Not quite Auntie Anne's Pretzels

But damn good anyway. More on that in a minute.

I find that if I get too engrossed in a project, I tend to let "benign neglect" turn into "ignoring" when it comes to the kids. As a (potential) homeschooler, I think my biggest issue/fear will be wondering if I'm a big fraud, which basically boils down to feeling like I'm not doing enough. In my heart, I know I'm doing just fine, but this is just that basic fear in the back of my mind.

Anyway, today I was working/struggling/fighting with a baby blanket for Kellen. It was a total failure. Something about mixing fleece, knit ribbing, and a satin blanket border was sending me into a tizzy. :) As I ripped out more of the tiny zig-zags so I could throw the satin border away, I realized that it might be a good time to take a break and do some baking with the girls.

My sister is a preschool teacher, so whenever I see her I ask for activities and book recommendations. We were fortunate to get to see her and her family over Easter and she passed along a recipe for soft german pretzels. I'm not a big white flour carb eater,but I do like to bake and the kids enjoy it too. In this very easy recipe, I decided to use 2 cups of whole wheat pastry flour and 2 cups of white flour(instead of 4 cups of white). The kids had a good time helping with the measuring and mixing. The especially enjoyed using their hands to roll out their snakes and make different shapes for the pretzels.

We made our initials and some knots. We also had a little math lesson. I'm totally the mom that asks leading questions. The girlsasked if we could have cinnamon and sugar on some of the pretzels. After agreeing, I asked how many we should do. Revie, my 4 year old, said 3 regular and 3 cinnamon sugar. I asked if that would cover all of them andafter fumbling around a bit she looked stumped. So we scooted and sorted intopiles for each topping.It was cool to see the recognition that we'd have 2 pretzels left over (since we had 8 total). Baking really makes math a hell of a lot more fun, especially fractions.That's way over my girls' heads, but we talk about it when we measure and when we cut things up. Just saying words like halves, fourths, eighths, and percents is a great introduction to math. And when they get to eat the lesson, they enjoy it!

Overall, pretzels were super easy and the girls had a great time. Were they as good as Auntie Anne's? No, my recipe doesn't include the 1/2 pound of butter. But the girls had fun and they were tasty enough for me to eat, so that is a win. Kellen enjoyed the pretzels too.

According to the Auntie Anne's website:

The largest pretzel ever baked weighed 431 pounds and was 12 feet across, created by Auntie Anne's franchisees from Lake Charles, Louisiana.

Here's the recipe if you're interested. I'd love to give someone other than my sister credit, but I don't have any clue where this recipe originated.

Ingredients:

1 1/2 cups warm water

1 envelope (2 1/4 t) active dry yeast

4 cups of flour

1 T honey

1t salt

1 egg

1. Preheat oven to 425 degrees.

2. Mix warm water, yeast and honey. Set aside for five minutes.

3. Mix salt and flour in a separate bowl. Add yeast mixture to flour misture and stir together.

4. Beat the egg and set aside.

5. Take a handful of dough and roll it into desired shape. (The more the dough is handled, the fatter the pretzels will be.)

6. Brush pretzels with beaten egg. (This makes them shiny.) Then sprinkle with salt.

A little puggish

A while ago, an acquaintance at church and I were talking crafts/sewing and I was telling her about The Cat in the Hat fabric and how cute it was because her son loves Cat in the Hat. Then she mentioned that her son had to give up his stuffed animal because of allergies. We got on the topic of things that might work instead and she asked if I could knit a stuffed animal for her son. I said sure and then I rudely put it on the back burner for five months. Not on purpose, but life just got in my way. Then we got invited to his birthday party and all the sudden I was motivated. :)

In true Piercy-poo fashion, I waited until a week before his birthday to even look for a pattern. I fell in love with Fuzzy Mitten's patterns on Ravelry. It has been a while since I've knitted anything. After finishing Revie's twirly skirt, I happily put away the knitting needles. (It took me a YEAR to finish that dang skirt!) I bought the Pug pattern (oh, who am I kidding, I had to buy all of Fuzzy Mitten's patterns because they were just so dang cute) and decided on a blue anorak. I settled on Lion Brand Nature's Choice organic cotton in macadamia (good) and walnut (eh). The walnut is a little more grey and at one point in the middle of the night I freaked out because it looked almost olive. It's definitely not the perfect puggy brown. I started working on my pug a good six days before the party. :)

And boy, did I have my work cut out for me. The pattern is great; it wasn't that. Well, it might be that I'm not technically an "intermediate" level knitter. But you move up to intermediate at some point, right?? Partly, it was the idea of focusing on my knitting project with the girls practically lying on top of me "helping." Then we all came down with colds. It was easiest for me to work on this after the kids had gone to bed, so of course that meant I stayed up w--aaa----aaaayyyyy too late. So, there I was, Thursday night (with the party the next morning) when I realized that the face of the pug involved intarsia knitting. Holy crap.

I've never done intarsia knitting. In my head, I'd gotten intarsia mixed up with...oh dang, I forget, but it was something that I had spelled out in my handy knitting book...Fair Isle knitting (which I've never done either, but the book had such nice pictures). Gasp.

But, thanks to the internet, and more specifically this video, I figured it out. It might not have technically been right, but I got 'er done. For example, I was in the middle of watching the video and the woman said, "when in doubt, twist the yarn," and I actually turned off the video and just twisted my yarn every time. The idea of trying to wrap my pea-sized intellect around which way my dang pattern was slanting was just too much for me. It was flat. Eventually, the dang thing would be stuffed and fluffed and round. Slant? No idea. So, I happily (and rather clumsily) twisted my heart away.

I got past that. I got past the ears without any hiccups...kind of. Since I've only ever done ONE skirt and three pairs of longies, I was unsure about leaving a little "tag" of yarn on the back side of the ears after I weaved my yarn ends in. I was unsure because I thought you would see those in the finished project (whereas you don't in a skirt). So, back to the internet where I found Fuzzy Mitten's Flickr photostream. I emailed her and she kindly (can't say thank you enough!) wrote me back and answered my questions. She even sent me a link to different pointers and tutorials on her blog, Knitting Cuteness. YEA!

Well, we were too sick on Friday morning to go to the party, so I didn't have to put my tail between my legs and shuffle my feet while mumbling something about accidentally on purpose leaving the gift at home. It's amazing how every night, I thought, "Tonight's the night, I'm just going to whip through this and be done and it will be amazing and perfect." Then it would be midnight and I'd have one foot done.

By tonight, I've got all the main dog pieces finished and I'm attaching them to the body. It was going fairly well until I got to attaching the legs. Holy crap. I'm about to take a wrench to this puppy. I'm going insane. I cannot possibly get my dang needle through that fat little pug's body. I've tried skewering it with my knitting needles. Hell, I've stabbed it several times in fact. I've tried finesse. I've tried power. There are scratches on my coffee table where I tried to put my weight on the tapestry needle in an attempt to break on through to the other side. This pooch has a poodle or something in there. It's crazy. I even took a break to take my vitamins. I might have to just hot glue a wooden leg and call him a pirate. What in the world am I doing wrong? I went back to the fabric store to try and get a longer, sharper, bigger-headed needle and it promptly got bent on puggy's fatness. WTH. Damn you, pug.

I feel guilty for thinking so meanly to such a cute face. But whatchu hiding in there?? Did you eat my cookies? I could go on and on, mostly because I'm typing instead of continuing to stab my needle into you. Grr.

I got it done, except for the sweater. I'll zip through that before midnight, right?? (I've never done a sweater before either.)

Introductions all around

I've been thinking more than typing lately, and I find that a lot of my thinking comes in blog form in my head, so I might as well type it out. I'm a mom, I'm married, I stay at home because the thought of wearing a suit and going to work to sit in meetings makes me want to cry (been there, done that and ain't going back if I don't have to). Oh, and I guess I should say that I stay at home because I love it. I do, I swear. Most days. Not on the days when the temper tantrums out run the sanity hours.

I like to sew, knit, and in general be just crafty enough to repurpose something into something cooler and cuter. I hate paper crafts (so there won't be many posts about that on here), but I love looking at scrapbooks. I think making my kids a first year scrapbook is a necessary evil, but I will never put more work into it than just cutting up pictures, pasting them on fancy paper and writing in the same color marker throughout the book. After that first year, I'll have my books professionally made, thank you.

We're also homeschoolers. In theory, at least. Right now, my oldest is only 4 so we're not really doing anything academic. When I make chocolate chip scones (which is too often), I tend to say I'm cutting it into halves/fourths/eighths just to make myself feel better about eating something so fattylicious.

I have 3 children. See how I posted such a fancy picture of us? That's just from a catalog. Kidding! We just happened to be going to a wedding that day. I thought about using aliases for the kids, but I'm too lazy to come up with decent nicknames for them. Naming them was hard enough the first time around! Revie (pronounced Ree-vee) is 4 and will turn 5 in September. She is always dancing, singing, and says she wants to be a mama when she grows up. Ginny is 2 and will turn 3 in August. She is usually singing and has the capacity to go from super sweet to super saucy in mere seconds. It's amazing. Kellen is almost 9 months old and enjoys chewing on my neck. And my lovely husband, Jeff, is mine, so I'm not going to tell you much about him. :)

Oh, and the name of the blog is from Thoreau. In the first chapter of Walden, 'Economy,' Thoreau states, "I trust that none will stretch the seams in putting on the coat, for it may do good service to him whom it fits." And while I hope that metaphor holds true for my blog, I mean to do the opposite in my life. I think it's important to stretch the seams of my comfort zone fairly often in order to learn new things, find new adventures, and grow as a person.

So there you have it. I've thought about blogging for long enough, I might as well actually see if I'm going to stick with it. Hurrah.