Making Something Old Look New Again
My friend Joann brought this wall hanging to church yesterday and asked if I had something to get the stains out. I offered to bring it home to see what I could do. I wish I had taken a “before” picture, but I wasn’t terribly optimistic. It was badly stained. To my surprise, an hour-long soak in some OxiClean got out all but a few stubborn spots. It looks much better:
I’ll give it back to her at sewing on Thursday. I am not a textile conservationist. Sometimes I just get lucky.
I’ll have to ask Joann, too, if this was a family heirloom or what the provenance was. The appliqué is so delicately stitched.
We said goodbye to Margaret after church yesterday. She heads back home this week. We may have a few new faces at quilting this week—my friend Susan is now retired and will be able to come. Margaret’s niece, Barb, who has been teaching in Europe for many years (most recently in Slovakia), also just retired and moved back to Kalispell. And Barb has a niece who was in elementary school with my girls and has expressed an interest in joining us, which means I won’t be the youngest one at quilting anymore.
I’m almost done with the comforter top. At the rate we’re picking up new people at sewing, though, I may have to make a few more. I could always bring a machine with me and sew while others quilt and tie. Joann, who is in charge of our prayer shawl ministry at church, noted that we’ve given away quite a few recently and our stock is low. I have one that is almost done and I’d like to finish it and start another one.
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I realized this morning that my current to-do list is all over the map in terms of tasks:
Gardening
Processing produce and cooking
BSKD website/social media
Sewing/knitting
Grading apron patterns and a backlog of design ideas
My days are not like they were when I was transcribing; back then, I could get up in the morning and count on eight straight hours of a specific kind of work. Now I’ve got to figure out what tasks I want to do when and which part of my brain is going to get the exercise. Sometimes produce leaps to the top of the list because it won’t wait. I can only do website work for about two hours before I get cross-eyed. I have to be careful about timing the pattern grading work, because once I start, I could go for hours without coming up for air. (And someone still needs to be fed regularly.) Canning is a study in multi-tasking, or as the husband refers to it, “Doing many things badly at the same time.” (I am a wicked multi-tasker so that doesn’t really apply to me.) Sewing and knitting—once everything is cut and ready to go—is rather mundane and mechanical.
The schedule is ever changing, which has its good and bad points. I’m never bored, but sometimes I feel like I am jumping around too much trying to give attention to all these different tasks.
Regarding the website: I have about a dozen patterns, all the books, and half the back issues of Twists and Turns listed for sale. I want to get the other half of the back issues done (20 more individual issues and five compilations) and add half a dozen additional patterns, and then I am going to make the new site live. I don’t want to wait until everything has been added because it might be December before that happens. September and October are going to get crazy quickly.
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DD#1 asked me last week if I would make her a new bugout bag. She thinks the one she had was stolen from her car because it has gone missing. DD#2 needs one, too. I constantly hammer on the topic of being prepared for emergencies, especially as both of them are living in an earthquake zone. It was a good excuse to get my bugout bag out of the car and go through and update it, too. These bags are nothing fancy, just sturdy backpacks filled with a variety of items one might need if one were stranded for a couple of days. I have a separate bag that I keep in the car which holds my knitting, because being stranded somewhere for a couple of days with nothing to occupy my hands definitely fits my definition of “emergency.”
Speaking of bugging out, I am itching for a road trip. I hesitate to leave for very long, though, because the weather has turned hot and dry and windy. It’s been a relatively quiet fire season so far but there is no reason to believe it is going to stay that way. I may still try to get down to Missoula for the day. I’d really like to visit The Confident Stitch and see what they have available.