I love dim sum.

I like going to dim sum with my fam­i­ly. Lots of chat­ting, lots of eat­ing, lots of dawdling. Makes a relax­ing Sat­ur­day morning.

I also tried to make dim sum at home, with the frozen stuff, steamed in a large saucer. (I tried microwav­ing them before, it was bad news. They must be steamed.)

And of course, I have to make them with yarn.

If you like all-day dim sum that smiles back at you, they’re in my shop :D

The one on the right is a shrimp dumpling (蝦餃, “har-gau,” the pale pink one), and the one on the left is a pork/shrimp dumpling (燒賣, “siu-mai,” the yel­low one). Siu-mai was the kind I was steaming.

Har-gau is a steamed dumpling filled with shrimp and wrapped in a white, translu­cent wrap­per. Siu-mai is also a steamed dumpling filled with both pork and shrimp and wrapped in a yel­low wheat wrap­per and topped with crab roe.

If you do know how to cro­chet though, here’s a bril­liant pat­tern for mak­ing siu-mai from All About Ami! I’m so tempt­ed to make them, they would make a great “how are you feel­ing today” chart on my fridge! :D

If you pre­fer to knit, I stum­bled upon this great pat­tern for knit­ting dumplings (or jiao-zi, in Man­darin)! The writ­ten pat­tern is a free Rav­el­ry down­load if you’re a Rav­el­er, but there’s also a how-to video for every­one. The cre­ator stuffed the dumplings with cat­nip for her cat to play with :D

 

I’ve been work­ing on some dumplings as well! Cro­chet­ing, of course, and adding anoth­er pair of char­ac­ters to my “hap­py togeth­er” series (which includes, so far, nigiri and wasabi, napa cab­bage and chest­nut, and pina cola­da). Char­ac­ters in the hap­py togeth­er series were main­ly made for wed­dings (except for the napa cab­bage and chest­nut, which are for my mom), and these ones I’ve just made are no excep­tion — they’re for an old friend who first met her fiance at a dumpling gath­er­ing! She’s prob­a­bly too busy to read my blog at this point, and I’m going to block her from see­ing this post on Face­book, so it should be safe to show you… if you promise to keep a secret, that is.

Ta-da! Dumpling, and a lit­tle bot­tle of soy sauce! XD They’re spend­ing a few hap­py days on my fridge, then I must say good­bye to them and send them to their new home on Sat­ur­day… *sniff* But I’ll be ok…

Stay tuned for the pat­tern, com­ing in the next cou­ple of days!

Hap­py Monday!