The Dark Side of My Loom

It's Thursday and for some time now I've made Thursday the day I report on my current thread projects--crochet, needlework, etc.--but due to the (less than productive) efforts I've been putting into my Script Frenzy project this past week I've not made one single stitch or loop since last Thursday.

The most productive thing I did today was clear about 200 email out of my inbox. Which leaves 2400 to go.

Oh my poor eyes.

Oh, yeah, got two loads of laundry done too.

The image at top is from So Much Pun one of the sites in the icanhascheezeburger.com family. I love puns.

LOL cats, word play, and email archiving are just a few of the ways I take breathers--urm procrastinate.

I'm a week behind on my script page count

I'm a month past due on finishing the baby afghan

I've got two weeks to finish the silk shawl.

I think I'll go watch something on Netflix.

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You Thought I Was Kidding?

A while back I posted about my issue with hoarding and mentioned that one of the things I save are the thread clippings off my needlework projects. That's a picture of the collection of ends clipped off the tails of my crocheted bookmarks in the last several weeks. Actually that picture was taken a couple weeks ago and I've tucked a lot of tails since then so there's even more in that envelope now.

Saving these sixteenth inch to two inch thread pieces began as an attempt to keep the litter off my clothing, the floor and the furniture especially since I carry small portable crochet, embroidery, cross stitch or needlepoint projects with me to other people's homes and cars and in public where it would be rude to leave my droppings indiscriminately.

So I began putting them in envelopes or small plastic bags kept in my sewing kit to keep until I was near a waste basket again.

Ha.

It wasn't long before the build up of the colorful little threads began to look too pretty to me to just toss. I concocted a number of theoretical projects for which they might be used: laminated bookmarks, book covers or greeting cards; decoupage fridge magnets; decoration on any number of items--mostly small containers, say pencil holders, jewelry box, picture frames, even wall art.

So I stopped throwing them away. At times in the past two or three decades I've had fistfuls of these floss, thread and yarn leavings scattered throughout my sewing projects. But have I ever actually made anything with them?

Guess.

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Homesick a Bit

My sister-friend Jamie took this picture of bluebells in my Mom's yard in Longview WA this week and posted it on her blog along with more. She has a knack for taking pictures of flowers. None of the ones I took last year turned out as nice as these. Her's have triggered a touch of homesick in me.

Thinking about taking those pictures last spring reminded me that a year ago this week i was still at Mom's house with (unbeknownst to me) another two months to go on my six month stay.

And I realized too that the anniversary of the day I started learning to crochet the bookmarks passed unnoticed by me sometime in the last ten days. So I've been at this a year and am still obsessed. Hmmm. It's lasting longer than some. I've crocheted something like 25 since the wee hours of Friday. Three more yesterday in a new pattern that was a variation on one of the others.

Meanwhile, I spent this afternoon sorting through and reorganizing my sewing and craft stuff, making some items more accessible and gathering pieces of targeted projects together in 'kits' to make them easier to get out and work on on an impulse or portable enough to take out to the porch or back yard when the weather turns sunny again. I had the whole bed piled a foot or more deep with the stuff. It amazes me it all came from somewhere in the room.

I cleaned out the bottom drawer of my sewing chest (the drawer below the one holding my collection of crochet thread) and distributed its contents to other places to make room for my yarn collection that was still in the Ziplock bag meant for storing winter coats or blankets in which it traveled to Longview and back for that six month stay at Mom's last year. Ever since last July I've had to wrestle it down off a shelf and back again while standing on the bed. Now it is directly behind my desk.

The next major project or should I say sub-project of this sort project is to sort and redistribute the items in the top drawer of that chest, which has become a 'junk' drawer for sewing and craft related items that are in a jumble and so stuffed that getting any one thing out is a formidable chore. I hope to dedicate it to the most accessed items for currently targeted projects.

I also put most of the finished bookmarks into the 8x11 inch sheet protectors I have for protecting the hardcopies of my best manuscript drafts. I say 'most' because a few were too long and those with beads on them wouldn't stay in place. If I'd taken pictures as I worked I wouldn't have had to steal one off my sister's blog for this post. [Thanx Sis :) ]

We're having a stormy week. Wind and rain and hail. We've had several power outages--lasting only a second or three but still annoying as clocks have to be reset and the DSL and satellite TV have to reset. The dirt track races have already been canceled for Saturday.

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Some Things Are Just That Fun!

moar funny pictures
Today was the second weekend of race season at the local dirt track and thus my second Saturday home alone for 8 to 12 hours. Last week it was very close to twelve. Today it was just over eight hours. Last week I had to prioritize the 300 some pages I had left to read in King's Under the Dome and 5 DVD all of which had to be in the library drop box before noon Monday. This week such pressures were off. I did have some chores to do in our room and laundry but nothing pressing. I was planning to spend the bulk of the time working on my script for Script Frenzy as I mentioned in last night's post. And if the weather was good (and it was!) I wanted to sit on the porch with Merlin and a book for a bit, alternating reading with sessions on the mini-tramp. And this evening I'd hoped to watch a movie on the big flat screen TV in the front room.

But before Ed and his folks left at 2 this afternoon, I started crocheting while listening to downloaded news pods. After making five more of the original pattern bookmarks, my wrist was twinging so I decided to get out the embroidered bookmark I've been working at for several years off and on. Next thing I knew I was glancing up at a dark window. I hadn't eaten. I hadn't started laundry. I hadn't sat out on the porch with a book and Merlin. Hadn't got on the mini-tramp.

No. Instead, I had sat in the same spot I spend most of my waking hours all week--the edge of the bed--and worked the hook or needle while listening to month old news; something I could do any time of any day. Now, unless Ed's folks choose to go out of town on the same day Ed has to work, sometime this week, I have to wait a week for the next race day, hoping for a dry track, to have another chance to do those things I can only do when I'm home alone.

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Vintage Butttons

I've been playing with my Mom's buttons. She's got about a bushel of them ranging in age from around twenty to possibly a hundred and twenty years old, if she's remembering right that some of those that were from her own mother's sewing basket had either come from her grandmother's sewing basket or off her clothes. That would make them pre WWI and possibly late 19th century. But if such elderly buttons are among those I looked at today, their not declaring themselves. The buttons are not sorted by age but loosely by color and material--plastic, wood, metal, covered.

Even the bottles and jars Mom had them sorted into are vintage with 1950s era glass Alka-Seltzer bottles, pre-saftey cap prescription bottles, film canisters, coffee crystals, and various condiments. Where possibly she indicates the predominant colors of the buttons with the color of the lid..

I've been dreaming about these buttons for over five years ever since I first started looking through them when I was here for my Dad's last days in 2005. I became so enamored of them I set myself the task of devising uses for them other than sewing outfits as that is not my particular passion. Here are some of my ideas:

• Spread a bunch out on a tray representing as many colors and types as possibly and arranged in an artistic fashion then take a picture and feed that picture into the jigsaw puzzle game on my computer. (The picture above will serve for that as well but I'd like to do several more--earth tones, black and white, metallic...)
• I could even have such images turned into physical jigsaw puzzles. Picture that pic above as a 1000 or 1500 piece jigsaw puzzle.
  
• Take a bunch of high quality pictures of individual buttons and then turn them into graphics that can serve as buttons on web pages. Or other decorative purposes on web pages.
• Or the same graphics could be used on printed stationary, greeting cards, bookmarks.
  
• Sew them onto book covers and book bags as decoration or even function--in place of a clasp. And for some of the rounder shapes use on the crocheted bookmarks in the way I'm now using beads.
• Make a mosaic out of buttons for a wall hanging.
• Replace the buttons on some of my own clothes and/or sew them onto clothing as decoration.

Anybody have any more ideas?

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Dreaming of Cool

see more dog and puppy pictures

Temps are still nudging 100 by late afternoon. But either it was a tad cooler today or I'm starting to acclimate. I found the energy to sew for several hours this afternoon and even went outside and sat on the porch with it after 7pm. I was working on the embroidered bookmark. The picture to the right was taken a couple of weeks ago when I was taking inventory of my sewing works in progress. I started this in 2005.

The words you see on the bottom were put on then. "Books can take you anywhere!" They are done in back stitch. Each one a different color, which wasn't on the pattern that came with it. The pattern shows them all done in red. There will be three balloons and a book cross stitched in among the words. Each one a different color and I hope a different color from any used in the words. I put on the book today and I made it brown instead of the blue the pattern showed because I was using the thread left over after petite-pointing the teddy bear in the picture at the top.

The picture at the top was painted on and I don't think it was intended to be stitched but I wanted to anyway. It is of a child laying on an open book that is flying in the air. I didn't care for the shade of green they had made the book so I thought it would look better needle pointed in purple. I started working that in the summer of 2005 and got about a quarter of the book covered in purple before the events preceding my Dad's passing that year distracted me. I'd been working on it while sitting with Ed's grandma that summer but when I got back from Longview after my Dad's funeral that November I'd switched my attention to another project.

Last week I finished covering the book in purlple then did the edges of the pages in gold floss with gold metalic thread and put some decorative stitches on the cover in gold metalic as well.

At 8PM I had to quit sewing and switch to reading as the light wasn't right for sewing anymore. Shortly before 9PM there wasn't enough light to read by either so I got on the mini-tramp and ended up spending an hour on a gentle workout, visiting with Ed during part of it. I'd missed getting on it for the last two days.

I also read for several hours earlier today and will be retuning to the books again as soon as this is posted as I've got four library books that must go back by Thursday morning. Also two DVD so I may play a movie if my eyes wear out on the books. I'm not likely to finish any of the books so I've already put my request in for all four of them to come back to me. One of them though, has a queue and I'm forth in line. That is the one I'm spending most of my time with. Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (and Why We Don't Know About Them) by Bart D. Ehrman. The author is an ex-fundamentalist who is a professor of Religious Studies at Chapel Hill University in N. Carolina. He is a scholar of the Bible in what is know as higher-critisism. I guess it's obvious (if you read my profile) why I'm interested. I may want this one in my personal library someday.

Tomorrow my in-laws will be out of town and I'm taking advantage of that to do our laundry. Then I won't have it do on Saturday when everybody is at the races and I'll be free to do something else.

Thursday I'm planning to go to the library and spend as much of the day as possible in their airconditioning. I went a little nuts ordering books in the last week and may have close to twenty waiting for me by Thrusday. What was I thinking? I don't have room for twenty more books in this room.!!!!

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Sunday Serenity #135

This was taken from our picnic tables at Touville Park on the Rogue River today. That is not actually the other side of the river showing but the edge of the island splitting the river in two--into an oxbow is it? Anyway it was a pleasant site not to mention full of pleasant sights. Breezy, sun-dappled.

My nieces parents were there and I expected her to go home with them but she returned to her grandparent's house with us and she and I holed up in my room and watched several more Gilmore girls episodes before Ed needed the bed and then we moved into the front room and watched more. We quit at 3AM (Monday) She to sleep and me to finish the sewing project I've been focused on for the last several days.

A birthday present for my sister whose birthday was Saturday. Ed said he would get it shipped overnight for me if I had it ready by 7:30 Monday morning.


I guess it is ready. I'm not as thrilled with the result as I was with the concept. I could not for the life of me keep my stitches going straight or of similar size. For most of the time I was taking out more stitches than I left in until I finally gave in to the reality that I wouldn't have it ready for her next birthday if I kept holding such a high standard for every stitch.

I consoled myself with the thought that most people would not be looking as close as I was--through magnifying lenses from two inches away. Or at least let's hope not considering where the design will be setting once she is wearing the tank top.

I used the embroidery stitch known as the back stitch to create at diamond shape traced by rows of color in the approximate positions of the colors in a rainbow.

Oh, well. I guess the important point to focus on is that I actually started a project for a specific gift occasion and finished it within a week of the occasion. Even more amazing, I finished a project inside a week of starting it. More amazing still, I gathered the materials for, started and finished a project inside of a month of first conceiving of it. All of these are significant WINS. Big time pluses worth kudos and back pats and victory Vs.

I also dressed two of the naked crochet bookmarks today and then gave them to my sister-in-law (my nieces mother) in recognition of her having just graduated with honors from college. I took both the tank top project and the portable bookmark wardrobe with me to the park but I forgot to take something to use as a backdrop for the pictures of the finished bookmarks. I improvised with a paper plate which wasn't ideal. But better than no pictures at all.

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High Priority Sewing and Craft Project in Progress

Several of the sewing projects I've got going which. These and more will be described individually below.

I am embarking on a finishing project for the several sewing and craft projects I have going. I'm hoping that by posting about it here, I will be more motivated to stick to a plan to wrap most of them up in the next six to eight months.

As you can see my working environment in this room is often compromised so its nice to be able to take a project elsewhere. I also like to take a project with me whenever I leave the house. I never know when a free minute or two might be available. And pulling out a needle or crochet project is more acceptable socially than pulling out a book. :)



Below, in no particular order, are the in-progress sewing and craft projects I currently have in portable condition and which are also high priority:

• The sixteen naked bookmarks discussed extensively in yesterday's post. I'm planning to offer several as prizes for the next Read-a-thon in October. And more are slated for birthday and Christmas gifts over the next year.
  
  This picture is not current. It was taken over a month ago in Longview and a few of those have been finished and given away. And many more added.
  
  
  
  
• The sweet pea vine embroidery on my Mom's sweater which I've promised her she'll have by the time it is cool enough to wear it in Washington--early October.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• The tank top I'm embroidering the neckline for my sister's birthday--this week!! Not even started yet!!! But I want her to have it for a road trip she is taking later this month. The design I have planned is very simple and shouldn't take me long.
  
  
  
  
• A needlepoint three panel Bible cover with room for a note tablet for my niece whose birthday was also this week so I'm aiming for Christmas.
  
  Again--sigh.
  
  I started this for her sixteenth birthday and she just turned 25.
  
  But at least I finished the needlepoint step while in Longview. Now I need to turn the edges in and cut out the cloth for the lining and sew it on.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• A needlepoint three panel notebook and file cover for myself. Still have several hours of stitching on the front and then sewing on the lining. No time pressure I guess though I did start this a year before I started the Bible cover for my niece. Sigh.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Several embroidery, needlepoint or cross stitch bookmarks and book covers slated for Christmas or birthday presents in the coming year.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• A needlepoint on plastic canvas cover (front and back) for a writing tablet. It's to include space for filing loose pages and carrying writing implements. Maybe stamps and envelopes as well.. Not begun yet but planned and all materials gathered for it.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• A needlepoint on plastic canvas cover for a small spiral notebook like the one I made for my traveling writer's notebook.
  
  I always intended to make a second one either for a different purpose notebook for myself or for a gift. I bought the materials for two when I made the first one in 2005. That one only took a week from the day the materials were bought because I was highly motivated by the fact the original covers on my writer's notebook were falling off.
  
  
  
  
  
• A 10x10 inch petit point mandala. Petit point is needlepoint that is more than 16 stitches per line inch. I believe this one is 18 count but I didn't stop and count while taking the picture. This will probably be a wall-hanging but possibly something functional like a notebook cover or purse. I started it once but there are no patterns or pictures with it and I can't remember my plan except the concept 'mandala' though possibly I was going to try free-form--make it up as I went. I'm not currently loving what I see here so I'm probably going to take out what is already there and restart it. Maybe I'm not cut out for free-form? But maybe I should make myself give it a whirl anyway. As an exercise in trusting the creative process.
  
• A long sleeved red blouse needing mending at the seams in several places and one sleeve's hem. Would be nice to have it wearable by October.
• A short sleeved blue and gray shirt needing mending on the shoulder seams.
  
  
  
  
• A long sleeved white blouse with over long sleeves which I wish to blouse with elastic at the wrist. I want it wearable no later than October 1st.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• A blue table cloth with a white geometric design embroidered around the edge. It's too small to be a dining table cloth and probably not of the right fabric for it either. I was picturing it as a runner for a dresser, upright piano, or lamp table.
  
  I've also considered making it into a throw by backing it with fleece or flannel. I was excited about it when I bought the thread for it ten years ago but I've packed it around with me ever since and keep dithering on design and function. It was once meant as a gift but I may choose to make it for our future home. We are going to be more bereft of the furnishings and decor for our next place than we were as newlyweds seeing as there won't be a bridal shower and wedding presents and we are starting from nearly scratch. So if I don't settle on what and who in time for this to be a Christmas gift this year, I'll aim for finishing it for our home sometime in the next year.
  
• The knee length wind breaker which my sister scorched with the iron across the left breast in 2007 while trying to iron on one small butterfly to cover a small tear and then ironed on a bouquet of butterflies to cover the scorched area but the edges of the iron on pieces keep curling and starting to peel off after washing so we brainstormed the idea of sewing an outline of sequins around tha edges. I would like to have that ready to wear by the time the weather permits--probably mid to late October.
  
  
• The dolphin cross stitch which is 90 percent finished. The only cross stitches left are the decorative metalic gold ones framing the picture. I've got one of the two rows going around about a third done. Then there are a lot of other decorative and enhancing stitches that need to be applied--more akin to embroidery than cross stitch per se.
  
  Neither the dolphin nor the orca project (below) are small really but they are compact and portable to the extent I could work on them here on my side of the bed, out in the yard or in the living room when there is company as long as I have the necessary light source.
  
• The orca cross stitch barely begun. Both these cross stitch kits were bought the year Ed got his Silicon Valley job 1999-2000 and started before he lost it and we were forced to move in with his parents in 2001. I was making them to hang on the walls of our beautiful double wide mobile home in Sunnyvale. I lost heart for the projects when we lost that home. But Ed thinks we are less than a year from being able to have our own place again. In light of which I would like to put my heart back into them as a token of my faith that will really happen this time. I'm picturing them gracing the walls of our new place.

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