And I’m already crazy from all the banging and crashing and hammering next door. I had to ask them to remove some boards from my flower garden where they were flattening my poppies. I was polite and the guy I asked jumped to fix the problem quickly. However, the fence (belonging to their side luckily) is broken in about 4 places now and bricks are lying on our side of the divide between the houses. See the view through my basement window?
Some of this is inevitable but I hope they don’t trample everything in an effort to remove the debris. I’m not encouraged to worry much about the gardens on the west side of our property this summer. I’ll be happy if we get away with minimal damage. Meanwhile it’s encouraging me to either work in my studio on the opposite side of the house with earphones on my head or to go out for several hours during the day. Today I plan to do both.
I’ve finished my granddaughter’s bright blue overtunic for the wedding and I have to say it turned out very cute. I’m almost finished the sunny yellow undertunic and hope to be done that today before I go out this afternoon. Tomorrow I will concentrate on cutting out my DIL’s outfit. She wants a bit of a train on the overtunic so that should be fun to figure out. Good thing these are fairly simple shapes and I have a lot of sewing experience. (Got my first sewing machine when I was 8 but I won’t tell you what goofy things I made on it! I’m sure you can imagine.) It’s a matter of making it up as I go along, drafting the pattern directly on the fabric and sewing without a model to try it on constantly as I go. They’ll be over next week for us to babysit though so I’ll have a chance to get some preliminary fitting.
I’m turning the heels on the T-Man ribby socks. I should learn not to knit while watching a very exciting movie though. I had to fix a fairly large mistake this morning. We watched Children of Men and WOW! is that ever a great movie! Very thought provoking as well as superbly acted and amazingly filmed. It’s like a documentary and the people act very much as anyone would in such a tough situation. Clive Owen’s character is very much a hero but not in the usual kick-ass sense. If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend this movie. Just don’t knit while you’re watching it.
I’m heading over to my friend’s house this afternoon to meet with some of the members of our Spectrum Study Group. Several of us missed the last meeting so we’re trying to catch up on our felted jewelry. I used some acrylic medium last night to stiffen my felt leaf-shapes and I realized that there’s a learning curve here and I need to experiment more. I have about 4 different kinds of acrylic medium and the one I used is a matte varnish. It worked fine to stiffen but dulled the colours just a bit (especially the black) and left some little plasticky bits on the back where it pooled while drying. I need to make sure it gets squeezed out more carefully so there isn’t any excess medium. Maybe matte wasn’t a great choice either because it probably contributed to the dulling effect. Next time I’ll try the gloss version. The leaves will definitely hold their shape well for a necklace though.
My smaller Christmas cactus thinks it's an Easter cactus. Don't think I'm going to argue with it — it's so pretty.
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