Watermelon Radishes Are Delicious

The husband and I went on date night last night. Choosing a restaurant is much easier now that tourist season is over. Indeed, the weather yesterday was pretty awful. I was out running errands in the morning and stopped in our church parking lot to take some pictures. The weather was just starting to come in. This is the Swan Range, looking east/northeast:

And this is looking southeast:

That red arrow is pointing to Mount Aeneas, which is the highest peak in this part of the range and a popular hiking area. The trailhead is located at the aptly-named Camp Misery. We live roughly just below that arrow, on the road that runs along the base of those mountains.

By the time we left for dinner, the whole valley was pretty well socked in and it was raining hard. A few degrees cooler and it would have been snowing, as I am sure it was at Camp Misery.

We ate at Three Forks Grille in Columbia Falls, not too far from the entrance to Glacier Park. All of their food is sourced locally and made in-house as much as possible. The husband was craving a steak. I ordered the Hutterite Chicken and Mushroom Risotto.

[The husband said to me, “How do you know it’s Hutterite chicken? Does it come with papers saying which colony it came from?” I don’t, but I do know that the chicken tasted like chicken used to taste, before they bred them to grow fast with no flavor.]

Our house salads were huge and came with slices of the new-to-me but currently trendy Watermelon Radish. Apparently this is an heirloom Chinese daikon variety. The slices were about 1-1/2” across, pink in the middle with a ring of white around the edge. I am no fan of radishes but these were delicious (and I ate mine before I thought to take a picture). I am putting them on the list of seeds to order next spring.

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I think the universe was trying to send me a message this week, because I ran across a couple of blog posts that really resonated with me. The first was this one, on the Whipstitch blog, entitled Recursive Sewing. There is much to chew on in this piece. but she hammers home the idea that we need to do things over and over—and accept failure as inherent in that process—in order to refine our ability and our vision. I am not unfamiliar with that concept. I have put my 10,000 hours in on a number of levels, but I guess I needed to be reminded of it again. The author does, rightly, blame social media for some of our unwillingness to suffer through those growing pains, because who would put examples of their abject failures on Instagram? We see only other makers’ beautiful end results. And it takes guts to write a blog post saying, “Hey, I tried this and it didn’t work out,” because you’re likely to get 10 well-meaning commenters pointing out exactly what you did wrong for every sympathetic person who says, “I hope you try again,“ or, “Yeah, that happened to me, too.”

And then there was this entry, on Mary Corbet’s Needle ‘N Thread blog, which pulls no punches with its title: Testing Embroidery Ideas: It Doesn’t Always Work! You can’t get much more obvious than that. How refreshing to hear an embroidery designer say that she has had to scrap entire pieces when it becomes apparent that her design idea isn’t going to work. And she is firm in her conviction that the process of “dabbling” is not wasted time.

My copy of volume 2 of the A to Z Embroidery Stitches series arrived with an Amazon order on Friday. I see lots of stitches I want to try on my wool penny sampler, but I haven’t had a chance to work on it. I spent Friday evening sewing down the rest of a comforter binding so I could take the comforter back to church this morning. And I decided it’s high time to start making myself some tops, so yesterday afternoon, I did this:

This is the Nancy Raglan from 5 out of 4 Patterns. I’ve had the fabric and the pattern for almost a year—and even took the pattern to the blueprint shop to have it printed on their large-format printer a few months ago—but haven’t had a chance to start working on it until now. The first step was to trace the parts I needed. The pattern includes variations for a shirt, tunic, A-line dress, swing dress, and maternity options for all of those styles. The assembly instructions themselves take up 49 pages. I have mixed feelings about patterns that try to cram all those variations into one set. To her credit, this designer did set up the pattern pieces such that if the sewist is printing them at home, it’s possible to select only the layer of the pattern with the desired size and print it that way. Because I had the pattern printed at the blueprint shop, where they think it’s rather bizarre that someone asks to have sewing patterns printed, I got large sheets with all the sizes and styles layered together and had to trace the ones I needed.

I chose the tunic style with a cowl neck. I needed four pattern pieces: front bodice, back bodice, sleeves, and cowl neck:

The fabric is a heathered blue French terry from Joanns. I am making this without any changes, first, to see how it fits. My main concern is that it is long enough. (If I were making a fitted sheath dress, I would absolutely make myself a muslin, first, but this is oversized, with simple enough lines, that I think I can get away without one. Those may be famous last words but we’ll see.) I am going to do simple hems at the bottom and cuffs. The last time I was at The Quilting Bee in Spokane, I splurged and bought the fancy hem guide for my coverstitch machine because I prefer hems to ribbed cuffs.

I expect I’ll have to spend some time experimenting with scrap pieces of the French terry to figure out what settings I need on my serger, but this should go together pretty quickly.My goal is to have a few go-to patterns that work and that don’t need a whole lot of tweaking. I’ve noticed that shirt styles in stores are trending more toward tunic lengths now (do you think women my age got tired of pants that didn’t come up far enough and tops that didn’t come down low enough????), but we’re back in muddy earth tone land and I’d like some tops in colors other than navy, burgundy, gray, and olive green. How about jade green, sapphire blue, and hot pink, instead?