Klosekraft: Sarah learns to spin

I got an email from my friend Sarah last week asking for a spinning lesson. She's a textile conservator who will soon be giving a presentation to some conservation grad students who are not textile specialists (mainly paintings and paper, I think). One of the topics she has to cover is yarn twist. So she sent me a note saying, quite sensibly, that while she's familiar with the technical information, she would like to have actually spun some yarn before talking to a bunch of people about spinning yarn. And she said she would bring food and wine.

So I invited our mutual friend Zoe, who brought more food and more wine and we had ourselves a party.

From the front, that's stilton with apricots, something soaked in wine and the most gorgeously stinky soft cheese washed in Chimay. And hot salami and a big plate of different varieties of plums and bread and olives and wine.

Followed by Zoe's homemade peach and blueberry crumble with my homemade Vietnamese coffee ice cream. I don't have her crumble recipe at hand but I can tell you how to make the ice cream, which is the easiest ice cream EVER. I saw it somewhere online, though I can't tell you where because it's so easy, I didn't have to print out the recipe. You probably won't either. Even if memorizing an ice cream recipe is the last thing you want to do right now, I bet you will anyway.

Vietnamese Coffee Ice Cream

2 c. strong coffee
1 can sweetened condensed milk

Mix together. Chill. Freeze in ice cream maker.

So, there might have been a request for me not to blog about the actual spinning part of the evening, but I'm choosing to believe it was the tee-hee-stop-tickling-me-you-big-handsome-man! kind of request and not, you know, the real kind.

Because, see? Look how good she is:

She's smiling and making yarn. This was maybe twelve minutes after she treadled for the very first time.