Meet hubby's Chaos Demon

Here is why my sewing lair is perpetually a mess:

Little Bit, aka "Chaos Demon" claiming the dog's quilt

For the record, that is the dog's blanket-quilt.  He was rather whiny and upset that she was not letting him on it that day.  My mom made that quilt for me originally, and up in Tennessee it adorned the back of the couch ... until the dog discovered he could wiggle on the couch and get it to fall over him so only his nose and tail were showing.  It is basically his Linus blankie and has been moved to the floor (when it's not being laundered) to encourage the dog to spend more time on the floor than the couch.

As for the Chaos Demon ... she was dumped at the public park next to our house up in Tennessee, and I tried for a week to coax he indoors without success.  We could hear her crying at night and especially when it rained, but I was lucky to even catch a glimpse of her.  Hubby made some remark about it, so I sent him out to try.  He came back in about five minutes, with a skinny but happily purring small cat in his hand.  He says all he did was sit down and tell her, "well, come on over here."

I know enough about cats to recognize a full feline claim on a person.  She has stayed, even though the other three didn't like her (and it was mutual).  Now, she is our only cat in the house, after Twilight the Terrorist Kitty died doing what she loved best: destroying something of ours while misbehaving.  She tore out a screen window to get outside (after hubby fixed it so she couldn't slide it open) and then apparently ate something poisonous.  We miss that stubborn, silly monster.

Oh, back to the Little Bit-Chaos Demon.  Every time hubby finds a dead frog or large bug under his chair, my sewing room is wrecked.  She is also fond of shredding paper, especially anything I have printed out on my computer.  Cleaning up that mess is on my to-do list, as soon as I get this most recent pair of socks finished (yes, I am still happily knitting socks), because I need new tops and so does my mother-in-law.

My dear kitty boys

I have been quiet for a few months, and this is one big reason:

Chester and Bourbon, early February

My dear kitty boys have left me after over a decade together.  I found this pic on my memory card this morning.  The digicam's date timestamp says early February, and Chester passed on at the end of February after never adjusting to the new house.  Bourbon seemed okay, until early May.  He had been greatly enjoying his senility, but when he missed a jump on a Friday evening we knew he was on his way out.  He died a few days after, while I was petting him and talking to him.  I had known Bourbon since he was a kitten - he originally belonged to a friend of mine whom I housesat for when I lived in the barracks.  Chester had been in my house up in Tennessee since he was a little ball of "mew" with too-big ears.  Chester was almost thirteen, and Bourbon had just passed his fifteenth birthday.

I am still trying to get used to life without my kitty boys, and seeing this on the memory card brought a wistful tear to my eyes.

The first step

The first step in hand sewing of any kind ...

Threading a needle!

Hubby found this one last evening, and when I finally got done laughing I begged him to send it to me.

While I'm at it, here's the official opinion of two of my three furry purr-monsters:

cat humor

Just substitute the big fat fluffy or the neurotic cuddle-kitty for the tuxedo cat in the pic, and this could be my house.  Although I have no idea where the cat fur is hiding in the pic!

Garden flowers and crazy cat

Just a little pic update - more garden flowers, and the crazy cuddle-kitty who provided quite the chuckle this morning (and held still long enough for a pic!)

Double sunflower bloom

Cuddle-kitty, guarding the dog's bone

The wool blanket and the cold front

First, my son is "celebrating" his first snow day of the winter by sleeping in.  What started as rain on Monday turned to snow yesterday in the space of only a couple hours as a nasty cold front blew in, including a twenty-degree drop (Fahrenheit) in temperature over lunchtime.  I know it was this sudden because my dear thin-coated doggie wanted out before the drop, then again two hours later to play in the snow (until the wind blew directly on his butt).

It's a good thing I actually flat-felled the wool I bought for hubby last week!  Okay, a true flat-fell seam is a bit of a pain to sew - especially on 60 inch wide wool - but it does look great ... hubby even said so.  Here he is holding it up folded in half ... I probably should have let him have at least one cup of coffee before snapping the pic.  Bad me.

Hubby holding his new wool blanket

He's holding it sideways, as the brown/burnt sienna panels are at the top and bottom of the blanket, each half a yard long.  The pretty plaid is in the middle of the blanket and is one yard uncut.  I have each raw edge of the brown straight-stitched one inch in, and our next step is to pull the cross-yarns to fringe it, then I'll find some embroidery floss to match or complement and make mini-tassels outside the straight-stitching and try my needle at some pulled/drawn embroidery just inside of the stitching.  I'm also debating whether I want to embroider a decorative band over the straight stitch line as well, as the yarns in the wool are just big enough to see.

Flat-fell seam closeup - and wool yarn big enough to see

The focus is a bit fuzzy, but so is the wool after a bit of air-fluffing in the dryer with some damp uniforms.  After I snapped the third pic (the first one he was really making a face) hubby said he could feel the warmth just holding it up like that ... which means the Terrorist Kitty WILL find her way onto his lap at every opportunity as she may possibly love wool more than I do.  Just for the record, she also sheds more than I do.

So hubby has a pretty two-wool blanket of nice warm FabricMart Shetland wool, and because I bought it on sale the whole 72"x60" blanket cost only $19 plus a little of my time ... so very superior to the plain piece of probably-poorly-serged 72x56 inch piece of wool he was about to spend $25-30 for before shipping ... and I still have a little over two yards of each color to make him a matching wool coat.  Too bad I can't just wiggle my nose and have the coat sew itself ...

Stitchin' it Old School

I figured today's "little" project would be easy once I got everything set up ... I thought wrong.  Last night I tucked Camster into her cabinet and folded it up, which makes it easy to see how she spent a year impersonating an end table, then broke out Timex, my ridiculously sturdy $80 WalMart Brother LX-3125.

Timex, my Brother LX-3125 mechanical

Timex is so named simply because he survived my first six months of sewing.  This is the little mechanical that could ... sew through poly boning both length-ways and cross-ways, go through an entire Elizabethan corset corded with hemp craft cord, and plow through through five layers of heavy drapery for my pirate coat.  I treated this poor little bottom-of-the-line plastic machine as if it was a heavy-duty industrial model ... and it still sews.  But this morning, Timex met his match ... my son's "papa-san" chair.

I tried to sew using upholstery thread, a topstitching needle ... and probably too many layers of fabric.  So I am resorting to hand-stitching this thing back together.  When I was up in Indiana, I managed to find a pair of Machingers gloves recommended to me a few months ago by Nay, an avid quilter who also has done bridal sewing and gave me all kinds of useful advice on sewing my silk charmeuse tunic.  These do help grip the needle for pulling it through the layers, but don't protect me from accidentally putting the needle point up and under my thumbnail.

So I have one corner fixed, halfway through the other, and still one more to go.  Then I have the fun of putting the "pillows" pieces back in right.

Something unusual from last night: my usually camera-shy Cuddle Kitty posed just long enough for me to snap a pic of him.  This time, he wasn't posing on the new Camster cabinet (I have been shooing him and the Terrorist Kitty off that cabinet since I set it up!) or a pile of fabric.  So I now have a cute pic of my only skinny cat:

my camera-shy Cuddle Kitty

Now y'all know where the darker cat hair comes from ...

Tunic for little sister Simplicity 2635

I actually started pattern work on this yesterday while waiting for feedback on my fitting issue.  As usual, one of my first steps is to trim the pattern tissue pieces ... and also as usual, my cats try to "help".  The crinkle of pattern tissue is as irresistible to them as the sound of a can opener on a can!  Before starting, I looked all around the room to ascertain the complete absence of the little fur monsters.  Half a minute later, as I had cut about six inches away from the piece ... I had my Cuddle Kitty on the other end of the long rectangle-shaped piece trying to pin it down to the carpet!  By the time I had the long side trimmed, I had all three gathered around me.  They don't take "No" for an answer, and didn't shoo further than five feet away.  I did manage to trim the pattern without needing to tape repairs.

S2635 and fabric - it is a bit more green than this

Third time was not a charm in my attempts to get a clearer pic of this ... meh.  I have seam allowances drawn onto the pieces, with measurement notes written on also.  I am embroidering on this tunic!  :)  Yes indeed, my embroidery machine is once again grumbling about too much time off, and my sister likes embellishment as much as I do.  I have enough room to stitch out 8 5x7 designs from this open decorative floral set.  I plan to embroider the front yoke on both sides of the keyhole slit, and above the hemline around the body.  Since sis wants the elastic-bottom sleeves, I will leave those undecorated ... maybe.  I haven't completely decided on that.  If I put a design on each sleeve, that will mean I use all ten in the set.  It's an attractive thought this morning.

But first will be a test stitch out to make sure the stabilizer and colors work.  Sis has asked for lots of spring and summer colors, and this design set has 6-8 colors per design.  Along with a nice vibrant green, I am thinking pink, yellow, white, light blue, lavender, and maybe even a cheerful orange.

Back to the Vogue coat

I have cleaned the turquoise metallic fuzz out of my machine already this morning (something I can do before the 2nd cup of coffee!) and utilized yet another odd but necessary sewing notion: the lint roller.

Not only does it get the cat fur off my fabric (like when the furry monsters discover how warm the coat shell is!) but it was indispensable with that poly brocade that frayed/shed as much as an individual cat.  I used it on my ironing board cover as I worked on the brocade ... you can see a thread in the corner of the pic.

Since I am tired of shooing cats off the coat shell, I am going to sew it up today.  I need to dig up the fabric I'll be using for the lining some point very soon ...

Silk splurges and sales acquisitions

I mentioned last week about my sewing being interrupted by the arrival of a box of fabric splurges and promised pics ... the procrastination on that is over as I had this urge to pull out my latest splurges and fondle them, so why not snap pics?  This time, instead of laying them on my table I draped them over Mathilda since the prints are huge (and there's currently a very yummy chocolate cake on the table since yesterday afternoon!).

Not surprisingly, these come from that "ebil enabler" site, FabricMart.  When I first saw these two silks back in late November, they were $35/yd, so they truly put the "wish" into my wishlist and I joked that the only way I would get them would be if we won the lotto ... I was wrong.  First FM marked them down to $30/yd ... then put them in the 50% sale.  Hubby spoils me rotten at times, plus has a wishlist of things he wants me to sew for him, so he gave this splurge the green light.  This time, my pics turned out!



 My pic 

  FM's pic 

Charmeuse #2:

FM's pic

My pic

On the utility fabric acquisition side of things, today I picked up cotton muslin on sale again for 99c/yd, a bit of cotton twill at $2.50/yd, and last week grabbed a couple yards of cotton down-proof mattress ticking to try out for corset cores. The ticking is lightweight, strong, and has little bias stretch and will be the core of my next attempt to turn KS 3850 into a four-layer corset.

Before I dive into version 2 of the bustier corset, I think I'll finished sewing up the Vogue coat mockup, as all three of my cats have discovered the outer shell and all three think it worth the effort to jump up and lay/shed on it ... even my oldest, fattest, and by far my laziest cat.  It doesn't take too many days of decent weather for these furry monsters to start shedding like mad ... so I need to get the mockup done and hung up!  Just for fun, here's all three napping (and shedding) on our bed:

My big FAT fluffy cat

I've been saying for a while I need a new "scale" pic for my oldest and largest cat.  I used to have a picture of me holding him, but that is on an old harddrive that crashed beyond retrieval.  Besides, few of y'all know what size I am in person, so that pic wasn't so helpful with nonfamily members.  So, I decided to get a picture of him with a standard 12 ounce pop can for scale:

For a further sense of scale, that sisal scratch mat he's laying on is 17 inches long including its border.

So what has prompted this endeavor into feline photography (which involves catnip spray)?  Guess which cat decided to wake hubby and me up when we tried to sleep in this morning?  Yup, this big fat fluffy hairball ... who weighs 30 lbs and is VERY effective as a variable time alarm clock.  At least he got the memo that hubby is on leave ... he has tried to wake us up at 0515 many times before, usually on a Saturday morning, thinking hubby was going to be late for first formation. 

I'm going to need another cup of coffee before I start in on that denim.

The infamous Terrorist Kitty

Those of y'all on PR have probably heard about my "terrorist kitty", whose actual name is Twilight ... although we often call her by less-affectionate nicknames.  Usually she will not hold still for pictures, but this morning she was in a strange mood, posing on a box next to my trash can (I cropped most of that out).

Yes, she usually does look that smug.  She also loves to lay on my fabric piles even though she knows she isn't supposed to ... and most of the time will sprint off the fabric as soon as I have her in sight.  Last night she must have been sleeping a bit more soundly, because I was able to walk up to her as she slept on the top of my fabric bolts (stored vertically in a vain attempt to cut down on cat hair accumulation) and pick her up to scold her.

Yes, this is the furry monster who routinely flips the vent covers up and until recently would venture down into the ductwork -- thankfully she is now too chubby to fit.  This is also the one who used to run up the drapes, walk across the long curtain rod, then launch herself onto someone's head and shoulders.  When she got too heavy to accomplish that ... and it took about half a dozen times of her pulling the drapes down before she accepted the idea ... she then moved to the tall bookcases for her launching points until we moved the bookcases.  She is obsessed with both plastic and cloth grocery bags, and even moreso by boxes.  Folding a box closed will get her full attention as she tries to find a way into the closed box ... even doubly so if the box contains a dark colored fabric that may snag.  She's just recently discovered the feline joy of thread spools and bobbins after ignoring them completely for over a year.  My mom says I am probably the only sucker who would keep this onrey feline ... but she does look cute in this pic.

Yes, that is a copy of Linda Sparks' The Basics of Corset Building she is sitting next to in the pic  :) a much-appreciated gift from my little sister.

Cats and front-lacing corsets

This has been a problem for me since the spring: two of my three cats insist on "helping" me lace my Elizabethan!  With 14 pairs of eyelets to lace in the front, it really does get annoying -and futile - to try to shoo these two off.  Here are the two usual suspects:

Both often try to "help" hubby with his bootlaces in both the morning and evening as well.  I'm sure one will tell you he is helping, while the other will assert that he is "saving" us from these laces.  Being cats, neither will take "no" for an answer!