A Regal Color Palette

I dyed up some tussah silk yesterday for a few projects, but shouldn't these all be put together into a project? Such a gorgeous and regal colorway.

Sunflower Garden

Just in time for the end of summer, our small collection of giant sunflowers bloomed this past week. It's so nice looking out the kitchen window and seeing all shades of sunflowers and wildflowers together lining our driveway. 

Bomber also loves to run around them to try and sneak up on birds and butterflies.

German Chocolate Cake Ice Cream

Earlier this year I got my new favorite toy, a Cuisinart Ice Cream Maker. With the help of two awesome books, Sweet Cream and Sugar Cones and Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams At Home, I started with simple Strawberry Buttermilk Sherbert and was soon making gourmet ice cream like Goat Cheese with Apricot Jam.  

I've recently gained enough confidence in ice cream making to try out my own combinations, and the most successful so far is definitely the German Chocolate Cake Ice Cream. Below is my recipe. You will need a 1.5 quart ice cream maker (and this recipe really will fill it to the brim), and a basic knowledge of how to make ice cream.


This is Betty, or as Brian likes to call her "Big Mouth Betty", because she sure does 
let you know when she's running with constant hum that goodies are on their way.

German Chocolate Cake Ice Cream

Ice Cream Ingredients:
- 6 egg yolks
- 1 cup sugar
- 1/3 cup dutch processed cocoa powder
- 1 cup 1% milk
- 2 cups half and half
- 1/4 tsp salt
- 1 1/2 tsp vanilla
- 8oz 1/3 less fat cream cheese, softened

Coconut Caramel Swirl Ingredients:
- 3/4 cup toasted coconut (I toasted my own on a baking sheet in the oven under the broiler for a couple of minutes)
- 3/4 cup brown sugar
- 3 tbsp water
- 1 tbsp butter
- 1/8 tsp cinnamon
- 1/2 tsp vanilla

Making the Ice Cream:

Prep:
1. In a medium heat proof bowl whisk the egg yolks and 1/2 cup of sugar together. Set aside.
2. In a medium heat proof bowl whisk the cream cheese until smooth.

Make the base:
1. In a heavy nonreactive saucepan, combine the cocoa powder with the remaining sugar. Whisk in 1/4 cup of milk to make a paste until smooth and uniform. Don't add the milk all at once or your cocoa powder will be lumpy. Whisk in the remaining milk, cream, and salt and put the pan over medium-high heat. When the mixture reaches a bare simmer, or 180 degrees, reduce the heat.
2. Scoop out about 1/2 cup of the cream mixture and, while constantly whisking egg mixture, add the 1/2 cup of cream mixture to the egg mixture. Repeat this step once more. Carefully pour the egg mixture back into the pot of hot cream mixture.
3. Cook the mixture over medium heat, stirring constantly, until it has slightly thickened, about 1-2 minutes.
4. Whisk the hot cream mixture into the cream cheese. You can put the mixture through a fine mesh strainer for a super duper smooth texture, but I didn't find this to be necessary. Set the bowl in an ice water bath, or put it in the fridge. Allow to completely cool, 2 hours or overnight. I like to make my mixture in the morning and freeze it in the afternoon.

Making the Coconut Caramel Swirl.
1. In a small saucepan stir together the sugar and water. Turn heat to medium and stir constantly until the sugar has dissolved. Stop stirring the mixture and watch for the mixture to turn a deep amber color.
2. Remove from the heat and stir in the butter, cinnamon and vanilla.
3. Allow to cool slightly and stir in the coconut.

You will want the mixture to be cool, but not harden before adding it to the ice cream. Once it is layered with the ice cream it will become slightly more liquid and any hardening will go away.

Freezing the Ice Cream:
1. Add the vanilla to the ice cream base.
2. Freeze according to your ice cream makers instructions. Make sure it gets really thick before removing it from the ice cream maker for the smoothest texture.
3. As you take the finished ice cream and put it in a freezer container layer the coconut caramel swirl and the ice cream, but don't mix them together. Make sure to put a little of the coconut caramel swirl in the bottom of the container and reserve a little for the top too.

Designer Madness

After lots of deliberating, scheming, sketching, swatching, procrastinating, and researching, a final burst of creative energy and verbal pushing from a few friends has helped me get to the point where I can share my next idea with the world: my first knitting pattern collection. What makes it special? All of the patterns will be written specifically for hand spun yarn.

This certainly isn't the first set of patterns written for hand spun, and I know it won't be the last, but it is special and unique in that I get the opportunity to put my love of color and texture into (hopefully) easy to follow instructions for daring and bold fiber artists.

There are 3 great challenges for this project:
- Designing patterns that are easy to follow, but challenging enough that they're worth paying money for.
- Finding a way to meld a pattern with bold yarn (one or the other or both should shine, not overpower and drown out the other).
- Find the time for all the testing, typing, tech editing, photographing and formatting that goes into making this work.

Luckily, I have found a great group of knitters willing to test and critique my patterns in my Ravelry Group (head over there and join in the fun!) and that definitely helps keep me working. It's very easy to get overwhelmed or distracted and give up or move on, drawing out the work and seeing the finish line get further and further away. I'd love to have this done by November, but knowing me it will be some time before next spring.

How could I get overwhelmed when I keep all my designing ideas all nice and organized?

Click on the picture for a more up close and personal look at my yarn inspiration. 

The best time of year is coming!

I love Fall, and by the looks of my pumpkins, it's almost here! The sugar pie pumpkins ended up really small this year, and there are only about 1 per plant (so maybe 7 in total?), but I'm hoping to get at least a pie and a couple of loaves of bread out of them.

The acorn squash on the other hand, they are out of control. This one here is almost the size of my head, and every time I lift up a leaf I see a new squash growing. I'm pretty sure anyone who comes to our house this fall will leave with an acorn squash and a dozen eggs.

Tour De Fleece 2013 Finish Line!

Tour De Fleece is a way for fiber arts fanatics to feel like they're part of something big, like the Tour De France. Only for us, it's less about sweating and cycling great distances and more about spinning lots of awesome yarn.

This year I didn't spin as often as I had hoped, the tour always seems to fall when I'm on vacation or have visitors, but I did manage to spin up a few yarns and some fibers I've had in my stash for way to long.

My final tally: 4552 yards and 2.37 pounds spun. Not to shabby.

I spun whenever I could, even out in the chicken yard. 

Left to Right, Top to Bottom: boucle made of superfine merino, bamboo, and Fleece Artist kid mohair, fingering weight superwash BFL (2 skeins), aran weight 2-ply made of superfine merino, bamboo, and angelina, a super bulky extreme thick and thin polwarth single, and a super duper huge and bulky 2-ply alpaca.

And just so you understand just how big that alpaca yarn is, here is my moderately cooperative model, Bomber. 

Fiber Arts Cruise

I've been on quite a few fiber arts vacations, but I'm pretty sure my most recent trip, the Friends and Fiberworks Fantasy Fiber Arts Knitting Cruise to the Bahamas was one of the most elaborate. I was fortunate enough to get trapped on a boat with 3 of my favorite fibers artists; Esther of Jazzturtle Creations, Liz of Reckless Knitting, and Vithard of Vithard Nordic Knitting for 5 days.

From left to right: Liz, Me, Vithard, Esther

The at sea days were filled with classes, cocktails, knitting, eating, and hot tubs. It was pretty awesome. I mean, where else do you get to take a fiber prep class with Esther and have a fruity blended drink in your hand the whole time?

Our workstation at the end of class. 

Knitting with Vithard after a dip in the hot tub. 

We really did take our knitting everywhere, even to the fancy "Captain's Dinner". This is a great shot, click on it to make it bigger. 

Liz and I had a blast together on excursions in Nassau and Freeport, snorkeling and touring around, and our time in Charleston, SC was almost more fun than the cruise. That city is so fun, colorful, and full of history. I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to visit a southern city with lots of charm.

Happy Hens

I realized I never introduced the newest members of our farm family! How rude. Back in June I got really impatient waiting for eggs. The chicks were still a couple of months away from laying and July was the month of family visitors. How could I let my family visit the farm without providing them with farm fresh eggs?!

I realized I just couldn't, so I kept my eye on Craigslist for already laying hens and just happened to luck out and find someone less than 5 miles away from me who was selling White Leghorn/Production Red x hens. If you know anything about Montana then you know that it was a miracle! No one ever lives that close to you and has what you want. They call it Big Sky Country for a reason. Your neighbors could be 20 miles away, let alone someone who posted a Craigslist ad for chickens.

We decided to bring home 5 hens and per the recommendation of every article online, including one written on Backyard Chickens, we put them in quarantine in the horse stall in the back of the property. Most articles recommend a month long quarantine to watch for disease and any other problems that might be passed on to your existing flock.

Happy new hens in "quarantine". 

I, of course, was impatient and only waited a week to start the introduction process. I wanted to integrate the flock before I went on vacation so I knew that everyone was getting along and the people keeping an eye on them wouldn't have to deal with the "pecking order" getting a little to rough.

I treated them all for mites just in case and then put the two flocks where they could see each other, but not have full contact with each other. The first few days were hard because our rooster Jinx kept biting the new hens combs and making them bleed. I had to put an extra barrier of chicken wire between them so he couldn't get his whole head through the fence. None of the other chickens seemed to have a problem so I had to wait it out until Jinx calmed down. After a few days I removed the extra chicken wire and let them get closer, and then a few more days later I removed the barrier fence all together and let them free range together.

I expected to have to sit out with them all day and play interference but I was pleasantly surprised when they all happily clucked and scratched and foraged together like they'd been together all along. And the best part- we started getting eggs a day after bringing the new hens home!

In the beginning of August we did unfortunately loose one of the young hens, Kiwi, to an infection of her vent (I think she had what is called "gleet", only google it if you want to see really gross pictures) when she was coming into lay. She developed the infection while I was away and by the time I was home it was to infected to treat. It was very sad, but she needed to be put down, and there was a chance that she had a problem with her reproductive system that never could have been helped.