garden | Tien Chiu's Blog

July 10, 2012 by Tien Chiu

Unburying the loom

I spent a good chunk of yesterday night unburying the loom. In our attempts to rearrange and unpack the garage, the loom platform had gotten covered with boxes, rendering the loom unusable. I finally got around to clearing it yesterday – there is still much work to do, but at least I can walk up to the loom now! And I have replaced the treadle cable, so as soon as I hook up the Compudobby and the live-weight tension brake, the loom will be ready to go.

Here are a few photos of the unburied loom:

all my weaving equipment — loom + weaving shelf

I still need to get rid of the various boxes, bicycles, etc. currently leaning against the loom – probably another day’s worth of unpacking and rearranging. Also, if possible, I’d like to get the homemade jams and candied citrus peels on the top and bottom shelves moved elsewhere – then I can spread out my weaving stuff so it isn’t quite so crammed, making it much more accessible.

My dye equipment is also unpacked and organized. I had no idea there was so much of it!

Actually, that is not quite all of it – the blender and the volumetric flasks had to go onto the weaving shelf. I really hadn’t realized just how much volume dye equipment takes up – and the five-gallon dye buckets are still outdoors! Definitely not a space-saving hobby.

(But then, it is a fully-equipped dye/surface design studio – with two kinds of acid dyes, two kinds of fiber-reactive dyes, thickeners, resists, color removers, paints, silkscreens, stencils, dye stocks, dye pots, and what have you. If I had only one type of dye, my equipment would be far more modest.)

Sewing-wise, I have draped a second basic muslin that I find more or less satisfactory. I’m now moving into moving the bust dart, and after that into draping princess and paneled designs. I haven’t done the parts yet about finishing the pattern (removing the muslin and transforming it into an accurate paper pattern) as I want to understand the principles of dart movement first – then I can refine the details.

And the zucchini? It is still cranking away, and I harvested two more zucchini yesterday, with two more coming in a day or two. It’s already producing more than we’re likely to use, since we eat three or four zucchini a week. In another week or two we may be on the lookout for unlocked cars in which to deposit zucchini…though we are doing OK for now.

The butternut squash is still going nuts. I’m counting 12 baby butternut squash right now, with more on the way. I’m guessing it won’t mature all of them, but you never know – we have an exceptionally long growing season (first frost in November-December) so it will certainly have every opportunity to ripen them!

July 5, 2012 by Tien Chiu

Alien vs. Predator

The zucchini has now got a new rival: the butternut squash! I planted a Waltham butternut squash, not knowing that it is one of the largest butternut squashes, both in the size of the vine and the size of the fruit. (I feel that nurseries should offer warnings on their baby plants: “Warning: This Plant Will Take Over the Garden and Eat Your House!” It’s rather like seeing an adorable little baby anaconda in the pet store, buying it, and five years later winding up with an 20-foot behemoth that has its own room in the house and is eyeing you with a hungry look.) At any rate, after growing slowly for a few weeks, it has suddenly taken off.

Alien (split into two photos because the zucchini is now too large to capture in just one photo):

zucchini 7-5 - front — zucchini 7-5 – front

zucchini 7-5 - back — zucchini 7-5 – back

Predator:

Fortunately (?) they are on diagonally opposite sides of the garden, so they would essentially have to take over the entire garden in order to meet. However, the butternut squash is already muscling into the beans and eyeing the tomatoes, and the zucchini is rampaging over the cucumbers and threatening the eggplant. So it will be interesting to see what happens.

And, because I have been told that baby pictures are adorable:

July 4, 2012 by Tien Chiu

New copy stand

First: this is post #2000 in my blog! I can’t believe I’ve written that many, but then, I’ve been blogging for nearly ten years now, so I’ve had plenty of time to do it. The scary thing (to me, anyway) is that some people have actually read all 2000 of them. That’s a lot of reading!

Anyway – I have been meaning to scan my Complex Weavers Journals for some time. They are chock-full of useful information, but because I don’t have a searchable version, I’ve not been able to take full advantage of them. So I want to scan them the same way I scanned all my Weaver’s magazines.

However, the old copy stand went with the move. It was huge and bulky, and we just couldn’t justify giving it that much precious space in the garage. So what next?

Well, I bought a Pedco Ultraclamp Assembly, which is designed to clamp a camera onto handlebars, car windows, etc. According to the description and reviews, it’s very stable even when clamped onto a motorcycle on bumpy dirt roads, and it really does clamp anywhere. I then mounted it to a bookshelf, like so:

It’s unfortunately not the best of photos, but if you click for the big version, you can see that something is clamped to the bookshelf (my warp beam crank, because it was the only thing I could lay my hands on that looked like it might suit), the Pedco clamp is attached to the protruding wooden piece, and the camera is attached to the clamp. (I tried clamping the camera directly to the bookshelf, but it needed to be further away from the bookshelf to take proper photos.) The magazine is directly underneath the camera, held down by a sheet of glass, and the two lights are aimed indirectly at the magazine (to light it up without glare).

And presto! I have an instant copy stand, that breaks down and stores in a very compact space, unlike the monstrosity I was using before.

This worked very well – I scanned the June 2012 issue (#99) of Complex Weavers Journal yesterday, did the text recognition today, and have saved a PDF of the table of contents and a PDF of the full journal to Evernote. I didn’t have to run it through my own text recognition software, as Evernote does text recognition on .jpg files, but it’s easier for me to page through the magazine this way.

Enough diversions. What am I working on now, creatively speaking?

Well, outside of various moving-related stuff, there are three things on my plate. The first is to develop the concept for my workshop on the creative process, since it looks like I’ll be giving it at one of my guilds in October. The signup sheet will be distributed at the next guild meeting, which means I need to finish the description in the next week. It would also behoove me to really think through the curriculum and topics – I have some great ideas but need to work out the logistics of it first.

Which gets me to the second item, the book. Since it is basically about the creative process, I’m going back to work on it while I develop the workshop ideas. They dovetail nicely.

Finally, I’m toying with whether to work more on Phoenix Rising or whether to finish off the long-delayed cashmere coat. Both of those would involve studying fashion draping, to develop the patterns. Phoenix Rising would also require weaving a bunch of samples in fine threads, which also means dyeing and unwinding those fine threads. This could easily become all-consuming, and since we are still cleaning up the moving-related details, I am tempted to work on the cashmere coat instead. But I will have to think it over.

Meanwhile, in the new world order, our zucchini invaders are busy churning out more invaders. However, we are engaged in a desperate battle to save the planet. Here is our first attempt:

I took Pat Foster’s advice (thanks, Pat!) and tried stuffing them. I scooped out the insides with a melon baller, sauteed some peppers, onions, and the zucchini innards, along with fresh basil and thyme (from our garden!), and put it back in the zucchini shells. It tasted delicious, even though I had to “cheat” by microwaving the zucchini shells – there wasn’t time to bake them since the rest of dinner was almost ready.

Anyway, we ate the baby zucchini (along with some Muscovy duck breasts in a mix of soy sauce and Meyer lemon marmalade), and the world is safe for now. But for how much longer? There is already one more eating -size zucchini on the vine, and I see others coming along in a day or two. I can see we have our work cut out for us.

(A friend, when I mentioned the zucchini, said, “One year we actually resorted to leaving a box full of zucchini on the passenger seat of someone’s unlocked car.” Egad! I hope we aren’t reduced to such extremis.)

Off to work on the garden! There is some weeding and zucchini harvesting to do, before we go off to the appliance store to buy a washer and dryer. Life continues apace, and I must go with it.

July 1, 2012 by Tien Chiu

Fruits of our labors

Since I finished the studio yesterday, today I changed my focus to the garage. I’ve now fully organized the dyeing/surface design equipment, on a giant set of utility shelves, and have more or less unpacked the weaving equipment. I need to clear more space before the loom is usable, though, and need to repair a cable, re-set the live weight tension, and reattach the treadles and Compudobby before I can start weaving again. Still, we make progress!

Meanwhile, other things are making progress, too. This may be the last zucchini photo – the plant is now large enough that I can barely fit it into the camera frame! But here is the latest photo of the rampaging zucchini:

Each of the three main branches is now about ten to twelve feet long, and in addition to shooting forward like lightning (six+ inches of new growth per day), they are also sending out side branches.

And to think that just four weeks ago it looked so sweet and innocent:

I’m morbidly curious just how long the zucchini can keep this up. I egged it on a bit last week by applying some organic fertilizer, and am wondering if it will go all the way up to the backyard fence if I keep giving it more water. It will be interesting to see how it plays out, if the zucchini doesn’t eat the house entirely!

At any rate, here’s something just as exciting: our first zucchini!

It’s bigger than it looks, about 3.5 inches across.

The puzzlement, of course, is that this is clearly not an Ambassador Zucchini as it was labeled. So what do we have? The stems are prickly, which suggests that it’s a summer squash of some sort, and I’ve seen photos of ball-type zucchini that look similar to this one, so I’m continuing to call it zucchini until I have positive identification otherwise. But if you recognize this variety, please leave a comment to let me know what it is!

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