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Restingmotion

  • Why No Sewing?

    It is 10:10 PM.  I am really impressed by those who sew in the evenings, alone, undisturbed by their families until the wee hours of the morning.  It is 10:10 and I am done with my tasks for the day.  I think I am too tired to start sewing now.  Of course I have to start cutting first, and I don’t think I have it in me to lay out the pattern, check it, correct it, get it ready to cut and then…put it all way before laying out the fabric on another day.  Don’t I manage to talk myself out of sewing projects so easily?

    Of course it would help if I didn’t have to lay everything out on the kitchen island.  It is large, but I can’t leave anything out.  If I had a table in the sewing room/office I could shut the door.  This is a goal, but I don’t see how it will happen soon.  There is no room in the sewing room for a table.  If I moved the cookbook collection out, that would help, but that means I have to get shelving set up somewhere else.  If I could move the office stuff to George’s “den” which he never uses except to store things, that would allow more space as well.  But cleaning out and reorganizing the den is a major project, made even more major because it will probably require reorganizing of the husband before it can even hope to proceed.

    I had hoped to get started on some sewing this Labor Day weekend.  So far I have thought about it.  I have done a lot of work in the yard.  I have done some closet weeding.  Here is a section of my closet.  (You know I must be desperate for photo content.)

    Closet1

    My closet hasn’t been this empty in years; I used to have two sections of skirts.  All the ones that don’t fit are
    gone.  Most of the shorter ones were made this spring and summer, I
    didn’t have any knee length skirts for a long time before that.

    Life is not really so bad.  We went up to Pittsfield for the first concert in our South Mountain concert series.  I felt like cooking so I have been playing in the kitchen, turning out some nice meals.  Too many choices.  Too many interests.  There is never enough time to do it all.

    Sewing will come.  Something else will be ignored.  Should I start the summer skirt I still insist on trying to make?  It requires a lot of cutting table work.  What cutting table??  Should I make the little top instead?  It is simpler to cut – well perhaps, depending on how the pattern looks compared to my block. 

    It is late.  Perhaps I will just knit.  No wonder I get more knitting done than sewing. 

  • Summer Ends…Fall Begins

    September 4, Taconic State Parkway, heading north…the maples are beginning to turn.  The transformation that is Autumn has begun.

    Southmountain1

    Sorry about the copy, I suppose that’s what I get for folding the program up accordian-like in my purse for the ride home.

    South Mountain: The Borromeo String Quartet.  Excellent performance, excellent musicians.    The Stravinsky Concertino was charming.  The Mozart Clarinet Quintet with David Shifrin was perfectly good but I felt it dragged a little.  I am not sure whether this is a valid criticism of the performance or just and admission of my own preferences where Mozart is concerned, not necessarily founded in any knowledge of how the music “should” be played.

    The Dvorak Quartet in G Major was eloquent.  In the beginning the dance that was missing from the Mozart begged us to rise from our seats.  The performance was outstanding, the second movement and emotional masterpiece.  Bravo.

    Dinner:
        Salt Cod Gallettes
        Frisee Salad with Warm Sherry Vinaigrette

    It’s almost 10 PM.  I still have to strain the secondary stock that was cooking while we were gallivanting across the Berkshires.  Then what will I do?  Something creative, something useful, nothing at all?

  • Grocery Shopping

    From Sam’s Club:
        toilet paper
        Kleenex
        juice
        chocolates
        vitamins

    To Adams:
        Sushi grade Tuna
        Belgian endive
        frisee
        fresh shiitake
        caviar, osetra

    There is no cultural dichotomy here, is there?

  • Post-Katrina

    I think the tragedy on the Gulf is in the back of all of our minds.  I alternate between being concerned for all those directly affected and cannot imagine what it would be like to face the possibility of having lost everything, and being angry at the inefficiency. callousness, and general lack of concern that have caused the situation.  Yes it is true that we cannot control hurricanes.  But so much of what has happened in New Orleans was predicted and even expected and yet nothing has been done.  This was not even esoteric information:  It has been in papers, journals, even on TV, and in that sense we all have to take the blame on some level.  Somehow that is even more discomforting.  How much easier it is to blame the politicians or bureaucrats.  How much easier still to blame Mother Nature.

    How do we balance our desires and greed (houses on the beach, ports, business, money-making, etc) with the consequences of our actions?  We seem much  better at putting the consequences off for another day and then when the day of reckoning comes, blaming it on someone else.

    ———————-

    The reaction I see most however, locally at least, is anger at the price of gas.  It is not that gas was cheap before, but the sudden rise has brought out the worst in many.  Everyone is talking about it.  Most people are angry.  Many are downright rude.  Frustration is understandable.  Bad behavior is not.  The situation is really out of our control.

    Yes there is profiteering.  Yes the gas station owners respond to demand, have to pay for the next load of gas at whatever price it will be, and yes deliveries have been interrupted.  It is going to be hard.  The disruption of oil and gas production and delivery will affect absolutely everything.  Worldwide production was already barely keeping up with demand.  There is no place to make up the difference.  Gas prices will have to go up and demand will have to be reduced.  Even the release of the reserves will not mean immediate relief at the pumps, the US stockpiles crude oil.  Half of the refineries in the country are in the affected gulf states.

    There are no easy solutions.

  • I haven’t been doing a lot of knitting, hardly any in fact.  It is not that I haven’t thought of knitting, as I have, but somehow, my mind has been elsewhere.

    When the weather turned cooler my mind started thinking of fall.  This made me think I should go through my projects, both knitting and sewing, and see which summer projects might still be worthy of staying on the list, and which would be consigned to the higher reaches of the closet to await the spring thaw.  This started a whole "fall cleaning" of the sewing room, bedroom, closets, etc. which is still ongoing.  Now that I can see what I have, and have gotten rid of a lot of things I don’t want, I can think about what I want to do in the future.

    This means more knitting.

    I did finish the first sock:

    Socks6

    I am not sure what I think of the way the striping of the yarn works in the sock, but the sock itself is nice and fits well.  I will make the other one.

    I finished this while glued to the television watching the devastation on the Gulf Coast.  I couldn’t sit there without something in my hands, it was just too awful to comprehend and come to terms with.  Looking down at the sock was a relief; still, I kept dropping stitches near the end, but it
    comparatively speaking, a minor tragedy. 

    Strange, on a totally mundane plane, that on Sunday we were driving down to NYC with Susan and Louis and talking about going to New Orleans together in February.  The men would go to the Academy Meeting and Susan and I were talking about shopping.  That seems so distant now.  I wonder what will happen to New Orleans.  Will it ever be the same?  I know it is a shallow thought, but that is all I can grasp right now.  I can’t imagine what it would be like to have to contemplate the possibility of having lost everything.

    Susan and I talked and talked on Sunday in the car.  I did not knit.  Unusual for me, but George and I usually take the train into the city now, it saves arguments over who drives, or more exactly who doesn’t drive.  On the train I knit.  I could have gotten a lot done.  Talking with an old friend was much more fun though.  We had a great evening.  Talking in the car, dinner in the city, watching Deema’s professional acting debut, even in a small out-of-the-way off-Broadway theater with 50 seats.  She was Anne Frank in the "Diary of Anne Frank".  Another story of devastation and loss.  Different tragedy but the devastation is the same, and the incomprehensibility of it all.

    Nonetheless I am progressing on posh:

    Posh3

  • Fall Coats

    There has been some talk on SewingWorld about coats, specifically this one:

    ArmanicoatPhoto courtesy of style.com .  The coat is by Armani and I admit I am very tempted by it as well.  I love the style and it may indeed morph into something in my fall wardrobe.  Truth be told, if the nice young man from Bergdorf Goodman had sent me this coat to try instead of a bunch of black suits, all beautiful but none of which interested me, he might have even gotten a sale.  Luckily for my pocketbook, it did not work out that way.

    Here is a detail shot of the collar, photo courtesy of www.elle.com :

    Armanicoat2_1

    If I make something inspired by this it will probably not be red and will not be exactly like this coat, even though I love red coats.  Perhaps I just want my own take on the coat, perhaps it is too strong of a signature look from Armani this season, and although I have knocked off designer looks, and I spend too much time in fashionable parts of New York, to want to look like I have a copy of THE coat.

    Anyway, this coat strongly reminds me of a coat from the Valentino Spring Couture Collection (photo is taken from the Hola Magazine Spring Haute Couture Edition):

    Valentinocouture2Obviously this collar is less dramatic but still much the same idea.  Here is a detail photo (from www.style.com ):

    Valentinocouture2a_1

    While I am on the subject of coats There are two others that are haunting my thoughts this year.  One is vaguely similar, this one from Luisa Beccaria (photo courtesy of Colleziona Donna):
    Beccaria3
    And in a totally different vein, this one from Alviero Martini (also courtesy of Collezioni Donna):

    Alvieromartini1

    I actually don’t think I would copy this coat very closely, but I like the idea of the leather panels on the lower part of the coat and I envision a nice plush wool coat, perhaps more fitted with a fuller skirt, with leather panels.  This idea still needs a good bit of time to percolate through my brain before we see what comes out of it, but this coat may eventually lead to something.

  • 20 years ago I would have not believed that I would ever be interested in hardware stores.  I would grudgingly go off with my then soon-to-be husband and mope about while he looked around.  I was interested in many other things, sewing, (I hadn’t started knitting yet), cooking, reading quite a bit and so forth, but I did not want to use hammers or build things or fix things.  I left that all up to the man in the house.

    Well things have changed.  As the DH gets older he does less around the place.  Truthfully he was never interested in building things the way I want them to be, "too much bother" he would tell me.  And so I reluctantly came to accept that I would have to do some things myself.  That list has grown, as DH finds things more and more confusing, and I never wanted to be the main handiperson around the house, but well life rarely considers wishes when doling out our obligations.

    As I get better at using hammers and drills and saws, I am getting more and more intrigued by the hardware store.  It is such a fascinating place.  How could I have missed this before?

    The local hardware store is going out of business.  The owner wants to retire, no one wants the store, there is a local lumberyard and home center  10 miles away and the big box stores take a lot of business too, although truthfully the quality of the hardware at Home Depot and Loewe’s does not always compare.  Such is the future though.

    We joined the throngs at the GoingOutOfBusiness sale:

    Drill

    I got a new drill, a 1/2" hammer drill, which I think will prove very useful over time.  Now it has been a godsend drilling screws through my landscape timbers, what would take 15 minutes of hard straining work with my old 3/8" drill, through stacks of cedar 4x4S now goes quickly and easily.  It is still hard on the back, drilling and stabilizing down hear the ground, but I get so much more done in the same amount of time and back strain.

    Happiness is having the right power tool for the job.

    Who would have thought I would ever end up saying something like that?

  • I lost the motivation to knit on the socks for a while, I was more eager to finish sweaters and life was just busy, busy, busy.

    I finally succumbed to the lure of the sock.  She has probably been singing her sock song for some time but I resisted mightily.  Once she was in my hands though, the tune got louder and I am once again her slave progressing:

    Sock6

    Instep survival, at least for me, seems to lie in not knitting for long stretches of time but rather picking up the sock and knitting here and there, while waiting for a fax to finish, in those little lulls while making dinner, for brief bits in front of the tele, waiting at the doctors or other places.  I don’t think the sock would survive a long wait, at least not in instep stage, too tedious – but now that the toe is here, the mad knitting urge has once again been rekindled and I can’t keep my hands off her. 

    There may be more socks in my future after all.

    It really hasn’t been a good knitting week.  I only have a few rows on the front of Posh done and I have been otherwise occupied with other things.  My little bits of sock knitting have helped considerably with general peace of mind in a hectic week however and it reminds me how often I at least need some calming thing to do with my hands while I wait (and wait and wait and… you know the drill), especially when life is particularly hectic or stressed and waiting seems like the most difficult thing to do.

    I am also reminded of the refreshing and calming influence of just sitting down and let the hands do the work on a knitting project, allowing the mind a little time to do its own purling, flowing to its own little track.  When I am tired I could plop in front of the tele and watch something but that seems to only deaden the mind and encourage me toward sloth; a little knitting on the other hand is refreshing and revitalizing.  I am not really one to wax philosophical about knitting.  It keeps me from fidgeting, it gives me something to do, knitting cannot bring world peace, although perhaps if more people knitted they would be distracted from other pursuits.  Not likely to happen though.

  • Frustration/Organization

    The cool weather has me dreaming of fall and the changing of closets even though true fall is a ways away yet.  The crisp has rekindled my energy and am back to tackling projects with gusto and already dreaming of more.

    The first demon that has emerged is the organizing demon, an old friend of mine, sometimes even my alter-ego.  I love to organize things and I can get quite manic about it  – sometimes much to the despair of my family.  Still, whenever things get out of hand, I know that if I can just get a little more organized I can have everything under control.

    Patternbook1
    Actually, as sometimes happens, organize demon, was brought out by
    frustration at finding a pattern.  Now, I look organized about patterns
    but this is really just a front:  Every time I buy a pattern, the
    critical information is put in a notebook.  When I was young, I traced
    these onto onionskin paper and kept them in a filofax.

    I still have that book.  More recently, as more technology has become a part of my life, I scan the photos and make a page for the filofax on the computer. 

    Patternbook2
    I haven’t yet gotten a useful way to get these all on my palm, although they can reside on my portable computer.    I still find it easier to flip through the book than search through the palm at least in this case, because I am not looking for a particular item usually, I want to look at pictures and see what catches my fancy.

    The problem is finding the actual pattern once I have decided which one I am looking for.  Last year I started putting patterns I have actually used in file jackets and storing them in file cabinets.  I always intended to use this method for all the patterns but, well I get busy with other projects and it hasn’t happened yet.  The patterns I haven’t used, or that I haven’t used in the past 3 years or so, are stored willy nilly in pattern boxes and file drawers and shelves, and in stacks here and there, wherever they will fit.  There is no system.  They are just put into whatever the box or stack du jour might be.  Therefore finding a pattern can be a challenge.

    Yesterday I wanted a pattern.  I wanted a pattern I bought recently.  I washed fabric to use with this pattern.  It was not on the most recent pattern stack.  Hysteria mounted.  My inner two-year-old was released and I dumped all my patterns out on the floor.  Did this help me find the pattern?  No.  Did this help me feel better?  Immensely. 

    I decided that, until I get the real system together, I needed a better way.  So I sorted all the patterns into piles by type of pattern such as skirt, dress, jacket, ensemble etc. and I put them back in boxes according to these new categories.  Now, when I want a skirt pattern I can look through skirts.  The new blouse pattern turned up by the way, somehow it had squirreled itself away in a box of Vogue designer patterns from the early 90s.  I have no idea how it got there.

    Here is a picture of the floor as I was near the end of the sorting processes:

    Patternreorganization

    Notice that a couple of pieces of fabric and some yarn jumped in to join the fun; they didn’t want to be left out.

  • This little piece of rock and clay

    The first flower bed is progressing, better than I hoped, and yet sometimes more difficult.  Challenges are there to be surmounted however and progress continues:
    Irisbed3_1

    Irisbed4