You Might Not Like the Answer

The phone rang yesterday afternoon. My naturopath was on the other end. When he calls me personally, I know it’s important. He and I have batted around the idea of doing some food allergy testing on me, but he warned me that I might not like the answer, so I hadn’t proceeded. DD#2 has an ongoing problem with eczema, though, and asked me if she could get testing done through his office to see if she could identify some potential triggers. I decided that because she was having the testing done, so would I. We both had blood tests just before Christmas. The results will be mailed to us, but my naturopath already had a copy of mine and wanted to chat.

Cutting wheat out of my diet about 10 years ago made such a difference that I believed I had eliminated everything that didn’t agree with me. I also don’t touch soy, high fructose corn syrup, or seed oils. I can tell when one of those sneaks in because my joints will start to hurt. I haven’t drunk milk since I was a toddler, at which time my mother says I stood in my crib and threw my bottle on the floor. I do, however, love cheese.

Guess what showed up as allergens on my testing? Eggs and dairy. I can’t even have duck eggs. (Sometimes those can be a substitute for people with a chicken egg sensitivity.)

I pointed out to my naturopath that I feel just fine eating cheese. It doesn’t precipitate the same kind of joint pain or intestinal distress that wheat does. I also know that these tests can have a high rate of false positives. Still, this is worth exploring. I agreed to cut both eggs and dairy out of my diet for six weeks just to see what happens. He said I might feel so much better that I won’t want to eat them ever again. (Doubtful, but okay.)

I said to the husband that I will be down to nothing but rice cakes and peanut butter at this rate. My naturopath suggested I look at the list and see what I can eat and concentrate on those foods. Beans were also mildly reactive, which would be a big problem for me as they are the primary means of getting folate into my diet—the MTHFR mutation I carry means I need folate, but I cannot tolerate methylfolate supplements—and I eat a lot of those, too. He said he thought they were reacting secondarily to the egg and dairy sensitivity and would probably resolve with the absence of those triggers.

Our friend Anna is a vegan and I know that she will be happy to help me navigate through this. I just have to approach this as being somewhat vegan with chicken, fish, and pork added. I do feel like I’ve given up so much, though. I shouldn’t have to eliminate so many foods from my diet, especially given that I cook almost entirely from scratch. Part of me still wonders if some of these issues aren’t the result of decades of corrupting the food supply in this country.

DD#2 hasn’t gotten her results yet, but he warned me that hers may be similar.

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I worked on the Gail Yellen serger Christmas stocking project yesterday. I did not get as far as I hoped. This is a very challenging project even for me, and I am far from a rank newbie. Her designs are very involved. She did a similar decorative stitch placemat pattern a few years ago. I never tackled that one because one placemat looked like it would take six hours to construct and who has time for that? I also abandoned the idea of making the coverstitch version of this stocking or trying to teach this as a class.

I’ve got the body pieces constructed for both front and back.

I still have to put them together, make the ruffle, and sew the front and back halves together. Now that I see it, I am not crazy about having added the red thread or ribbon, but it’s too late and I am not taking it out.

Part of what I found challenging was that her Zoom class did not go through the stocking construction sequentially. She bounced around the pattern because she wanted to highlight specific techniques. The stocking pieces need to be assembled in a specific order, however, if for no other reason than to minimize thread and stitch changes in the machine. And while her patterns are thorough and well-illustrated, she really needs someone to tech edit them for her. Several places within the pattern left me scratching my head. She knows what she means, but she needs to phrase the directions in such a way that they are understandable to someone who has never made this pattern before.

Oh, well. I will finish this and it will become a useful class sample for decorative serger thread techniques. However, I think I am going to have to design some of my own (simpler) patterns to use when I teach those techniques. I have some ideas.

Today’s to-do list includes making a master to-do list for January. I don’t want tasks, especially time-sensitive ones, falling through the cracks like they did when we were without internet. I’ve got three serger classes this month. Next Wednesday is a Bernina serger mastery class. The week after that I have a class on speciality serger feet and an apron class using some of the same decorative stitch techniques that were in the stocking pattern. (The apron is a BabyLock pattern.) The apron is made but I have to create the class samples and handout for the specialty feet class. We’ll be trying out the gathering foot, the elasticator foot, and the piping foot.

Last year’s red churn dash quilt—the blocks I found at a thrift store—is currently on the Q20:

I started it just after Christmas. This is not a quick project, although it’s moving along at a steady clip. I had to do a lot of ditch quilting in the sashing to stabilize the overall design, and now I am quilting the larger red sashing pieces. Once those are done, I’ll go in and ditch quilt around every church dash motif (25 blocks), then free motion something (pebbles?) in the white areas around them. I can work on this in small blocks of time here and there.