Wayward Knitting

Acai Berry Smoothies - a winner

Day 3's recipe was a winner.  2 servings:

2 packs of pureed frozen acai berries, unsweetened
16 oz unsweetened almond milk
1 punnet of organic fresh blueberries
ice cubes

more berry-like, better color, lovely almost chocolately taste.  Thumbs up on this variation.

Acai Berry Smoothies - continued

Day 2
1 package frozen acai berry puree unsweetened
10 oz unsweetened, almond milk
ice cubes
1 white nectarine

delicious, mild.

Amazingly enough, good enough energy boost I can forego coffee.

Something Must Be Done - Objective Acai Berry Recipe Experiment

I wanted to learn more about the Acai berry but with the exception of like 2 articles, nearly everything online is advertising crap.  Apparently Rachael Ray and Oprah and Dr. Perricone have endorsed this berry so the ads just harp on endlessly.  Since I pay for this blog and I do not allow ads on it, I decided, "Something Must Be Done." 

Day 1 - Green Smoothie Meets Acai Berry

1 pack Samazon frozen unsweetened Acai berry puree (purchased at Whole Foods). 
1 ripe banana
2 cups coconut water
5 organic romaine leaves
1 organic dino kale leaf.
ice cubes
yields about 32 oz.

Result - delicious, cool, refreshing.  Even my meat-eating husband liked it.  I had it for dinner, he had it for his dessert.
Negatives - can't taste the coconut water, next time I'll just use water, and it's an ugly brown color because green and purple together is not pretty.

Unexpected benefit - 16 oz was so satisfying that I had lost my craving for the sweets I had purchased.

The berry puree was cheaper than I thought it would be since the dried stuff is about $40 for 8 oz.  I think the Whole Foods freezer section sold the frozen acai berry puree in packages of 8.  However, since most of the online recipes tell you to use 2 packages at a time, that could get a little spendy.

For tomorrow, I think I may try 2 packages of berry puree and blend it with almond milk to see what I get.

It only took a year...

but I finally finished the 2nd Twist sock.  Love it.  Definitely would knit a 3rd pair.

Stitches West

I only bought 3 skeins of yarn.  Seriously.  It was the Newton's cashmerino yarn to make a scarf for hubby.  At $8 a skein, it was a bargain.

I did however buy  6 oz of yummy fiber from Tactile Fiber Arts, the colorways are amazing and I couldn't get a good photo of this due to the shine from the bamboo:
It's Merino bamboo roving in Pomegranate.  I spun some up on the drop spindle tonight.  Yummy.  I'm thinking cowl.  Of course, it's freezing now so I'm always thinking cowl these days.

I also bought some of this beautiful sky blue. 

I must be on a natural dyes kick because I also picked up 4 oz of corriedale from A Verb for Keeping Warm.  The guy helping me out there had this totally familiar voice and I couldn't figure it out and then suddenly I realized, it was WonderMike from YKnits!.  I totally love that podcast.  How cool is that?

Merry Christmas!

I meant to knit socks...

really I did.  I even got pretty close to my June goal for a pair of blue socks:
but then I sort of lost steam.   (Claudia's Handpainted, twist pattern from HelloYarn, converted by Grumperina)

Especially when everyone started to have babies:
which meant I really needed to crank out a few baby genius burp cloths.

And for twins -- well, I had to do twin hats (Cotton Ease):

Of course, there was a graduation gift (Luxe Neckwarmer, Jo Sharp Silkroad DK Tweed):

wrapped:

opened and modeled:

 

and then I taught myself to crochet and had to give a wedding shower gift (Patons Grace):

Then I started a sweater.  A tank top (Aleita Shell, 2nd Time Ecologie Cotton):

I've been knitting socks--really...

but perhaps I am a little behind.  Pictures to follow soon.  What's the deal with Plurk anyway??

Plurk.com

Finished for May!

Fifth pair of socks for the year:

Monkey by Cookie A. in Fleece Artist Hercules colorway on size 1 circs.

I loved how the colorway is shown off by the pattern.  My first pair of Monkeys had chaotic pooling in the STR carbon dating colorway. 

Finding the Stash

My stash is not in one place.  I feel like I have failed to adhere to the primary tenet of organization.  Deciding to start with baby steps, I tried to put all the sock yarn in one place.  It was nice to visit with the sock yarn and take it out of the ziplocks.

I even had a big container for all my sock yarn.

Then as I continued with my spring cleaning, I found some more sock yarn in the office, then some in the living room...some in the guest room and so on. 

Turns out the container was not as big as I thought...or I had more sock yarn than I thought.

It's a good thing that I really like knitting socks. 

Here are the socks from Sock Madness 2.  Though benched with an injury, I did at least finish them within a month but not in time to qualify for Round 2.

They are Socks That Rock in Tiger Eye.  Once I added decreases, the sock yarn stopped pooling and started striping.