V-Day Feast! Stitches! and what's on my looms!

Food!!!

February's cookbook, as I mentioned, was Commander's Kitchen, and our Valentine's Day treat. Dinner was:

• Pork loin over roasted winter root vegetables: damn tasty. I made 1/2 the recipe and it could have fed us for a week; I think their serving size is too big.
• Corn cakes: I'll make this one again!
• Onion marmelade: really, really good, especially with the corn cakes and the au-jus from the pork.
• Pots de Creme (Martha Stewart's recipe)
• And a nice bottle of red wine... Sorry, I didn't grab info from the label other recognizing "Oh! that's French!" and I took no pictures of the food.

Stitches, a knitting show and yarn extravaganza

Stitches was last weekend and I took a techniques class from Anna Zilboorg and from Candace Eisner Stick. I can listen to either of them for hours... Both educated, intelligent, articulate and fascinating women. Candace has a book out about skirts; I purchased the book and some appropriate yarn and you'll be seeing a knitted skirt on me in the near future.

I'm struggling with how to "set" the techniques I learned in class into my mind. I think the key will be to practice them all in the near future. We'll see.

Other trends I noticed: the severe over abundance of alpaca has declined, and the current hotness is sock yarn and gradient yarns. I also noticed there was a lack of larger quantities of skeins; so if you wanted a sweater quantity (or skirt quantity), it was not straightforward to find.

I got some yarn and some spinnables. It's logged into Ravelry, but I won't detail it here except to say that when I use it, I'll post it. Oh yeah, and Some Vendor Who Shall Remain Nameless put the hand dyed cashmere roving next to the cash register, which feels a lot like putting the Godiva chocolate next to the check out counter at Macy's. Two ounces of soft and lovely goat fiber came home with me.

Weaving

I learned something very important about warping, specifically, lock the cats out while winding on. Anyways, the Macomber is partly warped, I'm threading the heddles. It'll be a M&W pattern on the plainer sides, and a Z pattern on the hard painted part. Plus there's a surprise color in the border.... Pics to come once I'm weaving on it. I'm using the other 12/2 silk warp we dyed in Kris Abshire's CNCH class. I'm using the hand painted yarn originally designated as weft as more warp, and will use some skinny tencel  in grey blue for weft (it's sitting too far away for me to grab and describe more accurately).  Hoping it looks good; I'm having issues figuring out what colors to use. I

The school loom is mostly warped, I'm sleying the reed. School loom has hand-panted 20/2 cotton warp on it, dyed with procion fiber reactive dyes in burgundy, bronze, and chocolate brown; there's a supplemental 2/18 merino and merino silk in 3 different browns mixed it that will create alternate block floats that I'll clip and felt a bit.  I've also included a pic of the sweatshop we call our classroom. 

Textile Design

I create mood boards based on 4 countries (or regions), along with color palettes and some images that could lead to stencils; one of the ones I picked was the Czech Republic. I figured on using colors from Cesky Krumlov (imperial gold, that pinky color, plus a few others) but instead got sidetracked on the Soviet era concrete prefab housing units. Our historian guide had told us they were painted in bright colors after the fall of the Soviet Union, and I was fascinated to find that imperial gold and pink color, yep, still being used.

I was unable to attend the last class which was on stenciling and masking; I'm going to try it at home tomorrow, with some more shibori I have waiting to do into a dye pot.

Because of several Friday Holidays, we won't be doing Arashi Shibori in class which makes me want to cry. I think I'll be heading out to look for 8" PVC and give it a go at home.

Some of the Shibori techniques in the home environment are daunting. Like those little tiny circles. I happen to have 2 Shibori books and took a short class in Kyoto, so I can say without a shadow of a doubt that having the right equipment helps. Arashi Shibori is one of these techniques. I'll have to give some thought to how I can rig up something to make this easy at home.