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August 15, 2019 by Tien Chiu 3 Comments

Glitter girl

There are people who are perfectly mature, and capable of acting their age.

And then, of course, there’s me.

I went to a hairstylist last weekend. That’s not entirely unprecedented – it’s happened twice before – but unlike both previous times, I wasn’t getting married later that day. (At least, not that I knew about.)

No, I was getting rainbow glitter hair extensions tied into my hair. Not for any reason, other than delighting my inner six-year-old.

(By a curious coincidence, my shoe size actually is 6.5. Fortunately, I live in the U.S., because my European shoe size is 38, so the old admonition “Act your age, not your shoe size” would be much less funny if I lived there!)

Anyway, a hat tip to Syne Mitchell, who gave me the idea at ANWG (see what you learn at weaving conferences?). Syne had subtle strands of holographic glitter woven into her (much shorter) hair. I abandoned subtlety and went for the whole rainbow.

Here’s a shot halfway through the process: rainbow sprinkles on one side, plain ebony on the other.

And here’s a closer look at the rainbow side (the photo really doesn’t do the holographic glitter justice):

The rainbow strands, alas, have been sliding out of my hair at a remarkable clip – about half of them have departed after only three days. But I’ve been really enjoying it, and what’s left is truly wonderful. It’s now subtle enough to vanish at a distance, but glittery enough to provoke a delighted grin once I get closer, and the rainbow flashes out from under the sober black.

Just the way I like it. 🙂

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. 🙂

July 26, 2019 by Tien Chiu 1 Comment

Only two things that money can’t buy…

…and let’s face it, true love is overrated. (Sorry, sweetie!)

These are coming out of the garden right now:

plate full of ten or fifteen varieties of tomatoes — bountiful tomatoes!

These are the eating tomatoes, the ones I’m not trying to breed. They’re mostly newer varieties, mostly from Wild Boar Farms. I’m very fond of Brad Gates’ work. In addition to breeding beautiful tomatoes, and tasty tomatoes, he’s also breeding tomatoes for extreme conditions – hot, cold, drought, etc. – in anticipation of climate change. I’m all for anything that will result in continued tomato production in a time of turmoil. Particularly such delicious tomatoes!

Varieties include Sweet Cream, Berkeley Tie-Dye, Sungold, Kaleidescope Jewel, Sunrise Bumblebee, Pink Bumblebee, the tried-and-true Brandywine, Purple Calabash, Cascade Lava, and Brad’s Atomic Grape. Those are just the ones I recognize off the top of my head – there are undoubtedly others. A woman with forty or fifty kids can’t be expected to recognize all of them at first blush! At least, not if you’re me. I’ve never been great with names.

But of course these aren’t the real prizes. The real prizes (sorry, kids!) are the ones that don’t have names, only numbers – the ones that are part of my Fruity Mix breeding project. I grew out thirty-two plants from the three plants that bred true from the last year. Only five of the thirty-two produced tomatoes with the intense, wonderful flavor I was after, and here are an assortment of fruits from those:

I forgot to put in a dime for scale, but the image on my monitor as I type this is about real life scale. The smallest one is just under the size of a dime, and the biggest one is bigger than a nickel but well under the size of a quarter. They are (as originally described) a small cherry tomato, so this is getting back to the original variety. I’m not overly concerned about conservation (it’s flavor I’m after, not returning the variety to its roots), but it’s a sign that I’m on the right track.

I’m delighted to see that the yellow and orange colors have surfaced in this generation. Last generation all the tomatoes were red, and I was worried that the other colors were lost to posterity. However, pink flesh and yellow skin (which produces a red tomato) are both dominant genes, so if the Fruity Mix had gotten crossed to a homozygous-for-red tomato, all the offspring would necessarily have been red in the first generation. In the second generation, the other colors would start coming out as the recessive genes paired up, and I’m pleased to see that there were other colors lurking under the red. I got plenty of red tomatoes, but quite a few yellow and orange and even a red-and-yellow striped tomato! I have no idea where that one came from, but unfortunately the flavor wasn’t great, so I’m not going to grow out its offspring.

There are lots of tasty tomatoes among the 32 plants I grew, but only 5 or 6 have the intensely fruity flavor I’m breeding for. So I am saving seed from the tasty-but-not-Fruity ones (not sure why, maybe just because I’m a pack rat?), but next year I will only grow out seeds from the best Fruity lines. I don’t have time to pursue more than that.

The good news is that only a few fruits are enough to carry on the next generation of breeding, which means lots of tasty tomatoes to eat this year! I’m carrying a small container of them with me to Maryland – I’m flying out there today for a short visit (my esteemed spouse is holding down the fort at home), tomatoes and garlic in hand.

July 20, 2019 by Tien Chiu 5 Comments

Another jacquard loom is coming!

So, um, I bought another loom. Another TC-2 jacquard loom, in fact.

If you’re a new reader of this blog, you’re probably wondering if I’m nuts. (If you’ve been reading for awhile, you’re not wondering – you already know I’m nuts. Nothing to do with the mental illness, of course. 🙂 ) Why on earth would I feel the need to buy a second TC-2?? Especially now, when I’m so busy building a business??

Well, the short form is that I was thinking of buying a dobby loom with which to weave samples for my online courses, and a used TC-2 came up for sale, incredibly cheap – in fact, at roughly the price of a used dobby loom.

At moments like these, you don’t think (well, not if you’re me!) – you leap bodily for the keyboard and type the words, “I’ll buy your loom!”

Afterwards, you sort out the trivial details, like where on earth you’re going to put the monster (a LOT of garage-rearranging, stuff-purging, etc. is going to have to happen), how you’re going to finance the deal, and whether or not you’ll survive the giant impulse purchase (fortunately, I have a VERY tolerant spouse!).

Fortunately the ad had only been up for an hour or two when I saw it, so I beat out the other interested party, and this lovely creature is now mine, all mine:

new TC-2 jacquard loom — new-to-me TC-2!

She’s a 29″ weaving-width TC-2 jacquard loom with 880 heddles, and she’s in New Mexico right now. So my latest project is working out how to ship an 800-pound loom packed with delicate electronics 1000 miles. If you know of a shipper that handles large, delicate items and will take an item from Albequerque, New Mexico to the San Francisco Bay Area, please leave a comment on this post with your suggestion! I’d really appreciate it.

The next question, of course, is what to name the new TC-2. Fortunately, that is easy…I had already decided that my next loom (if I got one) would be named Maryam, after Maryam Mirzakhani, a brilliant mathematician and the first female recipient of the Fields Medal, the most prestigious award in mathematics (it’s the “Nobel Prize” of mathematics). Tragically, she died of breast cancer in 2017, at the age of 40 – she did so much, in so little time, that it would have been wonderful to see her contributions for another 50 years!

So Maryam she will be. I can’t wait for her to get here – probably in mid-August, as it will take time to sort out shipping and clear out space in the garage.

Speaking of clearing out space – if you are interested in purchasing an 8-shaft Baby Wolf in the San Francisco Bay Area, leave a comment (that will give me your email address). I will, alas, need to part with Lady Ada sometime in the next 6 weeks to make room for the new TC-2…so I will be selling her. She comes with a castle and stroller, and weaves beautifully. She is not a fine-furniture loom, which is to say she has plenty of scratches and one leg doesn’t match the rest because it had to be replaced – but she will be priced accordingly (once I have a chance to assess fair pricing). So if you are looking for a workhorse loom, suitable for workshops, that isn’t fine furniture, drop me a line. (EDIT: Lady Ada has been sold.)

Now, of course, I can’t help wondering – will Grace and Maryam have babies together, and if so, will they look like this 3D-printed, DIY jacquard loom?

What an adventure! I can’t wait for my lovely Maryam to arrive.

July 6, 2019 by Tien Chiu 2 Comments

The best birthday gifts ever!!

My birthday was last week, and I got the TWO best birthday gifts ever! The first was from Ricki, who finished threading Amazing Grace!! Yes, that’s right – finished threading all 2,640 heddles. Ricki has been working on this roughly since December, coming down two or three times a month and working five-hour shifts to get Grace threaded. I am amazingly indebted to Ricki for getting this done, because I simply couldn’t face the giant hump of threading and heaven only knows how long Grace would have sat there had Ricki not appeared.

I have now dived into sleying (much easier) with glee:

Sleying Amazing Grace, my TC-2 jacquard loom — Grace, three-quarters sleyed

Sleying the last half is going slowly because we accidentally put an extra round on warping mill when winding half of the warp, so I have to pull an extra three yards of warp through on four of the six threads going through each dent of the reed. So it’s taking awhile, but I should be done in the next day or two. Debugging is going to be long and painful as well – jacquard looms don’t like to sit unused and Grace has been idle for almost two years – but I’ll launch into it with something like my usual verve. Ricki got me unstuck, for which I owe them, big-time. I’ve already told them they are welcome to come down and weave on Grace any time they want to.

The other best birthday gift ever is from my in-laws (surely the best in-laws ever!). It’s a Leatherman Tread, a 29-in-1 tool bracelet. Yes, you too can break glass, open bottles, drive Philips, hex (Imperial and metric!), and flat-head screws, turn bolts, cut thread and fishing line, open and close oxygen tanks, drive socket wrenches, pop out SIM cards, and, uh, other stuff with one handy, wear-everywhere, TSA-safe bracelet:

The only downside is that I had to remove one full 1″ link and the 1/2″ link to get it to fit properly on my wrist, so I don’t get to use the full set of tools. But Geek Girl is thrilled beyond compare. I’ll never be using a butter knife to turn the bolts on my Baby Wolf again!! And the Tread is even engraved with my name and everything.

Best. Birthday gifts. Ever.