F Chord

I can play an F chord!!! Anyone who plays guitar knows exactly what I'm taking about. I have conquered the F! Finally! I started learning chords on my acoustic guitar about 4 weeks ago, when I purchased it from Portland Music Company. On my own I learned Am, D, C, and tried G but couldn't get it. By the the time my guitar class started (2 weeks ago) the G chord was really easy, and I had learned some more open chords. But the F chord still eluded me. I couldn't even use my right hand to force my left hand into a position that would actually make all the strings ring cleanly. Of course, the F chord seems to pop up in 50-75% of the songs I want to play and use practice, so it kept taunting me with it's unplayableness. But no longer!

Now I feel comfortable playing:
A
Am
C
D
D7
G
E
Em
F

I haven't played some of the other chords like Dm7 or A7, so I haven't memorized those, but chords are going so well for me right now that it's just a matter of memorizing them. Of course, now that I have a decent amount of chords at my disposal, it's now a matter of changing between them.

I think I'm in love...

... with this new tea. Chocolate caramel chai. I think I can die happy now. I've become a bit of a tea-aholic this past year and a half. I'm not a morning person, and as most classes are morning classes I require a dose of caffeine in order to become coherant. While I used to use soda, drinking that much soda is not healthy, plus it's pretty expensive. So tea it was. And this tea is delicious. It has "Black tea, spices (cinnamon, ginger, cloves, cardamom, nutmeg, black pepper and Chinese star anise), roasted carob, natural chocolate and caramel flavors with other natural flavors, roasted chicory and cocoa." Yummy.

Beginnings of a Quilt

The quilt is officially in the works! I've bought the fabric, and even started cutting. It's going to be a very bright quilt, with black as the faux sashing. The darker green in this photo is a more of a lime than an olive, but no matter how I messed with the white balance of the photo I couldn't get it to turn out correctly.


For the top I need to cut 98 squares (10 strips) out of four different colors, and 392 squares of black (40 strips). This of course doesn't include the two borders, but I'll cut those out later, as a break in between sewing all these blocks together. I've already cut out the darker green (a bit of a dark lime green color) and made them into blocks! This morning I cut out the dark blue strips, but haven't made them into squares yet. I was hoping to do that and cut out the lime green tonight, but work was so crazy today I was exhausted by the time I came home.


My iron has also turned brown, because I've been a bad sewer and have been using tap water rather than distilled. So I'm going to try a variety of remedies I've heard about in order to fix it. My iron's a cheapie iron that I got because my dad bought it for my sister when she went to college but she never used it. Hence, it is now mine, and although it's a cheapie, it does the job. It just consumes water like none other, which is why I've been using tap instead of distilled. Since I don't want to ruin my iron, it's time to switch back to what I should have been doing all along.

Operation Quilt

I really want to make this quilt for my first quilt. It's called a jewelbox quilt.

It looks relatively simple, but is still stunning. I'm definitely using black for the faux sashing. I have 3+ yards of a lime green, and 2.5 yds of a nice green, so I think instead of using them for the messenger bag, I'll use them for this quilt. They're high quality, but a little rough (broadcloth), which I'm hoping will soften with washing. If I go with these, it means that I would stay with the solid theme and buy other solid fabrics for the quilt. Then I wouldn't be able to take advantage of Joann's $1.99 sale on quilting cottons. Decisions decisions.

I haven't decided whether I want my quilt to resemble the picture above, trading out the colors of the blocks and using more fabrics, or whether I want it to resemble this. This only uses five colors, and the same colors/the same block is repeated over and over.

Oh the fabric!

A woman on craigslist was selling quilting cotton for $2 a yard, so of course I snatched some up. Look what I got, all for under $20! Almost all cuts are >1, most being at least 2 yards.

This woman had an insane amount of great purples! So of course I grabbed tons!


Alice of course had to investigate the purples. They met her exacting standards.


She had this great black and white print.


I even grabbed a few fabrics that were still on the bolt. I just love that rainbow! As anyone who knows me will testify, I am very big into the bright and bold colors. That fabric definitely fits the bill. I'm not sure what it's going to be yet, but I'm sure it will be awesome.


Then there was the beautiful blue.


I've recently acquired enough fabric that I have to think of ways to store/sort it. I don't have that much, but since I've decided I love applique, and probably will love quilting, my cotton stash went from non-existant to fledgling. So I spent one of my days off sorting through and categorizing my fabric, as well as washing and folding. I haven't gotten to the ironing stage yet. So I still have a mound of fabric that needs to be ironed, folded and put away. I love buying new fabric, but I hate the whole washing, detangling, and ironing part.


I had another great find at Goodwill. There's one by my work, one by my house, and many on the way to and from. Most recently, I found a Singer book on Machine Quilting. It's a great intro book, and will be really helpful when I finally start a quilt. So that makes my crafty Goodwill total to date... hmm. A huge bag of lace, a huge bag of buttons, a cardboard cutting board,

>30 yards lightweight sew in interfacing,

4 panels of Winnie the Pooh Christmas panel fabric, four Christmas gifts, a three drawer 8.5x11 organizer, and a Machine Quilting Book. That's just the crafty stuff I've found there. Goodwill, how I love thee.

And here's a photo of the green I was talking about in my last post. Do you see how much lighter the left side is? It looks like two completely different fabrics! That's not the underside, that's how much lighter the 'light' side of the gradient is! I don't know how on earth I didn't notice it before.


In case you can't tell, I'm trying to be better about including photos in my posts. I am a huge photography geek, and a computer geek, but for some reason I always get side tracked when I'm about to take photos for the blog.

Well... that didn't work

I'm working on my mother's Christmas present, getting everything prepped, cut out, etc. She reads this blog, so no specifics on the project until after Christmas. She knows it will be sewn and uses fabric, so I'm safe to post this.

Anyways, so I bought this great green fabric. It has a wonderful pattern, and the color matches the other fabrics perfectly. I was ironing the fabrics when suddenly I realize that the color looks off. I spread it out, and low and behold, the fabric goes from this nice spring kelly green to a very very light icky lime green color. Crap. At first I'm convinced that the color has just washed out. But to wash out in a perfect sequential gradient? Hmm. So off a googling I go. Low and behold, the entire series of fabrics in this line are gradients. How the hell did I not notice this on the bolt? Really, how did I not see this?

So now I have a day off that I won't be able to use working on my mom's present because the green ties this entire project together, and I can't go to the next step until I have the green. I'll have to wait until I get paid on Friday so I can go to Joann's again and find another green. I had a hard enough time finding this green, and now I get to start the process all over again.

Sometimes, I think I am my own worst enemy.

Motivation

Maybe it's the record setting heat, but I just haven't been able to focus lately. There has been no sewing, no knitting, and no beading. I want to do them, I have all the materials to complete several projects, but I just can't find the motivation to do so.

I'm hoping it passes soon. I want to work on my mom's christmas present, and do start some beading to sell at ArtSplash next year!

Meet Alice

This is Alice, the newest addition to my household. She's an 8 year old tortoiseshell cat, but she's so incredibly tiny! I've always had bigger cats - usually 10 lbs and up. My other kitty (who is in Arizona with my parents - enjoying the sunshine) weighed in at about 14 lbs in her prime. Alice is maybe, maybe 5 or 6 lbs. She's absolutely tiny.

Two years ago, my sister and I found her at the Oregon Humane society. My sister had been looking at Petfinder, saw Alice's picture and fell in love with her. She promptly called me for a kitty run to OHS. Luckily, Alice was still there and was cute as a button. She's been through a lot; she got so sick with Feline Upper Respiratory Disease while she was at OHS that she scored 1's and 2's on her health assessment. She was put into fostercare, and they fully expected her not to make it. However, she pulled through and eventually was well enough to come back to OHS. We met her foster mom, a very nice woman who told us all about Alice and how great she was. Alice's owner surrendered Alice, along with about $200 of Alice's toys and goodies, because his wife didn't like her.

My sister had Alice for about two years when she decided to go teach English in Korea for a year. She had no one to take Alice, so I begged and pleaded with my landlord to let me have Alice. My landlord is not happy, but she allowed me to take Alice. I figure I'm only going to be renting from her until May, and then I'll be moving into Beaverton/Portland, so it doesn't really matter if she doesn't like Alice. :D My sister actually decided she didn't want to go to Korea, but she still wanted me to take Alice. She loves her, but my sister isn't home that much, and she thought she wasn't able to give Alice as much attention as she deserves. So Alice came to live with me!

She's a wonderful lap kitty, but there are a few things we're eventually going to work on. When my sister first brought her home from OHS, Alice was wonderful in a carrier; she was even purring. We both remarked how strange it was to find a cat that actually liked the carrier. Of course, this was too good to be true. I think Alice was just so happy to leave OHS and to get a real home that she didn't mind being in a carrier. However, she is absolutely scared of carriers now. It was an incredible struggle for my sister to catch Alice to get her into the carrier(for the vet and for the trip to my house), and once in the carrier, Alice was terrified and shaking. She was so scared that on the way to my house she peed herself. It made for an interesting homecoming, that's for sure.

Alice adjusted very quickly to living at my house. The first night, she'd come out from under my bed, get petted for a bit, then go right back to her hiding spot. By the next day she hid a little, but she'd come out as soon as I called her, or she would just partially hide (under my desk chair, behind some of my fabric). By the third day (the second full day) she's completely normal and her extremely social self. She's chilling out on my bed as we speak.

I'm working on transitioning her over to a better quality food. My sister was just feeding her Alley Cat, whose first ingedients are Ground yellow corn, corn gluten meal, soybean meal, chicken by-product meal. ::shudders:: I've done a lot of research on cat nutrition and cat food, and the ingredients in this food are a big no no. Corn is just a filler with no nutritional value, and shouldn't be in the food to begin with, let alone the first incredient, or the first and the second in this case. Good foods don't have by-products; meals are okay as long as there is also primary meats or ingredients, such as chicken.

I have a bunch of sample bags of a variety of different foods courtesy of PetUtopia, whose owner is absolutely amazing and helpful. I mixed in a little of California Natural Chicken and Brown Rice, whose first ingredients are Chicken, Chicken Meal, Brown Rice, Rice, Chicken Fat. Alice ate some of it, but ate just as much of the Alley Cat. I really like California Natural for the ingredients and a reasonable price ($3/lb), so I tried her on the California Natural Herring and Sweet Potato. She did a flying leap onto my bed the second I ripped open the sample, then followed me to a secondary bowl where I poured a bit in. She immediately started eating it. Now it's a day later, and while she eats out of both bowls (one with Alley Cat and the CN Chicken) and the other with the CN Herring, she seems to prefer the Herring one. She's a slow, social eater, so if she's still liking the CN Herring by the end of this week I'll buy a bag of it for her. I may add a wet food as well: we'll see on that end.

I need to buy some more litter too - right now I'm using a non-clumping litter that my sister had a little bit left of. I'd like to switch her to Feline Pine - a pine pellet litter (no dust and less tracking) but although she seems completely settled in, I don't want to disrupt her routine/comfort so I'll wait a few weeks to do that, which means I need some other litter in the meantime.

Well, I think that's all for the moment, although I'm sure I'll be posting a lot of gratuitous kitty photos in the future!

Sewing

So of course I say there's no sewing going on here, and then what do I do? Sew. I made this really cute little bag which I absolutely adore. I'm going to make a bigger tote version. It was a tutorial rather than a pattern, and the way the pattern was set up had you flipping the entire bag right side out through a little hole in the lining. The interfacing does not like this method, so it got a bit crinkled. Next time I'll just do the outer, then the lining, then just top stitch the lining to the bag. I still think it's really cute, crinkles and all. :D I drew a little butterfly then traced that onto contrasting fabric for the pocket, and cut it out of the outer fabric. I had a bit of issue using a blue pen to mark out the butterfly on the front - those marks did not want to go away, so the fabric got frayed a bit with all that rubbing. For the pocket I used the fine tipped blue pen and drew really really lightly, and that turned out perfectly. I used fray-chek to keep those ends from fraying any more. I even hand stitched the front!

Once that was finished I immediately started on another project - my shirt from McCall's 2964. It's been pretty smooth, I've had a couple of instances so far where I had to reread the instructions several times and try to think really hard about what they wanted me to do, but so far I've managed it. However, the problem I've run into is that only a few hours in (I'm a slow ironer/sewer) it's apparent that it's not going to fit me. I've already cut out all the pieces, and don't have enough fabric left over to cut more pieces. Of course, it's the bust part that isn't going to fit - I made the second to largest size, and the bust is way to wide, and not high enough. I really hate that patterns are made for a B cup; if you're substantially bigger than that, shirts are a pain in the ass. So basically what they did was for a bigger bust size, they made it wider without making it any deeper. I know I'll need to do a full bust adjustment on most of my shirt patterns, but I'm thinking I may be able to fiddle with this (because the bust part is a separate piece) in order to get it to fit. Of course, in order to do that I would need to go buy more fabric, then cut out a deeper/higher, but less wide piece. I think I'm going to try to do that, but if I can't find the fabric I'll probably just finish the shirt as practice. But the shirt is so pretty, I feel like I'm wasting all the fabric. Plus, while I loved putting the shirt together, it kind of kills my enthusiasm to know it's not going to fit. Isn't the fabric gorgeous?

Update: Sewing and Riding

Not much sewing going on lately. I have enough fabric to make a few projects, but the problem is that all the fabrics are knits. At the moment, knits are my nemesis. No matter what I do, even with a stretchy stitch, even with tissue paper as a stabilizer, the stitching still puckers. I don't want to ruin all my beautiful fabric, so it lies there on the shelf, taunting me. I talked with my mother today, a master quilter and sewer, and she said that the tension is probably off on my machine. As my machine (a Bernina 1001 that used to be hers) is awesome I don't want to mess up my normal sewing (which is issue free) by messing with the tension just for knits. My mom offered to show me the tips and tricks for sewing knits when I'm down at my parent's house for Christmas, but since they're in Arizona and I'm in Portland, I'm obviously not going to lug my machine on the airplane. So depending on whether I get frustrated enough/annoyed enough with having all this pretty fabric and unable to do anything with it before Christmas, I might head down to my local Bernina dealer and see if they can help me. I've also been looking at sewing classes. I can wing a lot of stuff, and it turns out usable, but I'm a bit of a perfectionist and would like for things to look beautiful without being overwhelmed with how to get them there. There's a great set of classes at Josephine's, but they're a bit expensive and I have a couple other things that are a greater priority. My riding helmet is going to set me back a ridiculous amount, because of course my head only fits the expensive helmet. But I like my brain, and would like to keep it in the condition it's in, so I'll fork out a couple of hundred for a helmet you have to replace any time you have an unscheduled dismount. ::sigh::

Why oh why did I have to fall in love with horses and riding? Seriously, it beats even my photography as the most expensive hobby I have. Long story short on that front, I was a working student for a local dressage trainer for a few months. Did the stereotypical working student things: mucking stalls, cleaning waterbuckets, cleaning tack, feeding horses, turning out horses, grooming horses. In exchange I got free lessons. It was a lot of work, but I seriously got spoiled having lessons 3-4 times a week. I've never been able to ride that frequently before; as a kid I was only able to ride twice a month. Anyways, the trainer and I parted ways in March (for a variety of different reasons) and I'm counting down the days until I have enough money to find a new trainer. I was using my trainer's helmet, so now I have to get a new one before I start searching for a new trainer. The helmet's gonna cost me around $200, but like I said, I like my brain. I know of two eventing trainers south of me that I'm hoping to try out. I really want to jump again, but I need some serious flatwork before I'll be able to start doing courses.

Back to the sewing front, I have to post the amazing find I had at Goodwill. A huge bag filled to the brim with tons of different kinds of lace.
I can tell I'll be making lots of skirts and bags with lace! I'm already looking for good patterns to use this in.