I am actually pretty pleased with this shawl, though I consider it more of a hasty sketch than a carefully painted study.  It has some flaws, not fatal ones, but on the whole, it’s beautiful - especially close up, where the yellow stripes aren’t as pronounced.  Crumpled randomly into a pile, it is a collection of ever-changing colors, no square inch like another, flowing into each other gracefully - which was, of course, the point.

I have also figured out how to correct my warping problem that was creating the stripes.  The problem lies in the threading - I got the cross twisted somehow when I did my initial threading - and if I just rethread those sections removing the twist in the cross, I should be just fine.  I had thought this impossible because I am used to working with a plain beam - but with a sectional beam, I can easily identify the precise thread at which the incorrect section starts, and use my handy AVL treadling-the-threading trick to rethread the section quickly and accurately.  Hopefully that should fix it.

Tonight I am going to cut and dip caramels, tomorrow is a guild meeting.  Friday is date night, so no candy until Saturday…when I start in on fudge.  Yum!

And now, the photos….

Shawl, in loose folds

Half the shawl

Close-up showing the pattern

Shawl, rumpled

Then a friend pointed me at an interesting Scientific American article, which is mostly about analyses of chess grand-masters but which has this neat little tidbit tucked away in the body of the article:

Ericsson argues that what matters is not experience per se but “effortful study,” which entails continually tackling challenges that lie just beyond one’s competence. That is why it is possible for enthusiasts to spend tens of thousands of hours playing chess or golf or a musical instrument without ever advancing beyond the amateur level and why a properly trained student can overtake them in a relatively short time. It is interesting to note that time spent playing chess, even in tournaments, appears to contribute less than such study to a player’s progress; the main training value of such games is to point up weaknesses for future study.

Even the novice engages in effortful study at first, which is why beginners so often improve rapidly in playing golf, say, or in driving a car. But having reached an acceptable performance–for instance, keeping up with one’s golf buddies or passing a driver’s exam–most people relax. Their performance then becomes automatic and therefore impervious to further improvement. In contrast, experts-in-training keep the lid of their mind’s box open all the time, so that they can inspect, criticize and augment its contents and thereby approach the standard set by leaders in their fields.

I have occasionally wondered why it is that I progress so quickly in various fields (weaving) and so slowly in others (cycling).  I think a lot of it has precisely to do with this idea of effortful study.  With weaving, I’m constantly observing, analyzing, and thinking about how to improve, and so have made astounding progress in just two years.  With cycling, I tend to be in it for the Zen of riding and so don’t know (and haven’t any interest in learning) about the theory of it.  Mike, in just a few months, has long surpassed my knowledge of cycling - because he is engaged in active, effortful study of the subject, and I am not, despite having spent many more hours cycling than he.

This is also related to a concept in teaching (and other fields) called “comfort zone”.  You develop a certain degree of competency in the things you typically do, and get used to that.  Then, when you pursue a different field, suddenly you’re incompetent again, and because that is emotionally difficult (frustrating, possibility of failure), you relapse back into your comfort zone.  This explains why some people are so frightened by learning new things (even in an old field) - because learning is virtually always done outside the comfort zone.

I was lucky enough to be raised by two parents who were research scientists - a profession that more or less requires active, effortful study of a subject - and so got into the habit of reaching ever further mentally.  I got trained in the practice of learning.  And here is where the two subjects come together.  I believe that learning is just like any other skill: the more you practice and study it, the easier it becomes.  Further, if you don’t just practice it, but engage in effortful observation of how you learn, with an eye to improving your learning methods, you can actually become an expert in learning: learn to learn things faster than others.

That is, I believe there are useful learning techniques that one can study.  When I get frustrated by a failure, I automatically fall back to thinking about what I learned from that failure.  I started doing that after having it drilled into me by my parents that there are no failed experiments; a negative result is as valid as a positive one.  So my perspective on failure is quite different.  I have met many people who feel a failure is a disaster; this holds them back, by keeping them from trying new things.  By noticing things that keep you in your comfort zone - that keep you from actively learning - you can analyze what is holding you back and come up with better and faster ways of learning.  But most people don’t think of this.

One of the things I do to “keep the razor sharp” is to deliberately step outside my comfort zone on a regular basis.  I think of this as being like stretching my muscles before a workout: if you don’t stretch your comfort zone, it tends to tighten up, making using it (stepping out of it) difficult.  So I like to delve into areas where I am not an expert, and tend to resist seeing myself as an expert, because to me that hinders learning.  I came to this conclusion after effortful study of my learning style.

My final thought on the matter is that the mind is a muscle.  If you exercise it, it stays strong, flexible, and adaptable: learning is easy because you are in the habit of learning, you are in the practice of using your mind.  If you don’t use it, then it gets soft and flabby, and learning new things is difficult - partly because your comfort zone doesn’t stretch as far, partly because you aren’t accustomed to analyzing and taking in new information - you’re out of practice with effortful study.  This combined with a small comfort zone is a deadly combination for learning.  Unfortunately, it’s something I see all the time.  Because keeping the razor sharp is work, and many people either can’t or won’t invest the energy.

I was lucky enough early on to get good learning skills from my parents, and also (through having been a near-champion math team guru) having done the equivalent of training for the mental Olympics.  I am not nearly as obsessive about learning as I used to be (honest!), but those skills have served me very, very well as I plunge into new subjects and deepen my understanding of others.  And a lot of that has come from effortful study - not just in a given subject, but in the study of study.

So, on my lunch break, I made another batch.

This batch was curious; I had to keep stirring rapidly to keep it from burning, and it behaved very differently from the previous batch.  It wasn’t until about ten minutes after I poured it that I realized the reason: I had accidentally left out the honey.  Then it started crystallizing on me, since it was lacking the invert sugar (honey) that would keep the solution stable.  Ugly mouth-feel.  Ugh.

So tonight was “Lavender-honey caramels: take 3″.  I carefully set out all the ingredients, made my lavender extract, and cooked it quite successfully, poured it…

…and realized that I had left out the lavender extract, and the result didn’t taste much like lavender at all.

So I scraped it back into the pan, added the extract, and reboiled it.  It is now cooling, safely away from dishwater and cats (I will cover it up as soon as it’s cool), and I hope to Heaven that it’s going to WORK this time.  So this has been really frustrating.  I don’t like having to do things twice, and three times is infuriating.  I can do better than this.  Really.

On the upside, I was reading up on chocolate today and found Norman Love, a pioneer in the art of making beautiful chocolates.  Just looking at his confections is giving me inspiration for color work in chocolates…I purchased some gold and some silver shimmer cocoa butter from Chef Rubber and plan to try using them this year.  I only have so many chocolate molds, so I will need to distinguish the resulting chocolates from each other visually.  In the past I’ve used milk and white chocolate streaks to distinguish, but this year, who knows…gold? silver? both?

Anyway, I am genuinely inspired by his work, which is at the very least beautiful, and by reputation fantastically tasty as well.  If I ever come across a chance to take a class from him, I’ll seize it.

And now, off to bed.  I’ve done three batches of caramel today (in addition to a full workday) and I’m exhausted.

Caramels, it turns out, are tricky.  My first batch, which I made with glucose, boiled to a satisfactory texture at 246 degrees, the very bottom end of the firm-ball range.  My second batch, made with honey, I naturally boiled to the same point, expecting it to be similar, but it came out WAY too runny.  The next batch, boiled to 249 degrees (the high end of the firm-ball range), also came out too runny.  So I threw it back in the pot and reboiled it to 251 degrees, which produced the right texture - soft, chewy, and firm enough to hold its shape.

My conclusion from this is, as the textbooks mention, that caramels are a product of more than just temperature, and that the “old-fashioned” ways of measuring doneness, like dropping a bit of it into cold water, are a better way of establishing a baseline than merely going for temperature.  I’ve made enough caramels that I can also recognize doneness by the way the boiling syrup drips from the spoon - this surprised me, but it seems to be true.

I cooked the lavender caramels, which are off the same recipe, to 251 degrees again, but this time I also did an “eye” test and an ice-water test.  It seems to be OK, so perhaps I’ll use that temperature for other batches off the same formula.

In case anyone is wondering, here is my basic formula for honey caramels, adapted from Wybauw’s book, Fine Chocolates: Great Experience:

• 600g honey
• 1000g sugar
• 875g cream
• 250g butter, softened

Boil cream and steep with any flavorants (lavender, jasmine tea, vanilla bean, what have you).  Strain out flavorants, and add sugar (use a large pot as it will foam up a LOT).  Once the sugar is dissolved and the mixture is boiling, add the honey.  Cook to about 235 degrees, then add the butter.  Cook to 251 degrees or when the ice water test reads “firm ball” (this may be more dependable).

This makes two 9×14 cake pans’ worth of caramels.  That’s a lot, but I have 100+ boxes of candy to make…and I LOVE leftover caramels.

Tonight I’ll cut up and dip the caramels.  Tomorrow, who knows: English toffee?

Voila:

Candied bergamot peel dipped in chocolate

Dried apricots dipped in Valrhona chocolate

The bergamot peel and the apricot I’ve done before (the apricots have been in the box practically from year one); the brandied cherries, as you may recall, were a new thing, and this particular batch failed.  The chocolate didn’t seal correctly, meaning the syrup is leaking out onto the parchment paper.  I think the problem was that I didn’t dip the cordials in chocolate until about half an hour after I dipped them in fondant, by which point the fondant coating was already starting to dissolve, producing stickiness.  Next weekend I have a friend coming by to help me, and I may try another batch of brandied cherries with his help - me dipping in fondant and he dipping in chocolate (or vice versa).  if that doesn’t work either, I’ll call it quits for this year.

But that does mean I need to make another batch of brandied cherries to use in the next run.  Fortunately I have discovered that canned cherries in a jar make great brandied cherries as well, so I can pick up two jars from Trader Joe’s over the weekend and add some more Armagnac and a little vodka to soak them in.  I think for this next round I will probably use chocolate molds and pipe the fondant in, then add the brandy-soaked cherry - this has less risk than dipping, though it probably involves more fondant in the shell.

I also tried a lavender-bergamot caramel, but that didn’t work either - the lavender flavor was barely discernible after cooking and the bergamot vanished completely, leaving me with a pleasant but not exceptional vanilla caramel.  I did verify that the recipe I was using made an appropriate amount and that the base recipe is sound, though, so that’s something.  I am not dissatisfied; it was a good experiment and I have a better understanding of caramel now.  I may try it again with more lavender flavor, added at the end.  I really did like the lavender scent of it.

And I got to use my chocolate tempering machine for the first time!  OMG!  I have NO idea how I got along without that machine.  It makes working with chocolate simple, and an absolute joy - no more messing around on a marble slab, working fast to do the dipping before the chocolate cools, sticking it in the microwave to reheat it - it brings the chocolate to temperature quickly and holds it there indefinitely.  It’s fantastic.  I love it.

Tonight, after my Weavolution conference call, I’ll fire up the range again and cook my vanilla bean - orange blossom honey - jasmine tea caramels, which is my absolute favorite of all the confections I’ve made.  It’s intensely floral, sweet, rich, and stands up to dark chocolate very nicely.  I may also do another batch of lavender caramels, in hopes of getting it right this time.  Tomorrow, after the caramel has a chance to “set”, I’ll cut them in pieces and dip them in chocolate.

Fudges:

• Chocolate macadamia fudge
• Chocolate ginger fudge
• White chocolate - lavender - Meyer lemon fudge
• Coconut tequila lime fudge
• Coffee cinnamon white chocolate fudge
• Coconut almond fudge

Dipped items:

• chocolate covered bergamot peel (if I feel generous enough to let anyone else have any!)
• vanilla - jasmine tea - orange-blossom honey caramels
• English toffee - with and w/o nuts
• Choc covered candied ginger
• Choc covered apricot
• Brandied cherries

Truffles:

• Dried fig, white chocolate, Cognac
• Guava + white chocolate
• Milk chocolate - gianduja (hazelnut)
• Milk chocolate – caramel
• Scotch - SWS 19.36
• Armagnac
• Chambord
• Goat cheese & honey
• Jasmine tea
• Saffron + dark chocolate
• Caramelized banana
• Orange marmalade
• Honey (or possibly lemon verbena)
  
• Irish coffee

I am currently going through and analyzing, cross-correlating, etc. the formulations from the three professional chocolatier books I have to see what the common themes are.  This is more complex than it sounds since I have to take their breakdowns and analyze them for % water, % cocoa butter, % sugar, and so on, and from there build out some test recipes to see what the texture is like for those proportions.  This is going to be fairly time-consuming and I’m not sure I’ll have the time to do a full analysis, so in a pinch I’ll just take one recipe and run with it.  But I am hoping to have some time in the mornings (when I can’t do chocolate work, since Mike is still asleep) to do the requisite analysis.

I have also been researching confectionery bars, which are basically just stainless steel or aluminum bars that one lays down in a square or rectangle on a Silpat (silicone baking mat), then pours caramel or toffee or whatever into.  The nice part about using confectionery bars is that you effectively have a pan of adjustable size, with nice straight edges - so you can do a large sheet or a small one depending on batch size - and because they come in 1/2″ x 3/4″ cross section, you can measure a 1/2″ or 3/4″ tall item just by filling the frame completely.

Stainless steel confectionery bars retail for about $200 a set, but I had a burst of inspiration and realized that confectionery bars are just flat bars of metal, which seem to run about $50/set in stainless steel, so if I order directly from a metal shop I can save myself about $150.  Not bad!  I am going to stop by a San Francisco metal shop on Monday morning.

My chocolates schedule (hey, I’m a project manager - I have to make schedules!) says that I’m supposed to be making/dipping caramels, a test run of brandied cherries, dried fruits, candied ginger, and candied bergamot peel this weekend.  But we’ll see how it goes: today I’m going shopping at the farmer’s market, then meeting up with people to discuss the CNCH web redesign, then meeting (I hope!) with a potential graphic design volunteer for Weavolution in the afternoon.  Sunday I have two meetings (business and development) for Weavolution, and Mike and I are going for a mid-length bike ride, 1.5-2 hours, but I’m otherwise free.  I’ll probably devote most of the day to chocolatiering.  It’ll be a tight schedule, but I do think I can get a lot (if not all) of it done.

One idea that I think is particularly cool goes like this: You take a supersaturated sugar syrup, mix in some strong spirits (say, Armagnac), and pour it into starch molds.  (Starch molds are just what they sound like: spread a couple boxes of cornstarch (or other starch, but cornstarch is easiest to get) into a pan, smooth out the top, press a form into the starch, it leaves a cavity in the starch, and hey presto! you’ve got your starch mold.)

You fill the mold cavities, dump more starch on top and leave it there for a few hours, during which the starch provides seed crystals for the supersaturated solution, and the outside forms a crunchy layer of sugar crystals.  So now you have a no-longer-supersaturated syrup inside a thin sugar casing, which you then take out of the starch, dust off VERY lightly, and dip in chocolate.

And now you have a liqueur cordial!  Smooth chocolate on the outside, a thin layer of crunchy sugar, then some wonderfully boozy liquor/liqueur syrup inside.

I think this is such a cool idea (especially the starch molds) that I simply HAVE to try it.  However, I may not try it this year…I am already trying a new technique in making the brandied cherries, and experimenting while trying to do a production run of 120+ of each kind of chocolate is probably not the way to go here.  Next year I will probably do a more modest 30-odd boxes of chocolates, and that will make it easier to manage radically new techniques.

But you never know.  If I find myself with some free time, I’ll definitely seize the chance to make them.

I’m glad to have had an evening “off”; I’ve been running full bore the last week or so and was starting to feel exhausted.  And the next two weeks are going to be pretty hairy, since I’m way behind on chocolatiering.  So a nice quiet evening with a book about chocolate was just the thing.

Tomorrow is “date night” and Mike and I are going off to see a movie.  Saturday I’m meeting with a group of people about redesigning the website for CNCH (you may recall that, in a fit of weakness, I volunteered to redo the website for them), and following that Mike and I are probably going for a bike ride.  After we get back, I’ll probably work on making silkscreens and doing some test runs, silkscreening cocoa butter first on paper (to get it right) and then on acetate sheets for transferring to chocolate.  If it works right I should be able to produce chocolates with any image I want printed on them!  This is going to be tricky and I would not be at all surprised if I wound up working on it Sunday as well.

Saturday I also have slated to make caramels and start the candied bergamot peel drying.  (You may recall that the candied bergamot peel was my favorite from last year.  It almost didn’t make it into the boxes because I seriously considered keeping it all for myself!)

Sunday the chocolate madness begins…with dipping the caramels, dried fruits, bergamot peel, and slices of dried ginger in dark chocolate.  These are the ones that will keep for a long time, so I do them two weeks ahead of time to get them out of the way early.  I will also work on silkscreening the acetates if I haven’t finished them yet.

The following weekend the REAL madness starts…with six giant batches of fudge, brandied cherry cordials, and English toffee.  Monday I’m working, Tuesday kicks off five straight days of chocolatiering.  I haven’t yet worked out a schedule for that week but I am usually pretty busy. 

I’m really looking forward to this - a big burst of creativity followed by a VERY long trip to the post office.  This year, I may just do everything Priority Mail using print-your-own postage and then have the mailman pick up the packages.  It would certainly be a whole lot easier than staggering into the post office under (literally!) a hundred parcels.

Close up, the colors are gorgeous.  But when you stand back five feet it looks like a series of stripes, and almost like a plaid in the places where I got the warp wrong and there are visible stripes in the warp.  There is a strong value contrast between the yellow and the red, which makes the yellow stand out more, and there are uneven spots where you can see a clear distinction between two of the yellows.  The pattern does not stand out in most of the areas.  So there are definitely flaws in the piece, though the overall idea is sound.

I think I’m going to weave another piece with the same colors, only this time:

• Make each of the diamonds a single color, so the pattern shows up clearly.  Or do a gradual fade across the diamond, keeping more or less the same value.
• Be more careful to get gradual color transitions.
• Tone down the yellow and only go to gold, instead of fading to the lemon yellow.

This piece is pretty, but I think it could be more!  Advice on what might look nice would be welcome, I haven’t played with color theory much.  I think perhaps some more Photoshop simulations are in order before I do the next round…

The pix:

View of the full shawl.

A somewhat closer view

And an even closer look at one of the color transition areas

A rumpled photo, showing off some of the great iridescence.

Except weaving.  I have been weaving during my lunch hour (a bonus to working from home: you can actually do stuff on your lunch hour!) as a break from schedule analysis, the bane of every project manager.  And the shawl is now complete.

Unfortunately, the light in the evening is poor enough that it doesn’t show off the colors well, so I haven’t been able to take a good photo.  I haven’t even been able to get what I would consider a good look at the shawl, though some of that may just be mental exhaustion (I’m pretty brain-dead right now).  So I will wait until tomorrow morning to pass judgment on it.  Tentatively, I like it, although there are a number of glaring flaws in the color transitions, and I’m still not sure whether the lemon yellow was a good idea. There are definitely beautiful colors in it, I’m just not convinced whether it comes together into a harmonious whole.

Off to bed!  I can barely think straight.  Tomorrow I will take and post pix.

Here is a photo of the progress to date:

color play: turquoise to fuchsia in warp and red to gold in the weft

I am a bit frustrated since the photo, lovely as it is, totally fails to capture the full beauty of the color mixes.  The magenta blob is actually orange with magenta, and has an iridescence and motion that is totally lacking in the photo; and all the colors are more vivid than they were in the photo.  (I have got to read those books on photographing textiles.)  Hopefully once I get it off the loom I can take better photos.

I have actually chosen the colors and the pattern of colors to set off the pattern.  You can see how the yellow coincides with the center of the diamond; I purposely made the yarn lighter there so the center of the diamond would show clearly.  It then “fades off” into the outer parts of the diamond.  It works visually for the small amount I can see on the loom, but I don’t know if it will work for the shawl as a whole.  But I figure there’s only one way to find out! so full speed ahead, and hopefully when I cut it off the loom I will catch my breath at its beauty.  (One can always hope, anyway!)

I am doing a little more weaving tonight and then will go back to working on Weavolution tomorrow morning.  We have decided to hire an outside developer to help, but that means the site has to be further defined - which is largely going to be my work.  So I will be putting in some serious hours on Weavolution this week.

But for tonight, I’m going to continue playing.  And it is gorgeous.