Ready or not Kentucky, here I come

I am on my way to Louisville, Kentucky this morning. Louisville is the headquarters of GE Monogram appliances and they asked me to be their guest for the next three days. So while I'm in Louisville I'll be experiencing the GE Monogram Experience in the GE Monogram Experience Center.

So over the next couple of days, I'll be live-blogging the happenings in Louisville and I'll also be simulcasting (simul-blogging?) on Twitter. You can follow me there @saintpetepaul.

I'll check in later, and in the mean time have a great day.

Donnez-nous aujourd'hui notre pain de chaque jour

Gee, who studied French in a Catholic high school? Thank you Soeur Assumpta, after nearly 30 years I can still recite the Notre Père cold. Anyhow, since everybody in the US is at the beach, the stragglers and non-US-ians who read me are going to get a bonus from my kitchen today.

I fancy myself to be a baker of some competence and I have been on a bread making kick lately. To that end, I've been playing around with a baguette recipe that I am now declaring fully tweaked and a consistent producer of some really good bread.

I'm convinced that bread baking is easy, but few kitchen projects offer such a rich return on investment. Bread baking is a contact sport which is what led me to it originally. It's also easy to fit into a schedule. Most bread recipes require short bursts of activity spread out over the better part of a day so it's easy to work around. In addition to those benefits, there is no food so satisfying to prepare. To me anyway. Flour, water and a friendly mold work with a baker to produce a food that's still the bedrock of most diets the world over. Human beings have been baking bread since the Stone Age and I mean that literally. Baking bread in 2009 isn't a very different process from how someone in 9,500 BC would have done it.

Well, that's not entirely true. The recipe I've been playing around with is for a baguette, an archetypal French loaf that's only been around since the mid-1800s. And without further ado, here goes.

1 teaspoon active dry yeast

1 teaspoon sugar

1 ½ cups warm water (105°--115° F)

4 to 4 ½ cups bread flour

2 ½ teaspoons salt

olive oil

In a large bowl, take ½ cup of warm water, 1 cup of flour and a pinch of the yeast and mix together. Cover and let sit overnight at room temperature. The next day, add a cup of water to your starter and mix. Dry mix 3 cups of flour, sugar, salt and yeast and then fold into the larger bowl. Mix thoroughly with a wooden spoon.

Take the remaining ½ cup of flour and use it to lightly flour your hands and a kneading surface. Turn the dough in the bowl onto the surface and knead thoroughly for 10 minutes until smooth and elastic. Rinse and dry the bread bowl. Lightly oil the bowl and transfer the dough back into it. Turn the dough to oil it top and bottom. Cover the bowl and let the dough rise at room temperature until it doubles in size (1 ½ to 2 hours).

Preheat oven to 400° F.

Take a cast iron skillet and fill it ¾ full with water. Set in the lower rack of the oven.

Punch down the dough, turn it out onto the floured surface and form it into a long, slender loaf around 3" in diameter. Lightly grease a baking sheet and set loaf onto it. Let rise for ½ hour at room temperature.

Make 3 or 4 diagonal slashes across the the top of the loaf. Lightly brush the top with olive oil. Bake on the center rack for ½ hour or until the crust is golden. Remove from oven and cool on a rack.

This is a simple recipe and it yields a loaf of surprising complexity and texture. Though the resulting loaf is fatter than a true baguette, its size makes it perfect for sandwiches. I like it still warm from the oven with good oil and a pinch of salt. When it's toasted and slathered in apricot jam on day two it will make you never want to buy bread in a bakery again.

I need a brave volunteer

Fabric on Demand, whom I wrote about on Friday, has offered to print up a sample for me to show how their process works. All I need is an idea and they will turn it into a fabric pattern. Pretty cool and it's an offer I can't wait to take advantage of.

So before I come up with something on my own, I thought I'd throw this out there to all of you. Anybody want to see something of theirs turned into a fabric pattern?

All I need is a .jpg, .tiff, .bmp, .jpeg, .tif, .png, .psd file of eight megabytes or less and I'll take care of the rest. You can draw something by hand and scan it, you can draw something in Illustrator or another drawing program or you can manipulate a photograph. It doesn't matter beyond the fact that it will end up as a pattern, so think of a small illustration that can be repeated in a pattern.

Here's a sample of some finished fabric Fabric on Demand sent me this afternoon. This design started off as a single image of a peacock feather and will end up a dress for somebody. It's pretty cool all around.

If I can't find a brave volunteer by Wednesday, I'll bang something out myself. There seems to be a lot of interest in this process, so I thought I'd put it out there. Thanks!

Here's a brilliant trompe l'oeil

It's the Fourth of July, a pretty important holiday in the US and I'm taking the opportunity to write something unrelated to the design world. Sort of.

Richard Wiseman is Professor of the Public Understanding of Psychology at the University of Hertfordshire in the United Kingdom. He's also one of my heroes. Wiseman has made a career out of bringing the academic study of Psychology to the people, and he does it with a brilliant sense of humor and wonder. Check out the illusion he illustrates in this video. It's only a minute long and it will blow you away, it did me at any rate.

I talk a lot in my design practice about fooling the eye and making things disappear. I'm usually talking pretty figuratively but Professor Wiseman's being literal here. His video proves the point brilliantly that human brains, fantastic machines though they be, can be fooled. Remember that the next time someone sees Jesus in a Frito. Remember it too when someone like me tells you that he can make a flaw in a room disappear. If you know the rules, anything's possible.

On demand custom fabrics --high tech meets home spun

The girls over at Design Boner clued me into a contest being run by an on-demand custom fabric manufacturer yesterday. The manufacturer is an online-only entity called Fabric on Demand. The contest is pretty cool and I'll get to it in a bit. But what's really cool is the company behind it.

Fabric on Demand will print any fabric you can design in any quantity you want and they will turn it around in a week. It's a neat product and a really great service these folks are up to. They have taken away a number of the barriers to entry that other, similar manufacturers have in place. Typically, on demand fabric printers require that you submit a design drawn in a vector graphic program like Illustrator. There's a pretty steep learning curve associated with vector graphics and I'm sure that's scared off a number of people interested in expressing themselves through fabric.

Rather than relying on vector graphics, Fabric on Demand allows users to upload .jpg, .tiff, .bmp, .jpeg, .tif, .png or .psd files and then specify the repeats of the file. The layout section of their website explains the process clearly and concisely. Once submitted, Fabric on Demand will generate a proof. Upon proof approval, Fabric on demand will produce and ship your order within a week.

In addition to making the layout process simpler and more accessible, Fabric on Demand has increased the number of fabric options available significantly. Need an upholstery fabric? No problem. Need some polar fleece printed up? You're covered. Need a linen/cotton blend for new drapes? Done. The price per yard ranges from $16.75 to $31.50 and swatches of their fabrics are available for $5.

What's not to love? And speaking of love, the folks at Fabric on Demand have a sense of humor and a love of what they do that's infectious. They are running a contest right now to upholster four side chairs that have seen better days.

If between now and 4 July you get a wild hair and want to take a stab at Fabric on Demand's process, you can submit a fabric design for consideration. Can't pull something together by Saturday? Fear not. On the 5th, Fabric on Demand will publish a gallery of the finalists and anybody can then vote for their favorite entry. The winning design will win $500 and have their design reproduced and then upholstered onto what will soon be very happy side chairs.

The chairs belong to a real family and will end up in their home. To provide some direction (and to show off what's possible with Fabric on Demand), the family submitted the following four examples of Fabric on Demand fabrics they like.

Stay tuned!