Weapons of Bunny Destruction and Mutant Carrots...

No, really. It does make sense.

Painted Zig Zag Scarf

I had finished my student worker's scarf for Christmas. Now to just figure out what to get for the male student worker!! I don't know if I have time to knit him something, and being as he's not my kid, who'll wear just about anything I knit, I have to be a bit choosy. Here's her scarf: It's the Painted Zig Zag scarf from Lion Brand Yarn, and it's out of my stash, a rogue skein of Homespun in colorway "Windsor." I wrote a review. Here's the Reader's Digest version: Great pattern, sucky yarn.

I used to adore Homespun. Great quality. Glorious colors. Wore like crazy, and didn't "feel" acrylic. Somewhere along the line, the quality dropped. I had gotten skeins where the middle part was "unkinked" and in two separate pieces, requiring a couple of cuts and a knot to get it back together, and a friend said she got a good yard in one skein that was white. Which would've been fine - except her skein was green. In this scarf (which you can't see because I hid it), there's a blob of white. In the middle.

So, now that I can't work on my mom's cowl for a bit due to home-made noodles, (yes, there's a story), I figured I'd put it down for a bit and continue to deconstruct White Chocolate Bunny. See, this is what I'm doing for another 3 or 4 rows. Picking out yarn that's "near-roving" because there's literally no twist in it. So it's felted itself as I've gone along. Urggggggghhhhh! Hence the stork scissors. Gotta nip the fuzzies to get the stitches apart. It's a good thing this is strictly ornamental. I have high hopes for Milk Chocolate Bunny because he's an alpaca blend, so I figure he may give me less trouble. Love the Debbie Stoller yarn here, just frogging it is a pain. At least I have till January. Even though I have to start a baby blanket somewhere in here soon.

And wristers for Kid #1's girlfriend. And wristers for both kids. The ones for Girlfriend will be some sort of chunky yarn...gotta ask Kid #1 what her favorite color is. If I'm lucky, I can do the fingerless mitts for her.

So, the noodle story, and I promise, clarification of "Mutant Carrots." I decided yesterday to make Cabbage and Noodles, which we hadn't had in a while. Except that I forgot the egg noodles at the store. Didn't care to go back. Wanted a day where I wasn't running hither, thither and yon. So I thought, "I have eggs, flour and oil - I can MAKE noodles." Which, by the way, I have done, so I'm not a total nutjob here.

Got my stuff together. Made the dough. Had a slight panic when my "volcano" of eggs and flour over-ran its banks. But I did get the dough to cooperate. Ten minutes of kneading stiff noodle dough counts as an upper-body workout, by the way.

Of course, I do have a pasta maker, a Kitchen Aid mixer AND a food processor. But I also have two hands. And a rolling pin. Several in fact.

I chose wrong. I chose the "French" rolling pin, the birch one with the tapered ends. I love that rolling pin. The birch is a nice warm wood, and it's well-balanced. But I forgot something extremely significant. The screw in my thumb. As I rolled the dough out, the rolling pin came right up against where the screw and the joint were. And after Batch #2 (you split the ball of dough into 4 parts), my left hand was throbbing. I was getting cranky.

So I changed to the marble rolling pin, with handles. I don't like it as much, but since it weighs a good 8 lbs., it made rolling the dough go lots faster. I made about 2 lbs. of lovely hand-cut wide egg noodles, and yes, it was definitely worth it.

In the meantime, Hubby was deconstructing the garden. Time to get all the tomato vines out, pull up all the carrots and get all the (still green) tomatoes in for ripening under newspaper. They won't taste "sun-ripened" but since I'm using them for sauce, it won't necessarily matter. I'd have preferred sun, but Mother Nature gave us what she did.

I let the dough rest for the standard 15 minutes. In that space of time, Hubby dumped a sink full of carrots in the kitchen. My job was to scrub them off and get them into a bag for the fridge after they drain. We grew several varieties including some purple heirloom carrots. As I was chugging through them, I came upon The Mutant Carrots. At first I thought, "Good Lord, I hope this isn't alive!" But after a wash-up, this is what it looks like:

Mutant Carrots

As you can see, we have one carrot getting cozy with another one. I told Hubby to thin them out more!

Some of the carrots will go straight to the juicer; others may end up in a salad or in my lunch with some hummus. Hubby thinks we're crazy because home-grown carrots taste soooooooooo good. He says, "It's just a carrot."

No, it's not. It's a miracle of Nature, doesn't taste a BIT like the cellophane wrapped orange things you buy, and each of them (obviously, see above) has attitude! I took some "artsy" shots of this for our literary/art magazine competition -- I thought about texturizing the shots in PhotoShop, but again...don't want to mess with Mother Nature.

Anyway, that was my weekend. My thumb is still sore (I managed about 10 rows on the cowl today and the thumb is still a bit cranky), I'm futzing with fuzzy yarn, and I have to figure out once I get to my stitch marker what row I think I'm on. And I spent an hour re-sewing buttons on a sweater I bought because quality control has left the building!

Oh, and ONE side of my large desk drawer fell off the track. Is it a full moon??