THIS, THAT AND THE BLAHS

It's a dreary Sunday afternoon-- cold and cloudy. I thought I would accomplish so much this weekend and I have accomplished some things. I have cut out the front and backs of the tuck dress and completed the tucks. I marked them the old fashioned way with "tailor tacks" -- use needle and thread and make a single stitch leaving a longish tail at each end. You do several all along the line you are marking then you remove the pattern piece and when you separate your two pieces of fabric, you snip the the treads in between so both pieces are marked. Did I mention tedious :) I did that because lately when I've used "washable" markers, or chalk they haven't washed out very well. Well, I took a scrap of the fabric I was using and marked all over it pretty heavily and put it in with a small load of cloths. I put some spray and wash on just a small section. -- It all washed out. Maybe it's because I often press where I've marked. The thing is, it seems silly to have to wash a partially made object before you can do any pressing. My next step with the scrap will be to mark all over it again -- heavily and then press it and then wash it again to test my theory. Anyway, I did the second dress using the marker and will wash it out before I press too much. The marks I made were very tiny and only a couple actually show -- the rest were on the inside of the stitiching but I'm not going to press my luck.

I've been in kind of a funk off and on for the past week or so. Seems to happen every year about this time. It's been almost eleven years now and it took me about eight of those years before I figured out that it was kind of an annual thing and always went away after the anniversary of Bob's death. It's not every day and I'm not looking for sympathy from anyone -- I've gotten a lot better at dealing with it. It's just so unexpected. You're having a great day and all of a sudden the feelings just hit you like a ton of bricks and you start remembering all those things connected with the the illness and the death and the grief and anger and all of it. Then after a few hours or even minutes it goes away and a few days go by or even a week and it hits again. I guess it's kind of like reliving those first few weeks after he died. Only not on a daily basis. They say time heals and it does for the most part but you never completely forget. You just learn to deal and adjust. I'm so thankful that I have such a wonderful family. They all have had to work through and deal with their dad's/son's/brother's death too -- I know I'm not alone.

OK enough of that. On to something that brings a smile. My thread arrived that I ordered to be able to finish the log cabin quilt. I also got some books I'd ordered on free motion quilting. I should have just ordered the one book. They are all basically giving the same information. I'm going to try to practice some of the "lessons" so I can try different techniques but on the log cabin I'm just stipling just working on making the stipling bigger instead of tiny and really close together.

I'm planning on going to Nashville next weekend so I may wait till I get back before I set up my "quilting station" again since it has to sit in the dining room which is what you see when you first walk into my house. Or I might set it up after church tonight and aim to finish all the quilting before I leave. I'll make up my mind between now and then. Either way I'll either sew on the dresses or on the quilt. In lieu of some of the sewing I was supposed to do this weekend, I've been browsing sewing/crafting blogs via this list. There are over 500 blogs listed here. I've looked at about 70 and only 4 or 5 of the links did not work. I've bookmarked a few that link to some tutorials and things like that and some that looked interesting enough that I might follow on occasion.

I made chicken and dumplings this afternoon too -- almost forgot about that. They turned out really well considering. When I was in TX last weekend I had gotten a couple of rotisserie chickens from Sam's. I took the meat off and put the meat from each in a ziploc bag and froze it so it would make the trip home. Worked well but next time I'm also going to put the bones in a bag and freeze them so I can use them for the stock. Anyway, today I just put three quarts of chicken broth in my dutch oven and added a carrot, a celery stock and an onion and boiled ti for about 30 minutes. Then I took all the veggie pieces out, added a package of Mary B's Frozen dumplings and simmered for 40 minutes and then put the cut up chicken in with it. Oh, I added a can of cream of mushroom soup to the broth at the beginning. It turned out very tasty. I'm going to take some to this young couple who are on the verge of having their first baby and freeze the rest and take it to NashVegas this weekend.

Enough of this rambling. I've got things to do so I'm going to get to them. Have a great rest of the weekend and a wonderful week everybody. We have our science fair this week -- that's always fun to seeing what kind's of experiments our students do. Some of them are really good.