Booze & Yarn

Smokey, bourbon spiked Hot Chocolate

Miss1932 — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 15:07:39 +0000

Today’s cocktail courtesy of Booze & Yarn founder Corinna Mantlo, for Happy Homesteader .

There’s nothing better on a cold night than a piping hot cup of hot chocolate…that is unless you take it a smokey, spiked one!

Ingredients (makes 2 cups)

2 cups milk

1/2 smoked chipotle pepper (seeds removed)

1 Mexican chocolate tablet (approximately 3oz) – see below

4oz Bourbon Whiskey (I’m a fan of Bulliet Bourbon)

pinch sea salt

Mexican chocolate tablets pressed chocolate rounds, generally 3oz each. They come sweet, semi, or unsweetend. depending on the region, they will also include sugar granules, almonds, cinnamon, or other local spices. I bring back a stash of local, market bought tablets every time I go to Mexico, but you can find it in your local Mexican grocer, or Moctezuma is a good brand that can be bought HERE

Directions

Combine milk, chocolate tablet and chipotle in a saucepan over medium heat and whisk constantly using a molinillo. The molinillo is a wooden stirrer that serves two purposes. The bottom has notches cut into it that will help break up the chocolate, and the mid section has several rings that spin around then the molinillo is turned, this aerates the milk to keep it from boiling over and to give the hot chocolate a light, frothy texture. To whisk the mixture, place the molinillo in the pan, with the bottom touching the pan bottom. upright, with the handle between your open palms, roll your hands back and forth (as if rubbing your hands together to warm them). You can buy a nice molinillo stirrer HERE

Remove and discard the chipotle pepper

Add salt and bourbon

Pour into two cups evenly and serve.

Enjoy!

The wonderful, etched stainless steel flask seen above courtesy of Izola

- Corinna Mantlo, for Happy Homesteader

Beginner Kits

Miss1932 — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 20:01:03 +0000

Everything you need to start knitting…and in style!

NOW IN THE SHOP

Via Meccanica Yarn
Size 7 Knitting Needles
“The fun way to learn knitting” instructional comic book
Hand silk screened custom Booze & Yarn Tote Bag.

The fun way to learn knitting: Written by Corinna Mantlo, Art by Vickers Bastard Gringo. This book, as well as Via Meccanica yarn in a variety of colors are also sold separately in the store.

Order yours today!
If kits are being ordered for class, the shipping fee will be refunded upon pickup.

Booze & Yarn introduces Via Meccanica!

Miss1932 — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 17:08:01 +0000

Booze & Yarn’s retail venture, Via Meccanica is proud to introduce its own line of yarn. This soft and earthy 100% Pure Virgin Wool is perfect for any project, and only gets softer with wash and wear. Produced in a 150 year old, family owned and operated woollen mill, using machines dating to the 1930’s; this yarn has the quality, feel and wearability of the vintage knitted goods we all love so much. Available in 12 colors, and 2 & 3 ply weights. Knits up lovely on size 5 needles to 4.5sts per inch. Approximately 126 yards per hand wound ball for $7.

We hope you’ll give it a try!

now in the STORE

Isle of Manhattan cocktail

Miss1932 — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 00:20:11 +0000

Join Booze & Yarn tomorrow night for a Manhattan sipped over a pile of yarn and some good conversation!

7-9pm

Otto’s Shrunken Head, 538 East 14st

Stick around after for Cine Meccanica, screening Knightriders (1981) at 9pm!

The history of the Manhattan has a fairly convincing story behind it, only because it is so often repeated. Basically the drink was made for Lady Randolph Churchill, Winston Churchill’s mother at the Manhattan Club in the 1870’s and it was thoroughly enjoyed and became popular. The story has been picked apart and it seems it may not be true. The reality is that the Manhattan was probably one of the five borough cocktails (Brooklyn, Bronx, Manhattan, Queen’s and the Staten Island cocktail) made to represent the parts of New York city. – Art of the Drink

MANHATTAN
1 1/2oz Bourbon – I recommend Makers Mark

1/4oz Sweet Vermouth

dash of Stirrings Blood Orange Bitter

Garnish – Marashcino cherry

I also like to call this a “Rumble Seat Manhattan” ever since turning the trunk of a 1979 Lincoln into a cocktail lounge the night before The 2904, 2009

Corinna Mantlo, Photo by David Cohen

A Day For Girls, Bloody Mary Sew-athon!

Miss1932 — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 16:53:47 +0000

view the Printable PDF flyer here: GIRLS

Give a girl back EVERY day of her life

Across the globe, woman and girls are isolated during their menstrual cycle. Because of a lack of funds to buy disposable feminine products, these young women are barred from school and work every month. This affects their ability to support their families and to persue an education with their male peers.

Days for Girls is a non profit organization that makes and distributes washable sanitary pad kits to women in these communities. One kit can improve a girl’s life immensely and will only take an afternoon of your time.

Please join Booze & Yarn & Otto’s Shrunken Head, and sponsored by Bust Magazine on Sunday, August 14th, to lend a hand to help women in impoverished communities get on with their lives. We will be cutting and assembling kits and all skill levels are welcome.

There will be 3 sewing machines available and we will be using this as an opportunity to also teach basic sewing techniques, while constructing the kits.

Stop on by to help the cause and have a cocktail or three…Bloody Maries of course!

RSVP on the FaceBook Invitation A Day For Girls, and spread the word!!

- Corinna, Booze & Yarn founder

Can’t make the event?

Check out the Days For Girls website for donation, volunteer, pattern information.

It’s that time again!

Miss1932 — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 17:54:55 +0000

The 3rd annual “First Craft of Spring”

www.firstcraftofspring.wordpress.com

Deadline: March 19th, 2011

On March 20th, 2011 Booze & Yarn, will be joined by artists all over the country for the 3rd annual First Craft of Spring. The sole purpose of the project is to promote public art and community initiative. Change is possible and even a bleak landscape can be transformed overnight by individuals. Be a part, take a walk to see the blooms, perhaps even pick one by your favorite artist…but most importantly, enjoy and embrace the first day of spring!

The project has been a great success the last 2 years, with artists across the country creating unique and beautiful flowers. Please join us!

Rules:

1. The only flower type to be used for this project is the Daffodil.

2. Daffodils can be knitted, crocheted, sewn, drawn, screened. Any artistic medium is accepted.

2. Each flower should have a tag with a positive message or quote. You can use any message you want. The tag should be easily visible to viewers

3. Each tag must say below the quote: “First Craft of Spring” www.boozeandyarn.com.

4. On March 20th, earlier in the day the better, find locations anywhere on your daily route, and “plant” your flowers.

5. Take a photograph of each flower you plant. Cell phone pictures are fine in a pinch. Make as many flowers as you can, and plant them anywhere and everywhere.

7. Email them to me, to post to the blog with a location, your name, and the art medium used. You can also include contact details to you, your artwork or your website. (miss1932@gmail.com)

Please pass this call for artists on to as many people in as many cities as possible.

Click here for the knitted daffodil pattern That you are more than welcome to use, or adapt.

Hope you all can participate in this public art experiment!

Corinna Mantlo

Booze & Yarn founder

Need a new hat? Take this one.

Miss1932 — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 20:08:29 +0000

I first met Stacy at Booze & Yarn a few years back. She inspired me and cracked me up the minute we met, and we quickly become good friends. She has a huge heart and this winter she came up with a humble little project that proves that yet again, and I just love it. I hope this project inspires you to follow in her foot steps. I know I’ll be stockpiling knitted hats for next winter to do just that.

I pinned Stacy down to ask her about the project recently via email (as she is on a beach outside of Oaxaca, Mexico) and here was her response:

In February 2010, having just turned in my first book, I was rightfully exhausted. I’d spent the winter months hunched over my desk in my tiny NYC studio apartment, slogging through the final edit, and dreaming of a) moving to Mexico to live on the beach and b) having time to knit. I had a trunk full of yarn waiting for me, begging to become elaborate sweaters, but when I sat down to knit one early February night, I discovered I had approximately no brain cells left. I was struggling to speak in complete sentences and not fall asleep in the middle of conversations, how the hell was I supposed to knit a sweater?

I rummaged through one of the large Mason jars in which I keep my needles and pulled out a crochet hook. Having learned to knit first, and taught myself to crochet out of a book in an evening, I admit I viewed the latter with a knitter’s snobbery. I was somewhat embarrassed to be seen at my knitting group working with a single hook while everyone else had shiny things in both hands. However, that dark winter’s night I had an awakening: crochet was fast and easy, and I had a lot of single skeins of yarn. I picked up a ball of bright orange Cascade 220 and made a simple double-crochet hat in the time it took to watch a movie.

From then on, I was unstoppable. I made a double-crochet hat every night. I gave a few away to the friends who wanted them, but I soon had a few just laying around. One very cold night I pinned a note to one of them: “Need a warm hat? Take this one.” I went downstairs, put it on top of a fire hydrant, and made a deli run. By the time I came back, the hat was gone. I averaged a hat a day, left on my street, each with the same note pinned to it. It was an excellent way to pass the last few stressful weeks in the City, before I gave up my apartment on March 1 and moved to Mexico to live on the beach.

Stacy Pershall’s first book, Loud in the House of Myself: Memoir of a Strange Girl, will be published by W.W. Norton in January 2011.

“Le Surrealisme, c’est moi”

Miss1932 — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 16:32:19 +0000

“Le Surrealisme, c’est moi” (Surrealism, it is me!) – Salvador Dali

Elsa Schiaparelli’s iconic Trompe L’oeil, “Bow Knot” knitted sweater, that started her career is now available for free download at School House Press.

Elsa Schiaparelli was the first fashion designer that I became interested in. I loved that she saw fashion AS art and not just clothing. Unlike works by her fellow artists and friends Dali, Magritte and Duchampe that were seen only in art houses, Schiaparelli’s surrealist art made it to the public because it WAS clothing. This blew my mind as to the possibilities of fashion, something i’d tried to avoid as an art student. For the first time for me, fashion was not a dirty word. Schiaparelli’s introduction of the Shoe Hat, or the Chest of Drawers suit (modeled after Dali’s antropomorphic chest of drawers paintings) worn at a high society gala, by a lady of leisure is amazing to me, and truly surreal. (taken from a paper I wrote while at the Surrey Institute of Art & design, UK 1998)

While working in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Costume Institute in the mid 90′s as more or less a high school drop out, I had the great luck and honor to work under the brilliant Curator Richard Martin. Martin accepted me and taught me more about art in fashion than anyone else could have. He brought respect back to the “red-headed step child” fashion department, tucked away in the basement of the museum, and wrote prolifically on the subject of fashion history. On discussing a vanity mirror suit by Schiaparelli, Martin once wrote:

“The paradoxical and discomforting aspect of the Schiaparelli gesture is that the mirrors reflected the vanity not only of the wearer but also of the spectator. As images of the wearer joined those from the external world, the affect achieved was like that of Surrealist photographic trompe l’oeil.” -Richard Martin, Fashion & Surrealism

Schiaparelli’s most famous pieces include the lobster dress where the white chiffon gown replaces a white china plate, atop which sits a lobster and garnish, and a pre-tattered trompe l’oeil gown and shawl. However, she got her start making one humble little sweater by hand and marketing it. It was The Bow Knot sweater, a surrealist, trompe l’oeil piece.

“Dress designing…It is to me, not a profession but an art. I found it was a most difficult and unsatisfying art, because as soon as the dress is born it has already become a thing of the past…A dress has no life of it’s own unless it is worn, and as soon as this happens, another personality takes over from you and animates it, or tries to, glorifies it or destroys it, or makes it into a song of beauty. More often it becomes an indifferent, or even a pitiful caricature of what you wanted it to be…A dream, an expression”

-Elsa Schiaparelli

First hint of spring, button hole Scarf

Miss1932 — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 04:47:49 +0000

Materials

1 skein Cashmere – Lime Green

1 skein Cashmere – Cotton Candy Pink

Size 4 needles

Preparation

Lime Green (G) – Wind yarn into 2 balls in order to work both edges of scarf simultaneously.

Cotton Candy Pink (P) – Wind a small bit of yarn into a ball (20 inches long or so) to use later on for the button hole Left section

Scarf

With (G), cast on 20sts. Knit 4 rows (Garter st)

Row 1: (G) K4, join (P) and K12, Join second ball of (G) and K4

Row 2: (G) K4, (P) P12, (G) K4

Repeat these 2 rows 4 times more (working (G) in Garter St, and (P) in Stockinette St.

Decreases

Row 1: (G) K4, (P) K2tog, K8, K2tog, (G) K4

Row 2: (G) K4, (P) P10, (G) K4

Repeat these 2 rows 3 times more, decreasing 2 stitches every Knit (right side) row. 12sts remain.

Neck

Row 1: (G) K4, (P) K4, (G) K4

Row 2: (G) K4, (P) P4, (G) K4

Repeat these 2 rows for 12 inches or desired length

*Measure the width around your neck with a tape measure. This measurement is the length to knit for the neck section.

Increases & Button Hole Right

Row 1: (G) K4, (P) inc. in 1st st, K2, Turn

*do not work the rest of the row. Simply leave the un-worked sts on the left needle, or place them on a holder.

Row 2: (P) P3, (G) K4

Repeat these 2 rows 3 times more, increasing 1st on every Knit (right side) row. 10sts on needle

Increases & Button Hole Left

Using extra scrap of (P) yarn, join yarn to un-worked half and work as follows.

Row 1: (P) K1, inc. in next st, (G) K4

Row 2: (G) K4, (P) Purl 3

Repeat these 2 rows 3 times more, increasing 1st on every Knit (Right side) row. 10sts on needle.

Join Left to Right sides of Button Hole together and continue across row with larger ball of (P) yarn. 20sts now on needle.

Finish

Row 1: (G) K4, (P) K12, (G) K4

Row 2: (G) K4, (P) P12, (G) K4

Repeat these 2 rows 4 times more

(G) Knit 4 rows (Garter St). Bind Off. Weave in all loose ends

CLICK HERE FOR A PRINTABLE PATTER N

Spring’s almost here…

Miss1932 — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 16:28:13 +0000

Just a reminder to check out, get involved and pass the word along about the 2nd annual public art/craft project run by Booze & Yarn. please take a look at the website…

The First Craft of Spring

On March 20th, 2010 Booze & Yarn, along with artists working in every medium will be “planting” daffodils across this urban landscape, as a statement that grassroots organizing CAN make a difference. Last year the project was a great success, with artists across the country creating unique and beautiful flowers. Please join us!