A Dickens of a Christmas—A Christmas Carol, Staves 4–5

Posted by on Nov 19, 2010 in Blog Fun, Family, Podcast, Writing |

Welcome to the final part of A Christmas Carol brought to you by the podcast CraftLit: A Podcast for Crafters Who Love Books. In the previous episode I promised to link to a webpage with lots of A.C.C. and Dickensian information. This is the compendium of useful links. In this episode I point you towards the CraftLit episodes that cover A Tale of Two Cities, and two other books: Amazon.com Widgets Here are the various file formats you can use...

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A Dickens of a Christmas—A Christmas Carol, Stave 3

Posted by on Nov 17, 2010 in Blog Fun, Podcast, Writing |

Welcome to part two of A Christmas Carol brought to you by the podcast CraftLit: A Podcast for Crafters Who Love Books. During the course of the episode I promise a link to a webpage with lots of A.C.C. and Dickensian information. This is the compendium of useful links. Here are the various file formats you can use to listen to Dickens. a mini-video podcast you can watch here (see below) a video podcast you can put in your iTunes or on your...

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Now is the Season for Making Marmalade—Canning Across America

Posted by on Nov 16, 2010 in Cooking, Web Fun, Writing |

Mmmmmm. Marmalade! Now is the Season for Making Marmalade — Canning Across America. Not only is this a great idea, but it’s also got a link to a truly useful article on how things like weather and elevation affect food prep. I’ve found myself frustrated by the difference in baking between New York and Arizona, so this was something of a culinary life-saver. (The articles are also written by an old friend of mine.) Enjoy this...

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A Dickens of a Christmas—A Christmas Carol, Staves 1–2

Posted by on Nov 15, 2010 in Blog Fun, Podcast, Web Fun |

Welcome to part one of A Christmas Carol. One of the many hats I wear in life is as host to the podcast CraftLit: A Podcast for Crafters Who Love Books. The idea behind the podcast is that folks who are busy with their hands—knitting, quilting, gardening, taking care of small children, vacuuming—aren’t able to hold a book and read while they’re doing all the other things they like (or have) to do. The podcast expands their literary...

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A Dickens of a Christmas — The Cratchette

Posted by on Nov 12, 2010 in Blog Fun, Knitting, patterns |

Bob Cratchit is famous for a few things—being father of Tiny Tim, being cold, being basically cheerful, and having fingerless mitts in most representations of him. While it would be nice to knit some fine-gauge fingerless mitts as Christmas presents, my reality is that I have far too much knitting to do in far too little time. Instead, I worked up this little pattern for our Holiday Hop. For your knitting pleasure, I would like to...

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Tutorial—Cast-on Mid Row

Posted by on Nov 9, 2010 in Blog Fun, Knitting, tutorial | 1 comment

Ever needed to add a few stitches—like to make up for thumb gusset stitches you just eliminated from the palm of your mitten. Well, here’s an easy and quick way to accomplish that. The standard half-hitch manoeuver always left me with saggy cast-on stitches. A friend showed me this ages ago and I’ve never looked back.

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