Pepo Passion

Lemon Curd Puffs

2012-01-19T10:20:00.000-08:00

It's lemon season and my bandmate's wife treated me to a delicious spoonful of her lemon curd the other night at practice. Luscious, so sweet and tart! She sent Al to our next gig with a bag of lemons for me, so I made these:

Lemon Curd Choux/Puffs

Lemon Curd
3 large lemons
1 1/4 cup sugar or to taste
1/4 lb unsalted butter
5 large eggs
pinch of salt

Zest the lemons finely, mince if needed, and mix with sugar and a pinch of salt. Cream butter and sugar/lemon mix together, then add eggs one at a time. Juice lemons and add the juice into the mix. Heat gently over low heat in 2 qt saucepan, stirring continuously until custard thickens. Pour into container to cool. If using just for this recipe, can pour into shallow bowl and cover with plastic wrap (press into surface once not ridiculously hot) to prevent a skin from forming. Refrigerate once cool enough.

While lemon curd is cooling, make the choux

Puffs (this is Julia Child's recipe)
1 1/2 c water
9 tb butter
2 tsp sugar
1 1/2 c flour
5-6 large eggs

Preheat oven to 425
Place water butter and sugar in saucepan and heat to boiling. Once butter is melted and water is bubbling, turn off heat and add flour all at once. Stir with wooden spoon until all incorporated and pate comes away from the sides of the pan. If needed, you can turn the heat back to low to get it to that state (I've never had to). Mix in eggs, one at a time, making sure each is fully incorporated before adding the next. Batter should be thick and able to stand on its own, but glossy. If too thick and not glossy enough add the 6th egg in parts until glossy enough.

Form into 1 inch dollops on a lightly buttered baking sheet or two (this makes quite a bit, two baking sheets if you space them properly though I can fit almost all of it on one very big baking sheet when they're placed pretty close). I use two spoons. You might be able to use a pastry bag, though the batter/dough is pretty thick.

Bake at 425 about 20 minutes, then turn down to 350 and bake 10 minutes more or until golden. Leave oven door open when you turn off the heat and leave them in a little longer to dry out.

If you're me and you started this escapade sometime after 11pm, you then tidy up the kitchen a bit, refrigerate the lemon curd and go to bed. If you started earlier, you can proceed whenever the puffs aren't too hot and the lemon curd is set.

Fill puffs with lemon curd, either with pastry bag or by slicing a slit and spooning a bit in, then top with drizzled melted chocolate. Serve soon or they'll get soggy. You can store the puffs unfilled in an airtight container at room temperature for a day or two without filling, or longer in the freezer, but they should be eaten soon after filling which shouldn't be a problem.

Another view:

New Year

2012-01-10T00:34:00.000-08:00

Ended 2011 with a foggy hike on Mount St Helena.Charlie, Gabe and I had planned to go climbing, but we picked the one moist day of this dry winter so ended up hiking instead.
It was a beautiful damp day, enticing for photographs. I forgot to bring my camera, so Charlie and I shared his and some of these photos are his.

It's been so dry this winter that the hills are still pretty brown, but this area was nice and lush.
The reds of the manzanita looked particularly burnished in the damp air.
And the fog and moss gave the forest an ethereal quality.Lichen-covered branches contrasted beautifully with the fallen brown leaves,
and it coated standing trunks as well, making for a fuzzy forest.We veered off the path to find a nice deep dry hole with interesting little nooks.
And we checked out one of the climbing spots, the Bubble.
We stopped at a newish restaurant in Winters on the way home. Preserve Public House is a great place to eat and drink, and Charlie loves their pulled pork sandwich so much, he had it two days in a row while he was housesitting in Winters so he could introduce me to it. We headed home on a full stomach, then Charlie and I snuck over to Froggy's for Carol's surprise birthday party. Carol's friends filled the bar. It was a tiki-themed party, so I'd made a set of 19 cat and dog tiki mugs which were used as centerpieces. Here are a few of my favorites:

New Year's Eve was spent preparing a handmade ravioli feast. I was too busy stressing over being late to take photos, but luckily Sarah thought to snap a picture, so here's some I stole from her. Happily, we had lots of hands to make the ravioli, and everyone was fine with dinner being a process. And even more fortunately, our Italian friend Tommaso showed up in the nick of time to show us how it's actually done.
Dinner was delicious. It was so good that Charlie and I had to take a nap afterwards and never made it to the New Year's Eve party. Oh well.
Charlie made up for it with a January birthday party that broke records. He had the brilliant idea of hiring a taco truck and inviting all his friends. We're not sure exactly how many people came, but someone counted 99 folks at one point, and the taco truck fed at least 75 before running out of food. Charlie helped serve a few plates. (Photo courtesy of Julia Luckenbill.)There was a pinata too. The kids all took a swing, then Charlie finished it off.
Happy birthday Charlie!

food

2011-10-17T10:31:00.000-07:00

I like food. And I like that Charlie likes food. This is a meal he made near the end of September.
And yes, that is Charlie's homemade sourdough topped by his mother's jam.

At any rate, I get to eat pretty well normally, but we recently had an even more amazing food weekend. Charlie was house/dogsitting for these lovely folks:

Charlie got permission for me to come hang out with the dogs too, and it was a treat especially since there was a piano and bookcases on bookcases of cookbooks and food books.

The first night, I brought ingredients for thai coconut chicken soup and endive/pear/blue cheese salad. They were so delicious, we forgot to photograph them. We started the next morning off with Swedish pancakes, bacon and a frittata made with locally grown peppers and some local eggs.We discovered a pasta machine, so in the evening we combined more peppers and some Cloverleaf tomatoes with ground bison and our homemade pasta.
Since breakfast was so good the first morning, Charlie surprised me the second morning by making more Swedish pancakes on his own as well as eggs and bacon. He learned from my mistake in halving the recipe and made the full recipe this time so we not only had larger pancakes, we had leftovers.Frankie had already had her breakfast, but she thought ours looked better.
That night we made Chinese style noodles. These were similar to Italian noodles with the addition of more water/less egg and dusting the dough with cornstarch to smooth it as it's pressed through the machine.
We did a cold noodle recipe with a soy sauce/black vinegar/scallion/sesame oil sauce. Very tasty and I was too hungry to take pictures, but I made chinese noodles again a couple days later as a stir fry this time.
After enjoying their pasta machine so much, I had to have one of my own. Coincidentally the one I purchased off of ebay turned out to be located in Winters where we'd been housesitting and I knew the folks selling it. Small world...

Chinese noodle recipe (adapted from The Modern Art of Chinese Cooking by Barbara Tropp)
3 cups flour
1 large egg or 2 medium eggs
3/4 cup water
1-1.5 tsp salt

Mix flour and salt and form it into a mound (I do this in a bowl to make cleaning easier). Make a dent in the middle for the egg. Crack egg(s) into indentation and beat, then add water and mix. Gradually incorporate flour into wet ingredients. Once it comes together as a dough, start to knead, adding more flour as necessary to keep hands from sticking (or more water if too dry). Knead until elastic and smooth then form into a dough ball, lightly oil the outside and let rest, covered for 20 minutes to 3 hours. The rest lets the gluten relax and really helps.

Divide dough into six parts. With each piece of dough, roughly flatten with hands and dust with cornstarch before running it through the thickest setting on the pasta machine. Fold in thirds, dust, run through thickest setting with folds to the sides, repeat 2-3 times. Continue dusting with cornstarch as needed and running through the machine at decreasing thicknesses until the thickness you want. Plenty of cornstarch helps...you shouldn't really need it to keep the dough from sticking in the machine, but it helps smooth the texture and produce a silkier noodle. I used the second to last setting "6" on my pasta machine. Let the thin sheets sit for a while on a towel to dry out a bit (15-30 minutes?) before cutting.

I cut the noodles with the thin cutters, taking each bundle after they went through and stretching them out a bit further. Long noodles are lovely, but for sanity in cooking, it helps to cut them to about 15 inches or so. Dust cut noodles with cornstarch to prevent clumping. Let sit before cooking. Noodles can sit outside the fridge for an hour or two before cooking, just fluff them occasionally, or can be stored in the fridge for a day (again fluff occasionally). They can also be dried completely or frozen. Cook in boiling water briefly...if made thin, they will only need around 10 seconds after the water comes back to a boil. Noodles should be tender but still have a slight bite. Stop the cooking by rinsing in cold water. If not immediately saucing, mix noodles with a little oil to prevent sticking.

Hardly Strictly Bluegrass

2011-10-14T00:16:00.000-07:00

The day after Lambtown, I hitched a ride with my friend Sarah and her dog Punky to San Francisco for Hardly Strictly Bluegrass. We succeeded in leaving nice and early and spent the whole day relaxing and enjoying good music and company. The musical highlight for me was Edgar Meyer, Bela Fleck and Zakir Hussein.

Sarah and I both erred on the side of bringing extra food so we enjoyed a feast of bread and cheese and tomatoes/basil/olive oil/garlic and vegetarian steamed buns and wine.

Punky made friends easily and attracted the attention of Chris and Sierra who joined us with their dog Fonz (short for Fonzarelli). Since Punk's full name is Punky Brewster, it was only fitting they should find each other.

Chris and Punky enjoyed meeting each other.

As always, the festival was pretty crowded.
At the Dvotchka show, people were hanging out in the trees to get a good view while other just hung out under them.
This dog was having a pretty relaxed time.

I was a bit surprised how relatively easy it was to find people--the magic of cell phones. Spencer found us first.

Then we met up with Michelle and Tom.

And finally I found Abby for the Emmylou Harris set.

We were relatively close but we still had to do some maneuvering to see over the tall folks in front of us since everyone was standing.Fun day of music followed up by dinner at a pho shop. Good times.

Lambtown

2011-10-13T13:22:00.001-07:00

Some weekends there are just too many fun things to do. Recently Full Belly Farm hosted Hoesdown, a harvest celebration, on the same weekend as Dixon had Lambtown, a celebration of the sheep industry (and Calpaca joined in with an alpaca show) and San Francisco had Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, a big free music festival in Golden Gate Park.

I spent Saturday at Lambtown. I'd meant to just go for a short time, dash in, say hi to my friends in the sheep to shawl competition, say hi to Bruce and Joan and their alpacas and restock my mohair supply. But Lambtown has gotten big. Dixon is a small town of about 18000, close to Davis, and Lambtown used to be this little event where they shut down a few blocks in the center of town and had a lamb cook off on the street with some vendors and a few people demonstrating spinning and weaving in a not very large room. Now it's at the fairgrounds and there is a giant warehouse full of people selling fiber arts related things and supplies, there's a long walkway lined with vendors, everything from people selling wool and knitting needles, to sunglasses and bonsai. There was a lot to see.

I was wondering how to find Ah...Sweet Alpacas when I ran into Bruce walking Phantom around to garner interest in the alpacas which were tucked away in a corner of the fairgrounds. I got to show Bruce and Joan the finished yarn that I'd started at their farm. Meanwhile, my old sheep-to-shawl team of the Silverado Guild made a beautiful lacy shawl out of wool and alpaca to win the competition and after the excitement was over, I was able to visit with some folks I hadn't seen for a while. I ran into three ladies from Anne's Web, the spinning guild in Salinas that was one of my favorite things about being in that area. We had a good fibery talk while we waited and waited and waited for the wool show to finish their judging so we could buy fleeces.

My goal had been to buy a kid mohair fleece and knitting needles for the rose-grey alpaca shawl and nothing more. There were so many tempting things, so setting myself a goal was really wise. But the farm where I'd been hoping to buy mohair brought fleeces for the show, but didn't have a booth and I was about to give up when my friend Vera found some gorgeously silky kid mohair from Janet Heppler's Nebo Rock Ranch. It was a small fleece, so I bought it. Then the wool show sale opened and I ended up buying the first place mohair fleece from Eureka Mohair, the farm I'd been looking for (and I think it's the ranch that produced the first mohair I ever bought, a batt of natural red yearling). That kid must be enjoying life, lots of dirt and vegetable matter, but the curl and shine are amazing.

Here's a photo of some Eureka Mohair Farm kid mohair in a new bag I sewed to store the picked locks:

National Alpaca Farm Days

2011-09-26T11:22:00.000-07:00

National Alpaca Farm Days this year was September 24th and 25th. I did a spinning demonstration at a nearby alpaca farm two years ago but missed last year, so I was excited that they asked me back this year. Spinning alpaca among the alpacas for 6 hours, what could be better?

Charlie joined me and we spent Sunday out at Ah...Sweet Alpacas, an alpaca farm between Vacaville and Winters. As always, the alpacas were cute.

Joan and Bruce were very welcoming and there were two girls who've been helping out with the alpacas and were eager to share their knowledge with visitors. Here's a photo of Charlie talking with Joan over the fiber boy pen. Now is a great time to get alpacas. These sweet fellows are for sale for $500 for two (you need at least two!) and less if you get more.

Amazingly (for september), it started to sprinkle on the way over, and it was overcast and sprinkling for much of the day. Fewer people came Sunday than Saturday, but we had a steady trickle of visitors. Luckily there was still time to visit with the alpacas. This is Cayenne, the matriarch of the girls.

Here is Sabrina. Bruce says she's the sweetest! Here's Rosie posing for the camera:
Joan gave me Rosie's seconds to spin. One of the great things about alpacas is their range of natural colors, 16 distinct shades. Rosie has a beautiful variegated rose-grey fleece (sheared last spring).
And here's the yarn I'm spinning.A photographer for Fairfield's paper, the Daily Republic, took a photo of me spinning, wearing one of my felted shawls...this one is silk and alpaca, naturally.
Alpaca is one of my favorite fibers to spin because it can be wonderfully soft and you can often spin it raw without further preparation after shearing. Unlike sheep wool, alpaca doesn't have lanolin, so as long as you don't mind the dust, you can spin it without washing it. (You can spin raw sheep wool, but depending on the amount of lanolin and how warm it is, it can be much more difficult to draft than washed wool, and the lanolin gets all over your hands and wheel). I started out demonstrating how to spin from the "cloud"--just fluffing up a bunch of alpaca and spinning. I also showed how to comb the alpaca using my mini combs, then spin from roving. Got a lot of spinning done, got in a few plugs for the Craft Center ("learn to spin at the CC!") and even got one lady excited about raising silkworms. Good day.

The sun finally came out towards the end of the day. And I saw firsthand why some of the alpaca I spin is so darn dusty.

Sewing Machine with Koi...it was meant to be

2011-09-23T01:35:00.000-07:00

My fish spinning wheel is finally nearing completion and is actually functional for spinning off the spindle.
I'd neglected gravity a bit when I designed it so it wanted to lean backwards. I tried to compensate by adding extra wings on the base, but it still seemed flimsy. I finally gave in and designed a new base which is heavier and so makes it a little more heavy/complicated to pack up the wheel for travel, but it should still be able to be packed up for travel more easily than my saxony wheel. I have some more sanding/finishing to do as well as completing the flyers, but it is finally so close. I'm also thinking of inlaying the new base to match the treadles. Here's a close-up of the inlaid treadles:

At any rate, I've been wanting a treadle sewing machine for a while. I already have a very lovely 1947 Singer sewing machine that Aaron had refurbished for me, and I'm not that much of a seamstress, so I didn't really need another sewing machine, but I did really want one. What if there was an extended blackout?

So I might have been perusing Craigslist once in a while. And I might have happened across an ad for a machine right here in Davis. The couple selling it were very nice and when I went over to their house to check it out, they had a very friendly orange kitty who offered to assist, i.e. sit on my feet. The decals are pretty worn, but they're koi!--matches my koi spinning wheel. And the cabinet is in great shape and is oak which matches Steve's new cabinets, so he agreed the sewing machine can live in the living room. (My room is a little packed.)

Here she is closed:open:
And sewing the hems of some handwoven towels: (I took the towels off the loom ages ago and never finished the edges. It took buying a new sewing machine to finish them.)

Detail of the cabinet carving. Ok so it's a flowery flourish, but doesn't it look like koi?
And look--definitely koi!
The drawers are in good shape with pretty carvings.
And interesting innards:
There are quite a few attachments, and I've been trying to figure out what they are and how to use them. That's quite a step for me since I've never used any alternative feet even on modern machines. I've sewn all my zippers by hand in fear and ignorance of the zipper foot. Here's the box helpfully marked "Attachments"I bought a book on sewing machine attachments, so here's what I think I have:

Ruffler:Tucker:

Quilting guide:

If I'm wrong with any of my labeling, please let me know! And if you have a recommendation for learning how to use them, I'd appreciate references as well. The book I got was not as helpful as I'd like.

Point Reyes weekend

2011-08-23T13:08:00.000-07:00

I'm kinda bad at keeping up with things. And I take tons of photos, but then have to go through them and pick out the best ones, adjust contrast, etc...and then it's a week later and I'm on to something different. But in the interest of trying to do one blog post every few months...

My weekend started off with a stint at the Yolo County Fair in Woodland. My band played a looong set. Usually we play 50 minute sets then take a break and do 3 sets in all, but since we only had an hour and a half, we played all the way through. It was fun even though my fingers made themselves blisters then ripped right through them. I'd have better calluses by now if they didn't keep peeling off.

Dropped the bass off at home and took off for Point Reyes to see two of my favorite local bands, Miss Lonely Hearts and West Nile Ramblers. They played a great show with so much energy that even the pool players were dancing. The two bands alternated...each playing a few songs, with quick switches in between. Afterwards, we camped out on the town baseball diamond and had a slow morning with towel filtered coffee and kickball.

Charlie and I checked out the farmer's market and feasted on an amazing grilled cheese sandwich from GBD and oysters while listening to Too Hot, a guitar/bass female duo. Then we parted ways with Wyatt and friends to poke around the thrift store. Found a great enamel pot for solar dyeing at a much cheaper price than the Davis/Dixon thrift stores. Point Reyes Books proved a dangerous place as I picked up The Penland Book of Glass, books on Peruvian textiles and jewelry smithing and a book of feminist fairy tales with short stories by notable writers such as Margaret Atwood and Jane Yolen.

After comparing the grill stand's Hawaiian burger to their blue cheese burger (both excellent, but the Hawaiian was amazing), we extricated ourselves from town and headed off to the ocean. Finally, photos:
The beach was beautiful if foggy and cold.
The water was really really cold. Still, there were tidepools to explore.
And really cute hermit crabs.
But nothing was as cute as this guy on the path down to the beach.
I fell in love. Charlie was very patient.
Lots of bigger wildlife as well. Deer blending into the hillside.

An owl blending in too.
The highlight was perhaps the first thing we stopped to photograph...a herd of elk.
It was very foggy so difficult to get good photos, but wonderful to watch. There were quite a few elk. In one of the groups, there was a large male bugling and charging at another male on the periphery. With the dusky lighting and all the fog, it was a magical sight.

Whole Earth and Monterey

2011-05-09T23:41:00.000-07:00

Busy weekend, starting with the Whole Earth Festival in Davis. We caught some good music, including Random Abiladeze. I first met him when he briefly joined up with our hip hop band Soul Remnants about 6 years ago.

Then (a graphic I did from a photograph of one of our shows):and now:Yumi and Betta made an amazing dinner of gnocchi, salad and tiramisu as a N St community meal and brought it out to the festival. It was fun to picnic with a bunch of friends.

I spent some time at the festival on Saturday as well before heading down to Monterey for a quick visit and lots of eating. In 24 hours, we had Thai food in Pacific Grove at Pacific Thai Cuisine and Oaxacan food at La Tortuga Torteria in Seaside, then made risotto for dinner at Aaron and Bronwyn's swanky new house in the hills.

I got to see Laura and Yazu's beautiful new place and meet their resident feline.

Since it had been a while since I'd been down, Aaron took me to the beach.
It was a beautiful day, big waves...and sweet tidepools...

Some of the seaweed was beautifully iridescent, though that was hard to catch in photographs.We found starfish both in...

...and out of the water.We found little crabs...
...and bigger crabs.
Lots of sea anemones...

Lots and lots.
Even the iceplants were gorgeous.

Shiny Fancies: Fin

2011-03-24T03:04:00.000-07:00

The last piece in my show was this yarn/knitting needle installation, Tangle.

The glass knitting needles and handspun art yarn that I make are one of a kind "art" but are also functional and since I make them largely with the goal of selling them, they're a little different than the rest of the pieces. I was a little hesitant to include them in the show but I had played around with the idea of using the large blank wall you face when you walk into the Craft Center. It seemed like such a nice place for a big piece and it called to me..."make a mess."
So I did.

Detail of a lengthwise knitted "scribble lace" scarf knitted with some of my very first art yarn made in a class with Pluckyfluff's Lexi Boeger.
Siamese cat and boxer dog knitting needles with a swatch of "Salamander Jr" yarn

This next swatch was the very first thing knitted by my friend Charlie. I was a mean knitting teacher and gave him one of my crazy art yarns to learn to knit (it was all I had on me at the time). Beagle knitting needles.

Mohair from Eureka Mohair Farm in Tollhouse, CA. I dyed the locks and spun it into a "landscape yarn" with slow changing colors evoking a sunrise when knitted up. Turtle knitting needles.
Chihuahuas working on "Au Naturel" yarn, natural colored merino x lamb from Humble Hills, MO.
Detail of a matching yarn to "Au Naturel" showing off the lock structure (foreground) with my random generated scarf in the background (orange and blue). The scarf was created by assigning numbers to different elements (colors, techniques etc) then drawing numbers out of a hat to give myself a guideline for creating the yarn.
Couple more detail photos of the tangle:

Individual closeups of the yarns coming soon...these yarns are being reskeined and rewashed/set then will be sold on etsy at a discount...check it out! (coming soon)

My friends were awesome and filled the gallery for my closing reception (it is admittedly a small gallery). It was also my birthday, and though I had been frantically working on my spinning wheel in the hopes of finishing it by this birthday, I decided not to rush the finishing process (literally, I'm finally on the sanding and oiling) and cooked all day. I like to do something cool on my birthday and usually I try to do something artistic. This year, I decided to let go of needing to make something tangible and lasting.

I like the number 7. I was born in '77. My brother was born 7/7. It's a good number. The long awaited spinning wheel has 7 fish, just because as long as I was making it, it technically wasn't any more difficult to make 7 fish than 6 fish or 8 fish. For the closing reception, I wanted to make 7 different roundish treats.

I've noticed that though I like to cook a lot of things, there are a disproportionate number of things I cook that are little and round, so it was not at all difficult to come up with 7 round things.

1) Romano cheese sourdough bread puffs: sourdough bread balls cooked in garlic butter then rolled in romano cheese.

2) Green tea balls: similar dough to sesame balls, a dough made with glutinous rice flour, sweet potato and matcha filled with poppy seed paste and deep fried.

3) Cream puffs. 'nuff said
4) Chocolate peanut butter bonbons. Aaron's mom's recipe.

5) Chocolate gingersnap rum balls. I was impressed that this mound was almost completely eaten.

6) Chile cardamom truffles. Dark and delicious with a slow burn.
7) Pao de quiejo: tapioca cheese puffs. I made the batter at home and brought it to the craft center, then baked it in their oven so they came out piping hot for the reception. Apparently I forgot to photograph the plate before they got devoured. Here they are from the other night.

Shiny Fancies: Glass and wood and silk and metal

2011-03-23T12:53:00.000-07:00

Originally I'd planned a few series for this show...a series of pots, a series of lamps, a series of shawls and a series of mobiles. The pots and shawls happened, the mobiles never got made and I stopped after two lamps which don't really go together anyways.

This lamp was the first in my projected series of lamps using wood, fiber and glass. The wood is scavenged camphor from the wood bin at the Craft Center. I found the thin pieces with natural edges and saved them not knowing what I'd do with them, but the wood smelled too delicious to resist. I've never worked with or even seen camphor before, but later found out that this was from a bookcase my friend Dylan was commissioned to build. The photos of the full boards are breathtaking and I can't even imagine how wonderful it must have smelled while he was working on the case. I added in some found maple for the edges of the base, then foolishly tried handcut dovetails to attach a little block of oak to the maple for the lamp base. I like the idea of hand tools, but really really really need a class to learn how to use them well. The dovetails took forever and don't show unless you look at the lamp from the bottom and the whole thing is very probably overengineered, but hey, it works. The silk is from the silkworms I raised last year. I let the moths emerge, then degummed the cocoons and stretched them out over a frame to form the panels. The panels were then stiffened with paverpol, a fabric hardener.

The other lamp is a redo from a series of lamps I made for Tom Wickersham's Ides of March way back in 2005. Maurice Ravel's Piano Sonatine is a piece I first played in junior high, studied again with Susan Aceto at Williams, then used as an audition piece to get into private lessons with Lois Brandwynne at Davis. I've played piano since I was tiny, but had never been good about practicing until I got to Williams and decided I needed to learn a piano concerto and tried to learn Chopin's Piano Concerto No 1 on my own. I soon realized I needed a teacher and found Susan Aceto. She was wonderful for me, helping me improve my playing and technique while finding pieces that I really liked to keep it all fun. I've never worked so hard at classical piano as I did in college.

Ravel is an impressionist composer and Susan used the idea of colors and images to help me improve my playing of the piece, especially the third movement (which was the first movement of the piece I'd learned as a kid and is the most difficult). I played the entire piece as part of my college senior recital, but my most memorable performance of this piece was in the impressionist gallery at the Clark Art Institute on a beautiful old piano surrounded by Degas, Monet, Renoir and more.

I created images in my head for the different parts of the third movement and still have those images in my head, though I can't play the piece nearly as well now as I did then. I thought about doing a series of lithographs of the images, but never got the print time. When the theme for the 2005 Ides of March house art show was "Found in Translation" it seemed the appropriate time to translate the images from my favorite piano piece into a different medium.

There's an old weaving magazine called "Loom Music" and weaving patterns or drafts do look a little like sheet music. There are many possible ways to translate music into weaving. Since I wanted to do a series of fabrics from different parts of the music, I decided to translate bits of melody into the treadling (which determines the order in which sets of threads are lifted). The loom I used was an eight harness, 10 treadle loom, so I didn't quite have enough "notes" for an entire scale. Taking out the sharps and flats gave me 8 notes so I threaded a point twill and set two treadles to tabby and used the other 8 for my melodies. The fabric was made of 60/2 silk at 48 ends per inch (i.e. really thin yarn fairly densely set which means it took a really long time to set up the loom). I'd painted both my warp and weft threads in sections according to the colors for different parts of the song, so I ended up with a series of very different pieces of fabric, all on the same warp. Cutting the silk fabric fabric was the most painful part and I was tempted to just display the cloth, but I wanted to make a series of lamps since light was so important to the impressionists. I was rushed for time at the end and was never a good seamstress in the best of times, so I never felt I did the fabric and concept justice in the actual lamps.

A very long story to get to the point. This lamp is my redo. I took my precious fabric off the clumsy wire frame and designed wooden triangles to hold it instead. The wood is from some beautiful dense aromatic hardwood I got a while back in trade for a bunch of fleece. It's a wonderfully thick piece, so it felt a little wasteful to rip it into thin strips, but it was the perfect wood for this project. I was thrilled that my miters worked and the triangles glued up well. I made a series of glass rings to hold them together and very gingerly fused the glass rings together with a tiny jewelry torch. Happily I didn't scorch any of the wood. I may refine it further, but I'm much happier with this version than the original.
Few more pieces to round out the show:

November Rain. One of the only two welding projects I completed before I apparently forgot how to TIG weld. Steel, human hair (from back when I had very long hair) and glass. I made the two figures while I was depressed after a breakup. Apparently I was enjoying wallowing in grief :)

Moving Forwards. Glass, walnut. Walnut is my favorite wood and I like working with it even just to sand it down really fine and finish it with a nice oil. The glass figures are part of a study I was doing on movement.

Women Charge. Glass, silk, paverpol. More glass women. I can't remember when I started this piece. I wanted to make a bunch of glass women marching with fists in the air, but once I'd made a few I wasn't sure what to do with them. I tried welding together the steel framework for a glass bridge but found my welding ability had evaporated. I didn't really know what I wanted with a bridge anyways. Paverpol is a fabric hardener for sculpture that I'm just learning about. For this piece, I thought maybe I could make a silk "rock" out of silk roving and paverpol. It looks, well, interesting, but isn't as solid as I'd imagined, hence the women appear to be charging a little overzealously rather than marching. Hmm...

This is a long post already, so I'll end here. One last piece in the show...

Shiny Fancies: Part 3 -- Potted plants

2011-03-10T01:38:00.001-08:00

My glass pieces are done by flameworking, also called lampworking, which uses a torch to melt the glass. Glassblowing generally refers to larger scale work done with a furnace, but you can also blow glass on a smaller scale with a torch. I usually make solid sculpture, generally small (hence my class title "Tiny Glass Sculpture") but for this show, I was convinced that it would be difficult to fill the gallery with my tiny tiny critters. And as long as I was going big(ger), I decided I'd experiment with blowing glass as well. All the flowers in this series are blown in some way, as are the leaves.
Most of the petals are pulled besides the obviously blown one. The leaf construction is less apparent. For these leaves, I blew a large bubbles, then cut the hot glass with shears into leaf blades. Blowing is pretty fun, but cutting glass is even more so. I like the organic way the leaves moved as the soft glass flopped while it was cut.

One thing I really like doing in glass is glass chains. I still have a bunch of fine silver wire for making silver chains, but haven't quite found the time to do the tedious fusing of rings in order to do a handmade chain. Making glass chains is a slightly different technique and is still tedious but it encourages me to make fun handles on my ceramics. I also like doing glass nudes and am working on movement and expression in my figures.
The next piece again incorporates glass chains into the pot. This one took a while to attach all the glass rings around the ceramic loops.

The pitcher plants were a lot of fun to make. I coil-potted green, blew out the bubble slightly and coated it with a bit of red frit (small glass fragments/dust). I then popped a hole in it and lined the opening with red. The sides were pushed and pinched to further shape the flowers. I'm excited to explore the variety of pitcher plants...so much potential.
The last potted plant is a fantasy flower. I wanted to play more with cutting glass, so I coil-potted white, then reddish purple, then green. I blew out the bubble, then transferred it over onto a preformed stem. Heating up one section at a time, I then cut apart the petals. The stamens were added last.
This pot, like the others, was slab formed. My friend Charlie helped form the band running around and through the pot. Initially I was going to have the climber on a rope or chain coming from the top band, but she wanted to hang onto the pot directly.

Shiny Fancies: Part 2--Head Cups

2011-03-01T00:12:00.000-08:00

Ceramics is a class I took early on at the Craft Center, but never really got into it. My problem was that I'm not good at throwing, and when I went in to practice, I spent hours making mud. Mud between the fingers is very nice and soothing, but I kind of wanted to be throwing mugs and bowls and nice pretty useful things. I'd make a couple wonky vessels, then not set food in the ceramics studio for another couple years until something would spur me to try again.

Glass I like. And glass can be attached to ceramics. So I do ceramics in order to attach glass to it. And I keep practicing because maybe one of these days, something will click and my body will balance and out will come a symmetrical bowl. Until then...

I made these head cups to practice throwing off the hump. It was wonderfully freeing; since I was going to connect and sculpt the thrown shapes, it was ok if they weren't wonderful and even and it was totally fine if they leaned and had thin spots. I threw tiny saucers for the bases/necks and larger cups for the heads and didn't care if they got all distorted when I took them off the wheel.
I snapped photos of myself making different faces to sculpt the expressions, then flameworked glass eyes. Each eye was made as a miniature marble with the structure of a real eye: retina backing a clear posterior chamber then the colored iris surrounding a clear window (the lens/pupil) to the back of the eye with more clear glass (cornea) in front then white wrapped around the back for the sclera. The hot glass eyes were then squished into the clay so there would be more surface area to glue. Worked great except you can't see the eyes really well on some of the cups. Some of the girls got earrings and nose rings as well. The hair is from various sheep, alpaca and goat fleeces. Head #4 above has cormo (a very soft breed of sheep) locks from hogget 910 of Cormo Sheep and Wool Farm in Orland, California.
Head #2 above has suri alpaca locks from "Juan Valdez" of Smooth as Silk Alpaca Ranch in Deerborn, Wisconsin.

Head #3 has merino cross locks from Humble Hills Sheep and Wool Farm in Franklin, Missouri.

Head #1 has yearling mohair locks from "Otter" of Eureka Mohair Farm in Tollhouse, California.

As head cups, they obviously needed their heads filled with something besides hair. I usually work quite small; the class I teach is titled "Tiny Glass Sculptures" for a reason, but for this show, I branched out and made BIG marbles. Making big marbles is hot!

Next: more ceramics, i.e. things for glass attachment

Shiny Fancies: Playing with Silk and Glass--Part 1, shawls

2011-02-24T22:44:00.000-08:00

My art show is currently up at the UC Davis Craft Center Gallery, now through March 11th.
The Craft Center has been one of my favorite things about Davis. It has a bunch of different studios: ceramics, jewelry, flameworking, textiles, photography, welding, screenprinting, woodworking. They offer classes which are open to everyone, both students and community members. You can also use the studios on your own when there aren't classes in session. I started volunteering at the Craft Center in the summer of 2001. The first class I took was a black and white photography developing and printing class. I started teaching tatting (a Victorian form of knotted lace) shortly after. I switched to teaching weaving at some point and taught that for several years, and now have been teaching "Tiny Glass Sculpture," a flameworking class, for a number of years. Since volunteers and teachers get half price on classes, I've taken as many classes as I can and have learned so many cool techniques. Bookbinding, spinning, weaving, stained glass, fused glass, beadmaking, glass sculpture, ceramics, screenprinting, woodworking, ornamental metal, soapmaking, sewing, wood turning, enameling, jewelry making, lost wax casting, lapidary...I don't have much of an attention span; I like being able to do and doing everything. My show reflects that. I'd contemplated all sorts of ideas for this show. Grand themes for exploration. Experiments with a certain media, even with a certain technique in that media. In the end, I just made a bunch of things that I like. Beautiful and shiny and colorful.

My shawls are felted silk, inspired when I dyed up some silk roving and while I was preparing it for spinning by "refluffing" it. Silk sticks to itself and looks crisp when it has just been dyed. When I started to pull it apart again, it clung to itself in a delicate web. I loved the look and it made a beautiful shawl but was way too delicate.
I thought nuno felting might enable me to preserve the lacey ethereal look of the silk while making it more sturdy. Nuno felting is a wet felting technique, usually done with thin layers of wool on silk gauze to create a thin, light felt. Wool felts because each fiber has little microscopic scales which open up in hot water, then interlock with agitation and soap as the fibers matt together into felt. Alpaca has smaller (shorter?) scales than sheep wool, but also felts. For this first shawl, I hand-dyed silk gauze and baby alpaca fleece to match the silk roving I had dyed earlier.

For the second shawl, I wanted to capture more of the ethereal quality of the original idea. I liked the way the contrasting parts of the silk on the first shawl writhed and wriggled but wanted something even lighter and more open. I dyed the silk roving and wool roving at the same time so they would match. Once everything had dried after the dyeing, I pulled open the silk roving into a rectangular shaped web then distributed an even thin layer of wool over it. The completed wet finished shawl is cobwebby but holds together nicely.

In the third and fourth shawls, I wanted to depart from the rectangular shawl shape. Both are made similarly by pulling sections of silk roving out and spreading them with some overlap to form a triangle or half circular area. The third shawl uses natural grey baby alpaca to felt the silk.

This fourth shawl uses a cormo lamb fleece from Cormo Sheep and Wool Farm in nearby Orland, California.

Next: Head cups with giant marbles

Colorado

2011-02-16T09:39:00.000-08:00

I took the train to Colorado recently and had an amazing adventure. We took the California Zephyr from Davis to Glenwood Springs, a trip of 25 hours. The train is definitely the way to travel. Time passed quickly with the beautiful views and we got to relax and knit as well as walk around to stretch our legs. I got a little snap happy and took over 800 pictures on the whole trip. I'd never seen the Rockies before, that's my excuse. At any rate, it's taking me a while to sort through them, but here are some from the train ride there.

More soon...

Recent adventures

2010-09-05T14:54:00.000-07:00

Despite my utter inability to keep up with blogging, interesting things have been happening the past few months. August 1st, two historic houses were moved across downtown Davis to a new site to be made into new co-ops.
The Solar Community Housing Association runs several co-ops and has been working on establishing a new one. Two houses across the street from Davis' Central Park were donated and there was a big turnout to watch them be moved. It was a huge cooperative project, with tree trimmers, PG&E, the railroad and the city all having folks there to facilitate the 7 block journey through the heart of downtown Davis. Mark Chang brought his piano car and played "Our house, in the middle of the street, our house..." as part of a procession of bikes following the house.
The houses will be retrofitted for LEED certification and will rely on a large number of volunteers. Anyone in the area is welcome to come help out, no experience necessary. A bunch of my friends and I helped out at their big September work day. See their website for more details.

Also in August, I finally made it to the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. There was so much more than I expected, everything from tiny frogs:

to little brown birds:to catfish:I really liked the giant catfish.The living roof was beautiful, especially at dusk:

The next adventure was camping at Arroyo Seco. We hiked in and set up camp, then went for a swim before settling down for the night. The next day we decided to do a nice little day hike out to Tassajara Hot Springs. It didn't look far on the map. There were beautiful flowers along the trail.

and manzanita

and butterflies

and cool creeksWe went along the Horse Pasture Trail from Marble Peak Trail then took the Tassajara Cutoff Trail. There was evidence of the recent fires.and there were beautiful views

but Horse Pasture and Tassajara Cutoff trails were so overgrown that it was slow going slogging through them. It took us so much longer that we didn't have time to soak at Tassajara before turning around and taking the Tony Trail back. Tony Trail went up up up before going down and was washed out in places on top of having plenty of overgrowth. The burrs loved Aaron's socks.
Since I hadn't checked trail reports before going on this trip, I was completely unprepared in shorts and between brush and burrs and ivy and what not, my legs were in rough shape by the end.

We were very happy to make it out of Ventana Wilderness.
In September we went to the Monterey County Fair:and I was excited to see the Monterey Wool Auction
I was good and didn't bid on anything since I met Sue Reuser and picked up the three cormo/cormo x fleeces I'd bought from her in June. Her fleeces are pricey but well worth it...so gorgeous. Her fleeces took a bunch of top honors in the wool show and if I didn't have my lovelies filling the trunk, I would have been tempted to bid on more.

Doxie:hogget 910:hogget 925:

I also had some time to saw seashells by the sea shore (to inlay the treadles of my spinning wheel):while Aaron had his African drumming practice:

Culinary adventures included a mild fixation on pluots after reading Chip Brantley's book "The Perfect Fruit"

and a new obsession with making risotto:
Shrimp and fresh veggie risotto

Heat up 1/4 cup olive oil in a stock pot.
Add 2/3 c minced onion and 4-5 large cloves minced garlic and cook until aromatic.
Add ~1 cup chopped sundried tomatoes, ~1-2 tb finely chopped rosemary and 1tb finely chopped sage and cook for a few minutes.
Add 1 cup risotto rice and mix with oils, herbs, etc.
Add preheated chicken/veggie stock +/- water in 1/2 cup aliquots, stirring and waiting for liquid to be absorbed completely before adding more. Continue adding liquid until rice is done, still slightly firm in the center.
Add in fresh peas and corn. Cook for a just little bit, then remove from heat and add in 1 cup grated parmesan cheese. Stir to combine. Salt and pepper to taste. Add pre-cooked shrimp and stir until warmed through, then serve. Top with a squirt of lemon juice if desired.

Laotian weaving workshop

2010-07-11T21:52:00.000-07:00

Recently, I attended a Lao textile workshop through the Silverado Guild taught by Kongthong Nanthanvongdouangsy of Phaeng Mai Gallery. Phaeng Mai Gallery does the whole process from reeling silk to dyeing with natural dyes to weaving and finishing. They do beautiful woven fabrics, both traditional and modern, and run a school to train future master weavers.

The fabrics they make are amazing:
We started off watching a video about the gallery and weaving school and learning a bit about traditional Lao weaving. Then we picked out a cloth we liked and charted the pattern.
Meanwhile the students who had done the workshop the day before were trying to alter a table loom to use supplemental warp weaving techniques.
Barbara's workshop loom was modified to set it up for Lao weaving. The shafts were removed and additional bars placed across the top of the frame to hold the vertical pattern strings, two plain weave shafts and a reed/beater.

Here are the string heddles for the two plain weave shafts. These shafts were attached to two treadles.The pattern is picked according to the graph, then transferred to the pattern strings in the back of the loom. The pattern strings "save" the pattern so that once it's been picked once, you can pull it up again without repicking it.
Here's Debra spreading the pattern threads so the next pattern weft can be thrown.Dyed silk used as weft. We used several of these strands at once for the thicker pattern weft, less for the plain weave weft. For each "line" of the graphed pattern, there were two picks thrown of the pattern weave alternating with plain weave.

Our group sample:

Flowers

2010-07-09T09:30:00.000-07:00

A lot has happened in the last year, but one of these things is that Aaron has started growing flowers in his garden. Not just flowers like this:

But flower flowers:

After years of scoffing at flowers as useless, it all started with a little wild lupine seedling he nursed along from seed. He planted it in a pot in Davis and it survived being knocked over twice by the cats and made it to Spreckels where it got a place of honor in the ground. And it grew big!

It took its time blooming and when it finally did over a year later, the flowers were pretty but Aaron recognized it as an invasive species in this area, so out it came. RIP little (big) lupine.

However, that started him on a lupine seed collecting spree. He grew more varieties from locally collected seed.

He collected and planted seeds from other wildflowers as well.

Meanwhile we planted some flowers in the shady area of the garden which wasn't good for "real" crops. Columbines are my favorite flower; Aaron got this one last year without knowing what it was.

Some flowers were planted as beneficial insect attractors:

Coreiopsis--also good for dyeing
PhaceliaYarrow and stattice

And of course, a lot of vegetables have attractive flowers as well.Potato

Rapini
Some sort of squash (pepo!)

Anise

Scarlet runner, bicolor

Cucumber

And then there are all the sunflowers.

And lots of busy insects
And yet more flowers...

And not a flower, tobacco:

Garden

2010-06-09T23:52:00.000-07:00

Aaron's garden from December to May

Creeping thyme path
December:

May:

Other views

Food in the garden:Food out of the garden

Triple play corn from last summer:
Making cornmeal in the grinder Aaron got me for my birthday.

colorful stir-fry
Egg from one of the girls, freshly harvested purple potatoes.
Unfortunately his raspberries haven't ripened yet so these are commercial.

Fort Ord

2010-02-25T20:38:00.000-08:00

After some nice full weeks in Davis, I finally made it back to Spreckels. Early morning train rides are much better with croissants and to ensure a good ride, I got both a chocolate croissant and an almond croissant from Village Bakery. Decadence.

Aaron picked me up from the train station and after a lunch of pupusas, lobster bisque and sanddabs, he decided to play hooky from work and enjoy the afternoon with me. After working in the garden for a bit, we went to Fort Ord for a short hike.

The soil scientist couldn't resist examining the abrupt transition between the topsoil and the clay layer underneath.
The trees were beautiful.
But what really interested us were the mushrooms underneath.
An agaricus And an amanitaSee the volva and the eggs.Lots of the mushrooms were in pretty rough shape, but this was impressive. And lots of maggots!There were plenty of other interesting things as well.

shooting stars

wild cucumber

lupine

2009-12-17T13:29:00.000-08:00

I took a ceramics class at the Craft Center a long time ago to learn how to throw and was thoroughly discouraged. Years later, a friend who teaches ceramics later gave me a private lesson, which helped a little, but I definitely need lots of practice before I'll be making thin walled symmetrical vessels with any consistency. However, I love the way ceramics interacts with glass, so I've started practicing throwing again, throwing little vessels off the hump and not worrying too much if they're perfect because I then transform them into these little face cups. I'm working on a series with different expressions...I think I started this series in the summer, but I haven't been in Davis enough to finish them.

Here are the first two:
ceramics (Death Valley clay), flameworked glass eyes, suri alpaca locks (Juan Valdez is the alpaca's name)

ceramics, flameworked glass eyes and earrings, yearling mohair locks (courtesy of Otter from Eureka! Mohair Farm in Tollhouse, CA) She was going to have a tongue piercing too, but it made her tongue too delicate so I had to leave out the hole.

I'm enjoying this method of making glass eyes...making them sort of like real eyes with a "retina" of aurora behind clear glass, then an iris of whichever color that leaves an open "pupil." I then coat this with a white "sclera" and finish it off with a clear cornea. The whole thing has more depth than putting a colored iris and black pupil on the surface of the eye. I make it all wonderfully round and then smoosh it into the eye socket which distorts it but it still seems to look ok.

I forgot to take a photo of the hanging trapeze girl I gave to the Craft Center winter auction, but here's another sculpture I did recently:

And Sparrow laid her first egg! Yes it's grey greenish. And small, but yummy.

More food

2009-12-11T20:12:00.001-08:00

I'm kind of making up for not blogging much this year by posting a bunch of things all at once. But in an effort to avoid my forays into journaling (I would do an entry about every five or dozen years in which I would attempt to catch up on everything that had happened since the last entry), I'm mostly posting pictures which just a few words.

It would be a shame to miss memorializing some culinary adventures.

Like stuffed zucchini accompanied by fried stuffed squash blossoms:
We made this in late summer with some large zucchini from our garden. Stuffing was made from seasoned pork and vegetables stir-fried and mixed with egg, then stuffed into the hollowed zucchini and topped with cheese. The stuffed squash blossoms were made as follows.

Stuffed Squash Blossoms

fresh squash blossoms, washed, dried, stamens removed
1 cup cottage cheese
1 cup crumpled queso fresco or other mild cheese like farmer's cheese (grated)
5 green onions, minced
salt and pepper to taste

buttermilk
corn flour mixed with flour of choice...white is fine for traditionalists, a mix of rice and bean plus or minus tapioca flour works great for gluten-free folks. Almost anything will work.
seasoning, like garlic powder, ground coriander, chili powder, salt and pepper

Mix the cottage cheese, queso fresco, and chopped green onions together then salt and pepper to taste. Fill each squash blossom with the cheese mixture, twisting the top to secure. Pour some buttermilk in one bowl and the mix the flours with the seasonings in another bowl. Dip each stuffed squash blossom in the buttermilk then dredge with seasoned flour. Fry the squash blossoms until golden and delicious.

This works great with anaheim peppers as well. And you can do fried green tomatoes at the same time with the buttermilk and seasoned flour.

Then there's stuffed bell peppers. Aaron brought these beauties back from one of his worksites. It's nice to have a guy who works with veggies.

Bell peppers stuffed with a rice pork veggie mixture, topped of course with cheese.

And this has nothing to do with the food above, but this was one of our more recent dinners.
Stir-fry--garlic, ginger, carrots, peas, dried chili peppers and bok choy from the garden supplemented with onions, shitake, rapini and squid not from the garden.
I just wanted a photo of food with tentacles.

Pizza!

2009-12-11T19:20:00.001-08:00

Sadly I haven't been playing as much music as I used to. I've kind of drifted away from my former life goal to find the perfect bassist and drummer. But recently I got to jam again and have caught the music bug again. Actually got out of the house to hear some live music including Wyatt of Miss Lonelyhearts at the Irish Pub in Winters. I bugged my friend John into jamming with me after work on Monday, so we made plans to make pizza and noise.

Work never ends as early as it's supposed to, so we got a late start with the pizza-making. I had the other half of some sourdough wheat walnut dough that I'd baked a few days earlier, which I figured would make good pizza crust. Unfortunately, I'd put so much ground walnuts in that it didn't hold together well when thin, though it was a beautiful purple color. Over Deschutes Green Lakes Ale and spiced spiked apple cider courtesy of Nora, we decided to make the first pizza a deep dish pizza. John pre-cooked the fillings...onions, mushrooms, garlic and bell peppers. We heated oil in a cast iron skillet and fitted the crust in to brown. Cheese followed, then fillings then more cheese and tomato sauce (mixed with more cheese). Sprinkled parmesan on top and baked for a very very long time.

Meanwhile, we prepared a thin crust pizza. John made a magnificent herbes de provence garlicky white sauce and we combined olives and marinated artichokes and thin sliced red onions on the crust with more cheese (naturally) and the sauce.

Deep dish uncut:
A slice:
The thin crust:
Unfortunately, we ate at 11:30 and never got around to playing.
And following the theme of cats sleeping on guys:

Little things

2009-12-11T19:01:00.001-08:00

I'm not getting as much flameworking done, going between Davis and Spreckels, but I did work on some more tiny animals.

I made a glass Sadie cat for Carol who collects little glass animals. She asked for some little horses.

And for some little Boston terriers:The cat with them is supposed to be an oriental shorthair. I think I need to work on plain cats first.

This little black kitty looks like Sherman, so he went home with his person, my fellow vet, Melissa. He's perched on top of a cat food can for scale.

It's a good challenge trying to get these as small and detailed as possible.

Adventures

2009-11-22T20:41:00.001-08:00

The fall has swept past so fast, I didn't get a chance to post photos of...

breaking in my new boots:

hiking at Los Padres Dam:

trekking to Lacis, the lace museum in Berkeley with Carmel Crafts Guild:

hiking at Pinnacles:

finally finishing Aaron's hat (handspun natural colored baby alpaca from three different cria, handknit on size 00 needles with double-layered ear flaps and headband, started for his Christmas present when we first started dating and hopefully worth the wait):

This means I also missed the end of summer...

sunflowers:
hopi dye amaranth (which so far only seems to yield yellow):

nasturtiums and arugula growing everywhere:
and beets:
chili peppers:
scarlet runner beans:

triple play sweet corn and rosa bianca eggplant from the Davis garden:
The tripleplay corn was delicious when young:
One of the ears of corn in Davis got infected with smut. I was very excited--huitlacoche is a delicacy, a very grotesque delicacy. Aaron and I met after a smut party, actually...For those who don't live in Davis and haven't attended a smut party, corn smut is the fungus Ustilago mayis which infects corn and causes the kernels to balloon to enormous misshapen monstrosities. It's also known as huitlacoche which appetizingly means "raven's excrement." It is quite tasty, kind of like an earthy mushroom. I had too little for tacos, but it added a bit of oomph to a pasta with fresh thai basil and queso fresco.

Some people might call it a waste of time

2009-10-02T14:57:00.000-07:00

But look what I learned to make:

Cute chicks

2009-09-07T21:45:00.000-07:00

Growth

2009-08-08T23:42:00.001-07:00

In the spring, we moved into a little house in Spreckels with a huge backyard. The owners had created raised beds when they lived there, but the previous tenants hadn't been gardeners so the garden was somewhat neglected. Here it is in March.

Aaron got started clearing the beds, trimming back the rosemary and planting.
A lot of hard work and a month later, here's the garden in April with strawberries in the foreground, the bean trellis up in the back and some small tomatoes and lettuce visible in the midground.

It took a while for things to start growing well. Masses of earwigs tried to wipe out the little starts initially. But by May things were growing nicely.

Monterey County is generally about 10 degrees cooler than Davis, but sometimes it's 20-30 degrees cooler. That's nice when I drive down from sweltering Davis, but some of the plants wish it were warmer. It took a while for things to really take off but by June the tomatoes were getting big, the coriander was starting to bloom and the squash were getting ready to take over the world. We planted corn and sunflowers and prepared a new bed where we planted hopi red dye amaranth, japanese indigo, more bok choi, sweet potatoes, more beans and more basil
July was spent trying to corral unruly squash and tomatoes. The pest problem was improving/changing though there was a large beast who got the beets.
By August, the buttercup squash has extended practically everywhere and has 10-15 fruits. (Pepoes!) The coriander is drying in the garage. The sunflowers are blooming, we've been eating fresh corn and collecting zucchini and tomatoes, tomatoes, tomatoes.

Aaron also had the brilliant idea of making a little privacy screen along the driveway with corn and sunflowers. Unfortunately after planting we realized we had rather short varieties of both corn and sunflowers. But we will trellis the beans on the end into a super tall if narrow little screen.The pest of the moment seems to be aphids...coating the artichoke and some of the squash. We did find this beneficial insect (assuming it is a soldier bug as we believe). Unfortunately it doesn't eat aphids but if the flea beetles that decimated my eggplant in Davis appear here, it'll be ready.
We have been eating well from the garden. Here's a frittata made with Sadie and Ariel's eggs, potatoes and garlic grown in our Davis garden, zucchini and tomatoes from this garden. Unfortunately the variety of onions we grew this year in Davis weren't too good and didn't keep. Next year.

Coming to Etsy!

2009-07-20T16:36:00.000-07:00

My poor blog has been neglected in the traveling back and forth between Davis and Spreckels. Plenty of photos have been taken with the express purpose of showing off food and places and creations in this blog, but the photos alas languish on my not very transportable computer.

So a quick text-only entry...went to the Renegade Craft Fair so now I can say I've done my first craft fair. I wish I'd had more time to prepare items for a more general audience since I mostly had knitting related items, but no matter, now I actually have inventory to put up for sale on Etsy. I did a shopping cart directly from my own website previously, but the maintenance was a hassle, so hopefully things will run more smoothly on Etsy.

In other news, we have two new Ameraucauna chicks who are very cute and growing fast. Or I should say were very cute, as they're now at the awkward teenage half-feathered age. Photos coming soon...

Changes

2009-04-30T01:15:00.000-07:00

My housemate Victoria got married

and we went to her wedding in Florida

where we relaxed on the beach

and played in the waves.

My sadness at losing Victoria to Colorado and her husband Adam was slightly assuaged by my new housemate Paige and her brioche.

Meanwhile Aaron got a job in Salinas that was too good to pass up. We found a little house in Spreckels, the old company town for Spreckels sugar.

I still can't tear myself away from Davis, so I moved into the smallest room of my house and am staying there while I work and going to Spreckels when I'm not working. Hopefully once things settle down, I can go back and forth by train. My other new housemate besides Paige is Brian who coincidentally also has much baking/cooking experience. I swear I didn't pick them based on my belly, but we have had some good meals together already. Like this sandwich:

I've been experimenting with making chili/tomato/paprika sourdough bread. Tried to dye it pink with beets. Unfortunately the color faded to orange in the oven, but before baking it was a brilliant pink.
Last week was the first time I got to spend much time at the Spreckels house. I set up my looms and started weaving silk yardage on my 8 harness Schacht after a long period of neglect.

We introduced Meep to the house and yard. He wasn't quite sure about the whole thing.

The chickens weren't as concerned. The new garden has tons of earwigs and sowbugs. Yummy!

Pisces

2009-03-13T22:29:00.000-07:00

It was my birthday last week.Victoria made an amazing ice-cream cake.
'Twas delicious.

Aaron surprised me by having my old thrift shop Singer sewing machine restored. I bought it at a thrift store a while back but could never get it to work. He took it to a proper sewing machine repair place (the guys there said Aaron's a keeper) and now it works beautifully and looks gorgeous too. They said it was made in 1947.My mother got me a cute new bathing suit just in time for our upcoming trip to Florida for Victoria's wedding. Here's a photo of me in cuter bikini days:

Steven and Anne sent along a whole package of fun stuff including an adorable little black dress, a gorgeous photo book of Monterey and a dog-narrated mystery novel that I can read on my upcoming train ride up from there. Steve has been requesting more food pics. Here you go bro: Eggs (from Sadie, foreground, and Ariel, background) on toast (sourdough flaxseed bread made from Danny's starter)

Dutch baby (basically a giant popover)--one of my favorite comfort foods.

Roast chicken over root vegetables

Stuffed squash--buttercup squash from Aaron's garden

I've also been getting squash every time I've gone down to Urban Fauna Studio in San Francisco. They get fiber from local farms as much as possible, and one of the farmers gave them a bunch of squash which decorated the windowsill for a while. Although wonderful folks in every other way, Jamie and Blas are apparently not squash eaters, so first a couple then a few more squash worked their way home to my belly. They finally ran out of squash, so there were no beautiful pepo when I went down to Stitches, but it was still a lot of fun.

I finished my art yarn scarf on the train. My goal was to use the short bits of novelty yarn I'd made in Camp Pluckyfluff in January. I used Debbie New's "scribble lace" idea to knit a lengthwise scarf with rows of the art yarns interspersed between rows of thin loosely knit 20/2 weaving wool. The only problem was calculating gauge since this stretches so much in each direction...I guessed and lost track of my cast-on so added more stitches with the resulting scarf ending up twice as long as a looooong scarf. And each thick stripe took 11 yards so if I made a normal length scarf it would maybe take 6 yards per stripe for 7 stripes total...only 42 yards...great project for small skeins of yarn.
The hat is unfortunately not very visible, but it's my crazy hat knit from my flowering vines yarn that I spun up in January. This is my wildest yarn so far, and it was so much fun to make.Other photos of Urban Fauna Studio's booth at Stitches:

Jamie's on the left, Blas at the right and the wall of handspun at the back. Urban Fauna Studio is fantastic in stocking fiber supplies from lots of indie artists. I haven't heard how much sold yet, but my favorite handspun yarns all sold the Friday I was there.

Another view...you can see my knitting needles in the foreground, some of Jamie's hand-dyed yarns and roving to the right and the SpinOlution Bee in the middle (a fantastic new travel wheel by the makers of the Mach 1--very innovative accelerating wheel, folds up small enough to fit under an airline seat).

I'd hoped to finish my spinning wheel by my birthday, but it still has a little work left and it wasn't worth rushing it to finish by an arbitrary date. Here it is so far:
I'd also hoped to finish a long-term glass sculpture on my birthday but that didn't happen either. Need to work on my welding technique (there's a little metal working involved in the framework). In lieu of a large 32nd birthday sculpture, here's a little sculpture I made recently for Carol who, unlike my artist friends telling me to go bigger, encourages the making of small things:

Stitches West is coming, 2/27-3/1 in Santa Clara

2009-02-24T20:10:00.000-08:00

In my last post, I showed off a bunch of my knitting needles which will be sold at Stitches West. For the first time in a while, I'm spinning yarn for sale as well (I've been mostly spinning for myself for the last few years).

I spent a sunny day carding up batts on our porch. Scrapper was curious but kept a respectful distance.
Meep thought he could best help by sitting between me and the drum carder.This batt:
was spun into this:which was plied with a red thread and red beads with a soft overlay of pygora to become "Snowberries"
Other battswere used to make yarns such as "Felice"
and "Mardi Gras"I combined a crazy batt singles yarn with a thick and thin hand-dyed blue-faced leicester singles in shades of blues as well as glass beads, fabric, and tufts tied from hand-dyed cotton yarn left over from weaving to make "Seadebris"
Some other yarns..."Sallee"--kid mohair
"Pele"--soysilk, cotton
See my website for more yarns...and if you're in California, come visit me at the Urban Fauna
Studio booth at Stitches...I'll be there Friday and my stuff will be there all weekend...

Spinning madness

2009-01-28T19:24:00.000-08:00

Gratuitous salad pic: Aaron's baby carrot and greens along with local walnuts and apples from who knows where: My big treat to myself recently was signing up for Camp Pluckyfluff. The woman behind Pluckyfluff is Lexi Boeger. She spins fantastic fanciful crazy art yarns, very different from the usual thin even yarns I tend to spin. I tend to mostly use thin even yarns for my knitting and weaving, but after receiving Material Whirled's amazing Firetree art yarn, I've become more interested in art yarns. At any rate, I have a glut of evenly spun, super fine yarn waiting to be knit up on size 0 or smaller needles into gloves or socks or what nots, so I figured it's time to make some yarn that's a bit bigger.

I can spin funky yarn. Taught a private lesson recently and made this fun example yarn showing corespinning and tailspinning with mohair and wool around a fine alpaca single:
But it's so much more fun spinning funky yarn with a group. And Lexi is so inspiring. I took the class at Urban Fauna, my new favorite fiber store in the bay area. (I'm a bit biased since they sell my knitting needles there, but they pack so much cool stuff into a tiny storefront. Mustache stamps! Sheep poo paper! Soaps! And of course lots of beautiful hand-dyed fiber, mostly from small family farms, and Jamie does amazing hand-dyed sock yarns and there's handspun from all over, including The Spun Monkey who I finally got to meet for a day in SF...) Six hours of spinning plus a delicious lunch of pho....a perfect day.

Amazingly Jamie and Blas made room for 5 students and Lexi and our wheels and a drum carder and two tables full of fibery goodness and another table full of foody yumminess. We took turns carding up crazy batts and spinning them into simple yet splendid thick and thin yarns.

We made coils and supercoils and beehives and granny stacks and twisties, oh my! My version used a sparkly core yarn courtesy of Lexi, with this soy silk I dyed up a week or two before:
And of course since I was preparing for this amazing class, I had to dye up a whole bunch of fiber, most of which I didn't use since so much was provided, thus I still have oodles of new colored fluff to play with. Here's a bunch on the clothesline:
Close-ups--of tussah silk batt:

Soysilk roving:Bombyx silk... ...some of which was incorporated into this yarn:
along with felted nubbies, sparkly fabric, sequins, feathers and handpainted blue-faced leicester wool.

Another crazy batt yarn:

And before...a less than crazy batt...natural colored bay black alpaca, onion dyed merino (the orangish stuff), natural warm grey merino, procion dyed bombyx silk and muga silk:Same ingredients as above, version two:
Hopefully my new batch of knitting needles that made it down to the store will help justify the cost of the class...they'll be for sale at Stitches West, one of the biggest knitting shows on the west coast, coming up at the end of February in Santa Clara. I forgot to photograph them before bringing them to the store, but here are a few pics of some of the new needle critters:

The thing that didn't make it to the store was my soon-to-be spinning wheel because it is still looking like this:
I was hoping to have it done so I can use it for class since it will have some features that will help greatly in making art yarns, but it's not quite there yet. Still waiting on ball bearings to arrive, but I finally finished carving the fish. My new goal is to have it done by the end of February so I can put it in my custom made backpack and take it on the train with me down to Stitches West. Soon, my fishies, soon...

Holidays

2009-01-08T17:01:00.000-08:00

I spent December stressing over making presents like these:

in preparation for going to Los Angeles for the holidays to visit with my family.

It was a tasty visit.

Making stuff

2008-12-02T22:46:00.000-08:00

Though I haven't been blogging, I have been busy...
...processing fiber with my newish drum carder. I've been wanting one for quite a while, did a ton of research and ended up with a Strauch Petite. I love it. It's compact, does a great job with fine fibers and is helpful at separating the thel from the tog of my icelandic fleece. (Icelandic sheep have double coated fleeces...the tog fibers are longer and more lustrous, the thel fibers are shorter and finer.) On the advice of someone on Ravelry, I've been taking a lock, holding on to the tip, letting the drum carder pull away the short thel, then placing the remaining tog on my English 4 pitch combs to be combed into top. Here's before:
and after (thel to left, tog to right):
The roving and top are resting on fabric being woven on my dobby loom. I experimented with weaving with energized yarns this month, spinning singles and weaving with them without first setting the twist. The pink threads are cotton threads which I used to gather the fabric into pleats once it was woven. I then washed the fabric in hot water to release the energy of the tightly spun singles and once it was dry, I removed the pink threads. The fabric remains permanently pleated like so:

Warp is commercial noil two ply (not sure what material, thought it was silk when I warped it, but it didn't take dye at all, so it is definitely not silk). Weft is handspun merino/seacell hand-dyed in the "berry" colorway a little while back.
In other spinning adventures, I used my Spindlewood bolivian rosewood spindle purchased from Carolina Homespun at the California Wool and Fiber Festival to go from this (hand-dyed merino/seacell, fig colorway):
to this:
and finally this:
Dyeing with acid dyes:Freshly dyed yarn being rinsed:

Other projects include the Morgan hat from Knitty in 6 ply rayon held together with bamboo-silk-kid mohair from Artfibers (my favorite yarn store in San Francisco which is sadly closing its retail store...so check it out for a fantastic sale).
Note the glass double pointed needles because I didn't have a circular needle in that size and it was easier to make some double pointeds then go drive to the yarn store in Sac.

I've also been making hats. Inspired by Mel's experience at Camp Plucky Fluff, I used my drum carder to make a couple fluffy batts of kid mohair and sari silk, then corespun it around some white alpaca singles I had sitting around to make ridiculously thick and fluffy yarn. My poor spinning wheel doesn't like thick yarn, it has little tiny hooks that like to catch thick yarn, so the whole thing was rather taxing, but it came out nicely. I then knit it into a warm and shapeless hat in an amazingly short evening. It looks much better on a head. It's exciting how fast thick knitting goes when you've gotten used to knitting with size 0 needles and smaller. Have I mentioned my other souvenirs from the California Wool and Fiber Show? Circular needles in sizes 2-0(1.75mm), 3-0(1.5mm), 5-0(1.0mm) and 6-0(0.75mm)! Only exciting to fiber nerds like me.
Another yarn to hat pic:

Another hat:
And to the kitchen...this was earlier in the fall, but I finally completed a wood project in a
reasonable amount of time. Spice rack for the kitchen:
Meanwhile, I've been obsessed with these little tapioca cheese puffs one of our friends brought over for a dinner party. So yummy. And gluten free. And the dough is so nicely sticky. Pao
Pão de Queijo:
Bring 1 cup water, 1 cup milk or substitute (works fine with just water too), 1/2 cup oil, 1 tsp salt to gentle boil, pour into bowl containing 2 cups tapioca flour, stir into a sticky mass, add two eggs and beat into batter, add 1 cup grated cheese of choice. Make little balls onto baking sheet, cook in preheated oven at 400 for 15-20 minutes or until nicely browned. If you like the insides drier, cook longer.

Aaron and I also made pumpkin pie for Thanksgiving. The gluten-free crust was made with almonds ground up in the extra coffee grinder which is reserved for noncoffee things like nuts, seeds and spices. The filling was made with pumpkin from Aaron's garden as well as yam, cream and eggs. 'Twas yummy.

Gluten-free Blueberry Buckwheat Ginger Waffles

2008-11-02T11:17:00.000-08:00

We've been craving blueberry pancakes for a while, but haven't had a free morning. So this morning I went to the clinic to check on my patients first, then came back to have blueberry waffles (we decided waffles were more fun than pancakes). Adapted a recipe to make these delicious tasties:

Gluten-free Blueberry Buckwheat Ginger Waffles

1/2 c rice flour
1/4 c buckwheat flour
pinch salt
2 tsp baking powder
3tsp sugar or to taste
2 eggs
1/2 cup yogurt
1/8 c oil
blueberries, defrosted frozen ok, 1/4 cup or to taste
crystallized ginger, minced, ~1/4 cup or to taste

Mix dry ingredients. Beat eggs and yogurt in separate bowl, add 1/2 cup water, mix and add into dry ingredients. Add oil and enough water to form a moderately thin batter (slightly thicker than cream). Add in berries and crystallized ginger.

Makes about 10 4 inch square waffles.
Serve with whipped cream and pomegranate or peanut butter and honey depending if you're me or him.

Munchies

2008-10-25T08:18:00.000-07:00

One of the benefits of my workplace is all the tasty treats that people bake and bring in. One of the surgeons who comes in to do specialty surgeries always brings some home baked goods with him. I got his recipe for cornbread and turned these:

into this:
I altered the recipe to make gluten free cornbread which rose wonderfully in the oven though it sunk down afterwards. I'll be doing more playing with the recipe to try to perfect the texture.

Yesterday I indulged in gluten baking with an experiment in making romano bread puffs. One of my favorite pizza places growing up was Numero Uno and although it's been a long time, I still remember their delicious romano bread puffs. I remember them being quite soaked in butter, but these didn't turn out too greasy...made a basic white and wheat bread dough, kneaded in some romano cheese, panfried balls in garlic butter, then rolled them in lots of romano cheese. These will be following me into the clinic today

Food

2008-09-25T13:55:00.000-07:00

Growing up, we planted flowers, not vegetables. Once we grew basil which was exciting. And another time five corn plants that grew up from the kernels my brother brought home from his elementary school classroom. Other than that I remember jasmine, pansies, sparaxis, columbines, portucula, impatiens cycling through our garden. My elementary school had a little garden and I remember planting radishes and carrots and being excited at the little seedlings, but at that time I hadn't discovered the delight of radish cake, so I wasn't quite sure what one did with radishes other than admire their color and shape. I love the idea of gardening, but my problem is that good intentions do not water plants. Luckily for the plants, Aaron's version of gardening does include watering and other diligent care.

In addition to feeding the local squirrels and gophers, Aaron's plot at the Experimental Garden has provided us with some beautiful veggies and good meals. Here he is with a couple pepos. (Remember my obsessive cooking of squash every week for the first fall/winter of this blog?)Recent feasts have included this spaghetti squash from the garden with homemade veggie filled tomato sauce...
And here's the buttercup squash cooked and mashed accompanied by some of Aaron's fast-growing bok choy stir-fried with rice:

Other recent treats (not necessarily from the garden):

Ricotta gnocchi with rosemary butter

Gluten-free buckwheat savory cheese blintzes

Christy's recipe for mac and cheese

Gluten-free tempura

Art yarn and Coeur D'Alene

2008-08-16T10:11:00.000-07:00

Reenie of Material Whirled sent me the most amazing package for the Hush Hush Handspun Hootenanny. Inspired by one of my favorite paintings by Eyvind Earle, she created the most gorgeous exciting yarn I've ever stroked in my greedy little hands. I've looked admiringly at photos of art yarns on the web. I'm really a plain jane spinner, smooth even and thin. My "novelty" yarns are more textured boucles or fluffy/curly mohair locks or beaded yarns but they're still kind of all the same from beginning to end. Reenie's yarn on the other hand....supercoils, bold color, sparkle...I LOVE it! And she made a coordinating batt that is breathtakingly beautiful and also sent some super soft black baby alpaca roving and beads and thread to match. There was even tea to drink while spinning/knitting and a booklet of patterns for things to make with art yarn. She's amazing...go see her stuff!

I've been restraining myself from knitting with the yarn until I spin a coordinating yarn out of the batt, so I brought the batt along with me for our mini-vacation at Lake Coeur D'Alene. I started pulling it into roving in the airport which was insanely pleasurable (seeing it become roving, not the waiting in the airport). The early morning flight was quite frigid with the air conditioning blasting and all, so I was glad I hadn't gotten far in pulling roving as there was enough batt left to warm my poor frozen unsocked footsies. (Kim's survival guide: always carry wool.) Despite my toes, the plane ride was fine and I got some beautiful shots.

Eastern Washington and Idaho were beautiful and there were more spectacular clouds.

Aaron's family has a little cabin on the lake that his grandfather and uncle built. We had a very relaxing time paddling around in the canoe, reading, and otherwise lazing about. I read three or four books in the first couple days, including two excellent ones: "A Thousand Pieces of Gold" by Ruthanne Lum McCunn and "Snow Falling on Cedars" by David Guterson. In the evenings we took turns cooking scrumptious meals, read and played board games. Too quickly it was over and we were back in Davis. Our consolation:

Next time--Aaron's garden goodies:

Whoosh!

2008-08-14T23:13:00.000-07:00

That was the sound of time flying by. July was a blur of travel for weddings and packing for moving. After posting about the Tour de Fleece, my proud promise to spin every day of the tour was quickly plowed under by the realization that I had to make wedding presents, spend two weekends plus out of town, spin for the Hush Hush Hootenany and pack all my stuff in the space of a month.

The first wedding was in Portland. Aaron designed an elegant but simple fused glass soap dish for his friends. Since Aaron's family is in the Portland area, we flew into Portland a couple days early. We spent a day in Salem: lunched at his mom's house with his mother's mother, walked around the Salem Art Fair for a while, then visited his paternal grandparent's house, home to very small dogs.
The next day we went to the Portland farmer's market. Davis has a pretty good farmer's market, but Portland's was amazing. Yes the blueberries are really better in Oregon. We treated ourselves to some gluten-free sourdough bread, pheasant-bitter orange paté, Tumalo Tomme goat cheese and lots of blueberries. After a sadly short obligatory visit to Powells, we met up with Aaron's father and stepmother and managed to stuff some lunch and dessert from Deschutes Brewery into ourselves as well. It was quite a foody day. Even the sandcastle celebration had a food pyramid.
Dinner was a feast courtesy of Aaron's sister and boyfriend at their new house. We were too busy eating the delicious ribs, salmon, potato salad and biscuits to take pictures, but there was a brief pause before we started in on the gluten-free raw food cake.

Somehow, we didn't take any photos of the actual wedding, but I did take a lot of pictures of Aaron's dad and stepmother's kittens.

This is Cleo:
And this is Bea:Together:

We tore ourselves away from the kittens and Portland and flew back home to work for two days before driving down to Los Angeles for my friends Olivia and John's wedding. Making Aaron's wedding present for his friends was uncomplicated, but unfortunately my design style is not as elegantly sparse. I made Olivia and John a set of fused glass sushi dishes with a cherry blossom design inspired by their invitations. They actually turned out quite nicely though I forgot to photograph them. Somehow, though I'm quite comfortable with hot glass in a flame, coldworking glass makes me nervous. I don't like cutting glass, it's sharp. I prefer melting. Melting is a much nicer word than cutting.

Anyways, in Los Angeles, we spent a day at the Getty Center with my mom and my friend Mel who had flown in for the wedding.

There was a fantastic botanical illustration exhibit. Inspired, I took too many flower photos in the garden. It was a beautiful day. The sky was blue......as long as you didn't look too far in the distance.
We went out to dinner that evening with my brother and Anne, delicious japanese food. The next morning, Anne and Steve cooked us a magnificent brunch including stuffed omelet, smoked salmon, capers and greens.

Then we drove up to Ventura County for the wedding. I played with Olivia in a free jazz ensemble in Davis so some of us musicians brought our instruments to provide music over the cocktail hour. It was fantastic getting together with so many folks including those who've moved on from Davis.
I'm just not good at taking photos at weddings, too many other things to do. But one dance shot before I joined in...

Lest you think this remarkably long post is over, I did spin almost every day of the Tour de Fleece though I wasn't as productive as I'd hoped. Part of the problem was being away from my spinning wheel so much. I dyed up some merino/cashmere/nylon and made it into a batt for my amazing Hush Hush Handspun Hootenanny pal Abby for the unspun fiber part of the trade, and since she seems to work with lace and fingering weight yarn a lot, I decided to spin up her laceweight yarn out of the merino/seacell fiber I landscape dyed for her. The idea of this type of yarn was for it to slowly change colors to resemble the landscape it was inspired by. Since I wasn't at the wheel enough, I started spinning this on a little brass takhli. I'm much more of a wheel spinner than a spindle spinner, so this didn't go very fast. And I was spinning about 46-50wpi singles to become laceweight navajo ply (3 ply) yarn so 4 oz goes a long way at that size. I soon realized I was in trouble with time, but couldn't switch to the wheel until after getting back from Los Angeles. Even on the wheel it took me a while...this is the finished yarn.

Doesn't look like much, but it's 566 yards navajo plied yarn which is 1598 yards of singles. Which is a lot for me. Got to work on spinning faster...I dream of the Lendrum Saxony with the extra fast head. Hopefully when I finish my walnut fish spinning wheel (so much for finishing by the end of summer--I'm still working on relief carving the individual fish) it'll be nice and fast with the accelerating head.

fiber and food

2008-07-07T22:20:00.000-07:00

Just because I work better within an external framework of motivation...I'm doing this thing called Tour de Fleece. It's basically a spin-along with the Tour de France--"they spin, we spin". I actually did get a road bike earlier this year and Friday my big accomplishment was biking out to the neighboring town of Winters and back without dying, a roundtrip of about 30 miles. (The scale of such accomplishment is enhanced by my utter lack of exercise recently...the fires and resulting smoky air being a convenient excuse, though why my lack of exercise in the weeks, months etc before the current fires need not be discussed.) Despite my shiny pink bike (yes, yet another pink bike throws itself under my reluctant legs) and newfound interest in bicycle riding, I have to admit that I have not seen any of the Tour de France last year. And maybe I caught a few clips of the race last year. I did watch part of the Davis Criterium on Friday. Very very fast bicyclists cycling very very close together. Very very fascinating. But lack of TV has proved a deterrent in watching the Tour de France while spinning. Plus I've been busy away from TV land since the Tour started.

Saturday I worked my non-fiber job in the morning (though I did get to pet lots of soft fuzzy creatures) and got out late from work with just enough time to spin up some kid mohair locks before scrambling to make potato salad for my friend's BBQ. I'd previously dyed the locks inspired by a landscape photo which unfortunately I misplaced then mixed up the colors so I have to idea what was my intended original color progression. My Tour de Fleece 2008 kickoff yarn:

Sunday I woke up blasphemously early to catch a ride to the Alameda County Fair with my Sheep-to-shawl team. The county fair was full of inspiring works such as this quilt:

and this knitted lace shawl:
and this bobbin lace bookmark:
Our warp was my favorite yet. It was a beautiful shiny soft Wensleydale fleece, spun up and dyed by our industrious team members (though not by me the too frequently absent member).
After sampling different color combinations, our dyer decided on a deep cranberry color for the weft.
Unfortunately the fleece was somewhat matted which created grave difficulties in carding and slowed us down quite a bit. My three plus hours of spinning yarn for this shawl was my yarn for the day. It was stressful carding, spinning and weaving the shawl in the allotted 4 hours, but we got it off the loom and over to the judging table.
This was our finest shawl yet, 12 ends per inch which means the yarn and resulting fabric was thinner and less coarse and had great drape, even unwashed. Happily, our shawl got a blue ribbon! The finished shawl:

And a detail:

Meanwhile, Aaron's garden is growing well and provided us with corn for the Saturday BBQ.He's also growing corn as part of his field trial. Unfortunately it's silage corn so we won't be inundated with tasty ears of corn. We need to figure out which one of our ag friends are growing what so we can get some of the extras. I wonder if there will be another corn smut party or fresh tamale party this year.

Another sunset shot from the edge of the Experimental College gardens:And at home, my silk yardage is slowly growing. I haven't counted picks per inch because I'm a little scared to estimate how long the whole thing will take, but I know there are more than 48 picks per inch.

I also spun up some more artsy yarn (i.e. not my usual smooth and skinny stuff) after being inspired by Spunmonkey's post on Pluckyfluff Camp. Plus my stash needs to be whittled down prior to moving.

Cat yarn single spun from Scrapper Will's clippings, plied with an alpaca single = catlpaca yarn! Yes I know it's kinda gross looking. But it doesn't smell like wet dog when wet.
Hand dyed blue-faced leicester and soy silk coil yarn:
Finally, an abacus bracelet made with instructions on this tutorial with some of my rare lampworked beads (cause I hate making beads--I just don't care enough if they are symmetrical and beautifully shaped so they always turn out wonky and then I'm sad) and some handspun silk from one of my favorite silk caps I've dyed.

Hush Hush Handspun Hootenany

2008-06-25T12:45:00.000-07:00

(It's an exchange questionaire...no other news today)

1. How long have you been spinning? What skill level do you consider yourself? about 7 years. Advanced.

2. What kinds of yarn do you create (singles/2-ply/3-ply/art yarn)? All sorts, but especially like spinning soft fine fibers, usually 2 or 3 ply depending on their future use.

3. What do you spin with (spindle/wheel/both)? mostly my wheel, occasionally with my book charkha and drop spindles.

4. What are your favorite fibers to spin with? Anything you don't like? Love anything soft...I have tons of alpaca and merino. I'm really excited about other fibers like seacell and bamboo right now too. I don't like scratchy things.

5. Who are your favorite crack dealers fiber sources (etsy or otherwise)? Mendenhall Wool Ranch, Humble Hills/Genopalette

6. What kind of fiber do you want to try? Cormo, pygora, rambouillet, ingeo, buffalo

7. Is there any techniques you would like to learn? fun creative art yarn techniques

8. Do you dye fiber? If not, would you like to learn? yes I dye

9. Do you have fiber prep tools (and like to use them) or would you prefer ready to spin fiber? Have handcards and wool combs, currently coveting a drum carder

10. What do you do with your handspun? What projects have you completed? Knitting (especially gloves and socks, have finished one shawl, working on another one as well as just starting a sweater), weaving--scarves mostly

11. Are you in need of any spinning gadgets (WPI Gauge, threading hook, etc)?

12. What colors "fall into your shopping basket"? Any colors you just can't stand? Love rich deep colors, jewel tones, reds, purples, blues. Not so fond of yellows.

13. What is on your wheel/spindle right now? I'm in the middle of spinning up 5 and some ounces of llama/merino/seacell batts which is paused for a beaded silk/alpaca yarn. There's super thin yak-silk on my charkha and too many things on my various homemade spindles.

14. What other crafts/hobbies do you have? weaving, tatting, flameworked glass sculpture, woodworking, multimedia sculpture, playing music (piano, flute, bass)

15. Other than crafts, what are you passionate about? the outdoors (especially hikes when I can bring knitting/spinning), cooking/eating (although that's kind of a craft/hobby), reading

16. Do you have an online wishlist? Amazon wishlist

17. Is there anything that you collect? fiber, yarn, fabric (not purposefully)

18. Any books, yarns, needles or patterns out there you are dying to get your hands on? What magazine subscriptions do you have? Hmm...The Icelandic Fleece by Beth Abbott, Creating Original Hand-Knitted Lace by Margaret Stove. Some other books on Amazon wishlist. I've also been eyeing Aurora Alpacas "Here Be Dragone" shawl pattern and am always happy to get my hands on any Niebling patterns. I get Interweave Knits.

19. When is your birthday? March 11th

20. What book or movie character do you most resemble in personality? Um...

21. What is the climate like where you live around this time (need to know for careful shipments of anything meltable)? Hot

22. Tell us one weird fact about yourself!
I raise silkworms and am currently taking them to work every day so I can feed them during lunch.

Favorites
favorite painting/picture(link):
http://www.artsforge.com/gallery_new/eyvind/firetree.html

Candy:
good dark chocolate, Reese's cups

Food:
Oh that's hard. I love food. Lots of different foods. Flat rice noodles? Garlic eggplant? Pesto pasta? Gnocchi? Maybe sushi is my absolute favorite. How to choose...

Drink:
tapioca pearl drinks

Movie(s):
Triplets of Belleville. Monsters Inc.

TV Show(s):
Bones

Book(s):
Howl's Moving Castle, The Ordinary Princess, Mistress of Spices.

Guilty Pleasure(s):
spending way too much time playing on the web

Creek!

2008-06-23T21:12:00.000-07:00

My biggest problem with Davis is the heat. I melt and whine heartily while doing so. Luckily Saturday I finished work early enough to join my friends in an escape to nearby Capay Valley.

We packed into Aaron's car and drove out to Bear Creek. The water was fairly shallow, though there were a few nice deep and cool pools. The little fish seemed to enjoy nibbling at my toes. We cooled off in the water and sunned on the rocks for a while before heading back to the car and backtracking a little to the confluence of Bear Creek and Cache Creek. Cache Creek was flowing a lot stronger and we settled on a place with a little beach and a lot of water.

By the time we arrived, there weren't too many rafters, just this group of latecomers.
My swimming skills have apparently atrophied from disuse as I found it a lot more difficult to swim upstream than I'd expected. Luckily it was shallow enough to stand almost everywhere. Though her dad was a bit worried that she'd get swept over the rapids, Hudson the dog did fine too. She and Tad even shared a stick.

2008-06-12T12:47:00.000-07:00

I like to buy raw fiber from small family farms. That way, I know they treat their animals well and the animals aren't in a factory farmed situation. The downside to buying raw fleeces from small farms is the additional time/cost in processing it to get it ready for spinning. If I'm trying to make things to sell, even if I price myself at $3/hr, hand-processed, hand-dyed, hand-spun and handknit gloves quickly become prohibitively expensive (even if made on my knitting machine which is faster than handknitting, but still takes a while and lots of elbow grease). Though I definitely feel the extra time and cost of farm-fresh fleeces are worth it to support small family farms, occasionally my brain turns off and my bad little fingers can't resist a bargain and point and click away.

That's my excuse for the past few weeks. Or my other excuse is that I'm trying to be a patriotic all-consuming American and support the economy by spending lots of money instead of saving it. At any rate, I got a bunch of mill ends roving: a merino/cashmere/nylon mix and a merino/seacell mix. I also bought some bombyx silk roving (my silkworms don't produce enough to sell).

Finally, from Town and Country Llamas (which at least is a family farm even if they didn't raise all the animals producing this fiber) I got this:

Silk-seacell batt (seacell is made from seaweed--which is purported to have many health benefits, and lyocell--an environmentally friendly wood pulp fiber)

and this:

Bamboo for blending when I get a drum carder. Or I suppose I could make a hackle and blend it that way.

and this:
I'm spinning these llama-merino-seacell batts into thin singles
then making a fingerweight three-ply yarn which should be fantastic for gloves.

If I want to sell handspun at a decent price while actually making more than a few cents an hour, I should make thicker art yarn, but I really like spinning fine yarns and most of the fiber I buy likes being spun fine, so who am I to argue? For myself, I've also been spinning some alpaca/silk roving I got a while ago at Lambtown from Carolina Homespun.

The photo doesn't do justice to the softness and shine of this yarn, but it is pretty luxurious and along with some cashmere/silk and camel/silk will be knit up into a lace hoodie like the one in Interweave Knits Spring 2008. I may actually follow their pattern. (I can follow patterns, I swear. And I won't change it much. Maybe just a little. So it can be knit circular. And maybe a different stitch pattern along with a slow color change so it feels more mine. But it'll still be the same design; she did a great job designing it, why change it?)

When not spinning, I've been weaving.
Made a set of dishtowels a wedding present. My math calculation was a bit off, so I got two matching towels instead of four, but coupled with some other goodies, that should be fine.

The two photos above show how huck fabric changes when taken off the loom. The tightly tensioned threads relax and the fabric texture comes out. The photos below show some of the other huck patterns I used. The huck structures are from an Handwoven article. I made up the colored overshot borders.

Meanwhile, in our eat more local month, we harvested the potatoes from my backyard (the ones that weren't in the wine barrel that was taken and apparently dumped by my ex-housemate who came back to get the wine barrel to build a garden where he's now living. Despite being a gardener, somehow he failed to recognize they were potato plants and once he realized it, he didn't think that maybe we'd be a little upset that he took them without asking, nor did he think to harvest the potatoes and save them for us or even eat them himself. We had a bunch of fingerlings in that one too. Sadness.)

The paltry potatoes that didn't escape

At any rate, with Aaron tired of potatoes and onions and garlic and zucchini for dinner every night, I decided to make a quiche. With potatoes and onions and garlic and zucchini. (And eggs and cheese. Makes all the the difference you know.) Ran into a few folks at the Co-op so got back too late to make a full on quiche, hence this local almost-quiche. Instead of a delicious yummy crispy mashed potato crust, we simply layered thin sliced potatoes on the bottom of the pan, topped 'em with grated cheddar (yay for Clover being local and affordable...the other local cheddar I located at the Co-op was a little out of my price range to be grated en masse in quiche-like creation. I'll have to check the farmer's market cheese selection Saturday.) and then added our stir-fried zucchini, onion, garlic yum and topped it all with some farmer's market eggs mixed with Straus milk (really the best local dairy if you're in Northern California, sorry Clover).

The result was so yummy we had to eat it before we could take a picture.

Eating more local

2008-06-05T23:52:00.000-07:00

Aaron and I had grand plans to do an "eat local" month this year, trying to eat only foods grown within 100 miles. Can't remember why we didn't join the Students for Sustainable Agriculture club in doing it for the week in the fall, but we planned to do it late spring/early summer, hoping to be knee-deep in veggies from Aaron's garden and eggs from our girls. Our hens aren't quite laying yet, but we got some delicious eggs, cherries and bacon from the farmers' market, and added them to Aaron's potatoes, onion, garlic and zucchini for a June breakfast kick-off.

However, we gave ourselves permission to eat non-local food when eating out as well as letting ourselves continue to eat food in our cupboards which makes this not so much "eat local" month as "eat more local" month. Another month we'll be more strict...we need to find some local sources for some staples first.

Weekend buzz

2008-05-27T23:01:00.000-07:00

Made good use of the long weekend starting with a sheep-to-shawl competition at the Sacramento County Fair on Saturday.

The fair had a lot of cute critters including these goats:

We were stationed next to this unlucky sheep who despite the dye job, still had faith in humanity and gamely greeted all the excited kids.
In a sheep-to-shawl contest, a team starts out with a warped loom and a sheep fleece. In this case, we were sent the fleece ahead of time so we could wash and dye it. Once the starting bell rang, we carded the fleece into rolags, spun it into yarn and wove it into a shawl. The team consisted of three spinners, a plyer (combines two single yarn plies into a double ply yarn), a weaver and a gofer. I was one of the spinners. The goal is to finish a shawl in five hours. Our team has been pushing the limits of the contest for a while, not only trying to finish a shawl, but trying to make more and more complex, fine and beautiful shawls within the time alotted.

Me madly spinning on a borrowed Lendrum, probably one of the best wheels out there...at least three people on the team have Lendrums. My wheel is a Kromski; I love it and the company that imports them is wonderful, but since I have a saxony wheel, it's not very portable.

Working on the loom with plying in the background
Frantically working on the fringe.

More finishing work. We cut it too close and didn't turn the shawl in until 3 minutes after time. We didn't have time to twist the fringes, though that could be done later. The warp was handspun suri alpaca, which has a lovely drape and nice soft feel but is much less elastic and less forgiving than wool. The pattern alternated plain weave with areas of huck lace, so it was much more complicated than previous shawls and the weaver had trouble with the warp. We finished third out of three but were proud of our effort. The other two shawls were lovely and technically perfect, but much less complex. Overall, much fun.

Monday, Aaron and I took advantage of the long weekend by going out to the Palisades in Napa Valley for a hike. The weather was beautiful, having finally cooled down, but not being too cold. We passed through such varied terrain and the poison oak was gorgeous and lush with inviting berries. So far, no one is itchy.

The flowers were blooming:
The saprolite was weathering:The sun was shining, the wind was blowing:
And the view was beautiful:

Mending our web

2008-05-15T19:23:00.000-07:00

The theme of the Whole Earth Festival (annual music/art/education fair in Davis) this year was "Mending our web." In the past I've performed musically, sold crafts and demonstrated weaving/spinning; this year I decided to concentrate on making some art for Artspace. My piece:

It was definitely a process. The glass figures were flameworked over several weeks. Once those were done, I spun up fine silk thread from some of the silkworms I raised last year. The wooden framework was the most challenging. I cut thin strips of some scrap wood I had on the table saw, shaped the ends on the bandsaw and sanded them smooth with the drum sander. However, I wanted to avoid making a steambox to bend the wood and found that the resulting strips were still too thick to bend easily. Luckily I like handplaning and got plenty of practice thinning the strips. Taking a hot shower with them got a gentle curve in, but I had to resort to time over the teapot to bend them as much as I wanted. Then there was the task of weaving the flattened wire and suspending the glass figures on the silk without letting them bang into each other. Finished the sculpture two days later than I'd wanted to, but still in time for the festival.

Meanwhile, my current group of silkworms have been madly spinning. Here's one in progress:

and more cocoons:and more:
and more, pulled off their perches to make room for later spinners:
One determined little silkworm even made it out of the box, across several feet of carpet and up a couple feet to spin his/her cocoon here:
I guess that shows I didn't practice the bass for a couple days this past week but it was a very busy week. However, I did have my first bass lesson and learned...it's all about scales. Growing up playing classical piano (not practicing or I might be better, mostly playing) I was never very fond of scales, but in working with my college teacher, I became more appreciative of working on scales to improve technique, so I will be a good little bass student and start doing scales instead of my current regimen of playing/singing jazz ballads. Watch out neighbors, I'm learning to bow...

And last pic of Aaron's first harvest of potatoes...lovely purple and yellow fingerlings preparing for their demise:

new love--Meep has competition.

2008-04-25T11:23:00.000-07:00

As if it weren't bad enough that I spend all my time gathering these:

to feed these:

so they'll grow and shed:

and become these:
And free time on the weekends has been spent building a coop for these:

and commiserating with this guy over this: (evidence of gopher appetite)

Yesterday I came home with this:

Meep sized up the competition:

And apparently feels pretty secure there's enough love to go around.

Stebbins Cold Canyon

2008-04-12T17:15:00.000-07:00

This was a hike a while ago, but since I'm being really slow with putting together my Death Valley photos, here's the hike in pictures:

Older again

2008-03-20T10:27:00.000-07:00

No creative celebration of my birth anniversary this year. I spent the day and part of the night at work, although I did manage to sneak out for sushi dinner, before coming back to the clinic to finish up records. However I have finished a few things between 30 and 31.

Two of the many new knitting needles for The Spun Monkey Fiber Shoppe. Visit the shop to see more.

Hand-dyed landscape yarn, Navajo (3 ply) handspun bombyx silk

I also enjoyed my first cauliflower from my little raised bed and I've been hungrily eyeing the chard as well.
\

Putah Creek

2008-02-25T00:08:00.000-08:00

After being cooped up with a cold during a few weeks of warm sunny weather, my cough is finally receding just in time for a rainy weekend. It was a warm rainy Sunday though, and we went out to tromp around Putah Creek.

It was beautiful if grey and wet.

And muddy.

Spring was definitely on its way with plenty of buds leafing out and shoots coming up. I love how winter here is green.

At times it was almost sunny, much to Aaron's disappointment.

Our grand accomplishment for the day was crossing the creek without anyone falling in. We rewarded ourselves with chocolate.
Quite a nice walk.

Monkey

2008-01-20T16:41:00.000-08:00

One of the many benefits of my newish job is the seemingly endless supply of baked goodies courtesy of a certain technician. All of her creations have been delicious, but when my coworkers started raving about her monkeybread, I had to taste some even though she was bringing it in on my day off and I was warned to get there early before it was eaten. Sadly my cold got the best of me and warm bed won out over warm monkeybread. Only crumbs were left by the time I dragged myself in to return phone calls. But she gave out the recipe and since I didn't have to go to work this morning due to a scheduling mix-up, I decided to try it out. I feel a little sheepish I didn't make biscuit dough from scratch, but I'd forgotten how fun it is to play with Pillsbury biscuit dough.

A little sweet, but tasty tasty

Meanwhile, a new shipment of knitting needles is finally ready to go to Shannon at The Spun Monkey including these monkeys and these mice.

In older glass news, my boss who collects tiny animal sculptures inspired me to make these little glass dogs. I made them back in December, but gave them as Christmas presents so haven't gotten around to posting pictures before. It was so fun to work really small (someone coached me that I should try working bigger so I've been feeling guilty for not working up in size) and I'm planning on doing more of these tiny sculptures.
Other Christmas gifts: Aaron and I made two different types of soap to give to our friends and family. We figured they'd be amused by the cheesiness of our labels promising "an invigorating and spiritual grounding cleansing experience."

Another leftover photo from December is this lace shawl. The pattern is "Handsome Triangle" from Jane Sowerby's Victorian Lace Today and the yarn is hand-dyed, handspun merino-tencel.

After a short trip home to Los Angeles for Christmas, I spent a few days with Aaron in Oregon, driving back to Davis from Salem. The coolest guy ever, he wove his mother a scarf for Christmas, and in Salem, he took me to an old textile mill where we got to poke around and see how it was all mechanized and run by water way back when as well check out the looms and projects of the weaving guild (ever the perfectionist, he checked the edges of the works-in-progress and pronounced them "good").

After a refreshing stop at Breitenbush Hot Springs, we spent a couple days in Black Butte near Bend where we went snowshoeing and I finally got some good photos of my landscape gloves.
Currently I'm finishing up Aaron's Christmas gift (he's learned I'm always late), another hat, a pair of socks, a Niebling shawl and I have some gloves on the back burner. Aaron is working on an alpaca scarf with some of my handspun which is keeping me busy spinning. And Meep is busy trying to eat all my fiber when he's not posing for the camera.

PURPLE sweet potatoes!

2007-12-17T22:00:00.000-08:00

I'm a little behind with blogging so the initial rush of cutting into a sweet potato and discovering the insides are purple has passed but I can't pass up a chance to obsess about something new: Okinawan sweet potatoes!

I like sweet potatoes. And nonsweet potatoes too. But I especially like sweet potatoes. Besides the obvious (fantastic taste), one reason I love sweet potatoes is that they're used to make one of my favorite dishes, fried sesame balls stuffed with red bean paste (or black bean paste, or nutella or whatever you'd like to stuff them with). The recipe I use mixes mashed sweet potatoes with glutinous rice flour and hot water to form a dough that is then filled with red bean paste, rolled in sesame seeds and deep fried. Maybe they don't even use sweet potatoes in restaurants, they just use glutinous rice flour; I've seen recipes like that. But I'm convinced that sweet potatoes or yams are vital for making them because I like sweet potatoes. Yes that was a circle.

At any rate, a while ago now, I finally visited the Filipino grocery in the large strip mall across the street from the larger strip mall where I'd been working the past four years. In between chatting with the owner about her daughters and how she really thinks the younger should go straight into graduate school and how she worries the older is running out of time to find a man now that she's an ancient 29, in between laments and worries, I picked up a bunch of sweet potatoes to make sesame balls for my gluten-free old man of 30.

Of course, I got busy doing this and that, mostly that, some this, and no sesame balls were made before Thanksgiving. My mom was worried about a shortage of Thanksgiving food so she had me bring ingredients for a gluten free quiche down to Los Angeles where there are apparently no grocery stores and the few dozen that are near us are too scary to approach near to Thanksgiving. Mashed potatoes mixed with butter and onions pressed down into a pie crust and pre-baked makes a darn good quiche crust, whether you eat gluten or not. And since I had some unused sweet potatoes hanging around and getting old, I brought them down along with a couple newly bought russets. They all enjoyed the drive but didn't get eaten as there was no food shortage so back to Davis they traveled.

By this time, the sweet potatoes were almost as ancient as the storekeeper's unmarried daughter, so it was time to do something with them. I decided on gnocchi because I like gnocchi. (I like many foods.) I still had no inkling that these were not your everyday sweet potato until I cut into one.

The skin outside was normal pale tan sweet potato but instead of creamy white, the inside flesh was a definite purple. Now I like purple. Almost as much as sweet potatoes. And I've enjoyed regular purple potatoes before, purple skin and all. But sweet purple flesh hiding behind a pale skin?

Purple gnocchi it was then. I chopped the potatoes into cubes and boiled them. The water turned a deep green-blue, and the cut sides of the potatoes turned dark blue.
The unexposed parts of the potatoes were still a deep purple and mixed with some of their russet traveling companions, they formed a nice lavender mashed potatoes.
The gnocchi turned out tasty if not photogenic. I still haven't quite figured out how to make gnocchi that isn't slightly slimy and globby looking when served from the boiler. Mine seems to do (i.e. look) better lightly warmed in butter the following day. But since I ended up with pounds of purple gnocchi batter, I used some to make pancakes. Quite pretty with salmon and jalapenos stir-fried with shitake mushrooms.