Going deep on a couple of subjects...

Let's face it, getting Covid on my trip to Sweden has derailed my travelogue...  I will get back to it... but meanwhile, this is some of what I'm doing; I'll go deep on a few things instead of being comprehensive.

Sourdough

There was something wrong with my starter... I suspected mold so I discarded it and tried to capture wild stuff. It's an interesting process; at first it smelled like dirty socks, then more dirty socks... but after a week it had a nice sour taste and smelled like beer. I assume it goes through phases as it acidifies (lactic acid) then finally settles on a colony of yeast and bacteria that are more pleasing to my nose. 

After 10 days, I'm baking bread... the starter doesn't seem as robust as it could be and I frankly was out of time baking-wise so I had to just slam it in the oven; it hasn't risen as the other batches did.  I've parked the starter in the fridge for the week (too much discard to process into crackers!!) and will revive it and try again next week; if it doesn't work I'll start over in October with the freeze dried starter I just got from the mill. 

V. mentioned that you can ask a nice baker to give you some starter in France... I may talk to Tartine if that doesn't work.

Cowl

I realized I didn't have enough yarn to finish... And I don't want to buy more (it's an indy dyer, so probably couldn't get any to match well enough anyways!) The cowl has an interesting feature where it increases 10 stitches then decreases 10 stitches then joins for the neck part. I asked my knitting buddies and we have no idea why the pattern maker did that; the only thing we can figure is that it might be to make it lay flatter on the back? So I ripped out the section of 10 increases and 10 decreases and joined it. I will have plenty of yarn now to finish. I need to buy a brown top to wear it with...

I think the reason I ended up short on yarn is because I've doubled the icord edge on both sides (knitted the 3 stitches twice), to make it lay flatter. I'm happy with that decision.

Weaving Stuff

Crappy hotel room pic of 
the rag rug

I might have implied I was in Sweden to weave a rug (I was) and so there is a new rug... It has these cute little bow inlays that probably won't survive an vacuum cleaner so it'll be a wall piece. Right now it's laying over an ottoman at the lodge, and I think I'd like to weave a rug to lay over the ottoman...

The rug is about 2'x4'. I was inspired by the water lilles (neckrosen) I saw in the Lund botanical gardens and in the river backwaters in Broby. The challenge I gave myself was to use whatever yarn was left after folks picked their colors and make something attractive... It's based on a VERY similar rug made by Nina <last name> our stand in teacher in <get the books name>. 

I'm currently dyeing fabric according to Marie Rollander's instructions, but using procion dyes.  Looks like the ingredient quantities are the same, but she uses washing soda instead of soda ash; I assumed I needed half as much soda ash as washing soda (I need to verify that). I used WAY too much blue dye and not quite enough green dye, so I have dark blues and lighter greens; I like them though. I dyed sheets I had here, plus some from the Thrift Store in San Carlos; the thrifted ones cost me less than $5 a sheet and one was a fun grey pattern with green animals on it. These will become placemats and a runner for the lodge.

Runners on the loom

I'm also making a couple of runners... One for a hostess gift, the other? Maybe we'll use it or maybe it will go in the potential hostess gift pile. I'll attribute the designer and pattern source in a later post.

Other

I've been trying to recover from the Covid episode... mostly I've just been fatigued. Until late last week, I could do one thing per day and the rest of the time I laid around or napped. To be fair, sometimes the one thing was two hours of chopping down brush and hauling it to the chipper pile, so it's not that bad. But I'm finally able to get back to a normal level of activity, and starting to build fitness back. 

I've been doing a fair amount of cooking as well... the only recipe of note was the peach ice cream recipe from The Perfect Scoop.  The fresh peaches give it a beautiful taste and a wonderful peachy pink color. If I made it again, I'd use half and half instead of heavy cream, but it was a delightful dessert along with a plate of fresh berries and sliced peaches.