A Few Stitches...
I've been knitting on this for about a year, whenever Jet and I were watching Naruto, the new Fairy Tail episodes, or the newer One Piece episodes. It's the Hue Shift Afghan in the "Rainbow" pattern, though when I bought it was called Prism. I really love how it glows in the center...
What I love is the steady progression of the piece, and that every color not only has its place, but partners with every other color to make many more colors than one might think possible.
I was surprised to find that I've been working on this for a whole year. It's about five feet by five feet, as the tiles underneath it are about 14 inches square. And it's done in quarters from the corners in. I've been really thinking through another colorway that goes from black to white through the grays and then from palest blue to deep midnight blue, keeping the lights in the center and the darks around the edges with a pine green for the border. We'll see if that ever comes to light.
It was easy work, though, and I did a lot of it watching anime with subtitles. incandescens had told us that Fairy Tail was starting up again, and we've watched all the new episodes and they were fun.
We've worked through all of One Piece, and have now finished all of the old Naruto series and are sixty-some episodes into Shippudon. I'll admit that I like the Naruto manga quite a lot, and the Naruto fillers do suffer, but when the anime depicts actual chapters from the books, they do it really really well. There's stuff I couldn't figure out from the static pages that suddenly make a lot more sense in full-on action in the anime. I think one of the most telling things is that the actual author of Naruto really is brilliant about the seven-layers deep chess game that should be shinobi tactics, where nothing is as it seems. The people that do the filler aren't, and that really really shows.
My summer days have simplified even more. I'm mostly playing Team Fortress 2 with Jet, watching anime with him, and going swimming in the afternoon. We do various things for breakfasts and lunches: Shrove Tuesday Pancakes, almond croissants from Trader Joe's, biscuits and country ham and grits, bagels and lox, clay pot rice, frozen ramen with naruto and bok choy and scallions, and I do believe I'm kind of spoiling Jet for food. He's learning how to make quite a few of the dishes, too, though, which is nice.
One of my experiments was this biscuit, which is slathered in garlic butter. I'd minced the garlic and put it over a low heat with a tablespoon of butter and let it cook very slowly until the garlic started to color. I turned off the fire and the residual heat browned both butter and garlic. I then took a brush and painted the garlic and butter onto hot biscuits made with Brenda's recipe using coconut oil and wheat germ. I usually try and make a batch of biscuits that's half again what we usually eat for dinner, but this time we ate all but two of the biscuits.
Both the boys say they were a great success. I'll concur, especially when I found out that in the process, the garlic bits had turned beautifully crunchy as well as full of flavor. It's been a lot of fun trying out new food ideas while we have the time. Once we're back into the crunch of school time, it'll be fun to roll out the recipes I've practiced. We had the "tasty rice" for dinner on night, too, and leftovers for a few lunches has been very nice.
What I love is the steady progression of the piece, and that every color not only has its place, but partners with every other color to make many more colors than one might think possible.
I was surprised to find that I've been working on this for a whole year. It's about five feet by five feet, as the tiles underneath it are about 14 inches square. And it's done in quarters from the corners in. I've been really thinking through another colorway that goes from black to white through the grays and then from palest blue to deep midnight blue, keeping the lights in the center and the darks around the edges with a pine green for the border. We'll see if that ever comes to light.
It was easy work, though, and I did a lot of it watching anime with subtitles. incandescens had told us that Fairy Tail was starting up again, and we've watched all the new episodes and they were fun.
We've worked through all of One Piece, and have now finished all of the old Naruto series and are sixty-some episodes into Shippudon. I'll admit that I like the Naruto manga quite a lot, and the Naruto fillers do suffer, but when the anime depicts actual chapters from the books, they do it really really well. There's stuff I couldn't figure out from the static pages that suddenly make a lot more sense in full-on action in the anime. I think one of the most telling things is that the actual author of Naruto really is brilliant about the seven-layers deep chess game that should be shinobi tactics, where nothing is as it seems. The people that do the filler aren't, and that really really shows.
My summer days have simplified even more. I'm mostly playing Team Fortress 2 with Jet, watching anime with him, and going swimming in the afternoon. We do various things for breakfasts and lunches: Shrove Tuesday Pancakes, almond croissants from Trader Joe's, biscuits and country ham and grits, bagels and lox, clay pot rice, frozen ramen with naruto and bok choy and scallions, and I do believe I'm kind of spoiling Jet for food. He's learning how to make quite a few of the dishes, too, though, which is nice.
One of my experiments was this biscuit, which is slathered in garlic butter. I'd minced the garlic and put it over a low heat with a tablespoon of butter and let it cook very slowly until the garlic started to color. I turned off the fire and the residual heat browned both butter and garlic. I then took a brush and painted the garlic and butter onto hot biscuits made with Brenda's recipe using coconut oil and wheat germ. I usually try and make a batch of biscuits that's half again what we usually eat for dinner, but this time we ate all but two of the biscuits.
Both the boys say they were a great success. I'll concur, especially when I found out that in the process, the garlic bits had turned beautifully crunchy as well as full of flavor. It's been a lot of fun trying out new food ideas while we have the time. Once we're back into the crunch of school time, it'll be fun to roll out the recipes I've practiced. We had the "tasty rice" for dinner on night, too, and leftovers for a few lunches has been very nice.