Simple Crafty Life

Handwoven Christmas pyjamas

What kind of gift do you get for the boy who has everything? The kind of kid who never gets out of his pyjamas?

Clearly, you get him pyjamas. But not just any pyjamas. These want to be a little special.

Would you ever consider weaving a set of pyjamas?

Mompei pants

I have long been a fan of clothing that can be made from rectangles and triangles, like the classic SCA t-tunic and other early medieval clothing.

I came across a plan for Mompei pants on the curious weaver website, and figured a pair of these Japanese field pants would be achievable for me to weave, and then sew.

I would need at least 5 metres of cloth, woven at 14 inches wide. In 2/8 cotton, sett at 16 ends per inch, that means about 224 ends (individual threads in the warp).

I started learning to weave late last year with Jane Stafford’s online School of Weaving. One of her lessons involves designing a warp, so I sat down with some coloured pencils and started drawing swatches.

Each swatch represents blocks of coloured warp threads. Sketching helps visualise different arrangements of stripes (thick? thin? blocks of colour?).

I took a couple of days to fiddle, until I settled on a design I liked: three symmetrical colourful bold stripes, separated by a narrow navy stripe (number 3, highlighted).

The plan here was to create a vertically striped fabric, with nothing fancy in the weft. That way if my weaving wasn’t even from pick to pick, I wouldn’t have to match anything horizontally (like checks or plaids).

Plotting the execution

If you have ever woven anything, you know it (a) takes a bunch of time, and (b) takes a bunch of space. It’s rather obvious to most people in the house.

I had to be a tiny bit clever whilst starting this project to avoid tipping off my son that I was weaving him a gift. Mostly, this involved hiding in plain sight!

I warped up my little table loom with simple stripes in colours I knew my son would love: blues and greens.

This is Maurice Brassard 2/8 cotton in Jeans, Pale Limette and Slate, separated by stripes of Navy and Natural.

At this point, my loom looked just like it had for my all my recent projects, which were samples from my online weaving course. There was nothing here yet that screamed “secret Christmas pyjamas project”.

Sample time

The first thing I wove off this warp was a sample to discover the best weft colour combinations for this warp:

Sample showing green and red weft choices

I already have a startling array of colours from the School of Weaving samples (acquiring a lot of colours like this is a tad expensive, but totally thrilling). I have plenty of leftover yarn (whole cones!) to put to good use in projects like this.

I love many of these combinations, particularly the greens!

I showed this sample to my younger kids and asked each one which was their favourite.

Both children thought I was asking about colours to make more tea towels (since I’d been doing a lot of that for my online course).

Hehehe. Sneaky.

My son’s clear favourite was Peacock, a vibrant green-blue colour.

Weaving, and Sewing

Once the weft colour was chosen, I just got cracking with the weaving.

I hid the table loom in my bedroom, and wove during school hours. It was comparatively fast: plain weave is the simplest weave, and with only one colour, it’s just a matter of filling bobbins and weaving them off, until you run out of warp.

I recorded some stats as I wove, to see how quickly I was making progress.

Each bobbin weighed roughly 15 grams, covered 45 cm of cloth at the loom, and took me about 20 minutes to weave.

(This sounds rather fast, now, it’s hard to believe I was really weaving that quickly!)

Several days later I had a bolt of cloth to wash and prepare for sewing.

After washing, the cloth measured 12 inches wide, and had fantastic drape.

I was nervous of cutting into the cloth without dealing first with the edges, since I’d heard that hand woven cloth is prone to unravelling.

I used a bold thread to mark out the cutting lines, then I put zig-zag stitches on either side before I cut.

In future I would skip all this, and use starch to stabilise the fabric before cutting. Much easier!

The pants came together very quickly.

I was able to use a flat-fell seam using the selvedge to cover the diagonal cut edges. This was very flat and easier than a regular flat-fell where you have to fold the seam allowance!

Since my handwoven fabric was bulkier than typical store-bought cloth, I bound the crotch seam with cotton binding, for strength and comfort.

Determining the length of the pants was a leap of faith: I grabbed a pair of tracksuit pants from my son’s wardrobe, and added a generous amount up top for the waist band to fold over twice, plus a bit for hem.

In the end, I guessed exactly right, phew!

At this point I had the waist band elastic inserted, but loosely safety-pinned in place so I could adjust it if needed.

The final touches were to hem the pants, but I left that until after the gift was unwrapped so that I could double check the length on his body.

All in all, I think this is a pretty approachable project for a novice weaver (like me). It doesn’t really matter if you can’t get a tidy selvedge, since that gets sewn onto the inside of the garment. You just need a bit of patience, and the ability to install a longer warp (about 6 metres is a good idea).

The sewing is not too tricky, either.

Best of all, using one colour in the weft means you can develop a steady beat, and start to relax into a rhythm. I learned a lot from making this piece!

So, what do you think? The pants turned out perfectly for my son: he loves them. He spent all of January wearing them, so they must be pretty comfortable.

Now I want a pair!

Darn socks!

Darn it, I’ve almost put a hole in my favourite knitted socks! Luckily, I know just what to do: darn it!

I noticed this hole appearing in the heel of my sock just in time!

Can you see the filament thread tracing the shape of the knitting? That’s all that remains of the original yarn, and it’s all that’s holding the sock together right now!

My go-to technique to fix a hole that hasn’t quite exploded (like this) is to knit over the top with new yarn, using a needle.

I’m calling it needle-knitting. Or Knit-weaving.

Needle-knit-weaving?

Okay, it’s really just darning!

But I’m not making the classic cross hatch needle woven patch, instead I’m recreating the original knit stitches so the sock is still stretchy.

So much more comfortable to wear!

I’m using a tapestry needle to make stitches, following the path of each existing row. Here you can see me making the top of a stitch, working right-to-left (because I’m right-handed).

I always choose to start my first row a couple of stitches wider than the degraded yarn (the hole) so I cover a couple of “good” stitches on either side.

When I get to the end of the row, I flip the sock around so I can work again from right-to-left.

You start the first stitch in the row by coming out inside the stitch above. Here I’m coming sideways into that stitch.

I’ve shown the stitch I’m about to create in blue. It starts where the needle is just coming out, snakes down and around the stitch below, and comes back up to where it started.

The next needle position (shown in yellow) will form the bottom of the stitch. It goes behind the two yarn threads in the stitch below.

In this photo, I’m just completing a stitch, and I’m starting the next one. Each stitch has two sideways needle movements: at the top and the bottom.

See how I’m catching the two loops from the row above? This is what knits the fabric together!

I’m just following the original yarn around: left, down, left, up … repeat.

It’s easier to see the path of the original yarn if you stretch the hole over something smooth, round and hard.

Not too tight! You don’t want to snap the fragile threads.

My smooth, round, hard thing is a plastic toy pear (embroidery scissors shown for scale).

You can use anything, really! The classic option is a wooden darning mushroom, and I’m sure that works brilliantly well.

I use what I have. 🤷🏼‍♀️

When you’re done you have a patch that is seamlessly integrated with the original sock.

It looks like knitting, and it stretches in the same way. It ends up a little chunkier, though, because it’s hard to get the same tension as the original.

I rather like the contrasting colour on my patches, and it makes it easier to work (especially on dark coloured socks).

All (patch) shapes are welcome!

This technique works really well if the original yarn hasn’t completely disappeared.

If not: it’s so much harder! Almost impossible, in fact.

Once the yarn breaks, the hole tends to explode: you can easily have dropped stitches (causing a ladder in the sock). The stitches around the broken threads collapse, making it hard to follow the yarn’s path. And worst of all, there’s no way to place a new stitch without a knitting needle (or something to hold a row of stitch loops).

When this happens, I revert to just closing up the hole any-old-how, resulting in an ugly pulled-in snarl. It’s rather uncomfortable to wear a sock with a repair like this, and it usually ends up in the compost!

For now, these socks live another day. Yay! They are cheerful, comfortable socks, and I’m really glad I don’t have to pay to replace them just yet!

I’ll probably get another season out of these patches, and then I might have to darn them again.

Much cheaper than buying new pairs every year!

Converting my old loom

Want to know how I converted my old Jack table loom into a Counter balance loom? How well does it work? Let’s find out!

You may recall that I experimented with this conversion some time ago. (Oh dear, about two years)! I was frustrated with the loom and hadn’t woven anything of substance for many years. It had so many issues it was basically non-functional!

Threads in the top shed would sag, catching on the shuttle when I passed the weft.
Warp threads would break, probably due to the high tension needed to open the lower shed.
The lower shed threads were uneven due to the old cotton heddles.

On top of that, the loom was noisy thanks to the clatter of the metal levers, and the squeaky springs.

Now, however, it’s a dream to weave!

Here’s how I converted the loom. 😎

Step one: the roll bar

First, I detached all four shafts from my loom and removed the springs.

Then I added a roll bar.

The roll bar is from my old tapestry frame: it’s just like a narrow broom handle with a threaded metal pin at each end.

I put a sewing bobbin on each end and strapped it to the top of the loom using Texsolv cord.

The bobbin allows the bar to spin freely, without rubbing the Texsolv cord.

Step two: heddles

Next, I measured up my old heddles and ordered Texsolv replacements.

I went with size 205/12 (black ties) to give me just over 8 inches (20.5 cm) from top to bottom.

The bottom shaft bar hangs from the top using just the heddles, so I needed to install these before I could attach the shafts to the loom!

Step three: Attaching the shafts

I attached two shafts to the roll bar using a tablet woven braid I’d made some time ago.

The braid forms a strap that wraps once around the roll bar, then slips over the end of each top shaft bar.

I made the loops large enough so I can slip the strap off to install more heddles.

To get the shafts at the right height: I adjusted the length of the strap so that the centre of every heddle (on both shafts) was aligned with the front and back beam.

Essentially, a warp thread passes through the centre of the heddle when both shafts are “at rest” (under normal tension).

Step four: operating the shafts

Now I needed a way to operate the shafts: pulling one shaft down causes the other to rise up, but the old Jack levers are no longer suitable.

Instead I strapped another tablet woven braid to each shaft, passed the braids underneath the Jack levers, and then pulled them out the front of the loom.

Now I can simply pull on a strap to move that shaft down (and the other one up)!

To keep the shafts in position (forming the weaving shed) I step on the trailing end of the strap. This also allows me to fine-tune the tension of the open shed, as needed.

To keep the loom from walking forward, I clamp it to my table. Easy peasy.

What I love

What, apart from the fact that I can weave again?? 🤪

I love how quiet the loom is now. There’s a swish sound when I change sheds (you can hear this in the video if you listen carefully). The Jack levers still click under strong tension, but it’s vastly more peaceful that it used to be.

I love how quickly I can work: now I’m operating the shafts using my feet so my hands are free to hang on to my shuttle. I only need to put the shuttle down if I’m weaving with two at once (and I’ve never attempted that before, either).

I love how weaving is comfortable again. My feet are always dancing (which is a little awkward, granted) but this keeps me moving and I have zero pain as a result. I can weave for hours without noticing.

I love, love the clean shed I’m getting thanks to the new heddles and balanced tension between shafts. This is something I haven’t really experienced before (I’ve only used Jack looms prior to this). Even when the back beam smacks up against the heddles, I am still able to get a working shed. Loom loss is about 7 inches. That’s amazing.

What I don’t love

I (currently) only have 195 usable heddles. That’s okay to make cloth about 10-13 inches wide using 2/8 cotton, but I’d quite like to get on with samples from my online weaving course, and most are almost double the width!

I also rather miss not having four shafts, as I’m limited to plain weave.

With only two shafts I can’t do twill or lace. This is quite restrictive for me, especially as I want to create cloth for my historical costuming habit (lots of twill).

On the other hand, I’m loving plain weave now! I’ve never before attempted colour-and-weave or multi-shuttle weaving, and so far it’s so much fun.

I will be quite busy for a while just practicing these skills, getting more consistent with my beat, and probably crafting a whole load of Christmas and birthday presents for people.

And when I itch to return to four shaft weaving? Well then, it won’t be too long now before my … 🥁 … new floor loom arrives.

Hooooooo, boy. I can’t wait for that!
Jess, Excited

Long story short (jokes, my stories are always long) I won’t be modifying this loom again to add two more shafts. That’s technically a whole lot more complicated, requiring another two roll bars and much more height! I’m very happy with my “new” counter balance loom.

Do you have a Jack loom? Have you ever wondered if it would work better as a Counter balance? Maybe I’ve given you some retrofitting ideas. ☺️

Painting in cloth

At the beginning of the year I ordered a brand new loom: a Spring II by Louët! I’m soooooo excited for it to arrive, but even though it was due to ship around July, it’s now September and it’s still not here.

Well, that’s a bummer, but what can I do?

I decided to join the Jane Stafford School of Weaving and learn as much as I could from her excellent video lessons, and prepare for the day when my loom finally arrives.

But this just means I want to weave right now, dammit!

So I did!

Last time I pulled out my table loom, I had taken off two of the shafts to experiment with converting it from a Jack loom to a Counterbalance.

That experiment was enough of a success for me to detach all the remaining shafts from their springs and install a not-completely-dodgy roll bar for just two of my shafts.

Now I have a two-shaft counterbalance table loom that works 1000% better!

I honestly can’t believe how well this worked!

I have an even tension on the threads when they the shed is open, and no sagging threads.

And the size of the shed is huge!

(I’ll show some better pictures of the modifications in a separate post.)

The inspiration for this warp came from a painting I have hanging on my wall.

It’s a beautiful pastoral scene painted by Bronwyn Bellchambers, an artist who lives up the coast near my parents.

I wanted to see if I could capture the colour vibrancy in cloth, as well as the strong vertical lines of the tree at the left of the painting.

So, I wound a sample warp! This is Maurice Brassard 8/2 Cottolin.

The colours (from top to bottom) are Brun Chocolat, Stone, Slate, Seaton, and Pale Limette (green).

I wanted to see what happened when I blended pairs of colours, so the warp includes a gradation from the blue to the green as well as mixing brown with stone, brown with blue and blue with stone.

I started weaving with a colour gamp Tromp-as-writ (so, weaving colours in the same order as they appear in the warp to make a square piece of weaving).

Then I started playing with striping sequences to get the hang of using my new boat shuttles. I found this so much faster and easier to use than stick shuttles, and I love being able to change colour whenever I want!

I started to get better with my selvedges after I tried some clasped-weft technique, although I clearly need a lot more practice.

Regardless, I think this looks amazing!

My daughter said it looked just like a city, and now that it is off the loom, I have to agree.

The last part of the warp I used up sampling with some dark green wool I had purchased to make viking leg wraps.

I still plan to come back to this project, once I can weave again with more than two shafts!

In the meantime, I wanted to see how the different fibre in the weft would affect the piece after washing and fulling.

I chose to beat at 14 ppi since the wool was a little thicker than the 2/8 cottolin.

The reed is sleyed 1-1-2-1-1 to fit 18 epi into my 15 dent reed. As a result you can see reed marks in the right hand side of this photo, and in the city-scape picture above.

Okay, so how did it all turn out?

Log cabin and striping sequences
A more vibrant sample using Orange Brulé and Peacock. Yummy!
Dark green wool with two double-picks of Pale Gris in the centre
City-scape placemat (before hemming)
More stripes: Navy and Peacock this time. The navy gives beautiful texture on the chocolate, believe it or not!

Verdict: extremely awesome.

Once I washed, pressed and hemmed the cottolin pieces, I found that my selvedges had neatened up considerably. And remarkably, the width of my weaving was pretty consistent even though I didn’t use a temple!

The exception here was the wool sample, which I fulled by hand, and which was rather higgle-de-piggledy once it had shrunk down. I need to do more sampling in wool, preferably using the wool cycle on my washing machine to get a consistent effect. Now I’m thinking about the next warp!

The reed marks disappeared from all pieces except the woollen sample, in which they were surprisingly (and beautifully) enhanced. The wool sample has an amazing richness of colour and texture, and I love the effect from the reed marks in this piece!

All the samples were a little stiffer than I’d like (18 epi in the reed, beat at 18 ppi with 8/2 cottolin). The wool sample feels like a good weight for light upholstery, which is something to remember when I want to re-cover my weaving bench. 😎

Next time I’d like to try 15 epi to see if I can unlock more drape from my samples (and with a 15 dent reed, that’s easy-peasy).

Until next time, folks!

A tale of two cheeses

I mentioned earlier this year that I’ve been making fresh goat’s cheeses, like Feta, Halloumi and Chèvre. Do you recall me saying “It doesn’t seem amazingly hard (so far)”?

So how hard can it be™ to make an aged cheese? Can you guess?

Drunken Goat

As soon as I heard the words “Drunken Goat Cheese” I knew I had to make this one. You may also have seen this called Cabra al Vino. It’s basically cheese that is soaked in red wine before it is aged. Sounds amazing, right?!

I compared two different recipes for this one, and ended up mostly following the instructions in the second (there is a lot of detail with pictures on cheesemaking.com):

Recipe from The Beverage People
Recipe from cheesemaking.com

The make itself went really well, to the point where it smelled fantastic and I couldn’t wait to try the cheese! The only hitch being that I’d need to age the cheese for a few months before it would be ready to eat.

Newly pressed cheese
After brining
After the first wine soak
After the second wine soak, with a hand for scale

Easy, right?

To age a cheese you need a place that is both humid and cool. Not as cold as a typical fridge, and a whole lot more humid (about 85% is perfect).

So I built a cheese cave!

It’s an old bar fridge (the kind without any auto-defrost features) with the freezer shelf removed.

I’m using some pine boards that I washed with vinegar and left in the sun for a few hours as a place to rest the cheese.

I keep it at about 11ºC using an InkBird thermostat power point gadget (no need to hack the fridge, the temperature sensor just slips inside the door seal and the power is switched off and on if the fridge gets too cold or warm).

Water beading on the roof of the fridge means the humidity is at about 100%

The trouble is, the “cave” sits at about 100% humidity when there’s a moist cheese inside, which is too wet.

Any cheese I put in here grows a lot of mould. 🤨

I couldn’t keep the mould on my Drunken Goat cheese under control, so I tried to work with the mould instead of against it. I attempted to put a schmier onto the cheese:

Every day I brushed some of the liquid in the jar (a weak red wine brine) onto the cheese and the boards underneath.

I flipped the cheese every other day.

This is meant to build up a layer of friendly bacteria that prevents mould from getting into the cheese.

This worked, to an extent. Guess what: no mould got inside the paste of my cheese! However …

… my lovely Drunken Goat Cheese grew a huge variety of mould on the surface, some of which smelt awful (musty).

It cleaned up beautifully after I washed the mould away using white wine.

But it tasted (to me) too foul to eat! 😫

Besides the musty off flavours, the paste of the cheese was dry and tasteless.

Nothing like the soft and fruity flavour I was hoping for!

Colby

Shortly after I made the Drunken Goat cheese, I made a batch of Colby (from my Mad Millie cheese kit instructions).

I must have slept really badly, or taken a dose of forgetfulness with my breakfast muesli because this make went wrong in almost every way it could!

I heated the milk too hot in my double boiler before adding my culture and rennet. Oops!

The milk failed to flocculate for a whole hour (usually this takes less than 15 minutes), so I added more rennet hoping to save it. Oops! It instantly coagulated into a horrible grainy mess.

I soldiered on with the recipe regardless. I took exactly one photo of this cheese make, because by now I was expecting a total fail and was laughing at how badly this was going.

Eventually I managed to press the soggy bloop curd into a cheese shape and brined it (overnight, oops!) and then put it on the bench to start drying out.

About four days later I managed to get the cheese cave set up (oops, too long on the bench!) and popped it in to age with the Drunken Goat.

Yep, that puppy grew some pretty colourful mould!

I gave up on it after a few weeks, took it out of the cave, removed the mould (with a saturated brine) and left it in the main fridge so it would stop growing mould. I neglected it for another two weeks, after it had dried out and cracked like crazy.

Oh, that cheese was a fail.

But Stephen ate it!

He said apart from the dry cracked bits, it was quite nice as a sandwich cheese. It even smelt faintly cheesy, so that’s something!

Emboldened by this “success” I decided to try a second Colby where I didn’t screw up the make. And this time I waxed the cheese to make sure there was no mould!

So, how did that go?

Yeah, nope. Last week it started to feel a little squishy inside the super thick layer of wax, so I decided to open it up.

It went “pfffft” when I pushed the knife tip in, letting a puff of gas escape.

That can’t be good!

The trapped gas could easily have formed as a by-product of Botulinum reproduction. No way are we eating that! ARGH! 🥵

So I guess this was the tale of three cheeses, really. And all of them were fails. 🤷🏼‍♀️

I’ll stick to my comfort zone and go back to making delicious Feta for now!

Introducing our mini herd

When we brought home our two does at the end of 2020, little did we know that we had the makings of a small herd of miniature goats! In April 2021 (almost a whole year ago now) we had four new kids arrive, and we decided to keep them all.

Let’s meet the new kids on the block!

(Sorry, I’ll stop doing these terrible boy band puns soon, I promise)!

Pumpkin

Pumpkin is female (a doe) with a white forehead blaze on a black head, a black line down her back, mottled black / white on her right hand side, and mostly white on her left hand side.

She has black legs with white feet (except her front right leg which is mostly white), and a white tail. Her ears are black with white speckles.

Percy

Percy is male (a wether), brown eyed, with a white saddle / barrel chest and black everywhere else. He also has a black head with a white blaze on the forehead, and a white tail.

His fur is less mottled than Pumpkin’s and he has alternate coloured legs (his front legs are more blotchy than his back legs).

Charlie

Charlie (a wether) is brown eyed, with a warm russet and black coat, with some white patches on his tail, belly, front legs and head.

He has white speckles on his ears and in the saddle area of his coat that make him look like a fawn.

Jade

Finally, we have Jade, who is such a delicate little doe.

She is black and fawn coloured (dusty brown) with Swiss markings (I think) like her mum (Keira).

Her summer coat is fawn coloured, but her winter coat is plumping up with soft grey cashmere.

Fruit crates attract goats
Box-o-goats
Lush pastures await
Midday = snoozels
Pumpkin’s winter coat is the softest cashmere you’ve ever squished
Oh, hi!

What goats do when it’s rainy outside!

Learning to make goat’s cheese

Well, the title for this one pretty much says it all, really: I’ve been learning to make cheese! Specifically from goat’s milk, because …🥁… we are milking our goats!

Yes, this is awesome.

Our goats came to us with one doe in milk (Keira) and both does pregnant (surprise!). It has now been over eight months since both Keira and Scarlet had their kids. And we have a lot of milk!

What kinds of cheese can you make with goat’s milk? Turns out a lot! So far I’ve made:

Paneer
Halloumi
Feta
Chèvre

The next cheese I’m going to try is called Drunken Goat. Yes, really!

So, is it hard to make cheese?

Hmmm, I’m not quite sure how to answer this. At this point I’ve made a bunch of cheese (which is super cool, really) and it was not just edible, it was delicious! I must be doing something right, surely?

It doesn’t seem amazingly hard (so far) to follow a cheese recipe. I’ve used everyday cooking skills, like heating liquids, measuring the temperature of liquids, and using a timer.

Using a double boiler is something I hadn’t done very often prior to making cheese, but it’s really not rocket science.

I think the trickiest part (so far!) has been comparing recipes and deciding which one to use. They tend to vary a fair bit, so which bits have wiggle room and which bits are important to follow exactly? Which one is the “correct” way to do it?

I’ve found the wiki articles at cheeseforum.org to be really helpful in my learning process. I’ve just joined the forum itself, and there’s a wealth of information there, and a bunch of really helpful people.

After reading up on the forum, I’ve discovered my current level of confidence versus competence puts me at the “Naïvely confident” stage of the learning curve:

I think I know what I’m doing, but I probably don’t.
Jess, naïvely confident

But it’s fun! And delicious!

Getting started

Making cheese at home is more approachable than I thought it would be. Paneer and Queso Blanco cheeses don’t need any special cultures or rennet, just pots, a cheese cloth and some lemon juice or vinegar.

When it comes to equipment, you can wing it using things you probably already have in your cupboard (colanders, strainers, plastic containers with snap on lids, saucepans, etc.). Most people don’t have a milk thermometer, though (you definitely need one of these)!

Luckily I was given a pretty full-on Mad Millie kit (years ago) that contained a bunch of things for a variety of cheeses: ricotta and feta cheese molds, a cheese press, draining mats, plus measuring tools for tiny amounts of ingredients (spoon measures and pipettes).

To make cheese you need a way to turn milk into curds and whey. This is done with acid, or cultures, or rennet (it’s easy to get hold of vegetarian sources in Australia) or a combination of these.

My kit gave me vegetarian rennet tablets (which amazingly have not denatured yet) and citric acid, and I purchased some powdered culture from Green Living Australia.

One piece of advice if you’re getting started with a kit:

Use cheese-making kit instructions as a place to start, but go looking for other recipes to compare and contrast!
My advice, take with a grain of salt! (Not literally.)

I’ve found the Mad Millie instructions to be very time-based: “do this and then leave for an hour” type of thing. If your milk is super fresh or your goats have been on lush pasture, it will behave differently and the timings will be out of whack.

Understanding why you leave it for an hour is really useful (e.g. you are trying to get to a certain level of acidity, or to allow the curd to set for a “clean break”).

Understanding why helps you to anticipate the outcome you want and spot it happening early / late, rather than just crossing your fingers and hoping the recipe works for you that day.

Halloumi

If you’ve not had halloumi sliced and grilled with a drizzle of lemon, you’ve been missing out! We used to call this “squeaky” cheese because of the way it feels when you bite into it, and it’s possible to grill it because it won’t melt in your pan.

It’s traditionally made with a mix of goat and sheep milk, but it works perfectly with just goat milk. The basic idea here is to squash the milk curds under a heavy weight, and then boil them in the whey. I store the finished cheese in the fridge, in brine made from whey.

After making this cheese several times, I’ve discovered the reason it won’t melt in your pan is because the curds are not very acidic when you boil them.
Interesting halloumi fact

Here’s a batch of halloumi in progress, taking advantage of the cheese press from my kit.

On the left is a makeshift double-boiler (a heavy enamel pot on top of a stainless steel saucepan containing water). The whey is in the enamel pot, and is coming up to almost boiling point before I boil the curd.

On the right the curds are inside the cheese press, which is sitting inside another saucepan to catch the draining whey. The amount of weight I have “pressing” is about 6-7 kg (which is like a full 5L paint tin sitting on top of the curd). I like the cheese press, it’s very handy and compact!

Feta

Another classic cheese to make from goat’s milk: this is a firm, white, crumbly cheese you put into salads, or whiz in the food processor with spinach to make Spinach and Feta rolls (omg, yum).

I’ve made several batches, and I’m feeling pretty confident I’m making better feta than we can buy from the shop. Each batch I make gets more delicious, and yields more curd, and so I think there’s still plenty of room for improvement!

This was my first feta, and it came out pretty darn great.

This was my second, and it was even better. The colour of the cheese is a little more yellow and it had a more “cheesy” flavour.

Making Feta is fun because you drain the curds (basically a bunch of soft wobbly white things) inside a mold instead of a cheese cloth. After just 30 minutes you can flip the curd mass over (using your hands) and see your feta cheese taking shape! It’s like magic!

Chèvre

I made this for the first time on New Year’s Eve (I’m a party girl, me 🎊🧀). Well, I started making it, and I finished several days later. This one was more like making yoghurt: lots of time sitting and fermenting!

This cheese is a soft spreadable cheese that you can season with practically anything you like. I chose smoked paprika for one, and fresh oregano and thyme for the other. Yum!

To make chèvre you use mesophilic starter culture (I used this “soft curd” culture) to produce curds and whey. The bacteria consume the lactose in the milk and produce acid, which protects the cheese from spoiling on your bench top.

Here’s my 2L of goat milk, sitting in my house at 23 ºC, quietly approaching cheesiness (which is a quality you can measure: the target pH is 4.6, which is very acidic).

The top of the milk is greenish-yellow (that’s actually the whey pooling on top) and the curd is a soft mass of white.

Once it hits that pH (which I measured using pH test strips, like a boss scientist) you scoop and drain the soft curd for another day using whatever you have to hand (like a ricotta or feta mold or two).

I was able to turn out the curd by flipping it, but it was very soft. I worked some salt into it (by hand, in a bowl) which mixed it all up again. It was smooth and silky in texture, but overall it was firmer than greek yoghurt.

I put it all back in the feta molds to drain again (adding salt draws out more whey) before I seasoned the cheese.

I have to say, this stuff is amazing! It’s really delicious. It’s fantastic spread on toast or inside a salad sandwich, and I can imagine making a cheese cake out of it (skipping the herbs, of course)!

What’s next?

Like I said earlier, I’m going to try making Drunken Goat, or Cabra al vino. Mostly because I saw the name of it and decided I just had to make it!

No, I will not be making my goats drunk before milking them! 😵‍💫🐐

This cheese will be my first “semi-hard” cheese. It’s made by soaking the curd overnight in red wine before aging it in the fridge, giving it a red rind.

Wish me luck! 🍷

Men’s to Boy’s

Okay, you may not be old enough to remember the band “Boyz II Men” and thus get my woeful pun, but it’s too bad! I went there anyway!

This is the story of a Men’s collared shirt that found new life as a Boy’s collared shirt, just in time for my son’s Year 6 Farewell dinner.

We start our disassembly here, with this size 41 shirt.

A rotary cutter makes short work of separating the sleeves, collar, cuffs and yoke from the main body of the shirt.

By laying the side seams together and creating a fold at the centre back, we see it’s possible to cunningly cut a size 9 shirt from the main body.

Yes, even if it means piecing together the front facing!

Each sleeve yields up one back yoke, and one mini-sleeve each.

The offcuts yield enough fabric to make a short section of bias binding, or a pocket (or two).

And of course there are always scraps to audition button holes!

We can re-use all the buttons and have enough for two short sleeved shirts.

This shirt was so much fun to sew. I loved every moment of it.

Partly because the fabric is sleek, cool and a dream to touch (some kind of smoothed shirting cotton) and comes from a professional quality shirt (Van Heusen).

But mostly because I tailored the heck out of this shirt.

The pattern is the Thomas Shirt by Felicity Sewing Patterns: the method of construction is professional and the instructions are comprehensive. I was able to sew a completely seamless bag yoke! 🌟

I made a couple of alterations to the shirt, mainly to avoid using an overlocker (serger). I much prefer to see clean seam finishes in a garment!

Photo showing a flat-fell seam and a tiny curved shirt hem.

I added extra seam allowance to the sleeve and side seams so I could flat fell the seams (like they do on professional shirts).

Check out that teeny tiny shirt hem!

I used a light-weight fabric instead of fusible interfacing inside the collar and to line the facings.

This meant I could hide all the raw edges (by seaming and then enclosing the edge) which looks fantastic.

Yes, this is the inside of the shirt. Pretty slick, huh?

I set the rounded sleeve cap into the complete armhole (classic set-in sleeve technique) because the sleeve cap was pretty curved and needed a lot of easing.

I wasn’t convinced I could flat-fell the armhole seams so I used bias binding (cut from leftover fabric) to do a fake flat fell / bound edge hybrid.

The bias binding is a little too wide and looks a little clumsy, but it’s close enough!

Seriously stylish.

William chose the contrast button holes, and I used the same thread to attach the buttons, too, in a cross style.

That last buttonhole, turned horizontal? That’s to help the buttons stay closed if you tuck your shirt.

At the end of the day, I can’t stop running my hands over the inside of this shirt. I’m really proud of this make.

[Inside the shirt] Can you spot the join in the facing?

Remodelling an unfortunate sewing project

I’ve recently taken out my sewing machine, dusted it off, and tried out some new patterns by indie designers. I love the print-at-home phenomenon!

In the last two months I’ve sampled:

the Plantain tee (free), by Deer & Doe,
the Datura top, also by Deer & Doe,
the Alice top, by Tessuti,
the Thomas shirt, by Felicity Sewing Patterns, and
the Airelle blouse (again, by Deer & Doe).

It turns out that I’ve been pinning most of these patterns on Pinterest since forever!

Let’s talk today about the Alice top, which turned out not to suit me at all, and what I did to recover this project.

What I was hoping for

I wanted a way to use up this Revelry “Snap” voile (by Cloud 9) that I bought on impulse at a Spotlight store (back when driving over an hour to a fabric shop and browsing in person was actually a thing).

I hoped that the voile would work out because this review for the Alice top came up trumps (also a very amusing read). After reading about the yoke stretching out, I figured using a more stable linen with a contrast yoke would be a good idea, so I decided to try this alteration of the pattern.

Everything I have read says that voile has “good drape” and so it should have been suitable for this top. But I had some doubts.

Cotton voile is very tightly woven, folds crisply, and is quite sheer. I was nervous about using it without a lining, but I figured that gathering the blouse section would sufficiently hide my underwear.

The experience of sewing

I enjoyed getting started with the Alice top. I appreciated the way the paper pattern was pieced together, and the hand-drawn nature of the pattern made it feel very “mine”.

I liked that the seam allowances were marked at most corners with notches! I don’t like having to search the pattern instructions to find out how much seam allowance is included on various edges.

I also really liked that some allowances were small (necklines) and some were larger (side seams) so I could be frugal with fabric but still have enough to make an alteration (or a really tidy seam finish) if I wanted to.

Once I got up to fitting, things became less fun. Mostly because I couldn’t judge how things would fit in the armhole area until I had basically constructed the fully lined armhole…thingies.

Picture of a cap sleeve that is too tight showing wrinkles where the fabric pulls.

Once I attached them to the main bodice…

…the top was too tight under the arm!

I tried removing some of the fabric and leaving the upper part unaltered, to create a kind of cap sleeve…

…but I had unwittingly created a Star Trek maternity uniform!

(Why does my head look so small here?)

Finally I ended up ditching the armhole thingies altogether and doing a bias-bound edge to cover as much flesh in the armhole area as I could.

The finished product was quite wearable, so I called it “done”, but I didn’t really like it. I took some photos, praised myself for the awesome French seaming, but generally felt a bit lacklustre about the result.

Why didn’t it work?

For a start, choosing white for the yoke was a mistake, especially a very opaque white. I don’t this is a good colour for me, or at least not for a round high neckline.

Secondly, this type of top (gathered over the bust) in voile (a fabric that didn’t have as much drape as was needed) was not a great combination because the gathering caused the fabric to stand away from my body shape.

It looks rather like a slightly stylish mosquito net, I think.

The top didn’t suit me, and wasn’t flattering on my body shape. Erk!

What next?

A few weeks went by, and I made up a different pattern (the Airelle blouse) in another Cloud 9 voile which has turned out to be my new favourite top.

Yay! It is possible to sew something that suits me in voile!

What’s more, the new blouse was not too sheer, and is dreamy to wear because of the lightweight voile. An idea began to form … 🤔💡

What if I took apart my Alice top and removed the gathering? Could I turn the gathering into pin tucks, maybe? Could I use the dart shaping from the Airelle blouse for a more flattering look?

Out came the seam ripper (I call this a “Quick unpick” because that’s how it was marketed when my Mum taught me to sew, in the 1980s!).

Here’s my attempt at imagining what the top would be like without gathering, and filling in the armhole area with some leftover voile.

Not bad (better, anyway) but still not fantastic. A little frumpy, still.

I pulled out my pattern pieces from the Datura and Airelle tops and started comparing them to the bits I had leftover. It came to me (slowly, not at all in a flash) that the Alice top is most like the Datura in shape. Perhaps I could just cut a new yoke using the Datura pattern?

…and then the penny dropped that I could change the colour of the yoke!

The remodel

I sanity checked that I could re-cut the blouse section into a new set of body pieces for the the Datura top.

Yup!

I then cut a new yoke from a warm grey-brown linen (a colour called “Atmosphere” which you can no longer get, but I think “Drizzle” is a close match).

I made a full pattern to make it easier to lay out for best use of the fabric. Cutting these on the fold would have been really challenging!

The rest of this project was essentially sewing up a Datura top, but I made some modifications to the pattern before I started.

First up, I rotated the dart slightly so that it was perpendicular to the yoke (a little more “French dart” and a little less “straight dart”).

I also left the yoke unlined to give it a closer weight and transparency to the voile body sections.

Hello, Summer! ☀️

The neckline and armholes are finished with an all-in-one binding / flat piping using the bias-stripped I salvaged from the original project.

The final verdict? A smarter, more flattering top that I love.

What do you do when you sew something that you just don’t like? Does it kill your mojo for future projects? Do you end up doubting whether you understand fabric properties at all, like I do? Choosing fabric is surprisingly hard!

Ba…by goats, do-do-de-do

So, remember last time, when I said we had some adventures with our two new goats? The goats we brought home thinking, “One day we might breed these goat with a buck?” The goats we thought were not … already pregnant?

Yeah, those goats!

Surprise! Adorable baby goats! OMG squeeeeee!

We now have four (four!!) more goats, taking us to a total of six, which I think anyone would call a herd of goats. How on earth did this happen? Let’s go back in time and re-live this little adventure, shall we?

January

Our goats arrived at the end of November, and took the whole of December to settle in. In mid-January, we look at Scarlet and think, “Does she have bloat? She looks a little … rotund”.

February

By late February, we suspect that Scarlet is either pregnant (wow!), or has some kind of a tumour (eep!), and decide to call out the vet.

The vet laughs, but promises to bring the ultrasound to have a look (apparently spotting goats in utero is a bit hit-and-miss).

The ultrasound shows at least one spine, and three dark patches. We could have up to three kids in there!

“Shut the front gate!”
Our vet, upon seeing the ultrasound

But when is the due date?

Now we start guessing when we can expect to welcome some baby goats. The gestation period for goats is 145 to 155 days from mating, which had to be earlier than the day we picked up the girls (27 November).

If we add five months to that date, the latest we can expect kids is around 27th of April.

The penny drops that we’re going to be delivering baby goats pretty much any time in the following two months.

March

Now follows a period of frantic goat midwifery up-skilling, wherein we discover:

Many ways goats will show they might be ready to give birth “soon”
Many ways goats give birth normally (oh, wow, videos)
Many ways goat births go wrong (gulp)
What to put in a goat birthing box (towels, gloves, Betadine, dental floss, torches etc.)
Many opinions about how to prepare for birthing, such as should you shave the doe or not? Should you keep the kids separate, or not? Keep the kids with the herd or not? and so on, endlessly.
What makes a good birthing stall and how to build a safe pen for kids.

9 April

The kids are not yet here. How long now?

Scarlet starts to wallow (elegantly, because she’s a goat) and generally take it a bit easy.

We get pretty intimate with her udder, feeling her tummy and generally photographing things in an attempt to discover if maybe this is the week the magic happens.

12 April

Does Keira look a bit … football-shaped … around the middle? Do you think?

21 April

Well, hello super-sized udder. Looks like today’s the day! Clearly (and there’s really no mistaking it) Keira is going to give birth today.

What?? What??

Both our goats are pregnant. Both of them.

We get out the birthing box and watch for signs of labour.

Midday

It’s about lunchtime when I decide not to wait any longer, and to go get that Covid-19 test I booked in for, or I’ll be stuck in isolation if we have to call the vet. Keira is just fussing, and Scarlet is not really giving many signs of labour. I have time.

At 1 pm, I’m leaving Goulburn base hospital when I get a text from my husband. Scarlet is having contractions 1:15 apart.

I’m still twenty five minutes from home.

1:23 pm

I tear into the driveway and leap out of the car. As I dash into the goat pen, my husband reaches in to help Scarlet with her last push. Out drops our first kid!

This next bit is a blur. We watch Scarlet start to lick her first baby clean, not wanting to interfere too much. Scarlet is tired from the birth, because she pushed for at least 15 minutes (which is a decent time, for a goat).

She rests, and licks. Keira fusses and wants to come in and look. She’s jealous.

1:50 pm

Scarlet shows signs she is pushing again. The very next push, and we have our second kid! This time, I get it on video.

Baby number one is still not very clean, and Scarlet isn’t inclined to deal with the new kid yet, so we get in and swap them over. Once she’s licking him (it’s a boy!) we know we’re away chuckling. Scarlet is happy we’re here to help, so she licks us, too.

We spend a bunch of time towelling off the first baby (it’s a girl!) and generally helping them take a bit of milk, and our confidence grows.

Is there going to be another baby? Could be! We wait until Scarlet delivers her placenta, and then we decide we’ve all been amazingly clever.

Afternoon

Keira enters her birth stall about 2:45 pm in the afternoon. Scarlet’s babies are settling well, and we’ve seen a little bit of self-feeding happening, which is amazing.

By 4 o’clock, Keira decides to go back outside and dig a nest in the dirt. Scarlet eats her placenta. Yeah, that’s a thing.

By 6 o’clock, we figure it’s been a pretty darned exciting day, and we have to eat dinner, so one of us runs out for veggie burgers.

6:30 pm

It time to check on Keira: it’s dark, and really quite cold: 4ºC.

The last stage of Keira’s labour happens before we know what hit us. One baby arrives (a boy) and about four minutes later, we have another (a girl).

We are right there to towel off the babies, because it can’t be fun to be all wet and sticky when it’s not much above zero, can it? And they came so fast!

Keira gets on with it like a pro. She’s decided we are her babies too: she licks our hands and her kids, and she licks and licks and licks.

After twenty minutes the kids are parcels of fluff, they are feeding, they are well. We did it!

Well, there you have it. Surprise goats. It’s been absolutely wild.