Splitting My Personality

With the intent of keeping Creativity-Sidetracked a place to talk about creating and creativity and keep it more centered on that thought, I've started a more personal blog at Kat's How Do I Do. I am hoping this will give me more incentive to be more active on both blogs instead of questioning myself as to whether or not I should talk about more personal things here.

Since I enjoy being able to share what I'm doing, I do hope this will be an interesting place for you to return to see what is happening in my world.

Pillow Talk

My oldest granddaughter is five and the last time she was here I brought her up to my sewing room and embroidered her first initial. She picked the colors. During the process I discovered she loved blue and that her mom bought pink paint before asking what Nat wanted for her new bedroom.

So the N is blue with beige, gold and green around it.

I was left with the instruction to put “more of that gold” around it (she picked from several metallic shades) which I did. The next time I saw her, she asked for more blue.

Today we stitched the blue and added some pink ribbon stitched down with a heart stitch she picked out. I explained that it needs pink so it will look nice in her room and she thought that the pink looks good.

This is becoming a wonderful project. I had a chunk of my Andrea’s blue slip taffeta and she agreed it will be good on it. She also decided on a small, rectangular pillow form. I’m backing it with some rose upholstery velvet I have for some pillows for my living room. She thinks that will be great.

It is a great experience for both of us. I had been looking for the opportunity to do some one-on-one with my grandkids and this has been perfect. All of the grands are one year apart so when we see one, we see more. Her brothers were quite happy playing with toys while we did our thing.

Now I need to rinse out the stabilizer I used in the embroidery so I can go on to the next step.

Progress... of sorts

This has been a slowly progressing blog. I have been progressing, though. It has been 10 weeks since I broke my right arm. The doc is pleased with the amount of stuff he sees in the space where my humerus is growing together again. And I can almost get my arm stretched out straight without help but I will get fitted for a brace Thursday to make that happen faster. It will pressure my elbow to open straigh. I do hope it doesn’t take long but it does depend on how much I wear it and how much pressure I put on it.

I am also having a dye-injection MRI a week from today. My wrist just isn’t going back to normal so they are going go look. It takes half an hour to put the dye in, then another hour and fifteen minutes for the MRI. I want to know the results but I’m not sure I’m looking forward to the process.
I have been trying to be ‘creative’. I have been working on getting my sewing machine set up to do some quilting. The last quilt I made was for my Natalie – my first grandchild – and she will be 6 in December. I have four other grands and another expected in March and no quilts for them – at least none from me.

I would just like to be able to machine quilt without the strain to my shoulders and arms that I had before. Some of it has to do with the way the machine sits and I’m not sure what I can do about that. It sits on a sewing table my dad made from a hollow-core door decades ago – before I had children. There is an opening for my old sewing machine but my oldest has that now. My current machine needs a larger and deeper box. And it would be wonderful if it had a lift built in so it could be raised to sit at table height for machine embroidery, lowered so the bed of the machine was flat to the surface of the table or lowered completely out of the way, depending on what I was going to do.

I have picked up something called SewSlip (http://www.sewslip.com ) from Fabric Depot this week. It has a Teflon face and silicone backing. The Teflon lets the fabric slide around without dragging or catching on things and the silicone backing keeps the SewSlip from slipping. I would love to have a new gadget for my sewing machine that is supposed to make moving fabric around quite simple called a Fabric Mover. The price isn’t simple though so I’m hoping for good things with this SewSlip. You can even iron on the SewSlip. So they say….

That doesn’t mean that a quilt is anywhere on the horizon. I have too many problems with my right arm right now to strain it that much. I do want to do some practicing on some smaller projects though.

What I really need to do is to get my new Studio finished so I can move into it. Bob is busy with outside chores and fixing the ‘finally found’ leak in our roof is really next on MY list since rain WILL come again. So, putting the heat vent opening in and setting in the lower cabinets hasn’t happened yet. I need the place to do things. I need some flat surface. I need my cutting table to be exposed once again and, sooner than later, to have wrapping paper accessible. Birthdays and Christmas are a coming and they won’t be put off just because I can’t get to things.

Cabinets so close I could Touch them

Well, a most wonderful thing happened today. My son, my husband and my son-in-law lifted, toted, pushed, pulled and dragged cupboards from my front porch up to the current dump room which is in transition to become my new studio. I currently have a sewing/computer room – great luxury in itself; a studio – another luxury which seems to have and overwhelmed itself imploded, become unusable; and this dump room where anything that didn’t fit someplace else stayed.

Its most recent occupants, Toni and Chucky and their cat Coffee, have been gone for quite a while now and I think all of their stuff is also gone. While I worked on Andrea’s wedding last year – hemming the gown, making the veil and petticoat, sewing things seeped in. I then moved in all of the wrapping papers – quite a collection of paper, bags, boxes and ribbons. The last bunch of boxes from of dad’s things also landed in there.

This spring, Aaron asked where to get a dumpster. When I found what he was dumping was their old kitchen cabinets, I had a great money-saving idea. Bring them here and, with all of the experience he was gaining by installing new cabinets, he could even help reinstall his old ones. One thing leg to another. The cabinets were brought here under threat of rain and sat on the front porch for several months. My original plan was to have them installed before Bob’s surgery in the middle of June. I thought that I could be sorting and stowing during his recovery. Things happened and the pre-surgery install didn’t. Then I fell and broke my arm. Yuck.

Anyway, bless their hearts, Bob, Aaron and Chucky made the effort today and I’m well into having cupboards. Uppers are hung and some fiddling around to cut around a heat vent needs to be done before the base cabinets can be installed.

I think already we’re on Plan C as far as arranging the cabinets go. There is a plumbing access panel on one of the walls and we have decided in our great wisdom to not cover that. The space left is much smaller L-shape than anticipated. Originally, I was going to use the counter that included the spot for the sink which was to become my light box. We think that has been nixed since we think it won’t fit – as was the second high-cabinet since it would have covered the plumbing access. At this time I have one wall of cabinets plus one over-the-refrigerator cabinet on the adjoining space.

I am beginning to wonder what will fit inside all of those doors and drawers but I want to DO life and that means I need less of the in-case-of stuff. I think this makes me a first in my family. Not everyone is or was a packrat but some who started accumulating eventually got things packed in so tight there wasn’t much room for doing. I’m a wantin’ to be a doin’.

Another blog

I'm searching for the right blog spot. Since June, Bob had surgery for prostate cancer and I fell and broke my right arm. We got hooked on frequently updating just how we're doing using a medical page and now we want to be out of that and on with life. We are no longer in crisis mode although my arm begs to differ with that quite frequently.

In the mean time, our oldest is looking for a family blog but, being the independent that I am, I want a place where I can ramble. I tried Yahoo 360 but it doesn't seem to fit me. I hope this is easy to get to and to update.

Right now, though, I've been waiting for my pills to

make me sleepy

and have about given up. I guess it is time to just lay down and fake it.