some pictures of things i made!

Hello, internets! I can't flatter myself by saying you all have noted my absence, but just in case you have, I've been busy doing a lot of studying and keeping a secret second blog. By which I mean, not updating a secret second blog or the first, non-secret blog. I've really bitten off more than I can chew.

But I'm still doing crafty things as often as I can! In fact, I cranked out a few quick knitting projects and then enlisted the help of my lovely photographer friend Britt to document some nice, outdoorsy pictures of them. We picked probably the best day ever - fall comes fast in Portland.

So I want to share a few of these amazing photographs with you, internets, and also plug Britt because I'm super grateful to her, and crazy impressed by her work. Some of these projects did not look impressive on their own, but somehow Britt brought them to life with her magic.

my first post-surgery project

I had this crappy wrist surgery in March. The second I was even remotely better, I had knitting needles in my hands. And I didn't start with no piddly shit, either. I pulled out the big guns and cast-on for Jared Flood's Leaves of Grass. I liked the idea of a giant blanket-y shawl. Also, lace.

I don't often photograph my projects on people, but Erceg pretty much does whatever I tell her to, and it only cost me one beer. We got to hang in the sun in picturesque Cathedral Park and listen for ghosts while she worked the shawl. Seriously, what a babe.





It took six weeks to make and is the least painful project I've knit in a year and a half. Consider me healed.

things that get me excited

I've had this yarn for a couple years now - 11 skeins of 50% merino and 50% yak. Yak! It's soft and warm and light and would be perfect for a nice wintery sweater. Except I kind of hate the color. So I threw a swatch into a pot with a tiny drop of orange food coloring and voila! A tolerable color.


I am so pumped about this, it's ridiculous.

pecan butter: made up recipes are easy and delicious!

Geoff and I recently had dinner at a local restaurant which served waffles with pecan butter. I was amazed to discover it wasn't pecans ground up into a paste, like peanut butter - it was pecans AND butter. The perfect combination of boredom and inspiration struck and I tried my hand at a homemade version of this and...well, I really need to be careful to moderate my intake. There's serious potential for gluttony here.


I toasted something like 3/4 cup of raw, whole pecans for maybe 15 minutes. They looked a little burnt so I whipped 'em out of the oven post haste. Then I processed them into a meal with the food processor, sprinkled some brown sugar in there (maybe half a cup or less?) and dumped a whole tub of whipped butter (a cup? I guess?) on top of that. I reserved some ground pecans to adjust the texture to my liking. I left it a little low on the sweet side. I would almost prefer more salt, but apparently my ability to taste salt has tanked lately and then my sweet-salty treats turn out inedible to others.

The whipped butter is perfect because it's spreadable all the time! So I just pull the jar out of the fridge and spread it on some cookies (Trader Joe's Bistro Biscuits, in case you were wondering, are deeeeelicious with this). Um, I admit I have eaten it by the spoonful.


A moment of genius struck when Pablo and I discovered you could make tiny cookie sandwiches out of these. We are achieving food nirvana here, dudes.




So this is a super easy thing that you can do with two delicious ingredients to enhance their delicious-abilities. Apparently it keeps forever because I made this two weeks ago and it tastes the same. Yum!

80k and still spry

Approximately one month shy of my eight yeariversary of car ownership, my little black car just rolled over to 80,000 miles. I know, normally you photograph the odometer at 100,000, but considering this car had 25k miles on it when it came to me, a little bit of math tells you that it's going to be a while before I hit 100k.

The ironic bad news is that a dealer inspection today suggested $3,000 of repairs, so even though my car is still young at heart, it's showing its age. So if anyone wants to donate to my beloved Honda Civic's Preservation Fund, I have a PayPal.

how i got a macbook for less than $100

I don't know how many of you know this, but I'm broke. Some days, it sucks. But sometimes it's like a fun challenge, because clipping coupons and saving tons of money on grocery items is a really satisfying game. Sometime in September, I started thinking that it would be nice to get a new MacBook. I'd had this thought over a year ago, and wanted to act on it while I could still get some cash for my old MacBook. It often blows me away how insanely lucky I am.

Not long after making this decision, a few things fell into place - ultimately for the best, though sometimes it wasn't immediately evident.

1) Geoff alerted me to an excellent credit card bonus that I waffled on for a couple months. For me, spending $3k in 3 months is unfathomable! But I eventually realized how I could make it work.

2) My coworkers pointed out that my MacBook battery had bulged. I didn't realize that was a cause for concern. I hightailed it down to the Apple store and shelled out $100 (thanks, parents!) in a panic, because I thought my laptop might spontaneously combust.

3) Not long after receiving a brand-new replacement battery, the entire computer stopped recognizing the battery and only worked on adapter power. Another frenetic trip to the Apple store, and a two-day overnight stay for my MacBook. They replaced a part, as well as my top case and display bezel - pretty much half of the exterior of the computer. And they didn't charge me a penny.

Armed with a neatly remodeled computer, I drew up a Master Plan on an orange post-it note. My awesome landlord had confirmed that I could pay rent on a credit card. Better still, I could pay three months' up front. I received the card on a Friday (it's beautiful, by the way: a metal composite, thick, heavy, and shiny), paid my rent the following morning, and was at the Apple store feeling a bit dazed that evening.



I showed my old student ID and got a discount, too:


So I'd spent $2,750 in a single day. I promise I did not sleep very well that night. The next $250 went by in a blur (damn, that card is fun to use) and I had a $3k balance on a brand-new credit card, and two computers.

Reformatting the old MacBook is a long, technical story that nobody cares about. It took me several days. Afterward, I had it on Craigslist for several weeks, and most of the interest I got was this one dude trying to trade me one of any type of smartphone (that's not suspicious at all), or a bunch of fake scammers who wanted to pay me via money order because they suddenly lived across the country. Ultimately, I met up with a very nice fellow who had never owned a laptop and who promised to give my old friend a good home. I pocketed $500, because that's what I wrote down on the Master Plan, and that is akin to writing it in blood.

Then, just yesterday, I received my first Chase statement. I did, in fact, have over 53,000 points applied to my account. I turned that into a $533 statement credit, and after the $28 in interest I accrued (oops!), I'm still just under my goal of getting a MacBook for $100. It's only costing me $95.

The moral of the story is always write your plans down on an orange post-it.

i took a ceramics class.

i threw some clay back in high school, so i had some delusions of grandeur in regards to my skill. there's a bit of a learning curve, and even after i got the hang of it, most of what i produced paled in comparison to my classmates' work. so let's cut to the heart of it: i have photo documented every piece of pottery i made, in somewhat chronological order.



my first cups. chunky, misshapen, and the one in front actually took an extra spin around the wheel while i was trimming it. whoops!



tiny bowls. one has been holding jewelry (all three pieces that i own), and one is currently awaiting some fancy sea salt.



then i moved on to actual normal-sized bowls, without taking into account the approximately 15% shrinkage that occurs during the drying/firing process. fortunately, i eat small portions, and now i have a dozen jenna-portion-sized bowls.



the last bowl spawned this one - i dubbed it "the better bowl." an improvement on the last bowl in every way, "better bowl" is lightweight, delicate...oh, and still really small. this is one of the earliest pieces i finished, glazing and all, and was clearly a fluke. not positive i could reproduce it.



where the mug fits into my artistic timeline, i'm not quite positive. it must have been early on because i tired of mug relatively fast. handles are not fun, which is why this has a nubbin. it's got a bright blue glaze, which we'll return to many times.



i had a brief period of frustration with large bowls, so i turned to "tea bowls." i don't actually know what those are. i just made a bunch of small, handleless bowls. the blue one (front left) had such thick glaze, it dripped down the sides and stuck to the inside of the kiln. my love affair with "tea bowls" was brief.



i returned to normal bowls, and achieved some mild success. some of these are actually not bad. my glazing technique was not quite up to par, though.



here's that electric blue glaze again. my very knowledgeable and experienced classmate, leslie, allowed me to assist her in mixing a glaze. unfortunately, it looks nothing like we expected. it's even better.



then i tried my hand at a plate. still chunky, and not quite what i was anticipating.



my last day throwing clay, i churned out a few pieces. this bowl is pretty alright, and glazed okay too. maybe i am getting the hang of it!



judging by these little guys...no, i'm not. thrown from a delicate, "buttery" porcelain that another classmate gave me, these looked beautiful pre-glaze, but had very little structure or substance. so they were kind of a challenge. worse yet, i used them to experiment with the glaze leslie and i mixed up, only to discover that it's extremely runny. and the second coat of glaze i dunked them in "melted" off.



this is my "piece de resistance." early on, i learned not to set goals for myself because i often didn't achieve them and met with frustration. that wasn't the best method. i often found myself directionless, cranking out bad bowl after bad bowl. so i decided to challenge myself at the end, and try to make a pot. and it worked! i'm actually proud of this little guy.



oven safe! and perfect for jenna portions!

(there might be one more piece i'm missing somewhere. but in the meantime, here we can segue into the goodies i scored that aren't mine!)



another classmate, dan, is crazy talented on the wheel, and threw pot after pot after pot, all of a similar style. we found these on the shelves on the last day to fire ware, forgotten by him amidst all his other amazing work. he charged me with cleaning them up, and gifted them to me. i got to test out a couple of glazes on pieces that were going to end up in the trash, and now they are mine! yay!



and because i glazed dan's other pieces, he rewarded me with a couple rad pieces. now i have a giant bowl!



and a big pot!



and (yes, there's more), because talented, knowledgeable leslie was dissatisfied that the glaze dripped on some her mugs, she was designating these for the trash when abby and i intercepted. beautifully glazed, with only minor imperfections, i couldn't let these lovely mugs be tossed. trust me, they look phenomenal in person.



she was also about to part with this beautiful baby blue (one of her own glazes!) and coppery black mug. gee, some people are perfectionists.

ceramics class is over, so my artistic career is on hiatus. the end!

a couple recipes

Hi internets! I'm returning to you with a couple intoxicating (tee hee!) directionless recipes. Hold on to your pants!

Jenna's Drunken Sweet Potatoes
I'm tempted to call these "yams," but I have been informed that technically, yams are not available in North America. But the name has so much more flow. Yam. Jenna's Drunken Yams (see?).

You will need:
-some sweet potatoes (I used a 3 lb bag, but after peeling, may have been 2.5 lbs. You know, if you want to be precise.)
-brown sugar
-maple syrup
-butter
-bottom-shelf bourbon
-also, a crockpot

What you want to do first is commit to bringing a dish to a family Thanksgiving, and then get drunk the night before. Mix a few types of liquor - it's ok, Thanksgiving is a weekend! Stumble home at 11:30pm and find your pre-peeled yams awaiting you from a better, soberer time. Throw them in a crockpot with a sprinkle of brown sugar, half a bottle of good maple syrup, and a glug (or 4) of cheap bourbon. Half a stick of butter doesn't hurt too. Maybe some salt and pepper. Cover, set to low, go to bed.

When you wake up hungover in the morning, the smell of delicious sweet potatoes will coax you out of bed. They kind of fell apart in the crockpot, which is what I was hoping for. About an hour before serving time, I poured remaining liquid from the crockpot into a pot on the stovetop, added about a 1/4 bottle of maple syrup and a couple more splashes of bourbon, and cooked it over medium heat, stirring constantly, until it thickened. (See how professional that sounded?!) Then I drizzled this over the sweet potatoes still in the crockpot. People REALLY seemed to like these. It doesn't make an impressive amount, but they are quite rich, so a little goes a long way.

Geoff's Pre-Twilight Cider Concoction
(This name is still a work in progress. But I think it needs to have "Twilight" in it, because everyone should drink this during Twilight if they want to enjoy the movie.)
You will need:
-2 cinnamon sticks
-1 tsp of allspice berries
-1.5 tsp of whole cloves
-half a cup of brown sugar
-2 quarts of cider
-1 orange, quartered
-still a crockpot, but preferably one that is not a burn hazard

Yeah, this an actual 1970s recipe for hot cider, from a book that came with a possibly-malfunctioning estate sale crockpot. Geoff gets credit for that, though I'm the one who made the cider and tested the performance...and fire hazard. Cook over low for a few hours, until everything in the house smells delicious.

This is where Geoff's genius improvisation comes in:
Mix one part cheap bourbon with two parts cider, and add

a dollop

of vanilla ice cream.

You won't regret it.

Smuggle into Twilight and enjoy!

what does the yarn want to be?

Three years ago, or something like that, I embarked on my second-ever sweater project. The first three sweaters I ever made were weird Frankensteins, ignoring this super important thing called "gauge." It took me three sweaters to figure that one out. So this particular sweater, which was a thermal, which is a ubiquitous pattern, and which nearly everyone seems to have attempted at some point, didn't really come out so well. It was boxy and unflattering, and bunched up in weird places. So after fully completing it, I ripped it all the way out and decided to start over. I never really got back into it.


The only actually in-focus picture I have of this. If only I could stop my past self right here, but I know I had the sleeves finished elsewhere.

I think the reasons for my lack of interest were pretty obvious, yet I chose to ignore them. I didn't like the color of the yarn - mainly, although I think the color name was "Dolphin," and I'm a sucker for colors named for aquatic animals. I also didn't, and still don't, live in a climate where a thick silk/wool sweater is comfortable or necessary. And, most importantly of all, while in every other facet of life I am pragmatic and prefer simple, unadorned articles of clothing, this is NOT true of the things I knit. I like to go wild with lace and cables and colorwork, and leave the plain thermals to American Apparel (who has provided me with some seriously cozy though rarely-worn thermals for like $20.)

So, Saturday night, after binging on tea, I pulled this out of the closet and took it all apart. Then I spent the next day researching sweater patterns, and finding nothing that piqued my interest.

I had an architecture professor once who suggested we think, "what does the brick want to be?" My ceramics instructor recently said, "let the clay be what it wants to be." I'm seeing a trend here. What does this thermal really want to be? How can I re-dye this yarn so that it's something I will want to work with, and that the finished product is something I will want to wear?



So I decided to take this one step at a time, and tackle the dyeing first. Sunday I reskeined it the yarn, tied it off in quadrants, threw it in a pot to soak overnight, and just now, like half an hour ago, pulled brand new yarn out of a giant pot on my stove. And as soon as I did that, I knew what it was going to be. Magic!



It's going to be Abalone. Embarrassingly, I just got done telling a knitting friend earlier that "stockinette sucks," but when yarn speaks, you can't argue.

i have three giant balls

...of yarn! Thanks to Rachel's dad, who sent me a huge, ultra soft Italian cashmere sweater just riddled with holes! It took a while but now all the yarn is scrapped. I think I might ply a couple of these balls together to make some heavier weight yarn. Stay tuned?