I have two big events at work this month and this week was the first one. I was in the office for three days (I'm normally in once or twice a month) and I'm a little over people right now. I'm looking forward to spending time cleaning my house, reorganizing my kitchen, and baking my first loaf of sourdough bread. Keely, as you can imagine, has had a lot of feelings this week. It's not going to get better next week, but I promised him chicken so I think it should be okay.
I love Tim Gunn and "make it work" has become a bit of a mantra to me over the years. My boss also loves him and we say this to each other all the time. We always make things work. This week's piece is in honor of our always making it work.
This week, I used carbon transfer paper to transfer the text. There are lots of ways to transfer designs to fabric. Transfer paper is great for darker fabrics or heavier or textured fabrics. I have a stylus for transferring, but you can use a pencil or a pen with the cap on. My preferred method of transferring a pattern is using my light box. It's neater and easier to see how the lines are forming for the transfer. If you don't have a light box, use a window that gets good light. Works just as well.
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| I used Sublime Stitching's transfer paper for this piece. I have some from DMC as well. Both are great transfer papers. |
Here's this week's piece:
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| This week's color is hibiscus. |
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| February 4 |
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| February 5 |
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| February 6 |
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| February 7 |
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| February 8 |
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| February 9 |
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| February 10 |
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| Week 6 - complete |
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| Weeks 1-6 |
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| Week 7 - lilac |
Meet Doris and Edith
Last Sunday I met up with a friend I haven't seen in almost seven years. We met at the last company I worked at and stayed in touch mostly through Facebook. I used to bring homemade baked goods to the office all the time at that job. I loved baking for people and sharing something homemade since so many of my co-workers didn't bake or cook or didn't feel like they had time. I still bake, just not as much as I used to. I miss it.
Anyway, my friend Inga is a baker, gardener, preserver, canner, and all around good person. She started a blog when she was still living in Florida where she shares recipes, her garden, and other fun posts. You can check it out here. At some point, she started baking with a sourdough starter. Sourdough starters are a leavening agent that have a long history in baking. Rather than using yeast, starters are fermented, creating a living organism in a jar. You can use the starter to make breads, pizza dough, and lots of other baked goods.
I don't really bake bread. I make banana bread and English muffin bread, but that's really it. I love bread, but it intimidates me. Sourdough and sourdough starters are another plane in my brain. People have very strong opinions on how to feed a starter, how to bake with, and whether you can keep discard (the part you remove when you feed the starter) for two days or two years. It's a lot.
Inga offered me a jar of starter and I decided to take the sourdough leap. She provided excellent beginning instructions and got me connected with a FB group for more information. She also shared the recipe I used for my first loaf and is genuinely supportive and kind. She's my sourdough cheerleader.
Meet Doris and Edith.
Doris is the name I gave to the starter Inga gave me. Edith is her sister; I made her as a backup starter. Both of them live in my refrigerator since I don't bake that often and it's better for my baking lifestyle to keep them in the fridge.
I have successfully fed Doris twice. Edith will get her weekly feeding on Monday. Yesterday, I started day one of the two day process to make my first loaf. Doris was fed and left to her own devices. I reactivated the discard from Doris and used that for my recipe. They both looked great yesterday.
Doris has been returned to the fridge to live her best life until I bake again next weekend. She's the best. I set up my dough yesterday and it's currently finishing proofing in the fridge. I'll get it out in a little while and bake it. I'll share pictures of the finished loaf next week and over on Instagram. Thank you to Inga for giving me the starter and getting me back to challenging myself when it comes to baking!
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