This weekend i thought i would cook for my family, this rarely happens because truth be told i can’t cook. Well i say that i can’t, i can if i put my mind to it and what i can cook is quite limited. I decided to try something completely new and cook a dish that…
On Saturday I, quite literally, returned to school to attend a chicken-keeping course – held at my old secondary school and taught by my old science teacher. Once I’d recovered from the nostalgia that came with the dusky smell of the old art classroom where I used to spend my lunchtimes, I sat listening intently…
I’ve landed in London once again to begin a two-week internship in the city. I’ll be bed-hopping and sofa surfing; making the most of my good friends who are living and working here. Suitcase brimming with clothes, home-made chilli carefully packed in Tupperware, wrapped in cling-film and double-bagged, I arrived at my friend L’s front-door on Sunday…
Just in time for the last days of summer, I have a new pattern. Button Candy: a little wool dress that’s as sweet when worn as a tunic over leggings as it is on its own. Addie loves the sample, and I’m excited about dressing her in it all fall and winter, and maybe even next…
Almost as soon as I dove into designing garment patterns back in April, I decided I needed to be disciplined in my approach if I ever wanted to finish anything. Balancing a job and a family is hard enough, and I knew that piling knitwear design onto my ever-mounting to do list could end disastrously….
One thing I never expected was that I’d come to love spreadsheets, specifically, Excel spreadsheets. But here I am, admitting my fondness. It didn’t start this way. My first real brush with Excel was in graduate school. I worked for a temp agency over the summer, and one of my assignments was to work the…
When I began Make Ready I thought it would be the place where I documented my attempts at knitwear design. And for a short time, it served that function. I wrote about swatching (or not swatching) before diving into the knitting part of my first design project, and I extolled the virtues of garter stitch….
A few weeks ago I lamented winter’s departure and the impending end of this year’s sweater weather. Since then I’ve survived a nasty cold, the entire family succumbed to stomach flu, seven inches of unexpected snow coated our region, and the bitter cold just won’t quit. I’m done. Of course now that I’ve officially changed…
For two weeks now I’ve actually managed to find knitting time every day. It’s pretty much a Christmas miracle a couple of months too late, considering the stir-crazy toddler who demands my constant attention. My daily knitting sessions haven’t all been pinecone lace and Brooklyn Tweed LOFT, though I am making good progress on my Pomme…
For most of my life yarn didn’t matter. It’s not that I didn’t have some passing familiarity with it – I knew my flower afghan was made from it. But yarn was not something to be acquired on its own. Instead, it came as strands of scratchy acrylic bundled in plastic sleeves at the bottom…
For most of my adult life I’ve never thought much of Valentine’s Day. I don’t pine for a dozen red roses, Z and I don’t do romantic dinners, and both of us breeze past the displays of boxed candies at the store. Instead,February 14th marks the one day out of the year when we indulge in…
I’m in the midst of ribbing purgatory. The good news is I’m nearly through (three rows left to go). The bad news is it took me all week to get to this point, and I’m only just starting an adult sized sweater that requires 250+ stitches per row. The series of events that led me…
One of my greatest domestic failures is my inability to organize. I’ve probably mentioned this shortcoming elsewhere on the blog, but given the current state of my house, it bears mentioning again. Right now I am in the avoidance phase, willing myself to forget the explosion of fabric and yarn and notions that have overtaken…
We’re in the middle of a cold snap here. Not as severe as the polar vortex that gripped most of the states earlier this month, but still, the weather is not ideal for outdoor adventures, or really, anything that requires more than a few minutes of exposure to the elements. It’s a good thing I…
On weekdays I can usually keep my coffee intake to a reasonable level. One cup, maybe two, and I’m ready to begin my day. But on weekends I slip back into my caffeine addict ways. The siren song of the French Press compels me to casually ask Z if he was planning on boiling more…
My senior year of college I was elected to head the campus writers’ union. Essentially, this put me in charge of planning, or assigning the job of planning, student readings and a couple of parties. I learned two things that year: I enjoyed hosting events that had an air of seriousness but were actually excuses…
My love affair with peanut butter probably began when I was a toddler and it has not waned. I love it so much I can almost count my years in peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, which I could eat, uncomplaining, for lunch, dinner, breakfast, and desert. What keeps me from a three-meals-a-day peanut butter sandwich…
I didn’t acquire a taste for legumes until relatively recently. When I was a kid I refused to touch garbanzo beans, and whenever my Mom made chili, I picked all the red kidney beans from my bowl before I deemed it safe for eating. I’d never even heard of lentils and all the legumes we…
I finally caved and added a mini muffin pan to my bakeware collection. I held out for a long time because I never understood the mini muffin’s utility. The “gone-in-two-bites” size, while cute, didn’t strike me as particularly practical. And honestly, I’d still rather gobble down a full-sized muffin instead of trying to approximate its…
The inside of my oven has seen a few too many batches of cupcakes this month, so I decided to let it rest this weekend. But this being the season of sweets and all, I couldn’t let the weekend pass without a homemade confection to share with my little family. So I turned to the…