Ayse: October 2007 Archives

We had about twelve more large quince to deal with from the tree. Noel requested quince jelly, so I decided to make the juice today. Here's the canning pot filled up with quartered quince (and a couple small Jonathan apples that I threw in for flavour).

I tried something I need to work on in more detail later: I put the pot full of quince in the oven for half an hour at 350F to get it started on breaking down, then added water and put it on the stove. I think I could have roasted them for longer, as with the marmelada, and it would have been more successful. Anyway, I don't have any more quince to experiment with this year, and I'm certainly not going to buy any, but I'm making notes on what I want to try next year.

Technorati Tags: fruit, jelly, quince

OK, so the slightly scary lace tinkering went well -- better than I might have expected.

I give you: lace, repaired, and back on the needles

I ended up having to pull back four rows, which is not too terribly bad. Also, I found a place where I'd failed to yarnover properly, and fixed that.

Technorati Tags: crafts, knitting, lace

So I made a mistake a couple of rows back in my lace shawl, noted and set aside for more time until after the midreview last week -- if I try to do delicate repairs while in the middle of a big project I'm likely to get stupid, and making the mistake in the first place was stupid enough (knitting lace in the dark while drinking).

Anyway. The fix. I did some web searching and thinking on the subject, rather than my usual impulsive tear-the-whole-thing-back approach, or even worse, the try-to-fix-blindly approach. My knitting mistakes have largely been about fit in the past, rather than about, um, k1 instead of k2tog, so this called for a different approach. I found this tutorial and decided to go for it.

Here's the lace shawl, pinned out, steamed, and sprayed within an inch of its life with regular-hold spray starch. I forgot how spray starch smells like my grandmother's hair. I'm pretty sure she didn't, you know, actually use the stuff as "product," but is there some kind of old-lady hair spray that smells like that? Weird.

Technorati Tags: crafts, knitting, lace

What have I been doing for the last three weeks? Making this:

Well, then taking that and making it into this:

Technorati Tags: architecture, design, model building, school