Friday Random

* I bought some decorations for Chinese New Year , amongst which are the two red lanterns making our not-bright lights even less illuminating, but much prettier than the bare bulbs!

* I’ve been doing lots of knitting, so my cardi sleeves are almost elbow length, my shawl is a maybe 40 rows from done, and I have started on the heel flap of my new portable sock project.

* Our cooking adventures continue – recently I made an Apple Sharlotka, which was just lovely and a really fuss-free dessert. Yesterday was osso buco with risotto, and I have to say it was about the best risotto I have ever made – no crunchy bits anywhere! Today was Arancini di Riso with the leftover risotto, stuffed with peas, corn and mozzarella, with a choice of Chipotle sausages (v v spicy, not a hit with the kids) or leftover osso buco. Craig continues to bake bread, and it is really nice to have fresh, nicely textured bread – especially for toast. I dislike plastic shop bread generally, but trying to make toast out of it is a total waste of time.

* Went to the Space Museum today. It was probably cutting edge when constructed, but most of the exhibits are in dire need of an overhaul, even if only to make the interactive stuff work properly! Still quite interesting enough to amuse us on a rainy afternoon.

* Craig, the Man of My Dreams, has been doing a bit of online searching for a nice 6ply sock yarn – he wants more socks! He is going to be a slave to handknit socks – mwahahaha haaa!!!

* One of the lovely ladies at knit night lent me a spare cable so I can start my next cardi without waiting to finish the current one – my life is full of enablers!

I leave you with a picture of my sock-in-progress, the one I started at Ocean Park – the colours and place of beginning will explain the name!

 

First FO of 2012!

Yay! I completed a pair of child’s socks in ONE WEEK!! This is a personal first, and achieved mostly on trains, waiting for and watching children at playgrounds, with a little bit of at-home knitting to do heels and first cuff (I knew what I was doing for the second so could do that whilst out and about).

Yarn: Maizy (corn fibre) sock yarn. One from each of two 50gm balls, because I don’t have a set of digital scales here to weigh up how much I used. Enough left over for another child’s pair of toe-up socks, I think.

Needles: KP Harmony 2.5mm circs (no dropping needles on train/in queue/at playground)

Pattern: made up, from Judy’s Magic Cast-on, guesstimate of st count, Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel, eyelet ribbing and Jeny’s Surprisingly Stretchy Bind-Off. Eyelet pattern on foot thrown in to amuse myself.

Miss V is very happy with them, even though they are a little long – I guess she’ll get an extra year out of them! When it came to make the second sock, the first one was already stretched and very grubby due to herself prancing around in it whenever she could, the other foot bare

New Year, New Socks!

I celebrated the 3rd of January with a finished pair of socks: behold, Bartholomew’s Tantalising Socks!

 

(Slideshow here)

These took me a while to knit, maybe I was too busy to get my head around Cat Bordhi’s different way of doing things, or life was too full – but I adored the linen stitch cuffs, and the heel was fun (when I got it right the second time around). These would have been done a day sooner but I had gotten the heel wrong on the first sock, working like a normal shortrow where you shortrow to heel depth and then lengthen each row on the way back out to do the rest of the sock. In this pattern however you have already knit the sock to the full depth of the heel, so the shortrows are just to make the cup that curves around your heel, then you knit straight across and continue back and forth across the sole eating up all the extra gusset stitches in what is essentially the complete opposite of a top-down flap heel.

Really.

I’m not sure I can explain it any better than that with mere words, but if you want to know more, knit the sock! It is very comfy and squooshy, and I want some more, and have even received a request from my husband for a pair-  thankfully in 6ply yarn! Let’s make that a goal for 2012

Lastly, the photos were taken in a park 10mins down the hill, where the glowing soft light was courtesy of the overcast and smoggy day. That glowing spot is the sun going down.

2011 in review – WordPress analysed my blog for me!

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

A New York City subway train holds 1,200 people. This blog was viewed about 3,800 times in 2011. If it were a NYC subway train, it would take about 3 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

Starting as I mean to go on

Dear All,

Happy Western New Year!! We saw in the New Year (just barely) by going out to a Countdown Carnival at Sha Tin, roughly 35 mins north and 3 trains from where we live. There were many performances on stages large and small, and most things did not require us to understand any Cantonese – with the exception of the emcee patter and the smooth-talking magician.

While children played on play equipment I worked on a long-neglected sock, and pursued it further today – now I am almost at the toe of my Bartholomew Sock #2! I would be proclaiming the imminence of a new pair were it not for the mistake I made on the first sock that requires me to snip and remove maybe a dozen rows of shortrow heel I erroneously put in there when I should have been knitting straight across.

This morning I started the year well with an energetic walk around the park and a few arm exercises – there has been much enjoyment of delicious parts of life recently, and it is showing somewhat around the hips, so I am in need of more exercising habits. After some light housework I took my knitting outside and paid serious attention to my sock.

I also put some serious thought into my Tempest Cardi – I completed one cuff and tried it on, realising in the process that a cuff designed for a 3/4 length sleeve is rather more generous than one designed for a wrist. I have 150 and 100 gms left of the blue and purple yarns respectively, and the body-finished-to-armholes weighs about 130 grams (lots of guessing here, cheapy plastic scales are all I have now), so I think I have more than enough to make full-length sleeves!!! Very excited, I will cast on new cuffs tomorrow, much smaller, and heave-ho towards a new cardi to go with me new socks!

I really want to start a Vine Yoke Cardi, but I need to free up the needles and cables, so have to get Tempest at least as far as joining sleeves to body (hmm, maybe I’ll start the cuffs tonight….!)

Whatever else is going on I hope your largest dilemmas today were which knitting project to pick up, and what refreshments to pair with it.

Best Wishes for 2012!

 

 

Christmas Knitting!

There has been some glorious knitting time over Christmas, lots of lounging around watching movies or listening to audiobooks while children watched movies

Item the First: Gail aka Nightsongs Shawl

This fetching puddle of colour is actually 5 repeats of the Gail shawl. The Malabrigo Lace is slightly fluffy feeling on the fingers, but runs smoothly enough so long as I don’t let my skin get dry and snaggy. Although you can’t see it here (and won’t really until it is blocked) the lace pattern is showing up nicely despite the strong colours. I am really enjoying this shawl!

 

Item the Second: Tempestuous Romance

This stripeyness is a Tempest cardi, with which I am having a wild and passionate affair – madly knitting just about every day for the past 10 days, and am now finished the narrow stripes ready to do the wide stripes across the bust. The colours are not revealing themselves very well here – the light blue is close, but the darker stripes are much more purple than the brown they appear here.

I am knitting this in the round rather than in pieces, keeping the shaping as is, and did a folded hem using a provisional cast-on which I knitted in as if doing a 3 needle bind-off. I got the height wrong the first time and had to tink back one row, and joined on the wrong side, but it sits quite well now considering it hasn’t been washed and blocked yet.

It is a little snug around the hips, but I’m hoping that it will flop out nicely when washed and blocked, and that losing the Christmas excess will help too..

 

Other items currently floating around include Sophie’s Nereid mitts – I did finish them only to discover that the second was half a repeat too long, so have ripped back to my error and will reknit the plain section and ruffle as train etc knitting. I am looking forward to having these done, done and really truly done!!!

Friends and Fun

Dear friend Tink and family are visiting HK this week so we are having lots of family-friendly outings, visits to playgrounds, family-friendly dinner times etc.

Tink and I are also talking about knitting quite a bit.

This is fun, but leaves no time for blogging.

Oh, and those brownies? too wet. Far too much butter in that recipe, not enough flour. I’ve tried again with a different recipe, but this one was not quite enough butter. I believe a happy medium will shortly be achieved.

Off to Ocean Park now. Bigger than Disneyland.
Wish us luck.

Brownies

The chocolate urge was strong.

Jamie provided a recipe.

Adjustments were made according to ingredients on hand (slightly light on cooking chocolate, slightly heavy on cocoa, soft brown sugar in place of castor sugar, Valrhona chocolate crunchy pearls instead of fruit or nuts).

Now the smell is torturing us as we wait for it to be cool enough to slice.

 

If the pictures are _really_ good, will you forgive me?

It has been a while since I got my act together and blogged – any attempts at excuses would pathetic and fairly unconvincing, so I’ll just skip that step altogether, apologise for my blog-fade, and bring you pictures of knitting.

An 8 inch square towards a Wrap in Love charity drive.

A knitter’s birthday.

A teeny tiny cupcake I made for her birthday.

The fox that turned up to help celebrate.

Up to the torso on my Decimal Cardigan.

Up to the thumb gusset on Sophie’s Nereid (Rav link) fingerless gloves.

 

And some more joy from Teeny Tiny Mochimochiland – I bought the ebook of 40 patterns a fortnight ago, and had lots of fun planning what to make for whom… I am reasonably confident that the intended recipients of these particular lovelies do not yet know me well enough to read my knitting blog, so I can share the photo with you without spoiling their surprise.

 

So, am I forgiven?

Knitting at Rugby

The game, not the place This is the football field at Sandy Bay, belonging (I think) to Hong Kong University. This photo was taken after the game, whilst waiting for the bus to arrive. Apparently Saturday evening is little-person rugby training time.

The view in the other direction (minus the chicken-wire fencing):

 

The Kowloon rugby teams were headed off to The Canny Man, a Scottish rugby bar in the heart of Wan Chai (I know! the mind boggles, does it not?). The owner is on the board of the Kowloon Rugby Club, and coach for the team a grade above Craig’s, thus the team evening at his rugby bar. I was planning to go straight home with the kids, but we hopped on the bus in order to get back to transport, and carrying a sleeping Violet off the bus did not make me feel like shepherding 3 kids home on my own. The bar had some lovely lounges and chairs, so we could sit in comfort while blokes stood at the bar with various beers, ales or other beverages. I had a very nice Lamb Stovie for dinner – think Irish Stew but Scottish – with a bottle of cider. (This recipe sounds pretty close to what I ate) Yum. Kids had ham and cheese sandwich, fries, and pizza in various amounts (leftovers being shared around and cleaned up by all). Craig had a nice time relaxing with team-mates, and I continued my knitting in public. My Decimal Cardigan is now 3-and-a-bit inches long…

 

It’s more than a little bizarre, sometimes, the expat thing. Watching Craig play football here is so ordinary, yet the accents being thrown around the field are Australian, New Zealander, Scottish, Irish, English, French, something that might be Russian, and at least one Islander, possibly Tongan – then there are the Chinese players, switching between English and Cantonese as they call to team-mates. On the hillside overlooking the field were 10 and 20-storey apartment blocks, further around the bay are complexes that look like they are 30 storeys high, maybe 4 apartments to the floor, and at least 4 towers each, so about 480 apartments in one complex? The density of the housing is startling from time to time… sometimes the night view is more surprising than daylight, as you can see that the grey concrete tower is not offices but homes, windows showing lights all the way up.

Which all illustrates something that I’ve been thinking – we are not living the HK culture as such – we are having the ex-pat experience, brushing up against parts of the local culture as we go. But I don’t know that we could do it any other way – the need to earn a living and care for our family guide the decisions we’ve made about where to move and where to work, and lack of any skills in Cantonese mean that we do need an English-speaking workplace, which leads to mostly expat colleagues, and expat social-life. Hmm. Food for thought.