Fuzzy crafts

Christmas Day is here and after a beautiful Christmas Eve yesterday, I feel like I want to relax and have some soft yarn running through my fingers.
What better fitting joice is there but my recently purchased Aloft yarn from Knitpicks? It's white, it's light and  it's super fuzzy.
Mind you though, it is no easy feat to undo some mistakes if you happen to make some in your pattern.
Together with the yarn I got myself the pattern for the Dunes & Waves Stole by Natalia Blank. It looks beautiful and the Estonian Lace it uses is generally easy enough to be relaxing when knitting it. The only challange here is the Aloft yarn and its beautiful fuzziness. :)
I have no idea how long it is going to take to finish this project but I think once it's done, I'm going to treasure it a lot.

Watercolor painting

My first attempt of recreating a painting I saw in a youtube instrcution video by Martin Stephenson  for watercolor painting.
I definitely enjoyed the process from beginning to end and am looking forward to trying out some compositions on my own.

Curiosity lands on Mars!

That is so cool. The Mars rover Curiosity landed safely on Mars.


Check out Nasa's website for the latest pictures and graphics on what is going on. 

Zucchini - the first female flower

Things changed. The first female flower appeared (recognizable by the mini zucchini right under the flower, compared to the absence of which in the male version). After two weeks of shrinking excitement about the yellow bloom, the plant again receives much more attention when I'm doing my plant checking round. I'm excited. 
The female flower is currently still quite small, and I'll hope that not all male flowers are dried up by the time the other one is ready to get fertilized. 

Tasty cornbread

Today I decided to make some cornbread for breakfast. It is a quickly prepared, very satisfying, and actually quite versatile meal. Eat it on its own or maybe with a bit of sour cream on the side. It is also great as a side dish to beef or  vegetable stews (in this case,  I like to reduce the sugar a little bit but, hey, that's just me).

Cornbread
Preheat oven to 375F / 175C

1/4 cup coconut oil
3/4 cup Splenda
1/4 cup raw sugar
2 eggs
1 cup buttermilk OR 1/2 cup sour cream + 1/2 cup whole milk
1/2 tsp baking soda
1 cup cornmeal
1 cup flour
1/2 tsp salt

Mix together all the dry ingredients.
In a separate bowl, mix together all the remaining ingredients.

Add the dry ingredients to the wet mix and stir it all together for a creamy dough.

Pour the dough into a greased baking dish.
It does not really matter what kind of baking dish one uses, if it's round or rectangular, but I would recommend to use a smaller dish to keep the dough thicker. In my case I used a 5 x 8 in glass baking dish. 


Bake for 30-40 minutes until a toothpick comes out clean.

Growing Zucchini

Another first for me this year was growing a zucchini plant. 

It sprouted really quick and the young plant developed nicely. Flowers keep coming but until now there is no female flower. Well, at least the color is pretty. I do not harvest the flowers for frying at this point since there is only one at a time blooming and I don't think that warrants to heat up the oil. 

Growing Asian long beans

This was my first attempt to grow those pretty long beans. On the package it said that they would grow from seed to crop within 50 days. Well, it took double than that in my case until I harvested my first bean. I did not mind the delay and enjoyed the simple fact that the plant produced something that I love eating.