Carla

Also mark centre front and centre back on the toile with a marker before you put it on, and check they hang plumb. Costs nothing and tells you a lot.

The durability question at this price is not the vacuum, it is whether you can clean it. A flask that cannot be taken apart grows a coffee oil film inside the lid, then everything tastes of yesterday, then you stop using it. Any flask with a bayonet lid and a sealed drinking spout is on a two year clock in practice.

Mild pushback: if this pattern is a loose fitting shift or a boxy top with a lot of ease, the FBA earns much less and you can cut the 12 straight. The adjustment matters in proportion to how fitted the garment is. For anything with a waist seam or princess seams, do it.

Also check the across back measurement. If the back is narrow between the armholes, every forward reach pulls the whole garment, and you will chase the sleeve forever without fixing it. Measure from armhole seam to armhole seam across your shoulder blades and compare with the pattern piece.

The dishwasher is the whole story. Wood scales move with humidity, the detergent strips the finish, and the heated dry cycle expands the steel and the wood at different rates until the bond lets go. Twelve cycles is plenty to do it. Nothing you can undo now, but the repair holds fine if you hand wash from here.

Going stale and drying out are two different things, which is the bit that makes this confusing.

When bread bakes, the starch granules absorb water and swell into a soft, disorganised structure. As it cools and sits, those starch molecules slowly rearrange themselves back into an ordered, crystalline form and push water out as they do it. That is staling. The bread can be sealed in a bag with all its water still inside and be thoroughly stale, which is exactly what you observed.

The rate of that rearrangement depends on temperature, and it is fastest a little above freezing. A fridge at about 4 degrees sits almost exactly in the worst zone, several times faster than a kitchen counter at 20.

So the practical answer is skip past that zone entirely. Slice the loaf, freeze what you are not eating in the next day or two, and toast straight from frozen. Freezing is well below the bad range and it stops the mould problem you were trying to solve.

The rearrangement is also partly reversible with heat, which is why a stale roll put in a hot oven for a few minutes comes back to something close to fresh. It goes stale again faster afterwards though, so do it just before you eat it.