Still Socks

Socks are all I want to knit right now.

They are a little complicated, but quite colorful, and rather quick. Complicated is the wrong word. It is a ktbl purl pattern mostly so there is a lot of hand movement for any given row, since I an constantly flipping which side the yarn is on.

The pooling changed between the leg and the foot, so it isn't quite as neat as the stack I was getting. The colors are pretty true in this photo. I have been leaving before light, and not feeling like photos until dark. I finally had a little photoshoot outdoors.

It was rainy and miserable. The sort where the campus buses are overflowing, and you spend all day slightly damp.

I am 1 repeat into the 1 1/2 for the leg.

I really want to finish stuff, and I am sure if I focused on the sweater that could happen. But on the same token, the progress seems so much faster on the socks.

The DSLO and I made a huge effort this weekend to clean and put together our house. The boxes of stray crap were put in the attic, the office was 90% unpacked and put away. And the whole main room was swept. What this means now, is that there is no excuse not to have the house warming party. Things are presentable, which is wonderful. The occasion for the scramble was my parents and sister coming to visit. It was time to deal with the mess.

After my family left I cooked up a storm. I made butterscotch ice cream, and hazelnut brown butter cake. The cake turned out great. The ice cream . . . well, I burned it. How do you burn ice cream? My stove runs hot, and I seem to be burning butter quite frequently. So in one step you put 2 TBS of butter and 1 c. brown sugar, and you cook until bubbly. Maybe I missed the first bubbly and made it to the boiling. Not sure. The moment the cream hit the mixture there was a glomping and instant boiling. It wasn't ruined, but it wasn't the best it could be.

It looks right, it is just a little charred tasting.

The cake however was a big hit. And it was the first time I ever made cake from scratch. It had everything a good cake should be, an easy frosting, a moist tender center, an quick turn around for making, then baking. My store was not so fancy to be selling vanilla beans so I used extract, and it took a few minutes of staring at the nuts to find hazelnuts, but it was all worth it.

 
One of my labmates asked for me to make it again sometime, if he is in desperate need for cake.

The apo challenge was to only use the capabilities of the first version of Apophysis: apo 2.02. I thought this was a really classy flame. The next challenge is epispiral. It is an odd variation, as in strange. It makes for this oil slick, smooth appearance.