Monday, August 08, 2016

Getting Things Done...

Saturday:
  • Sent an email to both McCall's Patterns and Simplicity Patterns offering up some of my vintage patterns as loans for their reissues.
  • Posted ten more patterns in the Metamorphpursuit shop. Not as easy as it seems: the prep involves photographing or scanning the actual patterns, doing any necessary touch up work on the images, transcribing or copying the pattern descriptions, and researching current prices to come up with a realistic market price. Luckily, for most of my 100 patterns I have the images and the descriptions saved in Flickr.
  • Did research for my upcoming New Jersey/Philadelphia trip and discovered that they had three different sewing workshop/sewing schools (Butcher's Sew Shop, MADE Studio, and Handcraft Workshop)
  • Proofread 10 more chapters of my sister's upcoming thriller, Pay To Play, marking with my little red pen.

Sunday:
  • Removed worn out elastic from a favorite skirt to replace.
  • Took apart an old pair of underwear to make a pattern.
  • Removed sleeves from Simplicity 5190 because I never wear it and hopefully this will change that. I still love the fabric and I was going to take it apart and make New Look 6968 but Jo-Ann never brought back the brown stretch gabardine in Potting Soil that I wanted to use for the skirt.
  • Traced New Look 6216 and redrafted it from a top into a dress. Since the weight gain, I find myself almost obsessive about cutting out patterns and fabric because I'm scared the final make won't fit over my hips. This attitude is not making me happy. The failure of my New Look 6145 muslin still affects me. Being so out of touch with my own body is weird after knowing it so well for so many years and I'm sill mourning the image of that small breasted girl who fit all the clothes in her closet.
  • Looked up info for my dad on his medical insurance and prescriptions.
Digusting, right?

But the BIG thing that happened yesterday was that I discovered my father has been covering the floor in our storage shed with rugs even though the room floods periodically. Who does that? Argggghhh! Once he mentioned that, I ran out to see if any of my stuff (this shed is where the contents of my old and future life lives) had been damaged. I found out that my perfect rug; which had been rolled up in a plastic bag was standing with the unprotected (!) non-plastic covered end on the wet and moldy carpet. Worse yet, my lovely Brunei fabric had been rolled up inside the carpet, again directly touching the moldy carpet. So for the rest of the day I fought to protect two of my favorite belongings.*
 


Both the rug and 8 yards of the 54" fabric were draped across our wood deck to get dried by the sun. A little research revealed that the rug was 100% nylon so it should be okay after it has dried and been steam cleaned. I now regret I didn't rent the steam cleaner right then but I was very upset and in shock. After the fabric got a few hours fe sun I ran it in the washer on the sanitary setting in HOT water for 1hr 40min with white vinegar, a bit of Shout, and detergent. I then washed it a second time for a regular 40 min cycle and then dried it thoroughly. Afterwards, I ended up discarding about 10 inches of damage from the selvage inward by ripping along the grain.

Hopefully, tomorrow will be just as full of completed tasks but hopefully more positive and fun than that last one!

*that I hadn't been able to store in the house. The others include my rocking chair and my Crosley turntable, which luckily were left unharmed.

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