It’s summer, and I am knitting again!  It’s nice to have time to knit.  I am determined to whittle down my stash this summer.  I started with a baby blanket.  I have had some Lion’s Brand Baby’s Choice for awhile that I needed to use up.  I started it on another baby blanket awhile back, but I wasn’t liking the yarn in that pattern much.  So I began again.

I began twice actually.  I first wanted to make a blanket in the Concentric Squares Baby Blanket pattern.  It’s a really neat pattern, but I soon realized that I was using up all my yarn and I was not even 1/3 of the way done.  I was going to have to buy more yarn to finish it.  A lot more.  I don’t know what was going on.  When I took it off the needles to frog it, I realized that it was at least a twin-size wide.  It was on the way to being enormous.  I didn’t want to make a ginormous baby blanket which required me to buy more yarn. That was defeating the purpose.

I went looking again, and I found another pattern that I liked a lot.  It’s called Sweet Phoebe. I really like this simple pattern.  It has such a pretty lace edging.

The yarn is a bulky cotton/acrylic blend.  It’s a little shreddy, and it was hard to weave in the ends nicely, but I love how soft and squishy it is.

The above photo shows me that I need to work on my knitting versus purling tension.  I have no idea how I can do that, but I can definitely see the difference between the knit and purled rows here!

This pattern would be a great introduction to lace.  The lace is just around the edges and it’s a very short repeat.  Then you settle into the stockinette for most of the blanket.  It knit up fast with the bulky yarn, and I almost used all the yarn up.  I had less than a skein left. Perfect!

And now to totally change subjects. Yesterday I wanted to make a really good new salad.  So I googled “best salads ever”.   I found this one:  Chopped Salad with Bacon and Garbanzo beans.  It turned out great!  I made a couple of modifications.  It called for garbanzo beans and butter beans.  I thought that would be a little too much “beanage” so I went with just garbanzo.  I’ve always been a little unsure about eating garbanzos (except pureed in hummus), but I’d never fried them in coconut oil before.   They are really good.  I quickly learned though that I might need protective eye gear the next time I made them.  They started exploding on me!  Doubtless, I am doing something wrong.  Too high of heat maybe?  It caught me off guard though.  I am actually making the salad again tonight, so I will try to figure out how to avoid the exploding garbanzo beans.  I left the garlic and shallot out too.  I wasn’t in a garlicky/shalloty mood, but I am sure they’d be good in there.

Now I am off to make homemade bread.  We made a salt dough topographic map today (I will post about that soon), and it got David hungry for bread.  I have another good recipe for easy bread too. Really easy to make and so good!