Yesterday we were both still pretty exhausted, so we mostly spent it on Granville Island, looking at the artisans and exploring the Granville Island Market, which I have to say is exceptional. The Traveling Tigress, ever-inquisitive, poked her nose into shop after shop, discovering such delicacies as snake fruit, long kong fruit, sugar apples, kaffir limes, and birch syrup. Mostly they weren’t terribly exciting (birch syrup tastes like watery molasses, sugar apples like a somewhat drier and more sugar-cane-y cherimoya), but the kaffir lime has real possibilities for chocolate. I’m glad I now have a kaffir lime tree (thanks Blossom!) as that will give me a chance to try candied kaffir lime peel with chocolate this year.
There is also a decent chocolate shop in the market! “Decent” as in “comparable to mine”, which is rare. I’m suitably appreciative.
Anyway, I woke up this morning feeling far more refreshed, and as nothing was open and Mike wasn’t going to be awake for another two hours, I started working on more variations of the double-gradient doubleweave. It’s fidgety work – first I have to separate the liftplan into layers, then I have to apply pattern presets to those layers to “fill in” the liftplan with actual weave structures. After that, I save the liftplan as a .bmp file, open Fiberworks PCW, cut and paste the liftplan into the threading file, and save the resulting file. Then I take screenshots of both front and back of the cloth using SnagIt, take them into Photoshop, separate the warps and wefts into 4 different layers, and then apply a gradient to the weft layers.
All of which is basically explaining why it took me two hours to do three or four variants on the liftplan I was using.
Here are the variants I tried. They all look quite similar, but they’re not. In the first one, the pattern squares (the diamonds) vary from 1/3 to 3/1 twill. In the second, they vary from 1/3 to 2/2 twill. In the last one, the pattern squares are all 1/3 twill. The difference is in the slight vertical banding you can see if you look closely at the larger pix:
Of the three, I like the last one (“pure” 1/3 twill) the best, suggesting that sometimes, simpler really *is* better. (Something I have a hard time remembering!)
Off to breakfast!
Welcome back!
There’s also a commercial non-alcoholic “birch beer” soda (highly regional, but BevMo may have some) that tastes mostly like root beer with a bit of wintergreen. No idea how much birch is actually involved, though.
Have you tried Japanese “black sugar”? Its taste is remarkably maple-like, imho, mostly via complex caramelized flavors. Again, I’m not sure how much most of the commercial products have been artificially flavored, but it seems to be available as moist sugar candy chunks or a thick syrup– it seems to be based on partially refined Okinawan sugar cane.