Grand Freaking Finale

Comments from the cheap seats:

My mother-in-law said, “Soon you’ll be so organized you won’t be able to find anything.”

My brother Jeremy, when writing about the sewing machine pad, asked “Where is the snack drawer?”

Clever, clever folks.

This is actually my last post about all the organizational items I’ve been making, because I finished the LAST 3 ITEMS. Have I bored you to tears yet with my quest for organization? Did I do enough sewing? I promise, there is a reason I’m doing all of this. One day it will make sense! Eventually you will all look back and say ohhh, yes, I see what amazing forethought she had.

If that’s not foreshadowing I don’t know what is.

So this is 2 small pockets for Stuff. The green one is for crocheting and holds things like my gauge measure, stitch counter, stitch holders, plastic and metal needles, that sort of thing.  The purple one is for embroidery & hand-sewing, and has things like a seam ripper, adjustable measure, measuring tape, chalk, thimble, etc.  Each has two outside pockets and one main pocket. I haven’t decided whether to put a button close on or not. I think not.

I made myself a needle book, designed from the initial issue of Stitch in 2008. There are 8 felt pages for all sizes of needles and you know what? I own a lot of needles. And many of them are huge. Why do I own so many dagger-type needles?! Well anyway – each felt page features a sewn piece of bias tape written on with a fabric marker.

There you have a bit of detail. On the back of the purple pocket is elastic for holding whatever spools of thread I might be using at the time. Nice, right?  It will also hold embroidery bobbins. Then there’s the needle book stitching, there, I was happy about that – there’s a piece of fabric in between each felt page of needles.

Finally, THE BAG. The bag that holds all this stuff I’ve been making lately. The bag that holds every last little fiddly notion, tool and do-dad that I could possibly want whether I’m sitting on the couch or sitting in a car. Fact is, I do more handwork than anything else, and I HATE continually getting up to get things, and I also HATE losing things.

The bag has a top zipper in a very nice casing. But it’s the lining that makes this bag. It’s got three compartments.

YES THREE. Now, all you sewers out there, please take a second and try to imagine exactly how you would make a T-shaped three-compartment inner lining for a bag. It isn’t exactly easy. But I insisted. One pocket is for crochet, the other for sewing, and the end one for general STUFF like eyeglasses and pens.

And you know what? I’m not great at visualization or anything, but I am quite pleased with this.

Before and after. Haha!

I should mention I got the yen to make a chatelaine in the midst of this craziness, but I think I’m done for now.

Goal Achieved, Level Up

KNOCK KNOCK. Hello? You guys are being extraordinarily quiet. Everyone okay out there?

So you know I finished the One Skein Scarf, and mentioned the hat, and said it was all part of a hat/scarf/mittens set. The set comprises the scarf, the Applejack Cap and Lion Brand mittens made out of 3-year-stashed Homespun Prairie. Voila!

I’m pretty happy with how it all turned out. The hat was supposed to be looser than this, but since I (a) used a smaller hook to make the stitches smaller to make it warmer and (b) used bulky yarn instead of worsted, you can maybe see how I’d end up with a different hat than the pattern makes. I added stitches to it to compensate, and also added length to the hat so it would cover my ears. After all, what’s the point of a warm hat if it won’t cover your ears?  Actually, for acrylic, all this stuff turned out very warm.

The making of the mittens was an odyssey. I started them the day we left Iowa (the 26th) and made the ribbing, then continued the next TWO DAYS OF FREEZING TRAVEL through Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas. It was very snowy in Iowa and Missouri. Made for exciting travel. All my pictures look sort of dream-like, because I couldn’t keep the condensation off the windows. Here’s where I was just south of Kansas City, Kansas. My toes felt totally frozen.

I made both mittens at once as I went along. I knew if I just did one, the other would never get made.  Here we are in the spectacular Flint Hills in Kansas. It’s amazingly … I don’t know. Not much there but cows. The Flint Hills are a unique place. You know that super green and huge blue sky with hills desktop in Windows? I think that came from this place. In winter, it just looks scary-barren.

I’d managed to get a pair of warm slippers in Wichita, which gave me enough energy do all but the fingers by the time we’d gotten to Northern Oklahoma, near Ponca City (where I used to live). We thought we’d be able to make it home the first night, but a 2 hour traffic jam and icy conditions meant we stopped for the night in Oklahoma City.  Mittens going well, though.

Somewhere south of Ft. Worth, Texas I was mostly done with a thumb and was finally warm again! It was about this point I gave up on following the pattern, because the pattern had long since begun to seem stupid. It wasn’t wide enough in the hand, for one thing. So I just kept going and made them to fit my hand exactly.

By the time we got home to Austin both thumbs were finished. I needed to finish the fingers for the last three inches, and sew ‘em up. Two weeks later, I was done. It was frustrating to make mittens with this yarn. The thread-like core kept snapping when I tried to pull a seam tight. All I can say about it now is that my stash is smaller, and they’re very soft mittens.

It was an interesting start on non-beanie hats and finger-wear. I kind of wanted to try the patterns out on a yarn I hadn’t spend a lot of $$ on, so I could do them again but better. Now if I can only remember to write up what I did!

Three Tiny Ladies

Well, it’s day 30 of 30 for NaBloPoMo, and although I missed a day I’m going to finish in fine style. I updated my walking today by a little, and I have a new-to-me item for show-and-tell!  I’m not going to lie to you, this was a horrible month to try to gallop suddenly into daily blog posting. I moved, I adopted a dog, I’ve been working on two websites plus my normal job, there was a traveling holiday … I just don’t know what I was thinking. On the other hand, it was a busy month, full of change, and I’m glad to have recorded so much of it.

Back to the show-and-tell. I made a stop in at my mom’s on the way home from my MIL’s house the other day. My mom had a terrible cold last week, poor woman. It was terrible to hear her, although by the time I got there it was dying down to laryngitis. I was, as usual, rummaging through her stuff while there, and on this occasion I happened into the linen closet, where I found these things, which she let me keep! First this:

And this gorgeous fellow.

And these. Aren’t those just too cute? Kittens in flowers? Wow! Who does that?

The story is that my mom received these six embroidered, handmade pillowcases with handmade trim for her wedding from three really tiny ladies she knew grewing up in Demmark. All three ladies were sisters (Mrs. Houston, Mrs. ? and Mrs. ?, forgot the names!). She was married in … 1967? so these are around 40 years old. What shall I do with them? I don’t know. For now I shall hoard them as lovely memories of until I figure out the perfect thing to do.