Category: Miscellaneous Musings

Oven down!  Ovens are apparently not necessary items as I can’t get it repaired before June 5 and I called all the local dealers/repair places for my stove.  The only place that could come sooner won’t come because I didn’t purchase the stove from them – the fact that the store from which I did purchase the stove is out of business, and that I would be willing to consider buying from them in the future was not a persuasive argument in my favor.  But it is summer and the grill works and the burners work.

Aha! I have an old-fashioned free standing stove with built in oven.  If the oven doesn’t work but the burners do work, perhaps I have a blown fuse.  I am somewhat handy and would be slightly embarrassed to wait nearly two weeks for someone to come change a fuse.  Of course the owners manual does not tell where the fuses are hidden, and they are not obvious. Apparently it is intended that the consumer should pay someone to come change a fuse.  Still, they can’t be that well hidden, we don’t want the poor repairperson to have to work too hard just to change a fuse after all.

I found the fuses.  They looked identical so I could not determine whether or not the oven fuse had blown.  No problem I just took it out and hauled myself, with fuse, down to the local electrical store.  It looked good to them to but they were happy to sell me another one just in case.  I got home and plugged in the new fuse.  It’s not the fuse.  But I can add this fuse to my fuse collection.  I have several now.  After all you don’t want to wait for the AC repair guy when you blow a fuse on the hottest day of the year, now do you?

So back to the oven situation.  No oven.  I was planning on using the oven for a few things this week.  Now there will be no asparagus lasagna, even though the asparagus bed is  at its peak and I had begun saving the asparagus over the last two days to have the requisite 4 pounds for our spring indulgence: Asparagus and goat cheese lasagna.  I usually roast the asparagus for the lasagna, so I could grill it instead.  But I don’t think I can grill the actual lasagna.  After some research I decided that I could blanche the asparagus and freeze it, then make the lasagna when I get the oven back.  It was either that or eat asparagus for breakfast lunch and dinner for the next week.

Needless to say, nothing was sewn or cut out yesterday.  Still I thought of sewing.  More exactly I thought of fabric shopping — my favorite cure for daily frustrations.  Actually I was thinking of this fabric:

The top fabric is the Kaffe Fassett Dahlia fabric I used for Tiny Kitty.  I think it would make a cute skirt banded with the dotted fabric below it.  That fabric is called Bubbles.  They are both available, although I probably have enough of the bubble fabric to do the band on the skirt and the proposed stuffed animal.  I haven’t ordered more Dahlia fabric yet, but I might yet.  The idea is sitting just under the surface, teasing and taunting me, and in a moment of weakness I might just give in.

That’s the problem with sewing everything spawns more ideas and more tempations.

I have mostly been sewing in my head, planning out future projects, fiddling about with this and that in the sewing room.  Otherwise too much going on here.

Miriam sent a lovely small bouquet of flowers for Mother’s Day and the heady perfume of lilacs greets me whenever I manage to escape to my special room:

The coat fabric is still on the end of the cutting table, next to the flowers, and a ball of yarn for a scarf for next year’s donation box to Morse School.  The baby sweater still awaits being sewn together.  So much for gran plans.

Still, the flowers make me happy.  I never minded becoming a step-mom, I figured all along the kids came with the territory and never resented that.  I never expected however that I would come to love these people, adults now really, but still more child than adult when they came into my life, so fiercely.  Not having children of my own, I feel lucky to have these step-children, and I think how luckily I am to have them to love.

The pattern for the Balenciaga coat arrived:

The pattern is pretty intriguing and I think it would be nice in
several different fabrications.  I do not think it is what I want for
the multicolor organza coat however, not that I was counting on this
pattern anyway.  I need to make a muslin, and I am still undecided
about the contrast fabric, but it will all sort itself out.

More sewing this week:  actual rather than virtual.

via six and a half stitches, a handwriting meme using a pangram.  No brown foxes for me.  Since the meme specifies the pangram to be used, mine probably doesn’t qualify even though it is a pangram.  Always had an ornery streak, I.

Check out the photos at the fickr pool .

We are off to Tucson tomorrow and will be back early next week.

There will be no posts, as I am undergoing a forced exile from electronic equipment for the duration.

I will be checking out Buttons and Bolts, as I haven’t yet been there.  I am always being told it is too far away; it is on the opposite side of town from step-son Adam and his wife Lisa.  We drove by it once, I almost had my head out the window, tongue dragging, like a dog, smelling the fabric on the breeze.  This time I will be staying right near by and as my days will be my own, there is nothing to stop me.

That won’t stop me from driving across town to Leandro, one of the great temples of fabric temptation.  I would be lying if I said I won’t buy anything, but I will think very carefully and limit my choices. 

Presenting Penelope Anne (forward) and Matilda (background):

Penelope is modeling the new pants for her human, my
DSD. They don’t fit her perfectly, as
well as they do DSD in the photos I took, but they are pretty close. I spent several hours this morning reconfiguring Penelope’s padding. In her original
form her measurements were mostly right (she was a little small across the
shoulders and lower hips) but she was too round and barrel shaped. She needed to be thinner in profile and wider
side to side. She is still not quite
right but she is the best I think I can manage without the actual person here
for comparison. I did manage to square
up her upper shoulders in the back and get a little bit of that back curve that
is needed, but she does not come close to having the kind of sway-back her
human does. 

Still, I hope this is a good place to begin.

I also padded out Matilda who had remained frozen in my
shape from a couple of years ago. She is
now cushier through the waist and tummy, much like her human. Now we actually wear the same size.

The beautiful wine velvet has become a skirt of sorts; it has become the tree skirt.  Ahhh, one way to deal with temptation, because as it was: (a temptation that is), I was ready to chuck all Christmas plans out the window, tell my family to order pizza on Christmas eve, not decorate the house, or distribute my usual platters of cookies and Christmas candies or do any of the other things that I love during the holidays.  I was going to hole myself up with my new Hot Patterns skirt pattern and red velvet and not come out until I had a skirt.

That plan has been successfully aborted and delayed until next year, when my mind will be much clearer.

I do this every year, wrap some lovely piece of fabric around the base of the Christmas tree.  I am happiest when I have huge pieces that I can drape and arrange in extravagant folds so that it extends well beyond the border of the tree.  I have used cottons, velvets, silks, brocades, even, one year, a beautiful Chanel tweed, which later became a beloved suit.  And yet, every year I tell myself that I could have made a skirt for the tree, or even bought one.  That latter choice is not all that likely as I always find fault with the skirts in the stores.  Over the years I have had plans, often grand in scale, for the tree skirt I would make.  They never materialize. 

When I was young, naive, and full of energy, in my early 20s,  I thought I would embroidery one in panels, perhaps recreating beautiful stained glass windows and tying them together with velvet or brocade.  I planned at least 12 panels of embroidery, although I aspired to more.  I thought I would do one a year.  I would have been finished long ago if I had ever undertaken that project. 

Once I wanted to make a beautiful and grand needlepoint skirt, probably the size of a rug since I don’t like wimpy skirts.  That one was never started either. 

Once I was going to make a skirt of silk and velvet pieces like a crazy quilt, with embroidery and perhaps even beads….

You guessed it.

I still have fabric, plain old fabric, under my tree.  Probably always will.  But you know, after that fabric is made up into some favorite garment, it’s cool to think that I am wearing my tree skirt.

The telephone line has been out of service for 5 days.  It was restored today about 4 PM.  I immediately got on-line and started to catch up, to no avail.  The back-log is too great.  I suppose that this should only encourage me to move forward with my plans for a high-speed cable modem, but the basement clean-out which must precede the rewiring of the basement is enough incentive to let it slide a little longer.

Meanwhile, I will get caught up, hopefully, just in time to fall behind again this weekend when I must be at a conference.

Tonight was knitting night.  No computing or sewing here. 

Meanwhile, while the phone was down I was busy;  I was not busy thinking about what I would do if I had phone service and a computer connection.  I actually thought about the computer very little.  I have long had a great capacity for ignoring things I don’t like or can’t change.

The Bernina and the Elna were fired up this week in practical activities rather than creative endeavors.  A front ripped through on Thursday on the same wind that frizzled my telephone line into non-functioning status.  I finally was motivated to switch the closet to fall mode.  The sewing room has been packed with clothes in need of mending or alteration and I have been busy: taking in, letting out, and mildly altering the shape of many things.  The results are gratifying but not photographically interesting. 

I also started to realize that some of the fabrics that were put aside as transitional sewing have now missed the starting bell and will not be used until next spring.  They are awaiting the opportunity to move into out-of-season storage.  Of course as soon as I get the fall clothes out, move the summer clothes to the darker reaches of the closet, and start to think of wools and fall fabrics, the temperatures shift again and we are back to having days in the mid to upper 80s.  I think Autumn is just a big tease.

"Ohhh! This sewing just wears me out."

The yellow pants are (mostly) done.  I just have to hem them.  The hem is all pinned up and waiting.  We are going to see March of the Penguins  tonight though, so they might not be finished until tomorrow.

I noticed that the photo in my last post had disappeared; I don’t know where it went, the link was there, but sometime between when I first posted it (I checked it was there then) and now, I must have done something to change its character.  It must be that old Mardel magic.

Well I am finally working on the yellow pants again.  When I picked them up I had to take a few minutes just to puzzle through what had been done, where I was in the process, and what was next.  As you will recall, they had been thrown in the wash, unfinished and unpressed following zipper insertion when I discovered that there had been a close encounter of the poison ivy kind.

The pressing has been accomplished.  I need to to try them on, decide on whether there will be darts and a partial drawstring, or if the entire waistband will be gathered up. It is a simple project but I have been having trouble getting around to it.

Between work, yard, and my new workout schedule I don’t seem to have time. The weight work and stretching is helping, I haven’t gotten far in terms of what I can do and have discovered that I have lost a lot of strength on one side, but I am standing a little straigher and having less trouble getting out of the car, so I can definitely see improvement. 

On top of everything else, I seem to need more sleep again after a long period of doing fine with less. I miss the extra time.  On the other hand, when I try to force myself to my shorter sleep cycle, I fall asleep in the afternoon, even at my desk or my knitting or sewing, and then go through a prolonged groggy period that is worse than just sleeping longer to begin with.  Now this could just be a reaction to the new workout routine and other things and I will get back into my normal schedule soon enough.  Certainly when I was younger I needed more sleep so who knows.