Tuesday, November 13, 2012

Bad Blogger


I'm here, I really am.  I'm even sewing, off and on.

Let's see, catching everything up to date.  My aunt got sick, my aunt went to hospital, my aunt went to hospice, my aunt died.  I cleaned out her apartment and got rid of at least as much stuff as I got rid of last time.  I brought home a couple of carloads which is either getting added to our own rubble or listed on Etsy.  I've dealt with not-quite-relatives to the point where I'm glad I'm running out of them.

Craft show season is coming, as is theater sewing. I did turn down the first project offered me from the theater - a tweed trenchcoat.  When I said I'd have a limited time commitment this show, I wasn't envisioning being offered a project that would take at least 10 hours of my time, with serious profanity involved because real tweed would be hard enough to deal with; the kind of "tweed" that would come from a theatrical budget would make me want to throw my sewing machine out the window.  So I'm doing a few smaller projects, and keeping what sanity I have left.

I'm enjoying the craft show sewing, when I have a chance to do it.  The bags of thrifted and discarded clothes under my sewing table are coming to good use - pictured here are a few of the baby and toddler dresses I've done.  Not one of them has a scrap of new fabric in it - it's all either remnants or recycled.  Which makes me happy, and gives me a little more storage space under the table.

I also knocked out part of my recent sewing list: the pajama pants and 3 turtlenecks have moved from fabric to wardrobe, and are much appreciated, especially those flannels in my drafty house.

Out back, things are a little slow in the land of poultry.  They tend to slow down their laying in colder/darker weather anyway (though I did wire the coop so that a light goes on from 5:00 - 7:00 a.m. each day, and again from 4:00 - 6:00 p.m.  Right now it's not making much of a difference.  Bonnie's finishing off a fairly spectacular moult so I have hopes that she'll be back in business any day now.  Otherwise, she might be refugeeing with Bertha next year to go live with my vegetarian friends while I get a few younger, more productive ladies for the backyard.

The garden's basically shut down now - last weekend we tore out the last of the tomatoes (and pulled in about 5 lbs of green ones), shelled the last of the dried beans for soup, mulched the garlic that's already coming up for next year, set up and seeded the cold frame with greens, and cut back everything that needed it.  The tomatoes are now slowly ripening - good trick, if you ever need it, is to put green tomatoes in a brown paper bag with unripe, GREEN bananas.  When the bananas ripen, they give off a gas that ripens the tomatoes.  The flavor may not be real sun-ripened tomato, but it's not bad, and it's not waste, either.  They'll get sliced down into the dehydrator and keep us in sundried tomatoes all winter.

So I've been here, and busy, and just stressed with family crap.  But that's subsiding now and I'm going to try to find my way back to the stuff that keeps me sane and happy.  We'll see how that works. 

7 comments:

Carolyn (Diary of a Sewing Fanatic) said...

I'm sorry for your loss and glad that you're doing better. Love the little girl dresses, they're very pretty. But I have to tell you that reading this its hard to believe you live in Philly and not on a farm in the midwest...you really are a country girl at heart! :)

Anonymous said...

Recycling some old clothes myself...into Christmas stockings.

Andrea said...

Sorry about your aunt. LOVE the dresses. My favorite is the yellow with the denim. It's just adorable.

Clio said...

I'm sorry for your loss. Good that you are keeping busy.

THat little orange dress is adorable!

TE said...

You've had a rough time lately. So sorry. (our lives are spookily parallel, not to spook you further)

Sew, craft, cook, love. That's all there is to do about it.

velosews said...

You have had such a busy year, including the family issues too.
Sorry about your aunt.

The recycled dresses are gorgeous.

I would have responded the same way to a request for a real tweed trench. We're only human.

Jane M said...

I'm just catching up on blog reading and am so sorry to hear about your aunt and about Max. But your dresses are precious and it's good to see yo sewing again, hectic as it is for show time.