Delays

It has been what, 2 weeks since I finished the black and white jacket and no further sewing progress has been made:  nothing, Nada, zilch.  And this despite the best of intentions.

I have been thinking about sewing, that’s for sure, and as the world seems to get crazier around me I think about sewing more and more.  I really want to crawl into a hole this weekend, finish a few projects (non sewing but related), more about those later, and cut something out, perhaps make a muslin. 

But we have social obligations this weekend, including a day in NYC, that will limit progress substantially.

So what has been happening?

1.  I ran out of muslin.  I did go to my local Joann to buy a bolt but they didn’t have any whole bolts.  I could have bought a piece of muslin to get started and ordered the bolt.  But I didn’t.  I don’t know what I was thinking.  The muslin was half price if I ordered it (and I had a gift card if I purchased a certain minimum amount — the bolt qualified) but even at $2 – $3 a yard instead of dollar, it would have been a worthwhile purchase, just to keep me at my machine.

2.  The muslin arrived and I was filing some new fabrics on the shelves after I had taken some out to put up for auction.  On Saturday morning I climbed up on the stepladder to put some items on the top shelf and discovered the fabric was jammed somehow.  When I started to pull the fabric out, I discovered the entire shelving system had pulled out of the wall, and was only still upright (marginally so) because it was leaning on the 6 foot tall cabinet that holds my sweaters.  I realized that I needed to empty the shelves, which mostly held shoes, with fabric only on the top two shelves.  A lot of fabric can sit on two six foot shelves, each shelf piled about a foot high.  That fabric went on the cutting table.  Bye bye cutting table for a while.

3.  The shoes went on the floor of the sewing room between the cutting table and the wall, where the ironing board normally resides.  They take up that entire half of the room.  I know I have too many shoes, there are about 120 pairs of shoes and boots piled on the floor of my sewing room.

5.  I decided to move the shoes to a different closet, one that has been little used in recent years, since we built new closets in the master bedroom.  So I cleaned out and dismantled that closet.  Some of the contents of that closet will go in the sewing room closet, which I am now in the planning stages of reconfiguring. 

6.  I repaired the wall in the sewing room closet, which required some structural repair behind the wallboard, where the woodpeckers who infested our house in December had apparently pecked away parts of two support beams to make a nest, hastening the collapse of the wall. And I repaired the wall in the shoe closet to be ready to paint.

7.  In the meantime, I have been planning a new storage system for the sewing room closet.  This requires sorting and actually measuring the space required for the various things I want to store in that closet. It will still provide sweater storage and I want to make sure that I actually have a place for everything before I commit to the new plan.

8.  Driving home from the paint store today, someone made a right-on-red directly in front of me.  I slammed on the breaks and we only had a minor fender bender.  The other driver was yelling at me because I went through a green light and hit her  when she had the right-of-way because of the "right on red" rule.    When I got home I discovered that the gallon of paint in my trunk had apparently flown across the trunk and come open and the trunk and groceries were covered with paint, luckily water-based.  The eggs also flew across the trunk but were unscathed.  About half the groceries were lost.

6.  Now that I have spent a couple of hours standing out in the cold and snow scrubbing out my car, I get to start the day over and go back to the paint store and the grocery store.

I sure will be glad to stay home and sew again, one of these days.