Oh dear...

Intarsia (in-'tar-se-uh) n. A knitted design resembling a mosaic that is visible from both sides of a fabric. Derived from the German for haha, sucker!

Holy tangled mess of ends to weave in Batman!

Baby's first colorwork is a sight to behold. Actually, it's not so bad - the front side looks okay. But seriously, someone should have warned me about the tangly-ness. And apparently, bobbins - not as optional as I thought.

A few hits and one major miss

(insert excuses for my lack of knitting progress here - I won't bore you with my need to re-read books 1-6 before the 7th Harry Potter comes out later this month - I'm such a nerd)

I have knocked out a couple of quick projects though. First the successes...

Quickie Head Band

I'm not sure where I got this ribbon, I'm sure it was tied to something. But for the past few weeks it has been sitting on top of my desk. I keep looking at it and thinking it would make a good headband. Finally got around to actually making said headband.

Ingredients: length of ribbon that will more or less fit around your head and one generic hair elastic.

I started out thinking I would measure things. My hair elastic was about 2.5 inches unstretched, so I would subtract 3 inches from the circumfrence of my head to cut my ribbon.

But that just seemed too fussy, so I sewed up one side, wrapped it around my head and winged it. If I knew how to take a photo of the top of my head (and don't think I didn't try), I could show you that we're calling this project a success. But, you'll just have to trust me.

Running Scrapbook Revisited

I had been making a scrapbook for the half marathon I "ran" back in April, but since I hadn't made much progress on it since the race. Much like my training regimen, it was pretty much shelved.

I pulled it back out yesterday and knocked out a couple of pages. I also figured out the cover.

I had purchased this album way back thinking that the little window would be a cool place to affix my finisher medal. But when I actually got the thing, the way it hung off the ribbon was the wrong dimensions for the window. So I had to improvise a bit.

I took the medal off the ribbon and just hot glued it in front of the ribbon. Otherwise, the red really wouldn't have shown up. Hopefully no one will notice that it isn't really hanging from the ribbon.

And for more MacGuyver-esque scrapbooking, I made these pages of our adoring fans.

The background papers are actually 6x8 sheets spliced together to make an 8x8 page. I needed something to cover the line where the papers switch.

Enter the flip flop.

Emily and her husband Chris - who both friggin' rule by the way - not only drove all the way to Kentucky to cheer me on during the race, but brought me a fun pedicure kit for afterwards when my feet were sore.

Although I have used most of it for its intended purpose, the kit came with those little disposable flip flops that they give you at the nail salon. Well, at my house I can just wear regular flip flops, which leaves these guys open for crafting.

Doesn't it look like it was meant to be scrapbooking supplies?

The flowers came from the signs that Emily made for me (I love that I have a crafty sister - ours were the fanciest signs on the whole route). You can see them in the finished pages...

So, I'm calling those the "hits." Which brings us to one serious "miss"

Gardening Disaster

This year, I decided to "garden" by purchasing two already planted flower boxes for my balcony. How could I mess this up - someone has already done all of the actual gardening for me?

Turns out, I can still totally mess that up. One flower box was doing just fine.

Almost everything had died in the other.

So, I decided to dig up some of the petunias from one box and move them to the other, to even things out a bit.

Oops.

That would be my downstairs neighbor's patio. That would also be the flower box that was alive. Of course the one where I had killed nearly everything wasn't the one to fall to its doom. Nope, all of the healthy, pretty flowers. Sigh.

Wait, those aren't socks... baking experiments

Dear sock yarn,

I owe you an apology. My socks should have been finished a long time ago. But a crazy couple of weeks at work and a great big pile of indulgent summer reading have eaten up much of my free time. (and don't get me started on the little dog who steals knitting and drops stitches)

I have managed to get a bit of baking in - though with varying degrees of success.

Last week, I improvised a recipe based on one I found in The Garden of Vegan. What started as a fairly simple no-bake cookie became no-bake Chocolate-Cranberry-Mudslide cookies. I think I made about 11 substitutions too many (particularly since there were only about 4 ingredients). Should you get it in your head to make some no-bake cookies, only you are out of brown sugar, so you decide to use maple syrup and a bit more oatmeal, and you don't have chocolate chips but they say you can susbtitute raisins, but those are practically the same as cranberries, and then you think you might miss the chocolate, so you add some cocoa, and since it will be chocolatey, maybe you could use a bit of mudslide mix as a liquid sweetener, and you're measurements are totally out the window now so just add some peanut butter to make sure it holds together... seriously - step away from the kitchen. This is what happens:

They were not good. Sometimes when you are craving junk food and you really want a Blizzard, it is probably better to just get in the car and drive to Dairy Queen. Lesson learned.

This weekend offered a slightly more successful baking endeavor: a lemon raspberry cake. Although I'm thinking it needs a better name than that. Cake seems fancier if you call it a gateau or a torte or something pretentious like that.

My friend Kim had a baby last week (little Erin, who has adorable dimples, but alas, no blue cardigan, because like the socks, I haven't finished it either). So, she and her husband decided to have a cookout this weekend. I'm sorry, what?!? You gave birth 4 days ago, so now you think you should clean your house and cook dinner for people? nuts I say. nuts!

So, I offered to bring dessert. And since I didn't give birth 4 days ago, I thought the least I could do was actually make said dessert.

Pictorial recipe! fun stuff.

Step one: gather your ingredients. If you don't have the ingredients, you should go buy them or make something else. You cannot ask anyone else to eat no-bake Chocolate-Cranberry-Mudslide cookies.

I'm a big cheater, so I started with white cake from a mix. You just need to make sure it is an "add water, eggs and oil" type of cake mix and not a "just add eggs" or something mix.

Step two: Substitute lemon juice for about 1/3 to 1/2 cup of the water. If you were willing to squeeze and zest a fresh lemon, you could use a bit less. If you're using the bottle of concentrate like me, use a bit more.

Add water until you get the amount called for on the package. If you use a big measuring cup, there's less math.

Step three: Bake the cake according to the package directions. If you wanted to be really fancy, you could divide each layer in half and alternate between jam and frosting, so you have a 4 layer cake. If you are already running late for the cookout, 2 layers is fine.

Step four: Spread raspberry jam on one cake. I like to use the spoonable fruit-type product with little or no sugar added, because this is pretty sweet already. Spread a bit of whipped frosting (yeah, it's from a tub) on the other half.

Step five: Make a sammich.

Step six: Cover the outside with more whipped frosting. Then add a bunch of fresh raspberries. I think fresh berries are the secret to the dessert on the cover of every summer issue of Good Housekeeping ever published. But they're on to something - if you camouflage the frosting with fruit you don't ever have to learn how Martha Stewart makes her cakes so smooth and perfect.

Voila! Cake...or gateau...or whatever. This one honestly tastes good. I promise.

If you happened to get the inaugural issue of the craftfetish mini-idea books, you've seen this recipe. If you missed it, leave a comment with a pretentious cake name suggestion and I'll send you a copy (at least, until I run out of them).