Red Cedar
More apocalypse, less angst
In the garden mid-June.
Just a brief post this morning to herald the return of more garden-friendly weather! In the last two weeks things have really picked up around here and the veggie beds are finally getting it together despite the slow start in the spring. Right now:
- Everything that I planted early – oriental greens, radish, turnips – has bolted. This is the hazard of early planting in a cold year – particularly when temperatures go from cold to really warm overnight. This weekend I will be pulling out the failed greens and replanting.
- My tomato and tomatillo plants are now in the ground.
- My pole, bush and runner beans have germinated nicely.
- My summer squashes are also peeking out of the soil.
- All other seed is taking quickly at the moment – I’ve got beets, spinach, carrots and fennel all coming up in fits. My peas are really behind this year. It’s june and barely a flower!
- Gooseberries are present on the gooseberry bush, blueberries appear to be taking shape, and the raspberries are doing something.
I’m putting a lot more seeds in this weekend – both at home and my community plot. Oh – and starting my brussels sprout starts to go in for July – it really is that time already! Hopefully we get a long summer into fall!
Girl with a new dress on.
So here it is – the dress with many mishaps:
Made with Burda Pattern #7659 and $20 worth of fabric (quilting cotton) – this is my first ever attempt at making a dress for myself. After making it in the wrong size (too big by a long shot) I took in the side seams by an inch on each and had to put darts in the back to stop it from bunching up.
On this project I learned the following things:
- Pleats – how to make them and that they add a lot of extra volume on the front.
- Putting in a zipper – and the fact that it is possible to put a sewing machine needle through your finger when the zipper foot is attached.
- Darts – not best hastily done after trying a dress on ten times in a night.
In any case, this is not the most flattering cut to me, but the dress did turn out pretty damned adorable and I’m looking forward to it as a house/yard dress for the summer. I am also totally thrilled to have made a dress that involved so many different elements (yoke, interfacing, pleats, zipper, darts) and had it basically come out right. That’s pretty cool and I am looking forward to making my next dress which will happen soon (I’ve got fabric for a couple of skirts that will likely get made next).
Here is the back view:
Birdman
In the early morning hours I had the oddest dream in which Brian had the ability to turn into a bird and did so whenever he was angry with me. The first time it happened, he walked out the door and turned into a crow until I had done some act of penance and he returned to me a man. Neither of us liked the crow much, and so the next time we argued he went out and became a stellars jay which annoyed me just as much because it simply seemed a way to avoid our argument. When he came back in man-form, he had patches of skin that were still blue and not turning back. He was stuck then with blue feathery patches on his skin until the next part of the dream which involved more unreasonable behaviour on his part (keeping salmon outside until it rotted and then insisting it was fine to eat).
Fortunately I woke up just as the maggots started crawling out of the fish.
There were other surrealist moments in the dream of course, a road trip, a grand canyon-type place, some other odd people. But the main takeaway was this birdman weirdness.
The whole thing made me glad that I have never thought Brian birdlike. It also made me realize how much the open windows of early summer are affecting my sleep. The crows outside our place are just crazy right now.
My Pandora Park plot
I have a new summer dress to show off but no photos of it yet so instead it is pictures of my community garden plot which I finally got down to working on Sunday.
When I got there, the plot looked like this:
Now, while the wild-growing pansies are beautiful, they were pretty much taking the whole plot up (not to mention the buttercup, the clover and the many other unidentifiable plants growing in there!)
Fortunately the earth was easy to turn and *full* of worms so it was short work to getting my garden plot looking like this:
It’s a little less vivid, but there’s a whole lot more space for veggies now. This isn’t the best shot, but at the far end are two leeks from the last gardener, two spaghetti squash plants (for which I must built supports), and some cabbages. I hope to get some more seeds and starts in this weekend. I’m a little late on it, but still with plenty of time to make it go.
More adventures in sewing.
Two mishaps:
- I put my finger under a running sewing machine while trying to stitch a zipper and got a needle through the flesh (to the side, not the nail fortunately).
- I put together most of a dress pattern – the hardest thing I have done to date, and when I put it on last night it turns out I have made it two sizes too big! I’m looking at ways to alter it tonight to see if the work can be salvaged.
So the learning continues and I’m feeling a little obsessed at the moment. The oversized dress can be hemmed down on the sides a bit without too much fuss but I do think I am going to remake the whole thing again at the proper size which is really the better way to get a good fit. With different fabric of course – I can make a pattern more than once but I don’t like using the same fabric over and over…. so this weekend I’m going to hit Spool of Thread and see what retro-y cuteness I can come up with.
It’s interesting, this process of learning to construct clothing – a total mental engagement as I work my way through (sometimes poorly worded) instructions and then try to apply them to cloth. And unlike quilting, a dress comes together in relatively few hours. I mean, despite the sizing problem – my very first dress has come together in about six hours so far with another 2 to finish it off. That’s really just two after-work evenings or a Sunday project. A quilt takes 4-10 hours per stage – cutting, piecing, basting, quilting – and that’s just for simple projects!
I am hoping by the end of this week to have a dress to show off here – one that is not bunching in the back and bagging at the sides – but in the meantime I’ve left this post with a picture of a crocheted shawl completed last week. This is another field of new explorating and also satisfying my need-to-learn impulses!
Red Cedar 
