Summer Skirt

Spending all summer teaching kids different crafts had made me kinda miss the whole thing myself, so when a lady from my church had asked me to teach her daughter how to sew it gave me an urge to make a couple of things for myself. I'd had this chevron cotton fabric for a while and so I decided to take a stab at making myself a skirt.

One thing I will say is that sewing is not like riding a bike. You don't just remember everything you've been taught as soon as you jump back in-- or at least I don't. This skirt probably took me three weeks to complete! Partially because with working as a nanny there are a lot of weekends, afternoons and evenings spent not at home. Not that I mind it, but it does mean you have to stick to more portable hobbies and leave the sewing machine at home. So whenever I got the chance, I'd spend an hour or so relearning how to put in a gathering stitch, or sew a buttonhole, and ask myself why I don't do this more often so that I have better practice. But I will say that despite the small frustrations it was really fun and made me want to make a few more, so that might be my hobby of choice for the autumn. And I taught myself (semi-successfully) how to put in a zipper, and hem my own skirt, two things I'd never done before.

I started off my measuring a skirt I'd made a few years ago, and patterning the new one off of that. I knew I wanted it a bit longer, which I later found out meant I wouldn't be able to add the big in-seam pockets the last skirt had, since I bout the same amount of fabric I had bought for the first skirt, but I think it turned out pretty well none the less. And I'm hoping to run to the craft store in the next few weeks and see if I can pick up a bit more and add some top pockets instead of inseam ones.

I measured out the length I wanted the skirt, plus some seam allowance, and cut out a front and back panel. I then cut out a waistband, which is when I realized I wouldn't have extra fabric for the pockets, as I had to cut two strips for the waist band that I attached to make the full circumference of my waist. This is where I screwed up a bit.

I had remembered to add a seam allowance to the length of the skirt, but not to the waistband. My original plan was to have a two inch waist band which meant that I would need five inches so that I could fold it over, two inches in front, two inches in back, and have a half an inch on both sides for seam allowance. Unfortunately I only cut two inches, which meant that it ended up a little less than an inch in height once it was attached to the skirt. I hadn't done sewing math in a long time, and completely forgot to ass for seam allowance!

 Still I pressed on. The first thing I stitched was the two panels for the skirt. I sewed them together leaving about five or six inches at the top on one side to add a zipper and then started my gathering stitch at the waist, making a line along the edge of the fabric and then pulling the thread to gather the fabric.

 This was when I realized I didn't make my waistband wide enough and in order for me to add it o I was going to have to add extra fabric, or cut a new waistband from the skirt's length. It was also lie two in the morning when I got to this point and so I went to bed and left it to be planned out another day.

And then I got busy, and the skirt sat for a few days until I figured out something to do. It wasn't my first choice but I decided to go ahead and sew two strips of fabric together as a way of making the waistband taller. Then two more in the same way, and attaching all four together to make the waistband wider. It all seemed like so many extra steps, but gave me a much clearer way to fix the mess I had made and a couple Do's and Don't's for the next time! Because it had been so long since I had done this, and I was doing all of it from memory instead of from a pattern or tutorial, I made a ton of mistakes, but I think this was ultimately a lesson on persistence. I've worn this skirt so much since I finished it, and it bothers me that it practically took me a month to finish, when it was really quite simple, and I was just adding extra steps for myself that I didn't need to do! Don't you just hate it when you're basically standing in your own way to accomplish something?



 With a fresh perspective on the situation I forged ahead. I attached the waistband to the skirt, and was happily surprised that when I tried on the skirt it wasn't too big, or too small but actually fit my waist pretty well.

 I then had a big challenge to face which was to add a zipper. I questioned why I chose this moment to learn to put a zipper in, as the day I was working on it happened to be my sister's birthday and I had hoped to wear the skirt to her party that evening. I watched about 15 tutorials, and then kind of winged it when it came to the zipper. And of course took no photo evidence of the process, but I have a few of the finished product. Basically what I did was attach the zipper using pins, and then instead of using the zipper foot on my machine, I used the regular foot, and sewed up, over, and then up again in a "U" shape around the teeth, and then sewed it into the waistband.

It was then that I realized I had only two steps left! Angels sang as I attached my button-hole foot... and my machine stopped working. I could not figure out why it was only stitching one side of the button hole and not the other three needed. A few days of reading the manual and changing the settings, and I realized that for this sized waistband I was using too big of a button, and switching to a smaller one worked. I felt ridiculous that it was that simple.

The next day I measured from my waist to where I wanted the skirt to end, adding seam allowance (because I learned my lesson from the waistband), and then I decided to do something I actually really liked. When putting in the hem I stitched around at the base of the fold all the way around to secure the fabric, and then stitched all the way around at the edge of the fabric creating a one inch gap between the two seams. I think it actually created a cool effect on the end and made the hem look really polished. I think I'm going to do this with all of my hems from now on. It just looks so good!

 Lastly I learned to machine stitch a button on and I will never hand sew one again (I hate hand sewing buttons)! And I hand stitched a hook and eye into the waistband to secure it more easily. I am always having trouble keeping my zippers up in some of my skirts that I do this to all of them now. It really keeps it intact.

All in all I think it came out really well. There were a lot of mistakes along the way, but I really love this skirt and I know I'll get a lot of use out of it!

~Delaney

Apricots: How I've Been Spending My Summer

Okay ladies and gentlemen, it has been far too long since I've done anything with this here blog. Not for lack of wanting to but for lack of time/lack of ideas/increasing amounts of the soul-sucking-anxiety-that-nothing-really-matters-and-this-is-all-just-meaningless 😆 (You guys I am loving the discovery that you can insert emojis into these posts).

Anyway I've genuinely been thinking a lot about the kind of content I want out here, so much so that I've lost track of actually doing it. I think that an issue that can arise when you look at social media and content creators is that if you're a small content creator or really just doing this for the fun of it (or really because why the hell not 🤷[like me]), you forget that there is no audience to impress. Don't get me wrong, if you do read this and you enjoy it, I really do appreciate you. But I get this feeling that if I am going to do something I have to throw my heart and soul into it and that's just not true. Yes if you have something where you want to progress, like education or your career, then you should definitely do that with all the passion and hard work that you can muster so that you can succeed, but that being said success isn't the same for everyone. Success for someone may be views and comments on a video or web page, but I think for me, right now, it's just doing something and producing a product on a regular basis. To stop procrastinating and just do something that I want to do regardless of the comments other people say.

So that was my long winded way of saying I made apricot fruit leather, and pie. and there's probably going to be a lot of apricot themed things this summer (like maybe jam?), because our tree is fruiting like crazy! It's also me saying you might see me posting here more often (I'm trying). But let's get on to the goodness.

The first thing I did was, obviously, pick all the fresh apricots from our tree. Our tortoise, Slim, loved this! My brother came outside and would just shake the tree and a lot of the really ripe ones would just fall to the ground and then I would go and pick them up. Slim has been eating the ones off the ground like crazy and so he fancied it a game to see how many he could eat before I collected them. Hissing at me and grounding his hind legs every time I'd pick up one of the ones he had his eye on. He was actually pretty angry that my brother and I were out there stealing all his snacks! We had an apricot tree at the old house and I remember I made a really excellent apricot pie, but I stupidly never kept the recipe and I don't remember Slim being so into the apricots, bus sure enough he was out there at the ready to help consume them.

So we collected about half of one large grocery bag, and I went to work washing, pitting and quartering the apricots I ended up having enough for one pie plus two gallon zip lock bags which I froze.

For the pie I just made a simple crust and followed a recipe online that basically said to add the quartered apricots in a bowl with sugar, cinnamon, clove, and nutmeg and toss. Then pour into pie pan and cover with the top layer of crust.
The one thing I did do that I wish I hadn't was that I egg washed the crust and sprinkled sugar on the top crust before baking so it came out a little more black than I had hoped but the crust wasn't hared and tasted perfectly fine.

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Fresh apricot pie! 😋 . . . . . . . . . . #coffeecakebooks #blogger #baker #freshpie #pie #summerbakes #sumerpie #cuteaspie

A post shared by Delaney Linnea Barrett (@coffeecakebooks) on Jul 1, 2019 at 9:06pm PDT

After that I was on a roll! I had a ton of apricots and nothing to do with them, so I started looking up recipes. I thought about making jam but with the limited amount of people in my house who actually like the taste of apricots and the fact that we are somehow running out of canning jars, despite the fact that we haven't had to buy any in years. I had to go with plan B.

Years ago my mom bought a dehydrator she found somewhere and it didn't have a manual. she managed to use it to make some apple chips once, with the intention of learning more about the machine, but we never got around to it. So I looked up the manual and another recipe and I was on my way. So after a bit of trial and error I ended up with this recipe.

• 2 cups Pitted, Quartered Apricots
• 1/4 cup Honey/Sugar
• 1 tsp. Cinnamon
• 1/4 tsp. Clove
• 1/4 tsp. Nutmeg

Combine all ingredients into a food processor and puree until smooth, paying close attention to the chunks of apricot. All the recipes differed on whether they used honey or sugar, I tried one batch with each and determined that I liked the honey batch better. the sugar batch was grainier and much sweeter.

Once smooth spread mixture onto a fruit leather tray for a dehydrator, and set the dehydrator for Fruit setting. Alternately you can spread it onto a baking tray with a silpat or wax paper and bake in the oven at about 150F until dry. The recipes I found were all for the oven so I kind of did some guess work. I think over all this stuff was in the dehydrator for about 18-24 hours. he first batch too as little as 12 but came out brittle and hard to peel from the tray. It was way too thin.

With the second batch I filled the trays all the way to the top and gently placed them into the dehydrator. This was the batch that took about 24 hours, but It was also my best batch. It ended up coming out really nice and even, incredibly shiny, and chewy but able to tear easily.

The next issue I had with the recipe was actually with the portions per drying, and the shape itself. Although this dehydrator works great, we currently only have two of the trays for making the fruit leather. all the other trays are the regular drying racks you place solids onto, and they have holes and mesh for aeration. This is an easy fix of an obstacle as Amazon sells them in a 2 pack for $7.99 but still it slowed me down since I ended up with a good gallon and a half of puree.

The thing I learned about this process is it really is just a waiting game. In order to dry all the puree it took about 7-9 days. The tricky park was knowing the difference between a sticky top because the dehydrator is so hot or a sticky top because the batter isn't quite firmed. I did have to take a few out at the beginning and let them cool only to see that they were in fact still a little mushy and set them back in the dehydrator again. But all that being said, it was a pretty successful attempt at my first dehydrator fruit leather and the first time I made fruit leather in general since about 10th grade.

To store fruit leather I decided to basically make my own Fruit Roll-Ups with some wax paper, which was better in theory. The trays were donut shaped so  cutting the into strips made them a but uneven, but I worked with what I had and I think they turned out pretty good.

I tried two different methods for rolling the fruit leather. The first was to cut it into strips and lay them out onto the saran wrap and roll them up. Although you get more even strip s with this method, it's time consuming and a but more wasteful with the saran wrap. the second method was to roll the whole thing into the saran wrap and then cut it into "logs" essentially. The issue with this was that whether I used a knife or kitchen scissors it was pretty thick, and it not only left the sides exposed to dry but you would have to be mindful of picking the plastic out of the roll as you ate it. For this reason I think that baking it is a lot easier. If you bake it batter in the oven already spread out on the parchment paper it' not only easier to roll it's easier to cut, because you can cut it warm, rather than waiting for it to cool on the trays like I had to. But I do believe that the dehydrator makes a nice thin, and crisp leather, and I believe it takes less time ( not to mention it's on the counter so it doesn't render your oven useless for 6 hours). But I do have to say that having done this both ways there is no clear winner to me: oven or dehydrator. That being said I believe the last time I made oven baked fruit leather it was a berry and dried much faster because it was thinner and and a bit more dry going in.

But that could also be in perspective that I did it during a full day of 4-H meetings so the time wasn't spent waiting impatiently.

But all in all it was a nice little expiriment, and I really did like the flavor that came out. It's still apricot but with the cinnamon and nutmeg it almost has a pumpkin flavor to it, which gave me some good ideas for the fall, so you might see a theme coming up later in the year.

I'll leave you with the last few pictures of my attempts at rolling the leather. again I think the best decision is to cut the strips first but I will say one tip is to fold about n inch of the wrap over the edge of the strips before you roll, and doing a few a time works best if you have short fingers like I do.














But It was an enjoyable experience. Maybe I'll try again if we get another harvest of apricots and try and focus on keeping it thick and not adding too muck spiced to overpower the fruit flavor.

I also think we might have a fig tree in the backyard so making some fig rolls as well as fig leather would be a fun test. But all in all I'm excited to do some more stuff with this dehydrator. Looking in the manual I found recipes for dried fruit, dried veggies and even some tips on making your own spices and seasoned nuts. who knows maybe I'll get brave enough to make beef jerky! ~Delaney