I built the Eiffel Tower today.

Ok, it sounds kind of silly if I say it like that. But I did! I picked up the Nanoblock Eiffel Tower the other day and built it tonight. It was pretty fun. The whole thing is only 5″ tall!

It totally took me longer than 13 seconds, by the way.

The pieces look huge in the photos, but they are itty-bitty teeny-tiny. I had to use tweezers to pick up the single-cell block that I put in the wrong place.

Here, have lot’s of photos! This is what I do when I’m not knitting or making websites, hehe!

It’s not Friday, but I wanted to post some of the items I’ve finally finished recently! I picked up a few items that had been on needles for an embarrassingly long time, and finished them.

But first, I have a public service announcement. DO NOT let items sit on needles as long as I do, or bad things will happen. See the socks and gloves for details. Le sigh.

So. First up is my Vampire Heaven. For some reason this one took a lot more yarn than my Malabrigo version did, and I had to get some extra yarn to finish binding off. If I remember right, I was still supposed to do more rows on the edging too, but I got tired of knitting it. I don’t have a great picture, but here she is:

Then I picked up and finished the second Fake Party Socks. I don’t know what happened but one is a little bigger than the other.. I blame tension changes from waiting so long to finish the other. Shame on me.

Next up was a pair of fingerless gloves. I had made the first as a test knit ages ago and never started the second. It was a really fast knit, too, I don’t know why I dragged my feet on it for so long. I didn’t realize until I finished, but I had added some decreases on the wrist for a better fitting glove the first time that I didn’t add the second time, so the second glove is too big and bunches up on my palm. Sooo eventually I’ll have to rip out the cuff and a few rows of the thumb gusset and add those decreases. I’m not looking forward to it, as I really hated knitting the cuff. It’s cute, but the cable is a pain. Love the gloves though, will probably make more sometime.

Last but not least.. actually, I lie, it is least, I’ll never actually wear this, but anyway I finished up a hat that I don’t even think I had ever blogged about. My tension was all wrong on the colorwork. Also, I got my hat model a wig, but oddly I think I like her better bald haha!

That’s it for now! I don’t have any WIPs to share because my only new projects are already done save for blocking and finishing, I’ll probably be able to share one of them on Friday though, so be sure to stop by for more finished goodness.

Come one, come all! It’s time to determine who the winner of the Blades of Grass pattern giveaway!

We had 8 entries, which means there is one winner. I went to the Random Number Generator and asked it for a random number between 1 and 8. The number that came up was 2, so the winner is Nat!!! Congratulations!

To recap, Nat has won a free copy of my Blades of Grass pattern, which I’ve sent via Ravelry.

Thanks for playing, everyone! Please come back and visit again soon, and keep an eye out for the next giveaway! And even if you didn’t win a copy of the pattern, it’s on Ravelry for only $1.50, which is not that far from free :)

A while back, I made and released my first pattern! I’d been holding off blogging about it because I was trying to find a good way to sell directly from my website, but as time goes by I’m realizing that there may not be a solution that meets my needs that doesn’t cost more than I expect to make from this pattern. SO! For the time being, the pattern is only available from Ravelry.

Blades of Grass is a really simple fingerless mitt pattern. It knits up really quick in worsted weight yarn, and I highly recommend Malabrigo Worsted for nice, soft gloves. And, one skein gets you two pairs of mitts (at my gauge, anyway, in size Medium or Small). They make fabulous last minute gifts, if you can bear to give them up!

Cute, isn’t it? Anyway, it’s on sale now at Ravelry, with the name Blades of Grass for $1.50. But really, what fun would a pattern announcement be without a giveaway?! Everybody loves free stuff, no?

THREE lucky winners will receive a FREE copy of my pattern, as long as there are at least 10 entries (if there are less, there will be one winner). If there are at least 25 entries by the deadline, a fourth winner will receive not only the pattern, but a skein of Malabrigo Worsted in the colorway of their choice* as well! How cool is that? Be sure to spread the word to get more entries to try and win the free yarn!

Entries will be collected until NOON Pacific Time on October 31st 2011. Entering is dead simple. Leave a comment with your Ravelry username, and what color you plan on making your first pair of wristwarmers in. Make sure that you leave a valid email address with your comment, too, so I can notify you if you win! That’s it!

So, to summarize the contest:

1. 01-09 entries will have one winner, who will get the free pattern.
2. 10-24 entries will have three winners, who will get the free pattern.
3. 25 or more entries will have four winners; three who will get the free pattern, and one that will get the pattern and a skein of Malabrigo Worsted. The yarn will be in a color the winner chooses (* if my LYS carries it. I will work with you to get a color you like if they don’t have your first choice)
4. The pattern is a PDF and will be delivered through Ravelry, so you can download it as needed, and it will appear in your Library.
5. Comments will close at 12:00pm PST on October 31th. The winner(s) will be announced shortly after.
6. The winner(s) will be chosen via the True Random Number Generator.
7. ONE entry per person. Cheaters will be disqualified.
8. This contest is open to everyone, hooray!

And if you’re not feeling lucky or want to purchase the pattern as a gift (or just to put a buck in my pocket), you can always buy it on Ravelry. Good luck, and let me know what you think of the pattern!

UPDATE: This contest is now closed. Congrats to the winner!

After having made a loaf of white bread, I decided what I really wanted to do was make sourdough, because it’s my favorite kind of bread in the whole world. Who doesn’t love a little sour tang with their butter?! And apparently, sourdough is really good for you if you have blood sugar issues. I don’t have anything serious, but one day I will (most likely, my genes say) and I try to at least make a mild effort so when the day comes that I have to, it’ll be a smoother transition (in theory).

Anyway. In order to make sourdough, one must have a sourdough starter. I did some research about various ways to get one. Many of them involved knowing someone that already had one and mooching some from them. That wasn’t going to work. Others involved buying some cultures online. I didn’t feel like buying one because the good ones are more expensive than I felt like spending on something that I’d probably only use once because I’m lazy/have a short attention span. I found a couple methods to make one with flour, water and a package of instant yeast, but that felt like cheating.

Then I found it: a method for making a wild yeast starter! It sounded pretty cool, and being one that likes to jump in with both feet, it seemed like a good way to do something a step above what I probably should have been doing. The post I found is on The Fresh Loaf and there’s a lot of useful information. Most of it is in the comments though, and tough to read through. So I had some trouble at first. But now I have a pretty good starter, I think!

First, you start off with the freshest wheat and rye flour you can get. I bought whole berries and ground them myself. It took a long time and lots of pulsing through my Magic Bullet, and my “flour” didn’t wind up as fine as it should have, but it did the trick. After 3 days, this is what I had:

Looking back, it occurs to me now that my mixture was a little watery, but it turned out okay in the end. After the first few days of adding the wheat flour and pineapple juice to the starter, it’s time to start regula feedings. Here’s where I went a little wrong… because I don’t read things. Somehow, I missed the part about discarding down to 1/4 cup of starter, and after a few days my mason jar was about half full.

Turns out when you’re feeding a starter, it’s mostly a 1:1:1 ratio. So when I was feeding my 1.5 cups of starter 1/4 cup of flour and 1/4 cup of water, I was starving it. I couldn’t figure out why my starter was never rising after 2 weeks. It was bubbling like it was supposed to, and it smelled pretty close to right, though a little more alchoholic than I expected, but it just wasn’t rising. I was thinking that meant I didn’t have enough yeast or something, so I started reading more.

One of the things I saw is that when you’re getting a lot of hootch on your starter (which is a layer of brown liquid on top – and it must be brown, any other color indicates that you’re growing the wrong stuff, and you need to toss your starter and begin again), it means your starter is hungry. Everybody says to stir it back in, which is fine, but it took a lot of reading before I found out that it means the starter is hungry. I forgot to take a picture of my starter with the hooch on it, but here’s an example from Flickr that looks an awful lot like my starter when I figured out what was going on:

So two weeks after starting, I realized that I had way too much starter in my jar, and that I was underfeeding, and really it’s best to do things by weigh, not by measurement. So I measured out the 1/4th cup of starter like I was supposed to the first time (after I finally figured that part out) and weighed it – mine was 70g. So I poured that into a 2 cup measuring cup so I could better see the activity of my starter, then fed it 70g of flour (which was well over 1/4th cup) and 70g water (which was just over 1/4th cup) and noted the consistency of it.. it’s more like a really thick pancake batter. This is what I wound up with after a proper measuring and feeding:

Can I just say that doing it right was like magic? I expected it to take days to get my starter back on track. Turns out I really did have all the right yeasts in there though, they were just hungry. That same day, I had a mature starter. A mature starter will double in size within a few hours – mine doubled in two. This is what I had a couple hours after doing it right:

Ladies and gentlemen, it’s a mature starter! I’m so proud of myself. It’s still doing this, but a little slower – that day was remarkably warm in my kitchen. I made a loaf of bread from it, but that’s for another post. This one is already really lengthy! I probably left out some stuff I learned, but if you have any questions about starting the starter, please feel free to ask in the comments. I’ll be writing up another post on maintenance and using the starter once you’ve got an active one going, keep an eye out!

The first thing I made with my new KitchenAid mixer was a couple loaves of white bread! I used to have a breadmaker back in the day, but this was my first try making it (mostly) by hand. I needed an excuse to use the mixer (and I had just made cupcakes), and kneading by hand takes forever! Before I get into the bread though, here is my mixer in all her glory:

That, of course, is not her long-term home.. I had to move the crockpot and toaster to make room for the new boss in town!

Right, so I made white bread. I used a “cool rise” recipe, and wasn’t that impressed. I must have done something to annoy the yeast, because that bread just never rose the way I wanted it to, so I wound up with a really dense, heavy bread. It tasted really good though, and I had some bomb sammiches made from it.

I was shocked at how much the crust softens when the bread cools. It was rock hard when I pulled the bread out of the oven, I was worried that it wouldn’t be edible! When all was said and done though, I really liked the crust.

Next time I think I’ll do a standard warm-rise bread, and I’ll also not do a quick-activate yeast.. this recipe called for the yeast and water to just be tossed in with the flour, and I think it just didn’t activate right. Next time I’ll wake the yeasties up separate then add it to mix.

The other thing I’m working on is a wild yeast sourdough starter! I’m a little concerned that it’s not thriving, but I’ve learned a lot and even if I have to start over, I think I’m in a better place for my next attempt. That’s stuff for another post though, I’ll write some more up on it when I think this starter might survive. I’ve corrected the underfeedings, and still have hope for it.

I have to admit, though, that as cool as making bread by hand is, I really miss my old breadmaker.

Happy birthday to me! Well, on Friday anyway. As promised, I did in fact take photos of my birthday tres leches cake! I got teased (a lot!) for making my own birthday cake, but you know what? I’m totally happy that I did, because I got the exact cake that I wanted. It came out SO YUMMY.

I used Alton Brown’s Tres Leche cake recipe almost word for word – the only thing I did different was add a little bit of spice to it, because I remember all my cakes growing up having some. I added 1 tsp of cinnamon, and 1/2 tsp of nutmeg. It was amazing, but I think next time I’ll use a little less.. maybe 3/4 tsp cinnamon and 1/4 tsp nutmeg. The spice wasn’t overpowering, but it wasn’t as subtle as I wanted it to be.

My favorite thing about his recipe is that it measures the flour and the sugar by weight. With a tres leches cake, this is EXTREMELY important. It’s also important to use cake flour and not all purpose. The trick to a good tres leche cake is the texture. If your base cake isn’t exactly right, you will ruin it when you add the milk mixture. Tres leche cake should be moist, but it should never be soggy.

It was amazing to watch this cake grow. When I first poured the batter into my baking pan, it barely took up 1/4th the height of the pan. By the time the cake was done baking, soaking, and being topped, it filled almost the whole thing. Making the topping was a little painful, as it takes a WHILE to get stiff peaks, even when you start with whipping cream. I, as of yet, do not have a stand mixer and had to do it with a handheld one.

BUT! This was one of the highlights of my birthday. Tangent time! So there I was, standing in the Kitchen Kaboodle fondling the KitchenAide mixer that I’ve been coveting for months now, and lamenting the fact that I couldn’t afford one. My boyfriend was off somewhere else buying me a mini food-processor (which I totally love and have already used twice, but it’s no stand mixer…) while I pouted. I was trying to figure out if I could rearrange funds to cover one, but decided against it cause that can only lead to trouble.

Then when I got home, and checked my email… there was an announcement that I had won the mixer in a sweepstake! I had entered one last week online, and I won!!! I was shocked and amazed and totally excited. I never win anything, so to win this mixer in an amazing shade of green totally made my entire month! It should be here sometime next week and I cannot WAIT!

Ok, back to the cake. The red topping is a raspberry/blackberry/nectarine compote that I improvised as an excuse to use my new food processor. I boiled a handful of raspberries and blackberries with a little water and some sugar to get the base syrup. I had too much liquid so I drained some out (which found a new home on top of some vanilla ice cream… yum!) and then put the rest in the food processor with the rest of my berries and some diced nectarine. I processed to desired consistancy, and viola, fruit topping!

The flavors all went together amazingly well, and everybody that helped eat my cake loved it. I ate way more of it than I should have, but what good is having a birthday if you can’t eat your cake?! :)

It’s kind of funny to think about. I haven’t had a proper summer vacation in years and years – it’s one of the things I miss most about being a kid. And yet, for some reason, every time summer comes around, I fall into lazy resting mode. I still have to work, sadly (oh, to be independently wealthy….. a girl can dream!), but my crafting falls to the wayside, and as a result, so does my blog.

I have been doing a fair bit of baking, though. Oregon doesn’t really get hot, so I have no qualms against turning the stove on in the middle of July. My birthday is at the end of the week, and I’ll be making myself a tres leches cake to celebrate! I plan on taking loads of photos and telling you guys how the cake come out. It’s been my favorite kind of cake since I was a small child, and it’s amazing how hard it is to find a good one now that I don’t live in Los Angeles anymore.

I hate picture-less posts, so…. here, have some pictures of yummy things I’ve baked recently! I made chocolate cupcakes with mint-buttercream frosting (topped with Andes mints, cause who can resist?!) for my friend’s birthday, lemon bars, and attempted (and failed) to make easter basket cupcakes (ok, that wasn’t in the summer, but shhhh)…

How’s the summer treating you guys? Are you crafting more, or less? Does anybody have any small, summery projects to recommend, so that maybe I can get a little bit of something done that doesn’t go straight to my bum?

Today’s craftspiration is one of my favorite cupcakes ever. At least, my favorite picture of a cupcake. I haven’t gotten a chance to actually bake these yet, but every time I see this picture, it makes me smile :)

Image © Bakingdom.

Bakingdom is actually all around inspiring to me. Darla makes the most adorable cupcakes, and her photographs are stunning. I hope to one day be half as awesome as she is in the kitchen.

This particular cupcake recipe can be found on Bakingdom, in the (Mostly Piña) Piña Colada Cupcakes post. If anybody makes these before I do, please let me know how awesome they are, and give me a swift kick so that I make them, too!

Happy Monday! I was feeling totally uninspired yesterday when I wanted to get some sewing done, so I did what any good crafter would do… I went to the fabric store! It’s almost embarrassing how much fabric I came home with considering I only wanted to make a set of coasters…