piecedgoods

The Pomelo Experiment

Posted on March 21, 2011 by piecedgoods

I posted a link to a candied pomelo recipe last week and I thought I’d get back to you on how it turned out. The recipe came from a lovely site called They Draw and Cook. The fruit comes from trees in my yard. These are fruit as big as my head.

I followed the recipe. Peeling

Blanching (three times!)

Cooking with sugar

Until translucent

And finally drying on a rack and sugaring

How were they, you ask? They’re good. They’re great if you like citrus with a bit of a bitter edge sort of like grapefruit. I think they’ll be awesome diced and mixed into scones, or a fruit cake.

But then I followed the same recipe with a lemon and made candied lemon peel, the only difference being that I trimmed much more of the white pith off. Those were awesome – lemony, tart, sweet, intense. We’ve consumed almost all of it in two days.

Posted in Art Thoughts, Food, Recipes | Tagged candied citrus, food, Lemon, pomelo, Recipes | 4 Comments

Theory and Practice

Posted on March 20, 2011 by piecedgoods

As we got into making more snowflakes to piece into the Kaleidoscope quilt, we became anxious that maybe we didn’t know how to inset them in.

Ideally, the way to inset them would be to cut a round circle in the white ground of the quilt and sew them in as inset circles. Did we know how to do that? Kinda… Theoretically that should work. Had we ever really done that? Not really.

Schnap, the Co-quilter, advised practice, seeing how she’s gotten so much better skidding across the wood floor now that she’s worked on her technique. We believe there’s even still room for improvement. Theory and practice are quite different.

We decided to cut big circles into a piece of brown Kona Cotton (the Kaleidoscopes are set into white Kona Cotton) and see what we could do. The first one was a little wonky and though I love liberated quilting, this kind of liberation (unintentional pleats, sharpness where roundness is desired) was not the kind we wanted. After a bit of cutting, sewing, seam ripping, sewing, and pressing, we did it.

The snowflake test quilt top. Theory in practice.

Posted in Quilts, Schnap, Sewing, Uncategorized | Tagged Dog, kaleidoscope, Quilting, Schnap, Trial | 5 Comments

The Still Life of Beggar

Posted on March 19, 2011 by piecedgoods

Beggar the Dog is a well loved stuffed toy.

He’s been the subject of many a portrait, in addition to being an important part of my painting instructor’s young life. In painting class we each painted him in 4 poses. That’s five people painting four paintings each. Twenty portraits of Beggar in about 2-1/2 hours. We had approximately 30 minutes per pose. (Just so you know, normally oil paintings take longer than that.)

Sometimes doing an exercise where you have to jump in, prioritize and get going is a good thing. We left our inhibitions, anxieties, and need for perfection on the wayside. Each of us painted Beggar in our own style and captured a different dimension.

On a related note, I liked this print and saved the link so I could think about it later. I wonder if the misspelling of ‘lose’ was intentional.

‘Loosening fear’ sounds more interesting.