I had a wonderful setback today. I was over at my friend Ginny’s house, warping up her loom with my samples for Handwoven, and we lost the cross in one of the sections. This normally wouldn’t be a big deal, but these samples involve some pretty complex color sequences, and unfortunately the three colors are virtually indistinguishable on the loom. (The yarn is a colorgrown cotton, and the colors only develop after scouring.) I struggled with it for about an hour, and finally gave up on fixing it and went home. Later this week I will re-wind that section, then we’ll pull the warp off the loom and re-chain it, and I’ll fix the section next weekend.
Why was this so wonderful? Because it gave me a moment to breathe! I had planned to stay at Ginny’s all day, then stagger home around dinnertime, at which point I’d have to work on the huge case of tomatoes I bought yesterday at the farmer’s market. Then fall into bed exhausted, and get up the following morning to deal with various work crises. I’m energetic, but even I can’t go nonstop!
So, despite the frustration of my careful planning going astray, I’m feeling pretty good. I got home around 2pm, ran some errands, took a leisurely nap, and then tackled the tomatoes. 20 lbs of delicious tomatoes have now been transformed into about 2 gallons of insanely good tomato soup. Very simple recipe: saute some onions until brown, add chopped tomatoes, simmer until the tomatoes are tender. Put through a food mill to remove seeds and skins, add a big bunch of chopped basil, salt to taste. You now have a very concentrated tomato puree, to which you can add milk and cream (if desired) for a most excellent cream-of-tomato soup. But sometimes I just eat it straight up, without any fillers – it’s that good.
Of course it is only as good as your tomatoes – I use dry-farmed Early Girl tomatoes. Not as big as other tomatoes, but because the plants are minimally irrigated (if at all!), the tomatoes are intensely flavorful and sweet. I grew 83 varieties of heirloom tomatoes (yes, I said eighty-three!) one year, searching for the perfect tomato – but have since decided that dry-farmed tomatoes are tastier than anything I can grow at home. So I buy them instead.
Anyway, now that that is out of the way, the next week will be dedicated to muslins. I’m going to see Sharon on Saturday, so I’ll need to modify patterns and cut/sew the new muslins. I also need to clean up the studio – stuff is accumulating in piles!
No progress on the Infinite Warp – but I hope to get back to it sometime next week.
