Homemade soft pretzels, seriously.

I've had a busy last couple weeks, with very little down time for all my favorite home activities like cooking and sewing. So this morning, instead of getting work done that needs doing, I used a free hour to make soft pretzels from scratch! I've been wanting to do this for several months now, so perhaps its best just to go and do it so I can remove that desire from my brain and make space for other things. I used Alton Brown's pretzel recipe since it had such great reviews, and because he always seems to know what he's doing. Let me tell you, they turned out great, and actually didn't require as much effort and time as you might guess. They came out of the oven about an hour ago, and I've already had three... I didn't use pretzel salt on these, since I always pick it off anyway. I instead sprinkled regular salt over the top, which worked out quite well. The lovely picture above is brought to you in part by my new camera. So far I'm impressed!

Vintage Pattern Thursday

In this week's edition:
Interesting closures....

Bow tied cardigan from 1934

Embellished buttons from 1936

Cutest belt ever from 1935

...and fantastic backdrops.

Elegant sailing in 1934

Sweetness

If anyone has contemplated removing high fructose corn syrup from their diet, and needs an extra push, check out this article. Do I think this is alarming? Perhaps slightly, though it doesn't sound wide-spread enough to really get freaked out about. Still, I've been thinking about avoiding this ingredient for some time now. No time like the present!

This week in food

Perhaps you've figured out by now that I'm a bit obsessed with food and creating things. This week I tried out three new recipes, listed below in order of preference:

Chile Relleno Casserole

This was seriously good. I've never made real chile rellenos, and only started to eat them about a year ago. This recipe captures the essence of the dish, but modifies it so that rather than battering and frying the stuffed chiles, you instead bake them in yummy fluffy eggy goodness. I omitted the chorizo, and instead stuffed the chiles with a combination of cheddar jack and feta cheese. The feta added a really nice flavor and a less melty texture to the stuffing. This will be made again many times over.

Quinoa Vegetable Paella
If you aren't yet familiar with quinoa, I would recommend checking it out. It is similar to cous cous, only it contains quite a lot of protein. Plus it's really fun to eat. This recipe would be a great way to try quinoa for the first time. It's chock full of veggies, very healthy and tasty. If I were to make this again, I would probably kick up the spices a bit, since I tend to like flavorful food. This dish keeps with the traditional flavor of Spanish paella, which tends to be more subtle in taste.

Orange Berry Muffins
I happened to notice a copy of Dorie Greenspan's celebrated cookbook Baking: From My Home to Yours while visiting my mom the other day. Having read a lot of blog entries from Tuesdays with Dorie, I've been coveting this book for a while, and so borrowed it for the time being. It is chock full of some great recipes, many of which I can hardly wait to try out. Since I was expecting a couple house guests this weekend, I thought it would be great to make some muffins that could be munched on at any time. The orange blueberry muffins caught my eye, and so I whipped these up late Thursday. The muffins have a mild orange flavor, and are subtly sweet. I would rate these as a solidly good muffin. They don't bowl me over, and I don't find myself eating ten at a time, but they are certainly a pleasant thing to eat in the morning.

Vintage Pattern Thursday

I bought a whole pattern book for a sweater similar to the one above. I still haven't made it, and actually have kind of a love/hate relationship with the look of it. It's certainly compelling somehow. This particular pattern book has some very interesting styling choices.

Speaking of which, I've seen the image below several times, and it always makes me do a double take.


Apparently this coat comes in sizes both for yourself and your mini-self. Gotta love those early photoshop attempts!

Project bridesmaid: unconcsious inspiration

I came across this Vince dress on net-a-porter and noticed that it has nearly the same fabric I purchased at joann! Mine has all these tonal yellow dots applied to the fabric--though in a zig-zag pattern. Cute stuff!

I think I'm getting the hang of this

I've been in a sewing frenzy since returning from my holiday break, and I've made more progress on my sewing skills than the past couple years combined! Isn't it great when all of a sudden you finally start to get something?

This weekend I took a long wrap skirt that I bought in India and turned it into an adorable dress. The wrap skirt was perfectly nice, but I haven't worn it in years, as long skirts aren't really my thing, and wrap skirts make me nervous. It also had a prominent tear on the front that I did a terrible job mending. The fabric is this great handmade, hand printed fabric from a store called FabIndia. If you are ever in India, I'd highly recommend finding on of their stores. The fabric is beautiful, and the clothes they make are catered both to Indian and Western tastes.

The skirt, before.

As I mentioned before, I recently chose New Look 6824 as my 'it' dress. My idea was to really work on this one pattern to find the perfect fit. I started out by doing some pre-cutting work. I measured myself very carefully, then loosened the tape measure at each location to figure out how much ease I liked at each location. I made sure to move around during this process to get a good idea of the minimum ease necessary. I then took the tape measure to the pattern pieces and carefully calculated the finished garment measurements at the bust, waist, and hip for each size in my ballpark. This took a while, but was totally worth it. I ended up having to cobble together three different sizes at four locations, and added 5/8" to the length of the bodice. This clearly demonstrated to me that going by the finished bust measurement just won't cut it. I was a bit unsure of my frankenstein pattern adjustments, but honestly I couldn't be happier with the finished result:

New Look 6824 with straight skirt, no sleeves, and soft small cowl collar.
(Click any image to enlarge)

I think this dress came out so cute--it's very classy, yet has a certain vintage and lively quality to it. Also, I wanted to thank the nice ladies who left comments on my last dress post about invisible zippers. Although I've been using invisible zippers this whole time, I never knew I was installing them wrong. This goes to prove that it's always a good idea to show detailed shots of your shoddy work in public for others to comment on. Perhaps you'll learn something very very useful! I came across this wonderful invisible zipper tutorial, and as a result have the best looking zipper I've ever installed. I also experimented with making a full lining for this dress. It was very experimental, and worked better in some locations than in others, but I'm happy I did it. Perhaps if I read a bit more about linings I'll be able to improve this skill as well.

My sewing confidence is improving dramatically. I'm loving this.