Settling In

I am finally starting to feel properly moved into this place. There are so many things that are new and different and so many things that are just the same. With that said, I can handle the differences, even the ones that I think are objectively bad rather than just different, like cat vomit staying in the stairwell for a week.

I have several sewing-related pictures to post which I acquired over the course of my travels. German tailor shops like to put vintage sewing machines in their windows. It's adorable. And I spent a day at a museum of German technology which has some incredibly interesting old looms and things.

Lastly, I am working on a creative project which some of my new friends inspired me to try. It's not a sewing project, but not totally off-topic either. Once my camera batteries are charged I will post pictures of that too.

Diagnosis!

As some of you may know, I've been having joint pain issues for years now. Today, I finally made it to a doctor who would listen to me, and I have a diagnosis. Actually, two. I have the beginning of osteoarthritis in my hands and misaligned kneecaps.

I'm relieved. I had been thinking this was worse, because something that caused pain in so much of my body must be bad. It never really occurred to me that I might have two different problems! I have a nice conservative doctor who doesn't want to rush to medicine, and so I am under the following instructions: "Don't worry. Live your life. But come back in six months so I can check on you, ok?" He wants me to strengthen the muscles around my knees, which I will do, and other than that, not to take any serious steps. When I get back from overseas, we'll reevaluate.

Where does this leave my sewing? I don't really know. But he said not to worry, and he knows I sew, so I will continue to live my life, sewing and all, and we will see where that leads me!

Success of a non-textile kind

Yesterday, my father and I spent the day at Blackwater Wildlife Refuge on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. We had a great day and saw about 30 species of birds, some of which we'd never seen before! Here are a few pictures that I took.

This is the sign you see at the beginning of Wildlife Drive. Apparently they have Delmarva Fox Squirrels, although sadly we didn't see any.

There were so many Tundra swans and Snow geese there. When you got out of the car, you could hear their wings from several hundred feet away.

I have no idea what this is. Ideas?

There were lots of Bald Eagles flying around. We saw one on probably six or eight occasions.

J had begged me to bring back a picture of an eagle "in the wild" and luckily for her, I managed to bring back some adequate ones. (My new camera has a very nice zoom!)

Freedom! Democracy! All that jazz!

And this snake, whatever it is. Anyone a snake guru?

Detour to fundraising

So, it's November 2nd, which means that the Reece's Rainbow fundraiser has started. My twin sister is fundraising for a child who goes by the name of Aisha. (Her real name is masked for privacy reasons.) The goal is to raise $1000 between now and the end of the year.

I am going to be sewing some things to sell to raise more money for her, but in the mean time, would you consider making a small donation? Even $5 would help Teresa reach her goal!

You can find various ways to donate, which range from buying things like fun noodles to making a simple donation of cold hard cash, at Teresa's blog. (If you donate $35, you get a Christmas tree ornament!)

I promise I won't bother you with more straight-out begging for money. But I do plan to post pictures of the things I sew, and those might come with a reminder of why I'm making them. ;)

Safe after Sandy

Don't get me wrong, I am grateful at how we were spared. It does feel a little bit anticlimactic for the storm to be essentially over already, given how hyped it was and how little damage it did. I went out running today and toured the neighborhood, and I only saw one tree down--ours!

Yep, a tree in our backyard fell over some time last night:

As you can see, we got lucky. Had it fallen left, the power lines would have been toast, and that line doesn't power very many households, so it would have been a long long time until we got power back. If it had fallen right, it would have destroyed the fence and landed on a highway.

 Our fence was not undamaged, but this will be easy to fix. Just a few nails and a hammer.

We were truly blessed. Not only was Sandy not nearly as bad as the meteorologists predicted, a lot of our dead stuff had already been blown down in the summer's derecho, and the weakest power lines had already been identified and fixed. What the news is telling us about those in other areas of the East Coast is tragic. My heart goes out to them.

Blow, Wind, Blow?

So far, so good. Which is to say, we still have power, and nothing terribly bad seems to have happened. The fence in the back yard has partially been blown down, but there is no flooding and no trees down. I think perhaps we are seeing the benefits of the summer derecho--there aren't very many dead trees or branches left!

With that said, the internet is showing terrible things happening in New Jersey, New York, and so on, including quite near to where some of my friends live. The winds here are also picking up, so we might still get some damage. Please keep everyone in the range of the storm (...so the entire East Coast, pretty much!) in your thoughts and prayers.

Want to help a little orphan?

So! Big news. Those of you who know me in real life know that my sister has a heart for the oppressed, disadvantaged, and handicapped, especially children. She is involved in the Reece's Rainbow project, which is an organization that raises money to help handicapped children be adopted and families to adopt them. (As you may know, adoption can be extremely expensive!)

Teresa has committed to fundraise for a child this Christmas, and I have said I will help her. We're going to do an online auction to raise money for the child Teresa has chosen to help, as well as some other things.

I'm asking you to help me! There are three things you can do.

1. Donate something for us to sell. It doesn't necessarily have to be handmade, but it should be something that actually has some resale value--it's a little late in the year for a garage sale.

2. Give me some ideas of things I can sew that are not that hard to make and people will actually buy.

3. Pray/offer good thoughts/hope/insert your verb of choice for the success of our fundraising!

Please do 3 at the least, and if you can do 1 or 2, that would be amazing! To help us out, leave me a comment or email me. (I think Blogger provides a way for you to email me without me posting my email address for the spambots of the internet to feast on.) For more information about the fundraiser and about Reece's Rainbow, you can check out Teresa's blog, Sleeping Under God's Wings.

Jelly in Pictures, Part 2

(Here is part one.)

After you have made the juice, you have to turn it into jelly. Essentially, you add a bunch of sugar and cook the sugared juice until it's reaching the jelling point (8* above boiling).

Here is the process in pictures.

The juice with the sugar, cooking. I put the sugar in too early, but it doesn't seem to have caused a problem.

A tricky part (for me) is remembering that all the jars and lids have to be sterilized! I did it in a steamer basket, but you can use paper towels and a pot with water in it just as well.

A jam funnel makes it easier to not get jelly on the threads of the jars.

The finished product!

 Except, there's a little lie there. The picture above is not the finished product. My jelly has turned into a three step process again! Stay tuned for part 3, which will come as soon as possible, pending schoolwork.

Jelly in Pictures, Part 1

Yesterday I set out to make more jelly. A colleague of my father's has an orchard, and he gave Papa a bag of apples with the caveat that they were better suited for applesauce or something similar than for regular eating. I decided to make jelly. This time, though, I took pictures!

Jelly is a two step process. You cook the fruit and drain it to get fruit juice. Then you turn the fruit juice into the actual jelly.

Here is the process in pictures!

Start with apples (or another fruit)

Quarter them, but don't core or peel them. Stick them in a pot.

Cook them until they're mushy, and then let them strain through cheesecloth.

If you have a fruitfly problem in your house like I do, cover your fruit!

A different kind of productivity

We have been relaxing these past few weeks, and I have learned a new skill: making jelly! Eight jars down, four to go. I am making grape jelly with the grapes from my grandfather's back yard, which is really a lovely feeling.

Happy Father's Day!

Happy Father's Day, everyone! If you are a father, you are a hero. Thank you. (Or you at least have the potential to be a hero. If you're a father and not a hero, step it up!)

If you are not a father, you have a father, or are married to a father, or friends with a father, or some combination of the above. Say thank you to them. They do good work, and their jobs are incredibly important.

Have a great day!

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas and have a wonderful day with your family and friends!

If you don't celebrate Christmas, have a happy 25th of December and best wishes for a wonderful celebration on whichever holiday you do choose to celebrate!

Quick advertisement

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Happy fourth!

Happy fourth of July, everyone! I have been doing a little bit of sewing, but not as much as I would like to. I have a job now, and while I am truly thankful for this job, it does take up time and wear me out. I have an alteration to show you all, and I really should get around to finishing that quilt!! It's been way too long.

Bah. I apologize.

I know. I owe you multiple accessory posts. Or at the very least a link to someone else's beautiful creation or genius tutorial. But here's the thing:It's midterms season.

• I just got my wisdom teeth out, and pain medicine not only doesn't work very well, but makes me feel sick.
• My uncle is going overseas with the US Army and will be in danger for a good long time. (Those of you who pray, pray for him, his wife, and his children.)
  
• I have not been getting enough sleep.
• A close family friend just died.

So I have some excuses. I will keep trying. Maybe over spring break?

Contest and update

I haven't even touched my sewing machine since I got to college. This campus is full of fun things to do, and my classes are turning out to be more work than I expected. For example, this week (the second week of school) I have two quizzes and two short papers due. I haven't had much unscheduled time, and what I have had has generally been spent with friends. (Yes, I have friends already. It's very nice.)

I thought that I would share a picture of my side of my dorm room:

This was taken before I really started living in it, of course, so there are now stacks of books and binders and papers all over my desk. I have managed to keep the floor relatively clear, though, at least so far.

In vaguely sewing-related news, have you seen Shabby Apple's Design Contest? It looks interesting. Since I am not in any way, shape, or form a pattern maker, does anyone know roughly how much it would cost to get a pattern made?

I am hoping to pick up my sewing again soon, but I can't promise anything, as I don't foresee the workload getting much lighter.

Sorry all!

I have been very productive, I just haven't been sewing. Our youth group (well, part of it) spent a week in Delaware with Habitat for Humanity. We took a house from this:

to this: You can't see too well on the photos, but what we did is finish the decking on one side of the house (it's a duplex), and raise the walls for the second floor on the other side. It's not quite as much as we had hoped to get done, but we did run into a good many snags along the way.

Many of us also tried out new things. For me, those were sawing with a circular saw while standing on scaffolding, and nailing from the top of a high ladder:
That's me in the black T-shirt and white hard hat in the top left.

I also tried out what it might be like to die early. We took off work early one day and went to the beach, where a friend and I got caught by the waves and had a very hard time getting back to shore. Physically, we are both recovered (me) or recovering (him), but neither of us likes to look at pictures of waves or the beach, and as a matter of fact, when I went to see Inception last night, I had to get someone to hold my hand during those beach scenes. I think it will be a while before I go to the beach again.

It is getting to crunch time for getting ready for college. I honestly don't forsee much sewing, and I'm sorry about that.

This post is not about sewing

Because I haven't done any. Yes, you understood me correctly. Since my last post on Wednesday, I have no sewed a stitch. I have not oiled a machine, threaded a needle, or even looked at fabric longer than 30 seconds. I have been busy with another subject, one as dear to my heart as sewing, and slightly more urgent and expensive:

BOOKS.

I have been trying to buy my schoolbooks for next semester with a minimum of work and money paid out. This has actually been going fairly well, as many of my books are nerd books and generally not that expensive (St. Augustine's Confessions for $8 new? Check.) I shudder for all you poor math and science people--my math textbook costs $150. Needless to say, I haven't bought it yet and am working on alternatives. For anyone who may find themselves in similar straits, or for anyone who just likes getting cheap books, I will pass on Bookfinder. This site searches bookselling places, such as Alibris, half.com, Amazon, Amazon Marketplace, and more that I had never even heard of. And the prices it lists include shipping! This may be my new favorite website.

I hope to finish buying books (except maybe that evil math book) by Monday, and then hopefully some sewing will return--madcap panic rush sewing, as Teresa leaves for ND very very soon, and an entire week is taken away by a Habitat for Humanity trip.

(If you read this whole post, then you may like books enough to want to check out this book giveaway. And yes, I admit, I do get an extra entry for linking to it, but it actually did fit with the rest of this post.)

Oh, and one more random thing: Happy anniversary to my parents, who as of yesterday have been married for 22 happy years. :)

I have an excuse this time!

It's not a good excuse, but at least I have one. It is WAY too hot to sew. Even the thought of turning on an extra light bulb makes me want to pass out. Yesterday, with the humidity factored in, it felt like it was 110 degrees. Gack! (For those of you not on the East coast, all of us East Coasters are suffering under an extreme heat wave which has been breaking records all up and down the coast.) I hate hate hate the heat. I intend to move to Northern Canada some day and live in the Arctic with the polar bears. (Okay, maybe not quite that extreme....)

I have only been doing tiny bits of sewing in fits and starts, and am actually nearly done the Jalie 2908 jeans for Teresa. I suspect, though, that with this heat, the couple of hours I have left will take all week. *sigh*

Happy Fourth!

Yes, I get to post about both holidays...this is the greatest advantage of having dual citizenship. You get twice as much cake!

O! say can you see by the dawn's early light,
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming,
Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight,
O'er the ramparts we watched, were so gallantly streaming?
And the rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there;
O! say does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

On the shore, dimly seen through the mists of the deep,
Where the foe's haughty host in dread silence reposes,
What is that which the breeze, o'er the towering steep,
As it fitfully blows, half conceals, half discloses?
Now it catches the gleam of the morning's first beam,
In full glory reflected now shines in the stream:
'Tis the star-spangled banner, O! long may it wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

And where is that band who so vauntingly swore
That the havoc of war and the battle's confusion,
A home and a country should leave us no more!
Their blood has washed out their foul footsteps' pollution.
No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave:
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

O! thus be it ever, when freemen shall stand
Between their loved home and the war's desolation!
Blest with victory and peace, may the heav'n rescued land
Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation.
Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,
And this be our motto: "In God is our trust."
And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave!

Apparently a test that they use to see if someone is a terrorist sometimes is to ask him to sing the Star Spangled Banner. If he knows and sings all four verses, chances are good that he's not an American! Such a shame--the other verses are so nice.