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 ...

Pics wearing the simple skirt

Hubby graciously snapped some pics of me wearing my simple skirt I finished this morning, along with the white knit top that kicked off the cleaning spree and of course my denim corset.

Our yard is a bit uneven, plus hubby and I were talking while taking pics, so I cropped my face out in two of these due to my mouth being open.  LOL  We've had a wonderfully pleasant spring day today and I accomplished enough cleaning to even impress my teenage son.

Simple skirt and the proverbial wild hair

Yesterday, hot on the heels of my pillowcases victory, I started up another quick and easy project: a simple skirt.  This turned out to be a mild variation of my "no-pattern tube skirt" that I've made up a few times last year where I take either 2 or 3 yards, sew it into a tube, cut off excess then hem and put in an elastic waistband ... or if I want to get fancy like my red petticoats for Renn Faire, pleat the top into a waistband.  I wasn't feeling fancy last evening or this morning, so simple elastic waistband it is:

From selvage to selvage, without any trimming, this ended up being ankle-length after hemming and putting in the waistband, which is cool because I haven't made one that long except my petticoats.  This is the $1/yd cotton I scored last week ... I swear it really did jump into my cart and cry for me to take it home!  LOL  It's all 3 yards at the bottom ... but only about 2 yards at the top.  That's the variation - I trimmed out "darts" of sort so I wouldn't have so much bulk around the waist, fabric-wise.  I folded it into four, then tapered off 1.5" inches off each side using the next-to-bottom set of stripes as my taper point:

Then I just sewed up the triangles, then the open side, pressed, hemmed, and this morning put in the elastic waistband.  Another easy, fast, instant-gratification project.

As for the proverbial wild hair ... everyone has probably figured out I hate housecleaning, *but* I wanted to find a specific summer knit top to wear with this new skirt.  I haven't seen it since this past September ... so what started as a shirt hunt morphed into a massive clothing-sort of all my warm-weather stuff.  I have another full bag of clothing to donate, and a whole heap of laundry to wash ... and a big bare spot that hubby won't help but notice when he gets home.  Once I get that top washed and dried I can take a shower, because even though it's called "cleaning" I always end up so dirty after doing it.

The next big question will be "What do I want to sew now?"