A Little Yarn On The Side

With the table runner done,  and a little time on our hands last night,  Calisto and I decided to cut out a quick summer dress with FOUR pattern pieces.  FOUR!!!!!!!  Did I mention the corduroy jacket had 25 ?  And with only 4 little pieces, I have another finished project today!  And another 3.375 yards of fabric is gone from the stash.  Not to be left out, Theo helped me stitch the strips together for the next table runner: though we both sort of lost interest after all the strata were ironed.  Instead, I ironed the fabric for the summer clothes for Andy's 2014 birthday.  If one is more than one year late, one can at least try to be less than TWO years late, right?  So, I'm at 22.4 yards of yarn so far this year.  At this rate, I am on track to use up about 135-150 yards for the year.  I need more yardage, and it felt so good to get Andy's shirt done, which has been on the to-do list for several year...

But we do have a finished shirt for Andy, and you KNOW you're serious about finishing a project when you carry on through bloodshed: Being me, I have had to get fairly good at getting bloodstains out of clothing, but bloodstains on clothes that aren't even finished is a new one even for me.  Luckily, it was just on the interfacing, so it isn't going to be a problem.  AND another 2.5 yards of fabric out of the stash!  Normally, I might unwind at the end of the night with a book, but now that I'm obsessed with 200 yards , I started cutting the wedges for the table runner Monday night, finished them up Tuesday morning, had them all sewn together by Tuesday afternoon, and spent this morning finishing up the runner with a speckled-green top-stitching: Another two and a half yards out of stash, putting me at just over 19 yards of fabric for the year-- which FINALLY puts the stash where it was on December 24, before that one last online "hurrah" purc...

This and this are Robin's fault.   She has double-dog dared me to try for 200 yards of fabric this year.  200  Even in my 50,000-yards-of-laceweight-isn't-crazy version of reality, this is just a wee bit insane, but all day I've been musing about what that would really take.  My best sewing year used up 103 yards.  If I went back and finished some of my sewing WIPs, AND focused on bigger projects, AND found a little more sewing time, AND finished a couple of the quilts............. Oh my. So the purple is a cotton print that Andy bought for a shirt several years ago, and which I haven't ever gotten around to.  Since it's a short-sleeved shirt, it's much easier, and I cut it out AND got it started today, which will clear another 2 and a half yards of fabric out of the stash.  And before THAT, I got all the strips sewn together for the Spicy Spiral runner for Andy's parents' anniversary later this year, which will use up another two ...

Whew!  It's Monday again--how did that happen so fast? Guess what?  I'm wearing the corduroy jacket!  I'm still not wild about it, but it is Me Made Monday, and as I was taking the cats to the vet for their shots first thing this morning, I didn't want something I really liked to get shredded.One does have to think about such things with cats. Luckily, no one ended up bleeding this year, but this is as close as my little sidekick is getting to me today.  Neither Andy nor I are brave enough to even attempt to pet Calisto just yet, because she's kind of bitchy at the best of times.  However, being shunned by cats does have a few perks..... like getting control of the cutting table long enough to finish cutting the strips for the table runners,  and even getting the first set pinned and ready for sewing.  They're cute, but feline "help" is rarely, if ever, really helpful.  Maybe I can even get Andy's Valentine shirt cut out before I...

I've now gone 50 days without buying fabric!!!!!!!!!!!!!  I've come close, I've even had fabric in an online cart, but I didn't buy!!!!!!!!! Now just 316 days left to go................

Which is, truth be told, my least-favorite holiday.  I grew up in a small town with a VERY large extended family--many of which married REALLY young (usually because of unplanned pregnancies, of course)--and if you've experienced either scenario, you'll know that either of them means there's an inexcusable number of people constantly asking you when you're going to get married, why aren't you married yet, and making sure you really felt that you were unacceptable as a single person.  It got so bad that I dated someone for more than a year without telling my mother because she wouldn't lay off the incessant nagging about being married.  So, I am understandably touchy about anything that makes unattached people feel bad.  Do you remember Valentine's Day in grade school?  We'd decorate shoe boxes or made construction paper envelopes, then we'd all go around the room and drop Valentine's into the boxes.  Every single one.  I loved that.  It didn...

Just not Andy's Valentine's Shirt...................oops. It's the 3-Hour-Shirt from McCall's--which, of course, took the better part of 2 days NOT including cutting and laying out the pattern.  I think they use football minutes.  There was a brief moment of time when I considered trying to embroider something on the pockets, but after the horror of top-stitching on corduroy for the jacket, I just wanted this DONE and off my table.  I went with the mandarin collar to make it a bit less painful.  I don't think even my nifty new point-turner could make collar points in corduroy.  Instead, I opted to liven up the shirt the easy way--with cool buttons. In my button stash, I had quite a few options, but these were short one button, so I used these instead: which add a bit of femininity to an otherwise unisex shirt, and are shank buttons which worked much better with the thicker fabric.  And....................I love this shirt.  I already ...