Some quilt progress, and moving news

SEWING 

I started this post ages ago it seems. Time seems to have passed more slowly and more quickly than normal this past year.

One positive that has come out of this difficult chapter of history has been that the need to sew face masks got me back into the sewing room. Over the past year I’ve sewn over 200 face masks, mostly given away to friends, family, and a local community sewing group that was quickly organized to distribute face masks to groups who needed them. I sewed for the Maskateers, supporting Southeastern CT, as well as my synagogue, and friends and relatives. As difficult as this year has been, it felt good to have the necessary experience and skill to help.

Once I was back in the sewing room, I picked up other projects that had been on the back burner, like this bear quilt, a wedding present for Jeff and Julie, who have been married now for 3-1/2 years. I’m finally making some good progress. Guess it helps when I’m not doing a lot of my normal group activities.

I’m quite happy with the way it’s turning out, and all the bear applique squares are now finished. I still only have about half the number of bear’s paw blocks that I need.

Sewing has slowed down again though, not because I’ve lost the energy or the will, but because our plans have changed, and that has affected how much time I have to spend in the sewing room.

THE BIG MOVE

This pandemic and the year spent working from home has done more than bring back my sewjo. Dan has been working from home for over a year now, and has realized that he doesn’t really need to stay in Connecticut to finish out the few years he plans to work before retirement. He consulted with the powers that be, and has the go-ahead to continue working from home at a home that is not in Connecticut.

Our plan has long been to retire to Oregon, near my mom and daughter Jess, and much closer to the kids in Colorado. We have now moved up the moving date, bought a house in Lake Oswego, OR, and are preparing to put our CT house on the market. My time, therefore, has been spent purging, cleaning, packing, and making repairs and touch-up painting all over the house in order to be ready to show the house soon. Sewing is back on the back burner.

Guess I’ll have to change the name of the blog; in a month and a half I won’t be in Connecticut anymore. We’ve had a really good 25 years and there are a lot of incredibly supportive friends that I’m going to miss terribly. We do have a guest room in the new house, and I’m working on convincing all my dearest friends here in Connecticut to come visit us in Oregon.

OK, back to work cleaning and packing. Hope this house sells fast!

Shelley in CT

Couch to 5K (in one day)!

Ok, I'm not really a candidate for the 'couch to 5K' programs. While I haven't been running regularly for a long time, at least 9 months, I'm not a rank beginner, and I've been dancing, walking, doing Pilates, and getting in an occasional run just so I don't feel like a complete slug. I hadn't been running because of a strained hamstring. It seemed every time I was starting to feel a little better, I'd push too hard in exercise class, or take a long drive and it would start bothering me again. HOWEVER, I think I've finally moved past it. The pivotal event was a long day of much driving. 8 hours in the car, all told, and not a twinge! Huzzah! So it was time to get back into shape. Of course, every morning that I had time to fit in a run, it rained or snowed. Last week though I finally got out. Twice! Roads are clear, nights are mostly above freezing, and there are only little bits of snow left in shady corners. Did I start out short and easy? Define short. Define easy. I started at 3 miles. I figure I have enough muscle memory to keep me going for 3 miles. I hadn't run since early February, and I hadn't been running regularly then either. I didn't have to stop and walk, and I even felt OK. I was REALLY SLOW! But I can live with that. So 2 runs last week. Four miles this morning. No snow or ice to worry about (I would hope not, after all, it's April). Maybe I'll find my stride again soon and move up to a sub-10-minute mile.

socks for dear daughter

On the knitting front, very little has been happening. I know I've written about my tennis elbow. I was in physical therapy in the fall and it was really a lot better. Then I volunteered to work backstage at my dance studio's production of the Nutcracker. Have you ever heard the phrase, "No good deed goes unpunished?" Seems the backstage work was a little harder on the arms than anticipated. That moved straight into having kids home for the holidays and all the cleaning and cooking that entailed. Don't get me wrong, I was thrilled to have them all home, and it's much more satisfying to cook for a crowd than just for one or two or us, and I even got company and sometimes help in the kitchen. But it all took its toll, along with shoveling snow and clearing ice dams on the roof this winter. The pain has waxed and waned, and I've done little bits of knitting when I was feeling OK. The most progress I've made in knitting has been socks for my daughter.  I knitted on our vacation to New Orleans in March. Airplanes are great for knitting, and there was no stress on the unhappy arms while we were on vacation. Love those vacations---no cooking or cleaning!  Lately, though, both my arms have been a lot worse, so my knitting is currently not happening. I still go to knitting group, and chat and eat, and knit a little bit, and chat some more. Really, we mostly go to knitting group to chat. I'm going back to physical therapy next week and am hoping to finally get back to normal. Seems everything on my list of things I want to do involves heavy arm use.

  With all the knitting projects on the back burner, I needed a creative outlet. One was painting the kids bathroom. I find painting a room to be very satisfying because the change can be so drastic and the end result always looks clean and new and fresh. I've never been fond of the prep work involved, but it was all worth it. Our hall bathroom now looks like a lovely spa bathroom. Yay! It also helped that all the kids were out of the house and I could leave the mess when I was done painting for the day. The only thing I had to worry about was the cat peeing on my dropcloths. I was working with a deadline: I wanted to finish up before the kids got home for spring break. There are really only a few little touch-ups left, along with sanding and finishing the doors. I'll try not to let another 2 years go by before I manage to finish that up.

I've been doing more sewing lately too, also, I think, to satisfy the need to create. I made another version of"the perfect t-shirt" that I wrote about in the last post. I'm getting much closer to a really great t-shirt, and will talk more about that progress in my next post. Time to wrap up.

Shelley in CT

Snow.....and more snow!!!

OK, the first snow was pretty. But several snows into the new year, I'm tired of it, and the shoveling. And the cold. And the icy roads.

snow is higher than the snow blower mouth

Opened the garage door....

My wonderful Dear Husband snow blowing the driveway

Good thing we don't have to drive this car until everything thaws!

OK, I'm done.

The kids in town have certainly enjoyed their snow days, but let me tell you, when I'm trying to get back into harness with my running, the snow really messes things up! I find that I have to really pay attention to the weather forecast so that I can get out when the roads are clear. I did manage to get out last Sunday, wearing many layers in order to survive the cold.

It was well below freezing (but the roads weren't icy!) so I went with 2 pairs of wool socks, wicking tights and heavy polartec tights, and three layers on top. I have to say that all of these wicking fabrics are really helpful in cold weather. I wasn't cold at all. I will pass along my other trick for cold weather running: I always tuck the first shirt layer into my pants. It helps hold in the warm air and keeps drafts from wafting up inside my clothes as I run. I wasn't cold at all. Wish all of those layers had helped me run faster. Guess I'll have to take what I can get!

Since the Sunday run we've had a couple more days of snow and roads are slowly clearing again. Hopefully I can get in another good run before the next snowstorm, which, by the way, is predicted for Sunday.

Meanwhile I've been getting caught up on the laundry and housework. Today I even (finally) got the the sewing I've been wanting to do for ages. I have a T-shirt pattern I've been wanting to try, and fabric sitting with it. I decided that I could try out the pattern by making myself a pajama top in some lavender cotton waffle knit that's been sitting around the sewing room for years. Long enough that I can't remember what I bought it for in the first place. I figure that if it doesn't fit as well as I'd like, it's just a pajama top so it really only needs to be comfortable. I'm using a pattern from Pamela's Patterns called The Perfect T-shirt.

The pattern is very generously sized. According to my measurements I cut out the medium, but had to take in the shoulders and then take in the sides as well. I should have cut out the small and shortened the armscythe.  I'll try that next time. I used the same fabric for the neckband and cuffs since I don't have any coordinating or matching ribbing. I think the neck opening is a little wide for me as well. I'm not sure whether that's because this fabric is so loose and stretchy or if I would do better narrowing the neck opening for the next iteration of this pattern. I like the drape of the body, so it's worth tweaking until I get a fit I like. I left the bottom of the body circumference at the medium size, since I'll be using this shirt as a pajama top and I like the extra width for wearing with slim pajama pants or leggings. There is also a front option with darts, which I will definitely try out.

Not much else going on here. Just waiting for the next snowstorm. Sigh.

Shelley in CT

One more off to college...

Dear Daughter with van packed and ready for Freshman Move-In Day!

Well, another summer has come and gone, and we are now down to just one kid left at home. And he has his license and can drive himself just about wherever he needs to go. It will be interesting adjusting to this. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

First things first, we had to prepare dear daughter for her move to college, after we had all returned home from our various trips. She was returning from 2-1/2 weeks on Japan with her host-sister and we were returning from a trip to Colorado for my nephew's Bar Mitzvah. Once we had gotten past most of the jet lag (mostly hers, as she was coming back from a 13-hour time difference), it was time to make the lists of everything she would need in the dorm, and start cleaning, gathering, and shopping. Sounds simple, but gets much more complicated when you factor in an anxious teenage girl with a very particular sense of style, an unwillingness to compromise, and a propensity to procrastinate. Somehow it seemed that nothing on the list got done, no matter how many times I reminded her, unless I took charge and drove her to the stores and pulled out the list, or told her she needed to wash the sheets and towels TODAY, or carried suitcases and boxes up from the basement and pointedly left them in her room... She still has a couple of things she needs to finish up on campus this week.

Move-In went pretty smoothly. With the many thousands of students moving in on the same day, UMass came up with a system that required us all to sign up for a specific move-in time, and we had instructions to report to the "staging area" for our part of campus, and were directed to the appropriate locations by student volunteers. We were very lucky that our daughter had chosen a dorm that was mostly upperclassmen (who all moved in on a different day) so there were only about 26 freshmen moving in to her dorm that day. Things moved like clockwork, we arrived, were directed to the dorm, the van was unloaded in minutes, and by the time I had parked the van in the designated lot and hiked back up to the dorm, everything was in the room and she was half unpacked. Within the hours she had taken everything out of boxes and suitcases and put most of it away.

At UMass, family eats free in the dining halls (Yay!) so once most everything was unpacked we went off to the nearest dining hall for lunch. Quick and easy, and the food is actually quite good!

During the unpacking, we had determined that she needed a few more things - a couple of extension cords (how did we not think of those ahead of time?), another power strip, a shoe rack, and some over-the-door hooks. So off we drove to Bed, Bath and Beyond, just down the road, along with half of the other families moving their freshman in, to buy the necessary items.

Back to the dorm to put together the shoe rack, put up the hooks, and plug in the power strips and extension cords so that she could plug in her mini fridge and lights. I must say, we were quite efficient. When it was all done, though, we had a hard time saying goodbye. I'm not sure dear daughter was quite ready for us to go either, but I think we had the more difficult time walking away. Still hard to think of her away from home (though I'm completely used to oldest son being gone, but then again, this is his 4th year and we're trained). At least she's much closer than her brother, who's in Texas, and we will be visiting in October. We've already gotten a few texts from her assuring us that she's fine and keeping busy with New Student Orientation.

Daughter and Roommate

So now there are only 3 of us at home, and, of course, the cat. Younger Son has a busy schedule this fall with cross country practices and meets and rehearsals for the fall play, along with several AP classes. He is also our social butterfly and likes to go out with friends. Already testing his limits with the car and where and when he can drive. As I said, it will be an interesting year.

Knitting: I have done very little knitting this summer. I pulled out an old sock project to take with me on the trip to Colorado, since socks are so nice and portable. I haven't really worked on anything else though. After the hot days, I just didn't have the energy to take out a knitting project in the evenings. Oh well, I'll catch up this fall.

I've finally gotten around to sending out dates for knitting group. Soon the emails from would-be hosts should be rolling in and I'll put together the schedule. I'm even considering putting our schedule and group information on a website. How Twenty-First Century! Actually, it would probably be a blog for the group, but I could post schedule, location information, and updates. Something to discuss at our first knitting day.

Sewing: I have already posted most of my summer sewing. I made a microwaveable heating pad for dear daughter to take with her to college - the night before she moved in (now where does she get those procrastination genes???). Forgot to take a picture of it. Hope it works for her. I made it the same shape as the one we have at home and filled it with buckwheat that I had mail-ordered years ago in order to make many heating pads as gifts (and never did).

Ready to start in on all my fall projects: cleaning, organizing, painting, sewing, knitting, building, etc. etc. I have quite a list. I won't accomplish everything on the list. I'll be lucky to get to even a quarter of the things on the list, but then I'll just work on the rest of the list next year. No rush. If I didn't have a list I wouldn't know what to do with myself.

Shelley in CT

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

Begin as we mean to go on

I'm not a big one for New Year's resolutions, but I do like a fresh start, and I believe in beginning as I mean to go on. So I started early, spending the end of 2012 filing our (huge!) pile of paid bills and papers and documents. I moved old files to boxes in the basement so that the filing cabinet wouldn't be too full to access, and I cleaned up the file folders too. Boy that felt good! It'll make tax time a little easier too, because we'll be able to find the documents we need. It always amazes me how a good clearing out can lift my spirits!

The new year also started with signing up for an exercise class. I have been to this class a lot over the years, but I had lapsed, and hadn't gone in close to a year. I guess I got busy, but mostly I got lazy. The class gives me really good core-strengthening exercises, and good stretches that I never really get around to doing on my own at home.

On the house front, here's how far we've come on the construction of the three-season room. (I say "we" but really our contractor and his crew are doing all the work!)

The side of the house: the double doors are part of an extension of the garage

From the back corner of the yard

Inside three-season room (boxes are kitchen cabinets)

The other project I've started on is moving my sewing room. As the big construction project is moving along, the crew will be moving into the house soon to tear down walls, build a new laundry room and expand and remodel the kitchen. The room with my office and sewing table will be changed, and I don't want my sewing machine anywhere near all that construction dust. So, as my oldest son gets older and spends less and less time here at the house, we are ready to convert his bedroom to a guest room/sewing room. He's not really broken hearted, as he is already making plans for post-graduation (spring 2014) and those plans don't include moving back home. He IS enjoying telling all his friends at school how his parents started converting his bedroom a mere 2 days after he went back to school though. Ha!

Since I've been cleaning up the sewing area and starting to move things, I've also been inspired to take care of some of the mending that's been patiently waiting for me, along with some small projects.

 Here are 2 open-wide pouches that I made using the last few remnants of a favorite fabric. I found a tutorial for them online here on a blog called Noodlehead - quick and easy and great results. I used only fabrics and linings and zippers that I had on hand. A good way to work down the stash and get something useful out of it.

In addition to the sewing, I used up some more fabric covering boxes to use for yarn storage. I keep some of my knitting projects in the living room and the pretty covered boxes look so much nicer than old cardboard. I first tried using good old Elmer's white glue, but soon I made a trip to the hardware store and bought some spray adhesive. That moved things along much faster, though it's much messier. Notice the newspaper covering my work table in the "outside fabric" photo below.

starter box

add lining

add outside fabric

  

add grommets and handle

on the shelves

 Well, the shelves still look kind of messy, but it's a much tidier mess than it used to be.

Wishing you all the best of luck with your own fresh start.

Shelley in CT

Slow Progress

Now that I have just about recovered from jet lag and mostly caught up on work after being away for a week, I'm trying to get to some of those items on my very long to-do list.

I finally got around to weeding the bed in the front yard by the mailbox. It's been needing it for months and every time I picked up the mail or the paper, or went out for a run, I'd look down and say to myself, "I really need to pull the weeds out of that bed," and then I'd go on my merry way and forget all about it. Now that I've finally done it, it looks SO much better!

I also dug into the mending pile. One of mending projects was a skirt to be remade for my daughter. It was given to me last summer, and really only needed a casing stitched in and some waist elastic, but it has been sitting on the sewing table for an entire year now, still waiting. Now it is finally done, and didn't take all that long either.

Here is the lower half of my daughter modelling the aforementioned skirt. She is very happy with it. I can tell because she wore it the next day without any coercion. Really!

More weeding yesterday, in the back yard this time, and I've already started in on our CSA  vegetables (community supported agriculture - we bought a "share" at the beginning of the season and get a box of whatever vegetables are ready in a given week). The beets are steamed and waiting in the fridge for me to figure out what to do with them. A nice big batch of pesto is made and in the freezer. And last night's dinner was a yummy pasta dish using our summer squash. Yay! Maybe I'll manage to use all the vegetables from the box this week before the next box comes!

I'm enjoying the summer flowers. These are my daylilies in the back yard. I have a bunch more in the front yard, but the deer have eaten the buds off of every last one of them. Guess it's time to invest in some of that foul-smelling deer repellent.

Last but not least, an FO! TA DA!

 

2-at-a-time  1x1 ribbed toe-up socks in a lovely hand-dyed variegated yarn. I used the iron heel (here's a description/tutorial: http://pencraftco.wordpress.com/2010/10/13/the-iron-heel/), which puts the heel stitch under my heel, where I tend to wear out the socks. I'm hoping these heels will hold up better than a standard heel. The heel definitely feels different. I'll have to wait until the weather gets cold and I can wear the socks to find out just how good a fit this heel is for me. I also used Jeny's Surprisingly Stretchy Bind Off, http://www.knitty.com/ISSUEfall09/FEATjssbo.php, and it really is surprisingly stretchy, and very easy to do. I'll definitely be using that bind off again on socks, and anything else that needs a stretchy bind off.

Couldn't resist another sock photo - I'm so happy that I finished them. Now I can move on to another project!

Shelley in CT