Outcrafted by my vintage sewing machine

I am probably the luckiest girl I know when it comes to sewing machines. My mom got an awesome new sewing machine a couple years ago and inherited a sweet 1950's Singer Featherweight sewing machine. She decided to give her extra couple of sewing machines away to her daughters. I didn't want to sounds totally greedy, so I bit my lip, but I WANTED that Singer with all my heart. The other one is a Kenmore and it's awesome as well, all made of metal and probably about 20 years old, but the Singer....oh man.

My mom decided to go get both machines all tuned up and fixed up for her daughters and then she decided to give ME the Singer and my sister the Kenmore. I think my sister's pretty happy it turned out that way, too. The Kenmore is a bit more modern, and she's a modern gal. I am vintage to my old fashioned little core.

Here it is!

With it is the pattern I have cut out and am working to make.

Singer Featherweight that has been passed down from my
grandmother to my mom and now to me. Amazing beyond belief.

 At first, I thought a glass of wine just classed up the experience of sewing on such a machine. No I didn't drink the whole bottle, it was an old bottle and I had one (albeit rather full) glass of wine for the evening. The beer was for my husband.
As I continued to tangle myself up in the machine and sew things to the machine itself, the wine became more important for me not going crazy. What do you do when a machine that is so beautiful will not perform. To add salt to the wound, the company that tuned it up included a little strip of stiff cloth with it that had neat rows of stitches to prove the thing worked. Just not for me yet.

Here is the maddening path of the thread.

First look is not so bad...

 Still alright, yes?

 Stunning little machine!! Wind on little thread.

 And ready to make a first stitch to draw up the thread, right?

 Wrong!

Not sure how well you can see this, but the thread is hopelessly tangled. My bobbin is sending thread out at the right time, and sometimes I can even catch it and send it on up to the platform above. Nice, right?

Well, but it is taking the thread from the top and winding it around the outside compartment of the bobbin and making a mess. The thread breaks and the piece of fabric is sewn to the machine. SAD!

Drink a sip of wine, and carry on.

Doesn't get any better. I have decided to look on the internet for tutorials for how to help this machine and have dumped the contents of its box onto the floor to look for a user's manual, ha!

 No dice.

This mess keeps happening and I used basically the entire bobbin.

As I went to look at the sewing directions, I felt instantly insulted by the fact that it's called "Simplicity" and I can't seem to figure out the machine, let alone see if I can assemble the skirt (whose directions might as well be written in Gaelic for all the sense they make to me).

I have this image in my head of myself as a person who's pretty much home-made, if you know what I mean. Not like, sheltered and never gets out of the house, but like "Oh that's a really cute outfit," "Oh thanks, I made my jacket and found the scarf at a second-hand store. Want to come over later and pick raspberries and have homemade yogurt?"

I would never make such dumb conversation, but you know what I mean. Eat from my garden, make some of my own clothes, find things at antique stores, and put flowers on the table from my yard. (Also, being a person who makes her own wine would be pretty sweet) But the foibles with the sewing machine have instilled doubt in my heart.

There's the insultingly-named pattern and the lovely machine that will make me really cute clothes. The machine has all those amazing little clicks and things that make it sound really, I don't know, authentic. Anyone notice in the background that the glass of wine has gotten a bit more empty from my trials with the sewing machine...yeah.

After another sip of wine, I threw my hands in the air and decided to go to my kitchen. I found a tutorial online for how to grow a pineapple, but I didn't have my pot of soil prepared, so I stuck the top in water...which I learned is a bad idea. It molded today. The pineapple did have roots and things like the tutorial said it would. They were smaller on this pineapple and I am guessing it's because the poor thing was fairly green. Better luck next time.

I also decided that we would try growing avocado seeds. I've done it before, but have never had the space or time to turn them into plants. This time is different. We've eaten a ton of avocados lately because they've been dirt-cheap, so we had a TON of seeds on the counter and I decided to try making 4 of them into a plant; I figure, one HAS to work. We shall see. I changed the water in them today and will show you if I get plants.

After exercising my thumbs of unknown color, I decided to bake something. Bran muffins sounded good. I used a generic "All Bran" box recipe and added dried dates and currants and went without the egg substitute (used a whole egg instead) and without the nuts. They were good!
Then I saw the amazing lavender chocolate my husband bought me a few days ago. We love lavender. At our wedding, we had our guests throw dried lavender instead of rice or bird seed, and now we're hooked for life on lavender. We've tried lots of different kinds of lavender chocolate and candies and such. This was by far the best we have had. The lavender was very distinct, but not overpowering. YUM. We found it at the register at Cost Plus World Market. If you like lavender at all, get this, it's amazing.

After a piece of lavender chocolate and another sip of wine, I went back to the machine, finished the glass of wine and gave up on a skirt for the night.

If I find a decent tutorial about how to fix my present conundrum, I'll let you know.

Happy Saturday to you!

Garden Time!

As a combined effort to avoid over-processed foods with mystery sources and a desire to do something productive with my yard, I am going to have a garden this summer. We're also in the process of making a spreadsheet (yes, Dad, if you're reading, I said spreadsheet) that helps us find Farmer's Markets throughout the summer (and winter, there are some excellent winter Farmer's Markets). I figure, we should be able to eat local pretty much all summer.

This is my garden when it was a dream, really a figment of everyone's imagination. My parents came to help put this baby in place. That's them in my enormous back yard in the figment of a garden. The garden goes here mostly because the corner to the right of what you can see has some trees that we plan to tear out, and we also buried my dear childhood dog, Allee, in that area, not a great place for gardening, ya know? The tricky part about the south side of the yard is the shadow you can see running the length of the yard. As the season goes on, I think this shadow will shrink a bit as the sun begins to move a little differently in the sky, but we still accounted for the shade in the digging of the garden.

These are some of the things I've planted by now. The green things are herbs mostly: thyme, basil (x2 because it is so yummy), hot oregano, chocolate mint, and a goji plant for indoors. The other two green things are asparagus plants. I guess these guys take 2-3 years to get to where they produce asparagus, but once they start, they are unstoppable. They'll grow for like 20 years. Hope everyone loves asparagus! Then, I planted some bulbs of garlic, elephant garlic and onions. I also planted some carrots I started inside several weeks ago. Hope those babies make it! They said they were alright in this zone at this time of year. Oh, and there's also rhubarb in there. An all-time favorite of mine. And for those of you wondering, yes, I can count...most of the time.

What do you attack such a garden with? Well, I would like to tell you we used a tiller, but being broke, we did not buy or rent one. We don't even have a lawn mower right now... Anyway, back on topic, we (my dad, actually, as shown in the picture) used a pickaxe. My dad did most of the breaking of ground, my mom and I did a lot of the shoveling and weeding. With a yard that's pretty much a blank slate (as seen above), there's not much in your way but weeds. They were impressively established having gone years without being challenged, but they eventually gave way. The wood lying on the ground is from the fence breaking in the wind. It is going to need to be replaced this summer. Our house is a constant project that we love very much and are also hard-pressed to keep up with right now. We're always gettting a little further in things, but it's so old and hasn't been really cared for in so long, it's a lot to bring back up to speed.

There's Jason, my husband, and mys sister, Kirsten finishing the tilling. Her dog, Saoirse really enjoyed the yard. After the garden was in, she seemed to particularly enjoy barreling through the poor new garden. She's a rescue pet, can we blame it on that? Probably not, she's just a dog. The garden is starting to shape up in this photo. You can see the difference between the garden and the weed-yard we keep. Some day, we envision sod and REAL landscaping, but I am getting ahead of myself, as you can see. This is today and this is phenomenal progress. Day by day.

 One last piece of grass/weeds to remove. We'll probably have a lot of weeding to do this season, but it's alright. Gotta start somewhere. I planted a garden in Bissau. It's a photo in an earlier blog on here. I was tending those poor seeds until my last day on the continent. Apparently, they have indeed sprouted. I just need to call someplace home, so this is it. I am growing my own food in my yard this year. Maybe next year, I'll try a winter garden. I hear those can be extremely successful, and besides, how rewarding would it be to still be eating food from your garden in December?

 It's all tilled and the plants are ready to go where they are meant to be. I'll get you some pictures of my indoor makeshift herb garden some time soon as well. I bought a few more things for it today. It's seriously absurd that for the price of a container of an herb at the store, you can buy an entire plant, and if you care for it properly, you'll have those herbs for a long time. Genius, I say. I also am amazingly fanatical about perennials. How brilliant is it that even in Colorado, things can live through the winter and make more fruit and such the next year?!

This is me planting the first thing. Anyone who knows me well won't be surprised that it was garlic. I just adore garlic. I have been hearing tales that garlic shoots are a thing worth noshing, and can't wait to have them growing in my own yard.

Root part down, pointy part to the sky, about a few inches deep and voila, garlic.

To the left is the garlic going into the ground. Um, yes!!!! I am intrigued to know how to pick garlic and how one clove turns into an entire harvest and all that. The elephant garlic was planted as one clove (yes, that is ONE clove) and the others were to be planted as an entire head of garlic all together. Wonder what's going to happen. Will we get one head of garlic per thing planted? I certainly hope it somehow multiplies. Just ONE garlic would be kinda disappointing for this kind of work.

There it is all lovely in the ground and about to be buried. Later, it will hopefully be like 10 heads of garlic that are eager to be eaten! One can dream. It seems like garlic farmers would go out of business if you needed an entire head of garlic to get one in return. Surely, there's better stuff to come than that.

This is the garlic securely in place and the asparagus waiting to be planted. Those things will turn into an entire BED of asparagus. Again, I totally don't get it. Those plants look NOTHING like asparagus, and they also look nothing like photos you see of growing asparagus. I am guessing that's the miracle God performs in the dirt. This wispy thing turns into a stalky enjoyable food item. Side note: I have been much in love with asparagus of late. I want it all the time. There's something satisfying in eating those green spears. They're tender and flavorful. Yum. What's your favorite veggie?  

 Oh, to completely take a tangent here, those hands belong to my sister, and she is consuming a San Pellegrino Limonata. It's like sparkling lemonade, except amazing in every way. It's made with real lemons and tastes like summer in a can of goodness. Drink some. You will be glad you did.

My sister helping me plant a row of onions. We talked about the value of having rows of things with trenches beside them for the water to go in. Who knew it was so funny that the garden is laid out this way. My dad has always used a hoe to dig the trenches, and he did this time as well. Then, you kind of make a furrow (seeds don't get planted that deep anyway) in the top of the mound and put the seeds in and then close it back up. I really enjoyed having my dad and mom there to help me with my first garden. Some of my best memories growing up were of being in the garden with them during the summer.

There it is after an entire day's work. The lumps closest to the camera are for asparagus and garlic, the rows have carrots and onions, and out of your view is the rhubarb. It later got moved because it needed more sunlight and is now quite a happy plant. This is a good day's work, and was lots of fun. I have high hopes for this little plot of land and hope to show bountiful pictures of the products. If not, maybe it will at least be entertaining. Since taking this photo, I have added rainbow swiss chard, kale, and collard greens to the garden.

Fun is in the dirt!



I'd love to know any new tips on gardening that you have. I am a newbie and am seeking wisdom. I will show you my indoor garden next time!