Busy with....

Coughing.

For the most part.

We've had three weeks of real winter weather here. Each week began with snow, sometimes causing extremely slick conditions. Then after a few days the temperatures would warm up leading to rain which melts the snow. Rinse and repeat. Unfortunately I also came down with a cold, so I have not built a snowman despite the best intentions.

I have ridden Zoomie most days. It's not as bad as I feared it would be, but its no picnic either. To be honest, riding a skinny-slick-tire bike on hard-packed slippery snow is safer (for me) than trying to walk on it in my sneakers. I go slowly, maybe not even going out of first gear, and everything is usually fine. I fell twice the other day. The first was completely my fault. I thought I'd pause for a photo oportunity, and instead of braking slowly on the rear wheel, I accidently pulled the front wheel brake. Bam! Down I went. Very fast, pretty minor. Nothing hurt. My handlebars turned backwards, but other than that, I got my picture.

Pretty worthless, huh? I wonder if that's my breath.

Some better pictures:

My (old) bus.

I fell again on the snow on the way to Walmart. With all the snow, this last time being deep enough to threaten my ankles, I wanted to check for snow boots again at Goodwill. I found some.

My feet are finally warm!

The second fall was bad. I joked to my sister that instead of falling on my butt, I actually did something more like busted it. I was just sore up until after my afternoon run, but when I got home it was hurting more. Not really my butt, but my hip. The thick part of my leg where a sewing measurement would be for hips, not high where my hipbone is, either. So I count that as busting my butt. Jamie shoved an ice pack down my pants for swelling. The day after, I also had a sore shoulder and the right side of the middle of my back ached. I'm not sure if that is all from the one fall, but I felt beat. Today I got car rides from Jamie and co-workers even though the sun finally came out. 

On the way home from Walmart via bike path (not used often enough by me, perhaps):

Because I've been sick, my hobby pursuits are suffering also. I barely had a plan put together for our Saturday Pathfinder game, but I managed to get through it without any complaints. The players killed my bad guy as planned, but they are infected with a deadly virus needing a cure, which is of course why they will go where I want them to. I'm too new at Dungeon Mastering to let them mess up my plot.

The Jamiejacket has seen very little work, although I've tried. Jamie of course was disappointed. But, not only did the sun show itself, but I finally had a better day in a string of bad ones (up til midnight coughing uncontrollably after a whole day of that and sore abs? not fun when you tried to go to sleep at 8). I managed to screw up a simple piece-together when my head was a bit muffled. That's when I have a pattern piece that's huge, but only small scraps of material to use. They get pieced together to make the larger piece needed. Well, I neglected the seam allowance on two sections. I had to make do with very close seams for that section, and hopefully I can make it up with extra fabric where the sleeves connect.

Today I managed to mostly finish the entire back section piecing, and most of the cutting for the other pieces. Still need some lining. Jamie is letting me add parts of the maroon jacket to make up for only one jacket-worth of flannel to act as lining. With all those pockets, there isn't enough flannel to make up the difference. Still, with the freedom to add in the red, I think the jacket will look great.

Still on the mend, that's all for now. I need my sleep. Goodnight everyone!

Jamiejacket: a piece is done!

So the scottejacket, which I think should be termed the Jamiejacket, since it's for my husband specifically, has some definite progress! I have literally just stopped in my sewing to come and post this because I'm proud of it.

Here are some pictures:

What you are looking at is the left section of the front of the jacket. There will be a sort of shoulder piece above this part which goes to the collar. The patch pocket should end up positioned similarly to any other shirt pocket. Behind that patch pocket, though not quite hidden, is the invisible zipper leading to an interior breast pocket. You can see the lining peeled back in the middle photo to show that zipper opening. The full liner there is also the front of the handwarmer pocket. The back of the handwarmer pocket (not made yet) will include all the other interior pockets still making up the front panel of this jacket.

It sounds very confusing, because it is. I'll include more pictures as I go along to help explain things. 

Now all I have to do is make this section again for the right side, but I get to leave off the outside patch pocket. Still, this isn't really that much simpler because if you look closely, you'll notice that zipper stuck smack dab in the middle of nowhere. It isn't sandwiched neatly and easily between a seam. I hate it. But I also love it. The challenge of figuring out how to construct such a thing from only a very vague picture taken months ago was sort of fun while frustrating me to death. Maybe the second time a round will go faster.

So this is what I'm doing with my holiday (I also slept in, of course!). What are you up to?

Sewing

Jamie's jacket is coming along, little by little. Every day I put everything away neatly. Ok almost every day. When I fall asleep watching Psych after dinner, Jamie is nice and piles things on my desk for me and puts up the table, then unfolds the bed while I go to the bathroom before properly going to sleep. For some reason I get so sleepy watching TV that I've been conking out at 8pm. Really, I'm missing out on great cuddle time here!

In any event, because I can't leave things a mess like I like to during a project, things are going slowly. But, it IS going! I've cut out fabric and lining pieces for the front of the jacket and need to figure out the front breast pockets. The left side will have a patch pocket with a button flap cover over it also. I decided to try and create the jacket in sections which will be ready to fit together once each part is done. After all, it's very easy to tell the pattern pieces apart when they are made of paper and labeled. Not so much so when they are all the same color and vague unlabeled shapes!

I've considered taking photos along the way, but honestly I don't think they would be able to really show anything. I might make a video after the jacket is complete to show exactly how many pockets there are. That sounds like a wonderful idea, and our hosts have a couple cameras capable of doing that.

My reward for finishing the jacket: Jamie gets to wrap me up in my underwear with duct tape! No, this isn't some weird fantasy, but rather an attempt at making a custom dress form. Theoretically we can get my shape in the duct tape and stuff the form so that I have a fairly accurate double of myself to use for making my own clothes. It sure beats paying $200 for a dress form that doesn't even have my shape! I was hoping to make it out of Island Lime so the whole thing was green (of course!), but it is much more expensive than the plain silver version. So Jamie got me 2 rolls of regular, and one roll of green. I might be able to finish with the green, or maybe just make measurement lines with it (hips, waist, bust, etc).

I can't wait to finish, not only to get to the dress form, but also because this jacket, a pain though it may be, should be really, really awesome once it's done.

Oh my gosh, it's January

I am a horrible blogger.

Time goes by without me realizing that I haven't actually written anything, even though I've meant to several times. Then I sit down and open up blogger and not only see that my last post was half a month ago, but I've also completely forgotten some of the awesome things I should have written about since then.

I will try my best to do better going forward.

I have several topics i want to discuss, but I'd rather do it separately and in shorter posts. So the two weeks past in summary:

Christmas was great. We had dinner with Tig's family at a lone-bachelor-relative's spacious house. Jamie made my favorite holiday treats again- green bean casserole, my special delicious sweet potatoes, salmon dip. He deep-fried a hunk of beef by request that turned out to be wonderfully delicious. I now believe that holiday meals should be as follows: turkey for Thanksgiving, beef for Christmas, and ham for New Year's unless you'd like to add it to one or both of the previous. We didn't have a special meal for New Year's.

Instead, we had a lovely smorgasbord of snack foods that we ate all day long while playing Pathfinder and generally hanging out in the living room with friends both present and skyped-in until well after midnight. We had sparkling cider to celebrate, but there was no countdown or anything. I texted well-wishes to people as the New Year came to them in their earlier time zones.

Working over the holidays wasn't bad at all. The weather was warmer, I got up with the sun instead of way before it, and after a much briefer break than usual I returned to take the boys back home, which means my workday was over much sooner than usual. It was weird.

Now I'm getting up early again and strangely I haven't been able to fall asleep easily or stay asleep without waking up a bunch. I'm really hoping things fix soon because I'm really freaking tired. An attempt at a nap yesterday failed, resulting in two hours of wasted time.

There, now you are all caught up and I can talk later about other things.
Yay! A package just arrived and I get to try on some hand-me-down jeans. Be back soon, I promise!

Busy Busy Busy

(as indicated by the title, there's a lot in this post)

This week is supposed to be my winter break, but as I mentioned before, I was asked to continue working to bring three boys back and forth to their school for other services. One of my new best friends is also driving for that school, but she has enough kids to need an actual baby bus and drives a longer route to drop them all off.

For some reason, I feel like I've been really busy. I get up at the same time in the morning, but then the kids need to be picked up at one o'clock, instead of the usual three o'clock for my high school. Then I get home earlier, but I think my body is programmed to be sleepy a certain amount of time after I get there. I've been ready to drop at an obscenely early six o'clock or so. Weird, and not really a good thing.


I've also been occupied with a few artsy endeavors. Over the weekend I decided that I was sick of not doing anything with my lovely bright green yarn. I bought the yarn for $5.60 from this really neat little yarn shop at the end of Summers Lane where both the bus shop and the high school I service are located. It's called Come Yarn Over (personally I think they could use some webpage help). I've met two wonderful ladies there, one who actually makes yarn, and the other I think is the owner. Oh gosh, for the life of me I cannot remember either of their names! I thought I had them memorized by now... bad me.

Anyway, the owner lady offered to teach me to knit if I wanted to buy some yarn. She normally charges only a little bit more for a formal class, so I thought it was a great deal. I chose green yarn (of course!). She sat down with me and taught me to cast on, knit, purl, and identify twisted stitches. She seemed very impressed that I caught on quickly, and the spinning lady told me she was jealous because I knit continental style. In any case, I left very happy with a bundle of yarn and two needles sticking out from the center.

My ears were starting to get cold at that point from the chilly fall weather, so for my first practice project I knit half of some helmet earwarmers.

As you can see on this one, I accidentally figured out how to do twisted knitting, which is why the part on the left looks funky. Actually, I like the effect. However, I quickly got bored with that project for a few reasons. I have to sew the two halves together and then would still have to knit two more triangles to make a strap sandwich for my other ear. Also, I wasn't sure these would solve my cold ear issue, as my new Kryptonics helmet seems like the straps are held further away from my face- there would still be a gap for wind to get in. So I abandoned knitting for a while...

I have another project in the sewing department which has been a few months in the making. Or planning, rather- I haven't even begun actual construction yet! The project is an adaptation of a special vest that one of our friends owns, a Scottevest. The thing has maybe a billion pockets (slight exaggeration) and Jamie would like a jacket version with sleeves. Not having a pattern to use, I needed to make my own. I borrowed his vest and sort of drew a diagram with most of the important aspects of it noted. Our friend is also considerably smaller, so I've had to take those sketches and draw them on this pattern in order to enlarge it. Considering the complexity of this garment, it's not easy! This has to be the most complicated project I've attempted. Even the couch slipcover was easy compared to the mind-boggle of how everything needs to fit together on this jacket. Sometimes I get in a groove and things just click, and then others it's like I'm trying to do math homework with fatigue clouding my mind, making everything into a gigantic impossible puzzle. However, slowly I'm figuring things out. Now I am at the point where I am taping computer paper together to form a layered paper version- to make sure everything seems right as well as to give me pattern pieces. Oi...

It's no wonder with that colossal task that I wanted something else easy to do for a while, and that green yarn kept catching my eye. I found a few videos on Youtube that made averything seem so simple, I decided to jump in to make my first sock, which is the entire reason I wanted to learn to knit in the first place. This playlist is what I followed.

Casting on.

Gone circular with some round of ribbing done. 

Yes, I know it's actually a triangle. They call it circular, or knitting in the round because I just knit around and around, instead of making flat fabric with edges that have to then be sewn together.

Ribbed cuff done, and working on the leg of the sock.

Heel flap.

Heel turn done.

Gusset

Almost ready for toe decreases!

My sock is too large, obviously. The lady in the video was using worsted weight yarn (I think of it as regular yarn, it's like mine) and cast on 32 stitches. I thought that was just to knit a small sock for teaching purposes, and she had mentioned that most people would have 64 stitches. I also knitted a pseudo gauge swatch (usually a 4inch by 4 inch square used to see how many stitches you can expect to get per inch and how many rows on the size needles you use- I only knit a two inch section and several rows) and came up with 6 stitches per inch. Somewhere along the way I measured my leg and thought 10 inches around would be good, so 64 stitches seemed perfectly reasonable to me at the time. 

So I'm making a cozy slipper sock. Whatever. It's just for practice anyway, and I may or may not get more yarn to do a second matching one. I played around with enough of my yarn before this sock that I doubt I have enough here to make a pair. Now, I have gotten down to where I can start toe decreases, but I lost a stitch and have no idea how to fix it. I unraveled a bunch of rows, thinking I would just pick everything up and keep going, but then I lost one of those stitches and decided to give up for the time being and go to bed before I stabbed something in frustration.

Lastly, I have finally had my first casualty from riding my bike through the winter. There was a thin coating of little pellet-looking snow, a dusting really. I had no trouble going to work, but on the way home maybe I was going too fast, or the cars had gotten that area more melted by going over it. 

I tried to turn a corner to the right and quickly realized that my bike was slipping sideways to the left out from under me. I clearly heard myself let out a comical-sounding "oooh!". I put out my right leg to try and catch myself, which was a useless gesture because I was also still moving forward. I can't remember if I tried to brake or not. I ended up sort of sprawling out beside the curb as Zoomie and I both continued falling anyway. I hit my right knee and the bike sort of tangled with me on my left ( I think it sort of ran me over). I scurried up while making sure my knee was only merely banged (I didn't even rip my favorite jeans, yay!), picked up my water bottle, hanky, and purse, straightened my handlebars, and got back on to continue pedaling home.

I wasn't embarrassed at all, only sort of kicking myself mentally for not being more careful, and glad that I hadn't hurt my bike more than a crooked handlebar. I could have smashed the derailleur or something. I did have to put the bungee back in it's proper place holding up my tail light. I guess the crate shifting messed it up, the bungee keeps my light in the right spot under the crate.

You had hardly even see the discoloration that I'm not even going to call a "bruise".

Thank goodness today is Thursday and tomorrow is considered a holiday. I'm going to sleep in.

If you have been super busy lately with work, shopping or other activities, feel free to leave a comment and share!