Up and Running!

Mama Bernina is back in her usual spot and has been running steadily since I got her back and got home from the quilt show. At first, she was clattering a bit, but I threw oil at her and she quieted down. Project comments later.

While Mama was in the shop, I went through my embroidery designs, both in digital and physical form. In digital form, I have a master directory that contains ALL of my digital versions. The key is that there is only ONE master directory. I copy only the version of the designs that I will use into my master directory, into a folder with a descriptive name. "Collection #12513" tells me nothing. "Halloween Couture" tells me a lot more. Into that folder, I also copy the digital version of the directions, if there were any included. 

When I buy a CD of designs, I put the printed directions and the CD together into a plastic organizer sheet that goes into a 3 ring notebook. I don't keep the bulky plastic cases that the CDs come in.

My stuff is easy for me to find, and the system isn't complicated and time consuming to use. Win!

Mama Bernina's Table

For many years, I've used a table with a lift that allowed me to raise and lower my sewing machine.  The lift is too small for Big Mama Bernina. Not only that, but it was a bother to switch from sewing to embroidery and back again. My 165e could do embroidery, but I rarely did. I am going to keep Big Mama B on top of the table and not use the lift. I can easily switch from sewing to embroidery and back. I want to embroider more.

There will be no new table for Mama B. I'm not going to pay extra for in-home delivery of a piece of furniture, nor am I going to fight with eight pages of directions and a bent piece of metal described as a wrench to assemble sawdust wrapped in vinyl claiming to be oak or cherry wood finish. 

Certain decisions are freeing.

Now What?

After setting out on a contract, they hired my replacement after I'd worked there for 6.5 days. Just lucky, I guess. Anyway, I'm back at home, waiting for the offers to come pouring in again. My resume is out there, but it's a holiday weekend.

My Bernina is idle for the moment. I spent time working on Bud's quilt, I've set William's quilt aside for a while, and Ashley's tote bag is finished. I'm not in the mood to trace off the pattern for Josh's pajamas. My current list of projects does not include things for me. I did throw a small snit and embroidered a set of 6 napkins for the house. Not specifically for me, but nobody else in the house seems to take notice of things like that.

I've been creating order in my studio, since I don't feel like creating things. Eventually, I'll feel like creating things again. I'm not off on a quest to track down my muse. My muse isn't hiding, lost, or fled. I suppose she's on holiday weekend, too.

Not Retreating, Not Progressing

Each week, I pack up stuff to haul with me out to Central Florida for the work week. I take projects to work on in the evenings. I try to limit the projects so I don't haul lots of stuff back and forth. This week, I brought fabric and my pattern. I forgot the box full of scissors, thread, and needles for my sewing machine. I couldn't sew as I'd planned. I have been watching videos instead. This is a poor substitute. As much as I love Avatar and Frozen, I'd much rather be watching these movies while completing my sewing projects at the same time.

I couldn't even prepare to sew because our washing machine broke. I couldn't pre-wash my fabric. I could have pre-washed it using the laundromat at the trailer park where I'm staying, but I didn't have enough quarters to both wash fabric and my work clothing. Now that I've collected enough quarters, I'll be heading home to a repaired washing machine tomorrow. Tonight, I'll pack up untouched fabric to take back home with me.

I feel a bit like the Red Queen. I'm running as fast as I can, just to stay in the same place.

Traveling Crafter

I took a traveling OT job and have booked a hotel room for the first week of my 13 week contract. I left my new 830 sewing machine at home. I brought my old machine and a small amount of stuff to work on. Now, think of a budget vacation hotel room. Where does the sewing machine go? There's no ironing board. No desk. The coffee table is small, round, and knee high.

I drive a full sized truck. I could have brought half my sewing room. I was unwilling to turn myself into a beast of burden, loading and unloading equipment. Bud and I discussed this and decided on a solution. We bought a 25' travel trailer. Because it was the end of the quarter, we got a significant discount on the price. We take delivery April 5. We'll spend the weekend pulling my SCAdian camping gear out of the attic and stocking our trailer. For the next three months, I'll live in the trailer during the week and at home on the weekends.

Instead of paying $350/week for a room that doesn't meet my needs, we will rent a campsite for $250/month. I can cook my own food, sleep on my own pillows, and have space to work on my projects. In the long run, I expect to save anywhere from 50 to 75% of what I would have spent on hotels and eating out. I could have found a campsite for less than $250, but I don't wish to live in a trailer park right next door to a major highway.

FWIW, I am almost within sight of Legoland Florida. I'll probably have to drive past it on my way to work.

Waste Fabric!

I was digging through the instructions for the Mariner's Compass quilt to figure out how many yards of fabric I needed to buy. I was dutifully reading through the directions, making notes and adding up inches when I looked at the actual layout of the pieces. Instead of looking at a tiny diagram, I took out the pattern and unfolded it.

Wow. I can tell the fabric manufacturers LOVE this woman. The layouts are for speed during construction, not efficient use of fabric. Not by a long shot. In some cases, I'll use her suggested amounts of fabric. In others, I'm going to take apart her pattern and put it back together in a much more fabric efficient way. There is no way I can allow myself to waste that much fabric. Not at $13.00 a yard for batik cotton. I'm not the kind of person who saves every scrap for use in some other project. I hate scrappy projects.

Marking and Quilting

I've been using the chalk pencil and the air erasable marker to mark small sections of my quilt before I start a session of machine quilting. The air erasable marker lasts for more than one session before it fades off into no marks at all. The chalk pencil will brush off as I work and I have several times had to refresh the marks right before I stitch an particular area. Annoying as that might be, I'd rather the marks be too transient than permanent.

There is a huge fatigue factor. I'm a beginner, and I'm more tense than I wish I were. I don't have the muscle memory yet, though I can tell it is improving. I work very slowly, so I spend more time tensed up per pattern repeat than when working faster. Do I want to speed up? Certainly! I'm just in no rush to do so. I'd rather practice accuracy slowly than disaster at high speed. 

• Repositioning my hands very frequently helps.
• Making sure that the quilt is not falling off the table helps.
• Planning ahead so I don't have to sew accurately 'backwards' helps.
• Working in short sessions with significant breaks between them helps.

There are 244 pattern repeats on the quilt. The first day I tried, I completed three. I stopped after I got two of the scrolls upside down. Yesterday, I managed to complete 6. Today I did 10, and they look better than the first 9. By the time this quilt is completed, I should have the pattern stitch perfect.

Decisions, Decisions...

I am now trying to decide on the quilting pattern that I want to use on Bud's Flying Geese quilt. The straight lines in the ditch are in. I have one pattern that I practiced a bit, but it is swirly. Today, in a quilt shop, I spotted a flying geese pattern that had a cute geometric pattern in it. Variegated thread, too. But, I must get an OK from Bud about the pattern. I also purchased an air erasable pen, that vanishes with humidity. This is Florida. I won't be able to mark a lot in advance or it will be gone by the time I get to it.


The Mariner's Compass pattern arrived and I opened all the zip-lock bags and checked that all the papers and pages were included. I've already downloaded and printed out the corrections. Did I mention that the package weighed in at over 2 pounds? Yeah. I added up all the suggested yardage bits and it will take 30.5 yards of fabric to complete the top. I haven't purchased so much as a single thread of fabric yet.

I shopped for tools that I'll need to complete the Mariner's Compass quilt. Now all I need as a particular type of ruler in the correct size. As I work on this quilt, I will put the  pieces into a plastic under-bed storage box, to keep them together and in one location. If I decide to take my project on the road, it will be easier to transport.

Keeping House

As a newlywed, living in a 3 bedroom, 2.5 bath, 465 square foot house I would spend about 4 hours per day keeping the house going. I'd do laundry, ironing, vacuuming, sweeping, mopping, shopping, cooking, organization, filing, bill paying, and even some regular maintenance tasks. I didn't do any of that stuff on the weekends, but I would spend at least 4 hours, Monday through Friday, on keeping the house up. For a house that size, with no kids, it is a part time job.

You might wonder how I could have found four hours of things to work on. I ironed things back then when I did laundry. The grocery store was across the street and I would walk there and back on nice days. I washed floors by getting down on hands and knees and scrubbing them. They looked wonderful when I was done and I knew I was getting exercise. I didn't go to the gym back then. I didn't need to.

Up at 8, work until noon, and the rest of the day was mine. I'd do volunteer work with my mother, use my sewing room to get projects done, walk over to the library (it was in our back yard) and get reading material, or otherwise stay busy. 6:30 was time to have dinner on the table for the Hubster, then out and about if we felt like it, or home together for the evening.


Now, I'm home full time in a 3,450 square foot house with 4 bedrooms and 2.5 baths. Do I spend the same amount of time keeping up the house? Hah! I might spend an hour a day. Maybe. This will change. The more time I spend on domestic tasks, the happier I am hanging out at home. If home is a nice place, I enjoy being in it. Doesn't that make sense?

Racing to Finish?

Not. I'm having a good time working on this quilt slowly and steadily. I'm working in small sections. And I really do mean small. I trim my blocks down to be the correct size before I sew them together, so there are no wobbly edges. I'm sewing together groups of five geese blocks at 6.5" by 3.5" to create something that is 6.5" by 15.5".  It is only four seams.

For those that are doing mental math and not coming up with the correct finished size, I am working with a .25" seam allowance. All the missing .5" sections are used up in the seams.

Because I don't need to sew a lot to hit my defined target for success, I am allowing myself to be picky and precise. I check and double check, and I pin my blocks together before I sew them.  This is gaining me accurate results for what I am spending in time. It is not costing me in frustration for slow progress.

Accuracy is not always in skill; a great deal of it is in time, double checking each measurement, and not skipping steps for basic construction.

At the rate I'm currently putting this quilt together, it will be completed some time in June.

Count the Hours

There are many projects that are heavily advertized as being 'Easy to Complete in a Single Weekend!' Substitute 'One Evening', or 'One Day' for 'a Single Weekend' and you have defined a group of projects that hold very little interest for me. I don't mind working on a project for months. I rather enjoy watching something take shape over time. I'm perfectly capable of spotting something on Pinterest and completing it within a few minutes out of items I've got gathering dust in my stash. But the idea of deliberately selecting a project because it will be done in a hurry? Not so much.

I was thinking about this as I was working on the quilt top I started last month. I got thrown for a loop due to a 1/8" error in measurement and a resulting 1/4" error in the pieces I was trying to assemble. I walked away from it for more than a week and have finally headed back after a few false starts at correcting the problem. I simply needed to get out my seam ripper, save the parts that were cut to the correct size, cut fresh pieces to replace the ones that were too small and sew them together. Instead of working one step at a time for all the pieces of the quilt, I am creating one section at a time. When it is done, it is on to the next set of pieces for the next section. Each section is complete and correct before I move on to the next.

FWIW, I ended up throwing out two seam rippers that were dull, badly shaped, or both. It is a sad fact that I know the qualities that make up a good seam ripper, but there you have it. Clover makes a good one.

My Studio

The image for this blog heading is my old studio in Virginia. My studio space in Florida doesn't photograph as well. I took over the living and dining room of this house and laid out my studio to have space for paper, computer, sewing, and embroidery. I ended up putting in a space for my grandson to work on his projects. Paper is the northeast corner, embroidery is the southeast corner, sewing is southwest, and reading/grandson space is the northwest corner. He gets the square coffee table and can sit on the floor.

There are five bookcases. There are crates, boxes, and tubs. There is storage under the paper crafting tables and under the cutting table. I have my grandmother's sewing cabinet, my mother's sewing cabinet, and my grandfather's curio cabinet. Storage, as they say, is non-trivial. There are also six tables for workspace, not counting the ironing board.

While ten people could not all work in here at once, there are ten separate work zones. Cutting, sewing, ironing, reading, kid, computer, embroidery, diecuts, paper and stamping/beading. I use lots of local lamps as the living room has no ceiling light. The dining room has the chandelier, that I got Bud to loop up high enough to walk under. Neither window gets a lot of direct sunlight. That's a Good Thing down here. Direct sunlight = hot. 

I put up a folding screen to block access from the butler's pantry and a dog gate to block access from the front hall. There are toxic things in my studio that would kill Jack if she were to get her teeth into them. Jack would not still live Some of them are stored well within her reach. Even my grandson is not allowed in if I am not in here with him.

Even with this incredible workspace, before I quit working, I didn't feel like making stuff very often. Now, I'm getting back to work in a big way. Each day I either make significant progress on a project or I finish something off. With all that, I have only  started my attack on three years of round tuits.

Rainbow Looming

Neatness counts. And those diagrams that tell you what order to put rubber bands on in? Make a difference. Even when you think it will matter.

When there are five different rubber bands on a single pin, you need to be able to pull them off in the correct order. You need to be able to find which rubber band needs to be moved next. As soon as you pull on a wrong one, you'll find out what the definition of a problem is. I'm not going to mention how much of a difference this makes when you are digging down through three rubber bands that have been looped on top of those five as part of the process of looping your bands.

To prevent this, you need to pay attention to the order you put your rubber bands on your loom. If you are always changing the order slightly, you'll have problems. Do not put the left side on first for one pattern repeat and then the right side on first for the next pattern repeat. It's gonna get ugly.

Also, you need to keep them on the pin in that order and not allow them to roll and twist about.

Neatness counts. It really does.

Clean Workspace and PhDs

I just cleaned up a pile of oddments on my worktable of projects that I got started working on that did not work out on the first (or even second or third) try. Could I have kept working and turned them into a success? Sure. But they just weren't that important to me to put in that much effort, and therefore, they are now trash.

Am I upset? Not the least. I'm actually quite happy that my work area is a lot cleaner. The more I work in a location, the cleaner that location gets. Seeing my work tables clear off means that I'm using my work tables for actual work. If it isn't a project that I want to complete, it's gone.

I used to use UFO for UnFinished Object and WIP for Work In Progress. PhD, I recently learned, is for a Project half Done.

Snicker. I like the idea of working on my PhDs. Or should that be PshD?

Saving Mr. Banks is a very good movie, BTW. "It should be 'Let us go and fly a kite' but..." Grammar mavens will adore the corrections that P.L.Travers allows to slip past. FWIW, I have a copy of Mary Poppins that was printed in the early 1960's. Hardcover. The original copyright is from 1934. It is dedicated to "MY MOTHER 1875-1928"

Reference Notebooks

I have a section on my bookshelf for my collected reference materials. I'm not talking about reference books. I have a whole set of three ring notebooks that contain leaflets, pamphlets, printed out pages, handouts from classes, and the instruction sheet(s) that I got when I purchased the whiz-bang gadget of the week to make crafting easier. I've got a notebook on machine embroidery stabilizers and another one on hand embroidery fabrics. I've got at least one notebook for each of my sewing machines. 

Yes, I use the information in these notebooks. I can't keep it all in my head. There are days that I think I'm doing well to remember that I wrote that information down once upon a time.

Resolution

I'm not a computer geek for nothing. Ignore the 'Loading' screen. Press on with the re-installation of the software. Uncheck the pre-selected items that make no sense. Make sure the darned thing is plugged in and charging. Go away and do something else. Et voila! One functioning Gypsy.

Then I had a small cleaning fit and re organized a storage shelf. Or three. Not a big deal. I just made labels, alphebetized a set of books and put heavy stuff down low and lighter stuff higher up. 

Untouched = Not Updated

So, I finally opened up Lightroom after a long time away from my computer. Really, I shouldn't have. I have had to install at least two updates and reboot once. Eventually, I'll be able to print the two pictures that I wanted.

If I'd regularly used the application, I'd have been caught up with the updates and printing those two pics would be a snap. Nope. If you don't use it, you lose it and staying updated is no exception.

Upheaval!

I looked at my studio and decided that I wasn't using the closet space effectively. I got a set of steel shelves, some plastic tubs and POOF!


A much more effective use of the space. And, I'll be able to get rid of a very large and awkward cabinet that most of the stuff fit into. I just need to find storage space for my iron and my Inkle loom.




Everyone has a professional steam iron and an Inkle loom, right?

A Thought

Storage is not organization. Nor is organization storage. You can put everything away and not know where anything is, and you can know where everything is when nothing is put away.

Me, I prefer to know where everything is when it is put away. Therefore, when I am working, I put things away instead of put them down. If I need a tool that I used ten minutes ago I don't have to search through the things scattered around my work surface, I simply reach to the location where I know that tool is stored.

Tidy Up

I just spent a pleasant afternoon tidying up a lot of files that I'd downloaded and hadn't sorted out. Time spent doing that is not wasted. I can find the files that I want because I know where they are. I have a file system with clear labels that let me know what is inside the file. If you look at my studio, you'll realize that I label drawers.

I'm about to spend some time sorting through Hypatia, my Kindle. I've downloaded samples and haven't deleted them after I purchased the book. My directory of sample books is getting cluttered.