Sugar Cookies with a lemony twist

These are some of my favorite cookies ever. They're the cookies my grandma used to make when we would have tea parties. We went all out with our tea parties - tiny fine china, full length gowns, make up, little sandwiches, little snacks, and these delicious cookies in tiny form.

Sugar Cookies

2 eggs
2/3 cup oil
3/4 cup sugar
2 tsp vanilla extract
1 tsp lemon zest (or orange zest)
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
2 cups flour

Preheat oven to 400. Whisk eggs with a fork. Add oil and stir to combine. Add vanilla and zest. Add sugar and stir until thick. Combine baking powder, salt, and flour. Add flour mixture to egg and sugar mixture. Drop dough by the teaspoon onto an ungreased (I always grease mine, though) cookie sheet. Grease the bottom of a flat-bottomed cup, and dip it into a bowl of sugar, and press it down onto the dropped cookie dough to flatten. Bake for 8-10 minutes (it took right about 10 for my oven). Let cool on cookie sheet for a minute, then promptly remove to a cooling rack. If you leave them too long, they will stick to the sheet and break when you try to take them off.

This makes about 32 2-3 inch cookies. These are light, crisp cookies, not soft ones. And they're amazing.

Crochet Tutorial, Part 2

Here it is, crochet tutorial part 2, or how to finish your tutorial to make it an actual afghan.

First, prepare your coordinating color.

Insert your hook on the right corner of a short side, and wrap your 2nd color around it.

Pull it through and tie it. You are going to start by doing a single crochet. To review, this is how you do a single crochet:

Put your hook through where it just was. Put your yarn on top of your hook so you can pull it through.

Pull it through to make a loop.

Make a second loop, putting your hook through the next top "braided" part.

Hook your yarn and pull it through both loops.  Continue by making a new loop and pulling your yarn through both loops until you get to the end, like so:

When you get to the corner, do 3 single crochet stitches through the last loop of the row to make a corner. Just make your second loop through the same stitch 3 times.

This is the cool part. You're going to push your hook through a space before your first stitch on the panel (x marks the spot, and the red shows you where my first stitch is).

Ok, I kind of messed up with this picture, but it won't ruin anything if you follow it. Ideally, you actually want to hook your yarn with the hook on top, whereas I have the hook on the bottom in this picture. It's better to hook it with the yarn under the hook.

Pull it through.

See how the right side of the loop is on the top of the hook? What you want to do now is pull your hook out from this loop, and put it back in so that the left side is on the top and the right side is on the underside of the hook.

 See what I mean? This will make sure your design is "made" properly. If you don't do this step, it won't look right; it can actually look a bit tangled.

Now finish it off like it's a single crochet, hooking your yarn and pulling it through the 2 loops.

See how this makes a little triangle?

Repeat the process to make a second triangle.

For the next one, stick your hook through the space just before the third stitch in that row.

The next one should be just before the fourth stitch in that row. So the pattern is: 1, 1, 3, 4, 3, repeat. You'll do this all along the long sides of the panel, and a single crochet stitch on the short sides. Once you've gone around the panel once, you'll just do a single crochet stitch around the whole panel 2 more times.

To put all of your panels together (remember you should make 4 panels of 24 stitches across and 223 rows long, and one panel of 42 stitches across and 223 long) you'll put 2 of your panels with wrong sides (back side) together, and put your hook through the outside corner stitches of BOTH panels, and single crochet it, and continue until your get to the end and you have single crocheted your two panels together. As you might have guessed, you should put it together with the 24 stitch across panels on the outsides, and the 42 stitch panel in the middle.

When all of your panels are done and crocheted together, you'll single crochet around the whole afghan twice with your accent color, and then twice with your base color. You can add fringe on the short sides if you wish. There are several ways to do this, but what I have done in the past is taken 6 6-8 inch pieces of yarn, 3 of the base color and 3 of the accent. Put your hook through a loop, hook all 6 pieces of yarn, pull them through then pull the ends of them through the loop made with them, and pull tight.

If you do this you'll end up with a very warm blanket that is big enough for an adult.

That said, if you want to make one for a baby, you do the same stitches, but use baby yarn and an F hook (baby yarn is softer and thinner than regular yarn). You'll do 4 panels of 28 stitches across and 128 stitches long. To give you a visual, the one I've done ended up looking like this:

 Unfortunately I don't have a picture of an adult-sized afghan. I have made one, but didn't take a picture of it, and I'm not done with the one I'm currently working on. I'll post that when it's done, probably in December haha.

I'm back!

I made it back from Chicago. I promise to get back to crafty type things next time, with part 2 of my crochet tutorial. But for now, pictures.

Garrick and me at Millennium Park.

The bean!

We went to the Taste of Chicago. Want to see what we ate?

Course 1: Steak sandwiches with Bearnaise sauce. Yummmm.

Course 2: "Deep dish pizza." Yeah, right, more like regular pizza with gross overly sweet and bland sauce. We trashed it.

Course 3: Grilled lobster tail and baked potato. Yummmm.

I liked it lots.

Course 4: Sauteed goat with joloff. That's right, I ate goat. It was very tough. I don't know if it's always like that or if ours was way overcooked.

I was nervous about the goat.

Garrick was excited about it.

Course 5: Tequila lime chicken taco with medium hot sauce. This picture was really blown out, and this was the best I could do with my simple photo enhancing program. I loved this. Garrick thought it was just ok.

Course 6: Grilled anjou pear salad with bleu cheese and walnuts. Sounds great, right? It was AWFUL. I don't know what dressing they put on it, but they drenched it and it was so bright that you couldn't taste anything else. And I think they grilled the pair in the same area they grilled the meat because it tasted like meat seasoning. We trashed it.

Course 7: Oxtail with joloff. Garrick loved this. I thought it just tasted like beef.

In all, we tried to pick the most interesting and I guess sophisticated food we could find. There were a lot of placed selling fried foods or basic foods you could get anywhere, and we figured we didn't want to go there to eat food we could get at home. The one thing I wish we can gotten was an apple and gouda stuffed sausage.

Then we went to Navy Pier, where we saw Cirque Shanghai, went on the ferris wheel, and went on a boat tour around the pier.

Cirque Shanghai

Those are stacked chairs, and she is spinning on one hand on top of all of them. And I don't mean smooth spinning, I mean jerky spinning that made the whole tower waver every time she moved.

The finale included 3 motorcycles driving in a cage. It was much more entertaining than the pictures convey, mostly because not a lot of pictures were taken because we were entranced.

This was when we were on the ferris wheel. If you're not familiar with it, it's 1/4 mile high and takes 6 minutes to get around. I flipped out when we got near the top.

This is near the top. I don't like heights.

This is the ferris wheel. To put things in perspective, you can fit 8 people in each car.

The pier from our boat tour.

The city from Lake Michigan.

The lighthouse.

We also went to Starved Rock, a state park in Ottawa, Illinois.

This is us from the top of Starved Rock. I'd show you pictures of the rock itself, but you can't actually stand on the rock anymore. I don't know why, but now it's just a wooden path. The legend of starved rock goes something like this: There are 2 tribes, and tribe 1 kills Chief Pontiac of tribe 2. Tribe 2 chases tribe 1 onto this rock where they could not fight back. Rather than surrender, they decided to starve to death on the rock. Hence the name Starved Rock.

We thought this dragonfly had been caught in a web and was dead. Turns out it wasn't after we had been messing with it for a couple minutes.

This is at the lodge where we had lunch.

At Eagle Cliff - look! You can see the lock and dam!

We turned "Lovers Leap" into "Lovers Shove." The story of Lovers Leap is that a woman fell in love with a guy who professed his love back, but he had to leave and promised he would be back in 3 months. 3 months came and went, and she found out he was with another tribe and in love with a woman there. So the girl went to Lovers Leap and jumped off, committing suicide. The place where you can look out is, we're pretty sure, not the actual place she jumped from because it would have been more of a "Lovers Tumble" but there's a place really close that is a straight drop into the water.

And we found Bambi, if you look hard toward the middle of the photo you'll see him.

I have tons more photos, but that generally covers it all. I had a lot of fun seeing my grandparents and I wasn't ready to leave, but at the same time it's nice to be home.