La Maison du Chocolat

In two ways, in fact:

(1) Mike’s sister, Johanna, was nice enough to send us a box of chocolates from La Maison du Chocolat for Christmas.  Now, I am nominally avoiding sweets (gained over 5 lbs over the holidays!), but there is no way I am letting these go to waste!  La Maison du Chocolat produces the best chocolates I have ever tasted; they are the best, par none, as far as I’m concerned.  If I ever get my chocolates to be as good as theirs, I’ll know I’ve “arrived”.

So I ate a very lovely rum raisin chocolate yesterday and will dig further into the box today.  Chocolates are ephemeral and best eaten within a few days, so I guess I’ll just have to suffer.  🙂

(2) My brother and his wife were diabolical enough to give me a copy of the Playfirst game Chocolatier for Christmas.  It’s a fun little computer game where you travel the world in search of chocolate recipes, then make them in your factories.  You can buy ingredients in many cities around the world, and buy factories and candy shops as you progress.  It’s not very complex but it’s a fun little game, fun enough that it’s been cutting into my weaving time!  I’ve even bought Chocolatier 2, and will play that once I finish the story line in Chocolatier.

That said, I’m trying not to get TOO wrapped up in the game, because I consider computer games a waste of time (albeit sometimes a pleasant one) – it’s time that I could spend creating instead.  So I want to balance playing this game off with weaving and other stuff.

Speaking of weaving, I’ve decided to alter my tactics.  The stripes are creating a regular horizontal stripe pattern of oranges and yellows with about 3/4″ repeat.  It’s conflicting with my design line, which is considerably more flowing, and I think would also be distracting in the finished shawl.  So I have set aside the bobbins.  I will definitely use them, however.  I plan to set up a black warp at the same sett, weave it with an undulating twill, and name it “Tiger Stripes”.

Instead I will take the second half of the knitted blank (fortunately there was enough to do two shawls) and dye it in large blobs of orange, yellow, and red.  This will introduce some more variation – it will still come out in horizontal stripes, more or less, so I may need to alter my design line to be more compatible – but the pattern will look much less rigid, I think.

This may need to wait for the weekend as it requires a fair amount of setup and time, and work is heating up.  Instead, in my spare minutes, I may mock up the muslin for the cashmere coat.

And admire my new yarn, of course.  🙂