The war of sewing

My sewing machine is currently set up in our basement workshop.  I recently made four skirts:  two from tablecloth fabric, one from a sheet, and one from batik fabric that I was given for Christmas.  I had a lot of problems with breaking threads, and used up several more spools of handed-down thread than I expected to.  I used the same pattern for all four skirts, from a sketch I had in one of the wardrobe booklets that I had made a couple of years ago.  One of the skirts is waiting to be overdyed.

I also sewed a new seat and back for one of our director's chairs, which had been waiting a long time for new canvas.  That process involved more troubleshooting than sewing, because my sewing machine didn't like the weight of thread that I was trying to use.  At one point I had my machine more taken apart for dust removal than I had ever done before; its innards were actually a lot cleaner than I expected.

Back from a working vacation...

 ...in which we scraped and repainted a porch for family, and then went and started the clean-out of a very cluttered rental house owned by other family members.

I came back with ideas about things that need to be done to declutter my own house.

Someone dumped a push mower in our yard while we were away; both my husband and I have been thinking about learning about small engine repair, so we are going to see what we can do with it.

Mini chandelier mobile

Messing around with plastics a little. For the hangy bits of this project, I made hot glue teardrop shapes on a sheet of aluminum foil, and then tore away the foil around the edges when the glue was cool. 

I used an entire long glue stick, so I had many extras and could choose the best ones.

The circular rim of a plastic food container became the structure.  I sewed the teardrops onto it with "invisible" plastic sewing thread, which is annoying to work with--springy and hard to see. I didn't have any trouble pushing the needle through the glue, and none of my needle holes ripped out.

I also used the invisible thread to hang the mobile.  I ran up four threads, got them more or less evenly tensioned, and then spun the rim to twist them together for a length, which I knotted.

It turned out there was already a handy nail for hanging things above the planned kitchen sink location, so installation went quickly, with the addition of some more invisible thread. 

I thought of coating the backs of the teardrops with hot glue as I was sewing them on.  There are color variations as some of the glue I used was old and yellowed.  It was fiddly keeping the sewing tension loose enough for the teardrops to hang straight.

I only did one round, but others could be added.

Abiding

I cut up an old skirt, hemmed the pieces by hand, and made a bunch of washcloths, which have been handy to have around.

I'm eagering awaiting garbage day, since there is a dead squirrel in our trash.  It died of natural causes.

Blackberries are done now, but we still have mulberries.

Fruitfulness

We have ripe mulberries and blackberries, and yesterday I got out into the farther reaches of the blackberry jungle, and picked enough berries to make two pints of jam.

I almost didn't make the jam, but it seemed like a good thing for the children to see where jam comes from.  It turned out very well, and we used some of it to make blackberry lemonade.

Ghost bush

I took the last of the spray paint and primer that I had been using in our previous house to repaint the toilet seat, and used it to paint a dead bush in the yard.

The paint makes the bush look silver, not white.  It's in a very dry part of the yard, so if we replaced it with something living, we would have to water it frequently.

In other news, I added a possible correction to the second post before this one, here.  There is a lot that we still don't know.

Odd ends

 My family is working on a variety of woodworking and other projects.  I've been in a decluttering phase and haven't been making much myself, although I did use a little free time to play around with tatting.

I tried once or twice to learn tatting with a shuttle, but didn't get very far with it.  Then some years ago I heard about needle tatting, but I never actually tried it until now.

I was following my needlework book's instructions for shuttle tatting, though, and didn't know about forming the stitches on the needle itself until I looked up this comparison of the two methods.

One attraction of tatting is that it produces a very sturdy lace, because every stitch is a knot.

The thing that makes it somewhat hard to learn is that the path that the thread needs to take to make a half-stitch is not the same as it takes in the finished stitch (except topologically, if you want to bring mathematics into it), because it needs to be pulled to "flip" the knot to the other thread, as they say in the link.