Using the yarn Margene had leftover from her slippers, I made this pair for myself.

My shoe size is 8 1/2, and the pattern sizes jumped from 8 to 9 1/2. Figuring that the 8 would most likely be too small, I made the next size up and just kept felting them until they fit. Not only do they fit, they’re very comfortable – I wore them almost the entire weekend. I should probably go get some of that puffy fabric paint to put on the bottom of them. They’re not really all that slippery (not as much as I though they’d be), but maybe it will help them last a little longer before the soles wear out.

Pattern: Duffers—Revisited, by Mindie Tallack
Yarn: Cascade Eco Wool +
Needles: US 11/8mm
Ravelry: project page, pattern page

As he requested, it has bracelet-length… uh, I mean “watch-length” sleeves, and the ribbing at the neck is high enough to cover the neckline of a t-shirt.

It was interesting knitting it from Elizabeth Zimmermann’s “pithy” instructions, but I just forged blindly ahead and it all worked out. Well, the second time, anyway. I redid the sleeves because Larry thought the original sleeve size might be a little too small, but larger sleeves threw off the sizing of the saddle and shoulders, and it was a total fail, so I had to rip out the top and start the sleeves again with the original number. Not surprisingly, it all worked out fine that way. That Elizabeth was a clever one.

I tried it on myself, and although it was just a bit too big, I liked the lines of it, so I’ll probably make one for myself one of these days.

And of course, with the sweater of guilt out of the way, I’ve bought myself plenty of time for selfish knitting.

Pattern: Seamless Hybrid with Shirt Yoke, by Elizabeth Zimmermann
Yarn: Patons Classic Wool Merino, color 77115 “New Denim”
Needles: US 7/4.5mm for body, US 5/3.75mm for ribbing
Ravelry: project page, pattern page

Pattern notes: I did a phony seam on the sides of the body, as well as down the back of each sleeve. Since I wasn’t sure about the sleeves, instead of doing them cuff-upward, I used a provisional cast-on to cast-on the ending number of stitches and worked them downward for about 2″ before putting them on waste yarn. Then I joined them to the body according to the pattern and finished the yoke and neck. When everything else was done, I worked the sleeves downward.

It’s a little difficult to tell from the photos, but the neck opening is square, not round – but the ribbing makes it look fairly round.

What I discovered is that there are very, very few Bed and Breakfasts in Phoenix. Evidently there is an incredible number of regulations regarding them, and it’s difficult to get approved. Guess the hotel lobby is pretty strong there.

But at any rate, one popped up that not only had great reviews, but was also located very close to where the wedding was going to be held – the ZenYard Guest House.

We were thrilled with our choice – it was a fun and relaxing place to stay. Besides the nice living room in the main house, there are lots of great outdoor spaces to hang out in – in your choice of sun or shade. There’s a beautiful heated salt-water swimming pool and a hot tub in the front area. We didn’t use the pool because the outdoor temperatures were a bit too cool (it’s winter, after all), but it did look tempting.

There are two rooms in the main house which share a bathroom; a casita with a bedroom, bathroom, living room and kitchen; and a large bedroom with a private bathroom in a second casita (part of that casita has been turned into a massage studio). We booked the Cowboy Casita, which has the kitchen. It also has its own little patio area with chairs, loungers, and a hot tub. We took advantage of the hot tub one afternoon, and it was great. If you enlarge the photo below on the right, you’ll see one of the many hummingbird feeders that are located on the property. That window is the little breakfast nook in the casita – it was so nice to sit at the table and watch the little hummers come by for a drink.

The B&B hosts, Eddie and Dale, were wonderful. We also had a great time chatting with the other guests over breakfast each morning. Breakfasts there are Continental-style rather than large cooked breakfasts, but that suited us well. Dale is famous for his banana bread, and it was really good. There were also some scones, turnovers, and other assorted breads; yogurt; hard-boiled eggs; granola and chocolate Cheerios (evidently prized by the European guests), peanut butter and Nutella, and lots of fresh fruit. The property used to be an orchard, and there are still a couple of grapefruit trees, so we even had some freshly-picked, delicious grapefruits. There was also a nice variety of wine and snacks available for purchase.

The B&B is only a short drive from the airport – I don’t think it even took us 10 minutes to get there from the rental car place. There’s not a whole lot of things in the immediate walking distance, but we did go to a very nice Italian restaurant called Christo’s in a strip mall that was only about half a mile away. One woman who was staying at the B&B didn’t have a car, so Eddie and Dale provided her with a bicycle so she could ride around for the afternoon. With a car, there are lots of stores and restaurants within a few miles.

They had free wi-fi throughout the property, and there was also a computer available for use in the dining room – which was great because we didn’t bring one with us, and some things are a little difficult to do on a tiny phone-sized display.

All the other guests we met were also staying there for the first time, and we all agreed that we would definitely stay there again whenever we went back to Phoenix.

We had a few activities in mind to fill up out time, but didn’t get to do many of them. One thing that I’ve always been interested in doing is going to the Desert Botanical Garden. Since the weather was just perfect for it, that was our top pick. It took us about 3 hours to wander through the gardens and have lunch at the cafe. It was very nice.

I loved the Chihuly glass cactus at the entrance (the bright green “plants” in the photo below left), and of course, all of the wonderful cactus and succulents in the gardens.

On our last day in Phoenix, we took a drive out to Joe’s Farm Grill for lunch, where we were greatly entertained by the decor in the bathrooms.

Then we headed to the Superstition Mountains. We stopped at Goldfield Ghost Town. They staged a shootout which was fun to watch, and I even saw some knitting in the wild. The women were speaking a language that sounded sort of like German, but not quite. Dutch, maybe?

It was a great trip! If you want more photos, you can see the album here.

But all that was secondary, of course, to the event.

Yes, our Kitten had a most lovely wedding, and she looked spectacular in her beautiful red dress – a perfect choice to complement the groom’s tartan. The boys couldn’t have been cuter in their wee kilts.

Just look at that smile! Carrie has the most fabulous smile, especially when she throws back her head and laughs. It’s so infectious, and makes you feel good all over – I wish I could bottle it.

I was so pleased to have the opportunity to be there for the festivities.

Best wishes to the bride, and congratulations to the groom! May you have a wonderful and happy life together.

For my weekend trip to Phoenix (more on that later), I needed something portable but time-consuming. Laceweight is always a good choice, so with a bit of stash-diving, I came up with some Malabrigo in Lettuce to be made into Bitterroot. I made a good bit of progress on the trip:

Before leaving, I also cast on for some Duffers, which shouldn’t take more than a few hours to finish, so they’ll be great for SnB:

The trip also saw the demise of another project, my Kalajoki socks. I was trying to find some pattern to use with the Reynolds Soft Sea Wool I had, and thought this might work. I really like the sock pattern, but after completing one sock, I had to admit that I didn’t like the Soft Sea Wool for socks – or at least, not these socks. I think the yarn would be better used at a looser gauge. That project is headed for the frog pond.

Yes, after seeing Cookie’s, I had to have one. It’s now housing my most-used tea.

Last night’s sunset made me happy:

And the sky scarf? Here it is with almost a month down:

I’m glad that we’ve had a lot of blue sky this January, and no inversion – but you can see that we’ve had pretty variable weather.

If I were doing it again, I definitely wouldn’t be crazy enough to triple-strand. I figured that if I’m only doing one garter ridge a day, it wouldn’t be all that difficult to keep the yarns untangled, but it definitely is. I abandoned some of the colors (I had 2 blues and 3 grays) just so I wouldn’t have as many strands to deal with since I’m carrying them up the edge. I’ll probably just stick with one of the blues, the white, and one or two of the grays.

It’s been a great way for me to really pay more attention to the world outside, since I make sure to take a good look at the sky every day, and really appreciate it.

There are ways you could make this project even simpler, or more to your personal tastes. For example, if you don’t like blues and grays, you could just pick any set of colors you like, and assign them to weather patterns, like “clear”, “cloudy”, “rain”, and “snow”. Or use two colors, but with different textures.

One of our historic buildings in Salt Lake City is the Walker Center. It has a weather beacon on top which forecasts the following day’s weather – blue for clear, flashing blue for cloudy, red for rain, and flashing red for snow. Taking from that idea, you could pick any two colors you like (let’s say purple and green), and assign purple in your choice of two textures (stockinette, garter, seed stitch, eyelets, etc) to represent clear and cloudy, and two textures of the green for rain and snow.

Not a multi-color kind of person? Just pick one favorite color and assign different textures to the weather. Not into the weather? Take the same idea and assign it to any other daily theme.

I started out by looking up percolators on Amazon to see what reviewers had to say. It was interesting that many of the reviewers noted that the newer percolators (usually made in China) don’t last very long, and that the old made-in-the-USA ones were much better.

Aha. Maybe I could pick up a vintage percolator at a local thrift store or antiques store? I decided to take a look at eBay to see what kind of prices they were selling for.

I typed in “vintage percolator”, and what to my wondering eyes should appear as the first item on the list – with the auction ending in a mere 90 minutes?

A vintage Sears percolator, in a bright yellow that looked surprisingly similar to the newly-painted walls in the kitchen and sunroom. How could I resist? I figured that even if the coffee doesn’t end up being much good, I can always use it to heat water for tea.

And yes, it really does match the walls.

As for the coffee, the jury’s still out. My first pot was made with some Columbian coffee I had on hand. I thought it came out pretty good, but a little strong (I did put in more coffee than I use for the drip machine).

For the second pot, I used the Folgers Decaf that is what Larry prefers. (Yes, I know… but actually, for decaf, it’s not that bad.) The results were not so great – I found it a little bitter. I thought the strength was good, but Mr. Weak Decaf Larry thought it was still a little too strong.

The third pot was decaf again, using the same amount of coffee I’d use in the drip machine. Larry was pretty happy with it, but I found it way too weak and still a bit bitter.

Since the first pot I made with the regular coffee was pretty good, I think I’ll stop trying the decaf in it, and just stick with the regular coffee and see if I can find a good balance of amount of grounds and brew strength (there’s a dial from “mild” to “strong”). I’ll probably also try some taste-offs between the drip coffee, the siphon-brewed coffee, and the perked coffee.

Mostly, I suppose it’s the coffee itself. Unlike the extremely dark-roasted coffee usually marketed in the U.S. as “Italian Roast”, Italian coffee is much more lightly roasted. Many companies also include Robusta beans instead of using all Arabica beans.

But that isn’t the whole picture. I’ve purchased coffee from Illy and Lavazza, and the results at home were rather disappointing. I suppose the water makes a bit of a difference too, but I think that most likely it’s the equipment.

I started wondering how they make the American style coffee in the Italian hotels. They serve it at breakfast by the carafe, and I doubt someone is in the kitchen making dozens of servings of espresso to make carafe after carafe of Americanos. But maybe they are… I wish I had thought to ask about it while we were there.

Does anyone know?

I realize that no home coffeemaker of the traditional drip kind is going to compete with a commercial coffeemaker (drip or otherwise), and no matter how good the beans are, I’m not likely to get the kind of coffee I want from one of them. The water temperature isn’t hot enough, and the brewing period isn’t long enough. Paper filters remove the oils, and metal filters let a lot of sludge through.

I’ve tried Moka Pots, vacuum brewers (Yama), and pour-over brewers (Chemex). They make good coffee, but they’re a bit of a pain to use and/or clean, and there’s no way the hubby is going to make coffee if he has to use one of those. I’ve had French Press coffee, but I’ve never owned one. I wasn’t too keen on the filtering process, and I don’t like the muddy sludge in the coffee.

Then it occurred to me that on at least some of the cruise ships I’ve been on, they use large commercial coffeemaker urns that are evidently percolators. Hmmm. Percolators. My mother used one when I was growing up, but by the time I started drinking coffee, she had changed to Mr. Coffee. I don’t think I’ve ever had any home-made percolator coffee.

Percolators are a controversial item. Some people claim that they make the worst coffee, and others say it’s the best. But one of the articles I came across said that the main criticisms of percolators aren’t valid. Most critics say that percolators boil the coffee, which is evidently not true of electric percolators (the water is near-boiling, but does not actually need to boil in order to perk). Instead, the coffee is kept at in the optimal brewing temperature range at around 200F. (Besides, at Salt Lake City altitudes, the boiling point is 204F,  so even if it were boiling, it would be just barely within the optimum 195-205 brewing range.) The other main criticism is that the partially-brewed coffee is poured back over the grounds multiple times. A few people said that they couldn’t see how this was really any different from immersing the grounds for the same amount of time, as is done with a French Press.

Of course, there’s a lot of difference in specific equipment. For example, a home drip coffeemaker is probably not going to make coffee as well as a commercial one, and different brands of coffee makers will perform better than others.

And ultimately, it’s all a matter of personal taste. Some people like strong coffee, others weak. Some like the oils that are retained by brewing without paper filters, while others prefer the filtered coffee. We like what we like.

At any rate, in my quest to see if I could find a method for making coffee that suits me better than the drip machine, but which Larry is also willing to use, I decided it might be worth giving an electric percolator a try.

Tomorrow’s post will show you where that idea went.

It’s grapefruit season! This lovely Texas beauty is one of the best grapefruits I’ve ever eaten, except perhaps for some I had right off the tree in Belize. Gorgeous color and super-sweet. If you like grapefruit, now’s the time. This one came from Texas via Costco.

And here’s a peek at last night’s pasta, courtesy of the frozen bounty from my garden:

Scallops over papardelle, in a sauce made from a bit of olive oil, my last frozen Woodle Orange tomato and some frozen homemade pesto. Yum.