Kiss My Knits!

When Tvini gets enough sleep…

Everybody wins!

(Yes, Dad, I’ll be over later.)




By the way, maybe everybody already knew this trick, but if you have trouble opening those clamshell packages that everything seems to come in now, try using a can opener. I remembered this trick after I sliced my finger open, and it worked like a charm. Second fun trick I tried that worked great: instead of cutting chunks of butter into the flour, freeze a stick of butter and then grate it into the flour so it’s already in little pieces. It trimmed my cutting time by 3/4, easy. Tips from Tvini!

Got a headache, am a little stressed out, and this month’s unexpected expense (there’s always an unexpected expense) was a double ear infection for the cat. So I get to pour drops in the cat’s ears twice daily. I hate that cat.

Obviously I need a little kick start to get myself back to my usual sunny demeanor. I wonder if I could sub pureed frozen raspberries for some of the butter in my favorite brownie recipe. Hmmm…

It’s my husband’s birthday today! His favorite cake is carrot cake, but I’m mindful of the fact that he’s lost 50 pounds over the last year, and I don’t want to set his progress back. (I say progress, but he could stop right now and be right at the medically ideal weight for his height.) With that in mind, I found a recipe for carrot cake cupcakes that said it made 12 servings. Easier to see exactly how much you’ve eaten if one cupcake is a serving.

Well, you see how this turned out. Personally, I’d consider 24 or so cupcakes to be more than 12 servings. Maybe it means 12 servings if one of the guests is Michael Phelps. Also, I have a cup of homemade cream cheese frosting leftover if anybody local wants it. It’s not the frosting from the recipe – it’s cream cheese, butter, powdered sugar, and a little vanilla. Normally, I like to bring extra food to my dad when we’ve got something really tasty, but there are times when I weigh the wisdom of bringing a sugar bomb to a diabetic. Eh, he’s a grown man, he can make his own dietary decisions.

My weight’s going up tonight, and I don’t care. Dad, I’ll be foisting a couple off on you tomorrow – I’m not going out on my hubby’s birthday!

I’m back on the Jayne horse again now that I can breathe better. Not perfect, but better, and that’s good enough! I’ve got four hats and four kits waiting to go out, so I’ll be hitting the post office momentarily. Actually, only three of those hats are going out. I’m waiting for an e-mail back from a guy in Oregon – I’m missing his address. Hats next up to: CA, MO, CO.

Emily got it into her head earlier this week that we needed to make gelatin. Not “Jell-O,” “gelatin.” This is because she found it hilarious to pronounce the word “juh-LAH-tin.” Ah, jocularity, jocularity. We made some yesterday and she had it last night. “This is DELICIOUS!” she said.

She’s on a cooking spree lately. At her request, we made lemonade yesterday, the only way we always make it – from scratch, with lemons, water, and sugar. Here’s the recipe. Only modification: she doesn’t like pulp, so we squeeze the lemons through a sieve.

Yesterday I looked at her and thought about how much she was growing up, and took a chance. “Would you like to cut the lemons?” So I showed her how you curve your fingers to avoid cutting them. I watched her like a hawk but didn’t really interfere. It could have been really bad – nothing stings like lemon juice in a cut – but she did great. The cuts didn’t exactly bisect the lemons perfectly, but so what? It’ll come with practice. She picked out the bag of lemons at the store, since one of those 2 pound bags gives just about the perfect amount of juice. She didn’t boil the sugar in the water, obviously, but she did pour the cooled syrup into the pitcher. She cut the lemons, and she helped a bit with squeezing, but it’s hard for her little hands. I did the trick where you roll the uncut lemon on the counter to make it easier to squeeze after cutting, but even so, it took some muscle.

Emily poured in the water and the lemon juice and stirred it with a wooden spoon. And she’s been drinking it regularly. I took the opportunity to point out how food we make ourselves tastes so much better. I am a mom, after all. We say these things.

Today’s Emily art is Musical Lin. I don’t know who Lin is, but clearly she enjoys belting out the tunes. Time to get another kit packed up. Hope y’all have a great day!

The reason my fingers were kind of yellow in the picture in the previous post is because we’d been cooking something with turmeric in it. This is an absolutely delicious chicken recipe that we had at a friend’s house in 1998. The recipe doesn’t say to use strips, but we think you’re probably supposed to (what with “satay” in the title of the recipe). This went well with asparagus last night. I lost track of the rice and burned it, but obviously that would go well too.

Chicken Satay Singapore Style

3T peanut oil
1T soy sauce
1t honey
3 cloves garlic, minced
1T minced peeled fresh ginger
1T curry powder
1t ground coriander
1t ground turmeric
1t ground cumin
1 small dried chili, finely crumbled (can substitute red pepper flakes)
salt and ground black pepper to taste
2 pounds skinless chicken breasts

Marinate covered at room temperature for 2 hours (we do it in the fridge for food safety reasons).
Grill.

If using chicken pieces with skin, omit the peanut oil, peel back the skin while marinating.

Eat and enjoy!

I got a lot of mileage out of the leftover leaf-green dye from Sunday’s session. Here we see a small amount of leftover white Dale Baby Ull crammed into a pint Mason jar filled with dye. A day or so later, the dye was absorbed and the liquid was mostly clear. The picture doesn’t capture the correct color – it’s more of a grass green.


In other news, more banana chocolate chip muffins than two people could possibly eat.

Emily: “Maybe next time you can make strawberry muffins. That would be good.”

Everybody’s a critic.

I’m up to mid-March on hat orders. Next up: London, Alberta, and New York.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, DAD!
(I’ll call you later to arrange delivery. I love you!)

Apparently my courage in battling the monstera has inspired illiane to present me with some “yummy” “goodness” from Malaysia. illiane said that she thought the rambutan was “rude-looking,” which just shows you what a gutter mind she has. I’ll tell you this – no matter how sweet and delicious they are purported to be, I will not be opening the can of alien balls without full hazmat gear. Take “alien balls” how you will. I think we all know how illiane will be taking it.

I’ll report back when I sample these. Until then, they’ll be safely stored in a lead-lined bunker in the back yard.


Whipped up another little something, which I cannot show you in its finished form because it is a gift. These are the bits of it, though. I just need to put a finishing touch on it, then it’s off to its destination.

There are actually a fair number of non-Jayne items in the queue right now, which is always fun. I ran a reproduction of a felted purse past the client who asked for it, and she was very pleased, although it needs to be a hair wider. I need to knock another one or two of those out for her – she’s gifting her sisters with them for Christmas. There are a couple of Jayne hats that need to be ready by Flanvention II, but aside from that, most stuff is for Christmas. At this point, it’s too late to order a finished hat and have it guaranteed by the holidays. Kits are no problem, but if you’re not already in line for a knitted item, it may be January.


For Halloween, Emily said all season that she did NOT want a pumpkin. Next year, she’d want a pumpkin but definitely not this year. No sir, no pumpkin for her. Until 3pm on Halloween day. Great.

So we went to two grocery stores with no luck, then I thought I’d try a pumpkin stand I knew, and they had a few left. A few small, lumpy pumpkins. Emily quickly pointed to what we shall not call the worst, but instead “the one with the most character.” If there was a Halloween equivalent to the Charlie Brown Christmas tree, this was it. It was two dollars, but the guy took pity on us and only charged us a buck. We were very grateful.

We took it back home, and because I am one of Those Moms who sucks the fun out of everything, I had Emily draw me a picture of how she wanted the pumpkin to look so that she could work those fine motor skills. Actually, it was still fun, since it was part of the process of carving. “Triangle eyes, circle nose, squiggle mouth.” I’d never done squiggle before, but I gave it a shot. It may not be art, but it is, as my father would say, “good enough for newspaper work.”

Behold! The tiniest pumpkin! If ever the Great Pumpkin were going to visit a house instead of a pumpkin patch, he would surely choose ours, as our pumpkin was the most sincere in the neighborhood. The opening was barely big enough to fit a little tea candle inside.

I leave you with this belated image of Halloween. May your candy last exactly as long as you want it to.

AIEEEE!! It’s escaped!!

Oh, no. Wait. False alarm. It just ripened.

Texture: creamy, firm, and pockmarked, like the love child of a plantain and Edward James Olmos. Odor: Extremely strong tropical fruit smell. Like the Dole factory floor in July.

At this point, it’s ready to eat. Unfortunately, we were booked up all day yesterday and didn’t have time to set up containment facilities required by the protocols for dealing with extraterrestrial fruits. It’s in the refrigerator, loosely tied in a plastic shopping bag. Hopefully the cold will slow its growth. Hey, it worked for The Blob.

Tonight, we’ll perform the surgery. God help us all.

For behold, I present to you…

Click on the cut… IF YOU DARE!