I love this guide to DC's Farmer's Markets created by Cherry Blossom Creative! It was in today's Creative DC Newsletter and I have to re-share as I will be referencing this often for my own weekly shopping.
While these local markets will never completely satisfy my west-coast taste for produce, they are filled with yummy local produce. (If you are curious, the Alemany Farmer's Market was my favorite market in SF).
Find something fresh and in season!
Californication Mochila via Weavers of the World, $130
I was walking to brunch in SOHO with my sister and cousin and spotted these beautiful hand woven bags. We were really hot so I just grabbed a card and we rushed off to air conditioning.
These bags are by a company called Weavers of the World and each bag, called a mochila (it means backpack in Spanish), is hand woven by the Wayuu Women in La Guajira, Columbia. Each mochila takes three weeks to make.
I love these bags so much! They each have a really tasteful color scheme that is both minimal and fun. Check out their full selection of colorful mochilas next time you are looking for a fun bag or backpack.
Color grown cotton via grow your own jeans
I am very impressed by Fiber Shed's presentation on how to grow your own jeans. The website details the process from growing indigo and spinning yarn to creating locally sewn jeans. Now that I've been weaving for a few months, I understand how laborious it is to make fabric and have so much more respect for finished goods. I love Fiber Shed and the work they are doing to educate people on where cloth comes from. They are a great organization committed to more sustainable practices in textiles-something we need more people to get into!
Celebrate the process this fall in Bolinas at their Grow Your Jeans event, which will include spinning, weaving and dyeing presentations. I might have to take a trip to NorCal just for this!!
Via Fiber Shed
I've been meaning to post this for a while! Things have been busy with my new job and summer travel. Life.
This post is a Q+A with Adam Kavalier of Undone Chocolate. Adam and his wife Kristen create handcrafted small batch bean-to-bar chocolate right here in the District.
I discovered Undone last winter at a pop-up shop near Navy Yard. It was cold and this chocolate warmed me up! I all love their flavors (Nourish, Replenish, Arouse), but Arouse is my favorite. Undone chocolates make excellent locally-made gifts.
We make handcrafted small batch bean to bar chocolate from antioxidant rich organic cocoa beans sourced directly from small producers. - Adam Kavalier of Undone Chocolate
I stumbled across cacao while pursuing a doctorate in plant biology. I was intrigued by the chemical makeup of cacao and the process by which it becomes chocolate. Over the next six years I developed my craft in a Manhattan studio apartment, building small machines or repurposing others to fit my small batch process (not many machines are made to produce at the small level that I began at). I continued to make small batch chocolate alongside my research and studied cocoa beans for their chemical makeup. I sought out beans that had a story and were particularly rich in antioxidants. I played with different ways of making chocolate, including a number of roasting and grinding profiles to make chocolate that was high in antioxidant levels while aiming to not sacrifice flavor. Over time I fell in love with the different flavors of cacao
I began making chocolate from a very analytical angle. Measuring, timing, and calculating. I tried to make chocolate making fit into a box and over time realized that it doesn't fit into a confined space. I fell in love with the flavors of cacao and making chocolate became more intuitive than calculated. While I began very process oriented, as the chocolate making is very process oriented, I shifted to a more creative perspective allowing for parameters to change according the needs of the situation.
Switch tasks, sometimes meditation and yoga.
Creativity is the ability to use feeling and intuition to drive your actions and decisions. It is inherently a product of one's unique perspective.
So many things! Manage operations, customer relations, sales, packaging, shipping, finance, accounting, most all of these happen every day.
Double your financial budget and triple your projections on the amount of time you think things will take.
Adam and Kristen Kavalier
For us it has been magical, working on a creative business together has allowed us to explore unique parts of ourselves and each other and has expanded our relationship in a whole new way.
Special thanks to Adam for letting me do this Q+A! I learned a ton from this piece and am really excited to see Undone growing in the short time that I've known about them!
Spent some time on an island with work friends. That's right work friends! Half of us were from my office and the other half from the NY office. We don't all work together anymore, but we all at one point kind of did. A few in the group planned the whole thing and it turned out to be one of my favorite vacations! Days upon days on the beach, sitting in the warm gulf-coast water, followed by pool time, followed by jenga, flip cup and cards of humanity. We got pretty creative with the cocktails because there wasn't easy access to groceries and we forgot the mixers...but remembered the moonshine-drenched strawberries.
I grew up on the west coast, so this was a very different kind of beach experience. The water was really warm. There were storms every day at 4pm. Mosquitoes! No bonfires. Totally private beach (whole island was a resort actually).
And spending a vacation with coworkers? It was actually fantastic. We didn't talk about work (much), just hung out and spent time in the sun. We kayaked with dolphins and ate all our meals together before we set up the table for red cup games. We literally watched the sun go down every single day and it was gorgeous.
Can't wait for the next trip with these folks!
I finally finished dressing my loom! Setting up a project for weaving is a little complicated--you have to decide on your design, measure out all your thread, thread each end through the right heddles, and then tie on the ends and wrap it all up. The whole process has been both therapeutic and tedious. I'm super proud of myself for sticking with it. Now I get to do the fun part-weave!
Tabby weave to get my threads evened out.
The heddles.
Shuttles of thread ready for weaving.
