Good Friday Wishes

What today means to me:  Yes, there is such a thing as Love without limits.

Health Log Experiment Update

Here are the results of my health log experiment.  As I posted here, on January 28 I started keeping track daily of some basic health items such as my minutes of vigorous exercise, my minutes of low impact exercise, the number of times I ate sweets, when I went to bed, and my weight.

Scientifically speaking, this was a lousy experiment.

There wasn't a control group.  And I was trying to measure too many things at the same time.

But I learned some things anyway.

DIY Sweater Dress

So warm and comfortable!

The photos after the jump show how to turn this:

into this....

 

 But first, some tips:

• Sweaters don’t come unraveled the minute you cut them.  Good news for this project!
• Unlike more typical fabric like cotton, you cannot gather fabric or fudge mistakes very well.  You can stretch sweater fabric more easily, but then you get bumpy seams.  Ergo your measurements must be careful and you can’t sew one  piece to a slightly bigger or small piece!
• Design your dress to take advantage of finished edges of your sweaters.  Hemming isn’t possible.  Your only option would be to finish an edge with your serger, which isn’t going to look as nice.
• Check for stains and tears before you measure and plan.  Problem bits of fabric can be planned around.
• Choose your serger settings carefully.   This will reduce the bumpiness of your seams.
• Do NOT tug, pull, or stretch the fabric as you feed it into the machine!  Your seams will not lie flat.  They will resemble hills, or even mountains!
• Like jersey (T-shirt material), sweaters have some give.  I should have taken more advantage of this and made a narrower waist.

Feel free to ask questions in the comments!  (This isn't a tutorial--although I have some nice, step-by-step tutorials elsewhere on the blog.  Start at the gallery page.)

Keyboard Update :)

For some reason, my fingers wear away the letters on this keyboard.  Not all keyboards.  Just this ergonomic one.

This drives my husband nuts, and rather than buy a new keyboard, he fixed the problem.  (His monitor gave up the ghost, so when he had to use my computer for a day or so until he got a "new" Craigslist monitor, he promptly called for a silver Sharpie and clear fingernail polish.)

Tomorrow I hope to post more frugal fun--a dress made of sweaters. :)

(And I'm going to dust off my keyboard!)

Weekly Round-Up

This week I....
... celebrated with many dear friends the occasion of Andy and Ann's darling baby boy, Simon

... marveled as my husband built a plant shelf/book case from start to finish (including design!) in less than a day.  He is AMAZING!

... rejoiced in my husband's skill with the tiller-- in this shot you see two new garden beds in the foreground and my husband tilling the old plots in the background.  (Thanks, Mom, for lending us the tiller!)

.... helped Jen and Mike move into their new house.  Welcome to the neighborhood, friends!  Afterwards a bunch of us sat on the porch and enjoyed the beautiful spring afternoon.

Stripping Is Fun!

 I used Zinsser Magic Strip Citrus-Action Gel, which apparently can actually be used indoors, according to my instructor.  Here’s before, during, and after on the inside of the lid of the piano bench:

I haven’t been writing much about my furniture re-finishing class mostly because I haven’t been snapping photos, but here’s what I’ve learned so far in the two classes I’ve taken:

1. Wear your grubby clothes to class.  (Duh….)  Plus you don’t need a pen and a notebook for taking notes!

2. Working with my hands is fun.

3. The right tools matter way more than I thought.  Even screwdrivers.  If the groove at the top of the screw is too big for the screwdriver you have in hand, getting a bigger screwdriver is much easier than boogering up the screw head with one that is too small.  (Tom, a fellow student, solemnly explained that “boogering up” is the correct technical term. No joke.)

4. Stripping varnish is messy and sticky, and it gets everywhere.

5. Starting with a free piece that isn’t an heirloom was a really good idea.

6. Like sewing, not being careful or picky in the beginning follows you all the way through the project.

The Font of the Baskervilles...

Fonts are surprisingly controversial.  I’m serious.  Baskerville was once a controversial font…

 
"Mrs. Baskerville had been married before, and it was not happy tale.  At the age of 16 she wed one Richard Eaves, with whom she bore five children, before he deserted her.  She was then working as John Baskerville's live-in housekeeper -- and later became his lover.  But she was unable to wed Baskerville until Eave's death in 1764 and it may be that some of the society disapproval of Baskerville's work was fired by their unorthodox relationship."  However, in 1996, there is a font named Mrs. Eaves in her honor.  Mrs. Eaves is also the pseudonym of a young woman from Australia who likes to write all over herself with a black marker and post to the resulting videos on YouTube (107-108).

~ From Just My Type:A Book about Fonts by Simon Garfield.