craft and food update

Well, since the last time i updated this journal, i’ve been busy! This week, i decided to jump back into translation. Hyunjung and i have decided to study translation together in preparation for next year’s translation contest. With all the putzing around i’ve done this year, and all the miscommunications with Paul, there’s no way we will be able to do anything about submitting this year. Anyway, we have lots of research to do, and i have decided to just get lots of practice by translating all the stories in the 2007 Yi Sang Short Story Collection, and will decide later what to submit for the contest. Good luck to us! I haven’t studied Korean seriously in such a long time, it is rather slow-going at the moment

1. yarn2, 2. blanket pile, 3. what a mess, 4. testflowers, 5. red ripple, 6. turquoise ripple, 7. chevron swatch, 8. multicolour crochet circles, 9. candleflame shawl swatches

So, i finally collected all the yarn colours for my two new ripples, though i am on pause with both of them at the moment, as i have run out of the base colours–i need to go back to namdaemoon and pick up more of those honkin’ huge skeins of turquoise and red. Meanwhile, i have untangled all the scraps and have started making granny-square flowers a la yarnstorm, though i’ll be outlining them with black instead of white. i have about 35 so far, but i need about 120 for a full size blanket…depends on how much leftover yarn i have, i guess.

Also, i have rearranged things so that i can pile all my blankets in one place. i love the look of that!

I’m also swatching for two other projects: a chevron scarf, and a candle flame shawl. I definitely won’t be using these yarns for those projects–i need to hit an upscale yarn shop and invest in some beautiful, soft, natural fibers (hopefully for a reasonable price!) Love the patterns though! Much more fun and challenging than stockinette, or the 3×3 rib i’ve been doing for YEARS on the grey blanket!! I also want to try this pattern.

1. peanutbutter cookies, 2. beef and veggie stirfry, 3. honey whole wheat bread2, 4. out of the oven 2, 5. with a bowl of chowder, 6. homemade sausage and egg NkMuffins, 7. baked eggs, 8. comfort food, 9. pizza fresh from the oven, 10. banana bread, 11. butter tarts done, 12. tzatziki and pita snack, 13. July14dinner, 14. sort of greek dinner, 15. french bread 3, 16. french bread 5, 17. i love cherries, 18. my favourite oatmeal raisin chocolate chip sunflower seed cookies, 19. potato salad, 20. moussaka done, 21. at dunkin donuts, 22. apple bread pudding crisp, 23. tuna salad, 24. frozen berries 2, 25. banana coconut bread 3, 26. bruschetta 4, 27. pasta salad 2, 28. butternut squash salad, 29. turkish delight from haily, 30. iced coffee

Recipes and details to follow…but the highlights are: my awesome bread-baking skillz, homemade pizza, tzatziki, moussaka, and the egg mcmuffins!

Translation and Major Frogging

Well, it was an eventful Friday evening…..

After months of hemming and hawing and lots of hesitation and procrastination (on my part) about who we should translate, and how best to go about choosing someone (I’m not great with starting things that I’m afraid I will fail), Paul and I decided just to go to Kyobo bookstore downtown and JUST CHOOSE SOMEONE TO TRANSLATE. Well, we picked a few books, but not after a big ol’ fight in the middle of the bookstore about our (seemingly) different tastes in literature (our first big fight, probably one of many since we’re both so stubborn and opinionated and the language difference makes us prone to misunderstanding each other, even though we are usually of the same opinion).

Here are the books:

I’m pretty sure that we will be translating Kim Yong-taek’s poetry, but not sure which volume. Kim Hoon was Paul’s pick for fiction, and I was kind of hoping for a female author, so possibly Shin Kyoung-sook. We also picked up Cho Chang-in’s book, but probably won’t do it, as it is a full-length novel, and more popular than literary, and then I picked up this year’s edition of the Yi Sang Literature Award winners. Just in case we don’t like any of our other fiction choices, we can pick a short story from there. The Women’s Life Encyclopedia I got just for fun. And I also bought an English translation of Cheon Sang-byeon’s wife’s memoirs at Seoul Selection.

Now I have to start reading and researching all of this!! Aagh! When will I have time to crochet?? And, oh, yeah, Mom will be here in less than two weeks!! EEK!

Speaking of crochet–

I ripped out the whole thing and started over again.

It just wasn’t working…the tension was all wonky, and the colours were not doing anything for me. Actually, it was the bag that Shinjae brought back from Thailand that started it all:

Now, green isn’t usually my colour, but I just love this bag. The colours are really inspiring, and it sparkles! (Horrid pictures, but I’m getting a new camera soon.) So the other week when I was passing by the yarn shop, it was actually that bright green yarn that caught my eye, and I suddenly needed to do something to celebrate the colours of the bag. But the blanket that I started hardly had any green in it! So I undid the whole two weeks’ worth of work and started over again.

(As of Monday morning)

This project feels much more right. The colours are much better–the green seems to enliven it and balance it out–and the flow is much smoother. I’m crocheting faster and making fewer mistakes, so it feels much nicer to be working on this blanket now.

Hah, and you thought I was addicted before…!