Mondays are always busy days, but they are also days with a kind of dual existence. Years of training has led me to treat Mondays as the first day of the working week, the week we catch up from the lax behavior of the weekend, and yet, in this household at least, Monday is still part of the weekend simply because G does not go back to work until Tuesday.
It has taken us a few years to settle into a working 3/4 schedule that fits well with our plans, personalities, and dreams, but we seem to have settled into a grove of sorts. Sometimes Monday is a play day and sometimes it is a work day. This week it was mostly work. G got the mowing done as this was really the first day dry enough to mow for over a week and I was given some time to get things taken care of in the house. The repair guy came for the oven. It was the heating element, something new. He expected it to be a fuse. 15 years with this oven and I’ve gone through 5 oven fuses, although we’ve never had to change the other one, for the stove top – is that weird or what. We also have never had the heating element go before.
Somehow household chores are always more pleasant when you are both working, even on separate tasks, with little breaks over the water bottle under the shade tree and interruptions of companiable conversation. Mondays often include time for a slower breakfast, pondering a second cup of coffee, and a lunch spent together.
Although we eat a great deal of local produce, especially in the summer months, and very little processed or prepared convenience foods, last night G asked for one of his favorite dinners, Spaghetti with Tuna. The primary ingredients come from cans:
The tomatoes could have been local, had I put up tomatoes last year, but I didn’t. There are only a few other ingredients:
The recipe is by Marcella Hazan in The Classic Italian Cookbook. It has been a favorite so long that I just know it. It really needs flat leaf parsley. The shallots were a substitute, nice but without that special intensity the sauteed parsley brings to the dish. I thought I had parsley; imagine my chagrin that instead I had two bunches of cilantro. Shallots had to substitute. I suppose Thai or Mexican cuisine is in our future. The pasta with tuna sauce and a big salad of baby lettuce, baby bok choy seedlings, radishes, and slender baby carrots made for a lovely dinner with a glass of red wine.
After dinner I finally got back to the sewing room and cut out the pattern for the coat, Vogue 7833. I attempted to check the pattern for errors but got nowhere. I don’t know what to look for in a raglan sleeve coat. This was when it dawned on me that I have never made a raglan sleeve garment of any sort. My mom made them for me when I was little. I was told they fit better. But somehow I got it in my head that I didn’t want raglan sleeves and avoided them like the plague in my own sewing adventures. Well, it is about time to begin.
I traced off the pattern onto “soil separator paper” lengthening it by 10 inches while I did so. The coat would be short for me regardless. At 29" it wouldn’t quite cover my bottom, much less hang nicely below the crotch line as illustrated in the line drawings. But I wanted this to be longer even than illustrated. I will probably go longer yet, but I need to see the first draft.
I decided to try making the first muslin out of the soil separator paper. It looks sturdy enough to sew. It is thinner than PatternEase, but should still work. It might not hang as well as a coat, it is clingy, but it will at least tell me if I am headed in the right direction. I don’t really like this stuff as pattern paper – it is hard to read what you write on it, it clings to everything, markers bleed through it, but it is so sheer that you can trace even the palest most difficult lines. It would be nice if I can also use it for muslins. If the muslin idea doesn’t work, this roll will be my last.
I am hoping to get the muslin stitched together today and then we will see what happens. It looks simple. Hopefully it will work well.
