There are a lot of kitchen gadgets that I roll my eyes at, but there are some that I find genuinely useful. Two of the ones I use most are the least inexpensive: a wooden plastic-bag-drying rack (available from Lehman’s, a catalog which is full of little gadgets you never knew existed), and an angled whisk which I can’t currently find on the internet – mainly because I’m not sure what it’s called! This is what it looks like, but the picture doesn’t really show the angled-ness at the bottom well. It seems like all of whisks would work the same, but this type really works much better for most uses, and doesn’t clog up as much as the traditional balloon whisk.

What are the kitchen tools you find indispensable, and what do you find useless?

I’ve been wanting to expand my thrift store horizons beyond the 3 or 4 nearby shops I usually visit, so when I was down in the South Bay for other reasons the other day, I went to the San Jose Savers. I have to say that my reaction was mixed. It was a lot bigger than the Savers that’s closer to me – nice because the aisles between racks weren’t so narrow – but as far as selection it was on par at best. It’s difficult to judge a thrift store’s selection based on only one visit, as it can vary so much. I was happy to see that they carried patterns, which I’ve never seen at the other Savers.

I picked up these three lovelies for a buck each. The first is a collection of sewing room accessories from the 90s, including SM cover, pincushions, sewing kits, ironing board cover, hams, etc. I really should make covers for my machines, especially since they live in the garage near the dryer and lint ends up everywhere. The second is a P/P pattern for shoulder pads and a chemise. I’ve already got another shoulder pad pattern that I’ve never used, but you never know, right?

The third is a simple dress – I’m thinking the view on the far left, sleeveless with a sweetheart neckline, would be a great summer housedress for hot weather. Maybe sometime I can donate it and someone else can find it and wear it, and wonder about me.

I’ve got a couple IJ patterns that have been marinating in my pattern stash for far too long. I think I may use this contest as motivation to finally make one of them up!

I easily get impatient with myself for the techniques I haven’t mastered yet. I think big but then I get frustrated when my results don’t turn out perfectly the first time. Hopefully I will have several more decades of sewing in my life, and taking the time to learn new skills now will pay off in the future.

With that in mind, here are my sewing goals for the next year:

• Make my blog more robust; take and post more project photos
• Shift my focus from pattern and fabric stash acquisition to stash use:
  • Winnow down my fabric to those I love and will use
  • Get rid of all patterns that are the wrong size, too complex, or require an FBA (I’m lazy and I like the ones with the FBA built-in)
• Find a bookcase/location for my sewing books in my sewing space
• Fit and make a pair of (non-elastic-waist) pants
• Finish at least one project a month
• Enter a garment and/or a quilt in the local fair
• Attend a local ASG meeting
• Explicitly schedule some time for sewing each week, and try to do a little each day

What about you?

I said this year I’d be more organized about my garden, so a year-end recap seems like a good idea. Overall I’d give my garden a C – passing but not particularly impressive. Part of that was the weather (unusually cool, wet, late spring), and part was my errors.

[Quick description of my space: our yard is quite small and the planting spaces are mostly against one fence. I have one raised bed (~3’sq.) and two narrower in-ground areas, plus containers. The yard is dominated by an apple tree; there’s also a lemon tree, both of which increasingly shade as the summer goes on. We rent, so I’m limited in what changes I can make. This year I put in a temporarly drip irrigation line through the planting areas.]

Onions (in raised bed): I only got one usable bulb out of the whole batch. They just didn’t have enough depth of soil to get very big, and they tended to rot when it rained a lot (beginning and end of the season). Doubt I’ll plant again especially since onions are cheap at the store.

Squash: all my squash and zucchini died early – too much rain in early spring is my guess.

Peppers: the first round of peppers met the same fate as the squash. I bought two more plants and put them in self-watering pots; they did OK but with the late start and the pots the fruit didn’t mature until October and never got very big.

Tomatoes: I planted 6 plants, all from the local master gardeners’ tomato and pepper sale. The three in the ground (different slicer varieties) never did that well, and were too shaded by the trees by the end of the summer. What small fruit I did get tasted good. One of the three in the raised bed died early; the other two thrived but more as plants than as tomato producers. One was a red grape, and one was a yellow pear, and both produced a lot of fruits late. The drip irrigation did save me some time and helped on the hottest days, but was far from flawless.

Swiss chard & cabbage: these were beside the house and got pretty leggy in the summer. I think they need a cooler spot, or just to be grown in the spring/fall. They’re still in the ground and hopefully they’ll winter OK.

Winter garden: I sowed some spinach and kale seeds in the raised bed after I pulled out the tomatoes, so we’ll see if anything comes up.

Next year I will: buy less tomato plants, plant them out later, and put the slicers in the best positions, skip onions and resign myself to watering by hand.

If you garden, how did your garden do this year?

Putting Up: A Year-Round Guide to Canning in the Southern Tradition, by Steve Dowdney
Dowdney is in downcountry South Carolina, and organizes his recipes by season throughout the year. He focuses on naturally acid and acidulated recipes – in other words, stuff you can can with a water bath that doesn’t require a pressure canner. His explanation of proper pH and how to check it is very handy. And the recipes are a good combination of classic and intriguing. I am definitely trying the pickled garlic when fresh garlic season comes around.

Southern Biscuits, by Nathalie Dupree
I’ve only just started the second cookbook, Southern Biscuits, but already I’m impressed with its breadth. There’s a lot of variations and clear directions. I love traditional southern baking powder biscuits – my aunt makes them like nobody’s business – but my own attempts always end up dense as a hockey puck. I can manage the buttermilk drop biscuits from America’s Test Kitchen, but although they’re good they’re not a traditional biscuit. I’m looking forward to trying some of these recipes and seeing whether my biscuit skills improve.

Best wishes to everyone for a happy and healthy holiday season.

Is there some trick to keeping lasagna neat and together, or is this a fool’s errand?

I know part of why this happens – summer projects are faster and easier, and summer fabrics are cheaper and take up less space. Plus summer fabrics are often brighter and more appealing, at least to me.

Over on Youlookfab, resident stylist Angie reminds people to shop for their dominant season – don’t buy 10 sundresses if you live in Scotland, and don’t buy lots of knee-high boots if you live in Hawaii. I’m pretty good about this when shopping for RTW, but apparently not so much when shopping for fabrics and patterns.

The Burda sellers crack me up too. There are always people listing recent issues of the magazine for ridiculously high amounts – they must subscribe and then try to resell at a profit, which I can’t imagine works more than a small percentage of the time. And then there’s the Burda envelope sellers. Most everything is mislabeled – lots of descriptions along the lines of “top and pants”, but when you look a little closer the pattern includes only one garment – and a lot of the auctions don’t have a picture of the back of the envelope. Dear sellers, 10-20 (/22) is not a plus pattern, it’s Burda’s regular size range. You’d know this if you sewed, because you’d know that sewing pattern sizes are larger than RTW sizes. And I’m still not going to pay ten bucks for it.

The whole thing reminds me a lot of the used book market. Many people are convinced that their old books are worth something, but with very rare exceptions they’re not worth more than the cost of shipping them would be. There’s just a lot of them out there, even if you’re talking about books that have been around for a while. And the internet has made the market very liquid, and driven prices down to nearly zero for almost all books. Mainstream patterns are the same way – think about how long Jo-Ann’s has been having their 99c sales and how many copies of any given Big 4 pattern were originally printed. Even if a lot of them have been used and/or recycled, there are still a lot out there and the market’s gonna push the price down as much as possible.

I did end up with one bargain, which I’ll tell you about now that the auction’s ended – a pair of Burda envelope plus-size (really plus-size) pants, fairly current but OOP, for 3 bucks total. Interestingly, the same seller seems to list a lot of Big 4 pattern bundles in German, which she offers for international shipping. I’d guess that if you could minimize your costs at the 99c sales and then minimize your shipping, you could do a decent trade shipping to Europe since their retail cost for patterns is so much higher than in the US.