I sat on my last post for almost a month, so the info is a little dated... I wrote this post last night so we are, dear reader, caught up.
I've gotten a little burned out on the food challenge, plus some recent and annoying new discoveries about my digestive system has made cooking a lot less fun. Fortunately wine is still on the menu, and I'm going to try to find wines that I've never tried, don't recall trying, or wines I'm familiar with from regions I'm not familiar with. The cookbook challenge will likely reappear in the next couple of months.
December: 2007 Amarone della Valpolicella Classico Costasera
Amarone is full bodied, raiseny, with high alcohol content. I've been trying to save it for the right meal but haven't figured out the pairing; so I just finally served it with some lamb. This one was just at the end of the recommended drinking window but really a delight to drink. I'll need more amarone in my life. This bottle, by the way, was brought to me from Europe by M, who suggested I drink it right away... but I cellar EVERYTHING so I've had it a few years. M, if you're reading this, Thank You! and let's schedule a VC.
Based on this experience, we opened another Amarone that had been in the cellar for quite a while; it's from Arizona and a friend of DH had brought it to us. I've frankly been avoiding it because I have doubts about the US southwest being a good wine region... Sadly it was way past prime...
January: 2009 Domaine de la Grenaudière Muscadet de Sèvre-et-Maine Sur Lie La Grenouille
Muscadet is from the Loire Valley and made from melon de bourgogne grapes. It's light body, dry, crisp, and minerally. We subsequently went to out dinner and DH made me pick the wine pairing; I confidently choose a muscadet to go with some of the raw fish appetizers and it worked! Anyways, this varietal is a delight.
February: 2019 Sclavos-Zisimatos Vino di Sasso Robola of Cephalonia
There's more info that you can ever want in this article which gives details about how the grapes are grown and how the wine is made. Robola is food friendly, with high acidity and good minerality, and almost always comes from Cepholonia. They can pick up some of the notes you'd expect from an aged riesling if you let it cellar awhile... I bought more.
Sensing a theme here? Maybe that there's wine I haven't met but I haven't met a wine I don't like? Anyways, I have a couple more wines bought already and I'm waiting impatiently for March.
On the fiber front, I've been jumping around a bit...
Tablet weaving: I made a couple of Egyptian Diagonal card woven mask lanyards; one for KC, and the other because I can't do a short warp on my current card loom. I did well backing out issues with the first one (I make a lot of errors with card weaving); I started a second pattern and got it so screwed up I abandoned it and reset the deck to try again. Then Monday I walked to the next town for breakfast and back for a total of 13 miles, and sat down after to finish off the warp. I'll admit to some trepidation since I was tired, but unbelievably wove it off without errors. I talked to KO about it later; we think that the errors we make card weaving happen when our minds wander, and when tired enough, my mind does not wander... At any rate, they're done and ready to gift.
Incidentally, Egyptian Diagonals is not an Egyptian technique. There's trim on garments in some of the ancient Egyptian reliefs with strong diagonal patterns that were suspected to have been card woven; Mary Meigs Atwater was able to reproduce that pattern via card weaving. Later examination of an actual textile fragment showed that it wasn't tablet weaving, but by that time the name had attached. Why do I bring up Atwater's name? I'm reading her biography right now and it's very interesting.
Weaving; I'm also almost done threading the rug that I've been working on for some time... I need to get a couple of smaller weaving things started as well but plan to be weaving on the rug this week.
Knitting: I've temporarily laid aside the shawl I was knitting but am working on the orange sweater; I've finished the right sleeve and started the body.
Spinning; I'm taking a spinning class at Stitches West in a couple of weeks and needed to clear off some bobbins for it... So I plied the rest of the paper I'd spun. I also started that really big braid I won at SOAR; I divided the braid into color and will be doing a DK weight 3 ply. I'm also spinning up some singles of natural colored Zwartbles (almost black) as homework for my class; she says a bobbin full but what does that really mean? Anyways, aiming at DK weight 2 ply. I'm hoping to knit a DK weight sweater in the near future.
Other: I broke in the wet studio by doing some marbling. The Jacquard Marbling Kit I bought was a bust... The paint floated well on the marble sizing but didn't adhere well to the fabric... chaos ensured. I then switched over to some airbrush fabric ink and that worked well. I need to investigate what other folks are using, and develop a method of laying the fabric down that works better than what I was doing. Meanwhile it's nice to know that airbrush ink comes off the counters, the cabinets, the walls and the floor without issue.
A couple other notes... I read this statement on Joe Moorman's mosaic blog, which resonated with how I feel about making things.
And, M from the study group sent me a link to this publication by Alice Schlein on amalgamation (related to network drafting) which was pretty exciting.
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