Playing catch up

I't been a busy couple of weeks around the Deplume household! Last week, I used my Perfect Brownie pan for the first time.

As you can see, I had some leakage issues. I know that the answer is to line the pan in foil, but I resisted, as that seems like more work than just using a regular pan and cutting the brownies with a knife. People love these things, apparently, but not me. 

Then, I decided to make my daughter a cake for her 8th birthday. In a silicone bundt pan. It was given to me by a family member a while back, and I thoguht "what the heck? She said it worked fine, she just didn't love it." 

I think that maybe what she meant to say was that it was a miserable waste of silicone. I floured the pan. I used a cookie sheet under it. I followed the directions. But it still fell apart when I tried to de-pan it. To add insult to injury, this tragedy struck while I was trying to also get the house ready for about a dozen people to arrive for the party. 30 minutes before guests were to arrive, I was at the grocery store, buying a premade cake. This failure is still tasty, though. It lived in our refrigerator for a few days, being eaten and referred to as "The Fail Cake"

mmm, fail cake...

In other news, I'm knitting again. It's been slow going, as I keep screwing stuff up. I started a top-down hat on Superbowl Sunday, and it might actually fit when it's all said and done. But it's a beret, and I've never found one that I liked, so who knows what will happen. The yarn sure is pretty, though. 

So that's my last couple of weeks in a nutshell. I cannot wait for the Olympics to start. How about you?

Can I fix it?

I am calling on you experts and fearless folks alike to tell me what to do. I've been working on this flingin' flangin' "afghan" for far too long (well over a year). Entrelac is only fun for the first 100 squares or so. After that, it's more tedious than stockinette, and slower, too. I think the project is pretty in any case, and would love to see it finished some day, so I've been working on it again lately. I got through an entire row of squares the other night and decided to switch to a longer needle so I could see how wide it's shaping up to be, and I found this:

You see, there are not supposed to be cube-corner-shaped bits on blankets. I screwed up, by adding a square jutting out from what should have been the right edge of the work. For those of you not well-versed in entrelac, there should be alternating diagonal squares and triangles that create smooth edges up the sides of the piece. I've illustrated it thusly:

And of course I didn't notice this until after I had completed an entire row, consisting of hours of work. I know I could rip back and reknit the whole thing properly, but I know myself. If I start frogging this baby, I'm never going to re-knit. Too mind-numbing.

So my question is this: Would it work for me to snip the yarn, unravel just that square, and bind up the eight live stitches somehow so that the work can go on without undoing all of this? If so, where is the best place in the square to break the yarn? Then again, I might have screwed up something earlier, too, if I managed to attach the errant square on two sides, which should not have really been possible.

In the immortal words of Winnie the Pooh, Oh bother.

Ack! roof repairs in the rain.

After dinner, we were milling about, waiting for the big rain to stop and a particular TV show to begin when dh announced, "we have a leak." He went and got a bucket, and I started to see dollar signs.
It's raining cats and dogs and we just replaced the thingamajig and the watchamacallit, meanwhile, the doohickey and doodad are higher on my to-do list than the roof.

I took a deep breath, figured out that it was obviously near the edge of the low roof outside our bedroom window, and went off to look at it. I opened up my bedroom window, removed the screen, and launched myself over the dresser. That area is a section of rubber sheeting, as opposed to standard shingles (historically, most everything in my house was done in the most "frugal" way possible), so I looked around for a hole. Sure enough, there was a wrinkle at a seam about 10" from my window. The seam's adhesive had failed, and the hole was large enough I could stick a finger in it. crap. Once again, the Peter principle has kicked in-- home ownership is the ultimate example of having risen to the level of my incompetence. I have no earthly idea about how to fix a roof of any kind.

BUT, I didn't want to have any more leak, and I especially didn't want to have to leave a bucket in the family room until it stops raining, so I went downstairs, found an old vinyl tablecloth, chopped off a hunk with the kitchen scissors, and plopped it over the hole. I put some heavy stuff on top to keep it from blowing away right away and woohoo! it worked. The drip stopped in spite of another hour of steady rain.

Tomorrow's to-do list has just added "learn how to fix hole in roof." It's always something when you own a old house, eh?

oops.

Remember the bag I was working on for a couple of weeks? I was so proud of having only used $2 of yarn to make it. I love thrift stores. Well, I finished it. It still was not exactly pretty, but it was destined to mainly be a project bag so I got over it. I had knit a test swatch when I began, to make sure everything would felt together, so I was confident in this, my first project including felting. I was so excited to plop it in the washer and a few hours later, have a new bag.


I threw it inside an old pillowcase and into the washing machine it went. My favorite old blue jeans and my fancy new bag. After the washer stopped, I went to retrieve it.

shit.

This is what has become of the pillowcase. I knew its contents had met a horrible fate.



And here is the bag. Poor girl. She probably never knew what hit her.



For a $2 bag, it will still be functional. She needs to have a few more wash cycles before she is fully fulled. But I don't think she gets to leave the house. She definitely is going to live out her days hung on the back of the office door. Poor thing.

A happy accident, or something more sinister??

A while back I made a shrug. Just a simple rectangle in a drop stitch pattern to cover my shoulders when I get chilly in the summer. No big whoop. At first, I made it too small, so I pulled out the cuff and added a couple more inches. Then I plopped it here on my desk to wait for me to bother weaving in the ends. Some time later, I stuck it in the bag that hangs on the back of my office door. The bag has become a holding place for all the bits and pieces that need finishing.

This afternoon, I decided that I ought to finish up said shrug, since it is sometimes chilly in here and I wear a lot of tank tops. But alas, this shrug was just not meant to be.

Somehow a hole got in it. Now I don't want to jump to conclusions, but I'd bet dollars to doughnuts that the perpetrator is one of my offspring. I'm pretty sure my cats are too lazy to bother. If I had loved the thing, I'd be sad. But after trying it on today, it turns out I didn't like it so much.