Working on PHD's (Projects Half-Done): Rudolf

 Hello, everyone.

Today I resumed work on one of the PHD items in the sewing studio: half-circle folded Christmas napkins.

They're cute, but I suspect they're better suited to being a just-for-grins table setting, not for actual wiping of mouths. Though the bright busy candy-canes print on the back side might conceal a little in the way of spots, I think the half circle shape would be hard to get used to using.

On the right, the completed one. This was a Sewing Club project recently. 

On the left, the other one. (I had cut out two sets of half circles before the club meeting.)

Placement: I used the thumbtack alignment trick from the tee shirt project and the bicycle tote project after marking the center of the design thru a small hole in the paper with chalk. Then fiddled the needle to go exactly where the thumbtack had pierced the light blue dot. If one uses that trick, one must be very careful of the point sticking up through the stabilizer! But it gets the centers aligned.

I think Rudolf didn't draw up as much on this second one. I used two thicknesses of Polymesh as well as the Sulky Sticky Fabri-Solvy that the fabric was floated on. And used a scrap of Sulky Solvy topper as well!

All materials were from stash.

I can stop here and just use these two napkins for decorating...that rather appeals to me. As opposed to cutting out more half circles and fiddling with the placement and stuff. 

Coping with the mosquitoes, maybe

 Hello, everyone.

In a recent post the mosquito problem encountered walking after the the area received rain was mentioned. 

On that walk, we encountered a couple of fellows wearing insect veils--whole head coverings. The mosquitoes were very interested in the faces inside the veils, but couldn't get in to bite them. We continued walking and decided that fighting off clouds of bugs in front on the veil beats race-walking to try and stay ahead of them.

Research online not only told of various things like the ones we saw--the one man said his came from L.L.Bean--but also a number of DIY suggestions. The one I went with was the observation that, for keeping no-see-ums out, one can go into almost any fabric store. The fabric is also called "bridal veiling." AKA tulle!

I have a lot of tulle lying around so pulled out the big chunk of green--I keep it rolled on a paper towel roll--and got to work.

The concept: A full-width piece of the green tulle that looks long enough to go from the top of the head down to below the collarbone, gathered onto something at the top.

Ready for hemming. The white serged seam was only for the first go-around. The second time, I switched to darker threads. Attentive readers will note that the sewing clips are making an appearance here. As well as my old, but beloved, sewing machine table!

Tulle from stash, purple-ish cotton binding from stash.

The last stage of hemming: folding over the binding (like for a quilt) and then zig-zagging the edge down. I used green thread for the top, but since the bottom is the outside edge I used lavender in the bobbin.

On the dress form. It is almost completely see-through, so we can view the wildlife while wearing it.

The plan with these nets is to pin them to the top of our bucket hats so the brim will keep the netting from touching the face. Then we will tuck the hem into the collar of the shirt.

Missing the Camino Paths

Hello, everyone.

Things have been calm around Ye Olde Homestead this past week. No real developments or finished projects to report to y'all.

This morning we "got after it" as we say in South Texas, and left for our walk about 0600. It was dark. If there hadn't been street lights we couldn't have done our two miles. (Cracks in the sidewalks and unlevel panels in the cement will take you down very efficiently.) We were discussing light conditions early in the morning and after musing about best times to leave, as the days are shortening, we remembered leaving Logroño in the dark before dawn.

Arriving in Logroño

(Sorry no pic of the next morning...we depended on street lights that morning too.) 

We are continuing to walk nearly every day and will do as much walking as possible on any road trips that materialize. 

It's not entirely sure that dashing out first-thing almost every day for a couple of miles is really enough distance, but we went to Bentsen Park last week and the mosquitoes chased us hard the entire loop. It was the fastest 3.5 miles we have ever walked! It's been a rainy summer and the places we normally walk for training have all kinds of standing water...these would also be known as "mosquito farms." We don't want to lose a pint of blood while walking, and we really would rather not come down with something lovely like dengue fever! So it's up and down the streets for a while. This too shall pass.

Resuming an old project in process

 Hello, everyone.

When I say old, I mean REALLY old. Some of these squares were raw-edged appliquéd by DH's grandmother before she passed some decades ago. The work was taken up by her daughter, his mom, and then later the box of squares was sent to me to assemble the quilt.

The large butterflies were hand basted into place and then their edges were done with black blanket stitch. They each have little French-knot eyes at the base of their antennae. So cute!

DH had made a wooden quilting frame for quilting it, but our stage in life was not right to do a major hand quilting project--for one thing, I had never even tried it before--and the quilt was put away. Now it has come out, and will be finished with machine quilting.

The back piece was taped to the floor tiles to hold it smooth for pinning. Blue painter's tape is my friend!

Today this will be moved from the floor to the dining room table and the sewing machine set up to do the quilting. I will try to continue motifs that were done by hand years ago, but will be doing a lot of straight lines inside the blocks probably.

I had a good pile of basting safety pins, but had to buy more to get this pinning done. There is no such thing as too many basting pins!

Another Patriotic Embroidery

 Hello, everyone.

The pickup truck with the stars and fireworks was done on burlap. Of course, that was a chunk out of a larger piece of the stuff. So (surprise, surprise) there was more burlap lying around the sewing studio...

American readers will (or should) recognize the first sentence of Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. (They were dedicating a national cemetery for military dead on part of the site of the Battle of Gettysburg which took place not long previous to this event.) This speech is one of the classic orations of American history. 

It took our President Lincoln 5 drafts to get this short speech right. (So if you're a student and think every word you write is perfect the first time, learn from the master and learn to rewrite.) He was actually the introductory speaker for the event, another man followed him with an address that took something like an hour. 

Mr. Lincoln's five minute speech lives on as a masterpiece, while the famous star speaker's name is only known to really obsessive students of Civil War era history. People used to memorize the entire speech for public declamations...rather like the "Duty, Honor, Country" speech by General MacArthur in the 20th century. 

The famous phrase "that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth" is from this speech. 

The flying eagle below the text was one of the free (well, actually "party favor") designs that was a gift-with-purchase of my Hatch Personalizer embroidery software, it was thrown in by the dealer along with some other designs I haven't gotten any use out of yet.

The hanging method for this is the same as for the pickup flag, just stick a dowel into the ribbon loops and hang the whole thing with a string.

Another breakfast idea

 Hello, everyone.

This is called "another" idea because this time I tried something new in the eggs:

In addition to bits of nopal (parboiled in advance with a bit of garlic) and chicken meat, this got added at the end: Preserved Lemon bits! From the giant jar of preserved lemon that we made from the big harvest of lemons before the Giant February Freeze hit this past winter/spring.

The lemon is preserved in salt brine--no sugar is used--and it gives an amazing ZING of lemon flavor to whatever it's put with. 

Larks' Heads for the win

 Hello, everyone.

What are larks' heads? you ask. Well, if you didn't spend formative years in Scouting, you may not know them by this name. Or may not know them at all. The knot is used in weaving and other things, with various names.

This is the table runner/wall hanging from the Sweet Pea shop. It's a machine-embroidered appliqué project. I didn't want to restrict it to lying flat on the table, and I wasn't in love with the stack of three pairs their pattern showed. Others of their table runners roll out in a line and I thought this would actually be better as a line than a double stack. So that's what got done.

But where and how to hang it?

The back side of the hanging. I used the ribbon and drapery hooks method from the zipper holder project a while back in Sewing Club. 

Then I went to hang the banner and discovered that the (vanity-style) rod in the dining room is too fat for the drapery hooks. 

I have previously used ribbons to hang things from the rod, and it occurred to me that it would be perfect for this. And, not wanting to spend forever tying little knots at both ends of ribbons, with attendant uneven lengths, I decided to go for the humble, but classic, lark's head. It's a simple loop, with one end pulled through the other around the rod, and then the drapery hook hangs from the loose end.

Not only was this much simpler than other methods, by cutting all of the ribbons at the same time and making sure the loops matched it was easy to get it to hang straight.

Happy Independence Day to all of my fellow Americans!

A new flower

 Hello, everyone.

A couple of years ago, I received a gift of a bag of bulbs-and-tubers from family. I planted them. The Dahlias bloomed, but the climate here in summer is too hot at night and they disappeared. The lilies bloomed but have had little success since. The gladiolas marked time and disappeared. The next year, I dug around in the glads' pot and found some firm tubers. These got planted. Now, months later and after I had decided they weren't going to do anything after all, I walked outside this morning to find this:

I guess the glad tubers in the bag were too young or something. 

Training is in progress

 Hello, everyone.

As the title says, we're officially in training. Slowly. In hopes of walking the Camino again.

We've been walking just about 2 miles (3K) most mornings...traffic considerations chop off a few hundred feet at each end of the 1 mile long block as the morning drivers are a bit rushed.

A couple days ago, this photo during our morning walk:

A few seconds, a few steps, earlier the sky was pinker...I wanted to get mostly past the light pole and lost the moment. Still very pretty as the sun was coming up.

Today, DH didn't walk, so I took Die Pup out and we put on just about a mile and a quarter (2K?) as she's older and not in athletic shape. Also she wanted to turn around and go back home. (This is the same pup that was happy to stroll for 2.5 miles in Albuquerque, NM, a month or so back. Around home, she doesn't expect as much of herself.)

Yesterday the sky wasn't beautiful, but the air was nice. It was cloudy much of the day and rained some in the afternoon. It was unseasonably cool in the late afternoon: only 90F and then a cool breeze came through before the rain started and it dropped into the 80's.