Productivity

There's nothing quite like a big, white, elephantine project to inspire all sorts of productivity in a knitter. Right now, my white elephant is the ribby cardi. I am going to restart it...tomorrow. Promise.

This week the cardi really pushed me to get some other projects done.
I finished the airy scarf from Last Minute Knitted Gifts:


And I started and finished the Angora Baby Booties, also from LMKG. But first, take a close look at this picture, its the one I put up in my sidebar Friday night:

Do you see what I see? Yep, there is a piece of yarn on the heel that is hanging off, broken!! Somehow, when I put this down at 2AM Friday night (Saturday morning) I misguidedly thought I was supposed to break that piece of yarn. I wasn't, I was supposed to be using it to pick up some stitches along the heel edges. But I just stranded in a new piece of yarn and it all turned out fine. I even managed to finish despite the fact that I bound off, broke the yarn and THEN realized my bind off row was waaay too tight to squeeze a fat little baby foot in there so I undid the bound off row and looped in a brand new piece of yarn to bind off a second time using much larger needles.

Sometimes I think this blog should be called Knitcore Nadia's Gallery of Amazing Disasters.

Tonight Karen hosted the monthly Stitch n' Bitch we have for our personal friends to come and knit. The distinction between this and the knitting social is that anyone can come to that but the SnB we have is private, invitation only and usually involves food, drinks and generally a really entertaining night. Karen and I live in the same 2 flat (2 story apartment building in Chicago-speak) so we didn't even have to go outside which is a good thing because its rainy and disgusting out.
I had a great time even though only a few people showed up and I finished the booties. I had figured out the pattern well enough that the second bootie didn't give me nearly as much trouble as the first.


I also felt a weird compulsion and baked a coconut cake for the occasion.
Here is the cake with just the frosting:

Its a meringue style frosting that I had to hand whisk over a pan of simmering water for 7 minutes. My stand mixer didn't do me any good in that situation and I nearly died of arm muscle failure. Fortunately at the end of 7 minutes I just popped the bowl on the Kitchenaid and it finished it up in no time.

Here I am gently applying the toasted coconut. I didn't realize that the coconut I had was unsweetened but I toasted it and it was really a beautiful garnish and flavor.


And the final finished product:


This weekend was supposed to be relaxing and even though we stayed in both Friday and Saturday nights, I have no idea where any of the time went. I feel like I spent the whole weekend on the go, running from one thing to the next. Ah well, at least I got a ton of knitting done, maybe next weekend there will be more time for relaxatating as Dan would say.