Tephra

Right now Lulu has a sale, 20% any order if you use the code CABIN.

I think you all need a copy of Hilltown if you don't have one yet.

And for the only vaguely related Ravelry news:

I have a Ravelry store now. For the moment there is only one pattern available, a knit wig cap for dolls. It's free and you can download it now. :) In theory, no one has tried that link and let me know if it really does work for non-Ravelry members.

I hope to have another pattern up soon, probably after FC, for sale.

Swiped from morganalilith:

Go to Pop Culture Madness (http://www.popculturemadness.com/Music/Pop-Modern/2006.html) and select the year you became 18. Snip the top 50 songs (or however many may be there) from the list and paste the list in your journal. Bold the ones you like, strike the ones you dislike, italicize the ones you know but don't care one way or another, and leave the ones you don't know as plain text.

( Apparently I didn't dislike any of them. )

Well I haven't updated in a while so here we go.

NaNo: Last Sunday and Monday (the 8th and 9th) I didn't write at all so the whole week has been a slog of trying not to fall any further behind. I had a good day today and finally, finally hit a spot where the words didn't require concentrating until I sweated blood to get the out. I'm still behind but I wrote 3k today and if I can manage that again tomorrow I will be caught up.

Knitting: I've got eight inches done on the vest for my Mom for Christmas. That's about 40% complete since Mom is shorter than I am.



I'm a bit farther along that this now, but I haven't taken a new photo and probably won't until I'm ready to divide for the arm holes in about five inches. ( Older stuff under the cut. )

It's been a while since I made any soap, and I still have lots of lye and oil around so someone has been pushing for more soap to use up the lye. :D

So I threw together a recipe (olive, canola, palm, and coconut for the curious) and figured I'd use up the aloe juice in the back of the fridge (unfortunately I didn't finish it off with this batch) and why not use some cut St. John's Wort while I was at it, and some tangerine and ti tree essential oils.

I had to beat the lye about a bit to break it up but that went well enough, no mishaps which is always a plus when handling lye. I dissolved it in water, half the total liquid for the recipe. The other half I did with the aloe juice into which I put the SJW after running it through my coffee grinder. My coffee grinder was bought entirely for grinding up herbs and things for soap and has never been used for its intended purpose of grinding coffee beans. I let the aloe sit on a warm burner while the lye cooled and measured out my oils.

While I was measuring my oils I realized I had palm oil and had accidentally used palm kernel oil in my calculations. A quick check with the calculator showed me that adding half a pound more palm oil would make my lye amount work. I normally make 8 pound recipes so it was a relief to find that the mold, an old plastic shelf that is a convenient low pan when you flip it over, will hold 8.5 pounds. My vertical mold holds only 8 pounds and the only reason I hadn't prepped that one was that I was expecting the soap to get rather hot while curing. That turned out to be a very good bit of foresight on my part.

Anyway, I warmed the oils just enough to melt them all, turned off the heat and went about doing a cold process soap. The lye went in and I stirred it for a while, then added the aloe, letting most of the vegetable matter stay in the pot, what went into the soap will add nice flecks of scrubbiness. At that point the soap was a nice creamy egg yellow. Alas, the aloe juice has sugars in it and lye and sugar means heat so it was shortly looking more like pumpkin pie.

Then I added the tangerine and ti tree oil... hello hot and seizing soap!

Suddenly my nice calm cold process soap was a fast moving hot process, without turning on the stove. The stick blender (long used for soap and missing several "teeth" off it's guard) was brought into play and I now have 8.5 pounds of dark glossy brown soap cooling in the mold. Well, cooling after it finishes reacting, it's still very hot right now.

I'm sure it will be fine.

Lately it seems I can't read recipes in comments without hitting on the infamous Mug Cake. Now for an emergency chocolate hit it's okay but the texture was always too... meaty, for lack of a better term, for my taste. This is undoubtedly due to the lack of leavening and the fact that there is a whole egg in one large coffee mug worth of cake. So I played around a bit, adding a pinch of salt, a smidge of baking soda, things of that sort, and managed to make it taste a bit better but it still didn't really have a cake texture in my opinion. So I tossed the "must fit in a coffee mug" requirement and came up with this.

Coffee Soup Mug Cake

This may work with a smaller mug, but to be safe get yourself a 20 oz mug of some sort. Spray the inside of the mug with your preferred cooking spray.

Mix up in the mug:

¹/₄ cup flour
¹/₃ cup sugar
3 Tbsp cocoa powder
¹/₄ tsp salt
¹/₈ tsp baking soda

Blend these dry ingredients before adding the following wet ones, it will make things easier.

1 egg
3 Tbsp vegetable oil
¹/₄ cup milk
¹/₂ tsp vanilla

Mix well.

Microwave on high for 3-3¹/₂ minutes. The cake will rise above the level of the mug!

Be sure to center the mug in your microwave so the cake will cook evenly and to minimize the chance of a spill over (I've only had it dribble over once, and the mug was not centered in the oven so there was a bit of a tilt, and the small dribble didn't make it all the way down the side of the mug so it was easy to clean up).

You may need a friend to help you eat it, or be greedy and save half for later. ;)

I know a few members of my friends list/circle sew, therefore I will share out a link for drafting a corset and if you then use their link to share the link with a friend you can get a second PDF for including gussets, gores, and corded panels. Do note that this is basically an advertisement for Foundations Revealed, but the tutorial (which is for altering an existing pattern but could be adapted to drafting from scratch) is useful.

But then I do tend to drop off the face of the planet in the summer. Nothing all that unusual happened this year, I went and saw the family and came back with some paperwork to deal with but that's mostly settled now.

Unsurprisingly, I did some knitting. ( See what, some tiny, some not. )

On an unrelated note, any other Semagic users having trouble posting? It keeps telling me it can't connect to the server, and that server happens to be LJ, IJ, and DW!

In more ways than one.

So, I've been knitting things for Anjeni on small needles, sizes US#0 and #1 mostly (2 and 2.25mm) of late. And really, I never, ever, expected to knit with needles that small.

And they are too big.

So I used a Joann's 40% off one item coupon to get $1 shipping and ordered a Susan Bates sock set. It contains sizes 1 and 0, which I have but I could use another set of 0 anyway (and I now have three sets of 1s) but more importantly, it has sizes 00 and 000 (1.75 and 1.5mm). The cost for the 4 sets is still less than the cost of 2 sets in steel (the Susan Bates are aluminum) so I figured it was reasonable for testing if I actually can stand knitting that tiny.

So, onto the testing. ( Cut to spare the uninterested. )

Someone made a Wall-E from bits and pieces of, well, junk. I am in awe.