Garden Vegetable Tacos

My vegetable garden this year is pretty sparse. I planted two rows of carrots that didn't come up, I've got one cantalope vine and two squash plants, plus about five okra plants and some potatoes (We'll see how that one turns out. I just planted some little potatoes I had that were sprouting.).

Today some of my okra and squash were ready. Here's a recipe I made up for lunch. Not only does it give you a new way to use up all those yellow squash (and probably could be done with zucchini) and add vegetables to your diet, it's frugal (using less meat than regular tacos).

Ingredients:
1 package taco seasoning mix
1/2 pound ground beef (or 1/2 the amount of beef called for on the seasoning package)
2-4 yellow squash, chopped
6-10 okra
chopped onion to taste
crispy taco shells

Toppings:
avocado, sliced or chopped
sour cream
grated cheese
tomato, etc, etc.

Brown ground beef and stir-fry vegetables until barely tender. Add water and seasoning mix according to package directions and simmer 5 to 10 minutes. Serve in crispy taco shells with sour cream, grated cheese, and avocado.

This recipe is very flexible. There are lots of vegetables that could be substituted for squash and okra. Bell peppers would be good, for one. Potatoes would work. I generally view recipes as just general guidelines, anyway.

Brandon really liked these, and I was sort of surprised, because he's not as fond of most vegetable-heavy recipes as I am.

How does my garden grow?

Not very well, it turns out. It's been very dry and hot during the times it needed not to be.

But after I got back from camp, I found that some of my flowers had bloomed, and were very pretty!














The pictures don't do justice to the tiny blue flowers (anyone know what they are?), but sadly, they do justice to the rest of the flowerbed, which is basically bare dirt.

Lots of Embroidery Floss

I bought a ton of embroidery floss (a multi-pack of 36 little skeins, which, it turns out, would make somewhere in the neighborhood of eleventy-billion friendship bracelets) to take to camp. We made lots of friendship bracelets (with varying degrees of success) in my cabin, but there is still a lot left over, and having all that embroidery floss is making me want to embroider things. I like embroidery, but too much of it hurts my wrists, so I only do it sporadically.

These little cuties are going to be quilt squares:








I found them on Floresita's Vintage Transfer Finds blog. There's a lot of cool stuff on there, and on the Hoop Love photo pool on Flickr.

Bad blogger

I'm about to go to Black Mesa Bible Camp for a week as a camp counselor, so you won't be hearing anything out of me for a few days.

It should be fun, but hot. It's always hot.

I went to Black Mesa from the time I was nine until I graduated high school, and I love going back and seeing kids enjoying the same things I did.

I'm all prepared with supplies to make friendship bracelets in the not-unlikely event of a rainstorm that confines me to a small cabin with 15 hyper little girls for an hour or two.

In my absence...

I have been a bad blogger for the past couple of weeks. But this week I actually have an excuse. I was staying with my sister, watching Connor because his regular babysitter (the one who actually gets paid for it) had the week off. "Fun" is not the word I would use to describe it, exactly, because there were a lot of dirty diapers involved, and a fair amount of screaming and crying (not me, Connor), but I really enjoyed spending so much time with him. He has such a cute button nose, such cute blue eyes, etc.

I made my sister a baby sling, but I didn't get a pic taken. It wasn't really exciting to look at, anyway, just a bunch of navy blue cloth.

Stop here if you really don't want to know anything about my husband's underwear.

The other project I've been working on is boxers for Brandon (that's a nice bit of alliteration for you). There are actual boxer patterns out there, and I thought about buying one of them, but ordering a pattern over the internet would cost me $12 or $15, and wouldn't be nearly as instant-gratification as taking apart a pair of his old ones and using them for a pattern. Well, if by "instant gratification" you mean "an hour hunched over with a seam ripper, taking notes as you go". I love ordering things over the Internet, but I hate waiting for it to get here.

It worked. I had been wanting to try making a pattern from an existing garment for awhile, anyway. And this was a project of manageable size. I actually made the pattern and the muslin before I went to watch Connor, and while he was napping this week I managed to make two pairs.

The seams are flat-felled, which doesn't take long as there are only four seams, one of which is very short. I did make a casing for the elastic instead of sewing through it, because I am just not confident that I can do that without messing something up. Brandon said he couldn't tell the difference (wearing them) from store-bought, though.

And that pair on the left? The print is of corn. Perfect for a farmer. Except he doesn't grow corn. But there aren't any prints of milo out there that I've run across. Definitely not in the sale section of Joanne fabric.

Not sewing

I haven't posted anything lately because I haven't been doing any sewing since I finished the shirt dress. I wore it to the Frontiers in Writing Conference in Amarillo a couple of weeks ago, and since then I've been concentrating on my writing instead of sewing!

I found a local writer's group, which is the most exciting thing to come out of the conference. It will be so nice to be able to "talk writing" with someone again. I haven't had much of that in the last couple of years.

Brandon and I have also started putting a new roof on our house - there was a big hail storm that pretty much demolished the shingles, so we're going with a metal roof now. It's red. I'll have to repaint the shutters (the faux shutters) on the front of the house to match. Why is it that roofing and fencing always have to be done in the summer, when it is entirely too hot to be out doing things?

I did sew something yesterday. I hemmed a pair of pants, because they were about three inches too long. I used to not mind long pants, and just dragged my hems through the mud and wore them out, but now it bothers me.

Adding Side Seam Pockets to a Garment Without a Waistband

I will try to explain as clearly as I can how I put the pockets into my McCall's 2016 shirt dress. I've included some quick illustrations I worked up in Paint. They are meant to be only rough approximations of the pattern shapes.

Adult pockets are pretty much one-size-fits-all. The easiest method of getting a pocket pattern piece for your pattern that does not have one is to take one from another pattern that incorporates side seam pockets. The pockets I added to one of my husband's jackets came from a woman's robe pattern. The pockets I put onto the shirt dress came from another dress.

The pattern piece should be shaped something like this :





















If it looks like the piece below, with the flattened top portion, it is meant to go into a garment with a waistband. I think you could just trace it and eliminate the top flattened portion (as the blue dotted line illustrates) with no harm done.





















To determine the correct placement of the pockets in my dress, I guestimated a little. I measured from the approximate point the underarm seam was going to hit on my body to where the a pocket would be comfortable for me. Then I folded in the bust dart in on the pattern piece and measured down the same distance, making a new notch to mark the pocket placement. To make a matching notch on the back pattern piece, I measured from the notch that the pattern company put under the armscye (for matching front and back when sewing the side seam) to the new notch I'd made, and made the new notch on the back pattern piece the same distance below the existing notch on the back pattern piece.

Cut FOUR pocket pieces. Pocket pieces are sewn to dress pieces BEFORE the side/underarm seams have been sewn.

Right sides together, match the top point of the pocket pieces with the notches you made for pocket placement. Sew at the seam line (represented by blue dots). You should end up with fabric pieces that have the general shape shown in the illustration below. Press the seams flat.





















When it is time to sew the side seams (which in the case of the McCall's 2016 dress is after the side seams of the raglan sleeves have been sewn), put right sides together, matching notches and seams as usual, and matching pockets pieces, and sew the side seam AROUND the pockets, illustrated by blue dots below. Backstitch for reinforcement at the top and bottom where you pivot to go around the pockets.





















Turn your dress inside out and press. You have pockets!

If you have a copy of the Vogue Sewing book, it also has instructions (a little more fiddly then mine), and a pocket pattern piece drawn on a grid that can be enlarged.