We have 4 enormous tubs, 3 large pots, and a couple of middling sized pots filled with potting mix and/or various vegetable matter. For the big tubs, I raked up a heap of leaf litter and filled them 1/3 with that, 1/3 with chopped lucerne, and 1/3 with organic potting mix. There’s more lucerne left over to be mulch.

I’ve planted the 4 tomatoes, 3 peppers, basil, and thyme into the tubs and the largest of the pots. I’m waiting on seeds to arrive to plant stuff in the other ones.

Our worm farm also arrived today. Darebin (our local municipality) is a Transition Town so they have various programs to encourage sustainability. One of them is subsidised worm farms. Ours cost $60, and I’ll head down to CERES tomorrow to buy some worms to put in it.

Cooking:

Emily was going to make dal saag but she forgot to get spinach, so instead we had fried gnocchi. I threatened to blog her cooking, but she said she’d blog it herself at the food/craft/domesticity blog she shares with our friend Ana so keep an eye out for it there. Suffice it to say that she fried gnocchi in olive oil with vast amounts of garlic, then added kalamata olives, roasted red peppers, artichoke hearts, fresh tomatoes, and fresh parsley. We ate it with parmesan sprinked over, and it was amazing, especially after all the gardening work.

(Updated: she’s posted her recipe here.)

Now she’s got some lemon slice in the oven, using the lemons we found in that empty block yesterday. I am looking forward to them so much — that sort of slice is just like Nanna used to make, and something I hardly ever do myself but love intensely when other people do. She’s using this recipe.

Preserving:

There is going to be a lot of food preservation going on around here this summer. I bought an 80s-era Fowlers Vacola preserving unit from eBay the other week, but only after determining that actually, you don’t need to use the expensive Fowlers branded jars with the pain-in-the-arse lids. Seems you can use any jar you want, as long as it is clean and unchipped, and has a fresh lid. Green Living Australia sell bulk lids for standard Australian jars (the ones you find most often in supermarkets, such as jam, pasta sauce, and pickle jars), so I got a bunch of them, and they came today.

Now historically I’ve just re-used the lids that came with jars, but I was usually making sugar or vinegar-heavy recipes (jams, chutneys, pickles) that didn’t really need heat preserving and where bacteria would basically be scared off before they got anywhere near it. This year I want to preserve stewed fruit and passata (tomato sauce) without masses of added preservatives, which means hot water method and being much more finicky about the jars and lids I use.

Anyway, the Fowlers unit should be good for the hot water preserving in the summer, since it is an enclosed container with a lid, that runs on an electric cord (basically like a kettle or an old fashioned hot water urn), and which you can even put outside to run on a hot day, which means the kitchen needn’t get too overheated.

Also from Green Living: yoghurt culture and assorted bits and pieces for yoghurt making. In the past I’ve mostly just made yoghurt from other yoghurt, but I thought it might be worth a try doing it from dry culture for a change. We’ll see how it goes.

Christmas: I don’t think any of us in this house are massively into Christmas decorations, but we do like fairy lights, so we’ve been buying them and decorating the carved woodwork around the house with them. Today I discovered that you can get solar powered LED lights in the garden department at K-Mart for cheaper than the ones in the Christmas decoration area, so we’re going to put some of them over the front door and around the gatehouse. We’ve got the plain white ones and we’re intending to leave them up year-round.

Knitting: It’s warming up but it’s not so hot I can’t knit. Since I’ve been reunited with the bits of my yarn stash I left in storage in Australia, I’ve cast on a few things in an attempt to get rid of some of it before my other stash arrives from the US.

I have several not-quite-a-jumper amounts of 8 ply wool, so I’ve got this stranded yoke pullover (body in an oatmealy colour and yoke in grey-blue and cool brown), and a striped EPS in cherry red and black Cleckheaton Country on the needles. The former of those is up to the armpits and I’ll probably join them tonight and start on the yoke. Unemployment turns out to be good for my knitting productivity. Surprise.

Pattern

Materials:

• 2 skeins Spud and Chloe “Fine”, or 500yd/460m of fingering weight yarn of your choice
• US 4/3.5mm needles (gauge is not important, so you can choose whatever size needles suit you, but this is what I used)

CO 44 st.

Knit 19 rows.

Row 20: k3 p38 k3

Row 21: k3, (yo k2tog k4) 6 times, yo, k2tog, k3

Row 22: k3 p38 k3

Row 23: k4, (yo k2tog k4) 6 times, yo, k2tog, k2

Repeat rows 20-23 for approximately 5′ (1.5m) until you have only enough yarn left to repeat the garter hem, then repeat row 20 once.

Knit 18 rows.

Cast off.

Finishing: Sew in ends and steam block.

License

Grounded by Kirrily Robert is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

This means you may use it, adapt it, share it, reprint it, publish it, and do whatever you like with it, even for commercial (i.e. money-making purposes), as long as you:

1. Credit me (Kirrily Robert) as the creator, and link to this blog (http://oeconomist.infotrope.net/), and
2. License any adaptation or compilation based on it, under the same license.

See the Creative Commons website for more information, or join the Creative Commons group on Ravelry.

The coaster is just a simple crocheted square. I made it big enough that I can rest my teapot on it if I want — about 15cm square. The curtain tie-backs are just 8 stitches wide, with stocking stitch in alternating 2-row stripes. The natural curl of the stocking stitch makes them rope-like.

There’s nothing very special about these, but they’re cute and colourful and I rather like them.

The shawl is the Icelandic feather and fan one from Cheryl Oberle’s “Folk Shawls”, knitted in New Lanark Mills’ aran-weight wool in (IIRC) gritstone. It was left over from an earlier cardigan.

The shawl starts in a fairly standard way from the centre top, just at the back of your neck, and you increase at either edge and twice in the middle every second row. However, after a while you start increasing at the edges on the way back too, meaning that instead of increasing 4st for every two rows, it’s 6st. This gives the shawl long trailing ends that it wouldn’t otherwise have.

I’m not 100% sure how I feel about the shape of it. It’s not quite as cozy and nice to wear on the sofa while watching TV as a plain triangular one, but it does work better in public, worn sort of scrunched in the centre and draped like a scarf. I think its scarf-like properties would work better in a lighter weight yarn, though. I enjoyed knitting the pattern a lot, so I will probably try it again in something more lightweight, another time.

You take a ball of sock yarn, cast on four stitches, and increase gradually until you’ve used just under half the ball (judging by weight), then decrease at the same rate. I’ve knitted two so far.

The first is in a purplish shade of the self-striping Schoppel-Wolle Admiral Ombré.

The second is the lacy version of Baktus, featuring yarn-overs every eighth row, in Fearless Fibers’ lightweight sock yarn in a deep foresty green.

I have to admit I prefer the lacy version to knit, because it’s easier to tell whether you need to increase or not on any given row; in the plain version, it all gets a bit same-y and it’s hard to tell which row you’re on if your attention slips at all.

Both are really nice to wear and perfect lightweight scarves for San Francisco’s cold summers, where it can get chilly in the evenings even through July and August.

The red ones in the middle are the new ones. The yarn is Lana Grossa Meilenweit tweed, so as you can probably see the red yarn has black and brown tweedy flecks in it. I really liked it, and would happily knit more socks with it.

The pattern is just my personal basic sock pattern (all three pairs in this photo are knitted from it), with one new variation: I usually cast on 72st, but for these I cast on 84st and after I was done with the 2×2 ribbed cuffs, I decreased 3 stitches every half inch or so, four times. This makes them fit my huge calves better.

Recently finished:

Two dishcloths in this vile pinky red colour. I like them because they’re the same colour as Dreamwidth‘s “Tropospherical red” site theme.

A shawl, from Cheryl Oberle’s “Folk Shawls”. It’s the lacy prairie shawl. A simple triangular pattern, knit point-upwards, like a dishcloth. The lace is a very easy repeat. This was a great stash-buster as it got rid of 10 balls of grey wool that weren’t quite enough for a sweater.

Socks. My basic pattern, with a broken rib. I love this yarn. It’s Rio de la Plata’s “Multi-solid” and it’s three plies in burgundy, mustard, and olive green, making an speckly brown overall.

And now, some new WIPs…

Feather and fan shawl from Oberle’s “Folk Shawls”. I’m using the aran-weight Lanark Mills wool that was left over from my striped cardigan of last year.

Bottom-up birch shawl using this awesome woolly wool that I picked up in Austin when I was there for SXSW. (Um, yes, I have developed a thing for triangular shawls.)

Sideways eyelet scarf, which is curling pretty badly and which I really hope will flatten out with blocking. I wanted something sideways with nice long stretches of not having to think about anything. This is 300 stitches or so, and 7 of the 12 rows in the repeat are plain knitting.

Melissa Wehrle’s “Sesame” pattern didn’t come in my size, and apart from that, it’s for DK weight and I had some aran weight yarn I wanted to use. So I used her stripes as an inspiration and made an Elizabeth Zimmerman percentage-system raglan cardi.

This is my first ever cardigan, so the button bands were new to me. I even learnt a one-row buttonhole technique, which was kind of cool. Finding buttons to fit the buttonholes was very hard, though. I found some I loved but they were $10.95 PER BUTTON. They were real horn. The ones I ended up with were much more affordable. Alas, I think they are just a smidgen too small for the buttonholes. They don’t really slip out, but I feel like they might if given half a chance.

1. Monochrome afghan, 2. Finished, Yoda is, 3. Scrubby, 4. Gah!, 5. Hot water bottle cover for Erica, 6. Baby socks, 7. Big green cowl action shot, 8. Submarine cable socks, 9. Sock in progress, 10. Cowl, 11. Green hat, 12. Vest – complete, 13. Noro striped scarf, 14. Simple mitts, 15. Green sweater – almost done, 16. Nolan in hat, 17. Girlboyperson hat, 18. Scrubby, 19. Amy in her new hat, 20. Dishcloths

Additionally, not in the pictures above but soon-to-be-blogged, a striped cardigan.

Or, to put it another way:

• three sweaters/cardigans/vests
• two adult pairs of socks
• three baby garments (counting a pair of socks as a single)
• a hot water bottle cover
• a scarf
• two cowls
• three hats
• a pair of mittens
• half a dozen dishcloths (not all are shown)
• one blanket (technically crocheted, not knitted, but whatever)
• a shopping bag

According to Ravelry I finished 20 projects, of which five were gifts. This year’s resolutions commit me to at least meeting those two figures again this year.

Things I learnt:

• I don’t really like variegated yarns; semi-solids are OK, and self-stripings, but the normal hand-paint variety just don’t float my boat. Not even in butch colours.
• Yarn heavier than aran weight is just Not For Me, at least not as a general thing.
• Don’t put your hat in your back pocket or you’ll lose it (I lost two this way, this year.)

I’d tried to knit a couple of jumpers before, but something always went wrong. Now with the help of Ravelry I felt a lot more confident, so I decided to start in on two easy, recipe-based jumpers.

The first was an Elizabeth Zimmerman EPS sweater, built on a percentage system using the gauge of the yarn you happen to have. That’s still in progress, because it’s thick and heavy and I put it aside during the summer.

The second was based on Ann Budd’s “The Knitter’s Handy Book of Sweater Patterns” using some miscellaneous eBayed yarn from Australia: 8 x 50g of 5 ply (sportweight) in a heathery plum colour. Not enough for a whole jumper, but enough for something sleeveless or short sleeved.

Last week I finished it:

I knit the version at 6 st/inch and the 42″ size based on my above-bust measurement.

It’s ribbed up the sides for a closer fit, and those ribs come in along the raglan decreases to form a diagonal line. The front pocket was picked up along the bottom edge, knitted not-quite rectangularly (decreasing every 6th row), and then grafted at the top edge.

The sleeves are a mere 1/2″ long before joining to the body. I think they look a bit funny though; that cap sleeve sort of look isn’t the best on me. If I’d been sure I’d have enough yarn, I would’ve made them a bit longer. Never mind; I think I’ll mostly be wearing this under a jacket anyway:

Here are the project details on Ravelry.

(And the green jumper should be done this weekend, I think.)