No nuts

A nice, thick envelope arrived yesterday from my mom (she lives in Seattle); she sent me all of her Folkwear patterns. I don't think she ever used any of them which is understandable -- they are wonderful but complex. I always, always loved this coat pattern and was delighted that my mom still had it. The pattern is given so that you can make all the quilted pieces yourself and then construct the coat, OR you can use pre-quilted fabric. So my plan is to be on the hunt for a nice, pre-quilted, on-sale fabric and as a reward (?) for summer's worth of WIP completions I will see about making this coat come fall. It occurs to me that if a woman with my mom's depth of sewing expertise never tackled one of these patterns then it may be beyond foolish for me to attempt it, but I guess that's just the kind of fool I am.

Speaking of foolish, I ran in to all kinds of problems with the blouse I was working on yesterday. (Darts. I knew I should have just ignored them -- my figure is one that does not require darts -- and they were my undoing. That and again with the Simplicity pattern instructions that are poorly written/devised.) I keep telling myself that I need to look on this as a learning experience, that I need to have the kind of patience and willingness to fail that I am always talking to Dean about (he expects to be able to do everything perfectly the first time out -- wonder who he gets that from?). This could be the first time I just trash a project and move on.

Although I'm not finding specifics about recycled content in fleece (polar fleece), I'm finding a lot of results that indicate that it does contain recycled materials. I wanted to find something that said, for example, that 250 plastic soda bottles go into every fleece jacket, or whatever, but no luck so far. The Patagonia web site allows you to view products by those that contain recycled materials, and they encourage you to recycle all clothing (even underwear!) rather than throw it out. The underwear thing reminded me that I read once that places like Salvation Army and Goodwill that take donations of used clothing will take ANY clothing because what they can't sell in their stores they can sell in bulk to recyclers -- I have to verify that.

Meanwhile, muffins. The banana muffins yesterday were a big success (that means Dean likes them, although I was forbidden from including the nuts) and so here's the recipe. I need to find out how to convert US measures and terms to those that would make sense to my friends overseas -- anyone know an easy way to do this?