Weaving and chocolate

I have been steadily weaving this shawl and am now about half done. (Yes, I have been doing other things besides planning my trip to Ghana!) It’s going well–my rectangles are now (mostly) squares, and the pattern is looking better than I’d expected. I think it’ll still be a riot of color, but I’m holding judgment on the finished project until I actually see the whole thing. It’s hard to judge something when you can only see it four inches at a time.

I’ve been doing more reading on weaving. It’s extremely intellectually engaging–there is so much complexity to weaving, MUCH more so than knitting! Mastering Weave Structure is a great book that covers many (most?) of the things you can do with different weave structures, and makes it plain that you could keep yourself busy for a lifetime just with plainweave! It’s a great book but I find it exhausting to read, because it introduces so many new concepts and ideas so quickly. It’s definitely not a beginner’s book, but I love it because it challenges me to keep up with it. Going to keep reading it.

Uncharacteristically, I don’t plan on doing anything too ambitious until I feel I have my weaving “feet” more firmly underneath me. I’ve found a couple of patterns in Handwoven that I think will suit, and will probably follow those for the next few projects, until the thrill of just plain weaving wears off and I’m willing to entertain the possibility of weaving samples. 🙂 I’m not sure where this newfound conservatism comes from, but I suspect part of it is just that I’m intellectually engaged with other projects right now, so don’t want to focus too much on weaving. (Someday, for example, I *will* have to get back to that book…) I would like to learn to do my own drawdowns and designs at some point, but that point is not now. I’ll be a “recipe weaver” for a bit longer, I think.

Some things never change, though, and my taste in yarns remains fairly true-to-form: silk, cashmere, and fine wool. I’ve ordered a pound of cashmere yarn, I have a pound of silk yarn, and I’ve ordered another pound of a silk-wool blend. I think I’ll mostly be doing finework, though not ultrafine (30+ epi), for my weaving. Rugs are right out.

Meanwhile, chocolate doomsday approacheth. This weekend I’ll be making chocolate-covered apricots and pears, cherry-almond clusters, and chocolate covered macadamia nuts, if I can find macadamia nuts (Trader Joe’s has very unsportingly stopped carrying them). I might make some fudge as well, although I don’t know–fudge is usually better fresh.

Next week the plan is caramels, fudge, and English toffee, the weekend after that I’ll start the molded chocolates. Then, of course, comes Thanksgiving weekend, which is truffles, filling the molded chocolates, boxing up the chocolates (hopefully with assistance), and handing over piles and piles of leftovers to my friends Jon and Julie, who will no doubt eat themselves happily sick. (I don’t particularly like eating chocolates myself – I’m in it more for the artistry – so thankfully, they won’t be eaten by me.)

Weaving, chocolate, and Ghana. All three related, now that I think of it. Well, Ghana has both weaving and chocolate, anyway…

One of the things I love about my life is that I never know where it will take me next. I feel very, very lucky. Even with the bipolar disorder.