What you don't do to your thumb if you want to sew and/or keep your thumb

Wow, look what happens when you step back for just a moment, a month goes by with only one blog post that whole time!
There has been a crazy amount of actual working going on. But, now I have 2 weeks of holidays to recover! (and clean my house) I've been lucky enough to pick up a part-time contract for the whole of next term, which is lovely. I'll be teaching food tech to three year 7 classes and filling up the rest of each day with casual classes when and if they are available.

About a week ago now, I bashed/crushed/twisted my thumb unceremoniously between the big bolt that holds the sewing needle in the machine and the sewing machine bed. Theres no way to explain how I did this...all I can do is show & tell why you should not do this if you want to continue to own a thumb.

It started swelling straight away, but it seemed like such a minor cut. I took a photo to laugh t myself about look what happens when I try to sew tired...joke son me well and truly now!
By mid week it didn't look small or minor, it was gooey and sooooo painful even a small bump or touch made me cry, it was also burning hot and oozy, it started to pain, and spreading a raised lump a deep red colour under the skin from the cut all the way down to the knuckle joint. By Friday I could not stand to move my thumb, cover it with anything, (no bandage, tape, rubber gloves, nothing) and the pain and dark red burning was spreading into the palm of my hand. I can't show you, those photos would have been too gross and gooey and even if I had the thought of mind to take any, (I was too busy weeping at the time of dressing changes) they'd probably end up in some hall of goo or manky file on the internet -I've seen the toe files people!! LOL
Now that I am on the Antibiotics and let's just delicately say, my thumb has been slightly skinned and mostly de-gooed by the Dr. I can show you what it looks like today. It looks really good :)

See that darker patch of skin reaching toward my knuckle? Luckily it's receding fast, because thats the infection and it's hot and burning and damage causing! Today my thumb only hurts if I bump it or if I'm doing too  much with it. - Let me tell you, I had no idea how much I use my thumb until now! Typing is particularly bad, turning things like jars or taps even worse! The most sad is my scissors, I bought brand new Mundial shiny sharp "good" scissors right before this happened, the very night this happened, and I haven't been able to use them since!

For this months and last months FOSAL items I get a big fat FAIL stamp on. The little May cross-stitch still did not get finished, It was a purple stocking.

I didn't even get time to choose one to start for June, and here it is, July already. :(

I did complete my 12 sewing challenges in 12 months June item, (Something self designed or self drafted) and I even photographed it with days to spare, and then I promptly put the camera down and forgot to blog or flickr them. BAH! So I guess that's a Fail too! It did take me almost 3 weeks to sew. 15 minutes here, an hour there. Some time grabbed before dinner, after dinner, while I could still stay awake and before I made my thumb not so opposable.

I made...an apron. I had no pattern, I used my measuring tape to measure me, then estimated some extra room for gathering, around the uh, bust area. Then I drew it up onto some brown paper taped together. (It was like brown paper dress-ups!) I ended up stitching the gathers into the brown paper, then taking around half the gathering out of the bust region, re-fitted it and then, finally got to cut out some material! My rotary cutter and I went to town! I cut 2 strips for the waistband  (the 2 waistband pieces sandwich together trapping the top of the apron between one edge and the skirt of the apron between the bottom edge) and each tie is two really long pieces stitched together on 3 sides to form a tube when turned out.  The open end of one tie pokes inside the left and the other into the right edge of the waistband sandwich and is stitched in. I made wide binding for around the neck straps and edging on the top of the apron.
I stitched around the edges of the waistband, straps and ties with the dark blue thread to finish it off.

The top and bottom edge of the top part of the apron is gathered, or rather ruffled using my ruffler foot. It gives the "boobage" area a better fitting rounded shape rather than what a flat apron always does on me, which always seems to "tent" in the middle.

The floral fabric is vintage from my Mum's cupboard It's a very heavy, thick cotton. I've been in love with it for a very long time, she gave it to me a couple of years ago, I just didn't know what to sew from it. It's too floral for pants. Too heavy for shirts. I don't wear skirts. I just didn't know what to do besides look at it lovingly! The plain blue fabric is 100% cotton bought from Spotlight last year, it was bought for something else, but I can't remember what!
I may still take up the skirt because it's a tad long.
During the past few weeks I made a cake, from a packet..I know..Oh the horror! But it did taste good!

In other news, I have not been keeping up with my finish 2 projects before starting another. I plan to rectify that this week if my sewing room ever goes back to useable.
I'd been having back problems after sewing for even short bursts. I tried lot's of different chairs and stools but really I've found the Horn sewing table too low for me and a I keep hunching over to use my machine. So, I will be using my enormous table to sew from and cut out on. (It was destined for Dad's shed but never made it there) my horn sewing table is going to keep being used mainly for my overlocker and my old sewing machine and so, today this is what my poor sewing room looks like.

The poor Horn feels unloved. We tried to think of ways to lift the horn up a bit, but there just isn't any is there? It has a fold/pull out section to make it a T shape with draws etc so no matter what we thought of, we couldn't work out how to keep it functional.

So we decided instead to use my poor old table (which would have had to have it's legs repaired in order to be used anyway). The poor old wobbly thing! But now it has been re-legged completely to make it taller. Here it is in progress, with the table top upside down underneath it, because we have no space to move around it otherwise ;)

The legs may be stained sometime in the future, but for now they will stay as they are and we'll see how it goes.
Just before pulling apart the sewing room, I stitched up the free bag kit that came with a magazine called Homestyle sewing. I didn't make it fancy or make a flower or anything, I just made it and it fits magazines perfectly to take on holidays with us tomorrow to the beach.

Have a lovely rest of today, I've just realised I've been typing this post for a week! Finally I got to hit Publish on this post!

April came and went!

Well April disappeared last night, but I did get quite a lot done this week!

On Wednesday I finished my April challenge, for the 12 months 12 Sewing challenges challenge.
Aprils challenge was something lined! Lined...Lined I said..and weeped..and had flashbacks to High school, when we were to make a lined bag for sunglasses...I sewed through my finger on the sewing machine, thread all the way through the nail and out the other side of the finger, along with the needle. We had to unscrew the needle from the machine, cut the thread and then have it removed from my finger. Then...when it all got turned out the right way, I realised the lining was sewed on the wrong way and the seams were visible instead of hidden. I fixed it up, after more tears and unpicking, and the teacher passed my job anyway, I think only because of the physical injury involved! LOL
This time around for the Challenge, I did not trust myself, and instead...I followed about 3 different tutorials for lined bags on the internet...they were pretty dreadful. They all seemed promising at the start, got halfway through and the train left the tracks. I didn't realise they left visible unfinished seams on the insides of the bags...to me that isn't lined, not properly anyway.

This was the outer fabric...I LOVED this fabric for years, I saw it in my mums cupboard and eyed it off every time we were working on something else, and then she gave me a bag full of scrap fabric one day, and in it was this! She had at one stage cut a jacket from it, but I never saw her wear it, and I don't know where it went! The left over fabric she gave me had the jacket pieces shapes cut out of it, hehehe.

Anyway, back to the Challenge...So after the 3 previous disaster bags, (I wont show you them, it's too traumatic) ;) I began yet another search for a tutorial and found Robyn's blog over at Additional Jesus. Finally, and I say finally, because I then had to re-cut the bag again (for the 4th time) luckily I had enough left over fabric or I would have been weeping!!
At this point I will show you my progress photos, more progress than I ever made with all the other tutorials...THANK YOU, THANK YOU! Additional Jesus!

I know, I know, it looks like the bag version of Frankensteins monster doesn't it!?

And then it got stuck and I got scared.

But then it just popped on out and at this point I got so excited that it worked - that I squealed!

And then I squealed some more!

It even has a handle!

And now my knitting has a lovely home:) And I am in bag LOOOOOVE.

I started and finished my April FOSAL entry last night:

I finished it just after midnight, so technically it didn't get finished until May 1st, but..gee..it was still April somewhere in the world right!?

A Long weekend of Project finishes!

I've spent the weekend nursing a migraine - BOO! and finishing projects YAY!
Thanks to the lovely Hilary over at Quilary. She pointed me to another lovely blog called Made By K.

At Made by K, Karin has created a wonderful printout to list your unfinished projects on to encourage finishing! Her plan is simple. You print out her project plan and list each project so you know what projects you have there waiting to be finished and what the hold up was. The key to this is that you can't start a new project until you have completed 2 of your unfinished ones from your list. And ...there's no more hiding!
The first step was to print out the Project plan document, I ended up printing it out a whole lot because I have a whole whole lot of unfinished projects.
Then I retrieved each piece of an unfinished project from it's washing basket hiding place. Then I sorted all the individual pieces that make up one project into a ziplock bag. So now each of my projects is in it's own bag with a label. (You don't have to do this, its just something I needed to get organised). Then I wrote each project down on the document and wrote the reason for it's hold up to being finished.

In the shame of having sooooo many pages of unfinished projects, this weekend I decided on a catchup weekend. No new projects until I finished/made progress on a whole stack of them this weekend.

First there was the other Maisey.

There were 3 Maiseys cut out and in the basket, one for each of my sisters girls. 2 Maiseys are now done, just One Maisey to go. The third Maisey is all stitched up, she just needs stuffing and will be finished off tomorrow. :)

Then onto a much harder project. Actually it is two projects and they are not technically mine, they are actually unfinished projects of my mums. They were begun in 1970 when my aunt was getting married. With the leftover fabrics from my aunts wedding and bridesmaids dresses some Barbie dresses were cut out. Some were stitched up by hand, and some were just cut out. They were never finished and lived in a bag in my mums sewing cupboard. I loved to take them out and look at them when I was small, and I always wished she would finish them so my Barbies could get married. Then, last year she gave them to me and asked me if I wanted to re-sew them and finished them off. Now comes the hard part, I left them and left them, because I was a little scared of them falling to pieces and not being able to be fixed. At some stage a child has had a go at stitching them together, I believe it may have been my sister, possibly my cousin. The thread and some of the lining fabrics had disintegrated and frayed and the hand stitching was bulky and uneven, not like the nice little stitches my mum always did.
Here are the before pictures for one of the Bridesmaid outfit:

And here is the before pictures of the brides dress. See the gorgeous fabric, so scared it would get ruined!

Bulky stitching on waist and seams.

and Disintegrating and fraying. :(

I unpicked everything very carefully and zigzagged all the edges before stitching back together.
The finished Bridesmaid dress:

The finished Brides dress:

Together:

There is still one Bridesmaid dress to go. It was never stitched up, but is fully cut out, it will be a project for another day. :)

I also finished stitching my cross stitch which was supposed to be finished for March FOSAL. However, I noticed the other day that I had forgotten to stitch the stem of the leaf pattern in silver. So now it is finished in terms of the cross-stitch. It still requires sewing on some backing fabric to make into an ornament, and so it will be completed tomorrow on the machine, but here is a progress photo before I pop off to bed.

I also finished weaving in all the ends of the crochet granny square blanket for the twins, but I am still working on the other one for the older girl:) So, to be continued...

Tomorrow under the rules, I must finish 2 before starting another. And so, I will!...my new project is an apron swap, so I REALLY want to do it, I REALLY HAVE TO DO IT and so I MUST finish 2 tomorrow to start my apron project.

Oh yeah! Oh yeah, we have shelves!

THE SHELVES ARE FINISHED!

Above is a view of 4 of the 5 rows of shelves, the 5th, (the bottom row) is not visible because I couldn't get it into the shot with the phone camera. Hehehe apparently 2 metres high is too much for it;)

Above the top photo is the left side of all 5 rows of the shelves. The other is the right side of all 5 rows of the shelves. Apparently 2 metres wide is also too much for it;)

I wish I could, but I can't get a better photo for two frustrating reasons. 1. the proper camera battery is failing to charge properly...grr! and 2. to get the shelves into their location, the whole sewing room had to be packed up into one area of the room, kinda like tetris, so I can't get far enough back in the room to get the whole shelves in properly with the phone camera.
Once I start unpacking stuff and filling the shelves I'll be able to get back far enough to take another shot.
I LOVE MY NEW SHELVES! I Love them so much I want to sit and stare at them for hours. Some of that love comes from how hard a battle it was to make them! (Isn't that the case with all projects.)

The WORST part about this whole shelf debacle was pulling it completely apart yesterday. Having made them so beautifully, and perfectly, we had to pull every bit apart to fit it into the room. Involved with that was unfortunately pulling out hundreds of nails, levering off the backing sheets of MDF (which couldn't be reused afterwards...grrr!), removing the fabric panels (most of them ripped and shredded while being removed couldn't be reused afterwards...more grrr!), unscrewing all the screws holding it together, and then pulling apart all the shelves off their dowel joins and removing the side panels and carrying everything in the room individually.

Today we reassembled the whole thing again! We had to buy all new backing sheets, this time ply instead of MDF (incase it ever needs to come apart again it can be reused) and we learnt this time to use double sided tape to hold the fabric in place to make the nailing in easy! Some of the fabric panels could not be reused from  the first incarnation and had to be replaced by different fabric colours. I now have small dots, large dots and stripes. The colours are aqua, lime green, orange, dark purple and royal blue. SQUEAL of Delight! All done with plenty of organising to do to fill it. :)

UNFINISHED OBJECT progress!
Nearly every family holiday that involved a long car trip, also involved some sort of craft. Long stitches, Cross-stitches, Knitting Nancy, Finger knitting, knotted friendship bracelets to name but a few. We'd work on them on the way there, fill in rainy days in the caravan with them, and work on them a bit on the way home in between naps. Inevitably these often caused us kids in the back of the car to develop car-sickness...it was rare that they ever got finished, because once back home they were soon forgotten. Mum would buy us another the next school holiday trip, repeat.

This one was from the 1993 July trip to Bateman's Bay. It was found with it's unused threads attached to a piece of cardboard with holes punched in it for each of the threads and hand drawn representations of the pattern codes (I was quite organised back then apparently). Mum found it in one of her knitting bags, in the top of her wardrobe, with a packet of mints and her own UFO, a blue baby jacket and booties she was knitting for my cousin- who turned out to be a girl! - that's how we know the approximate year of the cross stitch.
Last night I finished it off and did all it's back stitching. Now all I need to do is give it an iron (once I can un-tetris the sewing room and reach the iron) and stick it in a frame. We'll call it still in progress.

UNFINISHED OBJECT tick one off the list!
While the shelf debacle has kept me out of action in the sewing room, I finished my UFO Pink Fluffy Scarf!

It was started in Winter 2004. Now I am certainly no knitter. My mum knits extremely delicate intricate patterns really fast, me, I always forget how to start it, drop stitches, break needles, loose needles, somehow add on stitches and generally spend more time pulling it back and starting again, I never learnt to finish it (until today) and I can only knit PLAIN hehehe - it drove my mum spare trying to teach me and she tried hard to teach me purl. I just have a blockage or some kind of defective knitting gene.
However, today I am proud to have finished the scarf, plain and possibly slightly defective as it is..and I "cast off" all by myself...well, with the help of this Patons How to Knit tutorial. I don't think I will ever be a great knitter, but I have conquered it's basics, maybe I'll one day find the light going off and finally know how to knit one purl one.

CROCHET - I got hooked.
This evening, I even did a few tutorials in how to crochet. I made a whole long line of chain stitch on my new Crochet hook, I've never seen in person, or touched a crochet hook before. It's one of those things I've always wanted to learn. I'm quite impressed with myself really. It's been a busy day:)

Taa Daa...February sewing with Knit Challenge Completed! - and other progress.

I found some time to finish my top for My Favourite's 12 month's 12 sewing Challenges, February Sewing with Knit Fabric Challenge. I'm still not happy with it entirely, especially the missed stitching of the double needle that is continuing, but it is finished! I still love the colour of it, although it looks like Pyjamas (Thanks for saying that Husband...hehehe).

I loved the cuff in the pattern picture, but now I'm not so sure..it seems awfully large. If I were to make it again  I would certainly make these smaller.

I stitched on some buttons just above the split in the cuff. I found them in a button jar that came from my mum's house. They are clear plastic, but swirly, and they seem to pick up and dance with the colours of the top underneath...hard to see in photos though.

Progress on the March FOSAL Ornament - Pattern chosen :)
I've decided to stitch up a bauble using this free pattern from Better Homes and Gardens.
I have also decided to stitch it up in purples rather than the blue they are using in theirs. I am not starting it until March, but it is kitted up waiting until then. Forgive the photo, I took it with my phone camera, because the proper cameras battery is charging.

Progress on the Shelves and Sewing Room :)

Sewing room looks like a bomb hit it. (meh!) Lot's of sorting and shifting and moving going on.

The whiter than White brighter than Bright shelves are all painted blindingly reflective white and were at any minute going to be constructed. I came in for some air-con and water...not blogging hehehe...and as I was typing, Husband (out in the hot hot outdoors) let out some cursing...and now he is off to go buy or do something...I'm not sure I should ask what went wrong. I snuck out there to take a photo of the progress, only to have the warning, Battery Exhausted (that makes two, three of us!) come up. It is certainly a very large project. Progress Halted...albeit Temporarily.

OK It's now 9pm on a Sunday night and the construction phase got moved into our lounge room. I'm not too hopeful this project will have a conclusion tonight but I do not believe that we will be putting up with  construction in the lounge room for too long. 

Here are some phone camera pics of the construction phase.

Yes, we know theres a Christmas garland and Christmas Lights still up..they somehow got missed when we packed up everything else, and are now jokingly are being referred to as the Easter lights...(they'll be gone soon I promise.

It's so very very Large!

So that's as far as we got tonight. It's a giant white skeleton. Weekend is over and Husband is back to work tomorrow... At least it is at a stage where I can cut out the material for the back and attach it, if I don't get called into work tomorrow, and Husband can attach the backing sheets of MDF tomorrow evening. God knows how we are going to angle it into the tiny hallway and then into the Spare room! - I'm expecting tears...husband says it will be fine, but it's so very big!

FOSAL - January and February Ornaments

My Blue Star Ornament - Submission for February for the FOSAL
I'm all finished it now! I did most of the cross-stitching while watching the winter olympics on Sunday. By Monday night  I was really glad just to be finished cross-stitching and it was quick to stitch up the backing and attach the loop on the sewing machine while watching Good News Week. Mostly it got sewn up in the ads for Good News Week, because it's hard to stitch straight while laughing. I backed it using some blue poplin and used a piece of silver cording as it's loop. I was planning to stuff it with some poly fill, but I liked it flatter so pulled all the stuffing out instead. I used 4 threads of Gutermann metallic silver thread (for sewing machine embroidery) and threaded them together to stitch all the silver cross-stitches as the metallics in the twisted strand embroidery threads were dull and looked grey rather than silver. The 4 silver threads were extremely difficult to manage and tangled easily, sometimes the back looked like an explosion of silver loops but luckily none of the loopiness knotted completely and eventually unlooped and slid through the hole! I especially like how the silver glints and reflects in the light. So here it is...
FEBRUARY Ornament ALL FINISHED:

While I was finishing off the cross stitch on the blue star, I noticed I had lot's of room in the top corner of my embroidery hoop so, to not waste the Aida cloth I stitched up a little snowman ornament to sneak in for late entry for January, (since I wasn't a part of the FOSAL in January) I found the free pattern at craftdesigns4you.com. I reinforced it with some white cotton and a green poplin backing. It was really difficult to turn right-side out and really difficult to hand-stitch up the bottom after turning. The Aida cloth really frays alot (as you can see in the photo below) and induced a decent amount of cursing.

There must be a better way to do this stuff! - Yes I'm all about the easy. Eventually I turned a blind eye to it's faults and I hand stitched it and poked it's wonky backside into submission. I used some multiples of green thread to use as a loop, because I could not work out a way to attach the silver cording nicely. So here it is... JANUARY a little wonky (don't look too closely), but ALL FINISHED:

Now, for thinking about the March ornament...I think I'll go looking for a free bauble pattern and make it up in either green and silver or purple and silver.