Cooking and Baking and Spinning and Some Thread Graduates from the Studio into the Closet

This will be a longer than usual post because I've been doing things...

Cookbook challenge

June was Alice Waters The Art of Simple Food. It's a lovely book but more of a "you can do this"  book than a recipe book. It's got some great stories and some excellent ideas but I really struggled to figure out what to make.  I made a salad dressing and one other recipe but my heart wasn't really in it.

July is Rick Bayless's Mexican Every Day. I cooked chicken with red chile rice (with black beans!) to use up the chicken breasts in the freezer that I accidentally bought... I substituted a mixture of smoked paprika and cayenne for the ancho chile as I had none then served it with the tomatillo and chipotle salsa and a green salad completely from my garden. I'd like to try it again with ancho chile and chicken thighs. This was excellent with a French Gamay. 

Someone at my bread!

Speaking of the garden... I dumped the contents of the compost tumbler into the garden last year when I had to move the tumbler. The cucumbers are going absolutely crazy! I fear we're having a hard time keeping up.

Today, I cooked Rick's basic pinto beans recipe from the same book, 25 minutes in the pressure cooker; they're very basic but I enjoyed them for lunch with some salsa in them.  I used half of them for his cowboy beans recipe from the same book.  I used 8 cups of water and it's way too much, so I'm boiling some off... maybe 6 next time?

I also baked a loaf of whole wheat bread using packaged yeast and the recipe from the Sunrise Flour Mill. It's 1/5th whole wheat, with the rest being bread flour; it rose nicely and has a good taste and crumb. Sadly, I'm pretty sure the sourdough starter had mold on it so I got rid of it. I'll try again when I am home in two weeks or so.

Fiber

Maybe I should have dressed up
for the photo... 

The red fabric is off the loom! and is now a shirt!  It's graduated from the Studio into the Closet! Here's the critique:

I did sample the yarn at three setts and decided it didn't matter that much, and settled at 30 EPI; I think 33 could have been a better choice and have made the sewing easier.

Having said that, the sett was firm enough where I didn't have to go to extreme measures to stablize the cut edges; I did handle it carefully and there was some fraying, but it was manageable. I used French seams and an applied facing made from cotton t shirt material so all the cut edges are enclosed. 

I didn't want to spend the rest of life threading heddles so I opted to have a center seam. I left about an inch on each side of the lace weave in plain weave but it wasn't consistent so the center seam looked a little wonky; I ended up sewing an extra line down the front to compensate. DH said it looked like a purpose style decision (yay!). Regardless, you have to be looking close to see it and I'm not unhappy with the outcome. I didn't factor in the shrinkage correctly and was a tiny bit short on the fabric but it fits anyways.

Fabric close up with ruler in inches for scale

The fabric has an obvious diagonal stripe so I slanted it in a V down the front and back, by flipping half of the fabric. But the design is made by threads floating over other threads, and they float horizontally on one side and vertically on the other resulting in each side having a slightly different luster. I suspect I may be the only one to notice this.

I'm extremely happy with the fit, the fabric, the overall look and this will be a piece I'll get a lot of use from!

In other fibery adventures, I hosted a spinning meetup for the Guild at my new fav coffee place,  the Village Hub in Woodside. It's a coffee kiosk in an oak grove at a church, with the goal of building community. Between that and the TdF, I finished the blue green merino/bamboo silk I'd started a while ago. I still need to ply that and the blue/black merino tencel.

The sweater I was knitting is on time out; my gauge is way off and it's never going to fit. This is why we swatch! But I never knit the same as my swatches... Meanwhile, I started a cowl that I bought the yarn for earlier this year, using a technique called assigned pooling. It's a color changing yarn and you do something special every time you encounter a special color. It's a perfect project to take on my trip!

Speaking of trip, I'll be travel-bloging here. 

And lastly, I'm taking a drawing class with G. Here are two apples.