sweetgeorgia

Food at the Fair

As a historically-confirmed sucker for infomercial-type gadgets at the PNE Marketplace (anyone need an orange shammy? apparently, I do), I haven’t been back to the PNE in years. But this year is special. It’s the 100-year anniversary of the Pacific National Exhibition and the lovely miss Nansiepants invited me along to the PNE’s first annual Foodie Tweetup. You eat, you tweet. Here’s what we ate…

There’s a surprisingly wide variety of food options at the PNE — everything from curry to crepes, from perogies to spring rolls — but the dear 黃厚巽 decided very quickly on the Deluxe Cheeseburger at Jimmy’s Lunch. Since 1929, this family-owned and operated food vendor offers this humble, yet famous, cheeseburger filled with fried onions. Heaps and heaps of fresh chopped onions get seasoned and cooked down slowly into a simmering, savory and caramelized mush. It makes the burger so much more than what you’d expect.

For me, I have a weakness for bratwurst, sausage, hot dogs… and I always think back to that intensely tasty sausage and potato dish that I had at the Heineken House during the Olympics, so that led me straight to the German Sausage Haus where I had $10 of a very tender bratwurst smothered in quite a mild tasting sauerkraut and complemented with some potato salad. I could eat this everyday if it promised not to make me fat.

Trying to decide what to have next was hard. But the deep fried jelly beans and oreo cookies at the Funnel Cake place were too unusual sounding not to try. The jelly beans were like the little tiny expensive Jelly Belly ones, clumped together, covered with funnel cake batter and deep fried. I think there’s a video somewhere on Youtube now of me eating one of these things. Not flattering, I’m sure. But yes, some of the jelly beans melted into a syrupy, mushy mess and other jelly beans stayed intact. In any case, it was like eating a golf ball made of pure sugar. Very yummy, but I couldn’t have more than half of one! So… bring your friends.

The deep fried oreo, on the other hand, was really interesting. It tasted almost like smoked chocolate if there was ever such a thing. Interesting enough to me to eat at least two, I think.

The wonderful organizers of the tweet up, Melissa Guillergan and Lauren Wainwright were so sweet to send us all home with some prizes and a candy apple for each of us! I’ve met craft and knit bloggers before, but never hung out with a group of food bloggers. It’s just always cool and inspiring to see people get excited things that they enjoy. There is indeed a video by Vancouver 24Hrs if you want to see what we were up to. And a few of my photos from the tweet up are here on flickr.

On a sugar high and narrowly escaping the purchase of a $100 Thunderhead shower head, we headed home under the sparkly lights of the fair, accompanied by the roar and screams from the rickity wooden Coaster. And as my wise friend, Jen, reminded me this morning, “The PNE is, after all, all about the food.”

A most unfortunate ending

It’s been yeeeeaaars since I started this cardigan. And finally, this hot, sweaty summer, I managed to finish knitting it. It’s Amy O’Neill Houck’s Cropped Cardigan design and it’s so sweet looking. Knit with two strands of luscious Blue Sky Alpacas Alpaca & Silk on big 8 mm needles, it’s supposed to be ridiculously easy… but somehow, I managed to make it a mess.

I ran out of yarn with about 3 inches left to go on the second sleeve. Of course, buying an extra skein of yarn four years (this is pretty much pre-Ravelry days, so I didn’t track even how many skeins I bought) after I started the cardigan meant that they were no where near the same dye lot. And not only were they different dye lot… they were different yarn lot. The main body of the cardigan is this warm and fuzzy kind of alpaca yarn, but the bit of extra yarn that I joined for the sleeve is all smooth and more silky looking. So it’s a sharp and distinct difference. It’s totally visible.

So now what? Should I wear it and just not care about the difference in the sleeve yarn (even though it’s totally obvious)? Or should I frog it? I’m leaning towards the frogging and knitting a Mini Manu. What would you do?

Needle in a haystack

It’s been pretty hot these past few weeks, but then the weather turned sharply cold and rainy on Saturday. The turn in the weather must have caused me to catch a cold or something, but I started feeling crappy yesterday afternoon. So after finishing up with dyeing the August Fibre and Yarn Clubs, I came home to comfort myself with a bowl of Dan Dan noodles and some knitting. Being still completely enamoured with Kate Davies’ Manu cardigan pattern, I was thinking about beginning to cast on when I got stuck… looking for needles. 3.75 mm circulars. Where the heck are they?!, I’m thinking.

Over the past several years, I’ve accumulated more knitting needles than I could have ever imagined. As a kid, I had a small collection of straight Aero needles which didn’t take up much space and were easy to sort and organize. But now, I’ve switched mainly to knitting with long circulars… everything from socks to sweaters, and they just end up in these big tangled piles. I am in search of the best way to organize these circular knitting needles so that I don’t have to go through six pairs of 4.0 mm needles to find the 3.75 mm needle.

So far, over the years, I’ve tried:

• Keeping the ziploc they came in and returning the needles back to the bags when not in use… this doesn’t work for me and I have a huge stack of empty Addi plastic needle bags to show for it
• Using a Lantern Moon circular needle holder (those horizontal tubes sewn in to separate different size circulars)… didn’t work for me because there are too few “pockets” for clear separation. Also, there’s no markings on the pocket to show what size needles are supposed to be there. (So sad that this option didn’t work. The case is made from lovely Thai silk, but since it’s not used, it was just a poor investment on my part.)
• Storing the entire pile on a bookshelf and digging through the pile as needed. I think that’s where I’m at now.

I finally managed to find a set of 3.75 mm circulars, but they are Knit Picks Interchangables so I didn’t even find what I was looking for in the circular tangle. Once Around in Mill Valley had a great post on their old blog about organizing them by file folders, but since they’ve re-opened the post is gone now. Any ideas or suggestions on organizing knitting needles, including circular, straight and double-pointed? How do you organize your knitting needles?

Twinflower

The new Fall 2010 Twist Collective was released today and I’m so excited to see the beautiful design Amy Herzog (aka stashknitrepeat) has created from our Merino Silk DK. “Twinflower” is a fingering/sport-weight pullover with classic styling and delicate details. And I’m so enamoured with the lace insets at the sleeve edges. I’m looking forward to seeing all the projects that come out of this lovely design.