Watch Janice Sew

Sometimes when I’m sewing, I’ll pick a topic and look for a YouTube video, then let YouTube travel down whatever rabbit trails it wants to explore by choosing the next video for me. Yesterday afternoon, after half a dozen videos featuring vintage apron patterns, this little gem popped up:

It’s entitled Simple Sewing, 1950s, and it features a sewist named Janice making a Simplicity jumper. The narrator, with her pointer and boards, was particularly amusing. (Rocky Horror Picture Show, anyone?) The Huntley Film Archives watermark is mightily annoying (could they not have put it in the corner?) but the video is still fun to watch. And Janice is sewing on a beautiful Singer 301.

At the time I was watching the video, I was working on these:

Adhering to the edict that “Anything worth doing is worth doing in excess,” I cut up all of my Insul-Brite, fabric scraps, and cotton batting scraps and made potholders. This stack represents about half of them. I am trying to amass inventory for a possible market later in the spring. Because I have to swap out the regular bobbin case in my Janome 6600P for the machine quilting bobbin case, I want to get as much of the quilting done as possible in one fell swoop. The potholders don’t take long and they’re not difficult, but there were a lot of them. (For some bizarre reason, I had two yards of Insul-Brite in my stash. Was I planning to make a parka?) This pile has been quilted and trimmed to size. Now I just need to attach the binding. For that, I’ll switch back to my regular bobbin case and my stitch-in-the-ditch foot.

Joanns is having a thread sale. I had a meeting in town yesterday morning and took the opportunity to stop in and buy a few more colors of serger thread. All of their Simplicity patterns were on sale, too, so I picked up this reprint, not currently in my collection:

My apron obsession continues.

I believe we will have a white Christmas. Besides sewing videos, I’ve been watching news clips of the Blizzard of ‘78 from the Cleveland TV stations. The clips are on YouTube and they’re pretty entertaining. I’m so annoyed with our local news station, which doesn’t actually deliver news anymore. It has become nothing but a “show”—and that’s precisely how the two female anchors refer to it—full of carefully-scripted feel-good clips of kittens and puppies with some national news thrown in. We had several newsworthy events in Kalispell this week, including a bomb scare at Wal-Mart, and none of that ever made it to the “news.” I hardly ever see actual reporters out reporting from the street. At this point, the husband and I turn it on for 10 minutes of weather and move on.

[Yes, I’ve contacted them with my concerns. They don’t care. They just want you to “chime in” with your news and photos. I am getting most of my local news now from the scanner and from a Kalispell-based Facebook group.]

The husband is pretty much done with concrete for the season and will work on the shop for the next couple of months. He framed in the access opening to the attic yesterday:

The ceiling looks good:

And even without a propane heater or insulation—both of which are on the list—it is fairly comfortable in there with just a portable space heater. He tells me there will be a propane heater mounted on the ceiling, eventually.

Lila and Rusty are not quite sure what to make of the space. They came in and sniffed around for a bit yesterday but left pretty quickly. I may have to get them ”shop poufs” so they can hang out in there when the husband is working.