Back in Business — Janet Szabo

Guess what showed up in the mail today?

Now I can finish the apron. Hallelujah.

Unfortunately, I seem to have picked up a cold. I went to bed last night feeling absolutely fine and dandy, slept well, and woke up at 4 a.m. sneezing, with liquefying sinuses. I have instituted my usual regimen of ibuprofen, hot tea (ugh, it’s 92 degrees out), and elderberry syrup, and even if the elderberry syrup doesn’t knock the cold out completely, past experience indicates that it should shorten the duration of my misery significantly. I am so annoyed. I feel just lousy enough not to want to do anything, including sew. I hate nonproductive days with a passion. The transcription account was all caught up, too, so my services weren’t needed today.

The good news? The high tomorrow will be 80 with rain (and only 68 on Sunday). The bad news? I need to find enough energy to get out to the garden and pick the current wave of zucchini and throw out more lettuce seed.

I did go to town this morning to run errands. Joanns is having a big 76th anniversary sale and the ad said that all the apparel interfacing would be 76% off. I need some more Pellon Easy-Pattern for tracing and thought this would be a good day to pick up a bolt of it. A bolt has 25 yards and is $100 when it’s not on sale. I wasn’t entirely sure that the Easy-Pattern would be on sale, because “apparel interfacing” is a vague description and the photo that accompanied the ad showed only the Pellon bolts with pink labels. (The Easy-Pattern has a yellow label.)

[I was not the only confused sewist out there, because this very topic was a thread in one of the sewing groups on FB this morning. Some Joanns are honoring the 76% off price and some aren’t.]

I had a 50% off coupon to use as backup if the 76% off sale wasn’t legit. The Easy-Pattern didn’t ring up as being on sale, but the cashier overrode it and gave me the anniversary sale price. Yay.

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My fellow Washington College alum and friend, Scott, picked up a vintage Singer sewing machine last weekend and has spent a few days rehabbing it. I fear he has fallen down the rabbit hole. He wrote about the process on his blog and it’s a very entertaining read.

I’ve had that Singer—the one I started stripping the paint off of—sitting out in the hot sun for the past couple of days. That’s always a good way to get that old gunky oil loosened up a bit. I need to finish dismantling it so I can get it sandblasted and repainted this winter.

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This has turned out to be very handy:

I can’t remember my own name some days, so writing down what I preserve when I preserve it has been absolutely necessary. I was able to check last August’s entries and see that I bought a case of Sweet Dreams peaches at Glacier Produce and canned them. There is a note that they were “very tasty.” I went back to Glacier Produce this morning and bought another case of the same variety and that will be my project for tomorrow.