Sewing Sewing

This week was the annual American Quilters Society Quilt Show here in Paducah. It's a week when women (and men, but mostly women) descend upon the town from all over the country (and many from overseas) for something like a state fair, but all about quilts. It's a time when the locals try to avoid downtown and we forget about going out to eat this week because the lines are wayyy too long.

But I like it. I'm not a quilter, but I usually find something I like--vendors galore come to town and there's lots of fabric and notions for sale. And about half the time (so far) I can talk my Aunt Carrie (who's an avid quilter of the type who would have come to the show anyway) to come stay for a visit.

So this year I've been wanting to make more of my own clothes. Recently, I added a new verse of scripture to my list of favorites-- Doctrine and Covenants 42:40: "And again, thou shalt not be proud in thy heart; let all thy garments be plain, and their beauty the beauty of the work of thine own hands;"

I love that verse, and not just because it encourages something I already wanted to do. It reminds me of the description of the creation of the world, how at the end of each day, and especially after everything was done, God looked at the work of His hands and declared that "it was good." There's a great sense of satisfaction in creating something, especially when you take the time to get even the smallest details just right. And God, the ultimate Creator, wants us to experience that feeling, just as He does!

So here's the work of mine own hands this week (just a peek at the details first; I'll add photos of the whole thing when I can find someone to take a picture of me!)

The pattern is one I drafted myself, following the instructions here. It came out a little big--I guess I'm more "squishy" in the middle than my tape measure indicates. I'll probably pick it apart next week and take it in a bit more, but I really wanted to wear it to church today.

I'm really pleased with how the details worked out--my seams lined up just so, the zipper went in perfectly, and I love the sneaky hot pink hiding inside. (I made my first bias tape, too, and decided to use it for this project.)


Seams lining up.


Nearly invisible hem.


Hot pink-a-boo. (oops, looks like I need to trim a couple of threads!)

Fascinating

I haven't really gotten anything productive done this morning. I've been watching workers from the power company install a new power pole and a transformer and I don't know what else they're doing.

I'm amazed how quickly they get things done. A couple of hours ago, this big wooden pole was sitting in front of the empty lot next door. About ten o'clock, I noticed two big trucks parked in front of my house, and one of the poles had been moved across my driveway and into my yard. Men were drilling holes and screwing in posts and whatnots at the top of it. Then the big drilling rig moved into place and dug a hole that was probably about 7-8 feet deep and 2-3 feet across, I'm guessing.

The drilling rig thing also has a bunch of cables and straps and calipers to pick up and move the power pole. I'm amazed that it can move everything all around those wires without getting shocked, because this whole time, there's still electricity in my house. In fact, one of the workers knocked on my door--once everything was in place--to tell me that they were going to be shutting off the power to my house for about fifteen minutes.

I don't know if they're going to be taking out the old pole or keeping it there. Maybe the new pole is just for the new transformer (that big, gray, garbage can sized thing at the top).

But it's been interesting process to watch. I bet my nephews would have liked to see it.

Yay, electricity!

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Peanuts, Turtles, morning TV, and more

Here we are again, a month later! Maybe I should just tell myself it's okay to update the blog once a month and call it good.

The house is beginning to fill up with foster animals again. I just had Ella by herself for a day or two. By the Friday after Valentine's Day, I'd been given a black lab named Dakota. Unfortunately, she only made it through a weekend here. She has some pretty major separation anxiety issues, and with me working full time and traveling quite a bit for church responsibilities, having a dog that can't handle being home without someone there just won't do. On a positive note, I've been wanting to change out the ugly commercial-looking carpet in the back area for something like vinyl or laminate flooring for a while. Now it looks like it's going to be something more definite than a vague "someday."

The shelter was able to find another foster for her--someone who is home more than I am--so on Monday evening, I traded her out for a smaller, less destructive model named Snoopy. I tend to call him Peanut--he's a bit too neurotic to be a cool, laid-back dog like Snoopy.

Peanut is a chihuahua mix who loves to snuggle up next to you and snooze. Right now, I'm sitting on my couch with Peanut on one side of me and Jamison on the other. They're about the same size, though Jamison looks bigger in this photo. He pretty much ignores the other animals in the house, although sometimes he gets hyper and wants to play with the cats, and they think he's scary. And then Zen wants to play, but Peanut thinks Zen is scary. I'd be scared of rough housing with someone ten times my size, too.

 

Today was an adoption drive at PetSmart, and I ended up coming home with another foster chihuahua. To be honest, I'm really surprised that Peanut wasn't adopted. He's adorable and friendly and little and just a fantastic little dog. Turtle is a little bit bigger than Peanut, but not by much. He doesn't like kids, so I'm a good fit for him. He's pretty funny--quite a different personality than Peanut. Peanut is a slightly neurotic cuddle bug. Turtle likes to be wherever you are, but he's not as much of a lap dog. However, he does like to play with tennis balls.

I have a couple, because Zen likes to chase them, too, although his attention span is pretty short. Right now, he wants to go chasing after the tennis ball too, when I throw it for Turtle. Sadly, Turtle is worried that Zen is chasing him and it ends in a snarl on Turtle's part.

Peanut hasn't shown much interest in toys until this evening. Just to see what he'd do, I rolled a tennis ball by him. He pounced on it, but his mouth isn't big enough to grab it.

Work has been pretty interesting lately. I saw a posting in a library forum online at the end of January talking about a program called "Blind Date with a Book". Basically, the idea is that you set up a display of a bunch of books wrapped up so that no one can tell what's inside. People can come check out a book and find out what they actually got when they get home. Like a blind date. I thought it sounded like fun, so I got permission to do it at my library. We had a questionnaire that people could fill out about their "date"--questions like "How was your date? Was there a "love connection"? Would you two go out again?" and a place at the bottom for them to put in their library card number. They could turn the date review slips in for a chance to win gift certificates for dinner and a movie for two. It was a lot of work to pull the books (and they really were random--I just walked up and down the aisles pulling books willy-nilly) and wrap them up and make sure that the correct barcode was on the outside. That part would be easier at my brother and sister-in-law's library, where the barcodes use RFID so they can be read without having to optically scan the numbers or key them in. But I think it was a big hit. We had almost 120 books checked out, only a little over half said they liked the book(s) they got, but everyone said they thought it was a fun idea and were looking forward to doing it again next year.

Our local news station has a regular feature they do called "Thrifty Thursday" where they do a story about different ways to save money. A couple of weeks ago, we got a phone call from a reporter asking if she could do a story about free or inexpensive things available at the library--particularly ebooks. So one Thursday morning, a coworker, the library director, and I showed up at work at 5:15 am and we filmed a couple of segments live for the morning news. It was nerve-wracking, but still, kind of fun. You always sound different in your head than you do when you hear recordings. You can see it here.

Spring is starting to show up here, and the gardening bug has bitten. One of my coworkers gave me a couple of wisteria pods last week. I planted the seeds and also tried to root the branches that the pods were attached too. It's too early to know if the seeds will sprout, and even if they do, I've read it takes ten years for wisteria plants to flower from seed. Sadly, the stems were pulled out of the dirt in short order by some cat or other. I planted a "non-invasive" honeysuckle vine out along the fence this afternoon. I have this idea of covering up the chain link with some vine or maybe a combination of several--honeysuckle, virginia creeper, berry bushes, whatever. Just something to give some privacy and still let the wind blow through without knocking the fence down. And the flowering plants should bring hummingbirds. :)

I picked up some orchids from the clearance racks at Lowe's this week. One for $7 and the other two for $1.50 apiece. The last two had already finished blooming and I'm not sure one of them is going to make it, but for less than two dollars, it's at least worth trying. Thankfully, the pets have left them alone. So far...

 

On crafty things

I'm still knitting and doing some sewing. The big project recently was something called a "vertical yarn swift." A lot of times, yarn comes in big long looped hanks (like an electric extension cord) rather than prewound into a ball. It keeps the yarn orderly without stretching it out (which can mess up your sizing when you knit it up), but it's not convenient to knit from--too easily tangled. So when you're ready to use it, you loop the hanks around a couple of chair backs, or your knees if you're up for an ab workout, or the hands of an obliging lover.

(painting by William Sidney Mount, Winding Up, 1836)

If none of those things are convenient, there are tools out there that will hold the hanks for you and spin. The most common ones look like the frame of an umbrella, or two cross-bars with vertical pegs sticking up at each end of the bars. They take up a lot of room, or they have to be set up and put away. That's where the vertical swift comes in. The yarn loops around vertically, rather than spinning around horizontally, and so I don't have to clear a space on the table for a swift to clamp.



It's not perfect--I kind of winged the design and I'm no IKEA designer so the pieces aren't cut and the holes aren't drilled exactly. It wobbles a little. But it does what it's supposed to do, and I'm pretty pleased with it.

A few other things I've done lately:
My fantastic Aunt Carrie, a quilter, finished a quilt for me in exchange for a pair of knitted socks. I LOVE LOVE LOVE it. I picked out the colors in the center and did some of the sewing of the blocks, and she added the borders and backing and quilting. It's the perfect size to snuggle under when I'm sitting on the couch.


A few months ago, some random person in England sent me a message on Ravelry saying that she had bought me a pattern from my wish list. She said that once a month she picks a random person and buys them something just for the fun of it. I used it to make mittens for my friend Ashley.


A train hat and a bunny for two kids from church. Their mom is my best friend, and for Christmas last year I gave her kids gift certificates for "something wooly". Their mom lets one person cash in their ticket at a time. The next one wants a Santa hat with an attached beard. LOL.
 

Finally, I painted the bathroom a fun shade of Tiffany Blue a couple of months ago. Eventually, I plan to put up a chair rail and bead board (or more likely, bead board wallpaper) on the bottom half of the walls.


I really need to post more often--these get waaay too long! :)

On animals

It's been a long time again! I'm still up to the same old tricks: work, fostering, church, and making stuff.

First of all, fostering.

I've had three dogs and another cat since I last posted. Bandit and Kiwi and Ella were/have been here for months. Bandit had a close scrape. He's an eleven year old dog whose joints hurt and he escaped a couple of times and bit me once when I tried to catch him to bring him back it. Dogs that bite are really hard to adopt out and we were afraid we'd have to put him down. Fortunately, though, he was accepted into a senior dog rescue, was adopted, and now lives somewhere in Georgia. And all very happy, I'm told.

Kiwi you met last time. She's still a pile of "adorbs" but I left her today at the cat room in PetSmart where she'll get a lot more exposure and is more likely to be adopted. It's kind of weird not having her nosing around for love or at least something to eat, since I'd had her since sometime this summer.

I got Ella as a teeny-tiny scared kitten back at the beginning of November. She's very cute and loves to be snuggled--once she's caught. Normally, she'll sit in the same room I'm in, but if I stand or make a move toward her, she'll bolt. It's literally only been in the past two or three days that she's stayed put and let me come up to her. I think she'll be ready to be put up for adoption very soon--yay, Ella!

Chloe was my shortest-term foster, ever. I picked her up at the shelter a week ago, and today she was adopted at PetSmart. She was shy but loved to be cuddled. I like the shy ones, I guess. It's rewarding to see them come out of their shell and learn to be friendly.

So right now, I just have my Zen and Jamison and Daisy, and fostering Ella. I'm also technically fostering a puppy named Lance, but he was adopted today and I'm only hosting him until Thursday. He's a surprise Valentine's Day gift.



So come Thursday, I'll be down to one foster animal. I'm okay with that--things were getting kind of crazy around here. :)

Two months--part two

It may be shocking to some, but knitting has been put on the back burner lately. I'm still working on things, but not very quickly. I've been:

Sewing. As I mentioned two months ago, I've been itching to sew lately, but needed a better place to put my sewing machine. A hunt for a good vintage sewing table led to the discovery that antique sewing machines are plentiful, usually work as if they were new, and really cool. One thing led to another and I have my sewing table for my sewing machine and also a beautiful antique treadle machine from 1923. I got this machine for a really good price because it wasn't working. All it needed was to be oiled well. The cool thing is that Singer set the standard for sewing machines a hundred years ago, so this ninety-year-old machine takes the same bobbins, needles, bobbin cases, and even presser feet as my BabyLock sewing machine that I bought new seven or eight years ago.

Obviously, the table top is not antique. I bought the sewing machine on Craigslist and the treadle irons at a flea market kind of place here in town. The top is a remnant piece of laminate countertop. It came with the irons, but you can get them for really cheap from home centers. I kind of like the granite look, but I wish it had some drawers underneath.

I love sewing with it. There is something nice about the rhythm of treadling, and it's fun to make something and realize that it didn't take any electricity. Well, except for the lights and the iron. But the actual making-up part of it cost nothing. I still have to break out the other machine when I need to do zig zag stitches, but 90% of the time, this will work.

My project this weekend was organizing my pantry. There's a company out there called Shelf Reliance and they make these fancy-schmancy shelving units that organize tin cans so that you can easily use the oldest ones first. But they're really expensive.

I signed up for a food-storage newsletter a month or two ago. Every couple of weeks they email you something simple you can do to get food storage started or more organized. Two or three weeks ago, they sent a link to a pattern that you can use to make rotating can-storage racks from cardboard boxes.

I can get good quality boxes free from work, so all I had to pay for was a utility knife (box cutter) and glue (I used hot glue). The boxes work well and I'm pretty pleased with them. I made a couple following the directions as they were, and then started making them with one rack more. It makes better use of my shelf space, but also means that I can load the boxes from the front instead of the back. I did find that the instructions for the vegetable can size seem to have the back panel about half an inch too wide, but that was an easy fix.

Anyway, I could blather on and on about the things I did--a quick, unexpected trip to Salt Lake to say goodbye to my grandpa, a weekend trip to St. Louis to hang out with my besties for Time Out for Women, for example--but I don't want to give ALL my secrets away.

Two months went flying by--part 1

Where do I start?

First of all: Name change. I started this blog a few years ago primarily as a place to talk about the things I was knitting, and now that I'm using it as more of an expanded general blog, it needed to be renamed. Obviously, if you're reading this, you're not still looking for my blog on the other address.

I'm on my third foster dog (and that may be changing to my fourth soon). Katie went to jail--quite literally. She's been taken up by a program that works with prisoners in the Kentucky State Penitentiary. The prisoners take care of the dogs and put them through quite a rigorous obedience training program, and it's a win-win all around. The dogs enjoy the work, and they "graduate" from the program well-trained and are much more adoptable. The prisoners are learning job skills that could help them find work when they are released, not to mention the benefits of being able to focus on and care for something other than themselves while in prison.

Dog #2 was Heart. She was a terrified, malnourished little thing when I got her, so frightened of everything that she wouldn't even walk on a leash; you had to carry her from the car to the house. I only had her for a couple of weeks before someone called to adopt her (and I hear she's doing GREAT!), but she had totally come out of her shell and was beginning to fatten up.

Heart's coloring is proof that eyeliner does make your eyes look bigger!

Current foster dog is Badger, a short little senior mutt who loves attention. His name is definitely appropriate, because he's got really fuzzy stiff fur and shuffles around like I imagine a badger might. I've also got a foster cat named Kiwi. She has beautiful big eyes and she's a snuggler: if you pick her up and hold her against your chest, she'll tuck her head up under your chin and put her paws on either side of your neck like a hug and purr and knead. *melt*

Badger may be moving on soon. Someone had expressed interest in adopting him last week, but hasn't returned my phone call lately. Or I may be trading dogs with another foster family; they have one that doesn't get along with kids as well as they'd like, but since there are no kids at my house, it's not a problem.

I enjoy fostering these dogs and cats. Especially in Heart's case--it was so rewarding to see her fatten up and it made me ridiculously happy to watch her come running from across the yard when I called, remembering how she wouldn't even walk with me when I first got her. So...if you're looking for a dog or a cat, I know people who can hook you up.

Oh, irony, how you make life interesting

Katie broke her streak of daily accidents this week! Of course, she had one the next two days in a row, but it feels like progress. I'll take it. I got a text from the adoption coordinator at the shelter and someone has been inquiring about her. I'll bring her to the meet-n-greet at Petsmart on Saturday, and hopefully she will be going home with a new family for keeps!

I've been having this urge to sew lately. Some of my friends have these cute little Japanese knot bags, and I've got fabric laying around and there are free patterns on the Internet. It doesn't look too hard (famous last words, ha ha!). But I don't have a good space for my sewing machine. There is room on the kitchen table, but then it gets in the way of eating. I have a whole spare room that has nothing in it but a few boxes I haven't looked into in a year, but no furniture in there. It's all just enough of a pain to make sewing a low priority. Until yesterday.

Having reduced every dog toy in the house to floppy shells, Miss Katie has taken on new, giant stuffies to destroy--the dog beds. When I first brought her home, I had three dog beds in different rooms of the house for Zen to lounge around on. Within the first week, she'd peed on one. It was a pain to wash, and I rationalized that Zen had two other beds and threw the smelly one away. Then a second one got torn to shreds. Last night, I was absorbed in a book, and only vaguely registered that she and Zen were play wrestling around me. I finished the last chapter, closed the book, and looked over to see what the dogs were doing.

That's the guts of the last bed. I wasn't really mad; puppies chew, and to her, it was not much different than any of the stuffies I'd allowed her to destroy. Just bigger. I felt worse that Zen now had nowhere soft to sleep, and was mildly annoyed that this little foster dog was going to cost me so much money in unexpected replacements for the things she's chewed up.

 

On closer inspection, I realized that she'd ruined the zipper of the outer cover, but the inner pillow was only torn at the seam. Fixing it wouldn't take much. So I pulled out the sewing machine and set it up on the floor of the spare room, and fixed the inner bag as best I could. I wish I had photos of the yoga poses I had to make up with the foot pedal at the same level as the sewing machine! It would be like trying to drive a car when the steering wheel was next to the gas pedal, and there were no seats in the car.

 

Now that the sewing machine is out again, I've really been bitten by the sewing bug. First, though, I'd like to have some sort of table to set up on. I spent my lunch hour at a flea market kind of place on the south side of town, but didn't see anything I really liked. I'd rather have an antique-type sewing cabinet than a new craft cart. The old ones are made of solid wood and are much better quality than the new laminate-covered particle board most places seem to sell. And they cost less.

 

Tonight, I set the sewing machine up on a TV tray in the spare room. It's not ideal or even a long term solution, as it's kind of wobbly and there's not enough room. But it will do for now.

 

 

A few months ago, I bought fabric to replace the tapestry side of the couch throw pillows. They don't match my living room decor. I cut the fabric for all four pillows, finished one, and set the project aside. (Probably because I needed the kitchen table!) I did another pillow tonight, and realized that in order to make the new pillow not be lumpy, I have to re-fluff the poly fill before cramming it back into the case and sewing it up.

 

 

In other words, I have to tear the stuffing to shreds.