Sweet things

I’ve had the urge to make sweets this week, and I have two parties coming up this weekend and next, so I’ve been in the candy kitchen. I made this batch of jasmine-vanilla-orange-blossom-honey caramels last night:

And, just for good measure, I made a blueberry pie:

But I’m not done yet. I’m making chocolate macadamia fudge tonight, and a batch of MacAllan 12 whiskey truffles on Saturday. Because anything worth doing is worth overdoing, right?

Meanwhile, the loom has not been idle. I’ve been weaving the most exacting and difficult fabric I’ve done so far: plain weave! The thing about plain weave is that there’s no place to hide your errors – in a complex design, there’s enough going on that a small error won’t be visible. In plain weave, any irregularity will jump out at you.

I’m not saying my plain weave is perfect – there are still errors here and there, where I didn’t catch them in time – but I think it’s pretty darn good:

I’ve woven about ten inches of it, which is enough for the small project I have in mind, so I’m going to switch to something different the next time I get to the loom. I think maybe I’ll weave some more of that 8-shaft huck lace pattern I was doing earlier, then move on to samples for the kimono. I’m dying to see how the warp weaves up in huck lace, with an orange tram silk as weft. I may try a dark ruby tram as well.