Ordinary Time

I don't really have anything to show you today. I'll start weaving the red towels tomorrow, I turned up the hems of the green towels so I can start hemming, and I need to put a third warp for a wool scarf on my rigid heddle loom. It's all holiday market making all the time here. It's also not terribly interesting blog content.  So you get a brief story instead. I stopped at Michael's today to pick up a couple of things I needed. The pins were easy. I also wanted some more wool yarn because of like to have quite a few wool scarves to sell. I looked and looked and finally found three (out of two aisles of yarn) that was 100% wool. I didn't think I'd have a huge selection, but I thought I'd have more options than white, brown, and grey. Everything else has acrylic in it. There was actually so much plastic yarn that I worried some small county's petroleum reserves must have been stolen by cheap yarn manufacturers.  And it wasn't even that cheap. I do...

There are some things about the property that we talk about improving, but time or money (or both) make it so our plans are difficult to carry out. We had a free day today (well aside from our chauffeuring duties) and the weather was beautiful, so J. decided to lay a brick path where we had long planned on putting one.  It runs alongside the chicken coop in an area that has been pretty much an ignored wasteland. Well, except for the hydrangeas we planted in it a few years ago thinking they would line the brick path we imagined and just ended up looking as though someone had dropped them at random. The path will help the hydrangeas make sense. We also had the bricks already. We picked them up for free from someone right after we moved and have been living in a pile by the parking area ever since. Now that pile is nearly gone as well. J. only needed a few supplies, making it a fairly low cost endeavor.  Here's the nearly final project. (J. still needs to figure what he's going t...

Mucking stalls everyday provides a lot of time to think. Well, it provides a lot of time to think when I'm not listening to a podcast. Sometimes I just need to have some quiet; as if my brain is full and it needs some time to process. All of this is the prelude for what I'm going to write about. I would really like someone to do a study on women's perception of body image correlates to the shift away from custom made clothing to ready-to-wear. I have a hypothesis that perception of body image becomes increasingly negative as less and less clothing is custom made from individual measurements. This is all due to my own experiences learning to draft patterns from scratch. Before industrialization, all clothing was created with a specific person in mind. Either these clothes were made in the home, or tailers and dressmakers were hired to create a wardrobe. Some dressmakers would live with a family for a period of time, taking measurements, doing fittings, and creating clothes a...

Recently, I think of things I could write about pop into my head throughout the day, Then, when I sit down to write after dinner... Nothing. I can think about the laundry I've done, the bills I've paid, the dishes I've washed, but none of those things are terribly interesting and everyone does them. I'm pretty sure no one really wants to read about those things, either. I'm beginning to wonder if I need to start keeping a running list of possible blog topics. Today I do have something to write about because we did something a typical. It was H. and Y.'s annual neurology appointment. It still feels so fantastic to be back home within an hour of the appointment start time. Today that was even with a blood draw added in. This is so much better than when we were driving an hour and a half one way and had to stop for lunch on our way home.  The appointment was quick and easy and we don't need to go back for a year. After needing to go every three to six months th...

Here is one of the more fascinating photos you are going to see on the blog.  Clearly you should read that previous sentence with a sarcastic tone because this looks like just a piece of fabric. Which it is, sort of. It's also my latest addition to my personal sample book that I'm slowly constructing.  I've learned that when you draft your own patterns one of the most challenging aspects is that there are no construction directions. It's great to say I want to put side seam pockets into something, but what would those pattern pieces look like and how do you put them together? This is where a sample book comes in. It contains directions and samples for various parts of garment construction, such as fly front zippers or ratios for Father's or side seam pockets.  I'm very pleased with how it came out and I am pretty sure that I can replicate it in an actual garment. But it also took me a ridiculous amount of time to figure the whole thing out and then actually doin...

J. took four children camping this weekend (H., R., L., and G.). Y. stayed home to work and I stayed home to see clients, take care of animals, and drive Y. The camping group met B. and HC at Apple Canyon State Park in NW Illinois. They had a great time, though Friday night, with its freeze advisory, was a bit chilly. Here are some photos various people took.