November is Full, December is Empty

Last November, I was asked by a local string teacher to play piano in a Christmas concert put on by her students. She organized a small orchestra and drafted a retired music teacher to be the conductor. The three of us worked well together, so I wasn’t surprised to get the text on Thursday asking me if I am available again this year. I get paid and it’s a nice chunk of money for something that is a lot of fun. I enjoyed playing in band when my kids were in school and I miss it sometimes.

I put the dates into my calendar—rehearsals every Wednesday afternoon and a concert on the last day of November—and decided that November is officially full. I cannot shoehorn anything else into the month. Indeed, there are a couple of days when I may be meeting myself coming and going, like the Wednesday when I have rehearsal from 4-5 pm and then have to dash over to the quilt store to teach a serger class from 5:30 to 8 pm. Our church’s fair trade gift festival is also in November. We haven’t had it for two years, so we’re hoping to get a good turnout this year. I’m signed up to work there two mornings.

I was planning to do my tomato canning some time in November, but I think that might have to get pushed to December. I need three or four completely empty days, schedule-wise, to get it done. December is empty right now except for Sunday choir practice and I am going to do my level best to keep it that way.

This is November:

This is December:

That empty December calendar is not an invitation to people to start filling it with things they’d like me to do, by the way. I have to hit the ground running in January and I need a month to myself before that happens.

November will not be all work and no play. Robin and I are going to Spokane for a few days and I’ll spend the week of Thanksgiving—and my birthday—in Seattle. DD#1 and DSIL are coming down from Alaska. DD#2 and I will join them at his parent’s house for Thanksgiving Day. The husband will enjoy a week by himself vacationing here in his shop. We do it this way every year and I know people think it’s odd, but it works for us.

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I’m still working my way through my garment fabric stash. I made another Harper Cardigan, this time out of some Robert Kaufman Laguna Cotton. The fabric is white with black dots, so I used black ribbing for the contrast bands. I bought the fabric at the quilt store north of town. I’ll take the cardigan in next week and see if they would like to use it as a store sample. They ordered the Laguna Cotton over the summer at my request. Both stores give me a nice teacher discount on fabric and supplies, so I don’t mind making up samples. If they sell more garment fabric, they will order more, and that’s a win-win for everybody.

I found another length of rayon French terry in the stash. This one is a deep carnation pink and is also destined to be a Harper Cardigan.

And I made up one of the dress versions of the Nancy Raglan. It comes in an A-line version—the one I traced—and a flare version. I narrowly averted disaster with that one. The purple cotton French terry had come in two separate pieces of one yard and two yards. I cut the sleeves out of the one-yard piece. The pattern indicated that the body pieces could be cut out of two yards, but I must have oriented the front piece the wrong way when I cut it on the fold, because I didn’t have enough left to cut the back piece on the fold.

When stuff like this happens, I always ask myself, “What are my options?” Going through that flow chart is helpful and sometimes shakes loose a novel solution. The obvious first answer was to cut the front down and make another tunic. I had enough of the fabric to cut a tunic back piece on the fold. I really wanted to try the dress version, though.

It occurred to me that if I were able to cut two separate back pieces together out of the fabric that was left, I could add a seam allowance and seam the back pieces together. I moved the pattern pieces around and discovered that if I were careful with my cutting, I could do exactly that.

The dress is assembled but awaiting contrast fabric for the inner part of the cowl. I don’t have a lot of purple fabric in my stash. Maybe something will show up at Walmart, LOL.

I looked at my black waterfall cardigan again to see if I could trace it, but it’s so worn and the construction is so weird that I decided just to alter the McCall’s pattern to make it look more like my black one. I want to size down to the Medium, though, and the pattern I own only has the L-XL-XXL pattern pieces. I’ll have to wait until McCall’s patterns go on sale again at Joanns and pick up the smaller size.

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I had just finished making dinner last night and was waiting for the husband to get home when I heard little feet running across the porch, followed by a knock on the door. WS was standing outside holding a piece of orange fake fur.

“Our sewing machine won’t sew this—could you do it?”

After a bit of questioning, I figured out that this was supposed to be a fox’s tail for his costume. The elementary school was having their Halloween carnival last night and he wanted to wear it. I pulled out some orange thread and re-threaded the sewing machine; luckily, it still had a ball point needle in it from the waterfall cardigan project. I ran up the seam and turned the tail inside out. WS stuffed it with fiberfil and then I tacked it to the leggings he was planning to wear.

It has been a long time since I worked on Halloween costumes for little kids. I told WS that he could pay me by bringing me a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup from the carnival.