Fabric on Demand put to the test

Two weeks ago, I wrote about Fabric on Demand in post called Fabric on Demand --high tech meets homespun. Fabric on Demand is an online service where anybody can upload a design and have it printed as a fabric. I'm fascinated by this particular iteration of web 2.0, and it bodes for a future I'm very willing to embrace. What a tremendous means of self-expression this represents. I mean; why settle for upholstery, clothing, window treatments or bedding you don't love when you can design your own?

Soon after that blog post posted, I sent a link to it to Fabric on Demand. I do that often by the way. When I find a cool product, service or website it's my standard procedure to write to the manufacturer, provider or web master to let them know that I found them and that I like what they're up to.

Anyhow, I heard back from Rysa at Fabric on Demand later that day and she offered to print me a sample so I could see how their process works up close. I jumped at the chance and in turn wrote another post asking for a brave volunteer to send me an original illustration that would translate well as a fabric pattern. I was looking for something brightly colored and easy to work into a repeated pattern.

I appreciate all the interest that request generated and Kelly James from Design Ties sent me an illustration she did of some pool balls and they were perfect. Here's what Kelly sent me:

I uploaded the pool balls to Fabric on Demand's website and had a proof back very quickly. Here's a close up of the proof:

Here's what that pattern will look like as a yard of fabric.

Pretty cool! Fabric on Demand is printing me a sample of this pattern and I ought to have it by next week. When it arrives, you'll see it here first. Stay tuned!

Oggi Sciopero!

The free and unfettered flow of information on the Internet is under attack in Italy. Today is a day of silent protest and bloggisti worldwide are displaying this logo in solidarity. Read about it here.

Advantage: Advantium

The third appliance category that impressed me at GE Monogram last week is their Advantium oven. Since GE Monogram's in Louisville, KY; the home of Churchill Downs and the Kentucky Derby, I'll use a horse racing analogy to rank my top three picks from GE Monogram. The Pro 48 is the win, the Monogram induction cooktop is the place and the Advantium's the show. If there were a catchy word for a fourth place, it would go to some of the innovations they've been adding to their dishwashers. Dishwashers however, are a topic for another day. Today belongs to the Advantium.

GE invented and developed the Advantium in 1998 and introduced it in 1999. It's been tweaked a bit in the years since, but this new model year added a fourth dimension that took an already good cooking appliance and made it great.

For anyone who doesn't know what an Advantium oven is, here's what one looks like.

It looks like a microwave oven from the outside and if you didn't know better, you'd swear it was a microwave when you opened one. It's not a microwave though, although it can be if you ask it to be one.

What it is really is a speed cooker that uses halogen light, microwave energy, a convection coil and fan as well as a radiant heat source to cook food. Advantiums are smart in the sense that they come pre-programmed to handle 175 every day foods. You can also add your own settings to the pre-sets or you can also use it in manual mode. When it's not actively defrosting or boiling something, it lays off the microwaves and instead uses its other energy sources to do everything from proofing bread dough to roasting a chicken.

What's even cooler is that it performs these tasks at incredible speed while using less energy than a conventional oven. So if you were to set out to roast a four pound chicken, it would take just about two hours in a conventional oven. In an Advantium however, that bird would be roasted golden brown in 25 minutes. As marvelous as the Advantium's speed is, what's truly remarkable is that it smells, looks and most importantly tastes exactly as if it were roasted conventionally.

Trust me, I did not go to GE Monogram with the expectation that I would come away from three days of boot camp extolling the virtues of GE. I'm telling you though, that experience shook up my preconceptions and threw my brand loyalties into disarray. GE Monogram makes some quality appliances that actually work. What can I say? They made a believer out of me and that is no small task.

Stop motion Sunday

My newest friend on Facebook is a Portland, Oregon-based artist, sculptor and designer Patrick Gracewood. Patrick writes a blog called Shadows on Stone and I've been going over his archives over the last few days.

Patrick has some real finds on his blog and these two stop motion animation videos are downright enchanting. The first is a wedding invitation and the second is a music video. Each is as beautiful as it is delightful. If you need a shot of art today, spend some time with Patrick Gracewood and his Shadows on Stone.

Induction cooking rules the universe

OK, so I spent the beginning of the week this week In Louisville, KY as a guest of GE Monogram appliances. While I was at GE I was not only treated like a prince, I was assigned a cooking station in GE's Monogram test kitchen. On Tuesday and Wednesday, the other designers who attended this appliance summit and I prepared most of our own meals under the expert tutelage of GE's chefs.

The bottom line was that I had a kitchen with $20,000 in appliances at my disposal and I was in heaven. I spent most of my time falling in love with the GE Monogram Pro 48" range I wrote about the other day. But the bulk of the actual cooking I did was on a GE Monogram 36" induction cooktop.

I have been on the induction bandwagon since my first hands-on experience with induction cooking at a Wolf seminar about four years ago.

I wrote a description of how induction cooktops work back in January, give it a look if you need a primer.

Induction cookers are highly efficient and they work with unusual speed. For example, an induction cooktop can boil six quarts of water 400 percent faster than natural gas can. I'm a bit of an efficiency nerd and despite my former preference for cooking with gas, I conceded that preference to induction years ago. Get this, from the energy expended from a gas burner, 62% of that energy gets lost and does nothing more than heat up a room. Only 38% of that energy gets delivered to the food being cooked. That lousy efficiency is why gas cooktops have to be vented. Old school radiant electric cookery is more efficient from an energy perspective. In this case, 72% of the energy expended goes toward heating the food and 27% is lost. In induction, 84% off the energy expended goes to the food being cooked and only 16% is lost.

This is the actual electromagnet and circuitry inside an induction cooktop

Anyhow, I've played around with induction at a variety of training seminars I've attended over the years, but I've never actually cooked with it. Until this week that is.

On Tuesday afternoon I browned chicken and made a red curry on an induction cooktop and I was really impressed. The process of browning chicken was faster, but it wasn't due to my using higher cooking temperatures. It was faster because the skillet got to the correct temperature in seconds. It was amazing, actually.

On Wednesday, I made pasta with a sauce of bacon, pine nuts, feta and mascarpone. I made the sauce in a sautee pan. I was always concerned about how well induction would fare with sauces, but my concerns were unfounded. My pasta sauce turned out perfectly. Ditto a caramel sauce I whipped up later. The butter, brown sugar and cream blended flawlessly at a medium heat and then stayed warm on simmer until it was time to eat. Best of all, when I cleaned out the pot later, there was nothing scorched on the bottom.

So, even though I've been responsible for getting induction cooktops into a bunch of peoples' houses in the last few years, I'd never cooked on one until recently. After having done so, all I can say is that induction cookery exceeded even my lofty expectations. So I guess the next step is to get one for me. Hmmm.