Zen Quilting

Life is calming down around here. We're back to trying to follow a housekeeping routine, catching up on the dishes and the laundry are a daunting task but I am starting to believe it might happen soon. I can at least find clothes in the drawers again.

 We've been doing lots of slowing down though...cancelling things, playing outdoors, reading together and naps, naps, naps. I've been working on a compilation of data about how to increase the strength of the immune system, since we've all been clearly a bit low and susceptible.

 I got the urge to mend our big master bed quilt the other day, there were flaps open on several of the patches after a lot of use and love over the last decade. Once I sat down in the sunshine with a needle in my hand, I couldn't stop.

 I did the utilitarian mending and then after all the holes were closed I just kept going. Its a block quilt with no real top stitching anywhere and so I just did some random top stitching, following my inner creative urges. It was so cozy there in the sun, with my needle, and the little stitch tracks going in and out and in and out....

 One of the most incidentally meditational things that has happened to me in a long time. I could be  hand quilter for hire. Any brilliant quilters out there who love the piecing and need a slightly obsessive, tiny bit harried housewife to sit glaze-eyed for hours pleasantly stitching designs over the patchwork? I am your woman! Please get in touch directly.

Sweet Sleep

Mattresses are important, people! I had the best night of sleep last night that I have had in forever: dreamless and smooth, rippling on and on, with only a few hip aching moments of dim awareness as I rolled over in the night. I usually sleep pretty well during pregnancy, I'm just lucky like that, or chilled out like that or desperate like that or something. But this pregnancy has been different...our mattress had done its most valiant but there are limits. It had been with us through a decade of marriage and who  knows how many years with another family before us. I honestly think our mattress was from the 60's or 70's. This year it reached astounding heights of absurdity. A and I had begun to joke about going sleep in the soup bowl every night but truthfully it was more like sleeping in a real life game of Chutes and Ladders. There springs poking up, gooshy holes, hard ridges, and broken plastic handles sticking out in gouge-ready positions.

Thankfully, oh so thankfully....I report to you that we are now the proud owners of a new to us, 2 year old mattress that feels like heaven. We lay in bed laughing this morning about the strangeness of sleeping on such a nice bed in our own room, we felt like we were at a hotel! So silly!

Before we carted our old lump-fest of a previous bed to the dump I whipped out a pair of scissors and zipped off the beautiful fabric that covered the box springs. I've been eying it for years and knew even when we first got it that I would someday strip that cloth off for another use. The bonus of ancient mattress sets is the psychedelic, vintage fabric that they come wrapped in. What do you think? Curtains in the bathroom or the kitchen or something more creative?

Pajama Christening

Time for a little sewing.

I keep finding that Ru has no pajamas and he keeps going to bed in an undershirt and a diaper. Its getting a little bit chilly for these sorts of shenanigans. Today I was moping a little about how I just spent a good bit of money on curtains so I shouldn't go buy pajamas and I was just moaning to A about how overtaxed I feel about running all over kingdom come all the time and therefore never being home or staying caught up on day to day maintenance. Ahem. Yes...that is the reason why I stayed home today and sent A off with the car so that I'd be grounded here. But, a boy needs warm bed clothes...what's a mommy to do?
Remember her sewing machine of course! Silly me!  I'd been thinking a while back that I'd love to try to make some simple elastic waist pajama pants for the boys anyhow, just for the experience of seeing how it would work...and then here I was with a genuine need for some!

It was my first little project in the Sunroom Studio that is going to be our creative space. This means its been christened and will forthwith be a place to dream and cut and paint with great abandon.That's a pleasant kind of milestone to mark off.

I just meant to make a couple for Ru but of course Dee couldn't resist chiming in and asking for a pair of his own and what mommy could resist eager pleas for some pants of one's own. Pajama pants all round!

 

I made three very serviceable  pairs, some of which were personally designed by the wearers, and hopefully, here ends The Great Pajama Drought.

Scribble Shirts

Today, I had a little help in the form of a fabulous mother's-helper from church who brought her freckled brightness to our home and played endless games with two bouncing little boys so that I could multiply my hours and get astounding amounts done. There is fresh clean laundry...there are matched socks...there is even warm banana bread...and there were even naps for all three of my sons!

Muh!!!! Is she cute or what?

Heavens!

With all this fabulous bounty of energy and productivity I thought it was a good time to squeeze a little sewing project into our lives. Its been about forever and a day since I had a needle in cloth and I miss it. In our new house, I'm hoping to set up the sunroom to be a delicious Carlie Oasis where I can lay out patterns and cut them, water ridiculous amounts of plants, set up my easel and pose subjects for blog photography. Plan to come visit and check it out sometime...but yeah, I digress.

Anyhow! I decided to launch into a sewing project I'd been toying with a formulating slowly in my mind for a while and suddenly, once I'd decided I was sewing something, the idea gelled completely and somewhat instantly and there I was with a plan!

See, Dee has too few t-shirts for wearing in this hot weather (like four? which all end up in the hamper far, far too quickly) and he has too many of these plain white undershirts...

...enter semi-obvious "Plan"....make some of these undershirts into legitimate shirts via decoration of some variety.

I pulled out one of my fabric scrap bags and let Dee choose his favorite (bright red, what else!), cut it into squares and handed him an ink pen. He drew the scribbles of his choice and then for fun I did one and lent the pen to Ru to do a square of his own to decorate a plain tee that he had in his bottom drawer. Why leave anyone out?!?

Then, I took their pen marks and embroidered on top of them (thus to make them show up and make them more decoratively permanent. For Ru's more representational art I included a little title (Balloons with a Seatbelt, for those who wonder!) and also embroidered the date (an oversight I mean to correct on Dee's) and then I zig-zag appliqued them to the shirts!

Voila! Instant t-shirts, instant sewing project and instant artistic coolness in our ultra-productive day!  

Yay sewing!!! 

The Day My "Studio" Ate

Am having a painfully explosive artistic day in which my boxes of stored fabrics and markers and ironing board and all manner of threads and beads have vomited all over my bedroom. I have been frantically wading through oceans of inspiration and ideas and manically throwing things together all day. Am now exhausted, too exhausted to go downstairs and get the camera and upload the pictures of said creations. I promise a photographic tour on Monday.

But now...my bed awaits.