Reading in the Summer

My gal Rita Farro, over at Rita's Sew Fun blog (link to the lower right corner in my blog roll) blogged today about summer reading.  Go, Rita!  Turns out she and I love some of the same writers.

I heartily agree with her opinion of public libraries.  She loves them; I love them.  I was just visiting my local public library last night.  We have our local quilt guild meeting there once a month, and it's the perfect time to stop in, pick up reserved books, and drop off the ones that are done.

I'm currently listening to some books on tape in my car by M.C. Beaton, they're mysteries set in the highlands of Scotland with a hero named Hamish McBeth.

I also like to buy books at the Goodwill.  Nothing beats the joy of owning a good book at a bargain price.  However, sometimes the girls and I do buy books at regular bookstores.  My daughter and I did the BN thing when she was younger.  We would go to the bookstore, browse around and get a pile, then go to the coffee bar and make our buy or not buy decisions while enjoying an overpriced beverage.  I do the same thing now only it's with three girls instead of one.

Miss A recently got herself a library card.  She was so excited, she said she's going to go to the library EVERY DAY THIS SUMMER!  When I told her that would not be possible, she said "No problem, Gramma, Grampa will just drive me over there!"

Love the enthusiasm...  and just think, they have gazillions of books, and they want you to read them ALL!

As to authors, here are some of my favorites... I have a bookshelf in my bedroom of books I purchased to read, or books that were gifts, or books that were passed over to me by my reading friends with whom I share.

 

I also love James Patterson, James Lee Burke, John Sanford, Jonathan and Faye Kellerman, Anne Perry, Anita Shreve, Sue Grafton, David McCullough, Doris Kerns Goodwin, oh my goodness I could go on and on.

Here's what I have read this past six months:

And what I want to read this year that I own:

My daughter gifted me with Killing Lincoln by Bill O'Reilly and Martin Dugard.  She knows I love history and the civil war period, and am a great admirer of Mr. Lincoln.  I think she was trying also to prove to me that Mr. O'Reilly is not as big a buffoon as he appears to be on TV, but that jury is still out.

And of course I have a full library of books related to my hobbies...  Can't resist the brightly colored photos.  Good for dreaming over when you're considering a new project, or twelve.

 I even keep my eyes open for used books, especially the classics:

 Read on...

What a Weekend!

I need several more days just to rest up...

My family, which I've blogged about before, has many, many branches on our tree.  This is specifically about my mother's side of the family.  She had seven brothers and three sisters who survived to adulthood, and two more sisters who died in infancy. 

Most of these siblings had multiple children themselves.  Only one aunt had an only child, and one had no children.  The rest of us are from families of four, five, or even eleven!

So when I tell you that I have a lot of first cousins, I mean it...  One cousin lives in the country next door to his brother.  They each have a ten acre yard.  Good thing because they have families who like horses, goats and dogs, and they themselves like cars, trucks, farm equipment and other fun stuff.

Once a year they generously host the family picnic.  You could call it a reunion, but if we get together frequently were we apart long enough to be reunited??  LOL!

This year both my children came and brought their kids. 

Miss E saying "Gramma, you're NOT taking my picture!"

After she ate, she texted Grampa to come and take her home.  (Oh no, Mr. Cranky Pants doesn't DO picnics...)

See the big slide in the background?  Entertainment for children all day long?  See the fingers in front?  That's my brother checking the weather report.  Thunderstorms were predicted and the sky was getting cloudy.

Miss K coming down lickety split!

Miss A and Miss K resting up from the slide.

More resting after much eating... son and grandson, a matched set, doing more weather checking.

My SIL looking very adorable.  She was a fashion plate.  Even her glasses frames are blue!

My brother.  Everyone joked that this is his best side. 

 

Once again, a good time was had by all.  There was volleyball and horseshoes, lots of food and beverages, a few sprinkles of rain but nothing disastrous until later in the evening.

 

Miss E got water in her ears and with the tubes it was problematic.  We left a bit earlier than I normally would but the kids were going to another party.  I had the grands overnight.  We got dried off at home, put things away, ate noodles and played in the yard, had ice cream cones and dropped exhausted into bed at 9:30 p.m.

 

I'm tired again just writing about it!

 

And a little bit jealous of my friend Marlene who retired last week, and didn't have to get up to go to work on Monday.  Or today.  Or ever again...  good for you, Marlene.

 

Party on...

TGIF!

At four o'clock it will be perfect!!

Party on...

The Princess and the Babylock

Last week I blogged a little bit about Miss E and the Babylock sewing machine I won at Nancy's Notions in May.  Here's an update of her first project.

First she learned how to thread bobbins, that was fun.  There were only four of them in the machine packet, and that's enough for now, but we put that on our shopping list.

 

We're sewing at my kitchen table.  The light in great in there, and she has her notebook and her accessories box, and of course will be well hydrated. 

 

She's stitching together a bunch of five inch squares that I had in my stash management storage.  I told her to take anything she wanted.  She took browns, blacks, grays and a few miscellaneous squares like orange/black check and some plaids.  I should have taken a photo of her laying them out, that ended up being quite the process.  I don't think "random" is in her wheelhouse.  She is a planner and gets a few OCD tendencies from Gramps down through Mom!

 

Anyway, once she was satisfied with the layout, she sewed and pressed and sewed and pressed, and this is the resulting small quilt top:

Adding a narrow border in, what else, black!

Pinning in the last border strip. 

This is the inner border. She has a wider brown border left to attach.

This turned out pretty nicely as a first 'on my own' project.  Since Miss E already knows how to operate a sewing machine, most of what I did was just coaching on the process.  Once she understood what she needed to do, she was off and running, and only came to me if she had a question. 

One border seam didn't catch for a couple of inches, so she learned how to unsew, which taught the value of putting in more pins.

The experience was altogether very pleasant for everyone.  In the process of the lessons, we thought of things we added to our shopping list: 

• 1/4 inch seam foot -- not in the basic kit
• magnetic pin catcher
• thread nippers

...and she already shopped the pattern section of our local Joann's for some likely next projects.

The pattern on the left, the sleeveless duster is Miss E's preferred next project.

There will be some shopping in my stash for an appropriate fabric.  She's requested a black and white print or floral.  I'm sure I have something suitable, and if not, we'll go shopping!

Rita, if you're reading this, thanks again!

Sew on...

Walking

Today I am going to start walking on my lunch hour.

When I got dressed this morning I was not happy with my side view.  I have never ever been thin.  Even as a child I was on the higher side of normal... not fat, just substantial.  And I've lost and gained back the equivalent of several persons over time. 

It's a struggle for me. Just thinking about losing weight makes me hungry.  I've been eating better kinds of food but portion control is a problem, and how many days in a row can you eat a salad for lunch anyway?  Just to be a rebel I had French fries yesterday.  Then I got home and DH had picked up a Culvers shrimp dinner for me. 

At least it had cole slaw in it, otherwise I would not have eaten a veggie yesterday!

I work at a sedentary job.  I am practically chained to the desk and some days I get so involved I forget to get up and go to the bathroom.  People hunt me down when I'm away from my desk.  Hey, if I'm so important, maybe I should get a raise... but I digress.

This. Must. End.

I am resolved to walk for half of my lunch hour at least four days a week.

Dang the people who are heating up such wonderful smelling lunches in the break room!

Let's hope I can last the week.  Wish me luck.

Walk on...

February Ladies' Sweater Challenge

Really it's me challenging myself to actually complete knitting one thing for myself. 

Normally I knit small things such as doll or baby sweaters.  Mittens and hats are my speed, and even some scarves and shawls.  Not too big an investment of time because I tend to get bored before they're finished.  Right now I'm looking at my yarn stash and I can see three or four works in progress that need some sort of finishing.  One just needs the side seams sewn, for goodness sake!  You'd think I could do that much...

So when I found Ravelry.com, and all of those lovely project photos, many with FREE patterns available for the download, I said to myself -- YOU can do this!  Start to finish, maybe not in one calendar year, but before you're too old to wear a nice sweater, you CAN knit one!  An adult size!  Come ON -- just do it!

I cast on the starting number of stitches and happily knit along in garter stitch (knitting every row, right and wrong sides), doing the increases to turn the corners at each of the raglan sleeve lines.

Once it got large enough to get my arms through what will be the sleeves, I started the lace pattern.  It's over four rows and seven stitches.  The pattern forms these nice leaves.

Of course there was a problem from the get-go, because I could not get my fingers to do the left-leaning decrease.  Knit two together?  No problemo!!  But slipping and back loops and psso and all that jazz, I couldn't do it while counting rows and stitches, so I just knit two together for every decrease.  The pattern looks just a tiny bit different than the actual knitting, but if anyone is close enough to see that, we had better be engaged!

Then of course there was the error or should I say there were multiple errors knit in.  And Frog Stitching (ripit, ripit) and reknitting.  I swear I should have the lace pattern memorized, since I knit so much of it!!

Then there was the hole, and the tear down... I pulled out 21 rows of the seven stitches where I did the yarn-over above the other yarn-over and knit in a gigantic hole.  Yes, lace IS holes, but this one dwarfed the others around it!

big hole... just begging everyone to look at it!!

Preparing to un-knit 21 rows of the pattern so I could reknit them on some short needles.

I reknit the offending 7 times 21 stitches, carefully counting rows, and turning my work so the purl rows on the wrong side would be knit as purls.  When I got back to the top, I should have been ready to knit those seven in pattern.  I should have ended on a purl row.  Seven purl stitches, no yarn-overs in the bunch.

I did not.

Instead I had a knit row, with knit tog's and yo's.

Oh dang!

If you look very closely you can see right in the center of this picture where the pattern takes a slight jog; everything looks good to the left, and it looks good to the right, but down the center, not so much.

At this point, it was after 10 p.m.  I decided that I was taking a bigger risk tearing those stitches out again and redoing them a third time than just leaving the whole mess alone.  After all, will anyone notice it while I'm galloping by on a horse?  Or is it if THEY are galloping by on a horse?

Regardless, I am leaving in the booboo.  Only God is perfect, and I am not going to try to pretend otherwise!

Besides, I have only about 4 inches to go before I'm done with the sweater body and can get started on the sleeves.

These items are soooo much easier to knit...

Have a great day!  Knit on...

Post #325!

Wow, I didn't realize I had written so much!  Of course it feels like I just started doing this...

Friday was a work holiday, and if you read my blog last week you know I took some vacation days on Wednesday and Thursday.

On Wednesday, Miss E came over with her sewing machine (Rachel, the famous Babylock) and she learned how to wind bobbins, thread the machine and sew a 1/4 inch seam.  She laid out her 5 inch black, brown and gray blocks and put together the center of a small lap quilt.  She got as far as sewing on the first border, and she has a second chosen but not sewn on. 


She kept saying "Is my face in the picture?  It's not, is it?"

I also taught her how to use a ruler and rotary cutter to square things up.

Thursday we took Aunt Zel to Joann's and bought some yarn to fix a run in one of Miss E's sweaters.  Then we hit the Goodwill store and picked up a bag of cotton tee shirts because we wanted to try bleach stamping.

This is an easy way to embellish tees with rubber stamps and bleach.  I saw it first on one of my favorite blogs, Hanging By A Needle and Thread.  Here's a link: 

http://hangingonbyaneedleandthread.blogspot.com/2015/06/stamping-with-bleach.html

This is a gray shirt that turned pink after bleach hit it.

This one faded but didn't change color.

Miss E's shirt surprised us all, dark blue turned orange-red.

Our crew chief, Miss A

We used plastic bin lids to keep the bleach on the front, and clean rubber stamps from our art box.  You need paper towels, bleach and water, and damp clean tee shirts.  We laid them on the grass to dry when we were done.  I only paid $3 per shirt, so if we didn't like the results, we could toss them with no guilt whatsoever!

I tried doing some work in my sewing studio, but other than moving stuff around and refolding yardage, not much was accomplished.

However, on Friday, Miss A and I were picked up by my friend Suzi for some exciting Retail Therapy.  Originally we were doing Ben Franklin Crafts and some resale shops, but decided to start with Quil-tagious, a new-to-me shop in Mukwonago.  It's actually been open for about a year.  A friend of my cousin Nancy opened it with her sister or sisters... and Nancy said it was cool.

It was!  They had a whole wall of Kaffe Fassett prints.  I succumbed immediately...

and picked up a selection.  Love the red, purple and teal combination, and the big splashy florals and 'suggestion-of-florals' that are his trademark.  He's not afraid of color, and I love that!

Friday night at family sewing night we made some additional fidget blankets for Shelley's nursing home.  By the time we got home to bed Miss A was too tired to watch the fireworks that were going off it seemed like just outside our windows.

So yards into the stash far outstripped yards out this week.  I bought 6-7 yards at Quil-tagious plus a half roll jelly, and 8 or so more at Ben's.  I did find some fat quarters that felt rather patriotic...

and some insane dots!!

 

These will make some awesome bindings...

 

Next post might be about my crazy knitting fiasco.

 

Sew on...

 

 

Keeping Busy With the Holiday Coming Up!

I'm so crazy busy this week you'd think I was trying to take vacation.

Oh, wait, I am... Since Independence Day is Saturday, my office is closed on Friday.  So I decided to make it a five day weekend and take off Wednesday and Thursday.  That's great, except you know you pay for vacation BEFORE you go, and again AFTER.  Murphy's Law, or office humor, or maybe both.

What I plan to do this weekend is get some more of my UFOs done, do a little socializing, and a little shopping and crafting with the grands.  My friend Suzi and I are planning an adventure on Friday when she's also off work; we're going fabric shopping and thrifting.

I have to finish up a batch of rhubarb jam.  I already made one batch, but a new bag of stalks showed up at church on Sunday.  It was small and very light in color, so there weren't a lot of takers.  The woman who brought it encouraged me to take it rather than just leave it sitting since most folks had left. 

This is a picture of some from my first batch.  Oh my gosh is it good. 

The recipe is a modification of a freezer jam recipe I found on Pinterest.  I used sugar for the 'sweat' of the rhubarb, added some strawberries, cooked it down and thickened it with strawberry Jello.  I used sugar free Jello instead of the regular.  I was worried that it required actual sugar for thickness but it turned out fine.

I have the pink quilt top to finish.  I trimmed the sides into a rectangle... I'm just not into square quilts I guess!

The color is more like this... the other photo is too 'red'.

I trimmed off portions of either side panel to get a 42 inch by 48 inch rectangle.

And I'm still knitting on the February Ladies Sweater... maybe that will be done by Christmas.  Still it's for myself so there's no rush, and it's something to do while helping hubby watch bad TV.

So the girls and I will be gallivanting for a few days.  We're going to Goodwill to buy some tee shirts because we want to try bleach painting, and we'll visit the local library because I have books on hold.

Here's a link to a site a friend sent me -- you will enjoy it:

http://mellysews.com/2015/04/8-things-people-who-sew-wish-everyone-else-knew.html

Sew on...