Of cloaks and chocolates

I just ordered some yarn for the cloak. I wanted something with glints of metallic red, so I ordered this:

It’s about 4500 yards per pound, which may be a bit heavy – but if so, I can always weave it with a finer weft. Also, I may use it in the color it currently is, or I may kettle-dye it black, to make it an intriguingly variegated dark red/black. It’s from Colourmart, of course – my favorite yarn vendor.

No further progress on the cloak design, but some work on chocolates! The source for my custom printed transfer sheets is having a sale on custom work – they waive the (substantial) setup fee if you order 250 or more sheets – so I have drafted up a design and will be chatting to them about it today. I’m still tinkering, but here’s what I’ve got so far:

The photo shows the design on dark and white chocolate. Left to its own devices, the red is a little too transparent to show up well against dark chocolate (though it’s beautiful on white chocolate), so I added a gold border to make it stand out more. The main question in my mind is whether the printer can get the colors to line up precisely enough for this to look good – the border is only 1/16″ wide so even small differences will be highly visible. I’ll call them about this today.

I also need to tweak the “name” design (the “Tien Chiu” at the bottom) – I don’t think it looks good the way it is, and will likely change it to be plain gold. This will show up nicely on dark chocolate, and will look much better than the combined colors.

Between this order and some previous ones, this should give me enough custom designs to have every one of my chocolates a custom design, mostly Chinese paper-cuts. That will be really, really cool.