blender bread, booties, and other misc. crafting

Christmas has come a little early here. Last week we received our Christmas present from B's folks: a new blender...and spent last weekend blending all manner of foods. One of the things this handy dandy machine lets you do is make your own whole wheat flour and then make dough for fresh wheat bread.

Here's the flour after the blender pulverized the whole wheat berries:


And the dough...which is nothing more than the fresh flour, water, yeast and some honey:


And here's the bread, which was super tasty!:


I've also been doing a bit of knitting, which you probably wouldn't have guessed given my more recent sewing posts. I made a pair of Saartje's Booties (free pdf and on Ravelry here) for a co-worker's baby girl. I knit them out of about a 1/3 hank of Knit Picks Sock Landscape yarn from my stash. These were super fun and fairly simple to knit. The best part was when the little toe took shape - it made me super happy.


I also started a Tilted Duster (Ravelry link) made out of some Rowan Magpie I've had in my stash for a very long time. I think it will be a perfect during-and-after-pregnancy sweater.

I've already knit the back and the fronts and almost one sleeve. I didn't bother with progress photos because nothing is blocked and frankly all the pieces look like nondescript gray rolled tubes at this point. I'm trying to power through the sleeves so that I can get to the skirt as fast as possible. It seems like people have been able to knit this sweater pretty quickly and I really need some longer sweaters now that my normal ones are starting to look short over my maternity shirts.

However, I've also been distracted by the cutest of flannels on sale at Joann's this week:

These are destined to be more burp cloths and bibs...I just can't help myself...They are so cute and so cheap to make!