I recently changed the URL for this blog – it is a domain now! I know most bloggers are moving to Instagram and other platforms and away from blogs, but I have wanted to make my blog a little more than it was for some time. But like everything else new, it has been a journey and my ideas were sidetracked. This blog will still be mostly about sewing, but if I can figure out some of the technical aspects of what I want to do I would like to add some tutorials, resources for reference or interesting tips and techniques.

It has been over a year since I blogged and some life changes occurred during that time. I retired from full time work last August and we took a 2 1/2 week vacation to Europe later that month. The rest of 2019 was spent on some house fix-ups that were needed and ‘learning how to be retired’. I thought I would spend all my time sewing, but somehow that didn’t happen.

When I worked, I got in the habit of sewing in the evenings when I wasn’t totally and mentally exhausted from my work day. When not working I seemed to keep busy all day doing things, then still tried to sew at night. But I wasn’t accomplishing much, because I was exhausted from being busy all day. AAAGGGHHH! I kept feeling like I needed some sort of schedule so I could build sewing in during the day.

Then came holidays and the new year. We decided to ‘remodel’ our hobby rooms. We both wanted to get rid of carpeting and put down a new flooring. And I wanted to do some serious purging and reorganizing of the sewing space. Replacing flooring meant each room needed to be completely emptied. Since we had limited space to put the stuff being removed from the rooms, we did them one at a time. Hubby went first because I knew packing up my stuff would take longer.

The process of emptying room 1, new flooring installation and putting back room 1 took about 3 weeks in January. Emptying room 2 (which is actually 2 adjoining rooms), new flooring installation and contractor work for a new cutting table, bookshelves and ironing station took about 4 weeks. So we were now at mid-February. I started putting things back in my space, happily went off to the Mid-Atlantic Quiltshow for a couple of days, came home and the Covid-19 virus was in the US! AAAGGGHHHH!

Well, now I was home all the time, so lots of time to reorganize and put stuff away. But like many others, I just couldn’t sew. I spent all my time reading about the virus, feeling sad, angry, scared, helpless, frustrated, etc – all the emotions that most people who actually believed there was a virus were working through. I had this beautiful, organized space and didn’t feel like using it. Then came the evolution of MASKS!

So I jumped on that bandwagon pretty early, even though some medical folks I know thought it was a complete waste of time and the masks would be useless. I felt I had some purpose with all that was going on. And we now know that were were all learning about the virus and efficacy of masks too (and still are learning).

I made a couple of masks for us; then friends started asking for some; then friends and kids of friends starting asking for some…so now I had a production line of mask making going. (That fat quarter quilting stash I built up really came in handy!) But the mask making really got me back in the groove to sew.

During the mask making, hubby asked me to make him some pajama cotton knit boxer shorts. He really didn’t like the purchased ones for various reasons. He rarely asks me to make him anything, so I couldn’t say no. I pulled out an old Butterick pattern, compared it to his purchased pair for sizing, and it looked like it would work. I found some cotton knit in the resource center, added in the changes he wanted and Voila! Sample pair got a thumbs up.

I didn’t have any other pieces of cotton knit I was willing to use for this project so I ordered 3 pieces of print cotton spandex knit from Fabric.com. Most of the print knits are more child-like. But I found a dog print, a fish print and a dragon print. He liked those just fine, so I whipped up 3 more pair for him. He was happy to get rid of the purchased boxers he had been sleeping in.

One trick I use is to stitch a small piece of ribbon into the back casing/waistband so that one can easily tell the back from the front in an elastic waist garment.

In addition to some sewing, I have been spending ‘stay at home’ time watching sewing videos, cleaning out the DVR but watching some shows we recorded last season, flower gardening and reading. A few other garments have been completed so I will cover those in future posts.

Thanks for reading!