Wonky Curtains

I sewed something, not very well though. I have wanted to make curtains for our kitchen door and kitchen window for ages. I looked at different fabric options and fell in love with some really cute Michael Miller prints (and I can't find now) but I couldn't justify spending the money. Instead I pawed around in the fabric stash I've been accumulating and decided to use fabric I bought last year when I went to San Antonio. The pattern is American Jane by Moda.

For the door curtains I used some lace at the bottom that I bought at an estate sale. There wasn't enough yardage left for the cafe curtains but I think that's okay. The seams are not really straight, but maybe no one will scold me. I'm just glad I had enough of an attention span to finish them. I'm sure there's a more proper way to make these, measuring and such, but being lazy and having a short attention span I just winged it.

Making and baking (but not making bacon - yet)

For Christmas I got a stack of books including: three cookbooks, a sewing book and a book on toxic plants. Jam it, Pickle it, Cure it was especially enticing because amongst the recipes/directions are those for curing your own bacon AND rendering your own lard. Not that I'm ready to do either of those things but I like that the option is there when I want to. I had not had a chance to make anything from the books until this weekend. I saw the recipe for homemade chocolate peanut-butter cups in Jam it, Pickle it, Cure it and decided to try it out. There was no actual cooking involved, just food processing and melting. First you make little disks out of roasted peanuts, honey and a couple of other things (processed until smooth) and then you melt semi-sweet chocolate chips. Once that's done you coat the cupcake liner with a thin layer of chocolate, lightly press in one of the peanut butter disks, add more chocolate on top and let them set for at least four hours. They were perfect and relatively simple to make. Plus as long as they're kept in an airtight container they're good for a week or two.This weekend I also made a favorite of mine, arborio rice pudding. I adapted this recipe from Smitten Kitchen, adding a little extra almond extract, using vanilla bean paste and subbing almond milk for the whole milk. The texture was perfect but I should have gone a little easier on the almond extract, especially considering I used almond milk.My Featherweight cardigan is making me crazy. My sleeve increases are all kinds of jacked up and it seems like each row takes forever, although I finally got to the point to pull off the sleeve stitches and put them on scrap yarn. So since that project was driving me nuts what do I do? Cast on another project of course. This is the Saroyan scarf/shawlette thing, from Feministy. It's a super easy pattern and with worsted weight yarn and size 10 needles, it's flying. I cast on last night and I'm already done with the first section. The yarn is Madeleine Tosh worsted in Tern bought in Seattle in December. I love this yarn, the color is exquisite and it's so flippin' soft with a hint of springy-ness. Adore!

I dusted off the sewing machine today and cut out the pieces to make a straight skirt (a Simplicty pattern) with a zipper. I didn't get around to sewing any of the pieces yet but I did cut them all out. The fabric is Anna Maria Horner I bought in Portland last summer. This year I really want to branch out and expand my sewing skills past elastic waist bands. Kind of like how I want to knit a sweater that's shaped for my measurements so it doesn't look like a sack.

I made skirts!

For real! Granted they're the most simple constructions of a skirt you could possibly imagine and the seams aren't perfectly straight and neither are the hems but they're still wearable! I used this tutorial I found last week from Grosgrain.The first one I used some fabric from an estate sale, I'm not sure how much fabric it was but I ended up cutting off a lot of 'extra' because it was pretty long. It took me about 2 hours to finish the first one but that's because I had to re-thread the machine once and wind another bobbin plus it took a few minutes to understand how the construction was going to work. But once I figured it all out it took almost no time.I used 1" non-roll elastic and I did hem the bottom because there were no 'sealed' sides. This one is a little big around the waist but not terribly so. I like the fullness of this one.

The next one is made from a vintage sheet from yet another estate sale. I thought it was cotton but it must be a blend of cotton and something else. For this one I used elastic that was a little more narrow than 1". The waist is perfect but it's a little long, so I might re-hem (I have no clue if that's the proper term or not) it.

The last one is made from a yard of Heather Bailey fabric I bought last year from Sew Mama Sew. It's shorter than I'd like it to be. I may attempt to add some more fabric at the hem to make it a little less scandalous. I'm really excited I made these all by myself. It's all a learning process and hopefully the more I do the better I'll get. I'm going to make a few more of these because I love wearing skirts during the hot, hot summers here.

Odds and ends and beans

This past weekend we spent a lot of time watching CSI and trying to avoid being outside. Saturday morning we had breakfast at Cafe Eclectic (which besides having the most adorable waitress ever has the best mochas in town) and ran errands. I grilled steaks, summer squash and zucchini for dinner, since it's so hot outside I like just cooking everything on the grill so I don't have to warm up the house even more.

Sunday I got up at the crack of dawn in an attempt to beat the sun, so I could finish up planting perennials in the flower bed and spreading some mulch. I was outside for 2.5 hours and was completely soaked by the time I finished. But that stupid flower bed is finally done. When we moved in it was full of overgrown monkey grass (liropa) and that was it. We spent those early days digging out monkey grass and cursing whoever let it take over that bed. Two years later, it contains ferns, several kinds of salvia, a knockout rose, larkspur, daylily, lavender, anise hyssop, foxglove, miniature crepe myrtle, star jasmine, butterfly bush, lamb's ear, dwarf sunflowers, coneflower, cherry sage, mint, phlox and lantana. Everything should come back and hopefully get bigger and fill-in the gaps.My beans were big enough to eat last week, yay! I blanched them and we had them with grilled pork chops. They turn green when blanched, which was kind of cool looking. I picked another batch for dinner tonight. The seed packet says that they'll continue to produce all summer as long as they're picked clean.

Last week I had a gathering at our house and one of the things I made was a vegetable platter with vegetables from the Farmer's Market. The only thing that didn't come from there were the grape tomatoes. When I saw the purple cauliflower I knew I had to have it, when I blanched it the water turned purple and I stored that fact away for later use because it might come in handy if I ever chose to dye my own yarn with natural dyes.

I finally finished that shirt I've been trying to sew together for ages. Again, my friends helped me and in fact they probably weren't going to let me leave until I finished it. The hem looks a little wonky, but it is my first shirt so that's to be expected. It's this Simplicity Built by Wendy pattern. I cut out another top the same day but I needed fusible interfacing, so I didn't do anything with it yet. Maybe I'll work on it this weekend, the fabric is from Joanne's.

In which I sew (sort of)

Okay I'm ashamed to admit this but I have had my sewing machine for well over a year and I have sewn nary a thing on it. I have fabric, I have thread, I have needles and yet I still do not sew. Shameful. I have recently been inspired to make things and I needed to use the sewing machine. One of them was a headband/headwrap thingy (great name right?) and the other was an already-made-tank embellished with a doily.

I posted about purchasing some vintage doilies from estate sales a few months ago and my friend Lynsey and I have been looking for ways to use them. Lynsey, who (to steal a phrase) is made of awesome, made a great jersey tank for herself with a doily-embellished back. Since my sewing skills, are, um, way less advanced than that, I took the easy route and bought a pre-made tank top at Target and worked on sewing the doily to the front of it. It took a small blood sacrifice and a string of words that might make a sailor blush before I got it sewn on. My craftsmanship is shoddy at best but it's attached and I like the way it looks and it cost about $8.00 total.

My second 'sewing' project was the headband. This is another piece of trim from Melissa's find. I had thought it would look great on a dark denim skirt, but only if it had some friends to join it. So I scrapped that idea and took the advice of the knitting group and made a headband to put it on. This was very unscientific. I took a headscarf, measured it across, cut out a length of fabric I had laying around, cut a piece of white flannel the same size (to give it a little more structure) and sewed that bad boy shut. I frayed the ends a little bit, tried the headband on and then pinned the flower to the place it looked the best in and then sewed it down. Viola, headband/headwrap thingy on my big ole melon head. Again, my sewing skills are crap but I have to start somewhere right?