sewing and sickness

In my last post, I mentioned that I was excited to hopefully have five days in a row off work.  Of course, I had to toil away for five days in a row ON at work first, but I made it!

But.  Day #4 (of work) my throat was scratchy/dry.  Not sore, but also kinda weird.  But it's furnace-all-the-time season, so maybe it's just dry air because I haven't set up my humidifier yet?  Day #5 was the same.  As the day wore on, I was forced to have something to keep my throat soothed some (I ate what feels like a whole bag of peppermints!) to keep from having coughing fits, but still felt fairly okay.  Maybe a little tired, but here's to hoping that tomorrow - day one of the five in a row off - would find me healthy.

Oh how poorly that hope manifested.

I spent all of Thursday - day one of five off - in bed.  Napping, snuggling kitties, watching some Netflix and generally alternating between anger and pity at myself for getting sick.  But I knew staying in bed was my best choice for getting better faster.

The kitties loved it - everyone but Toby got a chance to join me.  Toby did not because he is the reason Gabby lives in my bedroom in the first place.  (Don't worry, he got snuggles, just not on Thursday.)

(I have this cat bed ON my bed and Finn loves to snuggle in it in the daytime.)

Friday dawned (I didn't sew any of the days between my last post and Friday because I was at work, or, as above, in bed) and I wondered how I would feel.  Cats needed to be fed, litterboxes scooped, so I got up, planning to do the minimum, but hoping for better.  You know, sometimes when you get up and moving, you do feel better.

Guess what?  I did feel better!  And by the time I'd done chores and showered, I felt about 75% myself again!  Hooray!

Off to the sewing room!

I decided to put the baby quilt on hold, as I won't need it until February, and work on the quilt for my nephew that my hubby would *like* to have done for Christmas.  (His contribution is to ignore me while I sew, so...)

I used this pattern as a jumping off point, but in an effort to not have to make 300000 blocks, I made the blocks bigger.  (I still have to make about 200000 of them, but don't remind me, okay?)  Which lead to some math.  Math mistakes.  I bought about a yard less than I needed of both the greys.

Okay, but first, let's cut just a few pieces and make sure the NEW math is correct.  Before I cut it all.  Before I go buy more.

Woo hoo!  It works!

I then cut the remainder of the pieces and figured out how much more I would need.

That trip happened yesterday, Saturday.  I wore my mask to my local quilt shop because, though I'm feeling better, the hubby has the plague now, and maybe I'm not contagious, but maybe he has something else and I'm brewing that now too?  Also, just, you know, being courteous so no one has to miss Thanksgiving because of me.

I got my fabrics (whew - that lighter grey had gone into the clearance room in the week between my purchases, so thankfully it was still around!) and headed home to wash them and sew.

Here's the start.  It took HOURS.  Literally.  I washed and dried the fabrics (in with some other stuff so as to not waste waster) and was STILL sewing after they were done!  (Wash and dry take about an hour each around here.)

But, I got half the sky pieces on the geese bodies yesterday.  (Thankfully I only ran out of the darker grey - I need the lighter grey for the other parts, so I robbed Peter to pay Paul and then had to go shopping to pay them back!)

And I got them pressed.

And I got the new fabrics pressed.

And I got the remaining dark geese cut and ready to sew today!

These are the "hard" geese.  They can't be done using the 4-at-a-time method.  The other geese can.  Maybe that will go faster, maybe not.

Salem wants you to see how seriously she took her role as supervisor yesterday.  I can't believe we brought her home two years ago already.  She's such a sweetheart and still has the biggest purr and is so kind and patient.  And soft.

I finished just one book this week.  Between work and feeling poorly, it wasn't a great reading week.  I keep looking at my stash of books and am inspired, but it comes to actually reading them, I get too easily distracted.  Maybe acknowledging that will help me be better about it?

Anyways...

I barely started reading the blurb on the back and this went into my bag.

It's the story of Mr. March - the father of the girls in the book Little Women.  His life as a young man and rise into wealth, his fall into not-quite-poverty, how he came to be a chaplain in the Civil War, how he met his wife, all in as much of a jumbled order as my list above.

I listened to Little Women on the CraftLit podcast (link here is to website, as it's easier to search and link from there) a few years ago while sewing for the kitties and enjoyed it way more than I anticipated.  Which is why this book, written many years later by (obviously) a different author, was so quick to enter my bag of goodies.

I was excited to read this, but it was kinda hard to read.  He sees some terrible things in his time with the army - not only slavery bad stuff, but army and humans in general being awful.  He is confronted with the reality of the continuation as well as the ending of slavery and how naive he was about it all when he joined the army.  In the end, he comes home a changed man and we see clearly why.

It seems like reading this just shortly after reading James was good.  They both had a more detailed story of history than the sanitized version I'd been taught in school about the Civil War and slavery all things surrounding it.

I'm glad I read it.  Difficult or not, I feel like I understand things a little better now.

And it was a good book.  Yes, the topics were difficult, but the book itself was good and I wanted to keep reading.

If you want to read it, I think you'd probably be in the best position if you read Little Women first, though.  There are many references to the girls and other characters and situations in the book that are helpful to have a familiarity with it.  (And the podcast/audiobook I've linked above is a great one if you want to listen - at the start of each episode, the host does chat about crafty and personal stuff, but she also can delve into vocabulary or period-relevant topics that helps with understanding the book.)

I'll start the next book tonight - it's another that hit the bag with just the authors name on it, so hoping for a good read.  I mean, it has another of those permanent award stickers on the cover, so it's supposed to be good, right?!

Happy quilting and reading!

Katie

PS  And this morning, as I was elbow deep in the process of swampifying my kitchen in order to clean the fridge (it needed it!), the boss called, asking if I could come in to work.  Well...sorry, but I've got this fridge half torn apart and my kitchen now also needs cleaning and I haven't showered yet because who showers before cleaning out a fridge...  So, nope.  Not this time.

quilting!

Quilt piecing, that is!

I had a few days off last week and having finally finished the sewing for the cat rescue (this round at least), I was able to dig into the monsters!

The first one was rough.  The pattern is labelled as intermediate skill level, and the sewing itself wasn't difficult.  The pattern writing, however, is hot-flash-inducing difficult.  Lots of pieces labelled in non-sequential letters (and double letters and capital letters and small letters and all variations of that), plus not every step laid out in diagrams made for some errors.  Survivable, but this pattern could probably have benefitted from double the pages, instructions and diagrams.

But...

Monster #1 finally emerged!

With multiple fabrics cluttering up my ironing board, I decided to get out a project bin after all.  (I should have and eventually planned to, but for whatever reason, I was in a rush and didn't do it before I started.)

I set it down on the ottoman part of the chair in my sewing room and before I could turn around to collect the fabric, Lily jumped in.  She has a bit of RBF, but she also might not have been happy that I was telling her that this was NOT FOR HER.  (She thinks all the things are for her.  She is wrong.)

Anyways, I got the fabric in the bin and the following day whipped out monster #2!

I've had to do a bit of adjusting to get the colors right, so the pink is close to correct, but the floral is a little more orange than it really is.  (Same trouble with the blue above.  How I can hold my phone above the blocks and see two different colors between the phone and my actual eyeball is baffling, but true.)

As I was sewing #2, I had #1 on the floor for comparison or inspiration or whatever.  Apparently Freddie thought it was for him to un-alive it?

Good boy Freddie!  (He's such a goofball.  Still acts like a kitten every so often, even though he's about 7.)

A few days later, I managed to get back to the sewing room (work and such happened) and then there were three!

The pink is probably most accurate here.  Eventually I hope to have a photo of the fabrics with their REAL colors.  (Cell phone manufacturers - WHAT IS YOUR PROBLEM?)

And this is where we are now.  I plan to add sashings and probably something to make the quilt taller than it is wide, or at least square, but that's a problem for another day.

In addition to this quilt, I made a run to my local quilt shop and got fabrics for my nephew's quilt:

(Colors are almost okay here, so apparently I have to take photos on my washing machine?)

I'll get to this next, but I'm excited because the monsters are nearly done and, if all goes right, I'll have five days off in a row here soon - including the weekend!  (And two of them, the hubby will be working second shift, so I can sew late into the night and not have to worry about making him dinner!)

And, while I was there, I selected some fabrics for the annual Christmas pillowcase tradition for my three nieces and the husband of the eldest niece:

All of this new fabric has been washed, but it's sitting in a semi-tidily folded pile, awaiting my iron.

I also finished a single book:

The random number selection system gave me this after having read another by this author just a few weeks ago, but that's okay.  I like this guy - that's why I have a number of his books in my stash!

Set in Butte, Montana, during copper mining days, the story of Morrie Morrigan (introduced to us in previous books - ones I've read) continues.  He's an interesting, intelligent man who has been a teacher in previous books, but in this one turns up looking for an accounting position, thinking the mining company might need him.  Turns out, the mining company is enemy #1 of just about everyone in town (they work for them, but the workers aren't treated well, so...) and he ends up working for the local library, under an equally interesting character, and secretly helping the miners.

Though I enjoyed the book, either it wasn't as good as previous parts of this man's story, or I was expecting more.  Maybe the editor got to it and cut too much out?  Maybe he was trying to cover too many characters and it was just too much?

Whatever the case, it wasn't enough to put me off this author.

But of course I've moved on to the next book.  It's a short one, but there's a lot to be done around here, so we'll see how long it takes.

Off to do some stuff with the hubby before I have to be at work later today.

Happy quilting!

Katie

moving on

I've had a few days in a row off - enough to have a little down time to relax and THEN get busy on my own projects - and it's been productive!

First, I needed to get those cat carrier covers finished - they were piled (so they stayed nice and flat) on my cutting table.  There were quite a few to be completed, but they don't take a ton of time each.  Just a lot of time when there's a bunch of them together.

This feels so good.  I expect I'll be asked to sew more at some point, but the gal who was coordinating this effort stepped down shortly after she handed over the 14 bolts of fabric.  (I talked with her just a few days ago and found out she'd had a stroke!  She needed to focus on all the healing that goes with that, but I think she may come back and I'm glad,. not only because she is doing so well in her healing (she had zero risk factors, which is crazy), but also because she is so organized!)

So these will get donated the next time we make a run down to the shelter.  Or I know someone who is headed that way.

With that out of of the way, I could allow myself to FINALLY start on the baby quilt that I shopped for a while back.  The fabrics had all been washed and folded somewhat neatly, but needed to be pressed and folded precisely for cutting.

Lily got in on the action.  She wrinkled things up and then attacked my whole arm and tried to kill it when I tried to get her to move.  I turned on an automated toy, trying to get her to leave, but mom's arm was more interesting.  She's a spitfire.

Eventually I did get all the fabric ironed and folded and then I sat down with the pattern.  The eyes, noses, mouths, ears and bodies can all be swapped around to make tons of different monsters, so I needed to decide what I'd do.

The pattern - and I'm so thankful for this - offered a page of all the parts that you could copy and print and clip apart to make a reference.  Until I found that, I wasn't sure how I was going to make this all work, aside from just copying the monsters on the cover, because I wanted to make sure the eyes looked right with the ears and whatnot.

It doesn't look as great here, but since I just used a grey for the bodies where the floral will go, it's going to get a whole lot wilder in real life!  (I also had no purple colored pencils handy, so that one is green for now.)

Today, once chores are done (and blogging!), I get to start!

(Can you spot Salem helping me with the photo above?  She's much gentler and less crazy than her little sister, but she does love to help!)

I did finally (I think) decide on a quilt pattern for my nephew who asked for a new quilt.  I think this quilt at Aunt Em's Quilts will work nicely.  It's fairly easy (though I'm not a huge fan of flying geese) and should go quickly.  Now I just have to decide if I want to try to do it scrappy or go purchase fabric.

And I read just one book this week.  I mean, I started a second one yesterday, but still just finished one.

(book cover is a screenshot from my tracking app - I read a free(!) digital copy)

After reading James, I wanted to read this.  I still don't remember it, so maybe I never read it?

It was not as good.

I'm sorry.  I know it's a classic, but there were sections that went ON and ON and ON and ON and I nearly skipped ahead.

In James I feel like there was more story, even if things didn't always line up with this one (I know some of it is different perspectives, but Tom Sawyer never showed up in James and he took up about the last third of this one).  The story moved along in James, here it got hung up a few times.

And if I didn't really think much of Tom Sawyer from my remembering reading HIS book way back when, I think even less of him now.  (Yes, yes, he's a fictional character, but he's more obviously a controlling con artist in my mind now than he was before.)

It wasn't awful, and I'm glad I read it, but it also took me a week to read because I just didn't want to.  (Written dialect aside - that took a bit to adjust to as well, but I expected/remembered that.)

And with that I'm off to finish the last few chores and get busy sewing...well...cutting at least!

Happy quilting and reading!

Katie

another week without sewing

It was another busy week around here.  I had only Friday off this past week and ended up being talked into picking up a shift that day due to a communication issue.  And I've picked up another one tomorrow for the same reason.  (New employee, so trying to cut her some slack until I actually meet her!)

There was also family stuff and I read.

At one of the "family stuff" get togethers, my nephew (the one who just got a baby quilt for his new daughter) asked for a new quilt.  He's gotten a couple from me over the years (not including the baby quilt), but his latest is literally worn away to almost nothing.  So I spent some time perusing patterns.  I haven't settled on anything, but I'm not shooting for any specific date to finish, so I have time to think.

I also read a fair amount.  It's a nice way to wind down after a long shift at work.  (And they're getting LOOONG lately!)

This one has won a lot of awards (look at all those annoying permanent stickers on there!) and that made me wary.  But another quilty blogger mentioned she enjoyed it and I trust someone who is a quilter first and book reviewer second more than the other way around.

So I purchased it new (GASP!) in hardcover (double GASP!) shortly before we left for our up north vacation in August.  Since I read based on a random number system, it didn't make the cut to travel with me (though I thought about changing the system) and it got chosen this past week instead.

I enjoyed it very much.  It is not so full of itself that you have to wade through half-page sentences and 7-syllable words.  There is no need to delve deep into something beyond the story to understand and enjoy the story.  (Though there surely is much you can delve into in addition to enjoying the story.)  And it moved along quickly.

If you haven't already heard, it's the story of Huck Finn told through the eyes of Jim, the slave who travels with Huck.  Though I haven't read Huck Finn in years, I had a vague memory of the story, which may or may not have helped me.  If I had remembered it better, I might have expected too much and rushed through to get to the parts I knew were going to happen.  Or maybe I would have appreciated some of the scenes more seeing them through both sets of eyes.  Maybe I'll read Huck Finn again?

I'm sure there are plenty of literary folks who can do a better job of summing up all the intricacies of the story and all that.  I'm not the person for that.  I enjoyed the book, I saw things through a new perspective and feel like I learned something from that and would definitely tell anyone on the fence about reading it to do so.  Because it was a good story about bad things.

With that being a surprisingly quick read, I was on to this:

Told from the perspective of George Westinghouse's lawyer, this is the story of how Edison sued Westinghouse (312 times) over the design of the light bulb in the late 1800's.

It's historical fiction, so you have to take the conversations with a grain of salt, but the actual framework of the story is true and somewhat crazy at times.

In addition to this (very young, inexperienced) lawyer running around trying to figure out loopholes and make allegiances to make the lawsuits go away, there is a young woman who hires him and eventually becomes something of a love interest.

Tesla is also involved, which I think might have been the reason I put this "maybe" book into the bag for purchase.  He is such a mystery, even to the people who know most about him and I'm fascinated by his crazy genius persona.  (Though to be honest, the book paints Edison as not much different, in his way.)

I enjoyed the book.  The chapters were short, which is nice when you're just trying to read a little at night to wind down and don't have to read 300 pages to hit a good stopping point.  And the story is interesting - I found myself wanting to read just a little more to see what happens next.

Since I finished this last night, I haven't started the next book, but am considering checking if I can get a copy of Huck Finn first...  I have to work in a short bit, so I guess I have a few hours there to contemplate what I want to read when I crawl into bed tonight...

And with that, I'm hoping this coming week will be better on the sewing front.  If things go as the boss wants, I'll be relieved of my shift this coming Friday (to be given to the new girl who I bailed out twice this week) and then I'll have 5 days in a row off!  What to do with such luxury?!?!

Happy quilting and reading!
Katie