Monday 23 March 2020

The Good, the Bad and the Bread

I did not knit a whole lot this weekend.  My hands did not want to cooperate with tons of knitting, but I also suspect that my heart wasn't in it either.

I will show you what I did do.  I knit quite a bit on the blue top.  It is now at a great cropped length, though for me, this would be much too short.  More length.  More length.  That is as much my unconscious mantra as the lace pattern.  You can see that the lace is now well established and looks great.  It makes it so much easier to knit.  There is always something coming up and the two basic pattern rows always mark your place.  It is zipping right along.



And then comes the sad heart part.  I realized after another of the increases, that my pretty little blue and green lace, was right out to lunch.  I was starting to suspect that my pretty little lace had gauge problems, as in my way of counting gauge was not the actual gauge of what I was knitting.  I set it down for a bit to think about and pulled out something else. I will try again, but later.

That something else is green.  Deep forest green.  Seriously.  Green must be the worst colour to photograph.  It looks kind of like a dud here, but it isn't.  It is really rather splendid. 




This is the pattern I was going to use for the bright blue and green yarn I just set aside (I didn't feel I would have enough yarn to make it happen).  The pattern is Blanche by Veronika Jobe.  I have lots of this yarn and it is going to look something better than fine.  It is a bit like knitting two wide scarves, but the parts you shape make all the difference in the world.  I do plan to make one change, but more on that when I get there.

The rest of my plan for today was to bake some bread and buns.   We have chili left over from the weekend, and I was going to make some nice giant buns that we could turn into bread bowls for it.  Unfortunately, our oven is on the fritz.  When the landlord was making brunch, the oven would get hot and then rather than holding the heat, it would go back to a hold on warm cycle.  Our oven doesn't have a hold on warm cycle. We suspect the chipset or board is bad. I am not sure if the repair people will come out.  It isn't a critically needed repair.   Sort of.

I have a bread maker so our plans to make the bit of bread we eat can still happen.  I just hate baking in the thing.  I need a dough maker, not a bread maker, because that is what I use it for; dough.  I find baking in the unit gives you rather coarse dry bread, where the same dough, in the oven comes out wonderfully.  Still, I will use it.  The other thing I came across is quite interesting.

I wondered if people ever tried baking in their slow cookers.  I have two of them.  One older smaller round unit is the landlords, and my big oval unit.  Apparently people do bake in them.  So I am going to give that a try.  I will bake bread in the bread machine, after I make a batch of dough for the slow cooker.  But not for bread.  I am going to make sticky pull apart monkey buns in the slow cooker.

Even if it fails, we will eat those. 

Anyway, to everyone reading this, stay healthy, keep your quarantine.  It is the rule of the day, the sensible thing to do.  We will be done public distancing only when we no longer are diagnosing new cases of the wee beastie.  How long it takes, is going to be dependent on how well we do out part.  Stay home.  And that is it from my house.

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