This is why living with a chef is awesome!
Leftover chocolates from a commission!
Milk Chocolate covered coffee beans (in coffee bean shaped mold!)
Chocolate Stars (plain, orange, peppermint, and some broke-while-removing brandy infused ganache)
Dark Chocolate Brandy Truffles in Milk Chocolate
Dark Chocolate Truffles in Cocoa
Chocolate Dripping Surprise.
So named by me because it's the drippings from the tray under the rack they were hardening on; surprise, because it's a mix of plain, orange and peppermint flavoured chocolate, and you don't know what you're getting until you pop it in your mouth!
Dark Chocolate Speculaas bark
Left over dark chocolate ganache which I suggested we could use to try truffles rolled in speculaas crumbs. The Polar Bear was tired and didn't want to roll more, so it was mixed in the crumbs and rolled it out on a tray.
This stuff? Is f*@&ing AWESOME! (and I do not use that term lightly!)
This is why living with cats is awesome! I was taking the chocolate pictures right beside Persephone's chair, and as soon as the camera starting clicking she started posing for Playkitten Magazine! Belleh snorgling ensued!
As for recent work...sadly, the tapestries have been temporarily abandoned.
Shortly after the last post on them, I wove the face and was entirely unhappy with it. The colours of the shadows were wrong, the colour of the lips was wrong, (actually, funnily enough, the colour I wove the darker shadows in turns out to be the perfect colour for the lips!), and both the eyes and lips were cartoonishly big, despite being woven across only two warp threads. There are no pictures of the face; it was that bad.
Since it would have taken a fair amount of time to unweave, I decided to cut it out. Careful as I thought I was being, I sliced through a warp thread. I wove a new warp in and it's fine, but I was upset and wanted some time to rethink how to do the face. At that scale, I'm thinking I'm going to have to embroider the features. One warp thread is too narrow, two is too large. Or else scale up the cartoon and weave a bigger piece. Which I kinda wanted to do before I started weaving, but since these were supposed to be Christmas presents, I thought small would be faster.
Then I realized I was in fact unhappy with the figure as a whole, which I think would look fine enough at a distance, but the difference between the light and dark areas are too pronounced close up (and since the piece is only 7" tall...), and too definitively separate, instead of blending into each other. I'm thinking I can solve the issue with more colour blends, and with some hatching in transitional zones.
And THEN I realized that what I learned while doing the background wall could make the whole wall better if I started over. Mostly that the grey looks great, but there needs to be more of it. It's supposed to be a bare hint of light off rough stone walls, and it works where there's grey woven in, but it looks strange with only scattered areas with light reflecting off them.
I'm going to start over. In the new year.
So I did this instead! :)
The Polar Bear's birthday present! Yes, that IS Ceiling Cat! His head is a bit squished to one side in this picture. I don't know why. The Polar Bear is a bit creeped out by it all, which I didn't expect...
I want to do another with a black cat and put it on the floor! Basement Cat! Hee!
Also working on this. Stem stitched Japanese Pampas Grass, and mokume shibori dyed in indigo.
And that's all I'm saying about this project right now.
Also, while we're not doing Christmas at all this year, (no money, and no family even remotely near enough to care), and therefore have not bothered to decorate or put up a tree, I couldn't resist doing at least this outside my door to amuse my neighbours and the Polar Bear, when I found out Simon Tofield of Simon's Cat had put out a printable cut-out of the cat. (if you haven't seen the Simon's Cat films GO THERE NOW!!!!!)
You can see what the characters are doing better if you click on the picture.
No comments:
Post a Comment