I did some baking yesterday. You see, in the morning I went to a kitchenware shop to buy my mum a birthday present and, as always, spent as much on myself. Which is why I avoid kitchenalia shops. Along with an egg poacher and cup cake patties, I picked up some cookie cutters. I’m getting quite a collection, so I figured it was time to hunt down a good recipe and try some of them out.

Google found me Nigella’s Cut-Out Cookies recipe and I got to work. The first lot of cutters I tried were little fruit shapes:

I’m going to hunt for fruit flavourings to put in the icing next time I make these. I have orange flavouring, but unfortunately there was no cutter of an orange.

Then I used one of the cutters I’d bought that morning:

The little feet begged for nailpolish and shoes. Decorating them was a lot of fun. Unfortunately the colours bled. Anyone know why, or how to prevent it?

Look what arrived the day before yesterday:

Which was pretty quick considering the site said it would take up to four weeks to arrive.

When the Knitting Daily email arrived and I read that I could buy the tv show (unlike Knitty Gritty, which isn’t available on dvd) I jumped at the chance. I also ordered two charts that you can only get through Interweave. I’ve tried getting them through a bookstore before but they won’t sell them through shops, and it’s never been worth ordering because they cost less than half of the postage fee (US$27.40).

The charts are a useful guide to how much yarn to buy for a project, taking into account the thickness of the yarn, type of project and size of garment/accessory. I’ll be annotating them with Aussie terms like “8ply” and “10ply” to make them even more useful next time I’m shopping or ordering yarn.

I watched the first of the Knitting Daily TV shows last night. There’s a full 10-15 minutes of ads for North American stores and manufacturers at the beginning of the episode, but you can fast forward them, thankfully. Then the intro starts. The music is unbelievably awful. Like some sort of hold music on the telephone, repeating over and over, intended to be cheerful but only managing to sound manic and intrusive. I think my teeth ended up a few mm shorter.

Thankfully the music does end when the hosts begin to talk. Then it’s all a bit awkward and very much a first episode, the hosts and guests full of enthusiasm and nerves and the format not quite ironed out yet. Some of the guests looked petrified, some looked calm but their hands are shaking. It’s all very sweet. And I don’t think they did many takes, or anyone groomed them on when to look at the camera and that ‘yes’ is better than ‘m-huh’.

As for the knitting itself, I kept wanting to turn my head upside down as, unlike Knitty Gritty, they show the knitter facing you rather than from above. The demos were a little hurried in places and I wondered if a new or even intermediate knitter would take in what they were seeing, especially with the added challenge of watching the knitting being done upside down.

Still, it was a fun little half hour and I’m looking forward to watching following episodes.

Now for another ‘after sock’ recycling moment. Here are the socks made with Jitterbug after I threw them in a hot wash with the towels:

Since they were felting anyway, I figured I’d see what they’d turn into if it was deliberate. They’re now quite thick and small and I’m thinking they might work as bootlets for a child. Or I could cut them down into slippers – and maybe embellish them with pink ribbons or something.