There is so much going on online that I’m going to try and sum up for the coming week and share some love to the awesome. Some SCA, a lot that is not. All times in Eastern, google can help you translate. If you know of other events you want to pimp.. pop ’em in the comments section!
For those who know me RL, you’ll know the amusement in deciding to brew with heather flowers. (Heather brews a heather ale? How could I not!?) First, some background. I am off playing with dyes, and the next step in those experiments are to try some dye extractions with fermented alcohol, rather than distilled alcohol. Hey wait.. I’m a brewer, I have rapidly getting more stale grain in the brewing supplies! I can make this happen!
I decided that I wanted to make an unhopped ale, and hey look, there’s a baggie of dried heather buds in the brew supplies too, so let’s go with that. I only wanted to brew up a gallon batch, as I really only needed this for dye experimentation and honestly drinkability was a secondary hopeful feature.
I wanted my grain bill to end up being about 2 lbs. (I am very Canadian and liberally sprinkle measuring systems in my world, you’ve been warned) So I started with 1.3 lb from a bag labelled ‘base malt’. Who knows, I certainly don’t, but it was a nice light inoffensive choice, so base malt of questionable origin it is. Then I honestly just started polishing off last bits of bags of grain so a bit of honey malt (0.4 lb), and some Munich II (0.1 lb) and a good dash of flaked barley. (0.2 lbs) I had only about an once of dried heather buds, which was less than most recipes I found wanted, but that’s what I had, so that’s how much was going in.
Experience has taught me that I need about 6 litres (I warned out about the mixed measures) going into things to end up with about a gallon after the boil, so everything got mashed for an hour at 155F (ish), and then got the boil going. (Do not use my rough shorthand as a good how to on basic brewing, follow a real recipe! I can recommend these ones over at Beer Craftr.) No hops in this boil, but instead I popped in about half the heather flowers at the start and the other half with 10 mins left in the boil. Most of the recipes I was vaguely cribbing off of suggested adding honey near the end and I utterly forgot. So no honey top up for the yeastie beasties, and an OG (Original gravity, essentially a measure of the sugar that’s available for the yeastie boys..) of 1.052.
Ale in progress
It hung out for about 10 days to ferment, bubbling away nicely at the start, trailing off at the end as expected and the FG came in at 1.020. The difference between OG and FG, plugged into an arcane formula (aka I use a web form), tells me that my final ale sits at 4.2% Lower than I’d hoped, but oh right.. I didn’t remember the honey. Oh well, close enough. I primed it with a bit of honey, such that, in theory, my bottles would be carbonated (spoiler alert.. they were not. Sad trombone.)
A couple weeks in, I cracked a bottle and … it was terrible. It was sharp and acidy and unpleasant. Thank goodness for swing tops, I closed that sucker back up and all three bottles are hanging out in storage now. Two in the cheese cave and one in the fridge. Less what I used for my dye experiments, of course. Perhaps forgetting about them for a year or two might make it drinkable. Stranger things have happened!
I probably should have started doing this a year ago, but hey.. better late than never, I suppose. There is so much going on online that I’m going to try and sum up for the coming week and share some love to the awesome. Some SCA, a lot that is not. All times in Eastern, google can help you translate. If you know of other events you want to pimp.. pop ’em in the comments section!
At the beginning of February I was excited to take a beginner goldwork class at an East Kingdom embroidery event. Not only did I have a handy stash of bits and bobs of goldwork supplies from various other classes I’d attempted to take and never quite managed to for a whole host of reasons, but it was another category in my sample collection! Win win all around.
Stash dug out to see what options I had
Demonstration zoom classes are a challenge, there’s no two ways to put it. You are trying to have a good view of what the teacher is doing, and they are trying to have a good view of what you are doing, with only sketchy web cams to connect you (and often sketchier internet). The most effective demo classes I’ve attended have had a dedicated camera (often a phone camera on a tripod) aimed at the workspace and quite narrowly focused in, and then a completely separate camera aimed at the teacher (often their normal web cam, be that in their laptop, or an external one). Each camera is signed into the call separately and doesn’t move much during the class, so that you arent’ fussing with getting things to focus or making your students motion sick as you wriggle a camera around. If you can only have one, the close up camera is the important one, and a tripod (or other rigged up stable solution) means you do not have to rely on someone to hold it steady for upwards of an hour, which is a helluva long time to hold something steady. Showing the teacher where you’re having trouble is still a challenge and requires a lot of description, guesswork and holding things up to questionable web cams, but by and large the pack of us seem to manage. Mostly.
Because I’m me, I decided to use one of the silk fabric squares I experimented with dyeing with padauk. It isn’t the most even dye job, but it’s alright enough for a sample. Literally it’s a chunk of silk scrap left over from the banners that my husband makes, so it’s even waste fabric! Win! I got that basted down onto a square of linen, because the silk has no weight to it at all, and the metal threads would just win in that fight. You do not want the threads to win over the fabric, the fabric should be your stable backdrop. So the silk got some linen backup, and then popped into a hoop.
Silk in the dyepot
I picked what I hoped was about the centre of my square and started tacking down the felt to pad up the acorn top. Smallest piece first, then mid size and then the largest so that it’s smooth on top. The steps of felt would catch the metal laying on top, so you want the largest padding on top. At this point remember that a sensible person would have traced their pattern down before they put felt down, but I managed. (With a pencil, because the micron pen incident is still fresh.) Couch down gold thread onto that outline and realize that my ‘acquired goodness knows when or where’ gold passing thread does NOT want to make a nice point. Too much plastic, not enough metal I dare say. Get those suckers tucked into the back of the piece and then face the acorn top.
Progress is being made!
The little pieces of gold are actually tiny and delicate tubes, that need to be clipped to exactly the length to cover the felt and then you run your needle and thread through them like a bead basically to sew them down. I had a helluva time with that, my current glasses are not amazing and managing to see exactly where I was cutting was an adventure. A lot of glasses on, glasses off, peer, squint, cut, swear because it was too short, set aside to use later (always start with the long middle ones, when you miscut, you can use them later!) and then realization that I was running out of materials because I had quite a bit of damaged perl. If it gets stretched out of its spiral, it does not come back, and a fair bit of mine was looking pretty beat up. So it’s not quite as shiny as many others, but it is all mine, and all from stash! I’m pleased. I can see how to improve, but I’m still pleased.
Adventures in Arts & Sciences 