OK, back to work!

Sunday I invited several friends over for a chocolate-packing party.  Six of us took four hours to pack the chocolates into candy cups, the candy cups into boxes, the boxes into postal shipping boxes.  In total there were 70 boxes, but only 56 of them were slated for mailing; the vultures chocolate packing friends took the rest, along with a bunch of  the leftover chocolates, as a thanks for their indispensable help.

So chocolate season is over for the year – there are maybe four or five pounds left, which I will feed to my coworkers.  And that is IT!  I am much relieved.  I think next year I’ll scale down a little more – even 65 lbs was a stretch for me, probably because I tried doing too many flavors of truffles.  (The ganache-centered bonbons have to be made in the three days before Thanksgiving, the others can be done a week or two before.)  I think I’m also going to change the size of the candy box I use to something that will fit inside a flat-rate Priority Mail box – which could save me 50% of packing and shipping costs, and require less shipping material to boot!  But other than that, I’m satisfied with this year’s efforts.

Yesterday was mostly recovering from several 12-to-14 hour days of obsessive chocolatiering, and cleaning up the worst of the chocolate carnage.  The rest of this week will likely be at least partly cleaning, and then I’ll turn my attention to weaving.  (I haven’t yet received the patterns from Sharon, my sewing coach, so I can’t work on muslins just yet.)  I have the 27-yard warp (that’s 21.5 MILES of fine silk thread!) beamed on and ready to thread, just need to thread it, sley it, tie on, and get on to WEAVING!