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Filmed in Rio de Janeiro, Brasil.

The past few weeks, I’ve been working on quick little projects to use up bits of my rather large yarn stash.

At the beginning of June, I finally finished spinning a batt I bought in January.  The poor thing had been languishing on the bobbins, staring at me plaintively.  I couldn’t let it stare at me any longer, so I finished that puppy.  And it turned out a beauty.

Before:

After:

The batt is from Boho Knitter Chic and contains all manner of lovely, squishy things.  I can’t remember all that’s in it, but it’s definitely got wool, something with lots of lanolin, some soy fiber, and a nice amount of firestar or angelina.  The yarn itself was spun into a thick and thin aran or bulky.  I know I should have checked WPI, but oh well.  It knit up well on US 9 needles.

I ended up choosing a super simple pattern for this yarn.  There were only 134ish yards, so I couldn’t do a whole lot with it.  I decided to do a cowl and while considering the dearth of cowl patterns available on Etsy, ended up deciding to just make a damn stockinette one.  I cast on 88 stitches, did a few rounds in garter, then knit until the yarn was running short, did a few more rounds in garter, and bound off the stitches.  It was dead easy and finished in about 4 days.

My next super quick project was also finished within a week.  I’ve been wanting to knit a Baktus for a long time and for some reason, finally had to scratch the itch with some lovely yarn I bought in Germany December 2008, Mondial Fiamma.  I chose a needle one size larger than the recommended needle written on the ball band.  I really love these brainless projects and I really love garter stitch. The little bumps are so cute!

(It seems I have a thing for gold and medium purple!)  I am very pleased with how this turned out and can’t wait for winter so I can wear this with my coat.

This week’s super quick project is a crocheted market bag made with this fun cotton yarn:

I recently purchased Peter Reinhart’s Artisan Breads Every Day and have essentially gone gaga for homemade bread.  I enjoyed making bread before this, but I did it rarely.  What hooked me is Reinhart’s use of cold or slow fermentation.  The wee little scientist in me was excited by reading about some of the chemistry in bread baking.  Reinhart discusses the virtues and applications of this slow fermentation process.  This process, he says, is what makes a bread artisan.  You do not quickly feed packaged yeast warm water and sugar.  Instead, you let the natural yeast and bacteria already present on the wheat work slowly over several days to grow and produce natural sugars that caramelize beautifully when baked.  There are two methods: the slower sourdough or natural starter and just a cold fermentation.  The sourdough starter requires only flour, water, and patience.  However, it takes over a week for it to grow into a viable “sponge”.  The cold fermentation jump starts things a bit and does use a small amount of packaged yeast, so you can bake from it the next day.

The first recipe I tried was a simple Pain à l’Ancienne / Ciabatta dough.  Basically, the ciabatta is just the pain à l’ancienne plus olive oil and a little bit more fermentation time.  It’s very, very simple: flour, yeast, water, olive oil.  There might also be a bit of salt.  The same basic recipe is also used to make foccacia, but that requires a bit different shaping and additional oil.  This has a four day window to bake before, I don’t know, stuff goes wonky.

Day One: Mix the ingredients together, blah blah, put it in a bowl, cover, & place in fridge.

Day Two: Fold it, stretch it, maybe add some olive oil. (I’m going by memory here…)  The dough grows slowly overnight in the fridge.  This thing was somewhere between 75-100% bigger.  I was afraid it was going to sprout legs and take over my refrigerator!  But, wow, look at those beautiful gas bubbles!

Day Three:  I had decided to go ahead and bake the dough this day, though I could have let it sit in the fridge until the next day.  For ciabatta, you take the dough our 3 hours before you bake it and do prep work, like more stretching.  Then, you preheat the oven at an ungodly high temperature for 45 minutes.  550F in a small apartment in Texas in June is something else.  You have to be dedicated to baking bread.  Luckily, the World Cup was going on, so I could distract myself from the heat.

More beautiful gas bubbles!

Trying to coax the dough out of the bowl produced this monster. O_O

Lovely! You shape the dough, then let it rise and probably do some black magic on it for a while, then cut it in half or thirds, depending on how many dough babies you want. Wait, what?

Then you bake the shit out of it for 12ish minutes until you have BREAD, GLORIOUS BREAD!

ohhhh yeaaaaah.

That’s some good bread.

Next I will try my hand at creating a natural bread starter.  My inner mad scientist is squeeing with anticipation.