Bandwagon - Stitch Fix version

I read about Stitch Fix online a while ago, but didn't think any more about it.  Then, a few weeks ago, a friend posted about her shipment on Facebook and I realized that real people actually use the service.  And they like it. I've been thinking about trying to turn my wardrobe a bit away from comfy cotton laying tees and cardigans towards a bit more professional attire with some blouses, etc.  I've had a bit of a hard time, partly because I don't go shopping all that often, and partly because when I do go shopping, I totally gravitate towards little cotton tees, with the occasional dress, and an even rarer jacket with fun details. 

So, long story short, I signed up for a Stitch Fix shipment and got it on Wednesday.  I have three days to try them on, decide what I'm keeping, and mail back what I don't want.

And they send you a little style card with recommendations on how to wear your items.

Please excuse my open closet in the background in all these pictures.... apparently I wasn't thinking about posting photos when they were taken...


Collective Concepts - McKinley Tribal Printed Short Sleeve Blouse - $68

I like the pattern, but man. This is one of those loose flowy blouses that are in right now. While I can get behind the flowy, the flowy combined with the sleeves and the high neck... Nope. Not for me. 

Status: Returned.



Splendid - Ruben Tab Sleeve Open Cardigan - $78

I actually like the blouse better with the cardi over it. This is your basic long open cardigan. It's really soft cotton, and I dig the coral color. How much I have in my closet to go with it though.... I'll have to check.  On the docket for tonight. But is it worth a whopping $78???

Status: Debating.

AV Max - Hammond Clover Stud Earrings - 38

Nope.  $38 dollars for earrings, and studs at that. I normally wear drop earrings due to my earlobe size, and I think I could find silver studs I like just at much for half the price at the Rack.

Status: Returned.

41Hawthorn - Madox Tribal Print Fit and Flare Dress - $68

Hello, well fitting dress. It fits like it was meant to be. And with all the baby showers and bridal showers coming up? Calling this one a win.

The dress is pink and blue.  Look how well the coral cardi goes!

Status: Kept.




Pink Martini - Moises Colorblock Sleeveless Dress - $68

This dress is thin stretchy cotton, with a polyester skirt. Obviously the top is really thin and see through (hello black bra). It's cute. But... I kind of feel like the tulip skirt makes my bottom half look even bigger than normal. If the dang tissue paper wasn't in the way....

Maybe if I had a lil jacket over it? I don't know if that would mask the balloon butt syndrome though.

The man liked it. He brought up all the upcoming showers that will require dresses. Not sure if it's worth the $68 though.

Status: Debating, but will probably go back.


If I didn't like any of them, I could return them all and just be out of the $20 styling fee, but I think I'll keep at least the tribal dress, and maybe even the cardi if I can convince myself it's worth it.

If you decide to try it, use my link and I'll get a $25 referral credit!!

Soil Mix

Home Depot is having their "Spring Black Friday" sale all week.  That doesn't necessarily mean that what I wanted was on sale, but it does mean that I keep hearing ads and it really motivated me to go purchase the soil mix for my raised beds.

My math is a little sketchy, but the beds are 4 feet by 4 feet.  The boxes are 12 inches tall, but after positioning and an attempt at leveling, they are more like 6-10 inches deep.  Under the assumption that both beds were 6 inches deep, we would need 4' x 4' x 0.5' times two.  So 16 cubic feet of fill.

The Square Foot Gardening manual says to use 1/3 vermiculite, 1/3 peat moss, and 1/3 compost. For my beds, that would mean 5.3 cubic feet each. Right? Right.

Well, that's not quite what we bought.  There was some discussion and little debate about what we really needed to fill the beds.  Some of it was regarding the math, and some what about how deep the beds would be, etc. Our final tally included:

- 4 - 2 cubic foot bags of compost from one manufacturer
- 2 - 1 cubic foot bags of compost from another manufacturer (Cedar Grove, the place that processes Seattle's yard waste)
- 2 - 2 cubic foot bags of vermiculite
- 3 - 3 cubic foot bags of peat moss

How our math came out to mean that 10 cubic feet of compost, 4 cubic feet of vermiculite, and 9 cubic feet of peat moss was the right amount? I have no idea. But that's what we came home with.

It was 70 degrees out in Seattle yesterday, so I declared it yard work day. We managed to get both beds in their final locations and mostly level.  Then I pulled out the tarp and we got to mixing bags of soil.  So far, into each bed went 1 bag of 2 cu. ft. compost, 1 bag of 1 cu.ft. compost, 1 bag of peat moss, and 1/2 a bag of vermiculite.  Before adding water, that about filled one bed and was a little low on the other. 

Then we brought out the hoses.  Which, of course, meant finding hoses, checking to make sure they worked, and rinsing out all of the soap (??!?!) that was in one of them, before we could actually spray the soil mix.  I gave them both a good spray, mixed them up a bit, gave a bit more spray, and then let them sit over night.  It's supposed to rain the next few days, so on Thursday when it's sunny again I can top off both beds and start planting!

Next up on my list are a planting plan, creating a grid for square foot gardening, and researching mosquito repelling plants and how to attract animals and bugs that eat mosquitoes. Last nights mosquitoes were at LEAST the size of a nickel!

Bed Construction

I came home from a girls weekend to find a neat stack of cedar 2x6s cut to 4 foot lengths and a 2x2 sitting next to it, ready to be cut to 12 inch lengths for the bed corners. 

Construction was a a tad sketchy, simply due to the lack of a level spot in our backyard to work on. But we made it work, using the first completed box as a staging area for the second.

We moved them to the garden area last night, just as the sun was setting.

My project for tonight, in the 65 degree weather (!!) I hope to figure out their positions and get the boxes leveled so I can fill them and put some seeds in the ground.

You'll notice we propped up the fence. This post is completed rotted through and can't support itself. Another post behind the rhodie is leaning and also got some support.

I'm going to attempt to follow the square foot gardening guidelines for filling my beds: 1/3 vermiculite, 1/3 peat moss, and 1/3 compost. However, the guidelines suggest only 6 inch deep beds, so HALF of what these guys are.  I probably will only fill them 8-10 inches deep in order to keep costs down. I guess that if I want to expand in the future, I could always split one of the beds into two 4'x4'x6" beds for shallow rooted veggies, and keep the other one a full 12" bed for the deeper stuff.

My tomato seeds all sprouted over the weekend. The peppers should soon follow. Only one romaine seed is up; looks like it's time to toss those seeds. Maybe I'll scatter them over a couple of squares in the bed once they get filled as a test.

The Beginning of Beds

It's beginning to feel like spring time in Seattle. I'm been furtively trying to get spring clean up done in the yard between rain showers.  Over a month ago we decided to tackle the english ivy growing up our doug firs out front and cut all of the stems near the ground and started pulling them off the trees.  Those plants are super resilient, because the leaves are just now starting to turn yellow and droop. Maybe once we stop getting an inch of rain per week they'll come off the trees easier.

I just finished my spring pruning. I started two weeks ago and got the blueberries, one of the roses, the hydrangea, and the forsythia.  Oops! The Master Gardner informed me I was supposed to wait until AFTER the flowering shrubs bloomed to prune.  Apparently I got over excited when I was cleaning up the side yard. But in my defense, the forsythia looked like it hadn't been pruned in years and years and really needed some of that dead wood cut out..... maybe.

I only got one of the roses the first time around due to the waning light, but last night I failed to finish pruning the big rose for the second time. I would say that this rose has been neglected, but it looks like someone tried to take care of it, but had no idea what they were doing. It's two stories tall!! Someone pruned it to grow straight up, and then tied the stalks to the house so they wouldn't fall over into the yard. There are several branches that are dead in the middle of the knot. I did what I could with my two foot step stool, but couldn't reach the top, oh, five feet of the rose.  Add rose pruning to the list of reasons why we need an 8 foot step ladder!

The seed starting has begun!! After getting the grow light set up in the shop room, I started three kinds of kale, broccoli, leeks, romaine lettuce, basil, lemon balm, and marigolds two weeks ago. All but the lettuce have spouted - Maybe the seeds were old? Just yesterday I started my tomatoes and peppers. I knew I needed to cut back this year, so I only started three sungolds (one for Sarah), two nova, one indigo rose, two purple calabash, two saucey, two jalapeno peppers, and two anaheim peppers. Is 10 tomatoes really cutting back? I'm conveniently not remembering how many I had last year.  I am sticking to my guns this year and plan to actually snip the second seed in my cells instead of separating and keeping the seedling growing.  That will definitely cut back on the amount of final tomato plants!

George Washington's birthday came and went and I still didn't have my peas in the ground.  My garden area is far from ready to plant, so I found an alternate home for this year's pea crop.  When we first moved in a planted this weed flower bed with strawberries, thyme, and winter savory.  I hope to get a jasmine or clematis or some nice smelling climbing flower to plant along the trellis, but for now it will get peas. Yay, peas!

I recently started on the garden.  I found that putting cardboard down over the lamium didn't really do anything to it. When I pulled up the cardboard there was still happy little green sprouts of lamium completely covering my future garden.  That means lots of back-breaking work with a hoe... or does it?

I started out near the edge of the grass and started working my way towards the fence. At about 5 feet out I found the edge of the landscape fabric I noticed last time I was working outside. After some muscle flexing, I discovered that there are two 3 foot strips of landscape fabric running along the fence, covered in a couple inches of soils and a bunch of weeds. We were able to pull up the outer strip before we lost the light. If the ground would dry out a bit, and I had a strong helper, I would quickly be able to pull the rest of the fabric and begin leveling out the area in preparation for installing raised beds.  I'm currently thinking I will start with two 4x4 beds and try my hand at square foot gardening. This first year will be quite the experiment to see what we can grow in the filtered sunlight.

When I realized I couldn't pull up the heavy fabric on my own last night, I switched to the back corner bed.  The bed itself doesn't seem to be in bad shape once the weeds got pulled.  However, there are blackberries coming at it from two sides.  I think that the corner of my neighbor's yard was once an attempt at a compost pile, but it never got hot enough to kill the weeds and now it's a blackberry haven.  The other option is that the corner diagonal from us is overgrown with blackberries and they've taken over the old compost heap. Or a combination of the two. Either way, it will be a constant battle to keep the blackberry suckers from taking over. I'm going to put rhubarb back there, and while the flavors go well together, keep those pokey bushes away from my edibles!!

Needed a lifeline

The needles have been flying. 

Aside from all the baby hat knitting for Christmas, I also knocked out a hat for my future brother in law.

A stash buster, busted out at the last minute. A decent hat pattern, too. Might make it again.



I'm knitting table runners for the wedding. I'm assuming we'll have about 160 people, at 8 people to a table, so about 20 tables.  I started in early December. Now, in the middle of February I have 18.6 runners completed.

A couple of people told me I was crazy when I first started, but who's laughing now??

Muuuahahahhahaha.

Granted, when people scoffed, they were thinking big long hurking things, and I'm only knitting them to be 3 feet long.

Hoping I can stitch them together pretty enough to be a blanket after the wedding.



I'm also knitting a shawl.  It's my lunch time knitting at work and I'm making pretty good progress on it. Until Monday, that is. I took it to happy hour and did a whole pattern repeat, only to realize right before leaving that I had messed up a row or two back.  After some swearing, I figured out my issue and was able to tink back to the issue.

I kept working on it at home for a few rows after I fixed my problem later that night. The next day I picked up the project at lunch, knit three rows, then realized that my stitch count was off. SOn of a..... Took me three more days to get back to a row that I knew was knit correctly.

Now I'm going to go home and learn how to add a lifeline, because that would have saved me a helluva lot of time and swearing.

Lamium Eradication

Our backyard is definitely going to be a work in progress.  It slopes gently to the west and is surrounded by a large douglas fir to the north by the house, several hemlocks to the west, and a douglas fir and some sort of deciduous tree with red leaves in the neighbor's yard to the east. The south side currently has a hurricane wire fence that is mostly falling over.

Southeast corner of yard in September. Taken from deck.

After some monitoring and discussion with the MG, we decided the best place to put my garden is along the south fence line.  This area will get the most sun. Not a lot of sun, mind you, but hopefully enough for lettuce, peas, kale, etc. Tomatoes and peppers might not be in the cards for the next few years until a tree or five are taken out.

South west corner of yard.

 Unfortunately, this area is covered in the invasive Lamium. Lamium is in the mint family and spreads basically every way possible - ants carry seeds across the yard, runners, stems that touch the ground can root, etc. I'm not sure where it was first planted, but it is currently throughout my potential garden space and in the back of the neighbor's yard.

I spent about an hour yesterday working on this patch.  I started in the south east corner and was doing a really good job of pulling up everything I found by the roots. After a significant amount of time, I realized I hadn't made it past a small corner, maybe 1/6 of the bed, and gave up on being thorough.  From there out I mostly pulled foliage and stems, only digging up the occasional root ball when it was easy. And it still took me over an hour.

Lamium patch after an hour of weeding

I gave up when the Seahawks game started. Luckily, we had lots of cardboard on hand after the holidays, so I broke down a couple of boxes to set over the weeded areas in an attempt to block the sunlight and kill the remaining plants. I'm not too hopeful it will work.  My online research shows that the best methods of control are chickens (who will eat the foliage, but won't get down to the roots so it will keep growing back), manual weeding, and roundup.

One potential stroke of luck - there appears to be landscape fabric under at least part of this lamium patch.  There are several inches of soil over it, but with some effort we might be able to pull up the fabric and dislodge the ALL of the lamium by the root. It will take big muscles, but it might be possible.

If all else fails I will probably buy a bottle of roundup and attack the area when it's dry out.

Here is the stuff in another patch under the doug fir growing through our deck.

I've heard that flowering starts really early in our area, so pulling the foliage now before it blooms and spread seed is a must!

Three Baby Hats!

I was asked to knit a baby hat from a picture months ago. I was given this as an example.

Super cute. But try as I might, I could NOT find a pattern that was similar. Ugh. So I made one up.

I started with one baby hat pattern that didn't have ear flaps and one that did, but neither were close. I took the stitch count from one and cast on for the ear flaps. I must have started this dang hat four times before I decided things had to change. Now I can't even remember what I did, but I know I started at the bottom of the ear flaps and went from there. 

 

 Ugh. Not my best work. It turned out really wide and really short. I tried it on my nephew and it was... well, wide and short. And he's about 9 months older than the intended recipient. 

I hated it. It look me weeks to bring myself to sew in the ends because I was so disappointed.

Enter the Baby Earflap Hat. I had just finished knitting it for a friend's baby shower and I loved it.

Simple stockinette stitch hat with ear flaps, braided tassels, and a pom. Easy to knit. Clear, concise pattern. SO MUCH BETTER.

Back to the stash for more baby girl-colored yarn. I came up with cream and purple (good thing her parents are Husky fans).

So much better. So. Much. BETTER.

 

 And it fits!!


I ended up sending them both, with my apologies for the pink one and hopes it would fit at some point.

Lesson learned - always follow patterns for baby stuff.