Craft! Bang! Boom!

Given enough time, I’m fairly certain I’ll try anything even remotely involved with the sphere of fiber arts. And for some reason, recently, the notion of buying raw fleece and washing and processing it myself kind of started to appeal to me. I was fairly certain I’d find the process too much of a pain in the ass, but yet… I was intrigued.

Fortunately, instead of just buying an entire fleece at random without knowing what the hell I was doing, I was able to get a sample of raw fleece from Stickyfingers so I could give this a shot without committing to an entire sheep.

Here’s what I started with - about 4 oz. of Border Leicester fleece.

Click below the fold for the dirty, dirty details.

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I wound up watching Top Chef this season pretty religiously. There were actually contestants on it this time that I liked, and, even better, seemed really talented. My favorite two were Stephanie and Richard, both of whom were classy, nice, and damn good cooks. Remarkably, both made it into the finals, and Stephanie (who had been my absolute favorite) won.

Richard admitted at the Judge’s Table during the final judging that he had choked during the last challenge, being a victim of too many ideas with no restrictions, something I can definitely relate to. And so Richard, who had appeared to most people to be the odds-on favorite to win Top Chef, wound up coming in second or third place (I choose to believe he came in second).

Although he didn’t win the title of Top Chef, he was probably this season’s stand-out chef. As much as Stephanie cooked remarkable food, there was a certain playfulness and enthusiasm about Richard’s dishes. His food was memorable, and probably the most memorable dish he made was his banana scallops, which showed up during the series 3 times. They were, in fact, included as part of his desert in the final challenge, paired with bacon ice cream.

It was probably his recycling that dish so many times that led me to use “Banana scallops!” as a punchline while my dad was visiting this weekend. After discussing the dish ad nauseum with him, we finally made the bold step of purchasing some bananas at Jungle Jim’s to try to recreate Richard’s recipe. What actually happened was that we made something different. Chef Blaise, this one is for you.

Click below the fold for the recipe/tute:

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It’s been a while.

In all honesty, I was losing steam on the way I had this blog set up for a few weeks before Travis got sick, but after he did, that was pretty much the kiss of death. The most creative thing I did during the Great Sickness of Ought-Eight was to figure out how to get Travis to consume chicken broth.

After he got well, I decided to just put this blog on hiatus a bit until I figured out what I want to do with it. I think now I’ve finally got it sorted. I’ve always been more of a process orientated person, rather than product orientated. It’s hard for me to get up motivation to do something to solely achieve an end result. I get more enjoyment and satisfaction actually working through the steps of something rather than having a finished thing at the end of it all.

So, with that in mind, I think what I’m going to try to do with this blog is to go more in depth about my crafty endeavors. A catalog of FOs is nice, and there will probably still be some of that here, but I think I’d like to concentrate more on tutorials and things of that nature instead. So, the Yarnzombie mothership is still going to be, “Hey, I made socks; Barack Obama is awesome; Lost is spooky,” but this blog is going to be more on, “Hey, if you want to make socks similar to the ones I made, here are the steps I followed.”

We’ll see how it goes.

Also, coming soon: recipes! At least, one recipe. I’ll try to get it posted later today. Nom nom.

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It’s been a while, but the weather has finally turned spring-y, so that combined with the crazy price hikes in food is really motivating me to get my gardening act together. Yesterday we got our garlic in the mail from Pinetree. Travis was able to get out and rototill our gardening patch.

It’s going to be maybe 3/5 of the size of the last time we attempted to garden, and of that area, about half is going to be devoted to tall things, like broom corn and sunflowers. I love growing those! We’ve gone wrong in the past by trying to plant too much - too much food to harvest, and too much ground to take care of. I’m trying to go back to my gardening roots, so I got out the Square Foot Gardening book, which was my go-to book the first time we had a garden. Somewhere along the line (I’m pretty sure it’s when we moved to Ohio and built a bunch of raised beds) we lost our way and went for the uber-big over making efficient use of our space.

So I’m going to try to constantly plant things this year. If I harvest a radish, I’ll just plant another one in its spot. If my cilantro bolts, I’ll plant something else in its space. Stuff like that. I think I’m most looking forward to growing kohlrabi again. It’s insanely expensive in the supermarket, and most of the people who have it at the Farmer’s Market harvest it when the kohlrabis are really big, which I’ve never understood, since they taste horrible and woody when they get too big. I’m all about harvesting small veggies. Yum!

Anyway, I’m going to re-read my book over the next few days and try to actually get some stuff planted. First up is the garlic, and then stuff like radishes and kohlrabi. From what I read yesterday, the average last frost date for Columbus is May 9th, so a few days after then, I’ll go ahead and plant stuff like squash and sunflowers. I’m trying to be a lot less anal about the whole planting thing than I’ve been in the past.

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Double the Fug, so named because it combined two pretty fugly rovings. This one is a monster, 8 7/8 ounces, and 263 yards. I do really like the way it came out, so now I’m working on combining some more fugly rovings together.

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Behold the Hannakube pinhole camera! It’s designed so it has 4 separate compartments, basically making it 4 cameras in 1. It will fit 4″x5″ photopaper or film, neither of which I currently have, but I’m hoping to get some within the next few weeks. Might as well make the Hannakube in preparation for it.

Most larger format pinhole cameras (well, all of the larger format pinhole cameras, actually) that I’ve seen online are one-shot affairs. You load your film or paper in the dark or in a darkroom, take it out into the big wide world and shoot one picture, and then that’s it. All done. You have to either use a changing bag (a lightproof bag) to switch out film or go back to your darkroom to do it. This is just my attempt to circumvent that a little. 4 pictures in one camera! Modern ingenuity is crazy!

Here’s a slideshow - hopefully it’ll load in the correct order this time - of the steps I went though to make this. It was pretty easy, actually.

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Yeah, I know, I’ve been slacking off on the spinning lately. This is just a wee skein to prod me back into it. The wool was from a batt carded by Terrabellaspun called October Glow. 77.5 yards, 2 3/8 oz. I do like the way the yarn wound up striping. Tres cool.

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Toby step for in the bedroom! This was something I’ve been meaning to get done for forever, and yesterday the weather was nice enough that Travis dragged the box out to the driveway for me to paint and got a lid cut for it. We’ve got this big sheet of 3/4″ MDF we’re working on using up - my god is that stuff heavy! Anyway, we were able to put a dent in it yesterday.

After the box was painted and the lid was cut, I did some quick math and then we got a warp on the loom. I used some handdyed cotton as the warp, and my 4-ply handspun from earlier this year as the weft. I added about 3″ to each side for my warp to allow me enough extra to fold over and staple, and that turned out to be the perfect amount.

The weaving was done this morning:

…and it only took me about 15 minutes to get it off the loom and stapled to the lid. Hooray!

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Holy crap, I can’t believe this worked! Cameras - I make them. See below the fold for the details - including picture tute and sample photos.

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Dear Catastrophe Soy Silk. Medium twist single. I had dyed this soy silk fiber a few weeks ago, and it came out like ass, so I overdyed it a few days later, and I wound up getting weird colors with the bonus that the fiber just sort of collapsed into soft catastrophe. I spun this up today, and I think it redeemed itself. I was originally going to spin it up as a two ply, but surprisingly, the soy silk wanted to be made into a thicker yarn than I had originally thought, so I just kept it as a thicker single. Anyway, I like it now. 149 yards, 3 5/8 ounces.

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