Toe Stretching

I admit it, I'm a sucker for gadgets.   So awhile ago I bought some Yoga Toes.  The idea is that they help you stretch your toes and help you with your yoga.

Of course I purchased them and used them a couple of times and forgot about them.  Since I'm somewhat seriously doing some yoga again and was able to find them, I've started to use them.  I haven't seen a huge difference yet, but I think it might actually help.

I'll post again in a few weeks to see if there really is any benefit.

Dilly Meatballs not so good

Tonight I tried a new recipe for dinner called Dilly Meatballs from Company's Coming Make-Ahead Meals.  It was not so great.  I thought it would be tasty, but it was just kind of bland.  Which is odd as there are a good number of recipes in that particular book that are on the tasty side.  The meatball part was tasty.  It was just the sauce that wasn't so yum.

It was a combination, of ketchup, sour cream and dill.  There was just something missing.

Granny Squares

Well, I seem to have about 45 granny squares as it stands today.  I think I need to take a little break from the granny squares though.  I forgot how hard on my hand the crochet thing is.  Well that in combination with all of the data I've been moving around at work.  So a little resting of the hand is in order.

Pasty Success

Our pastry making session was pretty much a success.  We ended up making far more pastry than we actually needed by accident.  But that's ok.  I now have enough pastry put away in the freezer for about 4 more pies.

We did have one accident with the pastry making.  We had several Deep Dish pie plates and a couple of shallow ones.  We had a cherry pie filing for one of the pies.  When we put it into one of the deep dish ones it kind of,  well, wasn't quite enough.  So the brilliant group of us decided to try a whole pastry transfer to a shallow plate.  Didn't work too well as you can see from the photo, but it was funny as all hell and we named our cherry pie "Victim Pie".

All in all it turned out fairly well.  I need to work on my pastry rolling skills.  I found it wasn't as thin as my Mom's usually is.  But that will come with time.  We may try the blind baking too so the crust doesn't get to soggy too.

All the pies together

The bats

The great pie transfer

The Victim Pie

Pastry

Today is the day I'm trying to make pastry for the first time.  Hopefully it will go well.  My Mom has given me the recipe for her never fail pastry dough and some of my friends are coming over to partake in the pastry madness.

Here's hoping it goes well.

We will be attempting, cherry pie, raspberry pie and chicken pot pie.

Yoga and Wii

I've been feeling much better these days and I'm sure it's in part due to my increased activity level. Still exhausted as I'm not sleeping well, but the body is getting back to normal post surgery. Hopefully getting to better shape. I need to get more activity going. I went to my second Iyengar class this week and it was great. More difficult though. Which was good. There were a couple of poses that put some pressure on my incision scar, but it wasn't too bad. It also highlighted for me my issue of wrists. I have a hard time staying in the downward dog pose for any length of time because of my wrists. They always start to hurt and I have to drop in and out of the pose. One of the instructors gave me some exercises to see if we can strengthen them. Overall, it is making me happy to be doing yoga again and be able to do it with some friends. I think I may want to try a hot yoga class sometime in the near future. In addition to the Yoga, I've been using my Wii fit to slowly work up my activity levels.  
This morning I managed a Wii fit milestone. I tried all of the routines in the Wii Fit Plus section all in one session. It was pretty good. I even did the running one. And I can't stand running. I'm forcing myself to do it though so I can get in better shape. I didn't do too badly either.

Chakra Meditation

One of the types of mediation that was introduced to us in the second meditation course was Chakra meditation.  I was quite interested in it, but both times we had the guided Chakra mediation I fell asleep.  My poor body and mind were exhausted at that point and took that opportunity to get some rest.  I also had a tendency to do the same thing during the Body Scan.

Now i'm reminded that I need to find a good Chakra mediation to explore that type of meditation further.

Wikipedia Entry on Chakra Meditation 

Granny Square Update

I had said a few posts ago that I was going to try and work on a granny square a day for the next little while to use up yarn and make an afghan.


I seem to be getting more done than I thought.  I started just over a week ago and I already have about 16 done.  I really should slow down a bit though as my poor hand is starting to ache a little from all the crochet and computer work I've been doing lately.  

Yoga & Meditation Room - Before

I decided a few months ago that I really needed a dedicated spot to work on my mediation and yoga.  The living room isn't really the best spot for yoga as the space between the two couches is a bit narrow.  Also, trying to meditate in the living room when my husband is at home is a bit on the obnoxious side on my part.

So I'm in the process of converting our smallest middle bedroom into the yoga/mediation/massage room.  My husband has recently taken a course in massage and needs a spot for the table as well.  

The process is going slowly as I'm trying to find homes for all the items that were in the room.  I'm pretty close to emptying it, then it just needs to be painted and all should be good.  Right now I'm considering a colour called pickle green.  

Here is the before picture:

Hopefully soon there will be an after picture.  

Meditation

Last spring I took a Mindful Based Stress Reduction course through a wonderful teacher Heidi Walk.  I took the level I and Level II courses.  Both were eye opening and I found did me a lot of good.  I was a little skeptical that meditation would do me any good.  However, I was proved wrong as I generally found that the more regularly I did my mediation practice, the clearer my head is and the busy bees worrying in my brain didn't buzz so much.  I highly recommend her course.

The Level I course is based on the Mindful Based Stress Reduction course designed by Jon Kabat-Zim at the University of Mssachusetts Medical School.  I highly recommend the program.

It is a combination of meditation and yoga.  Our course used the Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness  and the  Guided Mindfulness Meditation CDs.  It takes some work and dedication, there is about an hour's worth of work to do during the course each day.  I found both the book and the CDs highly worth while.  I uploaded the Cds to my iPod and use the audio frequently.

I'm sad to say that since the second course ended in November, I haven't been very good at keeping up with my practice.  I've been very erratic about when I practice.  This has to change as I would like to get back to feeling the way I did while I was taking the courses.

Getting back to yoga is going to help me get back ino this as the yoga and meditation go hand in hand.

It's a cooking and cleaning type of weekend

On Wednesday night we hooked up our new freezer.  I have been wishing for a freezer for a good long while.  I hate always having to wonder if I have enough room in the freezer when I'm at the grocery store if I see something on sale, or having to eat spaghetti sauce twice a week because there is no room in the  freezer after making a big batch.  We've also got fairly busy schedules so it's nice to be able to have something reasonably easy to thaw and heat up.

I've been very excited about this and have gone on a cooking binge as a result.  Last night I made a nice large batch of spaghetti sauce that should last us a good while.

Today, I had the bright idea that I should try making meatballs since we had no special plans for the night.  I've only ever made meatballs once.  And that was with a friend's help.  They were actually turkey meatballs from Everyday Italian: 125 Simple and Delicious Recipes by Gilda Laurentiis.  These ended up being quite tasty and I should try making some again.

For some reason making meatballs has always intimidated me.  But tonight i decided to go for it. I found a recipe in Make-Ahead Meals (Original) from the Company's Coming Series.  I keep being gifted with these cookbooks and there are usually a few good recipes in each one.  So far they seem to have turned out well, none have fallen apart.  I did for some reason think it would take all evening to make the meatballs, but it didn't take me super long.  Waiting around for them to cook on the other hand.....


Now I'm debating whether or not I should bake myself some corn muffins.  Could be tasty and good to take to work next week.  It might be more fun than the cleaning I've also been doing.

On Starting Yoga again

Over the years, I've been practicing yoga on and off.  I've tried Ashtanga, Hatha, Restorative, Iyengar and the "whatever the community centre teacher is teaching today".  For the past 2 years though, I've been actually practicing yoga pretty much on a weekly basis.

However, due to the need for some abdominal surgery in January, I haven't been doing any Yoga at all since mid November.  I've really missed it.  There is a sense of well being that I often get from the practice. For the most part since about April of 2009 I've been working on the restorative with a few classes of Iyengar thrown in.

This past Thursday I was able to start yoga again.  There is a group of us that decided to go to the Yoga Centre Toronto to take the fundamentals of Iyengar classes (6 week course).

I was a little nervous about the class as I often still have pain in my incision and since yoga does involved a lot of muscles stretching, I  thought it might hurt.  Thankfully I was wrong.  I was able to do all the poses we did that night.  The only pain I experienced was my muscles elsewhere that I haven't been using.  And that was a good pain.

The instructors in our class were quite well informed and made sure that everyone understood what they needed to for the poses and helped with alternative poses if needed.  I also found that there wasn't that sense of "you have to keep up with the rest of the class" that you often get in group fitness classes.  There was a lot of emphasis on going at your own pace and that everyone is at a different stage in their practice.

I'm already looking forward to next week's class.

As an aside, I've previously been having a lot of problems with working on the bridge pose.  we did the beginnings of the bridge in the class and I found I had no problems with it.  This made me quite happy as it had been bothering me to no end that I wasn't able to do it before.

For some reason, I've always seemed to have trouble with seed stitch. Couldn't manage it for some reason. Which is silly as it's a relatively simple stitch. Then this summer, I seemed to get the hang of it and started making the Big Bad Baby Blanket out of the Stitch 'N Bitch: The Knitter's Handbook.  It was going along swimmingly, until about part way through November.  I was just over a half done the blanket.  Then I got some bad news about my health and that apparently made me lose the ability to do  seed stitch.
Of course I had to rip about 5 rows out several times to realized I should just put the blanket away and wait until my brain was in a better place concentration wise.  I was quite frustrated.    So it has been sitting in a bag waiting for me to come back to it.

Now that I'm feeling better I think sometime in the next few weeks I will see if I can salvage my poor blanket.  Mind you I am kind of distracted by the granny squares I'm crocheting right now, but perhaps I can pull myself away.

Leaf Hat

I've been spending a lot of time over the past year or so making little baby hats for friends, family and coworkers. Most of the time I've been making the Umbilical Cord Hat from the Stitch 'N Bitch: The Knitter's Handbook. However, after you make 15 or more of the same item, no matter how cute, it can be a bit boring. So I've been experimenting with other hat patterns. One of them was the Berry Hat Pattern I got from the Random Stitches Blog. almost identical to the Umbilical cord, but with some intarsia that requires some thought. I really liked how the hat came out. So the next person I know having a girl. It seems like a girly hat, will be receiving this wonderful hat.

Oh and I would like to introduce you to my hat model. I'm really not sure what "stuffed toy creatures" she is, but I bought it one day when I was feeling down and carried it in my arms all the way home. Then I discovered it was just the right size for being a baby hat model. She doesn't have a name yet, but I'll get around to it.

Granny Square a Day

I think I may try making a granny square a day for the next little while. They take almost no time to make up and I would still have time to work on my many other projects.

This is how scattered I am right now. I have the following under way:

1 baby hat - on hold due to the fact I lost a dpn and I'm waiting for some to show up in the mail.

1 bunting bag - I am stuck on

1 scarf - it's a scarf and just straight garter stitch. Sometimes I lose interest for a few days.

1 baby Kimono - the needles i have are too short and I' waiting for some circulars to show up.

1 baby blanket - having seed stitch issues and I put it away.

Too many things on the go. I'll hopfully whittle this down in the coming weeks. But for now I'm on the obsessed with making the granny squares.

Granny Squares - Woop

I've been dithering about with what to do with all the bits of yarn that are left over from my projects. I was going to just crochet up a big old ugly blanket. Crochet because I find it goes faster. So I started with the bits of yarn I had. But that was sure to the ugliest blanket ever. So I started looking around for patterns that might be of interest. I did of course think of granny squares, but I didn't think I had the talent for crochet that it required. But I thought I would try. So off I went and downloaded some patterns. Sadly I didn't really understand the patterns as I haven't learned crochet pattern reading yet. In fact, I really only know a couple of stitches and hope that things turn out all right. I got a little frustrated and then I recalled.... we have the intarweeb. There must be a video on Youtube. And I was right.

I found this wonderful video that showed me how easy it is to make granny squares. This is going to make using up those bits of yarn far easier. I've already made several squares.

The new place for my Craft Blogging

I've broken down and moved around the blogging of my crafting. I think this blog should be more accessible for the world in general and I won't be cluttering up my friends list on my slightly more private journal. Many of my friends on their probably don't need to hear my babble about my knitting, photography and other crafty type stuff on a daily basis. So i present it here! Lucky all of you.