Wow, it’s been a while since I’ve blogged. Both Griff and I have been sick on and off for about 3 weeks straight with various miserable colds and stomach viruses, so January and early February have just really sucked. I’ve never been this constantly sick in my life. In fact, I seem to have caught yet ANOTHER cold as of today, and I’m sure Griff will be a snotty mess in no time.

Griff continues to be cute, which is a good thing.

Let’s see what I’ve been up to. I decided to knit myself some mittens to match my new Calorimetry headband, and picked out a pattern for flip-top convertible mittens that involves stranded knitting, which I’ve never done before.

I have to say, I’m a bit disappointed. Basic colorwork is easy. Really, really easy. I don’t know what I was expecting. Maybe that I’d to have to sit in a corner surrounded by candles and photographs of the Shetland Islands, channeling Alice Starmore. Once I figured out what I needed to do to keep the two strands from tangling (I’m knitting English style and dropping and picking up the yarns as needed, not knitting with both hands), things started going very smoothly. The project is going slowly because I’m knitting in the 10-minute increments when Griff is asleep AND I don’t have anything else that I should be doing, but it’s going. Hopefully I’ll get to wear them before May.

Griff’s ailing tummy has meant we’ve had to spend a lot of time at home lately, which had at least one happy result: I got to do some spinning. This is some Fat Cat Knits Polworth fiber that was a gift from Jag. I decided to use it to try my first Navajo plying, and I ended up with a nice fat, squishy 3-ply. It’s about 175 yards of worsted to chunky weight yarn.

On the food front, I’ve been searching for the perfect overnight cinnamon roll recipe over the past few months, and I think I found it here!

Most cinnamon roll recipes call for 2 rises (it’s annoying to wait through a first rise when you really just want to shape the *&@^#@%$ rolls and go to bed), and for brushing the dough with melted butter, then sprinkling on a cinnamon sugar mixture (which is a pain and a mess). This recipe just does a 10-minute rest of the dough, and has you mix softened butter, flour, spices and brown sugar into a paste, which you then spread over the dough before rolling it up. Perfect!

The rolls came out enormous, and we were unable to eat more than one and a half each at a sitting. I made a cream cheese frosting instead of using the glaze from the recipe. They were totally delicious.