I have made, with my own two hands, from scratch:

I really wish I had pictures of the trials I went through to get the bread to this point. There were several points at which I should have liked to be able to take pictures, but my hands were a bit full and Bear was living up to his moniker this weekend:

There was killing the mixer. (bread dough travels up mixer thingys to attack the part that has the motor. Not good.)

There was gluing my hands to the chopping board I had decided to spread the dough onto. (Really, when making bread, really do use a spoon and add flour while IN the bowl until it’s not gloppy and glue-y anymore, THEN spread it on the lightly floured surface. I cannot stress this enough.)

There was the oh, crap, I’m out of flour moment. (Really, you can’t use a bag that has around 6 cups of flour in it if you are making bread. Really. Go buy more flour first, ‘k?)

There was the constant can I stop kneading now? now? now? now? NOW???? Finally, after what felt like three hours, but was really probably only 20-30 minutes (the gluing of hands to the chopping board and not having enough flour ensured my arms were ready to fall off by the time I was sure that I wasn’t going to get any more smoothness or elasticity into the bread dough (who the hell writes instructions that say the dough should be ELASTIC??). I was kinda worried I’d killed the yeast or something awful by overkneading, but really, most of the 20-30 minutes wasn’t actually kneading, it was trying to add flour without getting bread dough stuck to every imaginable surface in the kitchen. My hands were claustrophobic and having panic attacks by the time I finally got most of the dough off.

Can you tell how excitable this whole process made me? Isn’t making bread supposed to be therapeutic or something?

But finally, I had bread.

(I have no wire rack. Ok? The foil was covering the bread to keep it from over browning the last few minutes, so I flipped it over and used it to sit the bread down while it was cooling.)

Bear had to be beaten away to let the bread cool at least for a few minutes. But while I was beating him away, I asked him, “Why didn’t you come downstairs and help me? There were a couple moments there when I could have used a third hand.”

He looked me dead in the eye with a completely serious face. “It was too stressful.”

Who knew making bread was such a thrilling, nail-biting venture? Thank goodness it had a yummy ending.

The weekend was pretty great. I managed to accomplish some other good stuff. Not a single one included making a lightbox or getting a haircut, but I’m pretty damn pleased with the weekend.

I spindled some laceweight.

then plied it up

(Crappy picture. I know. I’m sorry. Really, really, I am.) That’s about 46 yards of 27 wpi laceweight spindle spun. I plan on using the yarn as a template for spinning more of this on the wheel.

I also managed to clean the house, dirty the house, do laundry, read a few stories, and spin outside while the landlord’s played with their grandson and tried to keep him from sticking his hands on the wheel while it was spinning. (I would stop it every time he came close, but then they started getting upset like he was bothering me. He wasn’t bothering me, I loved entertaining him. I miss cousins at home. But he’s just learned to walk and was enjoying his freedom of roaming the rather spacious front porch we share.)

I thought I had finished haruha too, but the scarf is way shorter than I’d like it to be. I know it’ll stretch with blocking, but I kind of wanted it to be longer than the branching out scarf since it’s wider. So probably I’ll go back and unpick the bindoff and the three finishing rows and knit a few more inches with some of the yarn from the third and final ball I have of this handspun that I’ve knit branching out and haruha with. The last ball is the largest (at least the same size, if not bigger, than the amount of yarn it took to make the Branching Out scarf and haruha combined) and I’m thinking about knitting the La Dentelle Belle scarf with the last of it.