just be.

clean-plate cleanse, days 5 and 6

feeling pretty crappy yesterday and this afternoon. like, as bad as i did on some of my sickest days. really bad cramps, lots of pain, clutching my tummy, doubled over, curled around a pillow as much as possible. it's the fault of the delicious smoothie from yesterday, i believe; specifically, the cultured coconut milk. at least, that's my suspicion. it has a variety of ingredients that i hadn't had yet during this cleanse, including carrageenan and guar gum, and nothing else i've had seems a likely culprit. anyway, so sick tonight that i came home from uke group before it even started. so sick during the day yesterday and today that i've spent most of them in bed in a fetal position wallowing in self-pity and self-loathing. okay, not wallowing in either of those things, just hating my GI tract. i haven't wanted to eat pretty much anything, either. blergh.

anyway, here's hoping that whatever it is gets itself out of my system soon, because i was feeling pretty good before that. and, it is worth noting, i haven't had a migraine since i started the cleanse. actually since a couple of days before that, i think, after i last ate dairy, if i'm not mistaken. which is freaking AWESOME. never before have i suspected that i had a food trigger for migraine. if this work with leah does nothing but uncover what foods i need to avoid to stop having migraines, it'll be worth every second and every penny.

oh. yeah. zero progress on the skirt. barely up for working, which involves sitting and working on my laptop, let alone anything else. gathered ruffle on the muslin is the next task in the project, and i'll be doing that for the first time, so i'm saving that for saturday morning, i think, when i'm feeling better and starting fresh. i hope.

clean-plate cleanse, day 4

yesterday was not my favorite day of food. these are things i learned:

1. broccoli is not a good substitute for greens in a smoothie. unless you want to drink broccoli-flavored goo. i tried really hard--i like all the ingredients in this smoothie, but together they made me gag. literally. i drank two large sips before having to admit defeat. so no greens in the morning for me, and that smoothie also had my flax seed for the day.

2. watercress is not as tasty with quinoa and adzuki beans, oil and vinegar, and salt and pepper as kale is. i like watercress, but i guess i usually have it as part of a salad with other greens? i don't know. it just wasn't good.

3. a fly stubbornly insisting that it is going to share that lunch with you can really spoil your appetite.

4. disliking breakfast and lunch to the point of not being able to stomach them makes for kind of a hungry day.

5. hilary's veggie bites for dinner can make up for a lot of food sadness. very satisfying and yummy, kind of like little hush puppies.

6. i'm going to have to either shop more frequently or buy frozen greens. fresh greens in the volume that i'm having to buy and eat them don't last a whole week.

7. someone needs to make a plant-centered refrigerator. huge crisper drawers, maybe root-vegetable drawers. built for this kind of eating. our fridge is kind of a chaotic mishmash at the moment.

today is already miles better. still the same quinoa breakfast thing is lasting me all week, but this morning's green smoothie is a berry smoothie, and it is YUMMY. of course, i think that some of that is because of the fact that the cultured coconut milk i bought is vanilla flavored and therefore has things in it that i haven't been eating recently, but i do not even care. it is so sweet and creamy and good. i have about five cups of it to drink today, and that is fine with me. later i'm planning to make either a soup with sweet potatoes or just eat a sweet potato all by its own self. friday, leah comes over to teach me to cook with some new-to-me ingredients, including miso, millet, buckwheat groats, and possibly avocado (blech). i'm trying to be open to trying new things, but i am a picky special snowflake supertaster, and that's difficult.

also preparing for a couple of meals out next week, which will be interesting while on the cleanse. dinner at root 174 (already left a message for the chef to talk about my restrictions) and lunch at the cafe at the frick (spoke with someone there last week about them--this will probably just be greens and oil and vinegar and salt and pepper, which is fine).

no progress on the skirt yesterday. work!

clean-plate cleanse, day 3

blogging so much because my life is so fascinating lately! right? yeah, don't answer that. really it's just because there are a lot of Things going on, lots of changes and new projects, that i'm photographing (well, if you can call them "photographs") and want to remember later.

so.

here is this morning's not-very-tasty-but-good-for-me-so-i-finished-it-anyway spinach juice thing:

a lovely color of green and not terrible tasting but definitely not something i'm going to look forward to for the next 18 days or whatever it is. but good for me! and i like to do things that are good for me.

also today i got most of the way through the muslin for my laura skirt. i'd have finished the muslin and maybe even gotten the real fabric cut out if it hadn't been for those meddling kids. i mean if i hadn't needed to come upstairs to look up how to do gathering stitches. that's a thing that cal patch thought i knew, which i don't. i mean, i know about them like i know about driving stick shift: i get it in theory but god help me if i try to put it into practice. at least i can't kill anybody with gathering stitches (as far as i know). anyway, progress shots:

first task of the day was to sew together the ends of the yokes (one outside yoke and one facing yoke). but, being the super sleuth that i am, i noticed immediately that the ends of my front and back yoke pieces weren't the same depth, which would look funny. so i marked and trimmed off half an inch from the bottom of the back yoke pieces and the corresponding pattern piece.

have i mentioned that i really love my rotary cutter? love it. it's magical.

next task was to sew the outside yoke pieces to the upper edge of the skirt pieces. i made this more difficult than it needed to be because i started out pinning the wrong edge of the yoke pieces to the skirt edge, but i figured it out before i did any sewing. also i drew no blood, so that's a plus. i didn't do a terrible job, but i did have a tiny unintended dart

where i failed to ease the curves together. this task involves sewing together two curves that are mirror images of one another, which is trickier than it sounds, at least for a novice like me. 

i also accidentally sewed the skirt seam allowance closed

which is *definitely* something that i would take out and redo if this were the real skirt. on the muslin, i'm not sweating it, but i did take photos of my mistakes so i'd remember and learn from them.

the next task was to sew the yoke facing to the outside yoke, which was relatively untraumatic. so no photos of that. bonus: still no blood.

spoiler alert: no blood drawn all day. i'm still awake for another five hours or so, but i don't expect to be handling any sharp objects. so unless jack-jack plays roughly with me between now and then, probably i won't have bled on anything. and that's a pretty good day, in my book.

but i digress: after sewing the outside yoke to the skirt and the yoke facings to the outside yoke, then it's time to flip the facings to the inside and attach them. this covers the seam that joins the outside yoke to the skirt and adds some stability at the waist. i think. anyway, this part was fun, but i still managed to do a not-very-good job.

i skipped the basting and went straight from pinning (shown here) to sewing. that's mainly because basting falls into the same category as driving stick shift and sewing gathering stitches. so i'll be looking that up tonight, too. (really? she wants me to pull out a hand needle and thread for this part? am i in prehistoric times or something?)

i did okay with this part. after the pinning (and, in theory or if you're a Good Sewist, the basting), you edge stitch the waist and the yoke part you just pinned. you're doing it from the public side of the skirt, which means that you can't see all the pinning you just did or the way the folded yoke facing meets the seam. which is *probably* why she wanted me to baste that beforehand.

whatever. i do what i want.

(i know that at least one friend is laughing right now because she knows that i am a goody two shoes who follows the rules. i do feel guilty as hell about it, if that helps. i'll be doing it correctly for the real skirt.)

so. anyway. i didn't screw it up too badly, but i sewed a dart down in the wrong direction (again, something i'd fix in the real fabric but not an issue for the muslin):

but overall it's not awful.

and, to finish the seams, i tried a couple of the stitches on my machine:

(insert "I have no idea what I'm doing" meme here.)

the zigzag stitch is the one i'll try to use, but wider and more carefully, i think. no idea what the other one is. go home, sewing machine; you're drunk.

so at the end of the day, this is what i have:

front of skirt, with ruffle piece waiting to be sewn on, and

back of skirt. the ruffle is one strip of fabric, 50 percent longer than the hem sweep plus seam allowances, sewn into a circle. now i just have to figure out the gathering business and attach it. and then i get to work on the real skirt! 

i rewarded myself for my productive afternoon with a yummy dinner of quinoa, adzuki beans, kale, and pineapple-mango salsa.

(the quinoa and beans are under there, i swear.) and i'll have an apple later with some almond butter. the quinoa was already cooked from day 1 breakfast, and the beans already rinsed from the day 1 smoothie, so this was super easy to throw together. nommy.

oh, and my PSA of the day: turn on the air conditioning if it's hot. i've been sewing in our dining room, which is on the first floor and therefore not air conditioned, and i was cranky and woozy and tired all day yesterday. today, i flipped on the room air conditioner in there and was happy as a clam. a sew-y little clam.

nommy meals

i forgot to mention the very yummy lunch i had on the first day of the cleanse. lunch every day is supposed to be brown rice or quinoa, beans, and greens, and then a piece of fruit. day 1 i piled a bowl full of some of the cooked quinoa from that morning's breakfast, some of the adzuki beans from the smoothie, a couple of leaves of kale, salt, pepper, olive oil, and apple-cider vinegar, warmed it for about 45 seconds in the microwave, and ate. really good and really filling.

over the course of the day, i ate an entire bunch of kale. and i gotta say, i felt too full to eat anything else by late afternoon. not bloated, just...like i could feel the food way up at the tippy top of my GI tract. i didn't want to eat on day 2 (yesterday) and ate pretty little, and i felt pretty lousy. just very little energy and still uncomfortably full. more in than out, if you will. so today (day 3), i'm really focusing on staying hydrated and following my instructions (i haven't eaten anything NOT on the list, but i haven't eaten all the things i'm supposed to).

anyway, the good news is that everything has been pretty yummy, except this morning's drink. every day, i'm supposed to drink a blend of two big handfuls of greens, a whole peeled lemon, flax seeds, magnesium powder, and ice water. (the powder and seeds don't have to be in this drink, but i'm supposed to have those every day, too, so i figured i'd just blend it all together.) not my favorite beverage. not terrible, but not my favorite. but it's just one drink, and it's just 21 days. and most of the days since i started eating more cleanly (which is about three weeks), i've felt much better than before. much milder and fewer GI symptoms and way fewer and less severe migraines. so the regular food in the house—the real bagels and kettle corn, for instance—is not tempting at all.

i am working on my skirt, still. got through the first seam of the muslin yesterday and tried out a couple of methods of seam finishing. both were pretty disastrous, but i think i have a zigzag stitch on my machine (task for today: dig up the manual, srsly) that will work better and more easily. i'm trying hard not to want a serger.