Drawstring bag

Lately I feel as though I've started a dozen things and not finished any of them. I have WIPs sitting all over the house. But today I started AND completed a little project.

Just to be clear, I did NOT make
this muslin for the fitted jacket!

Back in May I got a new sewing machine, but I haven't had a chance to even open the box, the summer and fall were so crazy. It's been years since I sewed anything, so I had nothing in particular driving me. But now... my youngest needs a costume in about three weeks' time, and I'm out of practice and unfamiliar with the machine. A very skilled sewer and wonderful person is doing the design work, but I'll have to take her model and use it to construct the costume, which is a sort of a steampunky Victorian-inspired dress. Petticoat, skirt, draped apron, fitted jacket.


I was watching a free mini-class at Craftsy which was about different sewing machine feet (a great refresher) and spotted another free mini-class on basic bag making. Whee!

I had some quilting cotton around, so...






...I made a
drawstring bag. It's lined, with a sturdy channel for the drawstrings.

The first attempt at making a drawstring in matching fabric was a failure - I think the pull cord made from folded bias tape was too wide, so I sewed too close to the edge. So instead, I used a couple of lengths of four-strand braided twine from a macrame disaster a few months ago for the drawstrings. That worked!

Later, I managed to make a drawstring anyway, by using a length of twine as the pull cord instead of the folded bias tape. Couldn't let the failure go. Re-learning sewing and learning this new machine have both been frustrating today, but finishing a simple little sewing project and succeeding on the drawstring felt good.

My skilled sewist friend set me some homework so that when I get to the fitted jacket bust curve, I don't screw it up. I am to sew spheres from felt, as it's a forgiving fabric. Since it's the winter holiday of course I feel more ambitious than that, and I'm going to make a snowman.

Sweet Potato Chocolate Cake and Soul-Destroying Custard

I just finished a sweet potato chocolate cake for my daughter's birthday. I loosely based it on a recipe from Betty Bake.

First, I roasted sweet potatoes. Mmm! That caramelizes them. Then, I put 1/3 cup dry baking cocoa, 5-6 tablespoons of coconut cream, and a dash of salt into a bowl and microwaved it 10 seconds at a time, whisking between each heating, until it looked smooth.

Then I beat together 3 eggs, a cup of mixed coconut and olive oil, and a cup of brown sugar. When that was fluffy, I added in about a cup of mashed roasted sweet potatoes.

Then I added in the melted chocolate mix. After all three were well mixed, I added in one at a time: about an eighth of a cup more dry baking cocoa, a teaspoon each of baking powder and baking soda, a good dash of salt, a cup of mixed brown and white rice flour, and a half cup of tapioca starch.


The batter was very thick and sticky. Poured it into a prepared 10" pan and baked at 325 for 25 minutes. It turned out really well, a delicious, dense cake a little like a cake brownie.

I tried to make a custard to go with it, but that was a disaster. I'm not sure what went wrong.

I used two quarts of almond milk and six tablespoons of vanilla extract, and heated it to a low boil. I took it off the heat, and slowly added in a whisked mix of 6 eggs, 8 tablespoons of maple syrup, 3 tablespoons of rice flour, 4 tablespoons of tapioca flour. It started to thicken, and I stirred, and everything seemed to be going well. I put it back on the heat on low, and stirred for a few minutes, but it didn't get any thicker. Nothing. I added one more whisked egg. Nothing. I added another whisked egg. Still nothing. I added another tablespoon of tapioca blended with a little dribble of water. Nothing. It was almond vanilla maple egg soup.

Despair.

After consulting Google on "custard problems" and "how to rescue custard" I realized the chemistry was more complex than I'd thought. No saving it. At least it hadn't curdled.Yet.

I dumped two packets of plain gelatin in, whisked hard, and put it in a covered bowl in the fridge. I don't know how to describe it now. It's some sort of gloopy suspension of particles.

Tastes good, I guess.We spooned it over the cake as a sauce.

Felting and spicy maple pecans

Most of my work projects wrapped up in the last two weeks, so I've been head-down on that lately.

I've found some time to continue working on the felting projects, though I'm struggling with the knitting side of the experiment. Until I can get a consistent loose stitch knitting, I don't think I'll be able to create a fabric suitable for felting, so that's a work in progress.

I've made these pecans three times this week. The first two times I used honey instead, and not quite enough spice. Still good! This last one is deliciously maple-flavored. My oven heats unevenly, so I've burned a good number of them each time, which is disappointing.

Felting prep

I've continued to work on the afghan off and on, but since I keep having obsessional felt-project thoughts, I switched to some experimenting in that area today.

I've felted a couple of crochet pieces before with an eye to making a padded drum bag, but I haven't been entirely satisfied with them. Perhaps crochet stitches aren't as conducive to felting as knitting stitches in general, or perhaps it was that I was using double crochet stitches rather than the half-double which is said to be the best crochet stitch for felting. Or maybe I crochet too tightly.

In this red felted crocheted circle, which I do use to pad drum heads but have yet to incorporate into any fitted cover, the stitches are still too well defined for me to be happy. Bucky likes it, though. He's a little weird about wool. I've often wondered how he'd react to a whole sheep.



I poked around in my stash and found this nice harvest-berry colored ball of thick and thin fiber. It crunched like wool when I squeezed it, and the fibers seemed loose, so I thought it might work for a felting trial. When I put a snippet through the burn test, it smelled like wool and the flame went out immediately, but then left a hard black lump. I thought maybe it was a wool acrylic blend, but when I pressed on the lump, it shattered into powder all over my desktop and working papers. Ugh. Well, at least that question is answered - it's wool.

I thought I'd knit a big swatch instead of crocheting it, and see how that turned out. Ha ha! That was optimistic. It's been more than a year since I practiced knitting. By row 2 my stitches were too tight to get the needle tip in. Riiip!

One crochet swatch with a more-or-less N sized hook (about #14 needle), and one knit swatch with #10 needles (about J hook). I think the crochet swatch will still turn out to be thicker when felted due to the thicker stitch, despite the larger hook size.
pix pending

Cool weather crochet

What with the cooling weather, I've been working on crochet the past few days. I don't have any big project I want to push to complete right now - lots of ideas percolating, mostly about small felting projects, but nothing lighting a big fire - so I'm plugging away on a couple of works-in-progress.

I have an afghan I've been poking along with off and on for most of a year in a nice set of muted colors in my favorite acrylic. I do prefer wool, but acrylic is just more practical for afghans.

Here's a view in progress - and also a link to my notes on Ravelry. Now that it's pulling together, it reminds me of Neapolitan ice cream. Which wasn't quite what I was going for, but oh, well. I like it anyway.

I'd like to get it finished and move on at this point. I have a lot of wool stashed in various lovely colorways and have been wanting to felt them. I had some ideas about a felted sculpture, but I don't have any of the colors I wanted for that, so in the meantime I might as well felty up some other little things. Gifting time is here!

Fused plastic

If you've read the novel or seen the 1990s A Room With a View, there's a hilarious scene where an adventurous Lady Novelist confronted with a damp spot of ground tells her timid friend, "Observe my foresight! I never venture forth without my mackintosh squares. At any time, one may have to sit upon damp ground or cold marble."

Now, I have a request from a Literary Adventuress who needs a mackintosh square of her own.

At first, I thought of making up some real mackintosh squares. Authenticity! But rubberized cloth is hard to come by, and plasticized versions usually look like just like cheap tablecloths. Who wants to attempt to sit with any elegance on an little square patterned with pictures of  fried chicken?

I bought some heavy-duty waterproofing spray in the hardware store, but feel a little dubious about whether weatherized fabric will last when folded and shoved into a backpack repeatedly.

So in the short term, I'll make a smaller waterproof pad.

We used to call these sit-upons in Girl Scouts. It's one of the first projects Brownies do, usually with carpet remnants or fleece or something with bubble wrap and duct tape.

This is Step 1 of my little sit-upon project - fusing together plastic grocery bags to make a thick, fabric-like, sewable lining.

It's easy - cut the plastic bags open so that they lie flat, and iron them between two sheets of parchment paper with the iron set to polyester. The plastic is fused one layer at a time, not all at once. It becomes very dense and workable.

What this might miss in true Literary Elegance it will gain in reuse/recycle hippie mom points in the refined airs of Berkeley. One hopes.

Fabric inspiration

More doodling today....

... with Miyazaki on my mind. I adore the chibi Totoro, the little white forest spirit... and the kodama, the tree spirits.

No-Face is one of my favorite Miyazaki spirits. I'd like to draw No-Face better.

But I'm also planning for a fabric/stitch/mixedmedia piece.(Now that I have some space to work.)

I'd like to build a grandma-related piece. Most of her things either went to Goodwill or weren't in good enough shape to give away,  but I have one or two pieces of her clothing that I couldn't quite get rid of since they're so strongly associated with her - especially a blouse in her favorite royal purple. I thought I would use a sampler model in layered squares to organize it with some other fabrics, then layer in some of the beads from her necklaces. I have an idea about adding images in over the layering, but we'll see. I think I need to start from the base and work from there.

Inspiration

I really love the work of the alternative quilter Jude Hill. There's something about the depth of the

Detail from How One Heart Might Affect Another, Jude Hill

textures she develops that is almost visually kinesthetic. I feel a very physical, sensory, sort of synesthesia when looking at her work, as though by looking with my eyes I also feel the roughness of the cloth in its layers with my skin.  I wish I could take a class with her, but instead I'll just have to let her work inspire me. Her site: http://spiritcloth.bigcartel.com/

by Anja Kieboom

I also found the Prayer Flag Project site today, and am enjoying the different styles and colors of the artists' work. I like that each piece is meant to be a prayer, that there's a concentrated idea and emotion presented with each flag.  
http://theprayerflagproject.blogspot.com/