It's crazy that I want to bake bread. After all, I live in an area rich with incredibly great bread. Yet, I want to bake bread. And, not just any bread. Sourdough.
Years ago when my daughter was very young, I baked bread every weekend. And every weekend I baked sourdough bread. You see, I have this starter that my mother has had since I was a kid. It was given to her by this old man in Placerville in the mid-1960s. As he told my mother, it was already a really old starter. I was about 8 years old at the time and believed that meant it was starter from a 49er, as in Gold Rush, as in 1849. My mom made bread with that starter sometimes. Sometimes she made sourdough chocolate cake. The best things she made with that starter was biscuits. I, however, cannot make sourdough biscuits. Mine are like hockey pucks. Smell wonderful, total inedible. The dog seems to like them though.
So earlier this week, I hauled out the starter that lives in my fridge. It was nasty looking. Gray water with heavy sludge in the bottom of the jar. Opening the jar emitted a powerful whiff of alcohol. No wonder it's claimed somewhere that the 49ers drank the watery stuff when better alcoholic beverages were in short supply. The smell like to knock me over and I wondered if I'd neglected my ancient starter too long.
I was determined to bring it back to life. I left the jar out on the counter overnight so the poor starter could get warm. Or at least warmer than it is in the fridge. Although, I was certain at the time that my kitchen was just as cold as the fridge since we were having a rare cold snap in the Bay Area. The next day I dumped it in a bowl gave it a wee amount of water and flour to start it's feeding. Yes, you feed a sourdough starter. It's kind of like having a baby that needs to eat every few hours. Then I fed it again and then one more time that day. It had some life!
The next day I fed it two more times and left it overnight. The next morning it was lively. It had small bubbles that are characteristic of sourdough starter. It had a lovely smell. It poured from a ladle like silk. It was beautiful.
The time had come to make bread. I decided on mixing half white and half whole wheat flours since my boyfriend is partial to wheat bread. Using all whole wheat flour produces a loaf which is heavy and dense and has a texture that I can't abide. The actual physical effort involved in making bread is pretty slim. You spend a whole lot of time waiting for the yeast to do it's thing, which is quite magical when you really think about. The yeast give the bread its lightness and flavor. You spend a couple of days waiting for sourdough yeast to do its magic. It ferments in a bowl after mixing and kneading. You punch it down and let it ferment again. This takes four to six hours depending on the temperature. You then take it out of the bowl and slap it on your board. (At this point, I kneaded in some olives into half the dough.) Then it's roughly shaped and allowed to rest. After its nap, you shape it into its desired shape.
I use willow baskets that are made for proofing bread, so I put the loaves in there. They proof at room temperature for about an hour and then go into the fridge overnight to retard. Retarding slows down the yeast and allows for more flavor to develop.
This morning I pulled the dough out of the fridge and let it come to about room temperature while still in their baskets. After that, the loaves were removed from their baskets, docked, and placed in a very hot oven on a baking stone. I didn't get the docking quite right and ended up with a heavy lip of crust on the slash.
Anyway, I made bread.
That's dyeing, not dying. Silk scarves, in fact. A few of these have even made it into my Etsy shop. The ones I dyed today will make their way into the shop in the next few days.
I went on a cycling trip through northeast Italy and Slovenia. It was an amazing eight day tour that started in Trieste, Italy and ended in Bled, Slovenia. I did all of this with a wonderful tour company called Ciclismo Classico. After the tour ended, I returned to Trieste for a few days and then joined my boyfriend in Verona for a few days of cycling there. Then we spent a few days in Venice being tourists since it's impossible to ride a bike in Venice. We have both been to Venice before so we spent time in museums and neighborhoods we hadn't explored on previous trips.
After my bike was packed, I took a walk around Trieste. Trieste is James Joyce crazy in addition to being cycling crazy. There is a bronze statute of JJ on a bridge crossing the Grand Canal. The Grand Canal isn't at all like the Grand Canal of Venice, which is what I picture when I think of the Grand Canal. There are bars and hotels named after JJ. I even stayed at the James Joyce Hotel. You can walk around the city following a James Joyce itinerary. Of course, there are the well known spots he frequented while he lived, taught English and wrote in Trieste. I've never seen greater JJ love outside of a university English Department!
Earlier this spring I bought a new road bike. I've been riding an average of five days a week. This has meant less time for knitting and spinning. At first, I was concerned about this. As I got more time on my bike, I realized that I had been needing a serious break from writing sock patterns, knitting and spinning. I had become seriously burnt out and that was a bigger threat to my continued interest in these things than giving myself a much needed break to recharge. 
I love the images I've seen of Sufi whirling. The cable in these mitts remind me of this movement. These started life as an idea for a sock that just didn't work. I couldn't let go of wanting to use this specific cable. I just couldn't figure out where else I could use it. So the unwearable socks languished hidden in a drawer for about six months. (And, I do mean socks; I had to knit a pair to prove to myself the design really didn't work.) I moved on and worked on other designs. One night while doing mental inventory of my designs, the idea of using the cable in fingerless mitts hit me.
I knit these out of A Verb For Keeping Warm Creating in Supernova on US #1/2.25 mm needles. They use less than a 100 gram skein of yarn and are fast to knit.
The only tricky bit is the cable. It is a ribbed cable over 11 stitches. An 11 stitch cable is a bit tight to work on the cross simply because of the number of stitches crossing one another. Because it is worked over an odd number of stitches some of the knit stitches become purls and some purls become knits. If you follow the directions, it works--you just need to forget what your brain tells is logical and trust that it works as written.
I went stash diving a month or so ago and re-discovered this Socks That Rock medium weight yarn in Mesa that I bought at Stitches West 2006. Socks That Rock was the buzz of the knitting blogosphere that year. This small company out of Oregon seemed to have come out of nowhere, was represented by The Fold at Rhinebeck 2005, and was suddenly the most sought after yarn in the world. And I had to have some.
This yarn tried to be many things. In the end, it worked best as a variation on my Basic Shaped Arch Sock pattern. I used US #2 needles and cast on 56 stitches. The ribbing is a 1x1 twisted stitch rib. I mixed up the heel a bit by using eye of the partridge instead of a standard heel stitch. I love the way eye of the partridge looks with hand painted yarns that have a lot going on color-wise.
I also love the way the triangle that is formed by the gusset and the arch shaping really highlights the angles the yarn is going in. This was a fast sock to knit compared to the socks I usually knit on US #1 or #0. I really like the way they turned out. I think this will be my fall back pattern for all of the really colorful hand painted yarn in my stash.
