Seattle Works

I’m pretty excited to start my volunteer gig with Seattle Works next week. They are a nonprofit in Seattle whose mission is “to inform, connect, and inspire people in their 20s and 30s to take action in our community”. A few times a year they start up Team Works, where for four months I’ll volunteer with the same group 0f 15 people one Saturday per month, each time focusing on a different community issue at a different organization.

My group is called "20s Sampler" (goofy, but descriptive). We'll be volunteering at:

Denny Wetland Nursery

ROOTS

Duwamish Alive

Secondary BOC School

The Denny Wetland Nursery is pretty obvious and Duwamish Alive has something to do with the river that drains into Puget Sound. Not sure yet what ROOTS and the BOC school are, but I'm looking forward to finding out. After each work day there is a happy hour gathering, so it should be fun. And it turns out my team captain is a woman who works for an organization affiliated with mine who I just saw present at an event on Friday, totally unrelated to Seattle Works.

A veritable wealth of information

I've been meaning to make a case to hold what has become a needle explosion in our house. I finally whipped one up in about 2 hours. The needle case is based loosely on a pattern from this wonderful book. I have a lot more double pointed needles than anything so I modified the pattern a bit to let the shorter needles peek out.

This project was pleasantly interrupted by Angela's arrival to pick up some of Kennet's dad's old ties, no longer wanted since he retired. Angela is planning to do some recrafting and I'm thinking of making the little tie-bag from this book. Angela and I then made a short, but fruitful trip to Stitches to get the materials for Amy Butler's desk organizer pattern, which arrived in the mail from my mom today (thanks mom!).

Here is the fabric I got for the desk organizer. I need some picture taking lessons from the household photographer.

Other good stuff:

• Check out our new book list -->
  

• What's a soup swap, you ask? Check this out, I totally want to try it.

• Do you know about RSS feeds, I ask?

I didn't until Kennet pointed them out to me. When you're reading our blog, you can drag this icon at the end of the address bar down to the bar just below it and save our blog kind of like a bookmark. Only it's better than a bookmark because if you click on it, it will show you a list of recent posts so you can see if there is a new posting. Very cool.

Geese and Shrinky Dink

I'm very excited because I not only finished this goose quilt, but also figured out how to plug that cool flickr thing into the blog over on the right so you can see little mini photos from the flickr account.

This is maybe my 12th quilt now? Every single time I make one, I remember what my college roommate said when I was stressing over some flaw in one- the flaws are how you know it wasn't pumped out by an industrial machine. I don't know if that many people in their twenties are making quilts these days, as everyone who finds out I do this is surprised.

This photo is of a recent shrinky dink my sister made that is an exact to-scale replica of the first quilt I made, a wall hanging for Liza, when she was a babe. I love cut and paste.

Hang On Little Tomato

I'm generally a slow-poke when it comes to projects. I don't pop them out at spit-fire speeds. Since this blog is still quite new, I'm going to pad it out a little bit my 28 year back-catalogue of unblogged projects. To keep things simple for the narrator I'm going to discuss things I did 4 months ago as if I did them yesterday. By choosing to read further you are explicitly releasing me from any responsibility for damage incurred as a result of confusion of the narrative tense.

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Here's a list of thing's you'll need to do this project at home:

1. Mutant Tomato
2. Tiny Saucer
   
3. Pink Martini Album
4. Hoya R72 Infrared Filter
5. Digital Camera and Tripod
   
6. Halogen Bike Headlamp
7. Tolerant Girlfriend
   

Amazingly enough, the oddest items on this list (1, 3, 4, and 6) all arrived within days of each other. Shelley was obsessed with the copy of "Hang On Little Tomato" (the Pink Martini album) that finally arrived from the library. The season was changing and I needed a headlamp for my now-nocturnal bike commute. I got an IR filter for my camera just for the heck of it and a strange little mutant grape tomato showed up in our groceries. Convergence like this was definitely a sign.

Here's the thing about infrared filters for cameras (it should be noted that they don't filter out IR, they filter out almost everything but IR). Your camera is sensitive to infrared light. This would make your photos look weird except that the camera manufacturers put a filter in front of the camera's sensor to remove most of the IR spectrum: most, but not all. You can get some of this sensitivity back if you stick a special filter on the front of the camera that takes out everything but the IR. The only drawback is, you now have to deal with a seriously long exposure time. Long exposures can be an asset too.

Why would you want to use an IR filter? Simple, it makes things look unusual. Chlorophyll reflects a ton of it, so plants look bright white in the IR spectrum (pictures of trees tend to look like cherry blossoms).

So anyway, while listening to China Forbes do her thing I set up the tripod, the x-men vegetable, and a little teabag saucer. All I needed now was a good source of IR light.

You know how halogen lights like to set stuff on fire? IR light happens to be very closely related to heat. Good thing I got that bike headlight.

Enjoy, and hang on little tomato.

(As a footnote, I do have a signed model-release form for the tomato, and it was not harmed in the production of this work. However, we did eventually eat it)

Costa Rica

I finally figured out how to best post our photos from our 10 day trip to Costa Rica. I had never used Flickr before, but it is super user friendly and fun. So I put a small fraction of the photos we took on there, complete with captions and titles.

The middle one is on the way to Monteverde, up into the mountains, and the other two are in Samara (SAH-ma-ra). You can see the rest of the photos here.

We spent 5 days on the Pacific Coast just outside the small town of Samara, then drove up to Monteverde, where we stayed for another 4 days. After that we stayed in San Jose, did a day kayaking/rafting trip on the Pacuare, and flew home. Unfortunately there are no pictures of the rafting trip because of the water and all, but it was one of the most beautiful places I've been so far. It was totally worth the pain in my rear from 4 hours on a raft.

No Knead Bread

This bread is all over the web right now and if you have a small dutch oven or casserole dish with a lid, it's the easiest thing ever. I haven't taken a picture of mine yet, so that's not mine, but just as pretty.

I've probably made it 5 times now and it never fails to turn out well. I use about 1/2 teaspoon of salt and half whole wheat flour. I'm ready to try a garlic and rosemary version pretty soon.

I originally got it from notmartha.org and have since seen another version with chocolate chunks.

Adapted from Jim Lahey, Sullivan Street Bakery
Time: About 1½ hours plus 14 to 20 hours’ rising

3 cups all-purpose or bread flour, more for dusting
¼ teaspoon instant yeast
1¼ teaspoons salt
Cornmeal or wheat bran as needed.

1. In a large bowl combine flour, yeast and salt. Add 1 5/8 cups water, and stir until blended; dough will be shaggy and sticky. Cover bowl with plastic wrap. Let dough rest at least 12 hours, preferably about 18, at warm room temperature, about 70 degrees.

2. Dough is ready when its surface is dotted with bubbles. Lightly flour a work surface and place dough on it; sprinkle it with a little more flour and fold it over on itself once or twice. Cover loosely with plastic wrap and let rest about 15 minutes.

3. Using just enough flour to keep dough from sticking to work surface or to your fingers, gently and quickly shape dough into a ball. Generously coat a cotton towel (not terry cloth) with flour, wheat bran or cornmeal; put dough seam side down on towel and dust with more flour, bran or cornmeal. Cover with another cotton towel and let rise for about 2 hours. When it is ready, dough will be more than double in size and will not readily spring back when poked with a finger.

4. At least a half-hour before dough is ready, heat oven to 450 degrees. Put a 6- to 8-quart heavy covered pot (cast iron, enamel, Pyrex or ceramic) in oven as it heats. When dough is ready, carefully remove pot from oven. Slide your hand under towel and turn dough over into pot, seam side up; it may look like a mess, but that is O.K. Shake pan once or twice if dough is unevenly distributed; it will straighten out as it bakes. Cover with lid and bake 30 minutes, then remove lid and bake another 15 to 30 minutes, until loaf is beautifully browned. Cool on a rack.

Yield: One 1½-pound loaf.

Comets look like little dots

Shelley and I took a field trip to the overpass where 12th crosses I-90, supposedly to see the comet at sunset. It turns out that clear nights in January are really cold. I would never have guessed.

Comets are neat to see. They're even neater to see if you're smart enough to carry a pair of binoculars. However, they're not that neat to photograph, even if you've got a telephoto lens with [a 35mm equivalent of] 700+ mm focal length. Zooming in on a dot still looks like a dot.

All was not lost. Against some vocal complaints about the frozen state of her keister, I made Shelley sit through me taking about 8 shots, each with an 8-second exposure. The above stitch is the end result (click on it to make it bigger).

[Update:]

I messed with the color balance, curves and cropping. The image you now see is the new one.

Fuzzbot and Fuzzbot

We finished what Craft magazine started. They had the nerve to put those uber-cute robotmonsters on the cover but kept mum about how to make them. The joke's on them. We didn't need their stinkin' pattern after all. Robotmonster 2.0 (aka "Gordie" is on the way).

At some point I'm pretty sure we're going to be sued by Craft or the person whose robotmonsters were on the cover. The first two prototypes went to my niece and nephew (ages 7 and almost 4, which is important for reasons that will be obvious in a moment). They were originally Fuzzbot and Gordie, but Gordie found out that being the younger sibling means doing everything your older sister is doing, including naming your robot Fuzzbot, even if it means denying his birthright and forcing him to live a lie.

Kennet originally wanted to call this blog "My boyfriend is a knitting genius". Except I made the Fuzzbots and so far all he's got are some dismembered legs. Really this all started because I was pretty sure Kennet would like knitting, because he has completed similar projects in his past that I'm not allowed to describe in public for fear that he will have to relive the humiliation of sixth grade. Mostly because he likes to build stuff. But finally it was the challenge of uber-cute robotmonsters with no pattern in the magazine that got him going and here we are 4 months later with 9 knitting needles on the living room floor.

So we'll post WIP (works in progress), things that are good, recipes (like the salad Robin made the other night) and maybe pictures of hermit crabs.

Oh and I have to give my sister, Britney, credit for the robotmonsters part even though she never could identify any pop culture robot who was also a monster. You win. They exist.

I'm way too excited about this, especially since I'm pretty sure that our audience will be limited to me. And maybe Hillary because she's too nice to look away.