Necessity Breeds Creativity

Well today was as crafty a weekday as I could have ever hoped. I started the day by getting my bread making book in the mail: "Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day" The basic Idea is that you make enough dough to last a week and then take off a chunk to bake each day or every other day as you so desire. I think I know what my weekend project is going to be! I also got a beautiful hat display stand in the mail from Nancy today and just couldn't resist taking some pictures with one of my slouchy berets on it.

Isn't it great? I think I'm going to have to update my listings on Etsy to include new pictures of my hats. 

Once I got such a great start in crafting just from checking my mail, I decided to keep with the trend and bought the necessary ingredients to try out the new oatmeal roll recipe I got from Mrs. Thornton. It worked great! The rolls I made were kind of small, but were very delicious. I think I might need to put them in a warmer spot for the second rising during my next batch, since they didn't rise as much as I expected, and that was the problem with my other roll recipe.

This recipe even called for a punching of the dough after the first rising which I wasn't sure how to do without messing up, so I let Lane take over and give it a nice punch. It even left a cool fist print:

While the rolls were rising and baking I had to fill my time with something, so of course knitting came into the picture (after I graded a stack of homeworks). I wound the ball of yarn I'm going to use for Laurel's hat into a ball and loaded it into my yarntainer:

I'm super excited to use this thing! I plan on starting the hat tomorrow so it can be finished by either Friday or Saturday. I've decided it's better to prioritize requests rather than my own projects, so my lacy socks are on hold for a couple days. 

Winding the yarn into the ball was the farthest I got with Laurel's hat though. And, as the title of this entry suggests: necessity lead to creativity (kind of in the same way that hunger is the best gravy). I recently obtained my own private stash of toilet paper for use in my apartment (since the main stash seems to be declining rapidly) and realized I wanted a way to conveniently transport and store my extra roll. And so my toilet paper handle was born!

I made this out of one of the partial leftover yarn balls I had laying around in my closet, so I made something cool and used up some of my extra yarn (nice!). I knit the handle long enough that I can hang the toilet paper on my door handle for convenience and hang it on the handle or TP holder in the bathroom. I even made a button closure by making button holes using 3 yarn-overs. That way it will be easy to transfer the handle to the next roll once this one runs out.

And let me tell you, I'm pretty proud of this little piece of knitting improvisation. It's things like this that I like to refer to as engineering in real life: Manipulating something I already had into something that I needed. Woo! 

And that was all for today, and I'm pleased with all I got done. Hopefully there will be progress to report tomorrow as far as Laurel's Beret. Also, keep an eye on my etsy shop, hopefully there will be updated beret pictures within the next day or so!