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Update summer 2021: blog has a new name! Please visit me at https://thepowerofquiet.blogspot.com/

Friday, August 9, 2013

Summer Projects

You know, I started this blog as a way to record my knitting, sewing, quilting, and crafts projects, with a little bit of life thrown in. Somehow, that's not how it's working out. Especially during the summer. I just don't knit during the summer. It's just too hot. I thought that maybe after we put in the air conditioning, I'd be able to knit through the summer months, but I think it's the mindset. Even if it's comfortable and not humid inside, I just don't feel like knitting because I know it's summer. At least I've done a few sewing projects so I feel a little bit crafty this season.

paint samples
I finally got around to painting the master bathroom. It took me all week to prep. Here are the paint colors I auditioned. We decided to go with the rosier one. I had to patch some holes in the wall before I even got to this point. The morning I was going to start painting, I discovered that I had forgotten to buy the paint! I had the little sample pots, but that wasn't going to get me very far. Then, after I went out to buy the paint, I kept getting messages and phone calls that I had to deal with, and then I had a physical therapy appointment, and painting never got started.

patching the wall
This morning I finally was able to set aside the day and paint. I set up my ipod with a good playlist and only took a break for lunch. The bathroom isn't all that big and I was hoping it wouldn't take all that long to paint, but with all the little hooks and towel rods and corners to paint around, this first coat took me all day.

cutting in around the edges
 
first coat
It definitely needs a second coat, so I'll be painting again tomorrow. Luckily, I don't have anything else scheduled. Except we need to start packing. We have a family Bar Mitzvah (my husband's sister's oldest son) to go to next week in Colorado. Lots of relatives on my husband's side will be converging on Denver from all over the country. We'll have 4 days to visit with everyone, which I'm really looking forward to.

There is a big birthday dinner planned for the evening that we arrive, at which we'll be celebrating all the summer birthdays among my husband's siblings and their kids and his great aunt. That's a total of 9, that range from the end of July to mid-September. That means I have to get all the cards and any gifts that we'll be bringing. I want to sew 2 of the gifts but haven't even started yet. I'm going to blame the painting. I'll just blithely ignore that fact that I went to jazz class and went out for drinks and dinner afterwards with my "dance ladies" and didn't get anything done last night. Maybe I'll have an incredibly efficient and productive weekend (and don't miss those flying pigs!). Oh well, I'll pull some late nights and get it all done. I can sleep on the plane. At least packing for 4 days should be pretty quick and easy. I've already made piles of the little things that I really can't forget, and lists of what else to pack.

My running injury recovery is very slow, and I went back to my physical therapist and massage therapist this week. The theory now is that the injury is caused by the long hours sitting at work. Yes, even though I only work 1 or 2 days a week, because I sit for such a long period, and tend to work to my right, it's causing all sorts of problems in my hips and with my running. It's been several months and I'm still not back to normal with my running and I'm very frustrated with it. I haven't run more than 3 miles at a go in months! Hopefully this new set of stretches and exercises will solve the problem.

Time to make my lists for tomorrow and get some sleep.

Shelley in CT


Sunday, August 4, 2013

Catching Up

I always look forward to the summer as a time to relax a little bit, ease up on the busy schedule, and get a few big projects done. And then it never happens. We always have some type of travel on the schedule, as we have family on both coasts and are usually visiting one side or the other. Now that the kids are older they are taking trips themselves. It feels like we're racing to prepare for a trip, then catching up from the trip after the traveler returns, then starting to prep for the next trip. I keep waiting for the downtime. Sigh!

I have been remiss with the blog, and not written anything since before I went to Germany, in March! I'll never catch up with everything that happened between then and now, so I'll give a brief summary and then pick up current events.

Germany was beautiful but cold and snowy. I'll try to throw in a few pictures in a later blog.

I came home to a construction project that was still not completely done, so I had to pick up the final details of that, some of which took forever. But it's done now and the work is beautiful.

We had a brief visit from dear oldest son for a week and a half  in May, in between finals (and his trip to Costa Rica to visit a "friend") and his internship this summer in Boulder, Colorado.

Dear daughter had a rough time getting through the end of her classes and the very few final exams she had to take, but she made high honors and had a beautiful day for graduation. Great Aunt Karen flew out from California for the occasion and we all celebrated.

The family at Graduation

Great Aunt Karen and the graduate
On to summer vacation, and dear youngest son and his attendance at a Cosplay convention in Hartford, and my construction of his costume. I had promised to sew him the costume for his birthday, last September, and then with all the construction and general busy-ness of life (and the fact that my sewing machine was not easily accessible for many months and had to be "dug out" after all the construction), I put if off until the last minute and had to really scramble to get it done. Sheesh! After yelling at the kids to plan ahead for all these years, you'd think it would have sunk in to my old brain. I had not taken into consideration all the time it takes to construct the patterns, and I always underestimate sewing time. I did manage to finish up, with mere minutes to spare. Whew!

youngest son is in the long red wig and pink vest
The next hoop to jump through was to prepare the very same youngest son for National Flight Academy camp in Pensacola, FL. He applied for and won a scholarship to the program so all we had to do was fly him down. Frequent flier miles came in very handy. Got him all packed up, with name tags sewn in to all of his clothes, and he had a very good time at camp, and got home safely, despite flight delays.

Next in line was preparing dear daughter for a trip to Japan to visit Aya, the exchange student we hosted the previous year. In addition to packing, she had to bring gifts. That's what's expected in Japan, and we didn't want to offend anyone, and we wanted to express our appreciation to Aya and her parents for hosting our daughter. So in addition to buying some American candies to give to the family and any other people dear daughter met out there, we sent along a bottle of our homemade wine, and I sewed some bags.

this bag is made out of my husband's old jeans

patchwork zippered bag
machine embroidered name

cute cat fabric that Aya will like
pencil bag




the whole set
I've made the wide-mouthed zippered bags before, using an online tutorial. Here's the link again:
http://www.noodle-head.com/2012/06/open-wide-zippered-pouch-diy-tutorial.html

I found the tutorial for the pencil bag online too. http://terriesandelin.blogspot.com/2010/07/pencil-case-tutorial.html

I sewed my "an original by Shelley" tag into all of them and hopefully they will enjoy the bags. I had fun picking out fabric to use,  but again, it took longer to sew them all than I had planned on.

Dear daughter has now safely arrived in Japan. Aya met her at the airport and they took a bus back to the house. She said she slept will the first night and with any luck she'll recover from the jet lag fairly quickly. She will be there for 2-1/2 weeks.

Last but not least, we are already starting to prepare for the next trip, out to Denver, CO for my nephew's Bar Mitzvah. That's in just a week and a half, but while there we will be celebrating all the summer and early fall birthdays on that side of the family, 8 of us! So, it's back to the sewing machine to make some more gifts.

Timing is working in our favor for a change, and dear oldest son's internship ends the day before the Bar Mitzvah, so he will be able to join us for the weekend. We'll help him move out of his summer apartment, he'll stay at the hotel with us, and then he'll fly out to visit my parents in Oregon for almost a week before he has to fly back to Texas for school. Dear daughter will be flying home from Japan the same day we fly back from Colorado.

I'm excited that the upcoming travel plans actually include ME this time! I'm not really exciting about the flying, since we are flying out of New York, and it's a 2-hour drive down to that airport without traffic, and summer traffic in this area is horrendous! But once we get there, we'll get to visit with relatives (on my husband's side) from all over the country. Many of them we've only seen recently (in the past few years) at funerals, so I am going to enjoy the much happier occasion. We'll all be staying at the same hotel and I won't have to cook! Woohoo! Hopefully I'll be able to get all the gifts pulled together well ahead of time and the trip will go smoothly.

Well, I think that's more than enough for now. Happy Summer!

Shelley in CT