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.