I thought I’d share with you what I’m currently doing, which is binding the raw edge of the jacket hem.  This is the same approach I took with  the wedding-coat – it produces a nice neat edge, although a time-consuming one.  (The fabric is thick enough that I won’t simply double over the hem and stitch; it would leave a bulky line that would show after pressing.)

Step 1: cut strips of your edge-binding fabric on the bias.  I used a lightweight china silk and cut the strips 2″ wide, which was way overkill: 1″ would have done just as nicely.  Join the strips into a single long strip, longer than the hem of your garment.

Step 2: sew your edge-binding fabric to the jacket, right sides together, with a 1/4″ seam allowance.  Trim the seam allowance after sewing to 1/8″, or the minimum possible to avoid raveling (on thicker, coarser fabrics it will probably be more than 1/8″).    The width of the seam allowance will be the width of your bound edge.

The fabric should now look like this:

edge, machine stitched and trimmed to 1/8"

Step 3: flip the china silk to the wrong side, and prick stitch the china silk down.  The prick stitch is essentially a backstitch that is only 1 thread wide on the “right” side of the fabric.  So it is invisible from the front.

Here’s a pic of the back side of the prick-stitched china silk:

prick-stitched edge, on the private side

And here is what it looks like on the “right” side: a nice neat bound edge.  Notice you don’t see any stitches, even though the thread doesn’ t quite match!  That’s because on the top side, only one thread gets caught.

finished bound edge

In this case the bound edge is 1/8″ wide, the width to which I trimmed my seam allowances.  I love this edge because it looks so neat and perfect.  It is time consuming, though, since you have to hand-stitch with tiny backstitches all along the edge.  But, for a couture garment, who cares about time?

The next step, after I finish binding the edge, is to put a bias-cut piece of china silk into the hem and catchstitch it down three times: once above the hem, to attach the silk to the body of the cloth, once at the top of the hem, to attach the silk to the hem, and once at the midpoint of the hem, to strengthen the attachment to the hem and keep it flat.  This will also be time-consuming, but will result in a perfect hem with no visible marks.  If I attached the hem allowance to the body of the garment, it would pull at the body, making the hem more visible, especially in such a lightweight fabric.  (In a heavier fabric, like what I used for Kodachrome, you could probably get away with it.)  Adding the catchstitched silk gives it a bit more flexibility and give, making the hem less visible.

I expect the hems to take most of the rest of the week – after I finish the binding and catchstitching, I will need to do the lining hem.  This one will be simpler, probably just double-folding the charmeuse and pressing.  It’s a lighter-weight fabric, so that should be fine.

My goal is to get the hems done this week, the leaves done over the weekend, and the sleeve linings set in next week.  That will finish off Autumn Splendor nicely before the photo shoot on Sunday the 12th – and if it isn’t quite done, that’s OK so long as all the visible sections are complete!  I will be having hair and makeup done for the shoot as well – a nice little treat with which to celebrate the finish.

Sue asked for my marmalade recipe.  It’s nothing special, an adaptation of the marmalade recipe on the back of the box of pectin.  I scrubbed the lemons, then quartered them and chopped them into small slices.  I packed the bits into a glass measuring cup, and when I had about 5.5 cups of chopped lemon (the amount specified on the box), I added just enough water to cover, and dumped it into the pan.  Then I added 4 cups of sugar, as specified in the recipe, and a little more water and more sugar to taste.  (The flavor will be quite bitter before adding sugar, but will become palatable as you add more sugar.)  Simmered for about 10 minutes, then mixed the pectin with some sugar to prevent lumping, and dumped it in, stirring quickly.  Then I put it into hot, sterile (=boiled in water) canning jars and sealed with a boiling-water bath for 10 minutes.  Ta-daa!

So I decided to harvest most of the lemons and make marmalade, in addition to putting the candied citrus into jars.  I figured it would take me a couple of hours to chop up, boil and can everything…

…six hours later, I now have twenty-seven pint  jars full of citrus!  Six each of candied Seville orange peel and Meyer lemon peel, four of candied bergamot peel, and eleven(!) of Meyer lemon marmalade.    That is almost a gallon and a half of marmalade.  I’m not sure what I’m going to do with that much marmalade – give the excess to friends and family, I imagine – but it is delicious.

(My favorite culinary trick: mix Meyer lemon marmalade with some soy sauce and use as a sauce over duck.  Sounds really bizarre, but it works – the lemon marmalade is tarter and bitterer than the traditional orange sauce, which cuts the sweetness dramatically.  And of course the Meyer lemon is a cross between an orange and a lemon, so has a wonderful tart fruitiness.)

And now I’m thoroughly exhausted.  We had a wonderful time at La Fondue last night, but we didn’t get home until nearly midnight, which is three hours after my usual bedtime.  And unfortunately, I wake up at the same hour every morning regardless of when I went to bed the night before…so I got very little sleep.  Time to go crash!  Tomorrow I will work more on the sleeve linings.

I also had several pounds of mandarin oranges which I had bought with the intention of making marmalade – a sweeter, less bitter version than the usual Seville orange marmalade.  These wouldn’t last another five days without the peel drying out, so I chopped them up yesterday evening and made about 1.5 gallons of marmalade.  This will go nicely over duck and into chocolates.  It’s one of my favorite jams, after the sun-cooked strawberry jam I make every summer.

At this point I am pretty well set with Autumn Splendor.  I have finished weaving one dark panel and am halfway through one light panel.  I think I can complete that today.  That leaves one dark panel to weave and the entire batch to wet-finish/dye over the weekend of January 7th.  It also leaves weft for one dark and one light panel in reserve, should I happen to mis-cut a panel.  After that I can start sewing!

Yep!  As illogical as it seems, winter is when citrus ripens in California – strange, when every other  fruit tree is hunkering down for the winter.  Doubly strange, that a semi-tropical, frost-killed tree should be bearing fruit in cold weather.  But there it is: it’s winter, and the citrus is just pouring in.

So here is what Nature (with a little help from UPS) has deposited on my doorstep:

bergamot and Seville oranges!

Satsuma mandarins and Meyer lemons!

The mandarins and Meyer lemons I bought at the farmer’s market (except for the ones I picked off the baby lemon tree on our patio), the bergamot and Seville oranges I ordered from Ripe To You, a California outfit that specializes in exotic citrus.

This all got triggered off by an attempt to purchase bergamot at my local farmer’s market.  I say “attempt” because, although it was labeled as bergamot, it looked more like a small orange and had very little aroma.  I got it home, tasted a bit of peel, and promptly gave up on the idea of candying it.  So I sat down and ordered some bergamot from Ripe To You, and while I was at it, ordered some Seville oranges as well.

(By the way, while you’ve probably tasted both bergamot and Seville oranges, you may not be familiar with them except as an ingredient.  Bergamot peel is used in Earl Grey tea, and Seville oranges are the classic marmalade orange.  Their bitter peel offsets the sweetness of the sugar.)

Anyway, they arrived on my doorstep today, and now I’m really regretting not having ordered more.  Fourteen bergamots won’t yield more than 2-3 pints (if that) of candied peel, and sixteen Seville oranges probably about the same.  Between fruitcake and chocolate, that’s just a one-year supply for me.  Since it’s just as time-consuming to make one pint as it is to make six, I’ve missed my opportunity to put up several years’ worth at once.  Oh well; I can’t order more because they won’t finish candying before we go out of town.  Maybe later this winter…

Meanwhile, I bought some mandarin oranges, planning to use them in marmalade.  The Meyer lemons are a puzzlement: when life hands you lemons, what do you do first?  Do you make lemonade, candied lemon peel, or lemon marmalade?  I want to make all three, but I only have so many lemons, so perhaps I’ll start with lemon marmalade.  Or else strip off the peels and juice the naked lemons, thriftily collecting lemonade and candied lemon peel from a single lot of lemons.

All I know is, it will be delicious!  And even more delicious in fruitcake, or dipped in chocolate, next year.

Here is a photo of a finished box:

box of chocolates!

In previous years I’ve used a plain gold box with a red ribbon (bow in center).  This year I designed some box art, printed it out on clear labels, and used them on white boxes.  The result is not only more attractive and better “branded”, it’s also a lot cheaper – white boxes are about 1/4  the price of gold ones.  And – added bonus – the stickers double as closures – they extend over the edge of the boxes to seal it closed.  All in all, I liked this method, and will use it again.

Packing required a certain degree of ingenuity, especially in packing the last few pieces in each layer.  It was like putting together a jigsaw puzzle – trying to figure out which pieces fit where.  In the end we had to leave out the dried apricots and (in some boxes) the English toffee; the boxes were stuffed absolutely full and there was simply no space for them.  Each box weighed approximately 1 full pound, remarkable since last year’s boxes contained only 13 ounces and I would have sworn they were stuffed completely full!  I suspect some fourth-dimensional twist of magically permitting more candy.

And then it was time to sort out the leftovers.  There were about 24 pounds of leftover chocolates, plus some “chocolate slag” left over after the last dipping.  My volunteeers must have carted off fifteen or sixteen pounds of chocolates, leaving about four pounds each  for Mike’s coworkers and mine.  (Well, and a small stash of jasmine tea caramels, which I love too much to part with completely.)  They went home, I printed out and applied all the mailing labels, and stacked the “to be shipped” boxes into a giant box.

End Chocopalooza 2011!  Another successful year of candymaking.

What now?  Well, there is at least another day’s worth of cleanup: washing out chocolate molds, putting away the chocolate containers, and picking up bits of ribbon, extra candy cups, etc.  Tuesday I will probably spend weaving and packing, and then Wednesday it’s off to Maryland!  We are visiting my family for Thanksgiving, chocolates in tow.

Which reminds me – I better prep myself something to do while traveling!  Perhaps it’s time to pop over to the yarn store (or  to my stash) for some sock yarn.  Or maybe I’ll just pack a bunch of weaving books.  All things in time.