Foraging and Fancy Feet

The strange new life we are living continues and like most of you, I suspect, we have adapted to the restrictions and settled in to a new routine.

On our permitted daily exercise we wandered into a "New to Me" small wood not far from home and discovered an abundance of wild garlic.

Well, it was too good an opportunity to miss!

Foraging complete we returned home and dug out the recipe books :)

Wild garlic and courgette soup for lunch and enough left over for two more lunches in the freezer, a good and delicious result all round.

Our shopping habits have, necessarily, changed in the last few months too, so we now have vegetables, milk and that lovely oatmeal bread you see in the photo above delivered from the local farm shop every week.

The vegetables that are delivered are not the clean, shrink wrapped produce that you see in the supermarket, so I needed some way of keeping them neat in the vegetable rack that didn't involve plastic bags. I ordered some cheesecloth tubes (I can't think of a better way of describing it!) and stitched up some vegetable bags. I used scraps of solid fabrics to distinguish the bag contents, so orange for carrots, brown for potatoes, yellow for lemons, etc.

I had never sewn with cheesecloth before, it was an interesting project as the stuff frays like nobody's business. I overstitched everything! Fortunately, as the cheesecloth was already sewn up at both sides all I had to sew was a seam across the bottom of each bag and then attach a coloured casing at the top for the drawstring.

In the absence of hugs for the gorgeous grandsons I have been stitching up some summer clothes for them instead. As you know I love Pox Couture's summer shirt pattern   and have made several of them already. On my last attempt blogged here   I had problems with the buttonhole foot stopping when it reached the shirt pocket and shortening the length of the buttonhole. So, to make sure that didn't happen again I treated myself to this!

It is called a fabric feeding aid and it attaches to the buttonhole foot as you can see below.

The feeding aid consists of an upper and lower fabric holder, which hold the fabric as it feeds through the machine.

You can see here how that the fabric is held between the plates of the feeding aid and the buttonhole foot will glide over the fabric without needing to compensate for varying thicknesses of fabric e.g. seams or pockets! (I forgot to take a photo whilst I was actually sewing hence the lack of buttonholes in this photo!)

I am pleased to report that it worked! Now all I have to do is find a way to actually see the buttonhole markings when the shirts are being lined up for stitching and I will have perfect buttonholes :) I am blaming the glare from the machine light rather than my eyesight for that problem!

I have a couple more "New to Me" projects on the go too, but will leave them for another day's post.