The Wimminfolk and Their Needlework

The Sergeant had a birthday party Sunday that involved an engine swap, loud music, a lot of grease and broken tools. Meanwhile the gals came prepared to knit or stitch, mainly because the topic of sashiko came up in a Facebook discussion beforehand. Turns out Amanda had recently bought sashiko supplies, as had I, and Mona was curious about the technique.

Not pictured is Jenny, who brought along something to learn how to darn on, but which turned out to be not very darnable — a backpack that a squirrel had gnawed holes in. I did a little sewing to close up the holes, but really, it needed a patch. So I patched it:

I had this little square of fabric that matched nicely, and it sure looks better than the duct tape Jenny was going to use. I put some of that Cloud Cover fusible on the inside to protect the stitching from snags.

Meanwhile, Mona was playing around with the sashiko needles and thread on a piece of batik from my stash. (I have so much batik quilting cotton, it's a little embarrassing.) She sent me this photo later.

I like the idea of stitching to outline some of the patterns on the fabric. I need to play around with that on the jeans-patching I plan to do. Possibly as soon as today (we have a new little sewing club at work that meets at lunchtime on Fridays).

Amanda was the stitching star of the party. Turns out we'd both ordered the same sashiko book and needles from Amazon, but Amanda had also ordered indigo linen from fabric.com and marked up grids to practice stitching patterns from the book.

Meanwhile, I'm still reading the introductory chapter. But I'll get to the actual stitching one of these days!

According to Amanda, who was kind enough to send me photos after the fact, the pattern in progress on the left, above, is called Yabane, or "arrow feather," on Page 75 of the sashiko book. The one on the right is called Dan Tsunagi or "linked steps" (Page 99). The one on top is an attempt at Kagome or "woven bamboo" (Page 100).

These little squares could become coasters or bags or even denim patches. I'm tempted to order some linen myself, but I've got an upcoming trip to the Bay Area that might include a trip to Japantown. So I'm restraining myself until then. I have plenty of other projects I can play with in the meantime.

"Get Out" Movie Sneak Preview

One advantage to seeing movies at Alamo Drafthouse as often as we do is the invitations to free screenings. Tonight we went to an advance showing of "Get Out," which will be released in most theaters this weekend.

It's billed as a horror movie, but it's more psychological thriller, directed by Jordan Peele of Key & Peele fame. The story is about a black guy and his white girlfriend going to visit her parents in their rich suburb. It becomes clear pretty quickly that there is something very weird and very wrong going on.

I'm not generally a big horror movie fan (though Silence of the Lambs is one of my favorite movies), but I thought I'd take a chance on this one, it being free and all. It sounded somewhat intelligent, and it was. There was a lot of sly humor and social commentary. And the horror came with some twists I was not expecting.

Joe Bo says go check it out!

Trader Joe's Frozen Fish

I like to cook (as you may have gathered), but sometimes I just want someone to do my thinking for me. It's been a long day at work, I get home at 6:30 or later and I just want to put something on the table without a lot of fuss.

Trader Joe's marinated frozen fish has been super-useful that way. This is the soy-ginger cod. I also like the whitefish Veracruz.

As long as I remember to take it out of the freezer the night before or in the morning, I can come home and fire up the rice maker, throw some vegetables in the oven to roast, then cook the fish. I use the pan-cooking method, which takes about 5 minutes. You can also bake or microwave it.

Do you have any go-to meals like that? Let me know; I'm always looking for more inspiration.

Darned Denim

I posted a while back about my ripped jeans. I was contemplating putting a patch of some kind on them and doing sashiko stitching over the patch.

But then I learned about darning. And it happened that I'd ordered dark indigo sashiko thread that matched my jeans almost exactly.

The lighting on these photos makes the denim look a lot lighter than it really is. I wore these jeans today and you could not see the repair unless it was pointed out. I had a solution for the inside of the repair, as well.

A friend suggested using Pellon Cloud Cover, a fusible product designed to cover up embroidery stitching on baby items. It's called a stabilizer, but is pretty flimsy and filmy for that. I ordered a roll from Amazon.


It fused quite nicely to the denim, helping secure and protect the stitches, and keeping the knots from being irritating.

We'll see how it holds up in the wash!

One of these days I'll sit down and write a darning tutorial. It really is a useful skill.

Looks Like a Party to Me

The Sergeant was on the road for his birthday, so he had a belated birthday party today. Here's what it looked like. Yes, that's his whole engine on a hoist. A new, speedy one, supposedly.

Meanwhile, all the womenfolk were in the house with me, doing needlework. I kid you not.

We got 20 banh mi sandwiches for 15 people and they were all eaten. There's enough leftover beer that the Sergeant is considering having another engine-swap party next weekend, since this job wasn't quite finished.

Everyone had a good time!

Yay! More Pokémon!

On Thursday, Niantic released updates to the Pokemon Go game, including a whole bunch of new Pokemon. That made my commute home fun. I'm not going to go crazy trying to catch all the new ones right away. It will take me a while to figure out which ones are which.

The one on the right is called Flaaffy. It's kind of sheepy, so it's my favorite so far. I caught it while I was on the phone with Mom. I usually chat with her as I'm walking home. She's going to give me a hard time about this post. She thinks playing Pokémon is dumb.

Tomorrow the Sergeant is having a party, so today I thought I'd better deal with Jackson's coffee stains on the carpet. He's developed a taste for my milky coffee and has managed to knock over a few cups trying to drink it when I've left it unattended.

Of course, my plan to just spot-clean was derailed by the general filthiness of the living room carpet (thanks, dogs), so I ended up just cleaning the whole room. Colorado is so dry that it will be ready for furniture again by morning.

Most of the guests will be hanging out in the garage, but the female contingent will be in the house. I plan to give darning lessons.

Dumb Ways to Die

I needed to go to Union Station today to refill my transit card. I signed up for a pilot program last year that lets you load money on a card that you just swipe past a reader at train stations. (It works for buses, too.) The only drawback is that you can't refill the card online yet, so I have to make the trek to Union Station every month or so. But it's not that far from where I work, and I can play Pokémon along the way.

And I enjoy the safety signs in the bus terminal underneath the station, where the transit office is.

This campaign was borrowed from an Australian train safety campaign, which included a really cute music video:



They should play the video on a loop in the station. It would give people more context for some of the images.


Then on my way home from work tonight I noticed this ad plastered (ahem) on the car I'd just disembarked from:

Not as cute, but definitely appealing!

Little Zipper Bag

As I mentioned yesterday, I thought I'd take my sashiko stitching samples and make a little zipper bag out of them.

It turned out kind of cute! I'm not thrilled about the zipper color (it's more of a turquoise), but I can always make more.

Should I give it away?

Pressed for Space

My cute little sewing nook is upstairs. My unwieldy monster of an ironing board lives downstairs in the laundry room. If I need to press a seam open or fuse some interfacing, as one does when sewing, I don't want to have to run up and down the stairs all the time, nor leave the iron unattended. Nor am I going to haul that ironing board up and down the stairs.

Happily, there are tools designed for such problems.

Here we have some 5-inch pre-cut fabric squares to which I would like to apply some fusible fleece.

And here we have the June Tailor Quilter's Cut 'n' Press, which has a small cutting mat on one side and a pressing surface on the other. It's a baby ironing board! (I don't know nothin' about ironing no babies, so hush; you know what I mean.)

Now we just need some steam. The Steamfast travel and crafting iron should be just the ticket. Let's take it for a spin.

Yep, works great! It gets quite hot, and produces audible and visible steam. That fusible is well-fused.

I crawled into bed with some more crochet cotton and a loooooong sashiko needle. This was the result. I think I'm going to make a little zipper bag out of it. That seems to be my default. Everyone likes a little zipper bag, right?

Darning and Sashiko Denim Repair

I've been researching Japanese boro and sashiko sewing techniques as an option for repairing my holey jeans. Sashiko is an attractive embroidery technique that's not super-complicated, and it might make the jeans looks trendy rather than just ... patched.

(By the way, it's not pronounced sah-SHEE-ko, as I thought, but SOSH-ko ... the "i" is almost silent.)

I also ran across a darning tutorial on imgur, so I thought I'd experiment with that, too.

Once upon a time, darning was a skill most women learned as children, and many men, too. I always thought it entailed just sewing a hole shut, or sewing over it. But it's actually weaving.

I cut a swatch from an old pair of jeans to practice on. The first hole I cut was too big, so I cut a second, smaller one and tried darning it with denim thread. Hmm, that didn't work very well. The thread was too fine. So I stopped halfway through.

I cut another small hole and used No. 8 crochet cotton with a sashiko needle (which is longer and sturdier than a regular embroidery needle, with a bigger eye).

That actually turned out pretty well! That will be a good option for fixing small rips in denim or other things.

For larger holes, especially if the fabric around them is weak because of wear, patching with sashiko stitching is an interesting effect. If you have to patch, you might as well do it stylishly, right?


I like the way that turned out, too. I folded the patch fabric so there were no raw edges, and whipstitched around the outside. I started to do the lines of sashiko stitching freehand, then realized I'd better mark the fabric with chalk. Next time I will try to map out my edge stitches, too.

It was interesting figuring out how to hold the needle and use the thimble. (This video, while not the best quality, shows how to hold maneuver the needle. Skip to 3:17.)

In the end, I also had to get some pliers to pull the needle through the mulitple layers of denim and quilting cotton. That's probably not standard.

A friend told me about an iron-on stabilizer called Cloud Cover that is designed to cover the rough stitches on the inside of an embroidered garment, so I ordered some. Soon I'll have those pants repaired!

I have this variety pack of blue batik-y fabric that should be suitable for all kinds of projects using sashiko stitching and boro techniques. I did a Google image search for "Boro" and have been exploring all the pages that come up. It's also fun to try using the Japanese characters for sashiko (刺し子) and boro (ぼろ) and explore that way. But I find that Google Translate really struggles with those pages, so I don't get as much out of them as I would like.

The Sergeant and I are hoping to go to Tokyo for a week or so just to explore. He went there for work last year and really liked it. I was jealous!

Brickbats?

I use this crosswalk every day. It's the last street I cross on my way to the train. The street is a frontage road for the highway that cuts through Denver (I-25, once called the Valley Highway because it follows the Platte River through downtown).

I'm trying to decide what I think about this brick veneer that's being added to the crosswalk (taking a crew of five or more guys multiple days to install). Is it supposed to be an esthetic improvement? A safety improvement? Will it be applied to all the crosswalks at that intersection?

Is this the best use of my tax dollars?

Collect 'Em All!

I was excited to get Andrea Nguyen's latest, The Pho Cookbook, in the mail yesterday. I've watched her Craftsy classes (on pho and on dumplings) and enjoyed them a lot. Her cookbooks help round out the experience of, well, Andrea's experience with all aspects of Vietnamese cuisine.

If I were really ambitious, I would try cooking my way through all of them in a systematic fashion and blog about it. Once upon a time I thought I would do that with Donna Hay's cookbooks, of which I have many, but the makinghay.com URL was taken. So I didn't do it. Really, that's the only reason.

That kind of blogging would be a serious time commitment, though. Time that I don't have right now. I'll just try to report on a recipe or two in the pho book, once I've dived into it.

Meanwhile,  dinner tonight was a winter squash gratin to which I added diced ham, and a big salad.

One kabocha squash yielded the 2 cups of roasted squash needed. I roasted it over the weekend, and diced the onion and grated the cheese yesterday, so it was all pretty easy to throw together when I got home from work ... with another bag full of produce from the CSA.

I can see that the amount of lettuce they provide each week is going to be an issue. I'll need to up my salad game.

Beasts of the Southern Wild

Tonight we went to see "Beasts of the Southern Wild" at the Alamo Drafthouse. If you're not familiar with the Alamo, it's a chain of dine-in movie theaters. All seats are reserved, and they have a strict no-talking, no-texting policy. We almost never go anywhere else anymore because of that. They often show interesting movies besides the current blockbusters, which we also really enjoy.

(The table service is so unreliable and the food so bad, though, that we have learned to get our drinks from the bar beforehand, and only order popcorn.)

"Beasts of the Southern Wild" was surreal and gritty and lovely. I wanted to see it when it came out in 2012 but never did. It's based on a play, which I find intriguing, since the landscape is such a character of its own in the movie. I'll have to investigate.

And didn't the girl who played Hushpuppy win an Oscar? No, Quvenzhané Wallis was the youngest ever Best Actress nominee, at 9. She was 6 during filming. (I'm looking at the Wikipedia page now.)

Have you seen the movie? Did you like it?

Share and Share Alike — We've joined a CSA

Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) has been around for a while. I remember splitting a CSA share with a friend of mine maybe 15 years ago. What I remember about it was that it was Too. Much. Food. And it was usually too much of one thing and not enough of others, like three dirt-encrusted rutabagas, a carrot, two radishes and 20 ears of corn.

I was cooking just for me back then. I didn't know what to do with all of it, and a lot of it ended up in the compost bin..

Then a couple of weeks ago Grant Farms gave a presentation at my company. They can deliver a small vegetable share, with sensible quantities and variety, directly to the office once a week. I decided to sign up. I've been making a concerted effort to cook healthy dinners for the Sergeant and myself most nights, and it's working pretty well, but I need to get better at menu planning, and I'm looking for inspiration.

The first box arrived Wednesday:

That's not an unreasonable amount of food for two people to consume in a week (nor too much for me to carry home on the train). Some salads, a pasta dish, maybe, and in a pinch, roast all the things that can be roasted.

Which is what I did on Sunday, because the Sergeant was out of town. I had some of the veggies for my dinner on Sunday, and the rest went into Monday night's yellow curry with shrimp for the two of us, along with the baby kale.

I used The New York Times' Shrimp in Yellow Curry as my starting point. I sautéed the aromatics, added the curry and red pepper flakes, then stirred in the extra vegetables before adding the coconut milk. I used the whole can, too, since I was adding a lot more stuff to the dish.

No shots of the finished dish, alas. We were both starving, so I was hustling to get it on the table. I have leftovers for lunch, though, so maybe I'll add a photo tomorrow.

It turned out quite well, albeit rather on the spicy side. I added some of that roasted poblano, minced, which turned out to have a lot more heat than I was expecting. Plus the red pepper flakes are made with peppers from our garden, including Thai bird chiles. Whoops. The rice helps temper the heat, though.

The roasted squash I'm going to turn into a Winter Squash Gratin for Wednesday's dinner, with a little diced ham added. Tuesday night we're going to see "Beasts of the Southern Wild" at Alamo Drafthouse, so we'll eat there. I haven't thought about Thursday yet, but another CSA box will arrive with something I can work with.