Farmstead Chef and Hedge-hog/bear Mittens

Joining Ginny today at Small Things blog for Yarnalong:

I found Farmstead Chef at my library on Saturday. I picked it up thinking it was a nice cookbook with a farming bent to it but when I got it home and started looking through it I quickly realized it was much more than that. John Ivanko and Lisa Kivirist include lots of recipes to make the most out of your kitchen garden produce but then peppered through are all sorts of little snippets to read. There are stories about foraging, advocating a backyard garden for all, building community through growing food and living a sustainable life. I'm looking forward to really digging into this book. Pun totally intended.

Knitting another mitten. Yup. Wish I had something new and exciting to report but time is short in my world these days and mittens are quick. I love knitting mittens though. I love them because they knit up quickly and I love their practicality and how nice hand-knit mittens look and feel. Every time I see someone with hand-knit mittens I automatically think "someone loves this person a lot". These mittens were going to become hedgehog mittens but I realized at one point that I should've started the moss-stitch to make them all hedge-hoggy sooner and was too lazy to rip them back and redo. So now they'll be bear mittens. Still cute I think. I also should've gone down a needle size but I love my wooden needles and going down a size would've meant metal needles and I just couldn't do it. I'm going to sneak down to my little corner of the house now and see if I can't get another few rows done on The Kirin shawl. It's a slow process to be sure.