Lettuce Destruction

We set up a rodent trap in the herb garden. The husband said it was too difficult to shoot in there without putting holes into my raised beds from the birdshot. However, I will not allow some stupid ground squirrel to eat all our lettuce. This is just a sample of the damage it has wrought this week:

It’s even eating the lettuce I left to go to seed after it bolted.

(Yes, some of the lettuce seed ends up in the gravel paths.) This would be comical if it didn’t make me so angry. I hate ground squirrels with a passion. Why God put them on the earth is a mystery to me.

Interestingly, it has not touched the arugula. 🧐

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Back when Zede and Mallory Donahue were still doing the Sewing Out Loud podcast, Zede used to talk about the temptation to overfit garments. She said that some sewists get so obsessed with eliminating every wrinkle and drag line that they end up with garments that don’t allow them to move.

I am trying not to fall into that trap. I also know that garment sewists are probably the only people who walk around looking at the drag lines in other people’s clothing. (I do, because I am trying to figure out why they are there.) No one expects ready-to-wear to fit perfectly—far from it. On the other hand, we shouldn’t accept poorly-fitted garments if we know how to fit them properly. There is a happy medium.

I ran up a muslin of the Amarena dress yesterday afternoon. I like it a lot. It could be the base for a lot of different styles. I do need to lengthen it—shocking, I know—and I want to tweak the bodice a bit. It’s going to be a keeper, though, once I redraft the shawl collar to work with the more modest V-neck.

The bodice tweak is an experiment. I want to see what happens if I divide the existing single dart into two smaller darts at the side of the bodice. Sarah Veblen had that suggestion in her fitting book, but finding a formula for making that change has been nearly impossible. (I love when books say, “Try this,” but don’t give any further information.) After much searching, I found a tutorial that shows how to divide and place the darts. I don’t know that such a change is absolutely necessary, but I won’t know if I prefer two darts versus one unless I run up a muslin. That is on the schedule for today.

And I still have the French Dart Shift on my list of dresses to try. I am hoping to get to that one this week, too. August is going to get a bit nuts and my sewing time is going to take a hit.