food

December 26, 2023 by Tien Chiu 9 Comments

A fabulous new tool: the Mesdan knotter!

Well! The new warp is dyed. This time, I got a little overenthusiastic with the dye, so while there are no white spots, there’s not much variation in color, either. It’s mostly deep navy blue, almost black, with a few lighter and a few darker spots, and some areas with hints of purple. That’s fine with me.

I am also shockingly far along in the warping process, thanks to a nifty new tool that is the best invention since duct tape (the wheel is sooooo 5000 BC). It’s a Mesdan fisherman’s knotter, and it looks like this:

It ties knots. Tight, secure knots with the ends neatly clipped off. A thing of beauty.

(There’s another, better-known-among-weavers, knotter, called the Boyce Weaver’s Knotter, which is now discontinued. You can get them on eBay, but they tend to be worn-out antiques from long-shuttered weaving mills. As a result, they also tend not to work. (I have four, none of which work, to prove it.))

My new Mesdan fisherman’s knotter, on the other hand, is another kettle of fish. This one is brand-new, purchased from A.B. Carter in North Carolina, and works 100% reliably. It has completely revolutionized my warping process. It also does my laundry, whitens my teeth, and irons my morning paper (or would, if I still got a physical newspaper!). PLUS, it slices my bread (take that, sliced bread!).

Well, maybe not quite ALL that…but close?

To put a new warp onto a jacquard loom, one ties each thread of the new warp to a thread of the old warp. This means one knot for every thread in the warp. And there can be a LOT of knots.

B.K. (Before Knotter), I tied all my knots by hand. This is every bit as slow and fussy as you might imagine, and also hard on the hands. By hand, I tie on at about 2 threads/minute. After an hour, I need to break for several hours because my thumbs get sore. So on a good day, working full tilt, I might be able to hand-tie 250 knots or so.

The two warps I’m putting on now require tying over TWO THOUSAND knots. 2,200, to be exact.

For obvious reasons, I was not looking forward to a week and a half of tediously hand-tying knots, followed by another two days of finding and fixing all the places where a knot let loose or a thread got tangled. NO FUN. (Sad face.)

Enter the Mesdan knotter. It ties tighter, much more secure knots than I can, with much less fussing. Lay two threads into the knotter, put them under light tension, pull the trigger, and voila! A nice, tight knot, with the ends neatly clipped off. I don’t even have to test it to make sure it’s secure, unlike my hand-tied knots.

It took me a while to figure out a setup that was both ergonomic and convenient. Here’s a pic of my setup, for anyone who’s interested in using one:

Mesdan Fisherman's Knotter mounted for tying new warps onto old

And here’s a video of the knotter in action (if you want to get the gory details of my setup, rewind to the beginning of the video, which explains everything).

Using this knotter, I tied on the ENTIRE painted warp in just a few hours! Four days of tedious, hard-on-the-hands work compressed into a single day. SO much faster. WAY more comfortable. And….dare I say it? Actually FUN!

Hard as it is to believe, this may even be niftier than blue tape.

Now I’m hard at work on the velvet warp. This one is going much more slowly, because it requires a precise sequence of threads that would be disastrous to get wrong. So I am checking each small group of threads six times, in six different ways, to make sure all is well. Nevertheless, it’s going faster than I would have believed possible. In only a day and a half, I’m already halfway done:

I expect to finish tomorrow or the day after, cutting my warping time from 14 days to 4 days and removing 90% of the tedium and frustration. WHOOPEE!!!! Warp speed ahead.

Meanwhile, I know pictures of your food are sooooo 2000’s, but we had a very tasty porchetta for Christmas dinner, and it was so beautiful I can’t resist sharing:

Pork belly, seasoned and tightly tied by The Fatted Calf in San Francisco, cooked in our sous vide cooker for 36 hours, and then deep-fried for 5-10 minutes to crisp the outside. SO GOOD.

And served with carrots, parsnips, and onions slathered in bacon fat, seasoned with thyme and pepper, and roasted slowly for 45 minutes:

C. made a pecan pie as well, but unfortunately I forgot to take a photo. C. says it was delicious, though!

The cats did not get porchetta for dinner, but they got extra cat treats and lots of snuggles. A lovely day, for all of us.

Happiness to all, whatever you celebrated!

May 23, 2021 by Tien Chiu 4 Comments

Cloth, chocolate, and carousel books

Well! It’s been a packed week and a half. Mostly working on the business, though I did get some weaving in. I am now 70.54% done tying on the “Fire” warp on Maryam, according to my calculations (hey, that .04% is IMPORTANT! Gotta keep up the troops’ morale!):

70 percent tied on - Fire warp on Maryam

I have also made important progress on the gradient warp. I figured out how to align a complex color gradient with a complex draft in Fiberworks and translate the resulting color/draft combination to the jacquard loom. It’s not a simple problem because the color pattern on the jacquard loom isn’t actually color but a structural pattern, and isn’t constructed at all in the jacquard design software the way it is in Fiberworks (shaft loom weaving software). In fact, on my to-do list for today is recording a video walkthrough of the process so I don’t forget how to do it. I will likely publish it on YouTube and in the Jacquard Weaving group on Facebook so that the two other people in the world who might be interested can access it.

Anyway, the wheels go round and round, and the end result is this:

Advancing twill gradient sample — Advancing twill gradients

The photo really doesn’t do justice to the gradient, though. Let’s zoom in:

Closer up, you can see that the gradient gives an almost three-dimensional feel to the pattern, the illusion that it’s curved outward in the center. Nifty, eh?

Anyway, that’s just a doodle, experimenting to see how the method works. Now that I’ve figured out how to set up drafts and gradients to align with each other, I can get on with the business of designing the actual samples. To be honest, most of the samples are going to be much simpler than this; the class is going to be four or six weeks (I’m giving two options) and the first four weeks will probably be devoted to plain weave and twill. The last two weeks are going to be packed with information about cool drafts like this one.

Before I weave the samples, however, I have to design the class. On deck for this week is writing a detailed class outline, both for the free weave-along and for the more in-depth, paid class. I’m really looking forward to it! Once I know exactly what I’m teaching, I can design the samples and get to weaving.

Meanwhile, there’s an even more important battle front at home. C. was complaining that there was no chocolate in the house. That, of course, is an intolerable situation, so I fixed it:

The apricots at the top are extra large slab apricots from the farmer’s market. The woman who sells them there says she only had 19 cases this year and her partner wanted to save them for big customers like Harry & David, but she said, Pfft! I’m giving them to my customers at the farmer’s market, the ones I see regularly and who actually care about me and my farm. The power of relationships. (The smaller apricots are her regular kind – better for snacking, but I thought it would be nice to have some big fancy ones to give away.)

And then I got some almonds and some dried Bing cherries from her as well:

almonds and dried cherries in chocolate — almonds and dried cherries in luscious chocolate!

I did some plain chocolate bars and some almond bars, too, so C. should be kept in chocolate for quite some time!

Finally, since the Fire warp looks like it will be weavable sometime in the reasonably near future, it’s time to think about what to do with it. As I mentioned a few blog posts ago, I’ve gotten fascinated by folded/origami books, so I’ve been investigating different book structures. I’m planning to experiment with several different book structures, including dragon books, flag books, and some fancier accordion structures – but the one that most intrigues me at the moment is the carousel/star configuration, so I’m going to make a carousel book prototype today. I’m also going to experiment with some methods of stiffening cloth into something suitable for book making – two methods were suggested to me, stiffening with konnyaku paste and backing with Japenese paper, and I’m planning on doing some modest experiments, if I can find appropriately sized scraps of handwoven cloth in the sample bin.

Here are some of the paper samples I plan to play with:

What fun! I’m glad to be able to make time for creative experiments again.

And, of course, it would be unthinkable to leave out the rulers of the household. Fritz and Tigress have been utterly fascinated by the persimmon tree outside the bedroom, where some birds have built a nest and thoughtfully populated it with constantly peeping cat toys. Sadly, they can’t get out to play with the cat toys (much to everyone’s relief), so they just have to settle for watching. But Fritz is very excited, and would like you to know that Tall Cat is Tall.

June 20, 2020 by Tien Chiu 4 Comments

Whew! What a month!!

I know I’ve been delinquent with the blog updates. I’ll plead that it’s been quite the month! Fortunately, in a very good way.

Janet Dawson and I decided to team up and teach a weave-along about weaving from your stash. We thought we’d get five hundred, maybe a thousand students, tops. Instead, we had over THREE THOUSAND WEAVERS sign up!! We were delighted, but also a wee bit overwhelmed. As a result, we both more or less dropped off the map for about a month.

I did get the sample warp onto the loom and weave the first set of samples for Tourmaline Butterfly. I was doing a rendition of this image:

image of butterfly wing — butterfly wing

The concept is that the cape, when the arms are spread, looks like butterfly wings, with dark green veins coming out from the body of the wearer and ending in the border of dots. The interior of the “wings” portion is intensely colored and shaded out towards the veins to give a dimensional effect.

For the folks who like technical details (if you don’t, just skip to the next paragraph): in all the samples, I used a point threading and a networked rosepath treadling in the pink areas (the tie-up is twill), and a brick-like fancy twill pattern in the green areas. It’s double weave, so the pink is one layer and the green is another layer, stitched together periodically so the fabric comes out as a single layer.

As you can see, the colors are pretty disappointing. I was hoping for some nice hue contrast and a clear, distinct pattern, but there simply wasn’t enough value (light/dark) contrast, and the chunks of color blended into each other even from a relatively short distance, muddying the bright pink into a dull brown.

I sat down and thought about it. I was facing a difficult color dilemma. Green and magenta, the two colors in the bright part of my painted warp, sit opposite each other on the color wheel. That meant that practically any color I chose as weft would blend into a dull color with one or the other of them. The only two exceptions were yellow and turquoise, both of which were strong-minded colors that would shift the colors away from the magenta and green I wanted. And yellow in particular is a super-assertive color that would probably drag attention from the painted warp (yellow is such a diva!).

Nonetheless, I thought I’d give them a shot.

Sample #2 for Tourmaline Butterfly, with yellow, turquoise/blue, and olive green wefts.

None of these were what I wanted – the blue was about the same darkness as the magenta, producing a nearly invisible pattern. The yellow produced a bright result and a clear pattern, but HOO BOY!! took over the entire piece – entirely predictably, and not at all what I wanted.

I thought about it some more and eventually decided that this section was all about magenta, and it would be okay to lose some of the oomph of the green. So I decided to try a dark, dull magenta weft. Using a darker, duller weft is a great way to bring forward the colors in a painted warp (because the eye is more attracted to light, saturated colors), and using a similar color would reinforce the magenta.

This led me to Sample #3:

In the previous samples, I had felt that there wasn’t enough of the painted warp showing due to the shading from the center to the outside of each section (it goes from showing more weft near the outside of each pink section to showing more warp on the inside). So I switched it to showing mostly warp throughout the entire section.

But on seeing it, I decided the sample looked too “flat”. So I wove sample #4, which was Just Right:

Sample #4 for Tourmaline Butterfly, with dark magenta weft and shading towards the edges of each pink section

I like this sample a lot. The darker magenta weft gives it subtle motion without significantly diluting the intensity of the pink areas, and the very subtle shading from dark outside towards lighter inside of each pink area gives it a subtle sense of three-dimensionality. I think for the final piece I will want to make the weft a bit darker, but I will have to weave more samples to be sure.

At the top of the fourth sample is another experiment with a slightly more saturated pink weft. I don’t like that one as much; it looks brighter but not as rich as the one below it. That’s interesting, considering that normally I am a bright-color magpie!

So that’s the Tourmaline Butterfly update.

Meanwhile, other things have been happening!

C. and I celebrated our 10th wedding anniversary! Here we are together, after a wonderful take-out meal from Manresa (three-star Michelin take-out – only in the Bay Area!). Hard to believe we’ve been married for an entire decade, but it’s true.

And yes, 10 years since my handwoven wedding dress really kicked off my weaving career. Hard to believe I had only been weaving 2.5 years when I started it!

And here it is in its home at The Henry Ford museum, being shown to some visitors.

A volunteer there told me that most garments are stored hung for space reasons, but my dress is stored flat in a special, custom-built archival box. I’m glad to hear that they are treating it as precious; I’d like to think it will be preserved for many generations to come.

Finally, the fruit trees C. planted seven years ago when we moved in are starting to bear fruit. Lots and lots of fruit. I have been making pie:

Aprium (apricot-plum cross) pie with chocolate ice cream

And, of course, the first tomatoes are ripening. An eager-beaver Sungold.

Sungold tomato - first of the season! — First tomato of the season!

Finally, since no blog post would be complete without a cat, here is Tigress, Queen of the Laundry Pile. Because laundry is not truly clean until it has been liberally bestowed with cat hair.

Whew! What a post. But there was SO much to catch you up on!

April 13, 2020 by Tien Chiu Leave a Comment

Chocolate and cows

Or, how I spent my Easter weekend…

First, the chocolate. (Because chocolate is so much more fun than cows!)

You may recall that awhile back, I made myself some low-sugar chocolate. Well, predictably, C. hoovered up most of the low-sugar chocolate, and after it ran out, asked me to make more. So I ordered another 6 kg of Valrhona’s Alpaco (my favorite flavor of their line), 3 kg of unsweetened and 3 kg of their 66% cacao solids. Over the weekend, I mixed 1 kg of each, tempered it, and made some 83% Alpaco chocolate. It’s very intensely chocolate, and low-sugar enough that I can eat it in small doses without feeling too bad about it (my blood sugar is, fortunately, very well-controlled). And, mixed with nuts and dried fruit, it’s even tastier!

Here’s what I made. First, plain chocolate bars. Here they are in the molds:

These are the heavy-duty, rigid polycarbonate molds used by professional chocolatiers. I’ve tried the thin, flimsy plastic molds sold to home cooks and I don’t know how anyone can succeed with them – they drive me crazy. So when I got rid of all my other molds I kept these four back, just in case I wanted to make bars again someday. I’m glad I did!

And here are the bars, unmolded:

They’re not absolutely perfect – they have a slightly matte finish instead of a high sheen – but that may be partly because of the high cocoa content, as the unsweetened chocolate doesn’t have as much cocoa butter as a couverture does. I’m not entirely sure about that. Doesn’t matter; they look quite good and will taste even better!

Here’s the peanut gianduja (aka: peanut butter mixed with chocolate, like the inside of a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup, only much much better). Technically it’s not a gianduja as it contains no powdered sugar, but don’t tell anyone!

The front part contains “regular” (unsulfured) raisins, the middle golden (sulfured) raisins. The back part is plain peanut gianduja, and very tasty it is.

And here is the cherry almond chocolate:

Dried cherries and roasted almonds mixed with chocolate

This is still in what I consider the most glorious stage of chocolate: when it hasn’t quite fully set, and is a little matte in sheen. I don’t know why I find this moment in chocolatiering so beautiful – perhaps because it is so transitory. It lasts only a minute or two. The chocolate goes from a liquid, translucent shine to the hard, waxy sheen you see in chocolate bars. But in between is this soft, matte glow that I just love. It says, “The chocolate is tempered perfectly, and will come out great.”

For those who have dyed with indigo, it’s like that magical transformation from the yellow-green of antifreeze through beautiful shades of aqua to pure indigo blue, after you take the fiber out of the dyebath and the pigment oxidizes. It’s wonderful to see.

Meanwhile, about the cows…Um, yes, the cows. Actually, only about a quarter of a cow. I hope, anyway.

I’ve wanted a chest freezer for quite a few years. I like making big batches of food because it’s more efficient, but of course the freezer is only big enough to hold 1-2 two-gallon batches of soup or chili. A bigger freezer would allow me to do a bigger variety of foods, so I can still cook efficiently without having to eat chili for two weeks straight.

But for a variety of reasons, we never quite got around to getting a chest freezer.

Then the coronavirus hit. And the idea picked up some urgency.

I will admit to being both a gourmet and a pessimist. I buy my meat at the farmer’s market, and what with social distancing and the throngs that usually populate the farmer’s market, I imagine it’s only a matter of time before they either shut down the farmer’s market or shopping at the farmer’s market becomes completely untenable due to long lines etc.

Plus, supply chain issues may become a problem. There have already been reports of meat packing plants having problems with workers getting sick. My guy doesn’t get his meat processed at a big meat packing plant, but there’s nothing to prevent the workers at his place getting sick either. And while I’m sure I could live without meat if I needed to, I happen to like grass-fed beef, it’s better for the environment than corn-fed beef, and I REALLY don’t want to support factory farming.

So…a chest freezer and a bulk meat purchase seemed like a good idea. I called him up, and it turns out that I can get a quarter cow for $5.50/lb hanging weight. Hanging weight is the weight of the steer when they hang up the carcass for dry aging, right after it’s been slaughtered. In this case, I asked for the smallest steer they had, which turned out to be 600 pounds. So that was 150 pounds of meat.

That’s still a LOT of meat for two people, but it turns out that you lose about 40% of the weight during the dry aging and butchering process, so it will work out to about 90 lbs of actual meat. I’m asking for bones + offal (all the stuff they’ll give me, anyway) so I might get a bunch more – we’ll see.

Anyway, we have a 7 cubic foot chest freezer (I had to exercise my Google-Fu and then call all over town to get it – apparently everyone and their kid sister wants one right now too, for the same reasons I want one!), and the quarter-cow will take up about half of it. I’d make a crack about the dead bodies taking up the other half, but since I quit my job as a project manager, I don’t need to dispose of dead bodies any more! 🙂

Now, of course, if you have a quarter-cow in the freezer, plus a quarter-freezer’s worth of cat treats that must not get stale (because priorities!), you have to organize it all. Dumping a hundred packages of beef into a freezer at random is a recipe for chaos. My tentative plan is to file the quarter-cow neatly into canvas tote bags, classified into steaks, roasts, ground beef, and so on. Using tote bags will make it easier to haul stuff in and out since tote bags (unlike cardboard boxes) come with handles. Wire baskets might be better, but I don’t have wire baskets to fit the chest freezer and am wary of scratching up the interior.

Of course, you then have the problem of differentiating a sea of identical canvas tote bags.

I bet you can guess where this is going…

Yep! I spent part of yesterday tie-dyeing canvas tote bags so I could differentiate frozen cow body parts:

The colors aren’t the most brilliant, but I was dyeing with the colors I was using for the dye samples for the double weave cape, and I was dyeing on an off-white canvas base. But I’m happy with the results anyway – I will certainly be able to tell them apart in the freezer!

And, with that, I’m off to other things. I’ll update you on the latest set of yarn samples once they’re dry.

July 30, 2019 by Tien Chiu 4 Comments

…but you can’t take the chocolatier out of the girl!

You may recall that I retired last year as a semi-pro chocolatier, after 30 years in the biz, on the grounds that things had gotten a wee bit excessive and a woman with Type 2 diabetes really shouldn’t be making chocolates anyway.

Apparently I forgot who I was dealing with.

(You’d think that, after 49 years of living with myself, I’d have learned, but apparently not. Sheesh.)

It all started so innocently. I was trying to find a low-sugar chocolate that I actually liked, using the obvious method of ordering one of every possible type of 80+% cacao-solids chocolate from Chocosphere and then sampling little bits of each bar. (Fortunately, my esteemed spouse, while significantly fussier than before meeting me, is still willing to eat most of my rejects.) I found one I liked – which promptly went out of stock, with no projected resupply date. It was also annoyingly expensive.

(A momentary rant: People who brag at you about the cacao-solids percentage of their preferred chocolate bar generally haven’t the slightest clue what that means. In a dark chocolate, the cacao-solids percentage tells you how much sugar is in the bar. That is ALL it tells you. Dark chocolate is made of cocoa butter, cocoa powder, sugar, and a tiny bit of lecithin, usually soy lecithin, that helps the emulsion stay together. Cocoa butter and cocoa powder are both considered cocoa solids. Lecithin is typically well under 1% of the bar. Therefore, bragging “My favorite chocolate is 66% cocoa solids” is exactly the same as bragging “My favorite chocolate is 34% sugar.” Exactly.

Percentage of cocoa solids tells you nothing about the actual measures of quality – the flavor of the chocolate, the amount of cocoa butter relative to cocoa powder, the intensity of flavor of the cocoa powder, the variety of cacao tree and the region in which it was grown, the darkness to which the cacao beans are roasted, or any of a slew of things that are way more important than the amount of sugar in the bar. So please. Stop it with the cacao percentages. Talk about something that matters.)

My favorite brand, Valrhona, did sell a low-sugar (85%) chocolate bar, but it was their Abinao flavor, which I find unpleasantly astringent and overly tart. Annoyingly, they had my favorite flavor, Alpaco, in a 66% cacao solids and an unsweetened chocolate form, but did they have it in 83%?? Noooo….if I wanted something like that, I was just going to have to make my own.

Well, okay. If that’s how you want to be about it…I can recognize a gauntlet when it’s tossed in my face. I had given away all my chocolatiering equipment when I “retired,” but fortunately, I still had a few tricks up my chocolatier sleeve, and one of them is a Cacao Barry product called Mycryo. Mycryo is a powdered, highly-crystallized cocoa butter that is designed to seed melted chocolate with the stable beta crystals that result in beautiful, glossy tempered chocolate. Without a tempering machine. (That’s how we semi-pros do it: We know how to cheat!)

So I ordered 1 kilo of unsweetened and 1 kilo of 66% Alpaco from Chocosphere. Ah, who am I kidding? I ordered three kilos of each. What on earth can you do with only two kilos of chocolate?? That’s less than five pounds! Ridiculously small quantities. Sheesh.

Then I ran a small test batch, sort of a proof of concept, to see if my idea would work. I melted one kilo of unsweetened, and about a quarter-kilo of 66%, to 110 F or so, then dumped in 500g of the (unmelted, still-tempered) 66%, stirred around until it reached 94F, then dumped in 20g of the Mycro as in the directions, added a trifle more of the 66%, and waited until it reached working temperature, about 91F. Now I had this lovely bowl:

bowl of tempered chocolate — 4.5 pounds of tempered chocolate

I had bought a few polycarbonate chocolate bar molds, but they were patently not up to handling 2 kg worth of chocolate. After filling all four of these, I still had about 3/4 of the chocolate left:

chocolate poured into bar molds — Chocolate in bar molds
(lower left: dried sour cherries and hazelnuts added after filling the mold)

So I started pouring pools of melted chocolate into a sheet pan and mixing in chopped-up tasty bits: dried figs, dried sour cherries, peanuts, hazelnuts, and macadamia nuts. I even added some peanut butter to a batch to make peanut gianduja. (Like Reese’s peanut butter cups, only much, much better!)

Here’s one of the puddles of chocolate (cherry-hazelnut, I think):

Now I have about 6 pounds of fairly low-sugar (85% cocoa-solids) chocolate in eight or nine different mixes with macadamia nuts, hazelnuts, peanuts, peanut butter, figs, and dried sour cherries. It’s a good thing I’m not a chocolate junkie – I’m perfectly capable of eating just 2-3 pieces a day, which is well within the bounds of a reasonable diet, even for someone with Type 2 diabetes. So I’ve got plenty of variety to nibble on, and fortunately, I also have a spouse who does not have Type 2 diabetes and will happily vacuum up the rest long before it goes stale, giving me an excellent excuse for making more.

…and they (and their cats) lived happily ever after. 🙂