New Pretty Things!

Just a quick peek at yesterday's teensy tiny shop update:

If you're into gift certificates, or if you're into my fiber & your loved ones are into gift certificates, they'll be listed in the shop tomorrow.

Cheers!

~Rachel

Scarves for the Gallery

I have been neglecting my Etsy shop a bit in favor of getting some winter scarves finished up & shipped off to the gallery. The funky fuschia scarf will be heading off to the gallery today, along with 4 others. I hope to have 5-6 more made and sent out in the next two weeks. Here's a peek if you're interested:

They're very simple scarves made with commercial yarn, so if you knit or crochet yourself, please feel free to check out my Ravelry projects section to find the yarn, stitch, & gauge info. You're welcome to make them for yourself or for sale, I certainly didn't invent double crochet or the drop stitch!

If you don't knit or crochet, or if you have so many projects going and so little time that you'd prefer to simply pick up a finished scarf, I'd be happy to make you one. The fuschia/black & gray/black drop stitch scarves are $45 each, and can be made in any color combination your heart desires. The crocheted scarves are $35 each, and a quick Ravelry search for Moda Dea Tweedle Dee will show you all the colorways this particular yarn comes in. Want to order a scarf? Got questions on how to make your own? Leave a comment here, or email me at SerendipityFibers {at} gmail {dot} com.

Funky Fuschia Scarf

One of my scarves just totally wrote a personal ad. I guess she's tired of living in my "Scarves to Send to the Gallery" basket. I'm not sure if there will be much interest for her here, since she's pretty different than the other things in my shop. I think my gallery customers and my Etsy customers are very different kinds of people who are looking for very different things. But she had a few hearts on Rav, and more people will see her on Etsy than at the tiny little gallery tucked cozily away in the mountains of North Carolina, so I decided to let her try to find her owner here for a couple weeks before mailing her off to frolic in the crisp mountain air. Which means if you want her, you should grab her quick. She looks like this:

And you can find all her details here.

I may add a few more scarves to the shop over the next few days. We'll see how it goes. Meanwhile, I'm still knitting on this amazing yarn from Cool Climates:

Which is in the process of turning into a truly amazing drop stitch scarf that shows off the crazy texture of this yarn in all its glory.

Have I mentioned how much I love art yarn?

Box Day Eve -- November

It is Box Day Eve. All of you Phatties know what that means. And all of you who don't know -- well, probably don't exist, because I am fairly certain that almost all of my blog readers, Twitter followers, Rav group members, and customers discovered me through Phat Fiber. But on the off chance there is anyone not in the loop on this, here, allow me to loopify you: www.PhatFiber.com. Go there. Read the homepage. Poke around a little if you want to. No, really. Go. You there, you too. It's okay. I'll wait.

Back? Yes? Excellent. Now you know how awesome Phat Fiber is and how much you want to snag a Phat Fiber Box of your very own. Good news! Tomorrow is the day you can do that! Or rather, tomorrow is the day you can attempt to do that. Every month there are somewhere around 200-250 boxes, and probably about a couple thousand people try to snag one. Good luck. May the Force be with you. Click quickly.

Here is a tutorial designed to offer helpful tips in maximizing your opportunity to snag a box by not making stupid n00b mistakes. And here is the Rav group where all the cool people hang out on the internets and gaze lovingly at each other's yarn and fiber. And talk about spinning and dyeing and knitting and crocheting. It's good times. You should be there. There's a multicolored felted sheep. I mean really, what more could you want in an online colorful fluff community? (His name is Shearlock.)

Okay, so here's the thing. I didn't contribute this month. Because I am a loser. Or rather, because October sucked. A lot. I had Bigger Issues At Hand, which totally threw my life off-kilter, and I didn't get my act together in time to send in samples for this month's Box. Boo. This sucks. Fortunately, I am working towards getting my life back on-kilter, and remain cautiously optimistic that I might manage to succeed at that despite not actually knowing what a kilter is. (Okay, okay. I couldn't stand it. I checked. And it's totally boring.)

So to make up for the lack of Serendipity awesomeness in this month's boxes, I'm taking part in a pretty crazy sale that's going on tomorrow. It was someone else's idea, and several of us Phat Fiber contributors have jumped on the bandwagon. Basically you go here and jump through a few fun little hoops, and get a pretty enormous discount on awesomeness from a wide variety of shops, including mine. But you have to jump through the hoops tonight, and you can only use the discount tomorrow. So go forth! Hoop jump!

ps -- Since I started moderating comments, there have been no comments. This probably has something to do with the fact that it's only been the past few posts (which have been mostly uninteresting) and this blog doesn't actually have, you know, readers. But it's making me wonder if the comment moderation thingy is doing what it's supposed to do. So to give me a chance to practice moderating comments, I will give a 5% discount to everyone who leaves a comment on this post, which can be combined with other discounts. (No, if you comment twice you don't get 10%. Sorry.) So if you have a 15% off coupon floating around, you'd get 20% off your order, or if you rack up a 25% discount from the hoop jumping, you could get a 30% discount. Okay? Awesome. Now go hoop jump. Then give me comments to moderate.

Tiramisu

A while back my housemate and I made tiramisu for the first time. I was looking for something I could make quickly and easily for an Italian dinner party later that night, so I grabbed a recipe off the internet and modified it heavily to fit what we had on hand. We made the happy discovery that tiramisu is very forgiving.

We substituted extra-strong regular coffee for the espresso, and used store-bought ladyfingers instead of piping our own. We also made it in baking dishes, but it would look beautiful in cups or glasses.

If you're ever looking for a rich, delicate dessert that you can make at the last minute, I recommend this recipe. The flavor will improve after it's been in the fridge for a day or two. But I know for a fact that instead of waiting you could just eat it all immediately as soon as it's chilled.

Ingredients:

• 6 cups of coffee, brewed extra strong (we used four scoops of coffee in a drip coffeemaker)
• 7 Tbsp. Kahlua
• 4 eggs, separated
• slightly more than 1/2 c. powdered sugar (we didn't have castor sugar, so we used powdered sugar we'd made in a blender, and just went by taste)
• 500 g mascarpone cheese
• 2 c. heavy whipping cream
• 500 g ladyfingers (savoiardi)
• cocoa powder for dusting

1. Beat egg yolks and sugar in a large bowl until the mixture goes pale and thick.
2. Add mascarpone and beat until combined. It doesn't matter if it's a little marbled.
3. Whip the cream until stiff peaks hold, and fold gently into the egg mixture. Gently!
4. In a perfectly clean metal bowl, beat the egg whites to soft peaks.
5. Fold the whites into the cream.
6. Mix the coffee and Kahlua together in a small bowl.
7. Dip ladyfingers in coffee & drain well.
8. Cover bottom of dish with ladyfingers, layer with half of cream mixture.
9. Repeat with another layer of ladyfingers & cream.
10. Smooth top & dust with cocoa.

Fiber has kept me sane through some really difficult times, and this week is no exception. Having a simple mechanical task to complete helps, especially when it means you get to touch something soft and watch something colorful.

I've had a few skeins of yarn waiting to be wound into balls for quite some time, and this week I've gotten most of them ready to be knit into scarves and neckwarmers and other warm things. One of them didn't have ends. No, really. It was a skein of Manos with a few knots in it, and apparently somebody skeining it got knot-happy and accidentally tied the ends together. It was like Sam Beckett's life all tangled up in a big red yarny octopus made of one continuous loop. I made a break in the loop and got it all untangled and neatly wound, so I guess he gets to go home now.

And there's this:

It's the most awesome yarn ever. It's handspun art yarn from Cool Climates and it is filled with bazillions of fibers in bazillions of shades of white & off-white, and LOTS of wild and crazy texture, and bazillions of cool things in it like pearl beads and antique lace and super twisty bits of overspun crazy-plied awesomeness. It's going to be a scarf or neckwarmer when it grows up.

For the past several weeks, I have been semi-absent from a lot of the great online communities where I usually hang out. As some of you may know, my aunt passed away recently after a long battle with cancer. It hurts. A lot.

She was one of the rare people in this world who are truly kind all the way to the core of their being. Kind and sweet and gentle and smart and fun to be around. She cooked and baked extremely well. Like, made-from-scratch cheesecake well. Like the chocolate-covered cherries at Christmas were made individually by hand and the sweet creamy filling inside them started out as powdered sugar and vanilla and whatever magic dwelt in her kitchen. She made beautiful jewelry. She was wicked good at Scrabble.

She was good at life. I miss her.

Her death and her life have given me a lot to think about. I've been trying to find my way back to a normal routine and get back in the swing of things. Some days I succeed more than others.