Tim Tams

Currently riding high on my personal list of things that are marvelous and amazing: The Tim Tam Slam.

(Erqsome beat me to the punch on documenting this awesomeness, as I found out when I searched Ravelry for forum posts about Tim Tams, but they are too good to go unmentioned here as well.)

A couple of months ago, Rahul and I saw a video of Natalie Imbruglia talking about the Tim Tam Slam on a talk show. We didn’t think much of it, but when we were in a grocery store in Hong Kong, he said, “hey, there are those cookies from that Youtube video–do you want to try them?”

So we bought a package of the dark chocolate-covered variety for the equivalent of $1 and change and went back to our hotel, where I brewed a cup of instant coffee with the Nescafe powder, non-dairy creamer, and electric kettle in our room. (The Cityview is a nice hotel, by the way, if you’re planning to visit Hong Kong–very convenient location.)

I bit off the corners of the Tim Tam, stuck it in the mediocre coffee, sipped it up, and crammed the disintegrating chocolate cookie into my mouth. The whole concept seemed a little gross, so I was completely unprepared for the mind-blowing deliciousness that ensued.

I’m ashamed to tell you just how many Tim Tams we then proceeded to eat. Suffice it to say that it was Too Many, and I speak from hard-earned experience when I say that no matter how tempting it seems at the time, you should eat no more than two Tim Tams in a single sitting. Two and a half, max.

We brought another package back with us, and made the fortuitous discovery that Pepperidge Farm is currently selling Tim Tams at Target for a limited time only. You can even get a coupon here, although we couldn’t get it to work. (Even with the coupon they cost a few times more than they do in Asia, unfortunately.) We bought a few boxes of them on our last Target run, and have been enjoying them with good coffee, and in moderation this time.

Although this may seem like heresy, I recommend the following technique to make your Tim Tam enjoyment last longer:

• Break each Tim Tam in half.
• Bite one corner off each half-Tim Tam.
• Put the bitten corner in your mouth and the broken half into the liquid.
• Consume as you would for a whole Tim Tam.

This way you get two Tim Tam explosions out of a single cookie and it takes slightly longer than the usual ~10 seconds to consume 180 calories and 22% of your daily saturated fat allowance.

Other great stuff:

These Dacca boots made from recycled plastic bags.

Day of the Triffids. (I have a glut of post-apocalyptic fiction out from the library at the moment and need to update Goodreads when I have a chance. The Road by Cormac McCarthy was fantastic, too.)

The sweater I am currently working on: o w l s, from needled! I’m making this in Beaverslide McTaggart Tweed in Big Sky Blue, bought from someone’s destash on Ravelry, and I have already finished both sleeves (two at a time, Magic Loop–when there are less than 30 sts per sleeve, the knitting goes fast!) I’m strongly attracted not only to the finished sweater but also the notes people have left on Ravelry saying how they finished the sweater in mere days. The only thing I’m not looking forward to is the part where I have to sew on dozens of buttons. But it will be worth it in the end, and I expect it will be fun to sift around in my button box to find suitable eye-buttons.

Beaverslide has a good reputation (cf. KR, BT, and Friender, a fellow Madisonian) and I can confirm it is a lovely yarn to work with–light, matte, woolly, spongy. It’s quite fragile, a bit uneven, but really pleasant to work with, and it’s next-to-skin soft, belying its rustic appearance. I hope it blooms when I wash it, as it looks a little too stretched-thin when I try on the sleeves, due to the negative ease.

I wear a lot of pullovers when it gets cold, and most of my nice warm rugged ones are store-bought, so I’m really excited to get this one done.

Oh and one more great thing. One of my local yarn shops, Lakeside Fibers, which was already pretty fantastic overall, is now serving wine in the cafe–as if delicious locally sourced food, a panoramic lake view, and locally roasted coffee weren’t enough. My neighborhood Stitch ‘n’ Bitch is in a wine bar, but sadly, it lacks any yarn aside from what we have personally brought in. Now I have a place where I can get Dream in Color merino and a nice glass of California Chardonnay in the same room.

Michael Phelps

Flickr is misbehaving, so no vacation pictures yet. In the meantime, at least I can do a belated post about some fun Christmas knitting I did. I give you…

Name: Michael Phelps (rav project link)
Pattern: Loch Ness Monster by Hansi Singh (aka Hansigurumi)
Date started: December 15, 2008
Date finished: December 17, 2008
Yarn used: Caron Simply Soft Eco in 3 different colors: 0.5 skein 0017 Spring Moss, 0.25 skein 0002 Natural, and scraps of 0033 Charcoal
Needles used: US size 5 (3.75 mm) and US size 6 (4 mm)
Notes: I made Michael Phelps as a Christmas present for my little toddler cousin Emma. As it turns out, he didn’t wind up in her hands till this last weekend, and she was apparently a little grumpy from having just been woken up from a nap, so I don’t think she was too impressed with him at the time, but perhaps he’ll grow on her.

I included an explanation of how Michael Phelps lived a peaceful existence, training 10 hours a day in the chilly waters of Loch Ness, before he flew to California to be her friend.

Here he is with a skein of Felted Tweed for scale:

His tilty little head:

Hello! Who’s a cute little plesiosaur? You are! Yes you are!

He’s even personalized with her name:

As far as the technical aspects of this toy:

• I apparently kind of suck at making a clean selvage, nice short rows, picking up stitches, and all the other skills required for this toy. I experimented with the selvage, but the left side selvage (RS facing) was never as nice as the right–always loose and sloppy, it seems, no matter what I did. I ended up knitting/purling the picked-up stitches through the back loop to try and close them up more, and I went back over the neck in the end with a new piece of MC yarn and a tapestry needle to try and close up gaps along the sloppy selvage.
• I also worked one more row after picking up stitches for the opposite belly side, before grafting, to try and make the stitches more even.
• I didn’t have any polyfill stuffing, so I stuffed him with cotton/ecospun roving and miscellaneous yarn scraps.
• I used a US 5 needle for the belly–didn’t have my US 6 needle points handy. It probably would have been better to use US 5 needles for the whole body since the gauge was a little loose once the toy was stuffed.
• Circular or straight needles should be used for the majority of the toy if knit as written, since most of it is knit flat; DPNs are really only good for the flippers and horns. The belly would be way too unwieldy if knit with DPNs.
• I tied little knots for the eyes, satin stitched (?) back over them again a few times, tied again, cut the ends to about 2 inches and used a crochet hook to bury the ends inside the body of the monster.
• Next time I would knit the tail in the round, subtracting 2 sts. I think it would be fine to knit in the round up until row 58 or so. Seaming the narrow part of the tail is really fiddly.
• Next time I would also try using my favorite garter selvage. The stockinette biases a lot, and I think it might be due to the selvage. While it definitely gives Michael Phelps a very cute demeanor–like he’s saying “arooo?”, as someone else wrote in their notes about this pattern–it makes picking up the sts for the belly sort of difficult and looking very sloppy/holey on one side. Plus, I never really understood how to neatly pick up 3 sts for every 4 rows (i.e. every 2 chains in a chained selvage). How do you go back through twice–just through 1 leg of the stitch, every other st? (That is what I did for the fin stitches, though–used a crochet hook, picked up the sts then turned and picked them up again through just one leg of the st.)
• The pattern doesn’t specify, but I knit the horns as i-cord instead of in the round–it’s the same thing when worked over this small number of sts, and much easier than turning the whole monster around and around.
• Satin stitched with MC under chin because I made the white belly part go up too far relative to the horns.
• I marked this pattern as “difficult” in my Ravelry notes because:
  • As mentioned, it’s hard to pick up the belly stitches nicely–selvages tend to gape and let polyfil ooze out
  • you have to be able to do a decent job of Kitchener stitch over LOTS of stitches
  • you have to mattress stitch a tiny piece of fabric (the tail) over lots of stitches
  • you have to have a bit of ingenuity when it comes to weaving in the ends invisibly
  • you have to be able to pick up and knit some tight and fiddly stitches for the flippers (and horns)

Overall: the toy came out very cute, I enjoyed the pattern, and I look forward to knitting more weird Hansigurumi creatures in the future, although next time I will try and figure out ahead of time if there are ways to minimize seaming and grafting.

Happy new year!

Hello everyone! Happy new year! Happy inauguration!

I got back from my vacation about two weeks ago, but was almost immediately felled by a horrible flu bug and have only just started to feel better. I was mildly sick (runny nose) during the last part of my vacation, but didn’t start to feel truly awful until we got back to Madison, so I’ve spent the last couple of weeks curled up feverish and coughing in bed, imagining all the awful things I might have picked up in Asia (SARS! Bird flu! Malaria! Strep throat! Dengue fever!) and wondering if I would ever get better. I’ve been sick for 2 1/2 weeks now and still not entirely well. Ugh. But as a public service announcement, I would just like to say that if you’re sick and congested, the Neilmed neti pot is pretty much the best thing ever invented. I laughed at Rahul when he first started using a neti pot, but now I’m a true believer. Blowing just doesn’t cut it, nasal lavage is where it’s at! (Probably TMI, but when you’re sick, it’s just great–it will flush what seems like gallons of yellow mucus out of your sinuses and leave you feeling fresh as a non-mucus-filled daisy.)

Anyway, I had an awesome trip and will post pictures soonish. We went to Hong Kong, Cambodia (Siem Reap, Phnom Penh),  and Vietnam (Hanoi, Halong Bay/Baitulong Bay, and Sapa). We had so many great adventures, I don’t even know where to start. It was so worth the astronomical cost of the vacation and all the planning-related stress. Angkor Wat, which I expected would be amazing (and it was, actually!) was not even one of the particular highlights of the trip, if that tells you how great the rest of it was.

One thing I did not do a lot of was knitting. I got a cowl done on the way there, but on the way back, because of the jet stream, the transpacific flight was several hours shorter (about 10 hours total). I slept most of the time, and by the time I had eaten my meal and gotten my in-flight on-demand movie set up and my needles out, we were in San Francisco already. And while we were traveling, I was too tired or busy most of the time to be able to work on anything besides writing in my travel journal.

Anyway, I’m back, I’m feeling better, and working my way slowly through my various clogged inboxes, so if you’ve commented or emailed/messaged me in the past month, I will get back to you as soon as I can. I used to check email all the time on vacation, but not this time. This was very relaxing while I was away, but made the re-entry twice as daunting!

One thing that was awaiting me in my inbox was a gentle Ravelry message kindly informing me that there was (as I had kind of expected) a mistake in the cast-on number for the Tyro Socks pattern. Oops! So there now is a corrected version (version 1.1) available for download. (If you’re in doubt, you should have 32 stitches while working the toe back and forth, 64 stitches once you start working in the round for the foot.)

Anyway, I have plenty of pretty pictures for blog fodder once I have time to do some more detailed entries, and I’m looking forward to getting caught up with everything I missed in Ravelry and blogland! I hope the New Year is treating you well so far.