Peaches. 8.11.2021

Picked the first crop of the season from this peach tree. It's a seed-grown tree from "Oregon Curl Free", a variety promoted as resistant to the dreaded peach leaf curl disease that, in the maritine Pacific NW, is to peach trees what COVID is to humans. This tree doesn't get peach leaf curl disease at all, which is sort of amazing, and is better than it's parent. Anyway, there are lots more on the tree.

Pickled Eggs. 8.7.2021

I made a batch of pickled eggs. The recipe was from "The Delicious Table". The amount of eggs was right for two quart jars (18 eggs), but the vinegar solution is enough that I can use the extra to make some refridgerator dill pickles, soon. The ingredients are cider vinegar, water, peppercorns, pickling spice, salt, Jalapeños, garlic, eggs.

Kitchen Garden Harvest. 8.7.2021

 Pretty good crop I think.  It's keeping us out of the grocery store for this round of coronavirus.  The sweet corn is "Trinity". The beans are Ning's special NE Chinese beans.

Digging Potatoes. 8.7.2021

 I dug some more of the potatoes.  They seem to keep better in the ground, so I only dig what I need for a couple of weeks.  I should eat less of them.  I'm starting to look like a potato.  But they ate very good and cook nicely.

Resizing a Vintage Shirt. 8.7.2021

I found a vintage shirt that I liked. Back in the age of the dinosaurs, I owned a shirt with exactly the same fabric, only in green. This looks like batik but is printed cotton.  This one was way too big, but the chances of finding one in my size are remote. So I used a shirt that fit well, as a pattern, took this one partly apart, cut it using the other shirt as my guide, and sewed it back together. I thought about just cutting the body of the shirt narrower, but the sleeves wouldnt look right. So I took off the sleeves, and cut them the same as my better fitting shirt. Then I cut the body of of the shirt narrower too.

Before cutting, I sewed the new seams and tried it on to check the fit.

The hardest part was sewing on the sleeves. I had made the shoulders 1 1/2 inches narrower on both sides, and the body of the shirt about 2 inches narrower. The arm holes are curved. I made multiple tries before getting it right. All in all, I'm pretty happy with the shirt and now I can wear a walk down memory lane.

I'm also pretty happy with the seams. The original shirt had flat felled seams, which dont have any rough edges insidecor out. I could have zig zagged the new seams, but they wouldn't look as smooth or as nice. Flat felled edges are not too hard, and my result was OK for a novice.