Final FO of 2008

I don't use it too often, but my dryer has a rack for items that need to dry flat. Pretty sweet.



I knit this hat, the Jacques Cousteau hat, in one day as a late Christmas present for my brother-in-law.





It's actually quite dark, a charcoal gray.


I think I messed something up in one of the four sets of decreases, but he'll never know. And it's a bit big. Eight inches of ribbing is perhaps too much.

Yarn: Cascade 220, one skein
Needles: Size 8
Size: 120 stitches

RIP

I wrote this a while ago but am just now posting it. I may replace the images with links in a few days because they don't exactly belong to me or even to the site I got them from (pushingdaisies-tv.com)—Knitopia

The Wednesday before Thanksgiving I went out and missed that night's Pushing Daisies. I just got around to watching that episode and wanted to share some screencaps from the series.

We've long known that PI Emerson Cod knits:

Various items on his desk have knitted cozies. He has knit socks, in which he once stored (and still does?) some reward money:
He even knit holsters for his guns (and a sweater vest)!
And on this pre-Thanksgiving episode, there was a swift—with an automatic ball winder!—
invented by this guy for his grandmother, whose yarn was oh-so-tangled:
(I love how the diamonds in the wallpaper match the criss-crossing wood in the swift.) I doubt we'll ever see a swift and ball winder on prime-time network television again.

And if that's not enough to interest you in the show, there's piemaking, pie eating, fantastic sets,
(look at the colorful spools of thread and the vintage sewing machine!)
the adorable Digby, neat (or at least interesting) clothes (pants with peacock feathers!), and They Might Be Giants references!





There's also dangerous amounts of cleavage (if that's what you're into).

Here, Olive shows us the lack of support her cleavage-bearing bras give her. I was interested in Pushing Daisies before it premiered, but I was worried about Kristin Chenoweth. I thought I wouldn't like her, but I was wrong. Olive and Emerson are my favorite characters.

I'm going to miss this show.

Leftovers

It's that time of year when there's knitting going on but you don't know if you should share it. So I'll post about food.

I don't like leftover mashed potatoes, but after seeing the recipes in this NY Times article, I decided to deliberately make too much to eat in one night. I already had a can of wild Alaskan salmon from Trader Joe's (more on that later), so I chose to make the potato, salmon, and spinach patties (I skipped the garlicky dill cream because I'm lazy, but you shouldn't; I think they need it).

I think I am the one who suggested we buy the can of salmon because it was wild and so cheap, and I like canned tuna just fine, so why not? But then it sat in the cupboard forever because I eventually read the label, which says the ("edible") bones and skin are included. Ew. And the can was huge. I might have given it to the Boy Scouts if I had remembered to put anything out on my porch for their recent canned food drive. Anyway, I don't think I am going to buy canned salmon again. The bones and skin may be edible, but I don't really want to eat them. It took quite a while to separate what I was willing to eat from what I was not (skin, larger pin bones that did not fall apart when touched with a fork, and, worst of all, bits of backbone I really didn't think were edible).

I got so tired of dealing with the salmon that I didn't include enough in the mixture. We couldn't taste it in the final product.

They were a little bland, which is why you shouldn't skip the sauce. I'd make them again if I had leftover potatoes, but I usually don't.

Dinner tonight: beef carbonnade from Art of the Slow Cooker.