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My 9-year-old grandson, who always claimed he was bad at art, recently started getting GREAT at it! I asked him how he did and he told me he watches a bunch of YouTube videos teaching you how, stopping them as he needs to draw a bit and then hits play again. Impressive! He just sent me this Baby Yoda. (I should have ironed it to flatten out the creases before the photograph.) I like the way he tried out the various colors of marker along the bottom of the page.
A week or so before he sent me this drawing he and I were hanging out. He was wearing a hoodie with an image of Baby Yoda on it, and talked to me quite a bit about how much he was enjoying watching The Mandalorian with his dad. He told me he thought he’d like to play Baby Yoda onscreen. I asked if he wouldn’t prefer a speaking part, and he said, “Nah. All Baby Yoda has to do is sit there and be cute. I wouldn’t have to memorize anything or worry that they’d change things at the last minute.” It was hard for me not to laugh.
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I have finally finished all the knitting of my Christmas gifts. Of course I still can’t show them to you. And this morning I dropped my handwritten, handmade Christmas cards into the mailbox. All my shopping is done, almost all curbside pickup from local stores (my favs!) with a few online from big retailers. My outdoor and indoor decorating is done. I do still have a few easy things to make in the kitchen and then package for mailing. Some of that will happen today, some likely not till Monday or Tuesday. Which means the packages will likely not arrive by the 25th, but I’m okay with that.
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A few weeks ago I asked for and received some sourdough starter from a fellow member of my local BuyNothing group. I’d made sourdough years before, and have baked plenty of bread over the years, but had a hankering to do some sourdough again. So you heard about my first bake, with all its mishaps, on Thanksgiving day. The bread was okay, but not great. Several days later I made another loaf, using the appropriate proofing times and oven temps, and it was much better.
My daughter sent me a link to this recipe for cranberry-wild rice-cornmeal sourdough. I do love King Arthur flour so had to try it. I’m sorry to say it was very disappointing. And rather a pain in the butt to make. And insufficient information in the recipe. Dried cranberries: assuming that means sweetened, as that’s the only thing I’ve ever seen in stores, but would have liked it to be confirmed in the recipe. Wild rice: can you ever buy just wild rice? I only see wild rice blends. So instead I opted for a black rice. But I think the recipe should have clarified what they wanted. After all, they said they preferred whole grain cornmeal, so be clear on the other ingredients, too.
The dough wasn’t easy to work with, despite following all their directions. And then it took MUCH longer to reach that 195 degree internal temperature than the 35-40 minutes they said. And I have a new instant read digital thermometer that has been calibrated so I know it’s accurate. The ultimate loaf, while tasty enough, is hard and rather dry.
So I sliced it and froze most of it, starting out the next day to make another recipe that sounded enticing: tartine olive sourdough. Well. This bread is over-the-top wonderful! And I only had 2 cups of olives on hand, not the 3 the recipe called for. I used a combination of oil-cured olives and jarred kalamata and pimento-stuffed green olives.
You have to be patient, as it takes almost 2 full days from start to finish, but it is well worth it. Besides, most of that time is waiting, not actively working. Heck, some of it is sleeping. The bread is salty and chewy, savory and just plain delicious. Cut yourself a piece of extra sharp provolone and there’s a wonderful lunch.
I had to look up what a tartine was – it’s a sourdough that’s not very tangy, so it requires much more time ‘growing’. If you make sourdough, you’ll appreciate that for 1,000 grams of flour this recipe used only 31 grams of starter. I would cut the recipe in half next time, as I never need – or even want – this much bread at one time so had to freeze 2 of the loaves.
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You saw my newly-painted and decorated bathroom. Well isn’t this towel woven by Master Weaver Laura Fry just the perfect accent?! She has many colors and weave structures available on her ko-fi page.
Once I’m done with all my Christmas prep and postcard writing, I’m planning to make – or at least try out – a valance of sorts woven on my pin loom for the glass block window. May or may not work as planned.
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Parting shot – I’m guessing it was starlings who found this tree perfect for making a themselves a little community.
 This is NOT what my dinner looked like! Like most people, my Thanksgiving was different this year – much smaller. It was also, um, plagued by mishaps. It actually started on Wednesday evening when I was gifted some sourdough starter. So I would add a loaf of sourdough bread to my menu. I knew I was likely cooking for myself, although it was possible my son would stop by.
I got up early Thursday morning, mixing the bread dough before my regular morning yoga so that I could do the 30-minute autolyse rising before I left the house for my morning walk. My plan was to bake the bread before I put the turkey in the oven, so after I got back from my walk I got the bread in a bowl to rise in the oven with the oven light turned on for a bit of heat. I decided I wanted it just a bit warmer so I turned on my electric heating pad and put it in the oven, too.
Then I started doing more time calculations and realized that I had to adjust my plan. I’d cook the turkey first, planning for it to be done around 1PM so that I could have a turkey sandwich on fresh sourdough bread around 5PM. (The bread and turkey wanted to cook at different temperatures.) So I turned off both the oven light and the heating pad.
Now I started making my family’s traditional stuffing – frying up some breakfast sausage, adding plenty of chopped onion and celery, and butter. When cooked I add chicken stock and Pepperidge Farm cubed stuffing, cover it, and let it sit while I prepare the bird.
My mother-in-law had a trick that she taught us and we have used for decades: butter the inside of a brown paper bag well, then put the stuffed turkey in that. Seal it with a few wooden clothespins and put the whole thing into a roasting pan. The bird cooks quicker, gets a lovely brown skin, and requires no tending or basting.
Before I got my hand – up past the wrist – full of butter while I preparing the bag, I got out the pan and turned the oven on to preheat. I buttered the bag, stuffed the breast (that’s all I was cooking, not a whole bird), sighed at the rip in the bag and decided I wasn’t going to start again with a new bag, and plopped it in the pan.
Only then did I realize I’d not taken out either my bowl of rising sourdough bread or my heating pad before turning the oven on!
Needless to say the dough was rising too quickly and the heating pad got slightly singed. Uh oh!
What time was it now? Probably 10:30AM but I decided it was time to open a bottle of wine that had been in my cupboard for a year waiting for an occasion; this was it.
I made my favorite cranberry-apple relish and sat and had a glass of wine. I didn’t have much choice but to shape the dough and bake it at the 325 that the turkey wanted instead of the 400 that the bread really wanted.
When the turkey was done, my son suddenly appeared at the door – YAY! He had been out hunting and had gotten a deer, which was in his truck, and because it was warm out he couldn’t stay long. He hadn’t had breakfast so we ate turkey, stuffing, cranberry relish, and bread – I hadn’t yet had time to make salad or a veggie dish. So it was most definitely not a healthy meal, but it was what it was.
Fortunately I was able to laugh about everything. Life can be very funny if you have a lighthearted perspective.
He left and I cleaned up the kitchen, making myself a salad after a while.
Later in the evening we both went to my daughter’s for games with the grands and dessert.
On the fiber front, I STILL haven’t gotten any further in weaving that hand painted warp; still just 60″ woven. I finally finished the project that I’m going to submit to an exhibit.
The submission is due by the end of December, and I don’t expect to know for many weeks after that if I am accepted. The show won’t open till October. If accepted, I have many steps to do to make the hanging problem free – no fussing on the part of those preparing the show.
I also been making Christmas gifts. Of course I can’t show you any of those. 🙂
Now I need to make time to write out my Christmas cards – the ones I made back in February. I’m actually looking forward to this.
I’ll also be writing 100 postcards to send to Georgia voters. I’ve got my list of names and addresses, and have ordered both the postcards and the stamps.
So there’s still plenty to do in the next few weeks. How about you?
It’s been a wild ride, hasn’t it? We’ve all done – or at least attempted to do – things that make us happy, help us retain some sense of our sanity while we tighten our grip on our health and our loved ones. Sometimes those activities and those grips are virtual, sometimes they’re in real life.
So what have I been up to for the last few weeks?
Well, I opted to start with the handpainted cotton warp in blues & greens. Here it is going on the back beam. This happened on October 25th, just 2 days after my last post.
I chose 20/2 mercerized cotton in a deep, dark purple-blue for those solid stripes, used doubled. Once it was all beamed, I threaded heddles and reed and set to weaving with the solid dark denim I’d dyed for the weft.
This was a draft I hadn’t used before. I downloaded something from somewhere (I’d happily give credit if I’d made notes – could be Cait Roy Bell, but maybe not), and then made some modifications to end up with this. Initially I loved it, but then I thought, “Uh oh. It looks like a chain link fence.” My sister assured me it doesn’t, so that’s good.
I only got about 60″ woven when life intervened. First up was Halloween with a full moon. I tried for some good shots of that great moon with clouds in front of it, but they all failed to show what I saw with my eyes.
Then the clocks changed and it was SO DARK in the evening when I was walking Jack that I decided I needed to make myself a hat to help me show up more. I bought this weird yarn at my local craft shop – acrylic plied with some reflective threads. The yarn is bulky so it knitted up quickly – just one day of knitting and watching meaningless TV and I got this.
Doesn’t look so impressive, right? Well, I took the hat off and put it in my dark green chair with a table lamp off to the side. That’s different.
But look at this! I used my flash when I took this photo. WOW!!
That should get me noticed when a car drives by, right?
Some time passed, and I finally had a chance to do something with my grands I’d planned for several weeks – mud dyeing! This totally non-toxic method provided a great opportunity to do some tie dying with them. The results are rather subtle but very on trend, or so my stylish daughter tells me. 😉 Here’s the bigger grand with his newly-dyed hoodie. We also dyed some jeans for him in a reddish hue, and 2 Tshirts for the little one, one in each color dye bath.
Next I decided it was finally time to paint the bathroom. Given that I HATE to clean, it took me most of a day to do a deep clean on the room in preparation. Then another day to do the painting. Although it may not look it in this photo, my bathroom is tiny, so there was mostly time consuming cutting in with a paint brush and very little roller work.
I am very happy with it. Here’s a piece of info for you all. If you buy your paint at Sherwin Williams like I do (and maybe even if you buy it elsewhere, I don’t know), you can have them not just mix the color on the paint chip as is, but you can also ask them to do a percentage of the value if you want the paint lighter. I chose 75% and could have gone to 50% for sure. The color is called Open Air and it sometimes looks like the seaside to me and sometimes like a robin’s egg; depends on the light.
Speaking of light…you see those light fixtures by the mirror? New. And I installed them myself. I’m always proud of myself when I do something like this. Something that is outside of my comfort zone for sure. I didn’t take a before photo, but here are the old fixtures, hoping someone in my BuyNothing group wants to claim them for their own vintage look. But I disliked them from the day I moved in; one of the few things in my house that I didn’t like. At all.
I needed to leave those lights in place while I painted to give me working light. The next day I turned off the breaker and removed the fixtures. You know how everything old is new again? Well look at the original paint under those light fixtures. Pretty close to my new paint, right?
So I turned the circuit breaker back on while I painted as it turned of my radio, too. Then I watched paint dry for a while, turned the breaker back off and installed the new fixtures. Sweet success!
Today I painted a bunch more rocks for my kindness rocks as I only had 2 left to distribute. This is the fourth batch of rocks I’ve painted for this purpose.
Leaving you with few nature shots and a wish. First, here’s my Japanese red maple putting on a heck of a show on Saturday morning. A beautiful start to the day.
Then a great sunset in my neighborhood on Saturday evening. A beautiful end to a beautiful day.
Now my wish…I wish for calmness, for peace. I wish that our country can begin healing the deep divide that we clearly have. I wish that we can begin to see some real justice – in education, health care, housing, policing, environment, and much more. This will take real work. Hard work. A willingness to really hear each other. To stop and listen. To breathe. To let go of our anger and hurt. To link arms with those who voted differently from us and move forward to create a future that will be better for our children and our grandchildren. It all starts with a single step. Will you take one with me?
You got all that undyed cotton. And you recently picked up a large shoebox full of dyes from another weaver/dyer. So what do you do? You dye, of course!
Before the cotton actually arrived I measured out a Tencel warp for a scarf – mostly one handpainted colorway with a second, much smaller, that I’d use for warp stripes. I am very happy with these warps.
I have plenty of Tencel and rayon on cones to choose from for weft.
Once the cotton got here I did some planning and measured out 3 bouts to make some yardage and a shawl. In my head I wanted to do a similar blue variation like on the Tencel above, with neutral tans for the stripes.
Well. Remember I said I’d picked up a mess of dyes from another weaver/dyer? There were 3 different blues in her box, and silly me, I thought they’d all be pretty different. But when I mixed them up they were all very similar. So I reverted to a strategy I haven’t used since I first started dyeing – I just started dumping things together. Then I added a bit of this and a bit of that from my own dye shelf. The colors all looked pretty dark when they were wet, so I wanted to make the neutral/tan bout light. I was careful with my mixes for that, since I was using all my own dyes that I’ve used before and knew what I wanted.
After the overnight batching, morning rinsing, daytime soaking, then more rinsing and finally drying, it was completely clear to me that this was NOT going to work as intended. I didn’t like the way these bouts looked together. NOT. AT. ALL.
So waddya do? If you’re me, you prepare more yarn for dyeing. This time I made 24 ounces of cotton into skeins for immersion dyeing for weft for that blue/green warp, knowing I had sufficient solid colors to use as offsetting stripes. I wanted a nice, rich, dark denim color, and think I achieved it.
I have a weave structure planned that I think will look great with these colors.
I also measured out another bout to dye just like that first bout with the golden & light chocolate splotches. I think I’ll just use undyed yarn for my stripes. Keep it simple & neutral. I checked my stash and have a variety of browns and oranges in mercerized cotton I can use for weft, but I dyed a skein of purple anyway, thinking it might make a nice contrast. I didn’t want to do a dye bath, so painted the purple dye on this skein and clearly didn’t get the solid coverage I wanted, but I’m not worried about that.
So now I have 3 distinct projects to get on the loom. I’m going to put each in a bag – with notes about length of the warp bouts and number of threads (guess who learned the hard way that her memory is unreliable on this score) – and I’ll have to decide which one I’ll do first. But for now I’m happy with what I’ve accomplished with the dyeing – and with using a bunch of that 14 pounds of cotton. 😉
In my last post I showed you a piece of weaving produced on my inkle loom, and told you that I was working on a project I hoped to submit to a show. After much work, I now think I have all the weaving done. Some finish work remains, and I have to determine how I will hang the various pieces and make it work all together. But here are all the woven pieces, in the orientation I currently intend.
I spent at least 12 hours between my computer and the inkle trying various methods to weave the 3 ‘banner’ sections at the top. I wanted those words to be larger than the names, but couldn’t figure out the best way to do that. So I’d warp the inkle with scrap yarn and try something. Nope. I’d come to the computer and try to work out a draft that I’d do on my 8H loom. Nada. I’d warp the inkle again to try a different method. Closer, but no cigar. Go back to the computer and try again. This time try both 8H drafting and in Excel, shape the rows and columns to try and graph the letters differently.
Finally I warped the inkle with scrap one last time and finally got something that met my expectations. Then I could warp it again with the real yarn and move forward. I am happy with my final decision on all of that. The only part I don’t like is how the zeros look in the years with a 20. I didn’t want them to look like the Os in the names. Oh well. C’est la vie.
Now if I can figure out how to display it appropriately without detracting from the overall look and impact.
I started this project in late September. So it’s been weeks since I’ve done anything else that’s even faintly weaving related. Except…
I’d like to make some more garments, and cotton is the fiber of choice. So when I saw a good deal on large cones of 8/2 cotton, I ordered two. It’s natural/undyed, so it will give me dye opportunities, too. The seller, who is reputable and has sold me yarn previously, sent me the FedEx tracking number. Which showed the shipment as Pending for 10 days. At that point the seller said she’d send me 2 more cones immediately. And since I’d been so patient she’d add more yarn to my order at no additional charge. Well. This box arrived the other day.
That’s A LOT of yarn! Roughly 14 pounds of it, for total yardage of about 47,000 yards! Guess I’d better get busy now that my time at the inkle is complete.
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