Playing with marmalade, indigo, satellites, and robots!

It’s been a busy couple of days! On the book front, I wrote the sample chapter on visual design and did the first review with my critique partner. It’s still pretty rough, but I have an idea where I’m going with it now. The next step will be writing the other sample chapter, on the creative cycle (Design, Make, Critique, Change). After that I’ll start editing and polishing.

On the marmalade front, I just finished the final batch of marmalade. I made four batches this weekend: Rangpur lime with saffron, grapefruit with rose geranium, bergamot, and strawberry/Meyer lemon with rose geranium. The strawberry/Meyer lemon is processing in the canner and should be out shortly.

All four are delicious, and it’s hard to pick a favorite! But I think the strawberry and Meyer lemon is my fave. At least for now. Flavors shift as the marmalade cools, so I’ll do a second tasting around once they’re completely cool.

And yesterday I did my first indigo vat in well over a decade. My friend Lisa needed to indigo-dye some T-shirts, so I offered to set up a vat. We used pre-reduced indigo from Dharma Trading Company, and it worked like a dream. It was magical to see the shirts go into the bath a pale blue, come out malachite green, and then slowly oxidize to a deep indigo. I took some time-lapse photos – the shirt was not fully oxidized at the end, but Lisa needed to take the shirts home with her so they could be washed out. I didn’t dye anything myself, but kept the vat and am thinking of doing some shibori dyeing this week.

Also in the textiles vein, I spotted this yarn-bombing at the Ferry Plaza Farmer’s Market on Saturday:

I particularly love the chicken feet. Baba Yaga’s bench, perhaps?

Also, work (Skybox Imaging) had a huge moment on Thursday as, bursting with pride, we shipped our second satellite off to launch base. It’s being launched out of Russia sometime this quarter, assuming things don’t get delayed. (No problems so far, but we’re devoutly hoping that Russian relations stay stable!)

Here are a few pictures of the load-out. The satellite’s official name is SkySat-B, but once it’s launched, it will become SkySat-2. It’s a modestly sized satellite, like SkySat-1 – about the size of a mini-fridge. But obviously, the protective crate is a lot bigger!

And, as a treat for reading to the end, here’s Tigress encountering a Roomba for the very first time!

(For those not familiar with them: a Roomba is a little circular robot vacuum cleaner that wanders around your house vacuuming up dirt. We just bought ourselves one, in hopes that it might improve our dreadful housecleaning habits. But they are also great as cat entertainment!)