If you read this, thank your mother!

Dear Mom,

I tried to think of a perfect gift for Mothers Day and decided that one of the greatest gifts you gave me was my love of reading. When I heard about the Barbara Bush Family Literacy Program, I realized that perhaps the best gift would be to pass it down. I hope it will bring joy to your day, knowing that the gift donated in your name will allow a young mother  to become a better reader and be able to share the gift with her children.

LIttle Golden Books and One Fish, Two Fish started my journey and I still think that Dr. Suess did it right. I remember bringing my book to your bed , sitting up against that padded headboard, and reading Little House on the Prairie while you read your Erle Stanley Gardner mysteries. You took me to the library constantly, always patient while I looked through the Black Stallion books and dreamed about visiting Misty on Chincoteague Island. You told the librarian, that, yes, this little girl really will read all of these books this week, so please let her check out more than allowed. There's a lesson right there! Ask and you might get the answer you seek!

Mom, you taught me that reading the instructions on the sewing pattern for the Barbie dress would likely help things turn out right. This led to pride in a job well done, not to mention several prom dresses and matching Hawaiian shirts for me and my high school boyfriend. As a young mother, I even earned money with a needle and thread, allowing me to stay home longer with Danny. 

With the power of reading, I tackled the words of crochet and knitting, and deciphered color coded charts for needlepoint. I used the nuances of language and word choice to develop my own color palette, no simple reds and blues for me, thank you! Instead a profusion of ochres and azures and  vermillions and sapphires! A lifelong fiber fascination and celebration resulted. 

I never learned to speak a foreign language well, just a little TexMex, but I learned to read several 'languages.' You showed me how to cook from a recipe and I dove into some crazy foods with complicated instructions. Throw in a little math and you can make twice as much or half as little.  I learned to read music and calculus, even accounting. And reading between the lines fueled my natural skepticism. No reading is too difficult, so legal documents, student rules, and OpEds only make me more knowledgeable. 

Reading is so powerful, Mom. I married a man who loves to read and we raised a son with a book in his hands. The joy continues. On this, your special day, please know that I love you and that all of my successes lead back to you. 

I can never repay the gift you gave me, but I hope to pass it on.

Your Loving Daughter,

Karen

De-stashing my life

Since my last post, I've been really busy with my goats and in preparing my house for sale. My crafty hands don't like that at all!  However, I was able to complete a baby afghan for a young mom in West Texas. I wanted to display it as I was crocheting it, but didn't want her to suspect it would be hers! Granny squares are sooooo soothing.
 
But the time has come to de-stash my life.

I know, I know, but this time I mean it! We plan to put our house up for sale in early May, so the clock is ticking!

Of course, when I went in the sewing room, I found a stack of jeans that needed repair on top of the sewing cabinet. Rather than jump into the de-stash (stall warning), I decided to repair the jeans first.

 


Working on the ranch can really mess up your jeans with barbed wire and such. Farm clothes get dirty and torn, kinda like 'play clothes' from when I was a kid. Fix the holes, patch the tears, and, voila!, another pair of jeans rejoins the queue. Like most sewing skills, mending has some tricks that ensure a strong, lasting repair. Ah, denim blue.


Here's a quick tutorial. First, stabilize the tear with stay-stitiching. Just a quick straight stitch around the edges prevents further raveling or stretching out of shape.


Trim excess fraying and raveling. However, on work clothes, I leave the warp or woof threads that are still connected at both ends; I only trim the broken ones.


Determine whether to patch and darn from the back, or place a patch on the outside. If the tear is new and the edges meet up reasonably well, I prefer to patch from the back as it generally is less obvious and a lighter weight backing material can be used. Baste the patch in place. Next, I use a multi-stitch zig zag stitch to 'darn' the tears and secure them to the backing fabric. On this repair, I inserted a line of stitching diagonal to the patch to provide strength along the grain of the fabric.




With a top patch, I use similar fabric to cut a patch, making sure its edges will sew into fabric that is not weak. Be sure to match the grain lengthwise to avoid the patch stretching out of shape. In this case, with a patch near the knee, I did a satin stitch edge to secure the edges of the patch from fraying or coming loose.





Wow. I forgot about these jeans! A piece of metal tore a humongous hole in those jeans (and me, too!).



That's it! Four pairs of jeans returned to service! Well worth a half hour of time. One pair was sent to recycle heaven: those jeans were ripped in the crotch and the fabric was nearly worn through. I would have needed to replace the entire seat.  Ain't nobody got time for that!


Ah. Back to de-stashing. I did a quick sort of random yarns, and pulled out odd skeins and weights and made a pile. I offered it free to friends on facebook and got multiple offers in a few minutes. There's some yarn gone! I also packed up all of my sewing patterns (which is a lot after 40+ years). One box done!

Thread Squared...

What a week! I've been at the PreLaw Advisors National Conference in DC all week and it's been a whirlwind event with events day and night. You'd think I wouldn't have had time to crochet, but I did! I ended up choosing the perfect project in my filet crochet tablecloth. It's small with an easily memorizable pattern--- really just a bunch of ch and tr. The only hard part is putting two tr in the 4th ch in the corners.

The best part about this project has been that the more I do, the smaller the jumbo ball of #10 crochet thread! Our conference involved bus rides nearly every day, and traffic in DC is a bear, so I would get 45 minutes a day minimum of hooking on the bus. I am member of the board and was totally consumed the first two days, but after that I attended sessions and luncheons and could hook on the side. I even worked  on my project during movie night because we weren't in pitch darkness.

Another thing I did was create a new way to carry my tools. I took a Crystal Light container and removed the label. Into that I was able to place two hooks, a small pair of scissors (TSA approved), post-it notes, a pencil, needle threader, and tapestry needle (for weaving ends). To keep the small items from falling out and getting lost, I took a prescription container (label removed) to hold them and put them in the taller container. Overall, this has been the best setup I've done so far. The crystal light container is see-through and the top snaps on firmly, so no accidental opening.

Overall, I completed one-and-a-half squares for the table cloth. I'll need a minimum of nine squares for the tablecloth, so hopefully this means this will not be a perpetual UFO.

Getting ready to board my flight to Houston! Starting square number three once on board. I hope to get several "rounds of the square" done before I make it back to Texas.

Have project, will travel

Traveling to Washington, D.C., this week and am at a loss on whether to take a project or not.

Before smart phones and tablets, traveling for work presented a lot of boredom. Flying from a regional airport means at least a two hour layover in Houston. I don't like to read on airplanes or in airports, so a little knit or crochet project is usually tucked in my carry-on. That way I can while away the time while creating something. But what to take?

First, the TSA had no problem with my taking some aluminum #9 needles on board, along with little scissors. But those little cutters that are like a pendant are verboten. Crazy, huh? Right after the bombings in 2011, I often had fellow passengers tell me they felt better knowing we had a weapon.

Back to crafting. A good travel project will be small and have few moving parts. Once I tried to complete a complicated cross stitch pattern that was almost illegible. Too many threads, small needles, charts, scissors-- yuck! When knitting, using circulars is a bonus because you can't lose one. Doing some socks on dpns is fraught with danger. Once, I took socks (small, right?) and the little metal needles kept sliding out and skittering across the floor. Not my finest hour.

This trip, I won't have lots of nighttime hours to spend in front of the tube and I'll be gone six days, so the suitcase will be stuffed. I think I'll take along a thread crochet project. One ball of thread, a hook and a spare, some blunt scissors, and the pattern! Crocheting is my 'native' language so I won't have struggles with figuring out what I am to do. I saw a pattern for a tablecloth in the June 2012 Crochet World magazine that would look great on my dining table. Nine squares of filet sewn together and then edged. Very similar to a throw I made out of thread and keep in the living room for chilly evenings in the summers. If I only got two or three squares done, that would be a good start.

Granny's Daughter

When you craft with yarn, you end up with leftover yarn, usually not enough to make anything, but throwing it away seems wasteful.  I either hand roll it into a ball, use my yarn-winder to make a center-pull skein, or leave as-is. I sometimes have a pristine ball of yarn or two left when I finish a project. What I should do is return them to the store for a refund, but I always talk myself out of it or plain forget about it.

Thus a stash begins...

My favorite way to use scraps to make something useful, like an afghan. I have made several "scrapghans," including the one shown in my first post, with light and dark shades of a color, surrounded by black. Last week, while cleaning up the sewing room, I came across a gallon container with little squares in it--Granny's Daughters. Basically, a Granny's Daughter is round one of a Granny Square and uses between 2 and 3 yards of yarn.

About 15 years ago, I received a 3-ring binder 'card' which featured a Granny's Daughter afghan pattern that is one of Vanna's favorites. (Did you know that the most famous letter turner is a mad crochet artist with her own line of yarns?). It was designed by Nancy Fuller and is the same as her pattern on Ravelry. Anyhoo, the offer was to join a club and they would periodically send you a new pattern card, or even win a lapful of yarn! (like I need one...). Vanna: I like the variety of colors in this afghan. It's made of miniature granny squares you can work using bits of leftover yarn from your collection (emphasis mine). Yup, always trying to get you to load up the stash, er, collection.

I never did join the pattern club, but thought using up small scraps would be a "good thing." Thus the jar of granny's daughters has slowly grown over time.

These are so easy and quick and they can be done without looking. Great for TV, travel or anytime you have a minute. This pattern calls for over 800 GDs, so I started working on it and have about 400 ish ready. The major drawback to this pattern is that each tiny GD has two ends which must be woven. Have I said I hate weaving end?  However, I have perfected it and crochet over the tail when making the first 6 dc in the 5 ch ring. When I finish, I just weave that one back the opposite direction and take the final tail and weave it on the opposite side of the ring. Balance, symmetry.

So far I'm proud of myself. I've been weaving tails before they go in the jar, thus avoiding the drudgery of weaving 800 at once. Now I'm just working on the GDs. I can make about one per minute at slow speed, so if I need 400 more, that's a minimum of 6-2/3 hours, PLUS the weaving time (it takes more time to weave than crochet). Add in time to 'balance' the porportion of colors, and I should be ready to progress to the second part of the project by mid-June. I have plenty of white yarn on hand to do the joining, so completing this stash buster will actually free up space!

De-stashing my life

Note--- I wish this were a picture of my sewing room, but it's not.

It belongs to Tara of the 'Easy Makes Me Happy' blog.

All who create with fiber have a stash, a collection of fiber, carefully hoarded and nurtured over the years. I have had a sewing stash since high school. Who hasn't gone into their favorite fabric store and just had-to-have that print, that suiting, that slinky jersey. And the accompanying thread, seam tape, interfacing, and zippers (Why do I have so many zippers?). My other stash was small, mostly because I didn't have the extra funds and because I usually bought with a specific project in mind. So, if  I were planning an afghan, I selected the pattern and yarn, bought what was needed, and started hooking. I'd be left with a small amount of yarn, which I wound up and put in a box. I bought most of my cross stitch as "kits" and just threw away the little bits of leftover thread. All was well.

But somewhere between motherhood and middle age, things got a bit out of hand. One Christmas years ago, I made afghans for everyone in my extended family and all my co-workers while watching The JAG and assorted British mysteries (Harm and Poirot entertained me for hours). I was also becoming known for creating lovely baby blankets. I swear, some women in my department at work got pregnant so they could get a Karen Blanket.  I think this is when I started buying yarn without a project in mind. (For those without a stash, this is the number one warning sign--Beware!). 

 I even opened an Etsy shop and started selling online.

Early in the 21st Century (heck, I like typing that!), I was getting 40% off coupons via email from Hobby Lobby every week, so I would go and buy yarn or tools. Sadly, the marketing mavens at Hobby Lobby know how to suck you in with gorgeous displays and with the mark-down shelf positioned cleverly next to the yarn. (Hmmm. Might as well look through and see if there's anything useful).
Again, a danger point I didn't see. Thus, all the cross stitch and crewel kits. 

Finally, I quit smoking in December 2007 and needed something to occupy my hands, so knitting became a compulsion-but I haven't smoked since! I think I reasoned that the money I did NOT spend on cigarettes was to be rightfully spent on stash!

Recently, I've made several forays into the sewing room, sorting and grouping, and its terrifying. I have about four cubic yards of yarn (boy that sounds better than 36 cubic feet!), two dresser drawers of sock yarn, scores of needles, hooks and scissors, numerous 'project' bags, and a library of leaflets, magazines, books and tomes.  When Hancock Fabric closed down in College Station, I bought a Vogue pattern cabinet and the top drawer is full of sewing patterns, the middle two with cross stitch and embroidery, and, of course, yarn in the bottom. I made a vow last year to NOT but any more stash until I had worked some of it off or given it and away and I've done fairly well. I have finished two cross stitch beauties ( gave one to my friend Kristi, keeping the other for me) and am started on a third. However, its baby time for a couple of expectant moms and I need to make two blankets and I don't have much baby yarn in the stash.

The big question: Do I work with what I have, or buy 'new' yarn for the babies?  (After all, it's for the children....)