Kristen Does It All

  Planned Pooling I’ve tried planned pooling several times, and despite reading and watching tutorials about how to make it work, I could never get decent results. The patterns I used just didn’t seem to pool properly. Every tutorial I read seemed to offer the gold standard advice:   Change hook sizes to get the desired number of stitches per color. No matter how many times I tried, I couldn’t seem to get it to work. Until now. I started on the train Saturday using Red Heart Pooling yarn , which is supposed to be basically foolproof: three stitches per color with a six color repeat. The instructions from Yarnspirations specifically for this yarn indicated that I should be able to see the repeat within a couple of rows, and see the colors offset by one stitch every other row. I frogged and stitched and frogged and stitched, and despite trying every hook size three larger and three smaller than the recommended H hook, I could only see the repeats offset by two stitches eve...

Last weekend, our youngest had friends over, and was stung by a bee in our basement. At the time, he said it was a hornet, but I didn't investigate too thoroughly. I went into "mom-mode" and went for the go-to sting remedy in my house:  baking soda paste. I grew up in barn-framed wooden house, and my bedroom was cohost to wasps every summer. They were a regular feature. Dad would foam the cracks each time, but the wasps were happy and cozy. I had stings pretty often, and thankfully, was no stranger to the baking soda paste. So B got a 7 a.m. blob of baking soda on his back and resumed his regular Saturday morning activities - sleeping.

Let me tell you about the time I tried to bake pretzel rolls using the recipe from Sally’s Baking Addiction . Their recipes are generally excellent. They taste great, instructions make sense, and they are clearly well tested. I, of course, can never do anything simple when it could be complicated.  The Plan:  Make Bigger Rolls Now, generally speaking, the recipe for pretzels is pretty similar to the recipe for pizza crust. The ingredients and methodology are similar, up until the point where you start forming them into their final shape. With pizza crust, I pretty much adapt the recipe on the fly by changing one key starting factor:  the amount of water. ¾ cup of water = 1 pizza crust. 1-½ cup of water = 2 pizza crusts. I figured pretzel rolls would be similar. Increase the amount of water by 20 percent, adjust other ingredients accordingly, and I would be able to transform our pretzel rolls from dinner-sized to sandwich-sized, which was the primary objective. Pretzel san...