I might not have made this scarf had I not seen the picture. The term "chevron" always makes me think of cheerleaders. Not that there is anything wrong with cheerleaders, I was one a long, long time ago, but I'm a bit old and square to try to dress like one now. This is a very popular scarf pattern from the book Last Minute Knitted Gifts.
I knitted this on size 5 needles using medium weight Socks that Rock from Blue Moon Fiber Arts in the Lemongrass and Rolling Stone colorways. I started the scarf with the Rolling Stone colorway, but I wish that I would have started with the Lemongrass. Because of the knitting pattern, one of the colorways is more visiable than the other. The way I made the scarf the Lemongrass is the more prominent colorway. I would have liked for the Rolling Stone to be the more prominent colorway.
I used almost all of both skeins of yarn, so this scarf is LONG. Even a little too long for my tastes, but I'll be gifting this one to someone who is a bit taller than I am, so hopefully it will be an appropriate length for her. This pattern is simple, but very time consuming and a little boring since it's made with a lightweight yarn. I have two more colorways of this yarn that I'm going to make myself a chevron scarf with, but I'll be taking a little break and working on other projects before I start the second one.
Duringi the Al Green tribute on this year's BET Awards, one of my favorite singers performed one of my favorite songs.
Here are the pictures of my brother's knitting lessons. Please note that these are some very unflattering pictures of me.
Getting Started:
Helping out:
Perplexed:
Back on track:
The campaign, in Canada at least, features shoddy, third-rate Michael Jackson and Madonna lookalikes explaining that they, respectively, want the "Jacko" and "Madge" Yahoo Mail addresses under the new domains. Even if you could get past the idea that you're supposed to identify with people who want to adopt the identity of insane 50-year-old pop stars, the worst part is that both "Jacko" and "Madge" are names bestowed upon the singers by the British tabloids, and both epithets are detested by the singers they've been applied to.
It's a win all around, really.
I'm finally getting around to putting up my pictures from the all-grain brewing process as demonstrated by my brother. Apparently he has been giving some of his homebrew to one of his neighbors, a big light american lager fan, who disliked most of them becaue he found them to be too sweet. R. decided to try to find a beer that his neighbor would like, so he bought the Liberty Cream Ale all-grain kit from Midwest Brewing Supply because he had heard it described as the Budweiser of Ales. I had told him that I wanted to see the all-grain process demonstrated, so he brewed it while I was in Missouri visiting.
You might notice that I don't have pictures of the entire process. This is because in the middle of it a severe thunder and hail storm blew through. We just kept on brewing. I told R. that he was hardcore brewing in a hail storm. He pointed out that he wouldn't be if it weren't for his little sister. Here is a shot of the entire set-up. R. brews in what he calls his "Jeep garage", which is the cargo compartment of a used moving truck that my father bought and turned into a feed mixing truck. My brother parks his rebuilt Jeep in it now.
I have some sort of mental block when it comes to remembering all of the appropriate names and terms involved in all-grain brewing, so I'm sure that I'll get this wrong, but R's basic process goes something like this. First he heats water in old keg up on the highest platform to a certain temperature, which will vary based on the recipe. I'm not sure the exact amount of the water, but it's enough to give him 15 gallons of beer when he's finished.
While the water is heating to the specified temperature, he mills the grains.
The basic idea now is that you run the hot mash water through the milled grains to extract the sugars and enzymes, but it's much more difficult than that. All of this happens in the mash tun, which is the blue bucket in R's set-up. First you have to put a certain amount of the heated water in the mash tun. This is called the strike water and the amount you use again depends somehow on the recipe. Here R is measuring the strike water to make sure he has the correct amount.
Then the grains are added to the strike water.
Here's where things get a little fuzzy for me. At this point, the grains stay in the heated water for a period (mashing??), then the water is run off into the boiling pot (lautering) and more hot water is run through the grains into the boiling pot (sparging) until the grain no longer tastes sweet. For extract brewers, this is about where we start in the process. From here the water (now with sugars and enzymes in it) is boiled with the hops for about an hour and then cooled and yeast is added. This is about the point in the process that the hail storm started, so I don't have any more pictures of the actual brewing. I do have this picture from earlier in the evening, just to show how big a 20 gallong brew pot is.
So what was I doing while R was working so hard here? I was doing this.
And a little of this (R's homebrewed ginger mead)
And a little bit of this as well (New Belgium Trippel - yum and not distributed around here)
There was also the low point of the night for me where R convinced me that any brewer worth his or her salt has chewed up a hop pellet before, so I did. Yikes. Thank goodness the camera wasn't around for that. The only disappointment for me was that my dad called during the boil and asked me to bring his car back home so that it could go in the garage and away from the hail, so I didn't get to see R's counterflow wort chiller at work. Now that I've seen what is involved in the all-grain process, I'm perfectly content with my little extract brewing operation.
Up next: I teach R to knit!
I got the official word today that I passed my comprehensive exams! I finished up my coursework this spring, so now all that stands between me and my PhD is that pesky little dissertation thing. I realize this has nothing to do with either knitting or homebrewing, but I did go out and buy a mixed six pack in celebration (apparantly dark beers seem more celebratory because all but one is either a stout or a porter) and I'm too excited about this to post anything else this evening. There is more knitting an homebrew coming. I still have pictures from Missouri and I hope to get a hefeweizen brewed this week sometime.
My mom used to knit on a regular basis, but hasn't really done it much in the last 20 or so years. Earlier this week she offered to get out her old knitting patterns to see if there was anything I would want to borrow. I took her up on it, but mostly because I thought it would be fun to mock the fashions of the 70's and 80's, not because I thought I would find a pattern that I might actually knit. There were plenty of mockable things in her pattern file, but I was also pleasantly suprised to find this little set of patterns:
There are three, maybe even four of those sweaters that I would actually knit and wear. I checked to see when the pattern was published. It's kind of hard to see because I was too lazy to change the lens on my camera, but the copyright was 1966.
I guess there really are some classic sweaters that never go out of style. I am going to take these patterns home and add them to my list of things that I'd like to knit someday. It's nice to know that even if it takes me twenty years to get around to them, they'll probably still be in style.
