Flint Knits

You heard me. It’s the first Friday in June, which means … National Donut Day!

Celebrate with one of these free donut patterns to knit or crochet [ravelry links]:

• Donut Pincushion, by Nevadamama
• DoKnit, by Matie Trewe
• Doughnut, by Dorien
• Jelly Donut, by Kat Lewinski

Today is ALSO the first day of voting in the Netflix Find Your Voice Indpendent Film Competition. My friend Eric Lin is a semifinalist, so take a minute to go watch the excerpt from his film (”Why We Pull the Trigger”) and give it 5 stars! (ETA: voting will be open until July 5.)

If Eric wins, he gets $350,000 in resources to make his film. Eric got married last weekend, and I turned 31 on Wednesday — your 5 stars can be your gift to us. Thanks! xoxo

After spending the last couple of weeks exhausted and ill with pneumonia (I cannot overemphasize the exhausted — as in sleeping 16 hours a day), I was thrilled to get out of the Minnesota winter for a weekend. New York isn’t exactly tropical this time of year, but there’s a remarkable difference between 30-above and 30-below.

I arrived in NYC on Valentine’s Day and discovered that it’s Minty’s favorite holiday. And I mean Favorite Holiday. Like, ever. In a crazy, wild-eyed-yet-eerily-focused, single-minded, heart-shaped kind of way that is simultaneously (1) charming and (2) utterly terrifying. She approaches the big V the way I approach Halloween: with Intensity.

Do you see the concentration on her face? It is intense and total! She’s done a lovely job of documenting her own obsessive, fascist way of celebrating VD. What she can’t really express in her post is how completely won over I was, and how much FUN I had!

Because Minty’s enthusiasm? Totally infectious (even for a cynic like me, who thinks the Official celebration of Romance is an oppressive tool for sentimentalizing the patriarchal regulation of heteronormative monogamy in order to make marriage palatable for white middle class women so they will make babies for the Nation). But it’s HEART-SHAPED!!

Needless to say, Minty was the best Valentine’s Day date EVER, and I had the best VDay ever, staying up half the night to decorate cookies and make heart-shaped miso-glazed tofu. Have I mentioned that Minty is teh awesome?

And the next day, I met John, who took me to lunch in what was definitely one of the highlights of my weekend.

You know how he seems so smart and sassy and sexy on the blog? That’s not the half of it. We talked nonstop about all manner of things, most of which aren’t appropriate for even this knitting blog. And, with minimal pestering on my part, he gamely took this dorky photo of us in Union Square wearing our matching Frivol hats. *Love*

Later, Minty and I met up with some of the Spiders (Connie, Jess, Lisa, Marie, Veronique, and Virginia) at The Point where not only did I completely forget to take pictures, but I also LEFT MY BRAND NEW CAMERA BEHIND. Jess had to chase me out the door with it. Thanks, ladies, for letting me come hang out, and a big See-You-Next-Time to Ms. Gleek, Ms. Schrodinger, Jessica, Katy (congrats!), and especially Sandra.

That gathering was followed by a wonderful dinner with Veronique, who was wearing a version of her lovely and recently-published sweater design and who, like Minty’s take on Valentine’s Day, immediately won me over with her wit, intelligence, thoughtfulness, and style. (Plus, she was knitting on a Marigold sock!) If you aren’t a Tres Chic reader, you should be.

This was was followed by a wonderful Saturday with Minty, visiting the Met…

… and hanging out in our PJs and leaving silly voice mails for Ashley, and generally not feeling like this was only the third time we’d met in person.

I am still catching up on the 1300+ blog posts that have amassed during my illness and absence. This means many of you will probably be getting comments from me on, like, your last 10 posts.

And now please enjoy the following preview of my next post, which will hopefully appear relatively soon (i.e. not after what’s become a now-standard 2+ week interim) and will definitely feature the belated birthday gift I gave Minty:

And I fondled admired the buttons.

And then I decided to bake some cookies (using my favorite cookie cutter, by the way).

Luckily, my 1920s Detroit Jewel stove cranks out a ton of heat. The company slogan back in the day was “It Bakes Better.” Let’s just change that to “It Bakes Sweaters.”

When I was done, the sweater was slightly drier …

And I had coooookies!!

RECIPE: brown sugar cookies.

1 part brown sugar
1 part butter
2 parts flour
salt
vanilla bean scrapings

Heat oven to 325F. Cream butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add flour, salt, and vanilla and mix just until it forms pea-sized blobs. Dump blobs out onto a surface that you’ve covered with a light dusting of powdered sugar, press into one giant blob, and roll to 1/4″ thick. Cut. Bake 10 minutes.

If everything is just right, the brown sugar will separate a little and make a wee, delicious, caramel-candy crust around the edges.

So, to the one thousand folks who have this sweater in your queue and are eagerly awaiting a peek at another finished one: Eat your cookies and hold your horses. FO shots are slated for Friday. xo

Yep. I was sure I had a second skein of this lovely Dream in Color yarn, but it’s nowhere to be found. Sadly, I also can’t find the label to this one, so I’m not even sure what colorway it is. “Lipstick Lava” maybe?

Anyway, I’m going to sit on it for a while before I frog, because it’s so damn pretty and squishy.

In lieu of real knitting content (as I curse the yarn gods, as well as my own shortsightedness), please enjoy last night’s dinner:

Throw a few handfuls of arugula in a food processor or blender with garlic, basil, and a bit of hard cheese. Blend it up. Drizzle in some olive oil as you keep processing. Stir in salt and pepper.

Cook some penne in lots of boiling salted water. Throw in some chopped green beans (same size as the noodles) for the last 3 minutes of cooking time. Put it all together with some fresh chopped tomatoes on top.

Those of you in the US, enjoy your day off! I’ll be spending mine at Flint’s 2nd annual Lumberjack Fest. I missed the flapjack breakfast, but am hoping to arrive in time for the live music and feats of strength (log rolling, log splitting, log tossing). It’s really just a bunch of my friends having a cookout with a theme, but it’s tons of fun.

Back from New York, and I am t.i.r.e.d. It was a great trip — the conference went well, and I spent time catching up with long-lost friends and walking around the chilly city by myself. And I got some excellent fabric goodies at Purl, along with a skein of 40% off Koigu (show and tell tomorrow, because I’m too pooped to take pictures right now).

But the highlight of the trip was definitely my meet-up with Minty.

She’s already said this, but it was just one of those happy ‘click’ moments with a new friend. It appears that I did not freak her out by holding every bolt of fabric at Purl in front of my torso and asking if she could imagine it as a dress (”What about This Print? Really? On my Whole Body?”).

And when we sat down to lunch, three hours flew by as we talked — about food, work, relationships, books, self-portraiture, TV, movies, babies (and no babies), knitting and blogging (of course), and life in general. We laughed so much that the SoHo hipsters next to us moved to a different table.

[a photo of Minty taking a photo of escargots]

Many crepes later, we took pictures in front of The Point (it was too packed to sit inside), and I took home the other highlight of my trip: one perfect Beard Papa vanilla cream puff. Heaven.