Sometimes, the FOs are tasty. This is about eight jars of peach nutmeg jelly that I put up this weekend. It's even husband-approved.
I have a mind to do some apple cinnamon jelly as well, but I want to get some apple pie filling done first so that I can have the peels and cores.
Jelly is kind of magical in that I feel like I'm getting something from practically nothing.
The spinning queue is moving along, too. Most of the time, I try to spin while listening to the Cubs play. At this point, I'm 3/4 of the way through the silk. I've got one more not-for-me spinning project to do, then it's on to spinning my own stash again.
I've also been working on some mending this week. When you have a pair of jeans you like, it's really hard to let them go. I'm liking the different sashiko stitch patterns and I feel like I get a sturdier patch this way, since no fabric is lost by cutting away the old fabric for the new.
With other kinds of mending, the patch tends to pull on the old fabric in such a way that often results in even more holes, so you get caught in an endless spiral of patching or you just give up on the garment altogether. Because sashiko patches are quilted to the old fabric, there's no significant pulling at stress points like corners. The whole patch moves with the rest of the fabric.
Next up is some embroidery for some of the smaller/more difficult holes on the side seam.
I've been wearing my plaid shirt this week, especially in the cooler early hours of the morning and, as Bu has also observed, it is so comfy. This is a sewing win.
And I did manage to get a picture of Iris in her natural habitat. The other pictures are a bit more flaily, but I thought this one was nice (garbage can notwithstanding).
Iris gets her pointe shoes this Saturday. This is a big deal for a dancer, like getting your wand before you go to your first year at Hogwarts. The shoes and the dancer's feet have to be just exactly right for each other or disaster follows. She could be injured or worse-- expelled!* At any rate, I'm proud of how hard she's worked to get to the place where she has the opportunity to work even harder. Here are some Australian dancers explaining this a little better than I can:
The best way I know how to express my joy for her is with knitwear, so a pair of rainbow socks seemed like just the thing. The socks pictured above are called Beautiful Feet and it's Lara Neel's Fork in the Road socks, toe up version of my own devising, in Knit Picks Felici: Rainbow and Studio Avenue Six Self Striping sock yarn: 2 light blue, 2 dark blue (discontinued).
I made some headway on the second link to the BFF cowl as well and I seem to be hitting my stride. The first part of the cabling is a little wonky and I'm going to leave it because I'm a little wonky and my BFF knows it.
Leto, on the other hand is stuck in the black hole of being made out of lace weight and longer than is strictly necessary, but I love the drape of a finely knit fabric and, frankly, kind of want to have a big wide chunk of that border pattern. It's a process knit, anyway, and not a product knit. Its lesson is patience and persistence.
The black alpaca got a little bit of attention this week, too, and finally got carded and spun a little. Tour de Fleece wasn't going to happen this year, but I'm glad to move the fiber queue up a little.
In ballet, to be en pointe is representative of skill, persistence, dedication, and strength. Taking point in the military means to be up front (where the danger is). Being on point in other contexts could mean to be at the forefront of an issue or to be someone who exhibits competence and style.
Sometimes I feel like I'm running to stand still, but I've had a good week. I feel on point/en pointe myself, and you can take any of those meanings you like except for the one where I'm literally standing on my toes.
Because that's really Iris' thing.
I only do it to reach things on tall shelves.
Which, frankly, is kind of often.
This is this year's Colors of FallOutfit-a-long all finished. One plaid casual men's shirt from stash flannel and one Trillian by Martina Behm in Silky B Cashmere in a navy sparkle, bringing my Stash Dash total meterage up to 1,462, about halfway to the 3k line. I deviated from the official OAL patterns, but I'm going to get a lot of wear out of both of these, so that's a definite win. I feel competent, in front of things, skillful, and maybe even a little stylish.
Iris is definitely all of those things and more. I'm proud of her. Good job, kiddo.**
*no one is getting expelled. Chill, Hermione. ** I also realize that the only picture of Iris in this post is the one of her feet. She's elusive and difficult to photograph, like Bigfoot, but more graceful and with better eyeshadow. She's certainly less hairy. I'm also very proud of Bu, who is full of so much potential energy and deserves much more than a footnote.
It's actually too warm for flannel shirt shenanigan, but I'll be ready when it finally cools down. I ended up using a men's/boy's shirt pattern and initially cut it much too large. Thanks to my experience with the boys' dance shirts, though, I was able to cut it down to a more sensible size. Miss Lladybird's tutorial helped me match the plaids and last week's buttonhole video helped me make neater, more even buttonholes. The next shirt will fit a little better, but for kicking around in cool weather, this one is just right. Successfully matching plaids is pretty darn satisfying and I can totally see me doing up another one in the future.
Pattern, fabric, buttons, and thread came from stash, so all I had to buy was interfacing for this one. If I were to do it again, I'd get a woven plaid instead of a print, but the whole project only cost a couple of bucks (and a ridiculous amount of labor).
So that's one half of the Colors of FallOutfit-a-long all done and ready to wear. The knitting on Trillian is done, but it still needs a wash and a block. I'll try to get some shots of both together next week. It's done enough for Stash Dash, though, so that puts me at 1245m and still moseying along.
I'm doing up some project bags in this same fabric, which will go into the Project Make bin as representative of the aforementioned plaid-matching shenanigans. The next bit of sewing after that will be a t-shirt for me out of some discount jersey. I'm picking through my neglected projects and I've worked on Leto a little bit this week, but I think the next thing will be the BFF cowl. Aside from the purse socks, I'm pretty sure that's the closest project to done, so far as yardage goes. That means I've checked off three of this month's goals:
Finish the plaid shirt
Finish Trillian
Find a neglected project and begin working on it before month's end
Sew a t-shirt for myself
Card the rest of the black alpaca and finish spinning it
I'm also studying for the GRE again and getting Miss Fluffalo ready to start high school, so it's busy times at the House.
This week's post is a little late, due to some extra adulting that happened yesterday. With luck, patience, fortitude, and persistence, I will be moving to the next stage in my professional career. That process is going to be a job in and of itself, but there could be very good things at the end of it.
It's not every day I treat you to a picture of my armpit, but I thought I'd share the results of my plaid-matching shenanigans. I gotta tell you, seeing it line up like that is pretty darn satisfying. Unfortunately, the other side wasn't nearly as tidy, but it turned out pretty well, all things considered. I still have buttonholes, buttons, and a bottom hem to go, which shouldn't take too long if I can ever get some quality time with my sewing machine.
Knitting is boring this week. I made it to the 400 yard mark on my Trillian, but have a whole other two hundred yards to go. It's going to be huge, squashy, warm, and wonderful. I can't wait to wear it.
This week's technique is buttonholes. There are several ways to do buttonholes and you do them by hand or fancy it up a bit and bind them with fabric. For the most part, though, and for a casual shirt like this one, I generally use the buttonhole setting on my sewing machine.
When you cut the buttonhole open, you can place a straight pin at the end so that you don't push your seam ripper through the stitches. I also use embroidery scissors to cut the holes open because I feel like I can be very precise with them and the pin trick would still work.
That's it this week. I'm hoping that by this time next week, I'll have a finished shirt to show you.
Last week we went to Cocoa Beach for a couple days and then to Disney for another four days mainly for dance-related shenanigans. Do you see that smile on my face? That's the real deal and I'm smiling like this in all of the photos I'm in because I am genuinely having a blast. Frankly, I'd forgotten what it felt like to be relaxed and have a nice time. Even when we did the Showcase of Bathrooms with the little bit, we were having a good time. Aside from a few unfortunate potty-training-related difficulties, it was one of our best vacations.
The best part? Everyone was super nice and not only because it was their job. I saw buckets and buckets of genuine compassion, playfulness, kindness, joy, and general awesomeness. Even guests were uncommonly kind to one another because... of... magic. That's all I can come up with.
I also left my tablet at home for the entire trip, which means my brain got a rest, too, but it also means that I'm short on pictures this week, so here's a gratuitous photo of the Fluffalo hoarding kale chips.
I actually got quite a bit of knitting done this past week, though almost no knitting happened during our four days at Disney. Much of what happened was during the 12+ hour drive. I got about 1 1/4 of Fluffalo's socks done, minus heels, on the way down and I managed about 2 1/2 feet of Trillian on the way back. I'm almost done with the legwarmers, too. It's amazing what you can accomplish if you spend hours doing nothing but sitting and knitting. It's like magic.
Now that I've started Trillian, the Outfit-a-Long is gaining momentum. I'm focusing this week on getting my shirt cut out and working on my shirt-making skills, including matching plaids. I'm mostly reading and watching videos about matching plaids right now because the fabric is still in the wash, but Miss Lladybird's tutorial looks like it hits the OCD/lazybutt balance just right. So that's this week's technique. (Woo!) I'll let you know how it goes. Right this second, though, I have to go put the fabric in the dryer.
Ummm... because mint
And speaking of being thorough, I just skimmed through my monograph on little (mostly) brown South American butterflies and remembered just how flippin' thorough I can be. I've spent some time away from it while Professor worked on the edits to send it to a journal and I wanted to look through it one more time before sending it out in the world. I'm proud of my work and I hope it will serve to help other scientists learn about these beauties for a very long time. Even as long as it is and as thorough as I was, it's not complete and never will be. It's taken nearly two hundred years to understand even as much as I do about this group and I know I'm only scratching the surface. Anyway, I'll let you know how that goes, too. I'm not sure what the timeline is for publication for this particular journal is, but it shouldn't be too long.
So, did you miss me? How has your June been going? Did you have a Happy Solstice?
Dance shenanigans took up the majority of last weekend and while there are still practices to go before our trip to Florida and Nutcracker practice after, recital week is done. The boys looked great in their shirts and, while I did get a great picture of them, I didn't ask their moms if I could put them on the blog. I'm sure it would be fine, but I'd rather be on the side of respectfulness. Anywho, I helped watch littles for the first half of the show, did the Mother Daughter dance with Iris, and pretty much chilled out backstage and knit for the second half. That resulted in Brickless being finished last week, but it has yet to be blocked, so no picture today.
I also did some more Project Make-related mapping, this one outlining the kinds of clothes I normally wear every day, arranged by season. The back of the page has fabric manipulation techniques (seams, zippers, pleats, etc.) that I want to learn. Even if I don't use everything I've written down as something I want to learn, each one will be another tool in my toolbox.
When sewing attacks! ...you wouldn't think flamingos were so aggressive.
The map was helpful when putting the elastic around the neck and arms of this little shirt, pointing me toward a new way of doing it that even used a stitch on my sewing machine that I've never used before. Unfortunately, the stiff linen prevented the elastic from drawing up as much as I wanted it to, so that was not the right method for this fabric, but I'm pretty sure that I could now put elastic into a pair of underwear without much trouble. While there's some disappointment about this shirt not fitting properly, I did learn something from it, at least. I'll rip the seam in the morning and try again. I like the simple construction of this shirt, but I think I'm going to like it better if I can get the neckline to work like it should.
And because the DaVinci Disorder won't let me really finish a project before planning the next six, I dove into the very modest fabric stash for some shirt fabric. I'm thinking "Fall ColorsOutfit-a-long" using this year's Pantone Fall Colors as inspiration for something that I'm actually going to wear. Just when I thought I wasn't going to find anything, I came across a few yards of the above flannel. My two favorite comfy cotton button-ups are wearing out and this plaid looks to be a suitable replacement. I would wear the heck out of a shirt like that and I think I'm going to pair it with the Silky B Cashmere that I got at Stitches because what goes better with a plaid flannel shirt than a silk/cashmere shawl? I ask you.
I haven't had my act together about posting new techniques for you lately, for which I apologize. I'll get back to it, but it might not be until we get back from Florida.
