Ordinary Time

I sew, sew, sew, sew, sew, sew, sew, sew upstairs the whole day through I sew, sew, sew, sew, sew, sew, sew it's what I have to do. 34 yards of bias strips It ain't no trick to make a dress When you sew, sew, sew, and press, press, press. There are pins (there are pins) There are pins (there are pins) And it's the seam ripper that wins. Bias tape  I sew, sew, sew, sew, sew, sew, sew from early morn 'till night. I sew, sew, sew, sew, sew, sew, sew up everything in sight. I sew the pieces by the score, It seems like thousands, maybe more. Zipper in And I know what I'm sewing for,  Sew, sew, sew-a-sew, sew.  Heigh Ho... Still needs a hem and interior handwork. 

You do know that the content of this blog is pretty much based on whatever random thing has happened that day or whatever thought has flitted through my head, right? This usually works fairly well because my brain does flit from interest to interest fairly regularly. When it doesn't work so we'll is when I don't have the freedom to flit and instead have to spend concerted time and effort on one thing.  Usually about this time of year I am knee deep in books frantically trying to get the school schedule finished. You'll note you missed out this year on the dozens of posts on that topic I usually write because I have happily jettisoned planning responsibilities to my children. Once we get started with school I'll help them sort things out a bit, but I'm now more of an advisor. I'm not sad about that.  Instead I have another project that is going to take all my time: finishing the sewing that I need to get done for B.'s wedding. This is your fair warning th...

Look what Y. whipped up for me! A little crocheted sheep!  Y. is pretty fast with a crochet hook, having just started this yesterday. My new little sheepy is going to sit on my desk and keep me company while I work.  ___________________________________ And a brief advertisement... I am starting a new program at Bittersweet Farm: Pony Phonics!  This is a chance for children who need a little extra help in learning to read get more practice while playing with ponies. We will play phonics games, build vocabulary, read to ponies, and create stories. More information is on my business Facebook page  . Eventually it will also be on my website. So if you are interested send me a message or pass the information on to whomever might need it.  Buddy has been practicing his phonics games to get ready. 

In order to cut out all the pattern pieces for The Dress, I need to piece some fabric together to have enough for the pattern pieces. It is the downside to having fabric only 25 inches wide. It's time consuming hand work, but far from mentally taxing. Watching something while I sew slows me down, but listening is perfect.  This is why I found myself binge listening to an amazing podcast. It's called Fiber Nation, and sadly the last episode produced was in 2021. Why am I telling you this not on a Monday? Well, don't let the title fool you. Even if you aren't interested in fiber related things, this podcast is so well done that I guarantee you will find it interesting, especially if you enjoy really well done history research. I've learned about cowboys, the intersection of feminism, home economics, and WWII,  the Isle of Mann, and an art and science installation of a huge crocheted coral reef. I have also found some resources that I have passed along to various child...

So this happened today. Yes, I cut into my handwoven fabric. I finished the dress last Friday, but spend the weekend finishing up odds and ends and cutting out patterns that I need to make for children for the wedding. But I realized that while that task was useful, it was really a delaying tactic to avoid cutting out The Dress.  So today I decided that I must had to do it. One of the questions lingering on the back of my mind was if I would have enough fabric. I spent a lot of time laying out pattern pieces to see how it will work. The good news is that I will be able to get all the pieces cut out. The bad news is that I'm going to need to spend some time forcing to have big enough pieces to get the two back sided panels. This isn't the end of the world, and I always knew it was a possibility because my yardage isn't quite 25 inches. It must adds a bit more fiddly work before I can sew it all together. My goal for tomorrow is to piece the fabric, cut out the last two piece...

This evening at dinner, I had to get up to get my phone in order to play "The Reluctant Cannibal" by Flanders and Swann for the children at the table. This made me realize that it had been a while since I wrote a post urging my readers to find some of their music to listen to. At the Drop of a Hat and At the Drop of Another Hat are two of their best known albums. (Personally, I like Another Hat best.) They are witty and funny and well worth listening to (and making your children listen to.) There are whole sections of patter between the Michael Flanders and Donald Swann that some of my children can do verbatim. And the vast majority of us know many of the songs and can (and do) break into them often. If this hasn't convinced to you take a listen, here are some past posts to encourage you further. Flanders and Swann - This has a link to their song, "The Gas Man Cometh", which is perhaps one of my very favorites. Stuff, part 3: That's entropy man - This pos...

Every so often J. and I realize that it has been quite a while since we've been out by ourselves and I plan in a night out for us on the dinner menu. Tonight was such a night. We had a lovely dinner and then took a walk along the path that runs along the Fox River.  So we got a nice evening out and you get... well, not a lot. How about a picture of Vienna and Buddy to make up for it?

See those boxes that are marked? Those boxes happen to appear on an official Clerk of Court document granting J. and I guardianship of H. It was rather anticlimactic when all was said and done. H. found the whole thing incredibly boring as we had to wait through quite a few cases before the judge reached ours.  I feel incredible relief. With this document we can now apply for social security for H., get her a state ID, and apply for her passport. Still more paperwork, but we've tackled the most difficult and most important piece.  Next up is doing the same thing for R. We have all the paperwork that we need, we (and by we I mean J.) need to turn in the paperwork to get her on the court schedule. It feels less intimidating having done it once already now. 

I'm truly trying to understand here because it makes absolutely no sense to me. Why, why, why do otherwise decent people continue to support the radical right when they do things such as create ugly, horrendous memes mocking a disabled child's obvious love and care for his father? Why do you tacitly sit there and not speak out? To be silent is to tacitly agree that this is acceptable behavior. I know I have friends who support the former president. (Whether you read this blog, though, is another question.) But if you do, why? Why is this okay with you? Why are you not as irate and heartbroken to read the vile things said about a good man and his child? How do you make sense of this?  This has been the question that plagues me. I know some of you personally. You wouldn't stand by if someone was doing this to a child you know. Why does the fact that he has a father who belongs to a different political party change that for you?  And another question for my Christian friends w...

On Sunday after church, Y. decided that she had a craving for baozi (steamed buns). We had some leftover pulled pork from a previous night's dinner, so she whipped up some homemade baozi. Well as fast as one can whip up baozi, it's a risen dough, so it takes a while. Y. had a late-ish lunch.  Though she didn't make a huge amount, there were some leftover, so I was offered some baozi for lunch. I'm never going to turn that down.  My plan for children to each have a night they are responsible for dinner is working well. Each of them has been responsible and started in a timely manner and all have had dinner on the table without any problems. I've fielded a couple questions, but that's it.  Last week everyone chose meals they had made before. This week some have decided to venture into New territory. L. wanted to make calzones this week, so will be learning to make bread dough. Y. had been our resident bread baker for a while, so I told them they needed to work out...

I have no idea why making this practice dress is taking me so long. It's not a difficult pattern. The fabric is pretty easy to work with. I know how to sew. Maybe the key is, I know how to sew, but it's been quite a few years since I did a lot of garment sewing. Maybe I'm still finding my groove. Or maybe I'm going slowly because when I finish this dress I have to cut into the handwoven fabric and that feels intimidating. It's probably all of the above, truthfully. Whatever reason, I still don't have a completed dress. All the seams are finished with bias tape, the process seams are seen, I have even pinned it all together and tried it on (carefully) to check the fit. I think the fit is going to work well with the handwoven. The next step is to insert the zipper.  Sigh.  Inserting zippers is not my favorite thing. I can do it, I even took a fantastic class on it, but once again, it has been well over seven years since I've done it. Today had me poring over m...

This is the title of the most recent Hidden Brain podcast that I've been stewing over ever since I listened to it yesterday morning. I didn't write about it yesterday because I thought some distance from it might tone down my reaction a bit. Reasonable is always better than highly irritated and angry. But time has not softened my response. If anything, it has increased it. I guess I need to write out my response to get it out of my head.  A better working title for this particular episode would have been, "Boys will be boys... or misusing science to excuse bad behavior." If you haven't listened to the episode, it was an interview with a scientist who studies why humans don't like being told what to do and how this explains people's behaviors.  I'm not objecting to the idea that Americans don't like to be told what to do. That's hardly surprising. Anyone who watched people's reactions to being told to wear facemasks during Covid knows exactl...

This weekend is our small town's yearly festival. There are all sorts of activities, but a carnival is a big part of it. J. just dropped off those children who were interested in going and handed them some cash. (They would much prefer to go at night "because everything is more fun then.") This is the beauty of older children. You can drop them off, pick them up when they're done, and put your feet up at home in the interim. This probably means I'm old, but I'm also pretty sure this would have been my preference twenty years ago as well.  K. keeps sending me pictures, so I'll share some with you. 

We started reading A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth this week at teatime. I had forgotten how many characters the book is filled with and how many of them appear in the opening chapters. Even my very experienced listeners were having a little difficulty keeping everyone straight. I ended up paying more than once to review who a character was and how they were related to everyone else. There are some family trees in the front of the book for reference and I may yet photocopy them so everyone has a reference sheet. I think by today everyone had begun to find their footing.  I also want to preach a brief sermon about how valuable reading good books out loud can be. It is more than just hearing a good story and becoming familiar with the sound of written English. It also provides myriad of opportunities for learning other things as well right at that moment.  The book is set in India in 1950, several years after independence from Britain. So far, in the four days we have read aloud, ...

So many people started back to school today it seems. I don't think our town has yet, but certainly other surrounding districts did. We did not. We spent the afternoon swimming with friends which is what should happen on a warm August day. Even if one of my children commented on the deep conversation my friends and I were having while standing in the pool.  K. couldn't join us since he worked all day. He did send me a photo he took of some cool clouds.  This was from the library parking lot. He had stopped there on his way home and picked up a book for me. Unless it's raining he rides his bike the 4.5 miles to work. At night J. goes and picks him up, but sometimes he's done while it is still light, such as today, so he rides home as well. 

I usually take the beginning of the new school year to revamp family systems and schedules. This is a good time to do it because for us the summer slide means a slow decline into entropy as far as anything being organized. If we had a schedule of any sort, everyone, including myself, has forgotten it, so it makes the perfect time to come up with something new. Now, don't take this to mean we are starting school. We aren't quite to the middle of August and still have a couple weeks of summer left. The advent of this new plan was a result of me looking at my calendar for the next two months and realizing how many 5:00 pm clients I have coming up. I didn't really want to make 8:00 pm dinners any more regular than they already are.  I remembered that years ago, when the oldests were in their teen years that I made a dinner schedule. Each of them had one day a week that they were responsible for dinner. I would buy the food and help plan the meal, but they would prepare it, aski...

There is really not much to show this week. The bulk of my time has been taken up with scheduling and planning for the 36 sessions for 6 families who are participating in my action research project on sibling rivalry. There has been little time for anything else.  Pretty much my sole accomplishment is making bias tape for the practice dress. Because I want to make the practice dress exactly as I will The Dress, I need to do Hong Kong seams on all unfinished edges. Hong Kong seams are when the raw edges of all the seams are enclosed with bias tape. Since I will be making the bias tape out of the facing material for The Dress, that is what I needed to do for the practice one.  My week's accomplishment is this. I didn't measure it, but have a sneaking suspicion I will be making more of it. I didn't think quite hard enough about how many and how long the seams on a princess seamed dress are. Today I managed to pin the bias tape to the edges of two pieces.  These are just pinn...

Everyone has enjoyed having the Olympics available via streaming these past two weeks. It means that people can sit down and choose which sport they want to watch when they feel like it. Plus, it also means that even the more obscure sports can be watched. It's been worth it.  Probably R. has enjoyed it the most out of everyone. For the past two weeks she has happily rewatched all of the women's gymnastics over and over and over. Then, wonder of wonders, she got to watch the rhythmic gymnastics. She has just discovered her favorite thing in the world. To be clear, it is only the ribbon part of the rhythmic gymnastics that she loves. The others don't hold her attention. But the ribbon... she is transfixed. I think it helps that she has one of those ribbon on a stick toys which she has loved for a long time, carrying it around with her and taking it outside and vaguely waving it around.  This afternoon she had it outside once again, this time just carrying it. (Just carrying ...

This is the question I have asked myself multiple times over the past week or so. I have a vague sense of dread that I have well and truly over committed myself. Here's my list: The Dress for B.'s wedding. I'm to the making the practice dress stage of the proceedings, but there is still the actual dress to construct. Other items for B.'s wedding. I have promised L. a vest like I made G. That should go pretty quickly at least. Ideally, I also make H. a dress. She is not a typical size, so making her a dress actually seems easier than going shopping to find something that will fit well. My action research project for the post-grad Level 7 certificate on sibling rivalry is entering the time consuming state. I have all my clients, though I need to confirm session dates with a couple still. But, the first client comes on Thursday which means there is a lot of work to do creating forms and evaluation tools that needs to happen between now that then. This is probably the most ...

Such as, today is International Cat Day. Clearly, we would all be the poorer without this vital piece of information. To honor the day, I share with you the four cats who are currently living in our house. Juniper, one of A.'s cats  Also Juniper. The funny thing about these two pictures is that they were taken days apart. Basil, well, part him. A.'s other cat. Juniper and Basil Nefertiti  Juniper, Basil, and Nefertiti Apollo, G.'s cat, AKA the barn cat lottery winner

For the past couple of months, a couple of friends and I have been meeting on Zoom to share our current weaving projects. These are friends I met taking weaving classes and we all decided that we wanted something more consistent than the random weaving class a few times a year. We specifically were interested in focusing on weaving fabric and then sewing clothing with that fabric. It's not something all weavers are interested in. I've been enjoying it. We each take some time to share what we've each been working on, give each other suggestions and encouragement, and also chat a bit.  I wanted to do this because I wanted consistent interactions with other weavers. Self-motivation is not always a problem for me, but on the other hand, knowing we have a time set to meet, does give me some benchmarks to work toward. It's interesting because we each lean towards different types of weaving and styles of clothing.  This feels like another small step towards creating the commun...

Isn't it funny how we are so convinced that we know what the future holds, yet time after time life shows us that our crystal balls are of less value than the Magic 8 balls some of us played with as children? I was thinking about how my life these days, outside of parenting, consists of horses and weaving. (Well, fiber in general, but weaving is what I spend the most time thinking about.) If I think back to even just ten years ago, there was not the remotest idea in my head that this would be the case. Life is full of surprises.  This is also true of our parenting. I can vividly remember sobbing on a therapist's couch about the horrible things I knew... KNEW... were in my family's future. And she very gently pointed out that nothing was set in stone. It was difficult to really believe her, but even have someone else who knew the details of our life think differently about our future was enough to pull me back from the edge a bit. And here I am, many years later, to say she ...

Here is the current state of my studio table.  With the fabric woven and finished, it was time to move ahead to the pattern for The Dress. But the wet finishing shrink the dress fabric by about an inch width wise. I always knew this was a possibility, and due to the amount of warp yarn I had, making the fabric wider wasn't an option. So it was time to pivot again.  I've pivoted so many times in this process, I don't have any idea what plan I'm on now. F? J? Something like that, I'm sure. Because the pattern wasn't wide enough for the simple pattern I had been working on drafting myself, I knew it was time to move to princess seams to get narrower pattern pieces. Princess seams are definitely far beyond my very basic pattern drafting skills. So I dug through my pattern stash. And what do I see right on top? The princess seam version of the dress I was drafting. Hooray!  It's Burda 7972: But there was no way I was cutting into my handwoven fabric without being...

Over the past week, J. has been trying to figure out what is going on with the air conditioning to see if he could fix it. He'd talked to some helpful people and yesterday, with the P. Family dad on the phone he did some more investigating.  With the purchase of one $16 dollar tool and a $20 dollar part, he was ready to turn the power to see if the new part did the trick. So I stood in the utility room next to to breaker box and J. climbed up on the porch roof. Communicating by phone, I flipped the circuit breaker and... The unit started running! The next step was to head upstairs to see if there was cold air coming through. Initially it didn't seem like it and there was disappointment. But in a little bit we started to feel some cold air and by bed time the upstairs was starting to feel cooler than downstairs. Hooray! Now, this is the unit that cools the second floor. Figuring out what is going on with the downstairs unit feels too complicated because our hearing and cooling s...

Every so often I go back and read old posts, and sometimes when I'm doing this, I come across one that I had forgotten I had written and I amuse myself. I want to re-share a post with you because I kind of love it.  This particular post is from 2013 and involves Gretel, our Labrador. We loved Gretel, but she was a character. She is the only dog we've had where I felt compelled to hire a dog trainer because I knew I was out of my depth with her. Being 2013, this also means that G. and L. were four and K. was seven. That spring I had decided that everyone needed a deep dive into fairy tales and I would check out many copies of the same one so we could compare them. If you do this long enough, everything starts to sound like a fairy tale, hence the blog post. Enjoy. ___ Once upon a time there lived three little children. These children loved grilled cheese sandwiches so much and were always happy when their Mother made them. These little children also loved going to movies. And on...

It feels as though it's been a while since I have written one of these posts. Last week, I had gone out to the store or something, and when I got back home, R. was trying desperately to tell me something about L. and a coyote. It seems there was a moment of great excitement while I was away. L. happened to glance out of the back door and happened to see a scrawny coyote trying (unsuccessfully) to snatch a chicken. L. ran outside and grabbed a shovel from the back porch and went to do battle with the coyote. He turned tail and ran, and L. chased him back beyond the horse pasture. I'm happy to say that we haven't seen a coyote since them. L. thought he wasn't well which either played into his poor chicken snatching skills or he wasn't well because of his poor chicken snatching skills. Zorro the rooster, did not acquit himself very well during the whole exchange, deciding to stand far away and make a lot of noise. The coyote was unphased by the noise.  Fluffy the roost...

 I am typing this post on my new computer. Well, new as of last week, but I have finally started to get acquainted with it. My old computer was over ten years old. Since I have no recollection of exactly when I got it, it could very well be significantly older than ten. I don't like to spend money on electronics, nor do I relish the process of figuring out the new computer or phone or whatever. If I could buy one computer and one phone and have it last, I would be very happy.  But electronics that last are not a thing I'm told. My old computer was running an operating system that was no longer supported and it was starting to run slowly and not always work as it should. There was a very real possibility that one day it would just stop working. And that would be bad. We've actually been talking about getting me a new computer for a couple of years now. Maybe three or four years ago, we backed up everything onto a flash drive just in case. But computers are expensive and as I...