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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