Kenzie's Quilt - 4/14/18

Greetings.

The macrame project discussed in my previous post remains unfinished.  (Act surprised.) 

The actual macrame part is finished, but the finishing is not finished.  Here's the deal: 

The instructions suggested un-twisting the long, dangling ends of the cords.  I liked the look, so I pulled a chair up to the project and picked up a cord - one of the short ones, about 6" long.  To my surprise, I discovered that the cotton rope I had used was actually braided, not twisted, over a nylon cord.  I was able to un-braid it with a tiny crochet hook.  As you might imagine, this took a while, and I pondered whether or not I had the staying power to do all the ropes.  I liked the look of the un-braided strings, though, and decided to go for it.  I snipped out the nylon cord and moved to the next braid.  To cut to the chase, this un-braiding process created a myriad of problems.  The longest cords (of which there are many) are LONG; they don't un-braid in a minute, like the short ones do.  The nylon core "stumps" that remain in the knotted part cause problems; some of them slid out on their own initiative, while others stubbornedly refused to budge. 

The project remains half-un-braided, and draped over a chair (with a bunch of other junk) in a spare bedroom.  It can be salvaged, I think, but I am not in the mood to fool with it. 

Besides, I have another project I need to do.

I must make quilts for two granddaughters.

Granddaughter McKenzie's quilt is up next.  I took her to the fabric store and asked her to pick ONE fabric for her quilt.  She picked a bold neon stripe on a black background.  Since then, I have been pondering how to use it.  Inspiration struck Thursday afternoon.  I shopped for complementary fabrics yesterday.  The fabrics have been washed, dried, starched and iron.  Let the sewing begin!


 

The Twisty Stick - 2/13/18

For months (okay...fifteen years), I have been pondering putting something pretty over our bed.

(We need something in that bare spot to the right, too, but that's another story.)

As you can see, there's not much space between the ceiling and the top of the headboard - maybe 2 feet.  I can't really imagine a painting there.  I thought about chopping a big grapevine wreath in half (the half-circle would nicely mimic the shape of the headboard) and arranging flowers and ribbons on it, but when I think of all the dust and cobwebs it would collect over the years (I keep things I  like forever), the thought of sleeping under it kind of grosses me out.  I thought about a series of plaques or doo-dads of some sort, but haven't found anything that grabs me.  I thought about a "saying" - you know, those vinyl letters that you stick on the wall that say stuff like "Always Kiss Me Goodnight" - but . . . .  Nah.

So.  What to do?

I have been clueless, until today, when I stumbled upon the idea of a macrame wall hanging.

Enter the twisty stick.

Last fall, I decided I'd had it with a crape myrtle tree growing near the front of our house.  We did not plant this tree; it was a "volunteer."  Evidently, a bird pooped a seed it had eaten in someone else's yard, for the tree that resulted from it bloomed a lavender color we don't have among the other crape myrtles in our yard.  The bird's aim was a little off, and the seed landed about a foot to the right of where I would've planted it.  But we let it grow. 

It grew taller than our roof.  As it grew, a stray tendril of jessamine (from a plant we'd cut down years ago) found a limb and twined around it.  Initially, I thought this would be pretty cool.  In our back yard, we have a crape myrtle that became fully entwined with stray sweet autumn clematis.  Amazingly, they co-exist peacefully.  The clematis begins to bloom just as the crape myrtle blooms start to fade, and the effect is that the tree sort of changes color from magenta to white.  Of course, I knew that the "volunteer" tree and the jessamine vine would not bloom at the same time, but I thought the tree might make a nice support for the jessamine.

Wrong. 

The crape myrtle grew up to be spindly (I guess it tried to out-run the jessamine), with a big clump of jessamine at the top, like a giant Tootsie-Roll sucker, and the least little wind, or snow, or ice would bend the vine-choked crape myrtle over until it nearly touched the ground.  It looked plumb ridiculous.  So this fall, when I was cutting back a neighboring shrub, I went to work on the crape myrtle with the loppers.  As it turned out, we had to break out the chainsaw, but within minutes, the crape myrtle was (probably temporarily) gone.

But one of the sticks had grown twisted from hosting the jessamine all those years, and it was too cool to throw away.  It has been living in a corner on my back porch ever since, waiting on its perfect use. 

What do you think?  Maybe not necessarily THIS pattern, but something similar - a macrame wall hanging on a piece of the twisty stick. 

Now, all I have to do is learn how to macrame.

Snow! 1-12-2018

Yesterday, my boss (the best boss ever) said, "If it's bad in the morning, don't come to work.  In fact, don't worry about coming in whether it snows or not."  I had somehow missed the memo that bad weather was coming our way.  It was 60 degrees outside, and so I just shrugged and said, "Okay," and started making plans for how to use the bonus day off.  Earlier in the week, I'd had the idea that it would be nice to make our grandchildren some trinket boxes for their rooms, a place for the little treasures they accumulate.  We'd have a long weekend to work on the first one.  So before I left work, I searched the internet for a free wooden box pattern, and on the way home I stopped at the lumber store and bought lumber, screws, and hardware to make boxes.

Last night at 6 p.m., it was still 60 degrees and drizzling rain.  This morning at 4 a.m., I woke up to the sound of sleet pelting our bedroom window.  By daybreak, our yard was covered with ice pellets.  By mid-morning, the sleet had changed to snow.

I am pacing like a caged cat, worrying about the family driving to and from work on these icy roads.  Thank goodness I have a project for today!

Raccoon Turd Reminiscence - 1/4/18

I was looking through some pictures on my computer tonight, and ran across a folder containing pictures we took during a trip to Eureka Springs, Arkansas a few years ago.  It was a fun trip.  We rented a cabin on Bear Lake, which we used as a base for day trips all over that corner of Arkansas.  It was a one-room cabin on the 2nd floor of a 4-cabin unit.  We got there middle of the afternoon, checked in, and hauled our suitcases up the stairs.  Halfway up, I spied an actual TURD on one of the steps.  It looked like it probably came out of a medium-sized dog, maybe a cocker spaniel or poodle.  It was fairly fresh.  I said to The Husband, "Ewww...there's an actual turd on the step...don't step in it.  I hope this is not a bad sign."  We took our suitcases inside and were relieved to find that the room was very clean and well equipped - little kitchenette at one end, sitting area at the other, bed in between.  Big old tacky jacuzzi tub right in the middle of the room....

We stowed our stuff and went outside to check out the view, and after a little bit we headed back to the car to do some sight-seeing.  On the way down the steps, we saw the poop again.  The Husband got a stick and raked it off the step so we wouldn't step in it when we came back.  We drove around and scouted out a couple of places we wanted to explore the next day.  We ate burgers at a biker bar, and went back to the cabin.

There was another turd on the step, and one or two more on the balcony.

I said, "For crying out loud, who would let their dog POOP ON THE PORCH!"

The Husband said it might be a raccoon.

As far as I knew, I'd never seen raccoon poop, nor even imagined what it might be like, so I allowed that he could be right, but, based on the number of poops, I also wondered if the 'coon had a digestive issue.  And then I looked up.

He had company.

We laughed and laughed.

* * * * *

January 2, 2018

Well, I have knitted myself the ugliest pair of house shoes in the world.

I have used this pattern multiple times.  It requires 100% wool yarn.  The pattern makes shoes that would fit Big Foot until they've been washed in hot water, at which time the wool shrinks, and the shoes become thick and toasty warm.  They stretch a bit with wear but can be washed and re-shrunk. 

The first pair I knitted (a few years ago) was PERFECT - nice medium blue color, fit just right, etc.   The Husband (whose feet are not much larger than mine) coveted them and promptly claimed them for himself, and then did not wear them.  I confiscated them back and eventually wore holes in both soles.  Two weeks ago, when the little toe on my right foot bore a new hole and poked out of the side of the shoe like it was hitch-hiking, I started another pair with the only 100% wool yarn I had at hand, camouflage yarn I'd intended to use for a man's toboggan some day. 

Nothing about this pair is perfect.  For starters, they're butt ugly.  And, because I made a mistake in binding off the knitting, when I washed them in hot water, the opening got too tight before the soles got small enough, resulting in 1" "spoilers" at the heels. 

I ended up snipping around the openings to loosen the fit around my ankles.

And, because the shoes did not shrink quite enough, they are a little drafty.



But I have resolved for 2018 to look for silver linings in dark clouds.  In this instance, I can expect with a fair amount of confidence that The Husband will not be coveting these shoes.  :)

New Year's Eve Eve 2017

I just got through doing something that I hadn't done in ages, and it came about in the oddest way.

Today, to prevent ourselves from sitting on our butts watching television all day, The Husband and I hooked up with his sister and brother-in-law, and did a road trip to an antique mall about 2 hours away.  This mall is HUGE - aisle after aisle of vender booths with everything under the sun.  We wandered the aisles for nearly five hours, looking for a few specific items - a print, a table, a Tupperware salt shaker.  He worked one side of each aisle, and I worked the other.  We'd hold up stuff - "Hey, look at this. . . ."  We found stuff we hadn't even known we needed.  ;)

Anyway, at some point, we were in opposite booths with our backs to one another, and he said something - I'm not even sure what it was (because he mumbles, and our backs were to one another) - that made me suddenly think about a bowl of ice cream with Coke poured over it.

I NEVER THINK ABOUT ICE CREAM.  I just don't.  I mean, if there's ice cream on a TV commercial, then I might think about it.  Or if I see somebody working with great enjoyment on a double-dip cone on a hot day, I might think I'd like to have one and might even go get one.  But ice cream just isn't regularly at the top of my list, or The Husband's, either.  I buy it, sometimes, and we might eat one bowl apiece, right away, then we keep it long enough for it to get freezer burnt then we wash it down the drain.  It's not my go-to treat.

Pouring Coke over ice cream was something my parents did when I was a kid.  We didn't call it an "ice cream float."  We ate it with a spoon, then drank the milky liquid.  I always thought it was kind of weird, though in a good way.  I have not done it - or thought about doing it - in probably 40 years.

I said to The Husband, "I don't know what you just said, but whatever it was, it made me think about a bowl of ice cream with Coke poured over it."  And he gave me the "Huh?" look, having apparently   not mentioned ice cream. 

It may be that the antique mall was playing music with subliminal messages (though it would seem that they'd want me to think, "Antique table," not "ice cream with Coke poured over it").  It may be that, come 5 p.m., when the place was closing and we had not eaten anything since breakfast, a drop in blood sugar might have been giving me subtle hints.  In any case, the thought sunk into my brain and would not go away.

On the way home, I happily remembered that we have ice cream in the freezer, left over from Christmas Eve, so probably not too frosty yet.  And there was a 2-liter bottle of Coke on the counter, also left over from Christmas Eve.  I thought I was set!  As soon as we got home, I fixed a little bowl of ice cream and tested the Coke for fizz.  Nada.  I got nothing but swirly syrup.  This would not do; there's got to be fizz.  I kept searching the kitchen.  In the pantry was a small bottle of Coke left over from a road trip we took two months ago.  Evidently, someone had taken one swallow and put the top back on; it was flat, too.  We had some cans of diet Coke left over from Christmas Eve, and I was forced to use one of them, for there must be fizz in a bowl of ice cream with Coke poured over it.

I ate the foam, I ate the ice cream, I drank the creamy Coke down to the last drop.  And boy, even with diet Coke, it sure was good.

From my toasty warm office - 12/27/17

It appears that the cold weather has driven me into the house for the next few weeks.  The low temperature tonight is supposed to be in the teens, with highs in the 30s for the next week or so.  Bummer!

Christmas has come and gone, and it was a good one.  Both The Husband and I were off work on the 26th, and we spent the day hunkered down in the house, eating left-overs from our Christmas Eve gathering.  I got out of bed at 6 a.m., had some coffee, then slept on the couch from 7 a.m. until 9 a.m., slept in the recliner from 11 a.m. until 2 p.m., and had the audacity to head to bed at 10 p.m. and sleep until 7 this morning. 

But I've been cracking the whip on myself today (in a figurative sense, of course - I am not into pain).  As Christmas approached, several of my embroidery design customers asked for special orders, and I put them all off until this week.  Now it's time to get busy!  The embroidery machine has been running for two hours, already, testing designs I worked on this morning. 

There's just never enough time in any day to do everything I want/need to do.  I still have gifts to embroider for folks I didn't see at Christmas.  I want to paint a picture for our bedroom.  I want to make a swaggy thing to go over our bed (but need to go to the craft store for supplies).  I want to build a table for my sewing room.  I want to rearrange my yard (which ain't happening in THIS kind of weather!).  I want to practice on my mandolin, and figure out how to get Alexa to do what I *#)!@ ask her to do.

And yet I sit here blogging . . . .