Creative Woman; 201; Connie Moyers and Silks- Part 1

... ... ... ... The creative woman, spotlighting a variety of topics of interest to today's active and involved women. With your host Cheryl Borden.

Welcome to the beginning of our second creative woman series. Each show will feature a variety of interesting topics and interesting guests, and I hope you learn some new things as well as some easier ways to do some old task. Today we'll feature part one of a two-part segment on sewing silks. My guest is Susan Pledge, who's a well-known sewing expert and who along with her partner, Patty Palmer, designs patterns from a calls pattern company. Today Susan will talk about the different types of silks and silk-like fabrics on the market. Tell us how to pre-wash and dry them and also how to prepare them for cutting. And another important area she'll discuss is interfacing. Our first segment is on tailgate meals, and this will be presented by Home Economist Connie Mortiers. Organization, this is the key word Connie says, especially if you're preparing foods to be transported to another place. Also, convenience and packability are important considerations too. Connie, even though we're calling this tailgate meals, which in essence means that the homemaker would make these foods and keep them hot or cold whichever depended on, take them to the field or take them someplace else to be served. But really if we think in terms of practicality and organization, we could do the same things at home, have a quick meal ready to serve to our family, couldn't we?

That's true. The main thing to remember is we just need to plan. A lot of people don't want to do that. They think, oh no, I don't want to plan. It'll take too much time. But it will save you time if you plan. And it'll make you feel a lot better to know that when you come home for work or wherever you've been and you need a meal on the table, I'll just take you a few minutes to prepare it. And I've heard you say before when women ask you at your demonstrations. Well, it would be easy to cook if I had everything pre-measured and already sorted as to what recipe it goes in. But you've always told them, you can do it too. That's right. And especially if it's something you're going to do over and over again, just measure it several times and have those dry ingredients or whatever measure them, put in some kind of a bag or container and ready to use whenever you need it. And I think another thing that's important is if we have appliances like the food processor to have them out on the cabinet, have them ready to be used in the first recipe you're going to prepare is actually done primarily in the food processor. That's right. The food processor, I think a lot of people thought was going to be a fat appliance. It wasn't going to last very long, but it really can save the homemaker a lot of time if she'll use it. And a lot of times they don't want to use it for a half cup of cheese to grade or something like that. So grade it all at once, do large quantities at once and have them ready to use in the freezer or refrigerate it for later time.

Well, that's in a way that's the idea behind this heavenly hash is that we can make large quantities of this and freeze it, isn't it? That's true. This recipe is a very large recipe. As a matter of fact, today we're only making a half a recipe because we just don't need that much. But for the homemaker, I would suggest never to half the recipe. Go ahead and make it all. It freezes very well for up to a year. Is that right? Okay. Would you go ahead and tell us about this and maybe talk about what we need to look for and using our food processor. We're going to prepare this in the food processor. What we need is instant pudding and make sure that you get instant pudding a lot of times they forget or just accidentally pick up the regular pudding and this won't work. We do need the instant pudding. And we're using pistachio, but you could use other flavors and we're using some milk. And one of the things to remember while you're doing this is just make sure that you don't over process it. If you're doing this in the blender or the food processor, because if you over process is going to separate and it's just going to be running, it won't work also. And I think people who have not been used to a food processor or a blender, this seems to be a problem. We over process it.

We're going to just put this on and off and then let it mix for just a few seconds. By turning it on and off like that, we're giving this stuff a chance to fall back down into the blades. And here it is. It starts to thicken and then we can go ahead and add the other ingredients. And if you're going to do this at home and have a little bit more time, you might let this set for about 10 minutes and thicken up just a little bit more. We're going to put some kind of a whipped topping in here. I like this recipe because I can already see lots of ways we could substitute. If we didn't have all of the things the recipe call for, there's lots of ways to make substitutions. Now we're going to put some pineapple and we did drain the juice off of the crushed pineapple to put in here. Some coconut, marshmallows and walnuts.

And we're just going to mix this for a few minutes or a few seconds. We're just wanting to blend those ingredients. Okay, we're going to put this in a pineapple halves today. And sometime if you want to do something a little bit special, if you're going to have a backyard barbecue and you don't want to take your good bowls outside, there's lots of fruits and vegetables that we can use for bowls. It makes meals more interesting. It might just make your family wonder what you've been up to. So those are some things that you want to try. Makes it a lot more special for just a simple recipe. One of the things about the whipped topping container Cheryl is what was left over here, we could just put that in there without even having to wash it. It's a good freezer container to label it what we put in there and it's ready to go in the freezer to be served later on. We're going to decorate this with marshmallow cherries or something else to make it a little bit more colorful too. It would be real nice.

So this could be the dessert or the salad to our meal. It's ready to chill and put in the freezer or refrigerator. Well, that didn't take probably about two minutes from start to finish. Not very long process. Again, the next recipe we're going to make is called a marinated relish and this marinated relish is really good, really colorful. And it's something that needs to marinate overnight. So there's lots of recipes that you have that you can make overnight. The marinade will either blend the flavors together or if it's meat, make it more tender. But those are things that you can get out of the way ahead of time and then when you come in, it's ready to start preparing. We have some cauliflower and some frozen french style green beans in the microwave. Now, how long had you cooked these for six minutes? And really, they're not cooked. It just was enough to blend the flavors or to start throwing this out. We're going to stir it up. The microwave intensified the color of the green beans.

You could use canned green beans so the color wouldn't be quite as good with these. And this, of course, is an advantage of using the microwave. The vegetable colors do seem to stay more true. And they're also very crunchy. Have a good texture. We're going to add some mushroom halves, some black olives. This is a very colorful dish, isn't it? And some tomatoes. Cherry tomatoes, you can have the tomatoes if you want to. And then the dressing that goes over this is just a half a cup of that Italian dressing. So we're going to support that over the top and this is ready to chill and marinate overnight. So you have your salad ready in about seven minutes total time. Well, that didn't take long. And again, if we wanted to make this, this makes quite a lot, but we could, this would be a very easy recipe to double and make a very large quantity, wouldn't it? It would be very good. So we'll set that aside. Now, the next recipe you're going to do may be something that not all of us are as familiar with it as you are. And it's kind of a fun, it's a fun bread to work with, I think.

We're going to use Peter bread and it's something that nobody is not new by any means, but it's something that a lot of people around this part of the country haven't used before or are not quite aware of. When you buy it in the store or you can make your own and the recipe booklet has its own recipe, if you want to make your own, then you slice it and when you open it up, there's a pocket in it. So that's how we're going to, we don't pile things on it like a tortilla. You could, and you can make a pizza or something like using that as the crust. That's one of the uses. Let's go ahead and put this meat in the microwave and talk about this just a little bit. The filling that goes in this, one of the best time savers a home maker can have is she comes home from the grocery store with say five or ten pounds of ground beef, cook it all at once in a large pan. She can be doing lots of other things while it's cooking. Then, every recipe that you see that needs a ground beef, it says brown one pound of ground beef. Everything says brown at first. If you've already got that done and put it in this freezer zip lock type bag or a sealant meal type bag, then it's ready to use. It's really handy for the home maker. It's a great convenience for you.

So this is what you've done, then you just simply pull this out of the freezer. It was already brown and ready then for this recipe. That's true. You can put this recipe together in about five minutes if you have things kind of prepared like your meat. And we're going to add the meats, what takes the longest to prepare usually. We're going to add some chili or taco seasoning. And then you put about half a cup of water in here. We're going to put this in the microwave and cook it for just a couple of minutes to blend the flavors. Okay. Another thing that the home makers can do, that's really going to help around a lot of this greater cheese like I mentioned before. And a lot of times this can be very economical because like you could buy a horn of cheese on a lot of meat markets. It's about a taller pound cheaper than it is just buying it in a small blocks at the grocery store. Great at all at once. You've only messed your food processor up once. And then it's ready to go. This freeze is very well.

So any types of the cheeses we could do this and freeze them and just maybe in cup quantities or half cups or something. That's true. Or if you just want to freeze in a larger bag but it's easier if you'll divide it up in quantities that you might need. And if you don't need that much where you can put it back in the freezer. So it would be cheaper than buying those convenient little packages that are already graded at the store that's usually two, three, four ounces. That's right and those are very expensive. If you're paying for that convenience. So we're going to set this aside. All you have to do to put these together would be just to fill the pocket just like you would any kind of a taco shell. And put different things that you want on it. You might put lettuce and tomatoes and olives. Or if you wanted to serve this and just let people make their own, that would be fun. What are some other uses though for the pita bread coni besides the Mexican food type ways? You could put any kind of a salad in there like a lot of places are advertising now in their salad bars. You can put peanut butter and honey in there, the kids like that scrambled eggs and bacon or sauces. Everybody really likes that.

The bottom of it is an open like a sandwich so it's great for kids when they pick it up to eat it. Everything doesn't fall out at the bottom part. And how expensive is the pita bread? Is it very expensive? And usually it depends on where you find it and sometimes you find it in the freezer section. It's hard for people to look there for it. It doesn't keep it long unless you do freeze it. But maybe six pieces for about a dollar. But you can buy having it, you know, this goes a long way. And it also just makes the brown bag that everybody gets tired of a little bit. Very interesting. And I know in the recipe in the booklet we'll be talking about later has the recipe for making the pita bread from scratch. And the interesting thing about it is that you mash the bread flat. And then you get through it after it looks like a self-appear. But you do flatten it and you want it to be flat. That's true. And this is something if you're not brave enough to try it on your own, you might try it with a naver and get together and make a bunch of pita breads and just put them in the freezer. Now the hamburger meat is ready.

Okay, we're going to put a little bit of hamburger meat in here. I think kids would enjoy doing this. They really do. They like to make these. Get me to hold that while you add more things to them. I'm just going to add a little bit of cheese to it. And some lettuce. Some pita bread is larger than this. This depends on where you buy it, what brand it is. And of course if you made your own it would depend on how you roll the circle out, which is very pretty. And so there's a pita taco or a pocket taco. And again, we could do this for breakfast with the scrambled eggs and bacon or sausage bits. Any sandwich filling or a cooked filling that you want to put in there, it's really good. And something a little bit different. That's really colorful. Now another way that we can make use of the ground meat if we were as clever as you are and make large quantities ahead of time would be for this recipe. That's right. This is called inflation cornbread.

It cooks for about 50 to 60 minutes and sometimes people think, oh no, you know I don't have time to cook that. But if you have things ready, it has a layer of ground beef and a layer of grated cheese in the center of it. So all you have to do is make the simple cornbread mix that's in the recipe. Put that layer of ground beef that you already have cooked from the freezer, your grated cheese that you have cooked from the freezer. You can put it together in less than five minutes. Then the 50 or 60 minutes that's cooking, you can go do lots of other things and prepare the rest of your meal. All you need is maybe the marinade salad, we'll have to go with this. Or set the table and make the drinks or whatever you need to do. Another thing about this a lot of times, we don't think about this as a top recipe that could go somewhere with us. We could put this in while we're getting ready to go. And we need to take it to a pot like meal or on a picnic or whatever we're doing. Just wrap it with aluminum foil. So this was baked in the cast iron skillet. We've baked in this cast iron skillet. And especially since this is cast iron, it's going to hold the heat for a long time. And after you bake it, wrap it with foil. And then wrap it with about eight layers of newspaper.

Maybe tape it down and keep it in a towel so the newspaper won't rub off on you. And it's going to stay hot for an hour or longer, traveling ready to go and that ready to serve. So it's a versatile meal. Well I think a lot of the problem we encounter when we take foods out is wondering about the food safety. But as you mentioned, I think if we take the cold foods cold and keep them cold up until time to leave and then again keep the hot foods hot, that's really basically a very simple rule. That's true. A lot of times people take things to a reunion or something and they just leave it setting out and setting out and setting out. They need to realize that they do need to keep them. Like you said, hot foods, hot and cold foods, cold. And a lot of the stomach flu that they have after they've been somewhere like that will be eliminated because it's usually a form of food poisoning. Now this of course is baked in the cast iron skillet, but there are many, many airtight containers on the market and different colors for one thing and different sizes and shapes to fit almost anything that we'd want to put a food dish in and then take it because if it's an open dish that's hard to keep it from spelling for one thing and to keep the heat in sometimes or the keep it cold.

So I think today with all the things that we have available it's really fun to cook and to take things places to have picnics or just to have food ready when you come home from work. I think that's real important. You feel better about yourself all day if you know you've got a meal ready when you come home. And I can imagine people who have worked all day if they are during harvest or something would really appreciate having something like this brought to them instead of a dry sandwich. That's true. Connie, thanks for being with us and sharing some of these recipes and your booklet has many others that will make available too. Okay, thank you. All right, thank you. Susan, there are so many beautiful silks and silk-like fabrics on the market but I think a lot of a shy away from them because one we may not know how to sew with them but two, they seem like they might be a lot of trouble to take care of. Is that true? Oh, absolutely not, Cheryl. And I'll be showing you how to take care of your silks in just a minute but I brought a sample of some of the different varieties of silks that are available.

We see so many silk-like polyesters in the stores today but real silk is really getting a strong comeback. This is silk corduroy of all things, which I think is really fun. That's very, very unique. But much more common is a silk crepe de chien. This is what you'd make of flowers or a dress out of. And then a silk jaguar, very beautiful woven in design. But this is the kind of thing that's being copied in polyester as well. This is an elegant sheer with a woven in glitter stripe, a gold stripe for a beautiful evening blouse. These are all silk silks. These are all 100% silks, yes. But we also have silk suitings. This one, for example, would make a lovely pant or a skirt or a jacket and other suiting weight silks down here. Now, I don't know if you noticed, but this is a silk knit. Isn't that soft? And imagine how comfortable that would be in a little top, very stretchy and comfortable to wear. But I also brought some examples of polyesters that are really quite lovely. I'm wearing a polyester blouse today and it's polyester georgeat.

I throw it in the washer, throw it in the dryer. It's just great. But it looks just like the silky showed us. Oh, it sure does. And this is polyester crepe de chien. Drapes beautifully. Can you see how soft it is? It feels just elegant. Wonderful. These are extremely practical because you do just throw them in the washer, throw them in the dryer. But I wanted to show you some other silks that I've washed. I brought some silk clothing with me today. This has been washed. I would say 10 times. And I wear it a lot. It's a real favorite dress. A blouse fairly new. It's only been washed two or three times. Now, this is a silk suit, Cheryl. I have a matching skirt and a jacket. And this is a silk linen. But I would not wash this one. This is a little too heavy. Actually, it would be harder to iron it when it was still when I had to take care of it. But the dress underneath is also a silk crepe de chien. And it's been washed and hand washed actually many, many times. It still has a very nice drape to it. One of the things I really like about washing my silks like this blouse

is that when I wash a blouse, they always feel so much fresher when I wear them. And we don't have a dry, clean smell about them either. Oh, or the cost. Because silk is expensive to buy in the first place. And so when I can limit my dry cleaning cost, of course, I'm going to spend so much less over the lifetime of that garment. But I mentioned washing silk. And I want to share with you and with your viewers some of the secrets that we've used in washing silk. I'm going to give you that to get rid of for a second. We've brought just a couple of bowls here with us today. And naturally, at home, you would be using something slightly larger than a bowl to wash your silk. In fact, I usually wash it in the bathtub because then I have lots of space and I have lots of water to deal with with that fabric. But another thing that we want to do with that silk fabric is to wash it first before we cut it out. And that pre-shrinks the fabric and it really does a great job. We're not going to be disappointed then after we've gone to all the trouble to make something, then wash it and find lots of problems in shrinkage. No, not at all. Bleeding of colors. Right. I brought a little scrap of silk to show you how I would wash a piece of silk.

And I'm just going to dump it into my water. Now, I've used lukewarm water. The lukewarm to cool is really best because that seems to affect the dye and silk the least. If you use really warm water, you're going to run into some problems. Now, we're going to just put the silk into the water and we're going to swish it a few times. No more than for about a minute. Because if you let the silk soak in the water, then the dye again has a little more chance to run. And I would take care of prints this way or anything else. Now, when I rinse this fabric, I may find that my water has a lot of color in it. Our color was kind of light blue to begin with. So we won't experience much dye loss. But in my dark color dresses that I show you, I still get some color loss in those fabrics. But we're not to worry about it. No, what it really is, it's just kind of an overrun of dye that shouldn't have been there in the first place. I'm going to quickly move this into my rinse water. Notice I'm not squeezing it. If you scrub, you will braid the fabric. It's not very strong when it's wet. And just gently squeezing my soapy water out of this.

And I say soap, but actually what I've used here are, oh, I might have used liquid dishwashing detergent like ivory or joy or whatever you use. But there are also some commercial products that are really quite nice. Easy wash and wool tone. Woolite's another one that works very well. Both easy wash and wool tone are very nice on silk because they're not too harsh for the fibers. Actually, when I'm traveling, sometimes I just use shampoo because it's what I have to have handy. But now I'm going to rinse this several times, maybe even two or three times, just to make sure that I get all the moist or rather all the soap out of that water. And again, the larger the quantity of fabric you have, the bigger the container you want to use, the bathtub is good. Now again, I'm not rubbing and I'm not ringing this out. I'm just going to gently squeeze some of the water out of here. And I'm going to put it in a towel and roll it in a towel. By rolling this in the towel, I get it almost dry. Let's see if I need to do a little shifting here.

I'm going to roll this in the towel and just kind of gently press all the moisture out of this fabric. Yeah, we would never want to hang our fabric to let it drip dry without being possible. No, because there's too much weight in the water. Water is very heavy. So after I've rolled it in the towel and I've gotten rid of some of that moisture, it's still real wet. Now I'm going to press it until it's dry. While it's this damp. Yes, while it's this damp, so I'll let you take my towel away. And I have a little pressing pad here that I'm going to use. Oh, this is just the color of my pressing pad. It matches exactly. Be harder to see. Didn't think about that. There. It's really quite wet, Cheryl, and I think you can agree from touching it. There's a lot of moisture still in this. I've turned my steam iron on and I can either use steam or a dry iron. It actually doesn't make any difference. But I'm going to use a cooler temperature. I'm not up at the very top. If your iron says silk, that's fine. Or a wool setting, a low wool setting is good. I'm going to keep my iron in constant motion on my fabric. Can you see a color change here as it's drying out?

Do you usually find people panic when they see this happening? Yes, definitely. And they hold the iron in one spot. And then one spot gets too dry and the rest of it really doesn't. Now I'm pressing this just with a constant gliding motion so that it dries and gets an even texture all over. After we have pre-washed our material before we make our garment Susan, then we don't have to expect any surprises after we've made it. No, you really want it all. Now I think that looks really nice, don't you? This was a very lightweight silk, very soft, and it's pressed out with absolutely no wrinkles. Now one of the keys to doing this, though, too, Cheryl is that whenever you wash your silk blast, you have to have time to iron it dry. You can't just wash it and let it hang up and press it later on because it's really important to press it well. It's wet. Otherwise all of these wrinkles that came into my silk fabric here really will not go away. They'll dry in there and be quite permanent. But I think you can see that it really turns out very nicely.

Now there are some things that happen to silk when you wash them. They change a little bit in texture. And so what I always do is after I've washed my silk, I look at it. And I also measure it to see if it shrunk very much. Patty Palmer made a blouse and we just had to laugh. She didn't have enough fabric left for the long sleeve. She had to make a short sleeve. Because there can be a texture change and there can be some shrinkage because the manufacturer didn't really intend for you to wash this. Wow. But if I don't like the texture when I do a little test sample, I usually take just about a four by four square and scrap and just test it and see what I think about it. If I wash it and I don't like the way it looks, then I go right ahead and I dry clean it. I don't want to have a washed garment that I don't love when I'm done. Sure. Especially if we've gone to a lot of work to make something very detailed. That's right. Now interfacing's are, I think, something else that people perhaps don't understand about silk. Very important selecting proper ones. Well, what most people have always used

and I'm going to move my water bowl back over to this side again. What most people have usually used, Cheryl, are stitch-in interfacings. And if we're working with an extremely sheer fabric, we might use a silk organza like this one, very, very sheer and lightweight. Or people have often used our lightweight, blouse-weight interfacings. These are so-and. These are so-and. And yet the fusibles today, there are a couple of brand new ones that I'm going to show you that are fantastic. So I can either use a stitch-in or I can use one of the new fusibles. And I always make a test sample with a fusible. And I fuse it onto a scrap of my fabric. I feel to see which one feels the best. And it's a three different types. There are three different types. And then I look at them from the right side to see which one looks the best. Because all of those are extremely important. And then that helps me to decide which one I'm going to use. Now I'm going to show you three brands that I just love with silk and silk like polyesters. This, by the way, is the silky polyester. This one, can you see how sheer this one is?

It's called sheer fuse. And this one, maybe you can see a little better with my nail polish. This is a fusible. This one is called sheer blenders. Now would you only use this though with blues? Or does it say this? Well, this one would blend in with a blue background print. They both come in colors and they mix in match. You can buy it in red or in charcoal gray or tin or the typical beige. And this was called what? What was the next minute? This is sheer fuse. And this one is called sheer blenders. Now these are both brand new. Your fabric stores may not have them yet. We can look for them. Absolutely. Now when it's been available for a longer period of time, this one's fun. It's an nylon trickle like a slip and it stretches. This is easy knit. That stretchability really just provides softness when we use it as an interfacing. I interface three colors here. And I want you to look at them, Cheryl, because let's see if I can kind of hang them over the edge. They really look great. And you know, a lot of people would say with fusibles, oh, it never looks right from the right side.

It's bubbly. These have not bubbled. And I've washed them five times and dried them in the dryer. So they've been really super. One last thing I want to show you about fusibles is that particularly with the nonwoven fusibles that we see so much, both sheer fuse and sheer blenders are nonwoven. They are really nice if you're doing a lot of detail work like V-neck lines, for example, because they stabilize the neckline and that's what we want. Stretch. And some of the other real soft interfacings would not have that same effect. I've used fusibles and all the clothes that I brought to show you today and I've just been very, very pleased with the result. I think that's wonderful to know that we're having some new products on the market that are especially designed for these exciting fabrics. You know, technology puts men on the moon and they now let us fuse into our sheer fabrics. Isn't that great? Well Susan, thank you for sharing this information. And next week our viewers will learn more about scenes and hymns and a little bit more about making an actual beautiful silk or silk-like garment. That will be my pleasure. Thanks really fun. I hope you've enjoyed our show today. Next time we'll conclude the segment on sewing silks.

We'll learn to do k-bob cookery to turn very ordinary food into something special and we'll learn about cholesterol in your diet. I hope to see you next time on the Creative Woman Show. To receive your copy of Creative Living contains recipes, instructions and other information pertaining to the Creative Woman Show, please send your check or money order for $3.50 US dollars, which includes postage and handling, to the Creative Woman KENWTV Eastern New Mexico University, Portalis New Mexico, 8-8-1-3-0. That address again is the Creative Woman KENWTV Eastern New Mexico University, Portalis New Mexico, 8-8-1-3-0. Please allow 4-6 weeks for delivery. Hello, I'm Cheryl Borden, producer host for the Creative Woman Show. On our show next time, we'll conclude our demonstration on sewing, sensational silks.

We'll learn to do k-bob cookery to turn very ordinary food into something special and we'll see you next time. Hello, I'm Cheryl Borden, producer host for the Creative Woman Show. On our show next time, we'll conclude our demonstration on sewing, sensational silks. We'll learn to do k-bob cookery to turn very ordinary food into something special and we'll also learn about cholesterol in your diet. I hope you'll join me on the Creative Woman next time on this station.