Another wonderful scarf!

Yesterday, knittingdancer (from Ravelry) sent us a photo of her Papa Bear Sampler Scarf. It's beautiful!! The colour is gorgeous (but still totally suitable for either a man OR a woman). Whoever receives this as a gift will be very happy, we're sure. The yarn is Wollmeise Sockenwolle and the colourway is Sanguinella. Isn't the background quilt beautiful, too?

Don't forget......If you knit a Papa Bear Sampler Scarf and send us a photo to use on this blog, we'll send you a little gift.....a file to print a gift tag to go along with it! Send your photo to us here: grandmacocosdesigns (at) gmail (dot) com

Birthday Biker Boy Cookies

Someone we love is having a birthday soon and Grandma Coco thought Cheryl should make some celebratory cookies. We have all week. What's the problem? Well, the problem is we're still learning and you know what that means. Everything takes much longer than you'd think. If you rush a cookie, you invite disaster. You could even get (gasp!) bleeding so for a novice, every decision is pretty much life or death. Cheryl doesn't like to live on the edge the way Grandma Coco does but in the end GC was right. We have a plate of pretty cool cookies for a dude who likes motorcycles and cigars.

Copyright © Cheryl Coville 2010-2011

In the beginning....there was a drawing. There always is. Remember it? We simplified and simplified (remembering the complexity of the snowman this past weekend).

We can hardly wait to make more.

Photos of   Papa Bear Sampler Scarves   are beginning to trickle in.

This lovely (handsome!) example was made by shoshieb (her Ravelry name) and it's a beauty! What a great lavender colour that any man (or woman!) would be lucky to receive as a gift. Well done, shoshieb!

If you have finished a Papa Bear Sampler Scarf, send us the photo to show on this blog and we'll send you a file to print your own gift tag.  Here's the address: grandmacocosdesigns (at) gmail (dot) com

All Wrapped Up

We've been working on gifts and inevitably the puzzle of how to package them must be addressed. Last year, we were completely smitten with our friend Karen's lovely gift boxes. This year, we tripped over a tutorial for Japanese Gift Bags on The Quilt Show. You have to register to see them but it's worth it. They're quick and very cute. And just the right size for a beaded micro macrame bracelet.

And what do we have here? Femmeng Kate sent us a photo of her Papa Bear Sampler Scarf. Very handsome! The yarn is lovely. It's Tanis Fiber Arts Blue Label Fingering. Thanks for sharing the photo, Femmeng Kate! and thanks, too, for knitting along with us.

We've sent Femmeng Kate a file to print her own gift card to go with her scarf. Don't forget, we'll send you one, too, if you send us a photo of your completed scarf to show here on the blog.

Nifty, Gifty Socks

It's rainy here in the Kingdom today. Our friend Tony calls it a "dirty" day.....cool and just enough misty rain to make you feel miserable if you have to be out in it, working hard, as he does. It's the kind of day that just begs for warm, wool socks.

We've been working on a pair. Nothing spectacular but we're pleased with them which is good 'cuz they're a gift (for a fella who obviously doesn't read this blog). We made them from the same yarn we used for the Papa Bear Sampler Scarf. Elann.com's Sock It To Me Dankai....this time Colour 62 which is unfortunately no longer available. (They have other colourways left though.) We liked this yarn when we knit the scarf and we like this yarn for socks. It's very soft and the colours are very pretty.

We knit it with size 2.75 mm bamboo needles and 72 stitches. We worked 8 inches and turned the heel and then 8 inches for the foot and finished the toe. As usual. We had quite a lot of yarn leftover. It's a big ball of yarn.....420 metres (458 yards)....generous, indeed. The stitch pattern is simple but interesting enough to keep the needles clicking.

Row 1: *k2, p2, rep from * to the end.
Row 2: same as row 1
Row 3: knit
Row 4: knit

Man-Approved!

Now, to reach into our stash of yarn and choose another skein. Such luxury.

Cookies for a Sunday afternoon

For centuries art students have studied the masters. In a time before photography, art students would set up easels in galleries and copy the colour choices and brush strokes of really great artists. As long as you don't try to pass off this copy as your own work, we don't see the harm. It's a learning process.  Concentrate on the technique by not having to worry about composition or colour. Master the technique and then go on to pursue your own vision in the new medium.

Today, we want to document our own learning process. And the medium du jour is cookies! Remember art is everywhere.

We've been stalking a new-to-us cookie blog called Sweetopia and if you're at all interested in cookies, you should check out her blog. Go ahead. We'll wait........... Right. You're back.

There are about a million ways to decorate a cookie and one of the first that caught our eye was what Marian (from Sweetopia) calls a 'runout'. So cool! Seriously! It's a design made of royal icing piped onto parchment paper. Once it's dried, you can pick it up and set it on top of a cookie.

Like one of those art students, we set out to master this technique by totally copying Marian's project. I don't think Marian has to worry. We're clearly no threat because we made a ton of mistakes but we learned lots, too. For instance, when we went back to look at Marian's tutorial, we noticed that she had made a runout that fit on a cake top. Hmmmmm....perhaps that's why we had a wee bit of trouble making ours cookie-sized. :) Next time, we'll go with a simpler design.



Runout on parchment paper

This time we made Brown Sugar Oatmeal Cookies. It's a recipe we got years ago from Canadian Living Magazine (we think). You don't roll this dough. Just pat it into shape. We drew a rectangle on the back of the parchment paper and patted the dough out to cover. Bake and then slice while still warm. Because the snowmen are sorta large, the rectangles had to be big, too. Each cookie is a whopping 2.75 inches x 3.25 inches. Now, that's a cookie! We wrapped them up as party favours.

We really like how they turned out and we have big plans for more cookies to come. If you'd like to know the fine points of how this is done, head on over to Sweetopia.net to get it from the horse's mouth, so to speak. You don't want to learn from amateurs. You want to learn from the masters, too.

Weird Science

We're sorting out the details for a new beaded micro macrame bracelet. We haven't been at this long but we seem to have amassed a pretty good stash of beads and cords and findings. However, we've learned that no matter how many beads one has in her stash, she's always lacking one. That seems to be the way it goes.

20 ga. bronze craft wire

We need a special bead for the closure on our new design and we can't really start until we've selected one because the loop is done first and it has to be the right size.

It needs to be a sort of dull bronze. Coincidentally (ever notice how often that word comes up in the Kingdom of Coco?) we saw a tutorial on the Beading Daily blog for making beads out of wire.


That was pretty easy! And we ended up with a nice bead....albeit a shiny bead.

We read that you can give copper and bronze an antique-y patina with a chemical called "liver of sulphur" but we also read that it's more toxic and difficult than we're comfortable with. A quick internet search (where would we be without Google?) suggested there's an all-natural alternative. That's for us!!

We hard-boiled an egg, chopped it up and put it in the bottom of a ziplok bag. We put our bronze Precious-es in there as well and sealed it up. The article said to leave it 4 to 6 hours. We left it overnight.


See the difference?

In the morning, we opened the Ziplok bag and laughed our maniacal mad scientist laugh.

It worked!

Can world domination

be far behind?

Cassie's interested in science, too!

One lump or two?

Having passed the first day of December on the calendar, it seems it's all full-steam ahead to Christmas. Grandma Coco is, as you might imagine, a big fan of the holiday being the party girl she is but Cheryl is harder to drag on board. We pick and choose our activities......no to shopping and crowded malls, for example, and yes to.....

Christmas sugar cubes? Really, Cheryl? Yup.

The logical next step after sugar cookies. We caught the bug. We started with ordinary store-bought sugar cubes and royal icing and graduated to the "what if?" of how do they make sugar cubes anyway? Good question.

We experimented, finally settling on a mixture of 1/2 cup granulated white sugar and 1/4 cup icing sugar. We added water 1/4 teaspoon at a time until the mixture felt like damp sand. We found a very small and shallow plastic cap and lined it with plastic wrap. We packed the sugar mixture into it and scraped it off flat. This process is a lot like playing with a bucket at the beach, minus the sunburn. We tipped the cap over and used the edge of the plastic wrap to anchor the sugar as we lifted off the cap.

We left them to dry and found they were solid! Really solid. They don't crumble at all.

Anyone for tea?