I haven’t been doing to much sewing lately, but never say never. I have been dedicating all my spare time to artwork nowadays. I have a Supernatural fanart blog at
and an even newer art blog that includes all my non-fandom artwork.
Stop on by!
I devoted the morning to some house cleaning, washing clothes and organizing my art room. Once my drawing table was cleared off and cleaned up I did a little work on some of my colored pencil drawings. What I like to do when I have some time on the weekends is sit at my drawing table, surf on the computer, read bits here on there in my current reading books, make todo lists, and generally doodle and while away the time very pleasantly.
While I was whiling away today I was also keeping an eye on a couple of eBay auctions of Nancy Drew book lots. One lot was 14 books of 1960’s edition whose price was holding at about $25 dollars.
Another lot, also of 14 books from the same type of 1960 editions that I’m interested in, were going for about $18.
Of course on both of these you also had to consider the extra shipping and handling costs, which on one was about $18 and the other was unspecified. I was willing to make a bid on one or both of these lots if the price didn’t get out of control at closing. Unfortunately I realized that both auctions were scheduled to close just about the time we were supposed to be going out for dinner. I dawdled a bit so I would have at least a chance to make a bid and see the closing for one of them. So while getting dressed up for dinner I kept running back to the computer to try to put in a bid at the very last second.
I was thrilled to see that my bid for $36 won for the first lot. I swooped right in at the last second. It came in about .50 short of my bid limit. Combined with the shipping and handling price for this lot, each book will cost me about $3.90 which was just the range I wanted. The next lot didn’t close for another 20 minutes or so, and since I didn’t want Marty to faint from hunger ( I was pretty hungry myself) , I put in a bid and took off. I just crossed my fingers and hoped other interested buyers wouldn’t outbid me in the meantime.
To not make this too suspenseful, I did win the second auction for $37.09. The shipping and handling was eventually calculated at $9.59, so my total price was $46.60. Even better than the first one. I’m happy and vowing to stay away from eBay for awhile 
The weather is getting warmer this week. I can tell when we get home after work because my first impulse is to open all the windows to get the air circulating in the hot house. Pretty soon we will start having to program the air conditioner to cool the house for us.
I got another book today! When I look back at my entries, it seems I get them very often. It’s true, but I don’t think I’m out of control, not yet at least. I love each and everyone of them. Well, maybe not the technical books, but all the others yes! Hopefully we won’t be driven out of house and home anytime soon by the ton of books both Marty and I keep accumulating. I think we still have plenty of room for them. If ever we run out of shelf space, we would just have to winnow out the old stuff to make room for the new.
This is what I received.
It has some of the most gorgeous knitting designs I have ever seen. Maybe I just have a weakness for the exuberant use of color, but the knitted pieces in this book all seem amazingly beautiful to me.
Here are just some of the designs:
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I want to make every single one of these. Of course first I have to learn how to do stranded knitting. I think my first project will have to be less challenging than any of these pieces, but that is where I am heading.
Talking about less challenging knitting projects, I started work on this little thing.
It is going to be a potholder. I made a few changes to a pattern in Elizabeth Zimmerman’s Knitter Almanac that I got last week and started it in some orange cotton yarn I had in my stash. I like the patterns for dishcloths and potholders that I’ve seen in different books, but have always thought that they weren’t really very practical. I never use dishcloths and the potholders seemed too insubstantial. This pattern on the other hand calls for a knitted trim around a double knitted center body. I thought it would make a very usable and practical potholder, aside from being pretty and cheerful in the orange color.
So far it looks good. The double thickness in the worsted weight cotton yarn seems like it will provide plenty of insulation for handling hot pots and the like. If this works out, it opens up a whole new world of possibilities for quick and fun little projects.
Two days in a row of working in the sewing room, I can hardly believe my industriousness! I decided to do some multi-tasking in there. I put The Original Philosophers Two Handed Fair Isle knitting video into the player and started unsewing one of my old T-shirts that I want to alter. I got the knitting video a few years ago on Christmas along with the companion book.
It has a good explanation of how to do fair isle knitting. Since I have been toying with the idea of starting a fair isle project, I figured it was a good time to study the video. It is produced by Ann and Eugene Bourgeois who own a farm in Canada, grow their own sheep, spin and dye their own yarn, knit beautiful sweaters and pullovers and sell yarn kits and patterns.
While I was watching the video I ripped out the hem of a T-shirt that I had altered already. I had cut this shirt down from an extra large size. It was a gift from the Richard Burgi fan club and it has the little RBFC logo on the front. I really wanted to wear it and that is why I went to the trouble of altering it. Unfortunately it still is a little too loose and I have been meaning to take it in a little more. I like the shape and length of the sleeves, so I also wanted to make a pattern of the sleeves and use it to reshape some of my other T-shirts.
I watched the whole video, but didn’t get too far with the T-shirt. I guess I’m not very good at multi-tasking after all.
I headed into my sewing room today to whittle away on my pile of things to do in there. First I ironed out the green practice shawl I knit some time ago. I had this green scrap yarn and decided to try out the leaf lace shawl pattern and work out some of the things I didn’t understand in the instructions. It turned out great. I love the leaf pattern and it is actually very easy to knit. When I finished the little practice shawl I was excited to see how it would look when I blocked it out.
Unfortunately when I did the wet blocking it didn’t take. That is when I realized that the yarn is probably acrylic and doesn’t respond to blocking like real wool does. I was disappointed because it was still all crimped up and you couldn’t appreciate the lace pattern on it. Later I read on the Internet that it is possible to stream press acrylic flat. In the terms of the knowledgeable, you “kill” the acrylic yarn by this process. Steam pressing destroys the ability of the acrylic yarn to bounce back to it’s original shape. I figured I had nothing to lose, so a few weeks ago I experimented and steam pressed half of the shawl. It worked! After pressing, it stretched out to a larger size and lay flat.
This morning I finally got around to steam pressing the rest of the shawl. It now works nicely as a small shoulder shawl and you can really see the nice lace pattern. I think it looks great.
Next I decided to work on fixing this apron. I removed the binding and unsewed all the rest of the parts sometime ago so it was ready to cut down to size. I bought this apron at Ross but it never fit very well. When the ties were were wrapped at my waist, the bib came up too high on my chest. I finally decided that I would have to alter it if it was ever to fit properly.
This is how it looked with all the parts layed out before I reshaped the top. The red line indicates how much I needed to cut off.
It was more work that I thought to cut, reattach the edge binding and then reattach the neck and waist ties. I modeled the finished product for Marty.
I’m still here, I’ve just been ignoring my sewing blog for a long time. But I’m back with some new projects to work on. Something else new for me is that I’m on the Nutrisystem diet. I started two weeks ago, just after the New Years day and it seems to be going very well. I’m down 5 pounds and my clothes are all fitting better already!
Just in time too because Hubby and I are going on cruise next month and I have to put together a nice cruise wardrobe. I’m thinking of pulling a lot of the clothes I have sitting in my sewing room and fixing it. A lot of this stuff is new, with tags on still. Some of them just need small alterations like lifting hems, shortening sleeves, etc, but most of them are stashed here because they are just a little too small. Now that the weight seems to be coming off, I’ll be able to claim them for use.
It’s a seven day cruise along the Mexican Riviera, so I think most of the clothes should be casual, cool things. There will be two dressy evenings so I have to think about that.
We signed up for this particular cruise because it features 3 color pencil workshops for the three days that the ship spends cruising between ports. One of the workshops is headed by Ann Kullberg. I am subscribed to Ann Kullberg’s online magazine called From My Prospective, and learned about the cruise there. I love Ann Kullberg’s colored pencil work and have been wanting to take one of her workshops for the longest time. We also wanted to take a vacation, so the cruise combined both purposes very nicely.
I haven’t been too productive the last few days after work. On Tuesday I did manage to work a little bit in the sewing room. I did the finishing details on the new zipper for my olive capris. These capris have been hanging around my sewing room for years. I bought the zipper long ago and I started installing it a few weeks ago. I also added some material to the waistband since they have always been tight in the waist. I finished everything off finally. I don’t know why I invested so much work on them. They are a little worn out and are not made in the best material or color. I probably should have just thrown them out, but I suppose I just wanted to finish something I started so long ago.
I also cut the fabric for my little throw pillows for the sofa. They are a very easy design, just simple squares to cover the pillow forms like a closed pillow case. I finished all the raw edges with my serger and sewed them together for a first look at the fit. They were kind of big, so I stopped there. Next time I will just take a little more in the seams and finish them off. No zippers or closures to worry about. I will just whipstitch the opening after stuffing the pillow forms inside.
I ordered some new shorter legs for my ottoman about a week ago, but I haven’t received a shipping notification yet. I’m beginning to wonder about that order. I should have know that not being charged shipping was too good to be true.
Later as I read the email verification of my purchase I noticed that they have an unusual policy when it comes to handling the charges. They charge for the merchandise immediately when ordered and then supposedly come back and charge you for the shipping once they know how much it will be. Hmmmm… I should have paid more attention. Now I just hope that the charges that come through for the shipping are reasonable. It seems like a convoluted way to do things.
This is the place I bought them from online.
Hopefully I’ll hear from them soon.
On a health note, I’ve been eating wisely this week and tonight I did my 45 minutes on the treadmill. I’m proud of myself because it was very warm in the house this evening. We haven’t been turning on the air conditioner lately, just opening the windows when we get home from work and letting the breezes cool everything off slowly. It does take a while to cool off the house though and the only way I managed the treadmill walking was to set up a fan so it was blowing on me the whole time. I really enjoyed the cool shower afterwards.
Now that we’re using the sofa more I thought it would be pleasant to have an ottoman too. I toyed with the idea of finding a old ottoman and reupholstering it. This is a great plan but I couldn’t seem to locate any old footstools at any of our local thrift shops. Even a great bargain on ebay for furniture gets eaten away when you have to pay for shipping and handling so I didn’t even look there.
I did come across this one at furniturecentral.com, which was on clearance. It was discounted from $175.99 to $49.00. The clincher was that shipping was only $10. They had an added discount of %20 at the moment which basically took care of the shipping. So my price out the door was about $52.
As pictured on the website it is a little too tall, but I thought I could replace the legs and that would bring it to the height I needed. I ordered it and it arrived a few days ago. It is just what I wanted!
I have enough of the sofa slipcover fabric to cover it. Making a slipcover for it will be very easy and fun!
I also bought pillow forms and a bright coordinating fabric to make a couple of throw pillows, another easy and fast project that should go quickly!
I had a great time at Moonridge Zoo. We visited the animals, got an autograph from my favorite TV star, and supported a great cause. Here are Marty and I keeping cool under our sun hats.
But what else have I been doing since then. Well, mostly working it seems and what little free time I have has been diverted recently to my other favorite hobby, art. I have been studying a digital art tutorial CD I bought a few months ago and practicing Photoshop digital painting techniques. I bought the tutorial online at www.digitalarttutorial.com. It’s a series of quicktime movies that take you through the creation of the picture on the cover of the CD. Though its kind of hard to follow at times, I have gotten a lot of valuable tips and techniques out of it. It also assumes you have a good working knowledge of Photoshop.
Here is my attempt so far at applying the techniques to my own art work. I started with this sketch.
Then I started picking out sections to fill with a flat color. The colors in the hair are really just place holders, that is why the colors are so bright. I forgot to take a snapshot when I finished all the flat coloring. This shot shows when I started rendering the features of his face.
The rendering of his face continues with some experiments that change the tint of the skin color. I also change the hue of the hair and darken it to give me a better feel for what the color of the skin should be.
With more detail on the face it starts to look better but there is still a lot of work to do. That’s where I am right now. It’s slow going but I’m having fun.
