Give Me a Big Challah!

Last year, I had a personal goal of mastering a variety of soups.  This year, it’s the year of kick ass bread.  I think I can do it, but there is a little more science involved with bread, so there’s not always a guarantee that everything will turn out OK.  So, imagine my glee when my first attempt at challah bread turned out lovely.  I followed the recipe out of my 2007 The Best of America’s Test Kitchen cookbook, which you can’t access on their site without a membership, but I did find the same recipe here if you would like to make your house smell divinely of fresh baked challah bread.  You can let me know how it goes…

Scrapbook Layout

One of the nice thing about hobbies, is that sometimes other people can’t do them and they want you to do it instead. For money! Woot!

I have been making 9×9 scrapbooks for baby gifts and will start work on the 4th one, for hire, in the next week or so. I create 32 pages of baby’s first year moments, do delivery room and newborn photos to get the album started for the new parents, and do layouts leaving room for them to add photos at a later date of those special milestones.

Here is a page I did in a book I just completed of mom and dad with their new baby boy on a page. The nice thing about the 9×9 size, you can do a couple photos on the page or one larger one, they are quite fun!

World's Softest Baby Blanket

My BIL and SIL just had their 3rd girl at Christmas. Making a baby blanket for her was how I spent November and part of December. I cast on 110 (give or take, can’t remember now) and just did straight knitting of each color before the skein ran out. I used 2 skeins of each and, hold on to your hats, it’s pajama yarn and was the SOFTEST blanket in the history of babies, I kid you not!