Whole Wheat Sourdough Miche

A very, very good loaf of bread. This is the first one I've made that I would say is genuinely sour. It is tender and flavorful, but its real glory is its crust: deeply caramelized and delicious. It was also the occasion for a discovery. I had to use all of the starter I'd made for it, saving none to ferment the next batch. For fun I decided to mix a new starter in the old container, which had a few clinging shreds of starter in it, and lo: a whole new batch of starter, no problemo (and for that matter, problem solved). I'm learning that wild yeast is strong.

Pooling

See how the colors in the skein of yarn gather into long, downward-sloping bands of dark and light color? And how the same yarn, knit into a sock, assumes neat, narrow horizontal bands of color? What the yarn in the skein is doing is called "pooling;" avoiding that in the sock is a matter of achieving proper gauge, or number of stitches per inch. This is the first project on which I really understood that, and actively got it under control. Like most knitters I hate pooling (chiefly because the color pattern it creates looks ugly to me, and also totally obscures any stitch patterning you might be doing) but never knew what to do about it. Now I do. Problem solved.

Our Hidden Enemy

The Great Trapper set out last night to catch the second raccoon he'd observed in the yard, and look what he got instead! Long ago I was weak and tenderhearted and insisted that he not trap the possum that lived underneath the shed at his old house, and so we lived with it for months, watching it eat our cat's food. Finally, the spouse convinced me that the possum to whom I was so attached was the only likely source of a flea infestation that was making me (and only me, insects don't bite my spouse) crazy. He was right, and the possum was shipped off to a new kudzu patch, as was this one. Problem(s) solved.

Vanquished Foe

For weeks the amiable spouse has woken up chipper, only to go out in the garden, utter a dark "doggone it," and come back in, mood ruined by a varmint having once again dug up all his plants. I laughed, but this was serious business. As our nocturnal visitor found out last night! He's across the river now, foraging (I hope) in greener and more hospitable pastures. Problem solved.

Un-Knitting

Or "frogging," as the knitting blogs seem to call it, was the order of the day for me yesterday. Having blasted through two fifths of the Koigu sweater I talked about in an earlier post I found that the pattern I was using had a major error in the cabling instructions—and, as a result, I had major problems in my sweater's cables. At first, naturally, I decided just to keep on knitting and live with the errors. Then...I don't know. It just ate at me. The yarn is expensive, and since I'm knitting on huge needles it's a pretty fast knit, and I thought, well, what the heck. It's only knitting. So I unravelled the whole thing and started over. It actually felt pretty liberating, and took some of the mystery out of knitting. At its core a sweater is only a more or less intricatley looped long, continuous coil of yarn: having coiled it up once, I can do it again. The sweater is only a physical trace of a mental impulse. I do not serve the sweater! My life is not measured by the speed of its completion! Problem solved.

Also, it's not in fact a Koigu sweater, it's a Noro sweater. I confused my yarn names. You can see a little swatch of it above.

Green Socks

Ta-da! My first-ever pair of hand-knitted socks. I am pleased; it wasn't as hard as I'd feared, and it is quite satisfying to knit a shaped object. The picture is not at all accurate with respect to color, but does show that they fit (whew). I noticed as I knit (on two circular needles, rather than the traditional set of four) that I couldn't keep the stiches where the needles met from stretching out, creating long vertical wakes in the pattern. This distressed me hugely; none of the socks in the book looked like this. A quick internet search revealed that this is a common problem and that those wakes are called "ladders." I found a few tips to correct them, and they began to look a bit better. So, problem kind of solved. But I also took myself in hand, reminded myself that any kinetic art is learned by doing over time, and that this was my first attempt as opposed to the book author's nth attempt. I decided to forgive myself. Problem solved.

Problem Solved

I mentioned making oatmeal cookies in an earlier post. These are my favorites to eat, but hitherto I have hesitated to make them because the recipe called for smooshing them down before baking, one by one, with a glass. I hate that step. So then, a few days ago, looking at two big trays of unbaked cookies, it came to me: I could smoosh them with my fingers! No sticky glass-bottom, no icky sugar- or flour-crust left on top as I tried to prevent the glass from sticking! Problem solved.