Another Winner, Mostly

Burda 6329 is a solid pattern and will go into the T&T pile. It is definitely a quick sew. For this wearable muslin, I used some lightweight rayon/spandex from the WalMart remnant rack:

This fabric is better suited to a Laundry Day Tee, I think, but I only had two yards. ( I probably should have given this top a light press, but oh well.) The fabric is soft, which meant that getting those pleats to stay in place long enough to attach the neckband took some doing. I wanted to machine baste them in place, but my Janome 6600P is just not handling knit fabric the way I think it should. I’ve had trouble with everything from tissue knits to ponte. After working on a serger that takes whatever I throw at it without complaint, moving to a sewing machine that balks at simple basting stitches is frustrating. I need to fiddle with it a bit and see if I can figure out what is happening. The neckline is not as wonky as it looks on the dress form.

When I make this again, I will change those sleeves. They have a shoulder dart, which is appropriate in raglan patterns for wovens but probably unnecessary for knits. Also, the dart was cut open on the pattern rather than being sewn and folded toward the back, so the seam allowance of the dart makes the fabric stick up at my shoulders. Better to eliminate the darts completely.

I have another two yards of this fabric in green. I am going to make this top again but will remove the shoulder darts and gather the front neckline instead of pleating it. This pattern has the potential to be useful year-round by changing the length of the sleeves and playing around with the neckline, so I expect to make a few more.

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Yesterday was a busy day. We had a visit from my mother-in-law’s college roommate, Susie, and her family. I think the last time we saw them was at my sister-in-law’s wedding in 1997, but Susie’s daughter, Renee, and I are Facebook friends. Renee contacted me last year and said they were planning a trip to Montana and could they stop and see us? We showed them around the property and sat and visited for a bit. Susie and my MIL were very close. We sent her off with one of my MIL’s watercolor paintings and a photo from the husband’s parents’ wedding. (Susie was a bridesmaid.) The family had just spent a few days at Glacier Park and was heading to Yellowstone.

I also made a pan of scalloped potatoes and ham for a dinner at church. Our Executive Conference Minister is visiting our church this weekend and he wanted to meet with our pastor search committee. I am the chairman of that committee. We organized a dinner meeting and he laid out a timeline for us. Finding another pastor for our church is going to be a challenge, for a variety of reasons.

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The cucumber vines are just about spent, thank goodness. So are the zucchini plants. I started one last batch of pickles to ferment. I think the corn will be ready this week and I’m bringing in a bucket of tomatoes every day. The husband and I split the first Minnesota Midget melon a few days ago.

I’m not much for fruit, but I do like strawberries and cantaloupe.

I’ve got four students enrolled in my class at the small quilt store in Spokane at the end of the month. That store only has room for six students, in any case, so four will be fine. We will be making the Lark Tee by Grainline Studio. The Friday afternoon session will cover choosing a size and making alterations. The students will go home and cut out their patterns, and we will put them together Saturday morning. I’ll have to drive back to Montana Saturday afternoon so I can play at church on Sunday.

Need a Needle? Which One?

I taught a class on machine needles to five students Wednesday evening. I think it went well. I came prepared with a selection of fabrics from my stash. The students were given a 10-pack of assorted needles (Schmetz) and they sewed using needles on different fabrics to see what worked and what didn’t. Gone are the days when needles came in two flavors: red band for wovens and yellow band (ball point) for knits. Now there are Microtex, universal, embroidery, quilting, metallic, jeans, vinyl, jersey and stretch. (Yes, there is a difference between jersey and stretch—stretch needles are specially designed for fabrics containing spandex.)

The store owner’s son—who is the machine tech—was one of the students. I love having him in class because he asks such great questions. He doesn’t sew much, although we told him we need to change that.

The one downside to teaching classes locally is that I feel like I am constantly prepping new classes, and that takes a fair bit of work. When I taught for Stitches and TKGA, I could develop a class and teach it half a dozen times over the following year or two. With the exception of the Jalie Renee pants, which I’ve taught three times, each store class is new and usually taught only once.

I will be teaching the Sinclair Patterns Harper Cardigan and the Love Notions Laundry Day Tee in September and October. I contacted both companies for permission and both were very gracious about giving it.

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Every August, I meet with our accountant to do a quick review of the year to date. That helps to avoid any end-of-the-year surprises. We met yesterday morning. I will say that the one benefit of having to use QuickBooks Online is that now he has immediate access to our records. I gave him the login information so he could make the general journal entries for 2022. I also told him he was welcome to clean up whatever messes he saw in there. He said I do an amazing job for not having any formal bookkeeper training, but I know there are things that could be tightened up.

[I may not have any formal training, but I have a pathological need to track everything down to the last penny, so I learned what I had to in order to do that.]

The husband and I planned, at the beginning of 2023, for him to get another new work truck this year. The 2014 truck was totaled in the accident in February 2022 and was mostly replaced by the insurance payout. His backup truck is a 2008. He ordered a new cab-and-chassis truck in March—it had to be built at the factory in Mexico—and we were notified in June that it was being shipped to the dealer in Tacoma. Once it gets to the dealer, it will be an additional few weeks of waiting while the racks and toolboxes are installed.

The truck is stuck on a rail car, apparently, somewhere between Mexico and Tacoma, with no firm delivery date.

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One of my rituals is to spend a bit of time on Pinterest on my iPad before going to sleep. I have this strange belief that doing so primes the creative pump in my brain. Last night, this pattern popped up in my feed:

I bought a top at the Soft Surroundings store in Seattle last year that I’d love to copy. I could reverse engineer it, but this pattern is for an almost-identical top. I’d be delighted not to have to reinvent the wheel.

I read a blog post yesterday where the sewist talked about spending so much time drafting and altering patterns that she didn’t feel like sewing. I am bogged down in the midst of that, too. I am burning through Pellon Easy-Pattern tracing paper at an alarming rate. Even some of my T&T patterns from last year have been re-traced, mostly to drop the waistline down where it should be according to my bodice sloper. I keep telling myself that all of this is adding to my store of knowledge, but it would be nice to turn some of these chunks of fabric into things I can wear. Hopefully the sew-jo comes back from walkabout soon.

Our lovely cooler weather is coming to an end. Temps will be up in the 90s again by the beginning of next week. We have visitors coming tomorrow, which gives me a great excuse to spend the day cleaning. This is a busy weekend for church activities, too.

Enjoying the Abundance

I inventoried the pantry yesterday and rotated stock. Some years ago, I heard an interview with Joel Salatin in which he said his wife puts up two years’ worth of food every canning season. That way, if there is a crop failure, they have extra to see them through. I try to follow that system, too, but it means being careful to use the older food first.

[Joel Salatin will be the keynote speaker at Self-Reliance Festival, where I am teaching in October. I will try not to be too much of a fangirl upon meeting him, but I am excited.]

We didn’t need as much salsa as I anticipated. I based my production last year on a quart a week. I think it averaged out to three quarts a month. I may make salsa again this year, but a smaller amount. And not as much tomato sauce. We are down to just a few jars of peaches and a few of apple pie filling. Those definitely have to be replenished. I’m waiting for Susan’s Duchess of Oldenburg tree to be ready to harvest, and I’ll check at Glacier Produce tomorrow to see if peaches have come in.

I’m thinking hard about how much garden space we need next year. Honestly, we probably don’t need four zucchini plants, seven cucumber vines, and 35 tomato plants, although I am happy to share the excess. WS came over last night to get zucchini for his farmstand. I give away produce at church, Anna buys some for her catering business, and the pigs and chickens are happy to hoover up their share. Ground squirrels aside, growing food is not difficult. The difficult part is dealing with it when it all ripens at once.

The far third of the garden is fallow this year. I am considering leaving it permanently fallow. That section has never produced much other than potatoes. The soil there needs more amending, It has had several layers of rotted straw tilled into it, but it could benefit from a couple of loads of chicken manure. That area would be a good spot for an asparagus bed if I could get the soil prepped.

We’ll see. I have all winter to think about it.

I am enjoying watching the tomatoes ripen. This one is a variety called Black Strawberry.

I need to locate the Aunt Ruby tomato plant in that jungle. Those tomatoes stay green even when they are ripe and I don’t want to miss them.

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I drove The Diva on Monday without incident. I am hoping that whatever the husband did solved the problem, although I did question if it had something to do with hot weather. I noticed the shifting problem most on those days when we were well up into the 90s. In any case, if it happens again, I can switch to driving the car in manual mode.

Our friend, Smokey, stopped by yesterday for a visit. We sold our stock trailer last year after the truck accident because it had a gooseneck hitch and we no longer had a truck that could pull it. Smokey offered us the use of his stock trailer this year. He has been a great help with our pigs in the past and will get pork in return for his neighborliness. He and I sat on the porch for a bit, talking and watching a storm roll in from the west. I saw a sudden flash of light and then heard a very loud crack of thunder right over our heads.

I don’t know where that lightning bolt landed. It did rain for about half an hour—not enough, but we’ll take what we can get.

I called the processor yesterday to confirm our appointment for next Monday, the 14th. We don’t want to arrive with a trailer load of pigs only to be told they can’t accommodate us. And it is good that I called, because they asked if we could wait an additional week. The pigs will go in on Monday the 21st, instead.

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A fourth of the log cabin top has been quilted. Two hours of wrestling is about all I can manage in one sitting, so I am not hurrying.

Burda patterns are on sale this weekend at Joanns. I plan to get a few, including this one:

I was going to make up a few more Laundry Day Tees with some of my Walmart remnant rack fabric, but those pieces are two-yard cuts and two yards isn’t enough. The LDT is a swing top and requires an extra half-yard to have enough for the sleeves. This Burda pattern should do nicely.

I’ve noticed that Walmart has had mostly two-yard cuts in their remnant bin lately. I hope this is not a trend. Two yards is not enough for a dress or a long (enough for me) cardigan with sleeves. Four yards is almost too much, but three yards would cover just about everything I’d want to make.

All the Songs We Sing

Today’s post is for the musical geeks among you.

Elaine presented the message during our church service yesterday. She spoke about the history of the hymnals used by our congregation. Mennonite Church USA released a new hymnal, Voices Together, about three years ago. New hymnals tend to evoke emotional reactions—both good and bad—and this one is no exception. In September, we plan to have a Zoom meeting with the head of the hymnal committee, to hear from him about the process of vetting and choosing the music that went into this current hymnal. It is no small tome; there are close to 800 songs and hymns included.

I love hymnals. I have about 50 in my collection, from all denominations. I have one with my father’s name embossed on the cover, because I think that back in the day, young people in Missouri Synod churches used to receive a copy of The Lutheran Hymnal as part of their confirmation. That hymnal also contains one of the few songs to which I know the Slovak words (Čas Radosti) although the words in the hymnal are in English. DD#1’s mother-in-law gifted me the ELCA Lutheran hymnal a few years ago, and that one is a favorite.

[DD#1 and DSIL both went to Evangelical Lutheran Church of America (ELCA) colleges—St. Olaf (SIL) and Pacific Lutheran (DD#1). They both love to sing. I used to fill in as pianist for one of the ELCA Lutheran churches here in the valley. I seem to have one toe forever stuck in that denomination.]

Some people get very tied up in the theology of hymns. My criticism of hymnals tends to be from a musical standpoint. Are the songs singable? Does the accompaniment support the singing or fight with it? (The new hymnal contains one song where the congregation is singing in two but the accompaniment is in triplets, and trying to keep everyone together is a major undertaking.) As the pianist, I am there to be part of the musical ensemble, not a soloist. Congregational accompaniment is a whole field of study unto itself.

In our congregation, the song leader chooses the hymns for each Sunday’s service and runs them past me. A few months ago, Elaine asked me about a song in our previous blue hymnal. She thought the text was perfect for that Sunday’s service. I had such a visceral response to the tune, though, that we are still laughing about my comments back to her, and she included them in her message yesterday. While I was growing up, our Lutheran Church Missouri Synod (LCMS) congregation used The Lutheran Hymnal, published in 1942. That book is full of old German chorales. Some time in the late 1970s, the denomination decided it was time for a new hymnal, and Lutheran Worship came out in 1982. That hymnal is so awful I don’t even own a copy. The hymns were arranged in lower keys, making them almost impossible to sing in parts. What’s worse, the arrangements have those chord progressions that are so characteristic of 1970s music. I don’t know how to explain it other than the hymns ended up sounding like Martin Luther meets Peter, Paul, and Mary. The song Elaine asked me about sounded like it could have come straight from that hymnal. Interestingly, that hymnal never received wide acceptance among LCMS churches (really?), many of which continued to use The Lutheran Hymnal. The denomination eventually saw the error of its ways and released the Lutheran Service Book in 2006. I do own a copy of that one, and it is much better than its predecessor, although I still prefer the ELCA hymnal.

So there you go. I think Voices Together is a good hymnal; it achieved the goals set out for it, the primary one of which is to be a hymnal for a culturally and theologically diverse denomination. And unlike a lot of other congregations, we keep all of our old hymnals and rotate through them so that everyone has a chance to sing old favorites.

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That batch of tomatoes yielded 10 quarts of sauce, which is 10 quarts more than we had a few days ago. I need to inventory what is left of both sauce and salsa in order to know how much I have to make this year.

This is a lovely, rich, tangy sauce.

I am going to drive the BMW to town today. The husband worked on it all weekend and then drove the car around for about 45 minutes last evening. He could not get the problem to reappear. Hopefully, whatever he did solved the issue. We shall find out.

Domestic Disaster Area

The house is a mess. It isn’t magazine-worthy even on its best days, but during canning season, it looks like a tornado went through here.

I hauled in a wagon load of zucchini yesterday and shredded enough to fill two gallon zip bags. Someone has been hoovering down zucchini fritters. I think we’ll get about another week’s worth off those plants and then they might be done. I took a peek at the jungle of squash growing on that nuclear waste site—the spot where the load of pig manure ended up before planting—and there are squash in there that I cannot identify. And a lot of them.

One of the cabbages that survived the ground squirrel attack is about ready to harvest. That one is a variety called Early Dutch. I should have some red cabbages before long, too.

I started working on tomato sauce. We’re going to need freezer space for pork in a few weeks and one of the chest freezers still had about a dozen bags from last year’s harvest. I am mixing those with what I brought in from the garden this week. The tomatoes are simmering in the roaster. I’ll process and can them this afternoon.

Sarah has helped to expand my gardening horizons this year. She started quite a few dwarf tomato varieties and a few of them ended up in my garden. (I did Dwarf Chocolate Mocha last year.) This is Atomic Sunset:

The tomato patch is extra colorful this season.

We had pork for dinner last night. I put it in the crock pot with some salsa verde yesterday morning and let it cook all day.

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The husband is determined to figure out what is wrong with the BMW. He spent a few hours on it yesterday afternoon and evening but it’s still shifting erratically. I am not sure that turning cars into computers on wheels was such a good idea. Repairing or replacing mechanical parts is one thing. Bad computer modules are another story. He could replace the part he thinks is bad, but the module has to be programmed. With BMW’s proprietary software.

I have no doubt he can solve this problem—as stubborn as I am, he outshines me—but I also told him that he needs to decide when he longer wants this particular albatross around his neck.

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I took in the sides of that black ponte dress so that it fits better. I may tweak the sleeves a bit because I’m not entirely happy with them. Overall, though, the dress fits well and that pattern will go into the tried-and-true pile.

That Jan Minott fitting book has a great section on reading wrinkles in clothing. Wrinkles can point to fitting issues. However, solving those fitting issues isn’t always as straightforward as one might like. Take the problem of a gaping front armhole. When the sleeve is attached, that extra fabric causes a fold at the side of the bust. That issue could be addressed by shortening the front bodice, making the bust dart larger, slanting the front shoulder line, or some combination of all three. (The wrinkles section of that book reads like a flow chart.) See this blog post for a good example of this problem, and the solution.

I still feel like I am stumbling around blindly, but I’m getting better at fitting my own clothes, at least.

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Yesterday was overcast and we never got above 75 degrees. It felt wonderful. As I write this post, it’s raining—drizzling, really—but at least that’s something. Unfortunately, such a tiny amount of rain won’t help put out fires. And the number of calls our rural fire departments are having to make to homeowners to extinguish campfires is astonishing to me. We are now under stage II fire restrictions, there are fires burning all around us, but some people still think they can roast hot dogs in their backyard.

I Love Tomatillos

I think tomatillos are my new favorite thing to grow. (Thank you, Sarah.) I love the smell and the taste. Yesterday, I canned up eight pints of salsa verde:

So pretty. That was the first batch; the tomatillos are just coming on, so I expect to do a few more batches before the end of the season.

I used the recipe from the Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving, which is my guide when I haven’t made something before. My only quibble about that book—and other people in the homesteading chat group said they have had the same experience—is that the yields given are wildly inaccurate. This recipe said it yielded two pints. I carefully doubled the recipe, because I don’t freelance when it comes to canning, and ended up with eight pints. Someone’s math is off.

I’ve become a fermented pickle evangelist, mostly due to a lack of space in our fridge. My friend, Anna, bought some cukes from me the other day for her catering business. As she was leaving, I handed her a quart jar of pickles for her husband. Yesterday, I gave four jars to our employees. I might make dill relish today.

I only wish that everything didn’t ripen all at once. Oh, well, the chickens are happy to get a daily ration of cukes to munch on.

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I made a black ponte sheath dress yesterday afternoon. I am using the Pamela’s Patterns Classic T-shirt dress pattern, slightly modified. The fit in the bodice is just about perfect—hooray! I need to take in the dress at the hips, though. That dress was drafted for more apple-like figures—which is noted in the pattern—and I should have graded down at least one size from the waistline down to the hem. That issue is easily fixed. When it came time to understitch the neckline facing, I did as Pamela suggests in one of her videos and used a triple-stitch zig-zag there. That worked beautifully.

Once hemmed, I’ll have a basic black dress in the wardrobe. I’ve got some Robert Kaufman bright pink sparkle ponte in the stash, too, and that may end up being my Christmas dress this year. Why not?

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I am hoping we get the promised cool-down this week. Right now, the forecast indicates temps in the 70s with some rain. That would be wonderful. Michael Snyder, who does the Pacific Northwest Weather Watch channel on YouTube, says that models are showing that after this system moves through, a ridge will build that will bring us (and Seattle) hot weather again—possibly hotter than what we’ve already have. Ugh.

Bat in the Belfrey

I keep forgetting to mention that we had a bat in the house last week. I wanted to take a picture, but the husband nixed that idea as he was carefully relocating the bat to the great outdoors. (He put on a pair of leather gloves and scooped it up.) The bat had managed to squeeze itself in through the window in the upstairs bathroom. Fortunately, the husband spotted it. He said it was probably just looking for a place to spend a quiet day.

The latest wave of ground squirrels has arrived. I’ve been hearing shots around the neighborhood again and the husband got one in the backyard last night after dinner. The damage the ground squirrels are doing in the garden is limited, now, to nibbling on the occasional cucumber. The turkeys, however, are making a nuisance of themselves. I yelled at one camped out in the berry bushes yesterday.

We have a couple of mama deer with babies—a single and one set of twins. We’ve seen quite a few handsome bucks, too, although they will disappear as soon as hunting season starts.

A squirrel (the regular kind) got into the greenhouse and scared the living daylights out of me one morning as it ran past me. After I recovered my wits, I suggested it go back outside, which it did a few minutes later.

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I bought a Spokane Beauty apple at the plant sale in May. Susan grafted this one. She said that I might want to wait to plant it until it had a better root system, so I’ve had it in a pot in the greenhouse. It has done very well in there. A few days ago, I repotted it into a much bigger pot, where it will spend the winter:

Despite the name, I am not sure how this one will do here. I think the tree will grow fine—Susan always grafts onto hardy rootstock—but it is a late bearer. Sometimes the late bearers either don’t ripen in time or we have to clean off the trees so the bears don’t raid them.

We’ll see how it does. Mother Nature loves to surprise.

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I took some time yesterday afternoon to make a muslin of the Burda 6221 dress pattern with the neckline ruffle. I made the front of a short top, not the full dress, because my goal was to work out the bugs with the neckline before trying it on that Simplicity 9649 top. I like the ruffle; however, I need to raise the neckline a bit. I wouldn’t describe it as plunging, but it’s lower than I would like.

Clothing sewing may get shelved until later in the fall, though. I’ve got a quilt to finish and canning is going to take up a chunk of time. The forecast is still calling for a front to come through tomorrow that will drop temps to the lower 70s and possibly even bring some significant precipitation. Hallelujah. Running the air scrubber helps with the smoke and ash, but it’s loud.

I think the husband has a plan of attack for the BMW. Truly, if I weren’t married to my own personal BMW mechanic, I’d be driving a Honda. DD#1’s Acura is a stick shift and will be fun to drive for a few weeks while the BMW gets sorted.

I made a batch of zucchini fritters for my dinner last night. I am trying to perfect my recipe and I think I am close. I use almond flour instead of wheat flour. For yesterday’s batch, I also added a tablespoon of coconut flour. The nice thing about coconut flour is that is absorbs a lot of moisture, so that small amount helps keep the mixture from becoming soggy. (I do salt the zucchini and drain it, but it’s hard to get it completely dry.) The husband even ate two and said they were pretty good.

Ground Squirrels Don't Like Squash

This has been a good year for squash and cucumbers. I hauled in my third wagonload of cukes yesterday. The pigs and chickens got some of the larger ones. The husband continues to snack on fermented pickles. I made him a raspberry/tomatillo pie the other day—Sarah’s recipe—and he had some for dessert last night with vanilla ice cream. I do love the zing the tomatillos add.

I see more spaghetti squash:

And butternut squash:

I am delighted by the dry beans, which promise a bumper crop:

I need to take a peek at the currant bushes today. I think they are probably ready to harvest, too.

Gardens are miraculous.

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The husband has done a bit of research on the BMW issue. He thinks it may be a solenoid in the transmission. ETA: This morning, he tells me that he thinks it is actually an issue with the gearbox. He drove it last night and said it shifted fine when he was shifting it manually. In any case, I expect to be without that car for at least a couple of weeks while he chases down this problem in his spare time. (“Spare time.”)

I am still casually shopping for another car, just in case. There does come a point of diminishing returns.

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I started quilting the log cabin top yesterday. Choosing the design always takes me a while, and I’ve been thinking about how to quilt this one ever since I finished the top. I quilted loops on the version that is on our bed. Loops are fine, but they are easy for me and I don’t improve my skills by always defaulting to easy. This “lollipop” design is one that was stuck in my brain:

It is made using one of Amanda Murphy’s large Lollipop rulers. Log Cabin is a traditional quilt block, yes, but the neutral colors lean modern. I thought a more modern quilting design—streamlined, with rounded lines to complement the blocks—was appropriate.

This was not as straightforward as I thought it would be (things never are), although I got better at it as I went along. My brain kept wanting to make the straight lines between the circles follow the seamlines. However, the “logs” in the blocks are not all straight. Some are a bit wonky, which is part of the charm. I had to force myself to stop seeing the seamlines and concentrate on making the pattern.

[The rulers have registration lines to make it easy to align the current line of stitching with the line that came before it. I am not freehanding these.]

I am quilting this one quadrant at a time because wrestling a king-sized quilt through the Q20 takes a bit of effort. I am glad I bought the hydraulic lift table when I got that machine. I raised the table and brought in one of our kitchen chairs to sit on. We have a “gathering table” with taller-than-normal chairs. By raising the table, I was able to keep the quilt off the floor.

I quilted for two hours yesterday—about all I could handle—and got half of one quadrant done. At that rate, the quilt should be finished in a week or two.

We’re getting a lot of smoke from the surrounding fires. I am going to have to run the air scrubber today because my eyes are very irritated. If the forecast holds, we are in for a cool and rainy weekend, which would be wonderful.

Upcycling

Some people drop $20K on a fancy new side-by-side. The husband customized a $500 golf cart:

It has ATV tires that will traverse our rough terrain. The orange sign came from the dump. He hooked up the wagon from my John Deere tractor courtesy of the hitch we bought at Home Depot on date night. After I snapped this photo, he installed a gun rack and a fire extinguisher on it. He is all set to drive around the property shooting ground squirrels and putting out fires.

It may sound like I am making fun of this project, but I am not. He continually amazes me with his ability to create stuff like this. And I might have to re-upholster that seat after all.

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The Diva is having issues. It may be the transmission/transfer case (again) or it may be something else. I noticed the problem while driving around town yesterday and was able to reproduce it for the husband last night. (Truly, there is nothing worse than taking your car to a mechanic and having him tell you it’s not acting up for him.) At certain speeds and RPMs, the car jerks repeatedly like something is slipping. He said he will have to do some research and look at it. In the meantime, I can drive DD#1’s Acura. We have it here because it wasn’t practical for her to take to Alaska.

My preference would be to keep the BMW. It’s a diesel, it gets 40+ mpg, and it’s a station wagon. Thanks to the US government, it’s now a unicorn. However, I can’t keep driving a car whose transmission self-destructs every 70K miles or so. The odometer just turned over 140,000 miles. I’ve gotten my money’s worth out of that car, certainly, but I hate to give it up.

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Fire season has begun. We had some gusty winds on Sunday and that didn’t help. The road that I take to get to Spokane—it’s a shortcut so I don’t have to drive south to Missoula and then west on I-90—is closed because of a fire, currently at 5000 acres. Some of the fires in higher terrain may be lightning strikes that smoldered until the wind picked up. Too many, though, are caused by people doing stupid things.

The forecast is showing rain and cooler temps by Friday. Let’s hope.

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I’m going to spam everyone with garden pics, because we’re in the thick of it now. I harvested my first ripe tomatoes yesterday. I don’t think I’ve ever had tomatoes in July before. (Yes, it was the last day of July, but July nonetheless.) I should have plenty of Oregon Star paste tomatoes for sauce this year:

I have never been a fan of cherry tomatoes, but Elysian gave me a Blue Boar Berry plant last year and it has made the permanent rotation:

And Sarah brought this Zebra Ezel to the plant sale. It is a green-and-orange striped beefsteak variety:

This one is a bit on the acidic side and will be a nice addition to sauce.

There will be more pics to come. The broccoli and cabbage may have fallen prey to ground squirrels, but other crops are producing with abandon.

Jardinière

I prefer to get the canning out of the way early in the day. The afternoons are bad enough without adding to the misery with a hot stove and pots of boiling water.

I am not sure if this jardinière will taste like store-bought, but sifting through recipes and variations was a challenge. I made my own mix of vegetables and used the jardinière pickling brine recipe from the Ball book. We shall see how this batch tastes and I can tweak it from there.

It certainly is colorful!

This mix contains cauliflower—three colors, from the Amish store—carrots, zucchini, celery, garlic, and pepperoncini. To that, I added pearl onions and pickling spices.

What a surprise, though, when I took the first batch out of the canner and discovered that the purple cauliflower turns everything else purple!

This is so pretty in the jars, but next time, I might stick to plain white cauliflower.

I ended up with 18 pints—plenty for this year. I don’t need to can for an army.

Next up on the schedule is apple pie filling. I should have my first ripe tomato this week, too.

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The husband and I went out to dinner last night. We had been given gift cards to Mercantile Steak and tried it for our anniversary. We both liked it so we went back again last night. They did not have a fish special, unfortunately—I prefer seafood to steak—but I had a burger and it hit the spot.

A storm passed over and it rained for a few minutes while we were eating. After dinner, we went to Home Depot. The husband is making some mods to the golf cart and needed a trailer hitch. Yesterday, while I was canning, he changed the tires and put a couple of ATV tires with deep treads on it. I told him that if he improves the golf cart too much, I’m going to have to re-upholster the seat cushion.

This is the husband in home improvement stores:

My calendar is clear for the week, but things start to ramp up this month. Fall will be busy. I’ll spend the next few days prepping projects and working on that Log Cabin quilt.

A New Sewing Machine, But Not for Me

Robin texted me on Wednesday and said she needed to go to Missoula to pick up her new sewing machine, and would I like to go with her? I said I would love to. I also offered to drive because I know my way around Missoula. She is more comfortable exploring with me at the wheel.

I picked her up at 8:30 yesterday morning and we headed south. Our first stop was in Polson, MT, at a small quilt store called All In Stitches. The owner recently announced her intention to retire and close the store. All stock was 25% off. Robin found quite a few pieces of fabric to go with current projects. I have enough quilting fabric and did not buy anything.

We continued on to Missoula. Robin’s new machine, a small Janome that she can carry to classes, was waiting for her at A Clean Stitch. This is a wonderful store. It outgrew its original space, in the same strip mall, and moved to a much larger space a few months ago. I wish I had remembered to take pictures. The store is clean and inviting. They are dealers for Bernina and Janome machines, carry the full line of Accuquilt supplies, and are a Wonderfil retailer. I had fun shopping while Robin got to check out her new machine. I was hoping they would have the new Amanda Murphy quilting rulers—for petals and leaves—but those haven’t come in yet. I bought two storage boxes for my Accuquilt dies and a couple of spools of decorative Wonderfil thread.

These are Razzle and Dazzle, two 8wt rayon threads to use in my serger. I have a project in mind for a class next spring.

We hit up the WalMart remnant rack. I am trying not to buy black fabric or clothing, but I found a four-yard chunk of the most interesting black fabric. It looks like ponte on one side and microfleece on the other. I haven’t quite decided what to do with it. I think it would make great leggings or possibly a Toaster sweater.

Robin suggested lunch at The Montana Club. We each had the daily special, which was an excellent plate of fish and chips with a cup of clam chowder.

After lunch, we stopped at Joann Fabrics—meh—then made our way downtown to The Confident Stitch:

This is a small independent fabric store that carries a lot of deadstock and other wonderful apparel fabric. What I love most is that the owner has the same Winter coloring that I do and the inventory reflects that. I treated myself to a couple of yards of a rayon woven in a turquoise aboriginal print, a few yards of a lightweight twill in a pretty pink color—to be made into something for next spring—and a couple of yards of a royal blue French terry.

I also picked up two patterns. One is the Camber Dress by Merchant and Mills:

It doesn’t look like much in the photo, but I think it will be lovely when it’s made up. The back has an interesting yoke detail. We’re going to be broiling here for the foreseeable future and I am all about the cool and comfortable dresses.

I also picked up the Grainline Uniform Tunic:

It’s another unassuming style, but the sleeveless variations look cool and comfortable (and long enough).

We headed for home with a stop, of course, at the Amish store in St. Ignatius to do some shopping and enjoy a cup of ice cream. I bought two bags of cauliflower because one of the items on today’s to-do list is canning up a batch of jardinière vegetables. I also got more ClearJel. Susan said her Duchess of Oldenburg tree will be ready to pick soon and those apples will become this year’s batch of pie filling. I have three Duchess seedlings that Susan grafted for me, but it will be a few years yet before those trees are producing.

We had a long day. As expected, traffic was heavy. I used my horn liberally. I wish people would read and pay attention to the signs that say “Slower Traffic Move Right” and not park themselves in the left-hand lane. I think that the husband and I are going to have date night tonight. He needs to pick up a flashlight that he sent in for repairs and I need to get a few supplies at Home Depot for one of my classes at Self-Reliance Festival in October.

Summer Play Dates

Susan brought her grandsons over on Wednesday and they played with trucks while she and I taped newsletters. The four of us ate lunch out on the porch. I was reminded of those summer days when my girls and I would join Susan and her mother and her girls for luncheons on Susan’s porch. The boys ate peanut butter and chocolate chip sandwiches. I had plain old peanut butter and jelly. We sampled some of the fermented pickles and they were such a hit that I sent a jar home with them. The four year-old and I rode around in the golf cart and on the John Deere tractor and both boys climbed on the construction equipment and sat inside the trucks.

Sometimes I don’t know who is having more fun. 😁

I got a text from Elysian yesterday morning. She knows I usually go to town on Thursday mornings, so she asked if I could drop WS off at Kids College for his YouTube Content Creators class. I love Kids College. The program began around the time my girls were in elementary school. The community college offers week-long classes throughout the summer on a variety of topics. On the drive there, WS and I were trying to remember all of the classes he has taken. He is 9 now, and I think he started when he was 5 or 6. I’ve been his Uber driver occasionally over the years and it was fun to do it again yesterday. He was in class from nine to noon, which gave me plenty of time to run all my errands. On the ride home, he entertained me with his repertoire of knock-knock jokes.

I had a Zoom meeting scheduled for yesterday afternoon, which didn’t leave me a lot of time for sewing, so I did prep work for my Needles 101 class on August 9:

We’ll be sewing on various substrates with different kinds of needles. Everyone will get a pack of needles and about a dozen different fabrics. This is the stack of knits—a cotton jersey, double-brushed poly, fleece, and ponte.

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I am the pianist at our church. Elaine also plays and fills in for me when I am traveling. I do reasonably well, although if I could change my short, stubby fingers into long, elegant concert pianist fingers, I think I would be even better. I am in that category of church pianists who are not professionals, but who don’t want to play easy, boring arrangements. Finding interesting arrangements that don’t take hours of preparation is a challenge. I am sure that some arrangers also get bored easily. I found one arranger whose early work I loved, but she made a comment in one of her later books that “pianists should be able to play with equal facility in every key,” and veered off into bizarre arrangements in keys with four and five sharps.

[Elaine and I joke about Marty Haugen, who is a Lutheran arranger with the same tendency toward bizarre arrangements. I played Holden Evening Prayer one December for the Lutheran church where I used to fill in, and that piece has one section in E-flat minor, which has six flats. Do you know how hard it is to remember to play C-flat instead of C?]

A few years ago, I ran across a young arranger named James Koerts. I have just about everything he ever arranged. The pieces are interesting without being fussy. He arranged a wide variety of contemporary praise songs and beloved hymns. I was part of his monthly Piano Club and received a new arrangement every month. Last week, I got a very cryptic e-mail telling me that my Piano Club subscription had been canceled. I pondered that for a day or two and then received an e-mail from his team saying that he had died suddenly after a short illness in June.

I am very sad about this. He left a wife and kids, apparently. I will miss getting his new arrangements every month, although I have enough of his work to keep me busy for a long time.

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After a lovely few of days of cooler weather, the heat has returned. I expect to be getting ripe tomatoes soon. And it looks like at least one of my mystery squash plants is producing pumpkins:

Every gardening season should have a couple of surprises.

A Wideback That Wasn't Wide Enough

I headed for the church around 10 am yesterday morning. One of the families in our congregation has a huge reunion here in Montana every other year. Our friend, Amanda, who works with me at the fire department auction, belongs to that family and texted me a few days ago to see if they could borrow one of the church’s quilting frames for the reunion this weekend. I told her I would meet her at the church and help her load the frame in her car.

Church was a busy place when I arrived. We are renting our church basement to another local church for their daycare program. Their staff was getting the space ready. Our church ran a daycare/after school care in our basement for 20 years—Susan was the director—and it is a desperate need in our area. Northwestern Energy was also using our property as a staging area; it looks like they are extending the natural gas lines.

The fellowship hall was empty, though, so I got to work laying out the Log Cabin quilt while I waited for Amanda. I started with the backing, which I stretched and taped down on the floor. (The floor has a low-pile carpet and I was working in one of the low-traffic areas.) I laid a Warm and White cotton quilt batt over the backing, then added a low-loft polyester batt. I’ve been doing that on the last few quilts and I like the combination better than just a single cotton batt.

Once those were down and smoothed out, I laid out the quilt top. And then I stopped, because there was a problem.

“Wideback” fabrics are traditionally 108” wide. In fact, sometimes “wideback” and “108” are used interchangeably. My quilt top was 96” wide, which should have left me a good 6” of backing fabric on either side of the top.

I had a scant 1-1/2” on each side. I got out the little tape measure I always carry in my purse and measured the backing. It was nowhere near 108”. It was only 99” wide from selvage to selvage. I do prewash my fabrics, but any shrinkage is going to occur in the length, not the width. I had plenty of length.

Arrggghhhhh. Usually, a basted quilt has at least 4” of extra backing width on each side. That extra width is essential when loading a quilt onto a frame. I like at least 3” when quilting on the Q20. I didn’t want to have to take the quilt apart and go get another backing, so I proceeded with basting. I will just have to watch as I quilt it that I don’t lose any width.

Here is a birds-eye view. The battings are wider than the top. You can just make out the pieces of painter’s tape at the top that are holding down the corners of the backing and see that the backing is narrow. The backing should be as wide as the batting.

Here is a view from the floor while I was pinning it:

Once I was done, I carefully rolled up the quilt and headed to town to get serger thread. The store that carries the serger thread I like also happens to be the store where I got the backing, so I mentioned the issue to one of the employees. In return, I got a lecture about how “not all widebacks are 108” and it’s up to the customer to double-check the width before purchasing.” I suggested that a note to that effect over the shelf of widebacks would be helpful.

[To be honest, I didn’t appreciate that response. I thought it was a bit condescending. I also don’t think it’s correct, because when I got home, I looked up that fabric company’s listing for that line and even the fabric company claims that wideback is 108”. That bolt must have slipped through quality control and was narrower than it should have been.]

In any case, the top is basted and ready for quilting. I’ll get started on that tomorrow. Susan is bringing the little boys over today. We had a local copy shop print our homestead foundation newsletter on Monday. I picked up the copies yesterday. While I was making dinner, I set up the paper-folding machine and ran 1500 newsletters through it. Susan and I will sit and watch the boys—they will play with the wooden trucks for hours—and tape the newsletters for mailing.

The copy shop also printed and bound the Jan Minott books for me. Those will make good bedtime reading. And I had them make a copy of the Itch to Stitch Icaria Pants pattern. I know I am going to have to adjust the rise on those pants, so I’ve been watching Karina’s very helpful videos on pants fitting at her Lifting Pins and Needles YouTube channel. Karina is 5’8”, so knowing how she lengthens the rise on pants is helpful. I can find a lot of information on how to shorten patterns, but information on lengthening patterns is harder to come by.

I need to visit the cucumber patch again this morning. And I’ve got to keep an eye on the currants and tomatillos so I can begin harvesting those when they are ready.

Those dumb chickens of mine—after over a month of sitting on a pile of eggs, the eggs disappeared and the hens gave up and moved on. I never saw any chicks. It is a very good thing I am not relying on the chickens to reproduce themselves or they would have all died out a long time ago.

Coffee and Tomatoes

Sarah invited me for coffee yesterday morning. I got to tour her garden, which is beautiful and productive. Of course, I was so busy enjoying it that I completely forgot to take pictures. She texted me a photo last week, so I’ll put it here:

This is a dwarf tomato variety called Germanium Kiss. I love those pointy little blossom ends.

Sarah lives at a lower elevation than we do and she’s already getting ripe tomatoes. After the garden tour, we went in and had a taste test of some of the varieties she planted. Both of us really liked one called Rosella. I need to see if I have it in my own garden. (I have 38 plants out there and a couple of them are ones Sarah started for the plant sale.) If not, I will put it on the list for next year. I also want to put in some ground cherries.

I went to town after coffee and dropped off class samples at the quilt store south of town. I was clear on the other side of town when I remembered that I hadn’t picked up serger thread in a color I need to hem that turquoise LDT. I decided I would stop and get some at Joann Fabrics, but when I got there—at 11:10 am—I found a sign on the door saying, “Due to staffing issues, our hours today will be noon to 5 pm.” There has to be something going on for them not to be able to retain enough staff to keep the store open even six hours a day. They seem to churn through employees every couple of weeks. And it’s not like Joann Fabrics would be a stressful place to work even if one didn’t sew. Other Joann stores don’t seem to have trouble staffing for regular hours.

Joanns is always my last stop on my way out of town and I didn’t want to fritter away another hour waiting for the store to open. I came home without the serger thread. I need to go back to town this morning to pick up some items from the printer, so I’ll get my serger thread then.

If I had nothing else to do, I would be tempted to get a job there to see if I could solve whatever problem they seem to be having.

After lunch, I spent a couple of hours cleaning and organizing the sewing areas. They really were a mess. Now they are a bit less of a mess. That Miramar top pattern comes with a longer tunic option, so I traced that off for future sewing. I did chicken chores, checked on the pigs, made another six loaves of zucchini bread and started a new batch of pickles. The kitchen smells like dill.

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A cold front moved through here overnight. We got about half an hour of rain around 2 am, but we also got lightning. At least we did not get the gusty winds that eastern Washington got. Temps are down in the low 50s, so I have the windows open to let some of the cool air into the house. There is a new fire start on Columbia Mountain, which is about 10-ish miles north of us (between us and Glacier Park).

A friend of mine told me about an app called Watch Duty, so I downloaded it to my phone:

This is run by a nonprofit organization. Volunteers monitor dispatch and fire channels and send out alerts about new fire starts. I have mixed feelings about these kinds of things. My experience with websites and apps that track wildfires is that they can cause panic where there is no need for panic, because sometimes the information is woefully inaccurate. I monitor our fire channels on a scanner here in the house and get the best intel that way. I’ll keep this on my phone through fire season, though, and evaluate its usefulness.

Watermelons and Patty Pan Squash

Some of the cucumber bounty went to church with me yesterday morning. Our former pastor used to put up a table in the fellowship hall dedicated to excess garden produce. We may have to resume that tradition.

I was surprised to see how big the watermelons are getting. There are only two this year, but that’s okay:

Sarah gave me two patty pan squash plants a few weeks ago. Despite their late arrival to the garden, they are producing:

I have a couple of mystery squash that came from the plant sale. I will be curious to see what comes from them.

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I went through the stash yesterday afternoon and pulled out some lengths of rayon/spandex. That is my favorite fabric for the Laundry Day Tee because it is cool to wear. Some of the pieces are only two yards, though—Walmart remnant rack—and I need about 2-1/2 yards for that pattern because it is a swing top. I set those two-yard chunks aside for Lark Tees or Easton Cowls and made an LDT out of a three-yard piece of turquoise rayon/spandex. I felt much better about my sewing abilities after putting it together. I still have to hem it, though.

While I worked, I watched some videos on a new-to-me YouTube channel called the Closet Historian. She specializes in vintage clothing, but she also has a number of videos focusing on fitting. I am finding them very helpful. She did a video about making a bodice sloper by starting with a commercial pattern rather than drafting from measurements. She suggests using a pattern that has a two-dart bodice, like this one:

In the video, she chose the size closest to her measurements and compared it to the bodice sloper she drafted from scratch. In practice, this likely would require making several muslin iterations to refine the fit—doesn’t everything?—but it’s a good place to start for people not familiar with pattern drafting.

I’m tucking this idea away for my T-shirt class in Spokane next month, in case I get asked about making bodice slopers again.

I also pulled out the Miramar top pattern and tried on the muslin I made. That top has a self-faced V-neckline. I thought I might frankenpattern it with the Love Notions Olympia Dress because the Olympia has a similar neckline. After comparing them, though, I think it’s just going to be easier to use the Miramar pattern but incorporate the construction method from the Olympia Dress that anchors down the facing. I like the way the Miramar top fits, but I have to lengthen the pattern.

I’m attempting to get organized and begin using up some of my stash fabrics. It is far too hot to sew with any of the sweater knits, but I have some ideas for those, too.

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I am putting the Log Cabin quilt together tomorrow. I have to be at church for something else and it’s a good time to get the quilt basted there, too. That quilt needs to go on the Q20 soon. I also want to get out my inventory for the co-op sale and start pricing it. Everything has to be tagged and marked with my initials. Things are going to start getting busy again toward the end of August and into September—100 quarts of spaghetti sauce and more apple pie filling are on the calendar this year—so I’d like to have the co-op prep done and off the list.

A Good Year for Cucumbers

I’ve been working on some fitting experiments lately, but it’s been hit or miss. Mostly miss. I have to remind myself that the failures are educational, too. I’ve spent a lot of time looking at my fitting books, and went down a rabbit hole on the internet that led me to this:

This book is from the 1970s and is out of print—an original edition is available on eBay for $250—but the rights are held by the Sewing and Design School in Tacoma, Washington, and they have digital download versions for sale on their website. I ordered one. It is full of all sorts of useful information and illustrations. The Sewing and Design School offers classes and Kenneth King teaches there. I am going to figure out how to take a class this fall or winter.

Despite a few wrong turns, I think I’ve finally come up with a customized-for-me pattern and will make a ponte sheath dress soon. I’m using the Pamela’s Patterns Classic T-Shirt Dress with a few tweaks. I did say to the husband, though, that I need to make something quick and easy, like a Laundry Day Tee, to remind myself that I am a competent seamstress. I haven’t felt like much of one lately.

Let’s look at pictures from the garden, shall we?

Sarah gave me several tomatillo plants. They are all doing well, but this one is especially pretty:

I thought that it must have some unique name, but when I looked at the tag, all it said was “Purple Tomatillo” LOL.

DD#2 will be happy to know that we have spaghetti squash. It’s one of her favorites.

She and her sister and the boys (SIL and significant other) are coming to visit over Labor Day weekend. I am sure these will factor into the menu.

The squash section of the garden is a veritable jungle. The husband spread a load of pig manure in that area before I planted, and everything there looks like it’s growing on nuclear waste. I am hoping for a butternut squash harvest this year. I didn’t get any last year because we got a frost before they ripened, but the long-range forecast is for a warm fall.

The pole beans seem to have figured out (finally) that they are, indeed, pole beans:

Someone here cannot do garden math. We don’t need five zucchini plants or seven cucumber vines for two people. This was yesterday morning’s haul from the cucumber patch:

Judging by the number of blossoms still on the plants, we are going to be drowning in cukes. I’ve been making pickles out of the little ones. The husband discovered the pickle crock yesterday. He loves pickles. I took the first batch out of the crock and put them in fresh brine in the fridge so he could snack on them, then filled both one-gallon crocks again with two new batches. I also have a couple of two-gallon crocks, and I may have to fill those with some of the bigger cucumbers.

He sat down for a snack mid-afternoon with a plate of salami and some pickles and I asked him if that was his charcuterie board. He said, “What the heck is a charcuterie board?” I told him it was Lunchables for adults.

We have two more days of 90+ degree weather before a cold front blows through here Monday afternoon. Unfortunately, that cold front may come with gusty winds and dry thunderstorms—lightning, but no rain—so we’re under a Red Flag Watch starting Monday afternoon. We’ll cool off to a high of 80 on Tuesday before warming up again. Ugh.

Looking Ahead to Fall 2023

I bought a new calendar yesterday. School supplies are on display at Walmart and the desk calendar I like is in stock. I prefer a calendar that shows an entire month at a glance. I also like to color code my activities with highlighter pens.

I am caught up through October. The class coordinator at the quilt store south of town and I conferred about a few additional classes, so those are on my schedule now, too.

Tera and I were going to take a trip to Missoula today. I haven’t seen her for more than a few minutes at a time since we went to Puyallup in March and I thought it would be fun to schedule a playdate. She was called in to work today, though, so we’ll try for another time.

I heard a rumor that Missoula is getting a Hobby Lobby. Hmmmm.

I have plenty to do here to keep me busy. I made 12 loaves of zucchini bread yesterday afternoon. I miss the days when I could outsource that job to DD#2. She was much better at not forgetting to add crucial ingredients, like sugar.

I’m going to start running the air scrubber again. My eyes have been itchy for the past week. Either something is blooming or it’s the ash from wildfires. Best to get it out of the air now.

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Still no chicks. I think those hens want to be broody in perpetuity. They’ve been sitting on eggs since before I left for Portland—a month ago—and if anything was going to hatch, it should have hatched by now.

The pigs have a date for freezer camp of August 14. They will be ready. That is earlier than we usually send them, but we got this batch of weaners a month earlier than usual. I still have a few to sell, so if you expressed interest in some pork, remind me again and I’ll make sure you are on the list. It is so hot in the afternoons that after I am done with chicken chores, I go out to the pig pasture and spray them with the hose for a few minutes. They love that.

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My friend Susan’s daughter and SIL are building a house. The husband poured their foundation this week.

Susan’s two little grandsons were on hand to watch the pour. (I would have been there, too, but I was teaching.) I got such a kick out of this photo, where one of them ran a truck across the concrete:

I said it would have been fun to leave the tracks there, but the husband thinks they got smoothed over by the float.

Learn New Things

Nicole Sauce did a podcast earlier this week about how important it is to continue to challenge ourselves to learn new things. She just acquired a spinning wheel (an Ashford Traditional). It came to her unassembled. In the process of putting it together, she learned about Scotch tension, how the flyer rotates around the bobbin, and other bits of knowledge that will help her to be a better spinner.

I taught a Bernina serger mastery class yesterday (10 am to 4 pm), took a break to get some dinner, and then attended a two-hour evening class on fixing sewing problems taught by the store’s sewing machine tech. I learned several things I didn’t know, or only knew superficially. I hope Ryan continues to offer these kinds of classes because he did a great job. And I will continue to take classes because there is still so much to learn.

In her podcast, Nicole also observed that sometimes, it helps to learn from newbies rather than experts. Experts often make assumptions when they teach. (I have to remind myself that not everyone comes to serger class knowing what a looper is.) I think about that from time to time as I work through these fitting issues, especially when I am wondering out loud on the blog. I’ll give you an example.

I ponder bust shaping in garments quite a bit because I have to. Zede Donohue said, in one of the Sewing Out Loud podcasts, that having a larger-than-average bust measurement does not automatically indicate the need for a full bust adjustment. A full bust adjustment is needed when the difference between the high bust measurement and the full bust measurement is 4” or more. A lot of patterns will recommend choosing a size based on the high bust measurement, first, before deciding if an FBA is needed.

A person could have a high bust measurement of 42” and a full bust measurement of 45” and not need an FBA. Much also depends on how the breast tissue is distributed. One of the issues I’ve run into with some patterns (especially knits) is that in order to accommodate a fuller bust, the pattern is drafted to have a wider measurement at the underarm.

Minerva, a UK fabric company, has a YouTube channel. They’ve just started a sewalong series using this pattern:

I bought this pattern last year at Esther’s Fabric Shop on Bainbridge Island in Seattle when we were there for my cousin’s wedding, so I pulled it out to take a look at it while I watched some of the Minerva videos. As I am starting to do routinely now, I compared my bodice sloper to the pattern:

This is a bit of comparing apples to oranges, admittedly, because my bodice sloper incorporates a bust dart, whereas the Knit Essentials pattern does not. If I use the Knit Essentials pattern that corresponds to my full bust measurement, though, I am going to end up with a big chunk of excess fabric right underneath my armpit. (There is negative ease built into most patterns for knit fabric, so I’d actually be using a measurement slightly smaller than my full bust measurement.) That chunk of fabric drives me batty. I need the additional width in the bodice at the level of my full bust, not 3” above it. That is one of my gripes about patterns for knit fabrics, and I think it’s why I prefer to use the boob bump method. I would rather have the underarm fit more closely and only then accommodate my bust with either an actual dart or a boob bump.

[One of the husband’s nicknames for me is Goldilocks. Other people probably don’t care about that excess fabric underneath the armpit, but I want it to fit “just right”.]

But what do I know? I have no formal education in pattern drafting. I only know what I have learned through trial and error. Even a formal education in pattern drafting might not be the answer—ask the husband some time how he feels about architects who sit in offices and design houses on computers. I come up with all these questions but I have no way to find out if I am on the right track or not except more trial and error, or when I have the great good fortune to take a sloper class from Joe Vechiarelli and he points out that I need to lengthen my bodice sloper by a couple of inches and suddenly I understand why everything is too short.

Some pattern companies, like Love Notions, include a full bust pattern piece in their patterns, where the full bust adjustment has already been done. As I mentioned in another blog post, though, FBAs come with downstream issues, one of which is that making an FBA makes the area below the FBA wider, and unless that additional width is removed, you end up with a very tent-like garment. That is exactly how I would describe the fit of the Laundry Day Tee when I use the full bust pattern piece. If I use the regular bust pattern piece and incorporate a boob bump, I like the overall fit much better.

My questions and general observations about patterns should not be construed as criticism. Pattern drafting is a series of decisions and judgment calls, and no one designer is going to make all the right decisions for every sewist. Rather, I am trying to find my way through a maze of information and synthesize it with my real-world attempts to get my me-made clothing to fit properly. And I want to be able to share what I’ve learned with my students in some way that makes sense.

Zucchini, Pickles, Snakes, and Tools

The garden needed some attention yesterday. I cut the grass around the perimeter, picked zucchini—eight of them, with plenty more to come—snacked on raspberries and peas, and collected two dozen little cucumbers to make into the first batch of pickles. I spotted a friend in the cucumber patch:

I think it is the North American Racer snake; I did not see the yellow or orange common to garter snakes. It was shy and ducked back under the plastic when I tried to get closer. I am glad to know it is out there, though, and I hope it has friends.

I shredded the zucchini for zucchini bread, although I had enough that I also did up a batch of fritters for myself for dinner. The cukes went into a crock to ferment into pickles:

When I have lots of cucumbers, I process them into pickles the usual way, but I like fermented ones better. Once these are finished fermenting, we’ll keep them in the fridge to snack on.

I made a raspberry crisp on Monday, in a 9’ x 13’ pan. I used enough raspberries that the crisp was about 2” deep. The husband ate half the pan—with vanilla ice cream—after dinner Monday night. Last night, he finished the other half of the pan. I wish I had his metabolism.

The Big Brown Truck of Happiness brought the quarterly Tool Crate delivery yesterday.

Tool Crate is a tool subscription box. Yesterday’s box was very large, and I could hardly contain myself until the husband got home and opened it. There was a DeWalt tool bag inside, which the husband gifted to me. He doesn’t use tool bags because he carries all his tools on his truck. The tool bag is large enough to hold my Janome Jem sewing machine. The box included four or five other useful tools, which he kept. One of them was a very nice punch set. I may borrow that from time to time for setting hardware on bags.

I spent the afternoon working on patterns again. I am finding it helpful to go back and revisit patterns that crashed and burned the first time I tried them. I still want a ponte sheath dress, and the one I made last summer was hanging in the closet, unfinished because it had problems. My understanding of fitting is better now and I can look at clothing I’ve made and see where the problems are. I put on last summer’s ponte dress and got out the pattern. That dress was made using the Pamela’s Patterns Classic T-Shirt Dress pattern.

That pattern seems odd to me. The bodice is overly long (I think) from shoulder to bust, and that was reflected in the dress when I put it on. The upper bodice fit much better if I pinched out approximately an inch of fabric at the shoulders. Interestingly, the pattern instructs how to shorten that exact area of the bodice, which makes me think that other people have had similar issues there. Very rarely do I ever have to shorten anything.

I also adjusted the position of the dart so that it matched my sloper. I dropped the waistline. (No surprise there.) I reduced the height of the sleeve cap and checked the length of the sleeve cap to make sure it fit into the armscye properly. I re-traced the back dress piece and trued up the seams to make sure everything matched. I think I have a much better pattern for myself now, and I’m going to make what I hope will be a wearable muslin out of some cotton interlock from Joanns. If that fits, I’ll make a dress out of ponte.

Because I was curious, I also took out the Tessa Sheath Dress pattern from Love Notions and laid the Pamela’s Patterns bodice on it to compare the two. Once again, I was reminded of that joke that “every designer is a size Medium.” Those patterns were drafted from drastically different bodice blocks. That’s unavoidable, I think—bodies are different enough that the perfect bodice block doesn’t exist—but it’s a point I plan to emphasize when I teach.

I Taught Them Well

I heard from two of my students in Friday’s class that they have been shopping the remnant rack at Walmart and scored some goodies. I noticed that the rack at our store has been a bit on the thin side. This makes me happy, because it means that a) students learned something in my classes and b) they want to make clothes for themselves. I have had some requests for a T-shirt class, so the class coordinator and I are trying to get that on the schedule for some time in September.

On Sunday afternoon, I traced both views of this Burda pattern, 6146:

The blouse on the left looks very much like the one I tried on at Kohls last spring. I loved the blouse but—cue the chorus—it was too short. My version will be several inches longer. (It will not have those fussy cuffs.) Both views call for lightweight wovens, but I wonder if view B, on the right, couldn’t be made in a stable knit, instead. Not a ponte, necessarily, but something else. . . I’ll know the fabric when I see it.

I am aware that many sewists dislike Burda patterns because the instructions tend to be, um, brief. Or badly translated from German. I’ve liked the few that I’ve made, and Burda 6315 is one of my tried and true winter patterns. I picked up this pattern at Joanns yesterday:

I love the princess seam lines. I have a length of Robert Kaufman Brussels Linen in the stash that I’ve been wanting to turn into a dress and I think this will be a good pattern (view B).

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I mowed the yard Sunday morning before church. Hopefully, that will be the last time for this year. Our lawn—such as it is, because our yard features a lot of non-grass plants—goes dormant in July unless we water. We don’t.

I’ve seen some warnings on the internet to check the acidity of commercial vinegar this summer, because apparently some companies are now selling 4% vinegar instead of the standard 5% vinegar. Why does this matter? The USDA and Ball canning recipes are based on the use of 5% vinegar, so substituting a lesser strength may have negative repercussions on canned goods. Costco and our local grocery store had 5% white vinegar on their shelves, but I’ll be keeping an eye on those labels.

Some days it feels like we are in the midst of a constant war on our food supply. I’ve discovered that many of the products that contain corn—like tortilla chips—now come with a label stating, “Contains a bioengineered food ingredient.” I would assume that is GMO corn. Reading labels is exhausting.

We had a nice cooldown yesterday—temps were in the low 80s—but the wind! The wind was awful. A section of I-90 near Ritzville, WA, had to be shut down in both directions yesterday afternoon because of a couple of fast-moving wildfires.

I told the husband that the next item he’ll have to replace on the BMW is the horn, because I am going to wear it out driving around town. No fewer than three people—two with out-of-state plates—pulled out in front of me yesterday without looking. I do not understand this habit of driving as though you are the only person on the road.