Weaving and cooking adventures

 I had a huge post all planned out about cooking on the Happy Thoughts Range, or wood cookstove that I was using at Westfield.   It was Thanksgiving Day, and due to the local fair also being held, it's usually fairly quiet that day in the village.  I brought a number of pumpkin based historical recipes to cook and thought I'd have a ton of time to take photos.  However, everyone seemed to show up.  It was crazy busy, with really nice, interested and friendly people.  It was a great day, but so busy that I had no time to take photos, or to even get all of what I planned cooked.   Next day there is the Pumpkin Festival and it's a ticketed event, so people will be streaming in all day, but not all at once, which should be easier to deal with. 

I did however get the tea towels off the rigid heddle loom a couple of days ago.    There was more shrinkage than I expected with a sett of 20.  They are definitely soft and drapey, due to the fact that I couldn't get PPI for the weft tight enough.   But they are are much closer to the towels I weave on the floor loom or table loom than I'd expected.   Using two heddles, was a tad slower, but once you got the rhythm and order of the heddles, it wove up quickly enough to be satisfying.  After wet finishing they are 16" x 27".  Once hemmed they'll be 16" x 25.  Smaller but acceptable for a tea towel.

On the Rigid Heddle loom now is a wool scarf, with a hand painted yarn for the warp.    Next time I think I'd make it a longer skein to paint, so I could get longer colour changes, to make it more like a serendipitous plaid.    It's pretty enough, although they are not my favourite of colours.   I'm trying to hunt down the photo of the painted skein.  I must have take a picture of it, but I can't remember when I dyed this.   It was beautiful in the skein though.  It was a large skein, Lion Brand Fisherman's Wool, which comes in a 227g (8oz) skein and is 100% wool.  It's lovely to work with on the Rigid Heddle loom and dyes like a dream.

We had family Thanksgiving yesterday.   I was tasked with bringing turkey and apple pie.  I changed the apple pie to a pecan and a lemon pie because my son's girlfriend is allergic to apples.  However, it turns out it was only raw apples and the thing she's allergic to is destroyed by heat, so apple pie would have been fine.   This is a tiny pie I made for testing, with the leftover pastry and filling from the pecan pie.   I used maple syrup instead of corn syrup for the filling and it was sublime.  Expensive, but soo delicious.   The pecans alone, for the 2 cups that I needed cost over $10.  Definitely a special occasion pie!  The lemon pie was just a slightly adjusted old fashioned lemon meringue pie recipe but without the meringue, since that wouldn't hold or travel well and I'd made the pies the day before.   I added a bit more lemon zest and a bit more lemon juice for a slightly more tart pie, which people slathered with whipped cream since my daughter had whipped up a vast amount for the 3 pies which appeared on the table.   I tried the vegan pumpkin pie, which tasted fine, but had the texture that felt more like it was under cooked.  I'd have added a bit of cornstarch or something to make it less like an almost raw pudding texture.  It was a commercial pie and the crust was inedible: soggy and tough.  My guys are spoiled with good pies :)