

Ruffled Sunburst Sea-Anemone Baby Blanket

My sister Abbie had a daughter yesterday - Hannah Joy Burzynski, f/k/a sprout - hooray! Hooray for palindromically first-named nieces! Hooray for symmetry and frills!

Here's the baby blanket I made her. I was in the home stretch of finishing up the fringe when I got the call yesterday that I was an uncle again, so last night I plunked myself down in front of an endless supply of ABC reruns on the computer and finished it off. Hooray again!

It's a variation on the classic pinwheel blanket and also a couple steps removed from the blanket I made for her first, Ethan, which was pieced together using pinwheel/lace octagons and squares. I'll try to post snaps of that one soon - it's from my pre-digital era.

Abbie's husband Ben is really math-y, so I've been thinking of all the math stuff you could teach a kid (or a grown-up for that matter!) with this pattern. Triangles, spirals, arcs, squares, octagons, 16-a-gons, for starters. Also multiplication and exponents, since it goes 4/8/16. Although it's not a true sunflower pattern, Fermat's Spiral
and all manner of fun with Spirographs. Then later on, more higher math series stuff like Factorials and Triangular Numbers and Fibonacci numbers... The body of the blanket is also kind of like a circular family tree, now that I think of it. How a propos.

I also ruffled and frilled and fringed the bujeezus out of this one... I knew the ruffley-ness would happen because I added more and more stitches as the piece got wider - adding 4 stitches per round would make it flat - adding 8 per round made it ruffle, and adding 16 per round made the ruffles ruffle. I found the fringe pattern in the first Nicky Epstein over-the-edge book, which I also explored when I made Lowly the scarf (snaps soon!) and it added so much bulk to the blanket, it took on a weight and a life of its own!

Teddy Bear Sunflower? Sea Anemone? Gramma Tilda's shag carpet? Solar Corona? I've been looking a lot at Helle Jorgensen and My Art Grows Around Me lately, and I flatter myself to think that it shows...

I made this using plain old Lion brand yellow cotton on size 4 needles, and the fringey bits are incorporated into the bind-off instead of being sewn on - baby stuff is meant to get barfed on, and this should last for years (generations?) and hold up just fine in the wash. It's one heck of a wubbie. Please love it, Hannah!

For something so complicated, it's surprisingly simple and intuitive to make. If you'd like to take a crack at it, you can find the pattern here.

Knitted Uterus!

here are some snaps of the model uterus I knitted for Shana last X-mas. She's a doula to the stars and a midwife-in-training, so when I stumbled on the pattern on Knitty.com I thought immediately of her... the big snap is the uterus at large in the front yard - the little one is en scene inside the vinyl pelvis atop her dresser...

related, kinda: Kiki Smith