Klosekraft

Other color-ordered bookshelves

Or, as I keep calling it, "rainbow order," which sounds like the kind of thing I would have named my secret club when I was eight.

This photo from Apartment Therapy really got under my skin and was the inspiration for tackling my own shelves:

Crazy Aunt Purl did it a while ago.

Thanks to Alex, I can show you these too:
Random dude (or dudette?) with gorgeous built-in shelves (and no black or white books? what gives?)

This is the bookstore that Silvia mentioned in the comments and Alex handily tracked down. Thanks guys!

Before and after: bookshelf edition

Before:

After:

I *so* love it.

Style Icons

Gina and I were emailing a few weeks ago about style stuff and got on the subject of personal style icons. She named a few right off the bat and I was floundering, no names really coming to mind. I can describe elements of my personal style, certain colors and silhouettes that are flattering and I find appealing, but no people I would put to Gina's test: Would ____ wear this?

I was in high school when Jane Pratt had her tv show and I watched every day without fail just to see what she was wearing, but couldn't find any images online nor remember any specifics. There's one clip on You Tube, but she's wearing a boring Ann Taylorish pantsuit. I can't imagine that's what I found so covet-worthy, but who knows? I can't be responsible for the taste level of my 15-year-old self. It's entirely possible that I thought microfiber pantsuits were the absolute apex of sophistication.

Anyway. Moving on. There are a couple of people who come close to icon status for me currently though.

Selma Blair, for example, who manages to do both layered-quirky and vintage glam equally well.

And Cate Blanchett, who shares my love of layered black and clean lines and interesting, understated details.



(not sure whats going on with the sleeves, but I love the huge black graphic on white and the red lower edge)

However, I find the Sartorialist's photos of stylish real women much more inspiring than any celebrities. Like this woman, Yasmin Sewell, a buyer for Brown's department store in London. (all following photos from the Sartorialist)

And this woman, who tied her father's shirt into a skirt:

This one is pretty close to my own style when I put a little effort into it. Feminine with a little bit of an edge, full skirt, cinched waist, monochrome, vintage elements worn in a modern way... All it's missing is a handknit cardigan.

Pizza with homemade pesto and fresh tomatoes

One of the nicest things about having a blog, if you're me, is not having to remember things like which pizza dough recipe I like to use. I can just search the blog, find this post and get on with things.

I went to the greenmarket yesterday at lunchtime, planning to get some tomatoes and a little basil to use with pasta or on a pizza and some peaches and plums. I bought a couple of peaches from the greengrocer the other day and they were so gross, I don't have words for it — what flavor there was was almost bitter, in sharp contrast to the farm-fresh peaches I've been buying, which taste like love and happiness and joy and the way puppy ears feel. So I'm thinking I'd better eat a lot of peaches now because I won't bother again until next summer. I know there are good recipes out there for peach crisp and peach cakes and other peach recipes, but I can't get past just slicing them up and eating them right off the cutting board.

The greenmarket near my office is pretty small, just five or six stands with produce and a couple of bread guys. I didn't see basil at all in any of the first couple I checked out and was starting to get nervous, then saw a sign reading "Basil: $2.50." This seemed positively larcenous for this time of year until I picked up one of the bundles. They had to put it in a garbage bag for me to carry it. I'm not sure the picture really gets across just how freaking much basil there was. These are all of the ingredients you need, except salt.


Once I pulled all the leaves off, I had to wash them in the salad spinner in four batches. Each batch was maybe three cups (tightly packed) of leaves.

With that much basil, there was only one thing to do: make pesto. I used this recipe, which is very good and would have come together much faster if I had a food processor and wasn't trying to grind everything up in my aging blender. But no matter. I put a batch of dough together as soon as I got home and made the pesto while it rose. Then I spread the dough out, smeared it with some pesto, laid on some fresh tomato slices and topped it off with shredded fresh mozzarella and a drizzle of olive oil.

In the oven:

And on the plate:

Delicious. I still have about nine cups of basil left so I'll make a few more batches of pesto and follow Elise's directions for freezing it. I've always wanted to be one of those people who made pesto from scratch and then froze it to have onhand and now I will be.

I did manage to stock up on peaches and get these gorgeous plums while dragging around that shrubbery. I've never had a greengage plum. It sounds like such a British thing to eat: "Say, Nigel, why don't you knock me up and have some of those smashing greengage plums? Pip, pip!" "Right-o, old boy. Cheerio!"

My experience with British slang might be mostly from WWII-era children's books.

I'm in love

With this coat:

The sleeves are divine, the collar is charming, the seam details on the body are subtle and perfect and Jamieson Heather Aran Shetland comes in the kind of gorgeous murky shades that I adore. (I'm thinking Sholmit.) Sure, it's a lot of knitting, but I like knitting.

See?

That's the back of Flicca. It's my at-home knitting at the moment, mainly because it's getting awfully big to haul around.

I've been dragging the Placed Cable Aran around with me, which is how I knit the back in just a couple of days. A few rows while waiting for a movie to start (The Bourne Ultimatum — awesome!), a few rows while on the subway, it all adds up. It helps that I'm not altering the pattern at all, other than not binding off the stitches for the shoulder seams so I can do a three-needle bind-off later. And there's almost no shaping, so very little to keep track of while knitting. The yarn is cashmere/silk from School Products and I'm knitting it at a very loosened gauge, mainly because the yarn is several strands of coned yarn wound together and I know it'll bloom a lot after it's washed. Since the sweater isn't shaped much, I'm counting on the drape of the fabric to keep it from looking like a sack.

I have a feeling that I'm going to come very close to running out of yarn on both of these sweaters. And since they're both mill-end yarns that I bought at School Products several years ago, there's almost no chance of getting more. Living on the edge, baby! I checked the yardage of the lavender against what the pattern calls for and I have about 100 extra yards. However, I'm using a slightly smaller needle since the one called for (7mm) doesn't have a US equivalent and I'm wondering if that will use enough additional yarn to make a difference since the fabric will be denser and require more yarn to cover the same area. Just to be safe, when I get to the sleeves, I'll cast on provisionally above the belled section and I can always make that part smaller. I might anyway; I'm not wild about overlong sleeves.

I weighed the back of the cabled sweater (87 grams) and the rest of the yarn (~200 grams) so I should be okay there too, figuring that the back, the front and the two sleeves each take the same amount of yarn. (Yes, there's also a sizable cowl, but I have enough of the same yarn in a slightly different configuration that I could use if I need to. The sweater yarn is five plies of a very fine coned yarn, but I have a little more that's six plies.)

Another sweater I found myself surprised to love is the 1824 Blouson that was featured on Knitting Daily yesterday. I barely registered its existence the several times I looked through that issue of IK, but when they showed it on someone that it actually fit, I was really impressed.

This (too loose, looks like any sloppy, oversized sweater):

versus this (shapely, interesting, pretty):

Before and After

Before:

After:

Before:

After:

Fall knitting

The last couple of days here have been delightfully cool and overcast, which has me craving soup (made a pot of chicken and mushroom soup with barley last night) and new knitting projects. I thought I'd do a lot of knitting last night, but instead I ended up ripping out the purple cabled cardigan I've had hanging around for a long time. For a couple of reasons: it's too big, I altered the pattern and the neck was a little weird, I lost the pattern... I always forget how freaking long it takes to rip out an almost-completed sweater. It took a couple of hours to get it all skeined up. I washed it this morning and now I have about 1400 yards of butter-soft bulky lavender cashmere/merino to toss back into the stash.

I picked up the new Vogue Knitting the other day and there are a couple of sweaters I really love. One is this ribbed tunic, which I've been meaning to knit since it was first published in 1998.

I definitely want to knit myself a sweater coat for the fall but I can't decide which one. I have a bunch of Rowan and Jaeger and Debbie Bliss patterns flagged at home and I really like Flicca (which might be an excellent use for all of that lavender yarn drying on my shower rod — have to check the pattern to see if I have enough), but I also really like this origami-ish cabled loveliness from Norah Gaughan.

The modeled photo did nothing for me (almost the same color as the background, not lit correctly to show off the texture — on first flip-through, I didn't even give it a second glace, not realizing it was the same sweater), but seeing it laid out flat like this makes me drool, Homer Simpson-style.

I also like this unapologetically feminine top from Shirley Paden. I'm finding the buttons a little distracting, but I just wouldn't use them. It has that sexy neo-Victorian vibe, which I love in small doses.

As far as Interweave goes, the only thing that I'm itching to cast on is Cathy Payson's Placed Cable Aran.

I could use a couple of sweaters that fall into the category of 'casual enough to kick it around the house with pajama pants but still good for work with a skirt,' which this one does. And I just think it's very attractive. I like the way the wide ribbed cuffs echo the cable inserts. I like the slouchy cowl. I have some wool/silk handspun that should work well for this.

I also really like Eunny's Tangled Yoke Cardigan, but I'm not sure what color would serve me best, so I'm holding off on this for now.

There are plenty of patterns in books and non-current magazines that I want to knit too. I should go through all of the post-it-ed patterns this weekend and update my potential projects folder. And I've been meaning to write a personal style post too. It's something I've been trying to hammer out/pull together over the last few years, but I'm still having trouble articulating it. Gina and I were emailing about it last week, so it's fresh in my brain, though she beat me to writing about it.

Sarah learns to spin

I got an email from my friend Sarah last week asking for a spinning lesson. She's a textile conservator who will soon be giving a presentation to some conservation grad students who are not textile specialists (mainly paintings and paper, I think). One of the topics she has to cover is yarn twist. So she sent me a note saying, quite sensibly, that while she's familiar with the technical information, she would like to have actually spun some yarn before talking to a bunch of people about spinning yarn. And she said she would bring food and wine.

So I invited our mutual friend Zoe, who brought more food and more wine and we had ourselves a party.

From the front, that's stilton with apricots, something soaked in wine and the most gorgeously stinky soft cheese washed in Chimay. And hot salami and a big plate of different varieties of plums and bread and olives and wine.

Followed by Zoe's homemade peach and blueberry crumble with my homemade Vietnamese coffee ice cream. I don't have her crumble recipe at hand but I can tell you how to make the ice cream, which is the easiest ice cream EVER. I saw it somewhere online, though I can't tell you where because it's so easy, I didn't have to print out the recipe. You probably won't either. Even if memorizing an ice cream recipe is the last thing you want to do right now, I bet you will anyway.

Vietnamese Coffee Ice Cream

2 c. strong coffee
1 can sweetened condensed milk

Mix together. Chill. Freeze in ice cream maker.

So, there might have been a request for me not to blog about the actual spinning part of the evening, but I'm choosing to believe it was the tee-hee-stop-tickling-me-you-big-handsome-man! kind of request and not, you know, the real kind.

Because, see? Look how good she is:

She's smiling and making yarn. This was maybe twelve minutes after she treadled for the very first time.

And the rest of it

I did take a few non-tree trunk photos at Green-Wood.

A discarded saint:

Fake rose taped to headstone:

This name is great:

A beautiful smoke tree:

The saddest lamb of all:

Couldn't see the forest

I went out to Green-Wood on Saturday. It's interesting to me that every time I go there, themes emerge in what kind of things catch my eye. Sometimes I don't even notice it until I start going through my photos, but this time it was pretty clear: I was a little obsessed with the trees. The shapes and the textures were just stunning. There was a certain vibrant voluptuousness in a lot of them, a sense of arrested movement, like a lava flow or bowl of softly whipped cream or the body of some great beast. Wasn't it in Wicked that the enormous tribal queen turned into an elephant? Some of these trees look exactly like I pictured her body billowing out and the skin changing during that transformation. Then there are the ones with textured bark standing out in sharp relief, like twisted knit stitches in crisp, firm wool. The third picture down looks like a Picasso face.

I find it so inspiring to walk around and look at things (any things, really, anywhere) without an agenda in mind. It's amazing to me how much the eye will pull out of a landscape (or a cityscape, or a book) when you look at it with no preconceived ideas of what you're going to see.