Darts and Tarts

Old Quilts, a Fish & a Mouse

2009-08-06T14:44:00.001-07:00

When I went to the Brimfield antiques and flea market last month, I also bought these pieces of old handmade quilts:
I wanted to make something small with them -- I've lately been reading Mai's blog, Mairuru, and she sews many beautiful patchwork objects by hand like this and this.

I decided to make a little fish and a little mouse as a wedding present for my friends. Their (public) pet names for each other are "fish" and "mouse," and there was even a fish/mouse leitmotif at their wedding. The fish's eyes, of which I am most proud (because they are beautiful & surprisingly lifelike at the same time), are little glittery buttons I also found at Brimfield.

Guest of Honor dress: Part III (The Final Post)

2009-08-04T16:27:00.001-07:00

Picking up where we left off, I had successfully (meaning, with only a minor flaw) installed a lattice-work section into the bodice of the 50s-style grape dress. What I had left to do was the skirt portion & the handmade belt. For the belt I bought a vintage belt buckle when I attended the July session of the thrice-yearly Brimfield antiques and flea market.

For the seam allowances on the inside of the skirt, I used a flat-felled seam finish. You just cut about 1/4 inch off the inside allowance and fold the other one over that one.

Then I hand-stitched (slip-stitch) to the lining so that the stiching doesn't show on either side.

OK, seam finishes are pretty boring, yes? I will skip all the other boring parts, and bring this triad of posts to an end with the finished product:

That dark spot on my skirt is drool from a
friendly little baby named Eliza Jane.

In the excitement and awesomeness of the wedding, I neglected to take any other photos of the dress. And now it's dirty and I'm contemplating how best to clean it.

Guest of Honor dress: Part II

2009-07-30T10:11:00.000-07:00

So, at the end of the last post I had a muslin made for an all-purple (or "grape") 50s-era fitted dress. I had decided that I wanted to do something to make the dress less monotone in style and color. After playing around with some other ideas (adding a second fabric, applique, etc.), I came up with the winning idea of lattice-work in the bodice area. I decided to do a triangle-shaped cut-out with lattice work of the same purple fabric inside of it. I drew a mock-up:

This seemed pretty good, though I wanted the lines to be thinner (so it'd look more like an intricate design than a superhero insignia). Next, I sewed a bunch of little tubes in the same fabric as the dress.

I turned them right-side out and ironed them flat (with the seam in the center of the wrong side, so as not to show). Next I started taping them directly to a piece of paper with a triangle drawn on it. I didn't do much measuring here -- just eyeballed-it and wove them in and out as I went. I wish I had a picture of this stage, but I don't.

Next, I finished making the dress bodice and decided to line the bodice in the same fabric (rather than just do the facing the pattern asks for). I did this so that the triangle of lattice work would be sandwiched between the fabric & lining. The next thing I did was maybe kind of stupid: I sewed the paper triangle with the fabric strips taped on it directly to the lining fabric. Then I cut out the triangle of lining fabric from behind it so that you could see through it. I say this was stupid, because I spent about 45 minutes at this point peeling off the little pieces of scotch-tape that I had sewed onto the fabric. I'm still thinking about how I would do this differently next time.

Anyhow, when I finished de-taping and de-papering, I then cut out a triangle of the same size from the front of the bodice and ironed the edges under. I then hand-stitched the bodice to the lining/edge of the lattice work. The results:

can you spot my weaving error?

For next time: Seam Finishes &... a Vintage Find!

Guest of Honor dress: Part 1

2009-07-28T16:27:00.000-07:00

Did I mention that I am a *guest of honor* at an upcoming wedding? It has been requested that guests of honor wear purple. Lucky for me, I had bought 4 yards of Kaffe Fasset shot cotton in grape from Spool back in the late winter for a tablecloth that never really came into being. I almost never buy non-sale fabric and as I was doing it I had a deep feeling that that tablecloth project might be a non-starter but that the purchase would be ok anyhow. And it was: in April, I received the news that I was requested to wear purple with equanimity rather than rancour.

The only question then was: what kind of dress to make? I happened to have Retro Butterick 5032 (from 1952) on hand:

I opted for view A and made up a muslin to check the sizing. It needed only a few adjustments.

Looking good, but a little boring. I considered adding the cummerbund sash (view D) or the sheer gathered overskirt (view C) but these seemed like Mad Men overkill. I was thrown back on my own ingenuity to jazz up this grape frock. Tune in next entry to see how I did it.

Summer shirt

2009-07-17T14:12:00.001-07:00

I'm interrupting our Summer Dresses broadcast to bring you a couple of summer shirts posts. These are actually not so much summer shirts as professional clothing I'm making to wear in the intense heat when I move to New Orleans this August.

This first shirt I made from some fabric I got on sale from Fabric Mart. It's a very thin cotton -- so thin I had to line it -- and I bought it because it reminded me of some Rachel Comey prints like this and this.

The shirt itself is pretty simple, but I added a weird, reverse collar kind of thing and also handstitched around the armholes, neckline, and button placket with yellowgold embroidery floss.

This latter effect was inspired, in part, by this Mina Perhonen coat (though it looks nothing like it).

Maybe one day I'll have the urge to sit & do all those french knots.

Summer Dresses 4

2009-06-20T15:11:00.000-07:00

This dress I made by copying an H&M dress that I already own. I sort of pinned tracing paper to the dress and drew the lines on. It fits pretty much the same, so that must have worked. I bought this fabric from an on-line shop, which I rarely do. It came from Fabric Mart, on sale, and was described as a "cotton lawn." It turned out not to be what I had in mind -- when I think of cotton lawn, I think high thread count cotton & this is really more of a very loose weave, gauzy cotton -- but it turned out ok anyhow & maybe even better for the summer.

This fabric has a lot more going on than I usually like, but I was kind of into the color scheme which reminded me of my favorite My Little Pony from growing up (a pegasus). Looking around, it seems like lots of people are wearing their childhood nostalgia, which does make me feel funny sometimes even when I'm doing it myself.

The armholes & neckline are all finished with self-bias binding that I top-stitched in place. The bodice has one button & a button loop. A small piece of elastic runs through the empire waistline & the bottom half is really just a square, which makes this a pretty easy dress. In fact, I've started another with a less full skirt.

Summer Dresses 3

2009-06-06T07:45:00.000-07:00

OK, continuing on in our series: this, too, is a dress I made last summer. I really love it. I made it as a prototype, but it ended up being pretty wearable. It's made out of green linen that I believe was purchased by my mother when I was about 13, I don't remember what for.

The pattern came from HomSpun (ISBN 4579110609), which is either a japanese quarterly or a book series. Hard to tell. It's an awesome book with lots of weird projects (like curtains that have a sleeve coming out of them). If most other Japanese sewing books have a Japanese-French aesthetic going on, this one has more of a Japan-East Germany feel. The Small Object made a workdress from this book that is perfect.

My favorite part about this dress is that the front pleating releases just where the pockets end. You can see it most clearly in the pattern instructions.

I didn't really change anything about this dress. I used black & white gingham for the pockets and facings and hand-sewed the buttonholes on the back.

Summer Dresses 2

2009-06-04T07:24:00.001-07:00

To continue in our summer dress series, here is a pretty simple A-line dress that I made at the end of last summer. It's pink cotton with an exposed grey/metal zipper down the front and double grey/white piping on the armholes.

The pattern came from Pochee (Summer 2007), bought at Kinokuniya in Portland, OR in 2007. It was one of the issue's featured patterns, so there were some step-by-step instructions to go with it. I added was inseam pockets and moved the zipper from the back to the front & made it exposed.

The dress turned out very, very big (even cut in a size small). I took in over an inch at the side seams, but it's still pretty roomy. That's ok, though, because I only made it because I needed something to wear this awesome belt with:

awesome belt found at a vintage shop in Austin, TX

Summer Dresses 1

2009-05-19T12:29:00.000-07:00

Last summer, before I had a blog, I made a dresses for two awesome girls. Let's revisit them now since summer 2009 is nearly upon us.

I designed the dresses using dresses from their wardrobe for sizing. I wanted them to be similar, yet different. Adi is a bit older. Her dress was lined in yellow cotton. I made open tubes at the top and waist and ran strings of pink fabric through to gather and secure the top of the dress and the waist. I knotted wooden beads onto the end of the strings.

Adi's dress -- can you see the wooden beads?

For Julia's dress I used a simple fitted bodice with a gathered skirt.

Julia's dress -- it is smaller, because she is (or was)

Julia's bodice was lined in pink cotton. I made a button placket in the back, using some fabric with sentimental value.

Fun button placket on the back of Julia's dress

But will they fit this year?

Dresses in action. (Maine, 2008)

Linen Dress

2009-05-01T07:25:00.001-07:00

I made this dress last weekend with some linen from Jomar. The design was my own, made with my sloper. Though my final product looks nothing like it, I was inspired by this woman's drop-waist linen summer dresses that she sells on-line. I made mine sleeveless, with low arm holes so that I have to wear another shirt underneath.

But I wasn't quite sure I could commit to the low-waist, so I invented a design feature that would allow me to cinch the waist higher: I made a channel with bias tape (pictured below in light gray) on the inside of the dress on front and back and ran ties through to gather, emerge through buttonholes and tie on the sides. Also, as a side note, I sewed the channel onto the dress with a faint zig-zag instead of a straight stitch & I think it makes the gathering look nicer.

Inside channel in gray bias tape and
facings in fabric from Mozambique

View of ties from outside (reinforced buttonhole opening on right)

The only problem is, when I cinch it higher, I look like a doofus (see below). I think this is due to the thickness of the linen -- it might work out with something thinner and drapier (though I think something thinner or drapier might also make the un-cinched look problematic). Back to le drawing board.

Blue Stud Shirt

2009-04-12T10:51:00.000-07:00

On my trip down to fabric row for the birdcage veil fascinator materials (see previous post), I spotted these baby blue studs -- a whole bag for .98!

I conceived this shirt in their honor. The white yoke is made of georgette (I think) from Jomar. The blue is a really nice drapey bamboo fabric that I got a couple of years ago in Portland from Bolt. I've been sitting on it for a while, not really sure what kind of garment it wanted to be, but I think it works well here.

I've never sewed georgette before, but it was actually pretty forgiving. I did french seam finishes on it and bound the armholes with a self-bias binding. It seems like it'll all stay pretty well. The hard part was putting the front yoke on without topstitching. I actually used stitch witchery to secure the yoke to the bottom part & then put the studs through and hand stitched it down later. It's a little bit puckery, but it will do.

Birdcage Veil & Fascinator

2009-03-28T18:09:00.000-07:00

One of my best friends from high school, Desaray, was in town this week. She is getting married in August. She wants to wear her hair up with a veil. Her fiancee, Lauren, wants her to wear it down, no veil. Desaray decided to float a compromise: birdcage veil with hair down. You can read all about it here. The birdcage veil is where I come in.

Step one: Go to Fabric Row in Philadelphia and purchase French netting (the only white they will have available comes with gold pipe-cleaner decorative poofs, free of charge).

Step two: Cut into a face-covering width and hand sew a thread lightly through one end.

Step three: Gather that end, and secure.

Step five: Remove gold pipe cleaner poofs.

Step four: Return to Fabric Row & purchase miscellaneous materials for fascinator.

Step five: Machine-sew lace while drinking beer. Sew into finger. (Photos unavailable)

Step six: Glue gun!

Step 7: Bobby pins!

Quilted Bags

2009-03-21T14:40:00.000-07:00

Sarah heading out the door with
shoulder bag (Evanston, IL)

A few months ago, I made Sarah a shoulder bag from some of the fabric she brought back from Mozambique. I was really into the patterns on the fabric & so decided to add batting and a backing fabric and just hand quilt along the lines of them. I ordered the leather straps from these ladies in Wisconsin.

Now I'm making my own quilted bag from a different piece of Mozambique fabric. I started hand-quilting the straps for it a while ago and today I started on the body of the bag. I'm getting over my hand-quilting craze, so I thought I'd try some machine free-motion quilting instead.

If you go to places on the internet where people are discussing free-motion quilting you will find out that free-motion quilting makes people really, really mad. To free-motion quilt, you use a darning foot and lower your feeddogs and basically just glide your fabric around under the needle, ouija-board style. It's kind of like drawing by moving the paper around under the pencil.

I've been sizing up free-motion quilting for a while, but had never tried it before this morning. Emboldened by this lady's home video, shot by her husband, I logged out of all the alarmist, free-motion quilting chat rooms and went for it -- no practice run on scrap material even. And check out these results! I may have found my metier.

Bag front, free-motion quilted

Lining side, free-motion quilted

Red cabbage trials

2009-03-12T17:53:00.000-07:00

I forget if I've talked at all about the CSA that I joined this winter. I gave them a check in January, and every Thursday since then they come by my house and drop off a bag of vegetables. It's been a lot of fun, mostly -- I cooked (and ate) kolhrabi for the first time! -- but also a challenge dealing with weekly delivery of weird winter vegetables.

I've risen to the challenge for most of the vegetables. Surprisingly, the one I've been unable to deal with is red cabbage. I would always have said that I liked red cabbage. But they gave me one a month or so ago which is still sitting in my fridge, and when I went looking online for recipes to deal with the one I got today, I came across this blog post which perfectly encapsulates all the irritation with red cabbage that I didn't even know I had. I'm going to try something along the lines of the red cabbage pasta suggested by one of the commenters (sauteed red cabbage, sauteed onions, spaghetti), maybe with bacon as suggested in this other recipe I found. I'll let you know how it turns out.

Elastic Waist Skirt

2009-03-11T16:28:00.001-07:00

After making an elastic waist skirt for the Chicagoan one-year-old, I decided I needed one myself. They were both pretty easy to make -- just squares of fabric, gathered by elastic. But when I made my version, I discovered that having the waistband cut the same circumference as the skirt (as I did with the child version) created too much bulk to be gathered by the elastic. So I cut my first waistband off and made a reduced one instead. As you can see above, it still has the illusion of being the same width as the skirt, but really the skirt is wider and gathered and attached to the band before the elastic is pulled through. I should take more process photos instead of trying to describe techniques.

For this skirt, I used some fabric I had around -- it is tie silk, but I got it on the cheap, in part because the print is slightly off kilter. I finished hand-sewing the hem on the plane to Chicago and got these photos taken there by a professional -- can you tell? Here's a close up of one of the drapey pockets. For some reason, my Bernina sewing machine doesn't have a pocket tack stitch (which looks like an inverted right-angle triangle). There's probably some way to replicate this, but instead I used a 3 triangle stitches.

Bootie Factory

2009-03-05T15:33:00.000-08:00

Friends and family have been making and adopting lots of babies -- girl ones -- lately, so it's been back to the bootie for me. These sets I made out of some thin wale corduroy that my friend Mearah bought for me in Japan. One set is lined with light blue linen and the other with green linen.

And a skirt for a Chicagoan one-year-old (might not fit her yet, I'm thinking), to be delivered in-person this weekend. The skirt has a natural-colored cotton underlining that shows at the bottom and an elastic waist. I didn't use this tutorial to put the waistband on, but would if I did it again.

And finally, for those of you who follow the comments section on this blog, Shelby took up his own invitation to project a head onto my headless body. I've decided that this photoshop job is more offensive to Ben Stanko than to me, so I'm posting it.

Ben Stanko Sweater

2009-02-28T21:30:00.000-08:00

I saw Ben Stanko out on the town the other night, looking good all around, and wearing this awesome sweater.

Ben Stanko and his sweater pockets
with Martha in background

It was then that I realized that Ben's sweater had somehow inspired me, before the fact, to put a small pocket into this sweater that I made last fall:

This sweater was made with blue wool jersey that I bought as a remnant two summers ago from a fancy fabric store in Portland, OR (can't remember the name). You can't really tell from this photo, but the neckline and pocket-lining are a taupe silk and I used some decorative machine stitches around the waistband & neckline.

Refashioned dress

2009-02-24T18:07:00.000-08:00

A few months ago I was in a Philadelphia store called Sugarcube and saw this Steven Alan dress that I liked a lot.

Steven Alan, Elsa dress

Then, a few weeks ago, I was catching up on some blog reading and saw that Aimee from label-free (a collective blog about sewing clothes that features some local Philadelphia bloggers) had posted about it back in October. At that point I was thinking about trying to replicate it & then it finally occurred to me that I could just refashion the gray wool vintage dress that has been sitting in my closet because it doesn't look that great on me.

BEFORE

AFTER

This was an odd dress to take apart. It had a tailor's label on the inside that said "David Warren New York" but didn't seem very professionally made. One of the seams was serged, but the rest had just been pinked. I wasn't really planning to put pockets into the finished version, but then I noticed that the side seams had extra seam allowance in the pocket area for just this purpose, so I went for it. But now I'm wondering if this was standard practice -- to leave some extra seam-allowance so pockets could be added later?

bonus extra seam allowance for pockets

More pork blogging

2009-02-23T17:19:00.000-08:00

A couple of months ago my friend Scott sent me a link to a recipe for bacon brownies. I was like, ha ha, bacon-as-dessert trend, whatever. Then, a while after that, my friend Jenny had one of those Vosges chocolate bars that involved bacon, and she enjoyed it and told me about it, and I was like, huh. And then sometime after that, *I* had one of those Vosges chocolate bars with bacon in it, and it *was* pretty good. Meanwhile, Scott kept bringing up the bacon brownie recipe, so last week I finally took the plunge and made bacon brownies.

I don't have any pictures -- mostly because bacon brownies pretty much look like brownies. In fact, that turns out to be the moral of the story: bacon brownies: like brownies, but with bacon in them. If you're thinking that sounds totally disgusting, they're not as disgusting as they sound. If you're thinking that sounds kind of interesting and intriguing, they're not really as interesting or intriguing as they sound either. They're not really that different than brownies with nuts, except that the bacon is just a tiny bit meaty as well as being crunchy and salty.

My friend Steve (yes, clearly, everyone I know had to be involved in the bacon brownies -- what is the point of bacon brownies besides getting everyone to talk about them?) thinks I should have put more bacon in the brownies. That could be. I used about a half pound of bacon, which I cut into bacon-bit sized pieces and fried up before adding to my latest brownie recipe (without the spices). It might be also that the bacon brownies would be better with a less dense brownie. The recipe I've been using makes a very tall and dense and heavily chocolate brownie, which might just overwhelm anything that's put in it. The original recipe that Scott sent me called for chopping the bacon very fine in the food processor, as well as greasing the pan with bacon fat, both of which sounded gross to me, but would probably have made a more bacon-y brownie. Google reports that lots of people make bacon brownies by laying whole strips of bacon into brownie batter, but lots of people also make bacon brownies out of box brownie mix, which I can't condone at all*, so what does Google know.

On the whole, if you're going to try bacon-as-dessert, I recommend the chocolate bar with bacon. The bacon maintains structural integrity in the chocolate more than in the brownie, so you get more of the delicious bacon texture. Mostly, though, I recommend making a batch of brownies and then making some bacon to eat while they're cooking. Mmm, bacon.

*This finding actually really upset me. I mean, one of the people making Duncan Hines + bacon was some college kid who spent the whole time talking about pot brownies, heh heh, and that was kind of endearing, but the rest of them were all people with food blogs who wrote about, like, the smoky flavor of the bacon perfectly complementing the richness of the chocolate, or whatever, and I was like, PEOPLE. You have a FOOD BLOG. How will we as a species survive after the apocalypse if our food bloggers can't even make brownies from scratch?

Folk Dress

2009-02-21T13:28:00.001-08:00

I finished this dress earlier in the week. It's my folk dress. The main fabric is blue wool from my grandmother. The bib section is also, I think, fabric my grandmother gave me a long time ago. It had been sitting in my collection for use as scrap fabric because I wasn't that into the print. But when I used it as the backing fabric for the quilted pillowcover a few weeks ago, I started to get into it & then Tim mentioned that he liked it, too.

The blue fabric has also been sitting on my shelf for a while -- I'm pretty sure it came in a box of fabrics from Sarah's friend Heather a few years ago. To make the blue strips I cut bias strips from the fabric, sewed it in with the seams, and then hand-sewed it down on either side of the seam. I'm not really sure if there's an easier way to do this -- if so, I'd like to know of it.

I drafted the dress myself, but modeled it after this dress pattern, from the Japanese company M Pattern. Why are Japanese patterns so much cooler than American patterns?

Leftovers!

2009-02-15T18:25:00.001-08:00

I'm still working through all the pork I bought at the awesome Christian pork butchers'. (And I still have pounds and pounds of pork in the freezer, so expect periodic reappearrances over the next few months.)

I think I mentioned that I bought a pork blade roast. I slow-roasted it in a dutch oven, which was reasonably satisfactory but not that exciting. I did, however, make a highly satisfying soup out of the pork roast on, like, the third day when I was sick of eating it on its own.

The soup was triggered by a soup that I had recently at Barrio Cafe -- I think it's a pretty standard Mexican soup. The main ingredient was hominy, aka posole. The Joy of Cooking says you can buy hominy dried, or even make it yourself by performing some complicated chemistry on fresh corn, but I bought it canned.

I heated up the hominy and some shreds of pork in some homemade chicken stock that I had in the freezer. Then I put it all in a bowl and added lots of delicious stuff: cilantro, shredded cabbage, thinly sliced radish, that white Mexican cheese that I can never remember the name of.

The only problem with the soup is that hominy only comes in a gigantic size can at my supermarket, and I can only eat so much hominy soup. Luckily I came up with a good solution to that problem. Stay tuned...

Pillow Finito

2009-02-15T16:04:00.000-08:00

I finished the hand-quilted pillow for our couch and think this might be the most inviting couch pillow in the world. Doesn't it also kind of look like you could decode it? I made it a slip-cover pillow because I was too lazy to sew in a zipper.

Other than that, I spent time ripping out and redoing parts of a dress I'm working on. It should be done soon & I'll show the whole thing then.

Happy weekend!

Pattern Drafting

2009-02-08T14:46:00.000-08:00

I spent a few hours yesterday using measurement calculations (derived from here) to draft a flat bodice pattern (a "sloper" or a "block") that would fit me perfectly & that I could use to draft other patterns. Drafting is one of my favorite parts of sewing -- moving between the 2-dimensional and the 3-dimensional makes a lot of sense to me, much more than draping fabric over a dress form, pinning it, and marking it. In season 2 of Project Runwa y many of the castmembers disparaged (eventual winner) Chloe Dao as a (mere) "patternmaker" (rather than a designer). Would I be similarly disparaged on Project Runway? Yes. But would I, like Chloe, win the season and make my disparagers feel crispy? Judging by my results this weekend, No.

So let's not show those results, ok? Instead, let's delve into the back catalogue and revisit some triumphs. In the spring of 2006 my friend Joy and I took a pattern-drafting class at Moore College of Art and Design. The class was pretty fun, though we did have to spend most of it manipulating darts around a doll-size bodice pattern which was not so fun. But at the end we each designed and made our own dress and that part was the most fun.

Now, I really liked my dress, but I do have to mention that I have never worn it out of the house. So, it can't be a total triumph in that respect. I'm not quite sure why I never reach for this one, but I feel like it might have to do with the fact that Joy and I had not yet perfected our discount-fabric-shopping-at-Jomar skills and were often purchasing upholstery-weight, possibly flammable fabrics for dressmaking. You can kind of see how synthetic-y this gray fabric is in the photo. But maybe I also never think to wear this dress because it is weirdly straddling the formal (cf neckline) and the informal (fabric colors and contents). I would like to mention though, that I was a frontrunner in the pockets in dresses trend, so that's something anyhow.

Egg poaching

2009-02-03T17:31:00.000-08:00

Alton Brown, people tell me, doesn't believe in single-use kitchen gadgets. I have a huge crush on Alton Brown's food-geek persona, but I've actually never paid much attention to his instructions. So I didn't feel too bad about impulse-buying this egg poacher at Crate and Barrel last week.

One of my New Year's resolutions this year was to learn how to poach an egg. I've made substantial progress over the past month -- and eaten more poached eggs than in the rest of my life combined -- but not so much progress that I wasn't tempted by the egg poacher. Plus, Crate and Barrel cleverly tricked me by having another egg poacher prominently displayed that was both more expensive and less functional, so this one seemed like a good decision in comparison.

This egg poacher is more or less egg-sized and -shaped. It is made out of metal with a non-stick coating, and has various complicated hooks and handles (not pictured). It has a few perforations at the bottom. I still haven't decided whether it's best to crack the egg into the poacher and then lower it into the water (but then the egg drips out the bottom!) or put the poacher into the water and then crack the egg into it (but then the egg oozes out the top!).

I have come to some conclusions about non-gadget egg poaching. I've stopped putting vinegar in the water, because I don't like the way it tastes, and I've stopped trying to swirl the water into a whirlpool the way everyone tells you to, because I'm not coordinated enough to get the egg into the center. Instead, I just crack the egg into a ramekin (this is the one piece of egg-poaching wisdom I can support) and slide it from the ramekin into the water. Then I sort of nudge it with a spoon to keep it from getting too stringy.

The upshot:

On the left is my lovingly hand-tended, old-fashioned, gadget-free poached egg. It has kind of a weird glob of foam on top, but otherwise is reasonably compact. On the right is the high-tech Crate and Barrel egg. Note its slightly artificial egg shape. Not surprisingly, they both taste the same...

Bloomers!

2009-02-03T14:48:00.000-08:00

According to Wikipedia there are three varieties of bloomers: Fashion-bloomers (skirted), Athletic bloomers (unskirted), and undergarments. Judging by the accompanying images on the wikipedia page, athletic bloomers (unskirted) are definitely the coolest -- it seems you can play basketball in them AND smoke. Good thing, then, that my grandmother owns a pair of such bloomers from the 1940s (I think) that have been passed on, at least temporarily, to me. We celebrated my grandmother's 89th birthday last weekend and I wore the bloomers to lunch.

They have held up well and are made out of a really beautiful tricolor wool woven in a diamond pattern, that you can sort of see here.

Some of the buttons (above) are camel-colored and some, as you can see below on the back pocket flap, are greeny-gray.

You fasten these bloomers under your knee by feeding a tongue of fabric into a buckle made with metal teeth that grip the wool.

Want to make your own bloomers? No problem.

Image of bloomer instructions from Clarks O.N.T Thread Company's 1929 sewing booklet found at Little Grey Bungalow.

Flags!

2009-01-31T08:21:00.000-08:00

Last month I made flags for Adrienne (age almost 8) and Julia (age 4). Usually I get ideas from other people's sewing blogs (which is mainly why I wanted to start my own & give back), but this idea just popped into my head fully-formed (though I will probably realize later that I did get it from somewhere and, in fact, when I looked at the finished flags I realized I had taken artistic inspiration from someone, but not a sewer -- more below). I made Julia's flag first -- a pirate ship out on the open ocean at night, under an even darker night sky (Julia is a little pirate-like).

Adi's had to be different, but I worried it wouldn't be as cool -- I think when you're under 12, though, castles always win.

For the backs of the flags, I used sections of an unfinished rainbow quilt top that I inherited from Sarah's friend Heather who sent me an amazing box of fabric and notions about 2 years ago. The pieced diamonds are from the quilt top & then I filled in the blue.

These flags came out a little bigger & floppier than I had wanted -- more like room decoration size/weight than start-a-revolution-in-the-living room size/weight. But I had a really fun time sewing illustrations with fabric, which is different from the three-dimensional sewing I usually do. I didn't applique at all, just pinned cut pieces on there and topstitched, so it felt very free-form.

When I was done, I realized that I had been inspired by the cut-paper collage artwork of my friend Ida Pearle. Ida is most recently the author of A Child's Day: An Alphabet of Play (the image below is from there). Ida also makes awesome alphabet cards and custom name prints, available on her website.

[Special note to Adi, budding sewer, if she is reading: check this out -- it involves BOTH sewing AND American Girl dolls.]

Pillows for me, pillow for you

2009-01-29T10:36:00.000-08:00

I'm still working on a new cover for the couch pillow that I first discussed here. I patchworked the front of it & am now hand-quilting the triangles, as you can see.

For the hand-quilting, I'm using this Valdani variegated cotton thread (in a color that apparently is classified as "vintage") that I bought at Spool.

Working on this pillow cover reminds me of a pillow cover I made a year or so ago that I patchworked but didn't quilt. I always forget about this pillow because it lives on a chair that often has other things draped over it -- dirty laundry, mostly. Here it gets its day in the sun:

And I am also reminded about the decorative pillow I promised to make you for your Lay-Z-Boy, Sarah. In some combination of the fabrics you brought me from Mozambique. We have to come up with a design vision. I looked around Etsy & found some possibilities:

Thoughts? Do you remember that pillow we saw last spring, maybe, that had strips of printed fabric sewn vertically onto a plain blue fabric? Do you want something like that? What does everyone else think?

Hash browns

2009-01-27T14:26:00.000-08:00

Remember that time when we bought a 20-lb bag of potatoes at Costco?

We spent the rest of the week trying to use up the potatoes, and as part of those efforts I made some hash browns which were truly and tragically disgusting. They were sort of purple-brown and gluey and simultaneously burned and not cooked through...really, really, awful. So since then I've been trying to get my hash brown mojo back, with limited success. Last week I tried a recipe from the February Martha Stewart.

It called for rinsing and drying the potatoes, and it also called for SIX slices of bacon and a bunch of onions. I was intrigued because the recipe wanted me to cook the hash brown pancake on the stovetop and then finish it in the oven, which seemed like a good solution to the problem of getting the inside of the hash browns cooked without overcooking the outside.

Overall, the hash browns didn't change my opinion about the recipes in Martha Stewart Living: undertested and poorly thought through. Six slices of bacon for two large potatoes is way out of hand -- I made it with half that much bacon and it was still too much. And even though finishing the potatoes in the oven sounded smart, I still burned the outside. (Though that might be my fault -- I've been having some problems with my cast iron skillet lately.)

Failed attempt to flip

On the plus side, the potatoes were nice and light and crisp.

Special bonus "where's waldo" pork chop picture

2009-01-26T17:06:00.000-08:00

See if you can spot the small creature looking for a snack.

Power Animal

2009-01-25T18:20:00.000-08:00

Tim once enigmatically mentioned that his power animal is a turtle, so for Christmas I sewed him one -- a stuffed representation of his power animal. It has no name yet, but maybe that is just the deal with power animals, rather than evidence that it is unloved?

The giantest pork chop in the world

2009-01-25T13:49:00.001-08:00

Have I told you about this pork store I've started going to in Phoenix?
I read about them in some Phoenix food magazine -- they only sell pigs that they raise themselves on their farm out in the boonies west of Phoenix. Yesterday was the second time I've been there and I've decided that I totally love them.

It's a little storefront just south of downtown Phoenix, in kind of a weird area full of warehouses and body shops, and they have a very scary picture of a pig in, like, a biker outfit painted onto their store window. I think the store owners are some kind of crazy Christians: their email address is "the63rdpsalm"* and the woman that I've talked to there has long hair and long skirts. Also, the store is full of pictures of blond children playing with the baby pigs before they grow up and get fat and get slaughtered. (The pigs, not the children, presumably.) They raise, kill, and process the pigs all themselves, and they mostly sell frozen meat. I went in there yesterday because I'd gotten an email from them that they were getting a delivery of fresh meat. So I got there and had a long conversation with the very chatty butcher on duty. We'd have a little talk about what I wanted, then he would go into the back room where he had eight pig carcasses hanging, then he'd come back with blood on his jacket and a hunk of meat for me.

I asked him to cut some thick pork chops for me. (These are one and a half inches thick.) He wanted to know if I preferred center cut or rib cut (? I think those were the terms). I was like, um, the most delicious one? So he cut some samples for me to look at; I decided to get one of each and compare. This is the rib cut -- you can sort of see it has little whorls of fat going through it.

The recommended serving size for meat is 4 ounces, or about the size of a deck of cards.

I ate it with grits and swiss chard and it was delicious.

*"My soul shall be satisfied as with marrow and fatness."

Options, Decisions

2009-01-24T09:40:00.000-08:00

When we were in San Francisco in August, I went to the Kinokuniya book store & got this Japanese pattern book (ISBN 97845791114422) of "Unique Clothes" which seems in part to be about garments that you can wear more than one way. This past month, i got around to making one of the shirt patterns from the book, a button-down shirt with some volume around the neckline that you can wear front ways or back ways.

All of the clothes in the book seem to be made with cotton, but I had some black & white wool on hand, so I made it with that, and used some gold buttons that my grandmother gave me from her collection. The question now is, which way do I wear it? Front ways?

Or back ways?

I took my time making this -- I hand stitched the facing with black embroidery thread, did flat-felled seam finishes on the inside, and finished the arm holes with bias strips I made out of the same fabric. The pattern called also called for a sleeve gusset, which I'd never done before. Here's a view of the gusset (& the armhole finish) -- the gusset is just a triangle in the armpit.

Patchwork Edition

2009-01-19T15:30:00.001-08:00

When I got my new sewing machine last summer, the awesome sales guy explained to me that Bernina had slightly changed its basic model (i.e. mostly just moved some of the stitch numbers around) and slapped the new label "Patchwork Edition" on it to appeal to the quilting & patchwork demographic. And I was like, "Are you sure you don't have any in the back without this label?" and he was like, "yes."

And now, only 6 months later, I am patchworking like crazy. Well, not like crazy. But a few times.
These are the triangles that I'm currently piecing together to make a new pillowcover for our couch. You can't quite see how cool these colors are, so you have to take my word for it. I want the final product to look something like this. My other quilting project is also inspired by Yoshiko Jinzenji -- I bought a bunch of her fabrics for it but I can't link to them because they seem to be sold out everywhere. You can see a few of them here (though the top one is the only one there that I have) and read about her.

Anyways, that quilting project is a big one, which I will probably post about every 3 months for 6 years or something. So far, I've been hand-piecing some hexagons for it, which is pretty fun. Here's a partial view:
To hand-piece you take paper hexagons and tack the fabric around them with a few stitches & then hand sew them together. It's called English paper piecing -- here's a tutorial. When one of the hexagons is surrounded on all sides you can take the paper out.

Braised leeks

2009-01-17T13:31:00.001-08:00

Also, did I tell you about the delicious braised leeks I made last week?

Inspired by this recipe, but I cut out some steps -- just browned them in butter, added thyme/chicken stock/dry vermouth, and stuck in the oven. Highly recommended.

Prune spice cake

2009-01-17T11:25:00.000-08:00

So I went ahead and added some prune puree to the spice cake, and it turned out pretty well. Abby liked it, anyway.

I used the recipe in the new Joy of Cooking for "Velvet Spice Cake." It calls for yogurt or buttermilk; usually in those cases I use buttermilk, but I had some yogurt that I was trying to use up. I substituted a little over 2 tablespoons of prune puree for 4 tablespoons of the butter. To make the prune puree, I simmered 6 prunes in a little water and a little lemon juice for not very long, then put them through the food mill. It was a little less "puree" and more "chopped prunes" than I might have hoped, but the prunes seemed to integrate into the cake when it was baked.

The cake was a little too sweet for my taste. I don't know whether that was the prunes, or the yogurt, or just the recipe. I think next time maybe I would add some lemon zest, or some almond extract, or ???

Bread Pudding and African Fabric

2009-01-16T15:58:00.001-08:00

Usually Sarah will post about cooking, and I will post about sewing, but since we met in Florida over Christmas and I have the photos, I will post about what Sarah cooked (with some help from me) and what I sewed (with fabric Sarah gave me).

Here is the cranberry bread pudding that Sarah improvised for Christmas morning:

Sarah served this bread pudding with a winter fruit compote featuring pomegranate seeds and pears she had poached overnight with simple syrup, a bay leaf, cloves, and splash of orange curacao. Everyone was skeptical about soaking the pears overnight, but they felt crispy in the morning when the pears weren't mushy at all. Here is Sarah's mom enjoying (or rather posing with) this breakfast:

For Christmas I made a few gifts out of the yards and yards of fabric that Sarah brought back for me from Mozambique this past summer. For Sarah's niece Phoebe, a doll (unpictured), and for Sarah's new nephew Paul, a pair of booties (pattern here, courtesy of stardust shoes):

But what use have those two for gifts, when they have each other?