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For any of y’all who don’t know, I work as the Assistant Director for a nonprofit, non-governmentally run performing arts center. We’re a private 501(c)(3) corporation, for my nonprofit geeks.

Basically, everything we do, is large gatherings of people – people come here to experience the arts, to sing or dance, to watch a band play, to meet and talk about art, to plan art events, to advocate for the place of art in society, and to raise funds for the arts. It’s a beautiful thing, and it’s a good life. The people are the best people – creative, open-hearted, passion-driven, and genuine. Of course, with the current concerns about Covid-19, we are having to cancel a LOT of things – rehearsals, performances, recitals, dances. If we don’t stay alive and healthy, we can’t keep singing and dancing and making art; being healthy and keeping our (often mature and occasionally at-risk) audiences healthy is key to what we do. But it means slashing all the bookings that make up a big part of our revenue stream. We are diversely funded by a variety of grants, donations, and personal gifts, but a major chunk of our budget revenues are earned income from the activities we host. And, because the arts community is made up of awesome people, they are being understanding and agreeing to work together, accepting the changes to schedules with good grace and equanimity. Our patrons, who are not getting to see shows they paid for and were looking forward to, have for the most part been gracious and kind.

I’m also on the board for a national fiber arts event. In that group, we’re in a situation faced by many small nonprofits – we have enough money to keep our events going, but we don’t have a bankroll that will allow us to basically eat an entire year’s worth of expenses. When we announced that we had to cancel our upcoming event, we got some amazing responses – one vendor even told us that it would be OK if we weren’t able to refund her vendor booth fee, and offered to donate sales of a special yarn to our event. We’re facing a mix, with some companies and attendees being angry and frustrated and demanding immediate refunds, and others being willing to work with us, helping out if possible.

What I want for y’all to think about, is if you’ve got tickets to a show, or you’ve made a reservation for an event, and that event has made the brutally painful choice to cancel – that organization is hitting a wall, hard. Many of the smaller groups may not be able to survive a catastrophe like this; even many of the bigger ones will take a serious hit, and next year’s event may be under-funded or smaller than before because of it. If you have an income situation where you’re able to let a part of your refund be a donation instead, or if you’re able to make a gift to the nonprofit of whatever amount, it can make a huge difference in whether they can go on, pay their staff, present the show in the fall, have the event next year.

The nonprofit that I work for as my “day job” is a medium-sized, long-term stable corporation. We’re in good health, as these things are measured; we’ve got money in the bank, we’re endowed with gifts from people who love and support what we do, and we’ve got a strong and flexible professional staff. The nonprofit that I am involved with as my “passion job” on the side, is a healthy and dynamic organization, but it’s entirely volunteer-run. A board of ten people plus six advisors organize, schedule, and run this huge event that serves hundreds of students and thousands of visitors over the course of a four-day super-weekend. We have many volunteers at event time, and there is a lot of help – but it’s in the hands of those few people. We have funds in the bank, a little, but not enough to swallow a whole event’s worth of expenses and survive. As a nonprofit board member (did y’all know this?) I bear a personal financial responsibility for the organization – if it goes under, particularly if a big corporation chooses to be inflexible with the money we contractually owe it for an event we can’t have, they can name me in the suit (see also: turnip, comma, blood from…). They can go after every one of us. If they can get a judge to approve it, they could put a lien on my house, or garnish my wages.

So if you can’t go to an event, please think a moment before you give a nonprofit VOLUNTEER person a nasty tongue-lashing about how you believe they should have handled things differently. Pause, and ask yourself if you want the event to happen next year – if you want the organization to live. If you can’t get a full refund, because the dance troupe or the orchestra just doesn’t have the funds to refund everyone’s money (advance ticket sales are often used for things like space rentals for rehearsals, paying set designers, building costumes, paying technical help), can you afford to forgive that debt, make it a donation to the event? Canceling an event last minute is complicated and horrible – with the fiber festival, we’ve already designed brochures, laid out our vendor hall, ordered name badges. People did their class homework, bought plane tickets, picked out their favorite things to wear and show off. Everyone – including every member of our volunteer board – was looking forward to seeing people we see only once a year. We’re devastated and literally crying through our days some times, and we are doing our best to make it as close to right as we can, for everyone.

A few months ago, I found this post on Wheatbelly about probiotic yogurt made using special strains of Lactobacillus reuteri. That link will sometimes lead to a paywall; here’s another post that recapitulates most of the same info in case Wheatbelly is locked. Technically, it’s not precisely yogurt, because the strains that make it aren’t registered yogurt strains – but it tastes like yogurt and handles like yogurt, so that’s what I call it. I started making it, and switched from half and half to heavy cream to get more good fat and less carbohydrate since I follow a keto diet. I’m not sure how much of the Koolaid I’m willing to swallow in terms of some of the dramatic claims – but I can definitely agree that this stuff seems to help my digestion and make me feel better. This “yogurt” is about halfway between sour cream and cream cheese in both texture and flavor, and it tastes good in both savory and sweet dishes. I regularly take it sweet with Splenda and some Lily’s chocolate chips and crushed pecans, or savory with herbs and salt on vegetables or a steak, or thinned down with ranch seasoning for dressing. I made a batch and shared it with several of my friends recently, and some of them asked for a tutorial – so here it is!

Ingredients:

Cream. I like to use Horizon or other organic types because I know they’re raised without hormones or antibiotics, but any cream will do. I’m usually making it by the quart, so two pints per batch. If you use a kind with stabilizers such as guar gum, xanthan gum, or carageenan, it will make the yogurt a little more stiff, but still perfectly fine.

Inulin. This is a fine, mildly sweet white powder made from processing starches. It’s used as a PREbiotic (not a probiotic) which means that it helps feed your intestinal flora, your “good bugs.” In this case, especially because I’m using cream which has very little milk sugar, it helps feed the Lactobacillus bacteria that make the yogurt. I can’t find any chart showing the difference between the inulin made from different sources (there are a LOT), but they do have slightly different flavors and significantly different textures. You do want to get one that’s a powder, not a bottle full of capsules. I use two tablespoons per quart. My friend Allison came over, and we did some experimentation – the Jerusalem artichoke inulin mixed up OK, but the agave inulin was easier to stir to a smooth slurry. The chicory inulin was tough to stir to a smooth slurry, and I had to strain it. I won’t get the chicory again.

And, most importantly: the bacteria. This supplement, BioGaia’s GASTRUS, is the one that was listed in the Wheatbelly post, and it’s made from two strains that have been used in a lot of laboratory tests. The tablets are designed to be chewable, and they’ve got a slight mint/citrus flavor which doesn’t come through at all in the yogurt, but you might want to be aware of if you’re allergic to mint or citrus. Other probiotics will work, with varying degrees of success, I’m sure – I haven’t tried a bunch, and I don’t have a huge amount of yogurt experience. Unfortunately, this means I also can’t answer “but what if I substitute this different thing for that thing” questions.

I do this “cold start,” which means I don’t heat the cream to pasteurize it before inoculating it with the bacteria. I also don’t heat sterilize my equipment. I’ve read some sources that give all kinds of dire warnings about contaminated batches which go sour or fail to set. It hasn’t happened to me. If you want to heat sterilize your jars and tools and pasteurize your cream, by all means go ahead. I’ve done plenty of sterilizing with canning and jelly making, I’m just not that bothered about the likelihood of pre-pasteurized cream going bad.

Start: make the slurry. If you try to just stir the inulin into the cream, it clumps up into little nodules, and they are very, very hard to stir out. I like to pour a tablespoon of water into a small dish, and sprinkle the two tablespoons of inulin on top of it, let it sink, and then stir. If you don’t let the inulin sink, its hard to stir. If you get lumps, you can press them through a tea strainer with the back of a spoon to break them up.

Add the probiotics. There are two ways to do this; if you’re starting from scratch, use ten of the BioGaia Gastrus tablets, crushed to a powder. I crush them on a dinner plate using the bottom of a small jar, but any kind of mortar-and-pestle arrangement will work. If you’ve made one batch already, then you can use two tablespoons of the last batch of yogurt instead. Whichever of the two you use, stir the mixture until smooth.

Put the slurry-plus-probiotics into the jars you’ll make the yogurt in. I like wide-mouth quart jars for my own use; I use wide-mouth pints or even little jelly jars if I’m making it to share.

Add the cream. Because this won’t be steam sterilized, you don’t need to worry about head space; it will set without increasing in volume or making any kind of froth. I use a long spoon to stir the mixture. Be careful not to hit the side of the jar hard with the spoon, or it can break a hole, and make a mess. Ask me about how much trouble it is to clean up a quart of cream that spills down the front of the cabinets! Put the lids on the jars.

Put the jars in the Instant Pot, add a few inches of warm water, and set it for YOGURT. My IP has options on the YOGURT button for “more” and “less” – I set it for “less.” I have read some sources that say the IP gets too hot, but again – my results have been just right, with that setting. If you have a yogurt maker, you can use that, or you can do the trick with the oven that the Wheatbelly blog recommends. I set mine for 36 hours on the timer (press the little + sign until the time goes up). It will be yogurt-y after about 6 or 8 hours, but it grows more of the good bacteria as it goes longer, and gets a tangier flavor that I like. Refrigerate it to let it set before you use it.

That’s it! Once it’s yogurt, you scoop it out, add whatever you like (or nothing at all) and eat it. If you’re going to mix it with something, it helps to stir it by itself some first in the bowl, and then add whatever you’re doctoring it with. I like to add C8 MCT oil to mine to get more ketones, and a tablespoon or more will easily stir into a half cup of yogurt with no major impact on flavor or texture. This stuff isn’t light – it’s about five hundred calories per cup – but it fits perfectly in a ketogenic diet, with almost all of the already minimal lactose in the cream being eaten up by the bacteria+. If you’re not doing keto, and you’re eating it for breakfast, just be aware that it’s dense!

This also makes an AWESOME cultured butter – just put the cream in a stand mixer with the usual paddle blade and let it do its thing on LOW. If you try to do it too fast, there’s a lot of splashing. Once it starts to clump, turn it all the way down, and let it run until it’s one big clump. Pour off the buttermilk (which is VERY sour, and awesome for use in recipes or to drink with some sweetening) and then wash the butter in cold water, pressing through it with a spatula until the water is clear and there’s no more buttermilk in it. Salt it if you like your butter salted.

A thing I didn’t know until I started doing more and more research about silk: butterfly caterpillars make silk too.

Many of them don’t make much silk – it’s often just a little tuft, a few yards total – but it’s critically important to their life cycle. Most of the time, silk is used to make a small pad which attaches to a surface – anything from a twig to a leaf to a patio chair – where the caterpillar is going to pupate.  Many, like some swallowtails, also make a “lasso” which helps keep the pupa in position against its substrate.

This is the hatched-out chrysalis of a Gulf fritillary, Agraulis vanillae, from my backyard  passionflower patch. The silk pad attached it to the garden chair.

 

I saw another band weaver’s bracelets on Facebook, and got intrigued with the concept. This is the first result. The original ribbon was from years ago (decades, actually!) and is Gutermann polyester button thread that I had made for an SCA Iris ribbon; I had woven off the remainder of the warp just to have. I’ve always thought it was pretty, but didn’t have any real project for it. I saw it in my stash of woven bands, and thought, “This could be some seriously crafty homo bling.”

 

This is one of those projects that had a lot of “opportunities for learning” – where you aren’t sure how to proceed, and you screw up in interesting ways, but once you’ve un-superglued your fingers from the table, you have learned a valuable lesson, and you’ll do it differently next time. The clasp is magnetic, I got them from Amazon. Also, single-use packets of SuperGlue are AWESOME; one tiny tube did the whole thing, and there was no sad half-empty tube sitting in the drawer getting crusty afterward.

 

I used a piece of the “Fuck That B.S” sampler as the backing. I figured it was apt, and it was the right width. It gives the finished project a lot more heft, and it protects the gold threads from getting sweaty and/or snagged. The thickness of the band, however, meant that there was a significant difference in diameter between the inside and the outside once it was done. What it means in practical terms, is that the piece won’t lie flat. It buckles. Which is fine – it’s not meant to be flat, it’s meant to go around a wrist, and it’s more important for it to lie smoothly on the curve. But for the next one, there will be some curved pressing involved before the stitching, and careful distribution of that diameter difference to make sure that it’s even. Also, my stitches show up a LOT more in photos, so next time I’ll stitch a little more carefully.

 

This is the ribbon I started with. I wove it some time in the late nineties.

Notes for next time: Press the ribbon round.  Stitch in the ditch between threads, even if whipping is faster. Be careful where the SuperGlue goes.

 

Last weekend, I taught a class for the DFW Fiber Fest Board. Everybody had a loom, and I loved how they looked lined up on the table!