Detours

 All was going well in the sun room studio.

 Even a bit of progress had been made in the velvet cushion department.

But then...

THIS ARRIVED!!!

 

Yellow pollen is in abundance this year and it's either keep the windows closed and simmer away in the heat or open them and find a layer of this on everything you touch. Eventually I had to put my painting and sewing away until it passes as no Lucy wants a yellow stained pinafore and velvet  proved to be a literal pollen magnet!

 

 So the question arose...what to do with my time?

The domestic goddess answer would have been to dust and vacuum 24/7 in an attempt to keep ahead of the yellow plague but let me tell you that gets old fast!

Luckily I received a request for something that involved a mess of a different sort.

 

The jumble you see above was a project from way last fall. I had spent a couple days taking photos and notes of all the steps involved in making pincushions and pin toppers. It was actually a lot of fun to do and turning a discombobulated work space like the one above...

 

 ...into this kind of an arrangement is the type of cleaning up that makes me smile.

 

 And I even got some goodies made in the process!

 

The plan was to then take all those notes and photos and turn them into tutorials. Sounded good at the time but the nitty gritty of it once I got on the computer was way beyond my capability! It was much easier to just pretend I had never even started.

 

 But then this week I got a request.

Did I have a pattern for the yo-yo pincushions?

 

Well, yup I did...sort of.

My notes were still fairly organized, my computer had a mass of photos ready to go, and if I wasn't mistaken a spark of motivation was making itself known. That combined with free time on my hands led me to spend my week with this as my view.

 

 Organizing the images and the text really wasn't that difficult in the end.

 

 Gathering the skills together to put it all into PDF formats on the other hand, was another story and one which, were it not for the generous assistance provided to me by dear hubby and child #1,

 would not have been told.

 

Oodles of thanks!!!

I promise to make you guys as many cookies as you want.

 

The really good news, however, is that it rained today.

 

Buckets in fact.

And as it poured down

and puddled at the end of the road

   so too did the pollen!

 

Looks like could be work as usual next week...

 

 



Trial, Error, and Distractions

 With the beginning of each new month I like to plan out some goals I want to accomplish in the weeks ahead. The first step in this process is to take a few minutes to review where I stand at the end of the previous month's work. Today what I found to my credit was a lot of trial, error, and distraction! 

 

During May I made my first attempt at binding together a larger, more people

friendly version of Attic Days.

 

 In the process I discovered the order in which I had the pages arranged and printed was all mixed up. I fudged it a bit but ultimately that little shiny disk dear hubby created for me to take to the printers will have to be altered. Whoops!

 

 I also found striped fabric was too hard to work with. It shows every little pull out of alignment and drives me crazy! Next time I'll try a calico print and hope it's much more forgiving.

 

 Strange but true, my biggest obstacle turned out to be this....possibly the best Doll News ever! Every article was amazing. Most were directly related to Tasha Tudor in some way but those that weren't still made me think of her because of their focus on doll play.

 

Until every word was devoured it was a huge distraction to creative work of any sort. At first I said to myself I would read one article with every teatime break I took. Trouble was I found myself taking tea far too often. Eventually my stomach ached something terrible and so I had to put down both the cuppas and the companion cookies I was gobbling up.

 

 And then there was this old friend and bane of my existence....
Lucy's velvet pincushion!

 

 I do believe I've spent more time taking out stitches than putting them in.

I just can't seem to get it to look the way I want.

But then again, sometimes I don't even know what I want!

 

 What I do know is that I love this book upon which the cushion sits. It's called Cape Random and is the most amazing story set in nineteenth century Newfoundland. Reading about the hardscrabble life those early settlers had makes the trials and tribulations of a velvet cushion seem positively trifling!

 

 Anyone remember the little "Spool" quilt block I put in the book?

 

 Well I had a go at making one up last week and goodness were my patchwork skills lacking.

I loved working with the floral fabrics however...

 

...so much so in fact I couldn't help but head outside.

Talk about distractions, there were about a million things needing attention out there and most of them were weeds!

 

But June is here now and with it a whole new round of days to try things out and hopefully find some success to share along the way....