When you sit bolt upright and say "oh!"

During my Cornish pastie adventure last weekend, I was quite convinced that I wasn't strong enough to deal with the pastry properly, and that's why it was so hard to deal with. I was sure that I had followed the recipe exactly. I even called my mother while making them to check that I had copied the recipe down correctly.

After making the pasties, I was doing the dishes and I washed the liquid measuring cup and had a little flash of memory: I saw myself measuring the milk for the dough, and I saw myself only measuring a quarter cup instead of a half cup.

Sure enough, when Russ and I made a second batch of pastry to use the second half of the filling, I measured a half cup of milk and though the pastry was still tough, it was much easier to work with than the other batch. Amazing what a difference a quarter of a cup can make:

Getting started

There are several pictures under the cut.

For my birthday, Russ bought me a gorgeous wool cloak in the colour of my choice; ( some assembly required. )

Once the loom was warped, I found myself making excuses not to weave. I made soup and Cornish pasties. I re-did our budget. I created an unnecessary purse out of another piece of woven cloth. I figured out how to use Twitter to follow some of my favourite celebrities (hey, I wonder if Ivan E Coyote is on Twitter...).

As long I didn't start weaving, there were no mistakes, no messed up salvages, no tension problems, and no worries about the length of the warp.

As long as I didn't start weaving, the project was still perfect.

It took me two weeks to work up the nerve to make the first shuttle pass. I've now done about four hours of weaving and created the first 35 inches of my cloak. There are already mistakes all through it, but it is its own kind of perfect, and it is started.