I did write the last entry, since you asked, but I was copying Chanthaboune. In fact, I was teasing her.
And I discovered, while idly looking at my site meter, that someone came to my blog having googled for “scorpion nose”! I think that replaces “knitting sluts” as the weirdest search that has ever brought someone to my site.
Saturday morning I got up at 4:00 and made my husband’s coffee and saw him off to work, and then tried to go back to sleep. At this I was entirely unsuccessful. I tried lying in bed with my eyes closed listening to to the storm. Stayed awake. I tried turning on the bedside lamp and reading. Stayed awake. I got up and started dough for cinnamon rolls in the bread machine, went back to bed and tried again to go to sleep. No luck.
Around 7:00 I gave up and got out of bed. It was time to bake the rolls, so I had a couple with a steaming cup of tea while the storm continued. Rather nice, really.
Then it was time to begin the Personal Sewing Day. With my tailoring guide close at hand, I cut and fused the interfacing, sewed the collar and the facings, and put in the sleeves.
I stopped a lot. I would get to a point like the one pictured at right and quit for a while. The idea behind this was that if there was an error, I might notice it before I went on with the next bit.
I am not very precise.
We do this geometric personality test at work. It is not entirely dissimilar to the pick-a-shape thing on this page, though more serious and less amusing. You answer a bunch of questions, and based on your answers are categorized as a particular geometric shape, which then has a list of workplace strengths, “things that cause you to get bent out of shape” (you get the pun, right?), and so on. Our goal with the test is to have balance in the workplace, and also to know enough about people’s preferences and work styles to keep everyone reasonably happy. It works pretty well.
Cleverboots was in the store when Blessing took the test and we let her take it too. She is a psychiatric social worker, so I felt I had to apologize for the pop-psych nature of it. “You probably work with much more elaborate tests,” I said. She assured me that she mostly asks her patients what year it is, and what floor they are on. She liked the test, and we had predicted her results correctly, which made us feel clever.
I am a squiggly line. As the page I linked you to put it, ” If you chose the squiggly line then you’re always in a hurry. You get bored every eight pico-seconds and have to constantly find new challenges. You may be incredibly enthusiastic, but your ‘ants in your pants’ chopping and changing attitude to life means you’ll probably turn out to be a jack of all trades, master of none. You’re quite good fun at parties and you can put up quite a steady(ish) shelf (if called on to do so). Basically, you’re one of life’s ‘slightly useful’ people.”
Blessing is a triangle. She was telling me about the Pirate Family wife-swap program Feebeeglee wrote about. Apparently, the mom of a pirate family switched places with the mom of an organized family for a week. Feebeeglee liked the pirate family
“In what sense were they pirates?” I asked.
“They were lazy. They didn’t work. They just dressed up as pirates and lived horribly,” said Blessing.
I digested this. I’m still not sure I’ve got it, but we couldn’t get it any clearer.
“The other mom had a labelmaker,” said Blessing. “I do too, but she had labeled everything in the house. In the pantry, each shelf had labels for the kind of soup that went in each spot, and everything in the house was in labeled bins. It was my dream house.”
She smiled beatifically. Her expression turned to anguish, though, as she told me what the pirate mom had done.
“She dumped out all the bins and made a fort. I kept thinking about the organized mom having to come back to that mess.”
I don’t think that Blessing sews, but if she did, her notches would always match, her seam allowances would be identical throughout the project, and her collars would never be wonky.
This is not true for me. But I thought of her, and of Marji, and Pokey, and other highly precise people, and tried to channel their precision through my imprecise fingers. I was not entirely unsuccessful. In fact, you can see here that my collar has a distinct resemblance to a collar, my set-in sleeve has a definite air of sleevishness, and there is overall a jacket-like impression in this jacket.
I’m pretty chuffed about it. I still have quite a lot to do — the Hong Kong finish on the seams, the hems, the buttonholes. I will enjoy the first two parts, and am confident that I can do them well. I am not so sure about the buttonholes, but it could happen.
This jacket is very pretty and feminine. It has an Edwardian air that is stylish this year. But with its broad, shallow neckline, it is not classic enough that I could make several in different fabrics without it being noticeable that they were all the same pattern.
This is contrary to the rules of the SWAP. For the SWAP, we are supposed to use basic patterns which we have fine-tuned and perfected, and make multiples with slight variations. This jacket doesn’t fall into that category, but I am still very happy with it. It fits well, and I think it will look good when completed, unless I completely destroy it while trying to make the buttonholes. It matches the gray skirt I made last month, and next month I plan to make a pair of pants to go with it. That will finish the “bottoms” part of the SWAP.
Once I got to this point on the jacket I decided not to push my luck, and got in some knitting and reading while the guys watched the game (we won). They were yelling and punching their fists into the air and stuff like that. I was saying things like “Huh? Are we winning now?” The announcers got pretty involved, too. I was wondering — would the people in Alabama watching the game get their own announcers who were on the side of the Alabama team, or are the announcers supposed to be even-handed in their reporting? They didn’t manage it in this case.
I finished The Time Traveler’s Wife and began the knitting project for it. This is one of Danielle Cote’s pretty dishcloth patterns. I have been meaning to make some dishcloths ever since I read that sponges are filled with nasty bacteria which they smear on your counters, unlike dishcloths, which can be run through the washing machine without damaging the mechanism. The pattern of this one, in addition to having that plant-like look that brings The Meadow to mind, also reminds me of the way the story goes back and forth from one time to another, crossing and intertwining yet also stopping and starting abruptly.
Today I have errands and Sunday School and invitations to address, but I am hoping also to do some more sewing and to finish the KTC project.
Oh, and napping. Definitely more napping.
I really like the jacket. You are much more precise than I am, but I am a subnovice on most things crafty. I always need my mommy to help me. The dischloth is very cool. I would never have thought of knitting a dishcloth. I don’t know why, maybe because they were called “rags” when I was growing up, and that looks so extremely pretty and nice and fluffy. I have been anti-sponge for years though. YUCK. I change dishcloths three or four times a day.
That test page was fun. Most of the tests showed that I am logical and nice, and a bit emotional. I’m pretty sure boring was implied. I couldn’t decide on a shape, but my doodles are always a mix of triangles and circles. The drawing exercise was a lot of fun.
Have a good day. When you mentioned your nap, I wondered if you somehow make your napping efficient and hurry through them too.
The jacket is perfectly beautiful. Well done. I’d suggest that you could vary it by putting on different collars — except that, because I can’t sew at all I’m not able to determine whether the collar you already did is Logically Entailed by the jacket’s structure. In any case, when I find something to wear that I like and that fits me and that’s in my price range I have always bought several, in different colors; it would be obvious to anybody looking at me that all of them were made with the same pattern. I never realized that this was against the rules. [I not only can’t sew, you perceive, I don’t know anything about “fashion.” I don’t mind.]
I’m thinking now about crocheting some dishcloths, because of the sponge-bacteria thing; I’m not happy with any of the other solutions I’ve been trying out. I just wonder: How many days can you safely use a dishcloth before it has to go into the washer? [Not that there’d be any problem with making seven of them and using each one only one day, come to think of it.]
LoL on the “knitting sluts!” That is hilarious! Hey, when you finish with Metro Girl, let me know if it’s good. I’m working on the Stephanie Plum series right now, but I’ll probably read some more Evanovich when I’m done….if her other stuff is as good! 🙂
RYC: Hubby’s degree is in Business Occupations which basically means he has a business degree that included all his Computer Networking credits in it in place of specializing in either Marketing, Management or Retail. So he is basically a network technician/administrator with a bunch of accounting and economics classes. He loves accounting, but doesn’t have the Accounting degree or the CPA licensure…soooo…..we’re still looking! Oh, and I have the EXACT same thoughts during this pregnancy. I have all this joint pain and once I get on the floor, I can’t get up. I’ve been thinking….”If this is what it’s like to be old…I’m REALLY scared!” 🙂
I’ve always used a sponge for dishwashing. I never thought about the germ issue. Now making dishcloths makes sense. What a great excuse to do more knitting!
About halfway through your post (and an hour before I read your post), I was feeling tired and thinking about a nap. But taking a nap makes me feel so lazy.
I have noticed, though, that when I am tired and don’t take a nap, I wander around and take a stab at doing things, but don’t get much done.
If I take a nap, though, I wake up with more energy, and actually DO something.
I’ll have to think about that.
The microscope slide does not look like an anonymous splash of colour, it looks more like an insignia of rank.
RYC: Most of us living on $150 a week were not doing that voluntarily. In the total 4 years I was unemployed I would have written between 20 and 30 job applications and out of those got two interviews neither of which led anywhere. Even those at the Labour Dept where we had to go every 2 to 4 weeks (just to prove that we were still looking for work) were of no help. They were shocked that I had actually spent 11 years working at one place, not the thing at all. Also no one knew what to do with someone who had 12 years of work experience (no work references from the PO ‘tho as our work was covered by the official secrets act so no one was allowed to write down what we actually did) In addition I was female (women don’t do that kind of work!) with a BA in psych (we don’t want a psychologist around and anyway she is more qualified than I am which means she will get bored and go after my job). The irony of the whole thing, nearly every time I had to go to the Labour dept I had a new interviewer because the previous one had been ‘let go’ – they were downscaling the Labour Dept as well.You have to understand that the entire job market was unstable at that time because all the public services had been privatised so there were unemployed public servants galore looking for work. Had I been a typical female public servant who had spent 11 yrs working in an office I would have picked up a job ok but that was not the case. Many of the admin staff at university are post office trained and became employed by the varsity after the breakup of the public service.
Very few people want to be ‘long term unemployed’ by choice. The week spent on that course was one of the most depressing weeks of my life because I got to meet people who, under my normal life conditions (professional with a good job) I would never have met. And these people had never had a job although they were as old, or older than I. They survived by playing the system for all it was worth and supplementing what money they could get legally by somewhat less legal means. I lost faith in our ‘socialist leaning’ govt at that point and have never recovered it.
Blessing wouldn’t like my house much.