Adventures in Sewing Rosary Case for a Boy

Why can't you find just the thing you are looking for, when you need it?  Oh, maybe you do, but I looked all over Etsy, Storenvy, some other online sites, my local shops including the religious goods store and could not find a Rosary case/pouch/box/bag/...   I thought to use a coin purse, but they were too feminine, cutesey, girly and this is needed for a boy.  Finally I said to myself, just make it.

Now, I don't sew.  It's not that I don't want to sew, it's just that I have a hate-hate relationship with sewing machines.  It goes way back to Home Ec in 8th grade and the monster, I mean teacher that period.  "If ever a witch is one because, because, because...!  Because of the hateful things she does..."  I suppose I should say that I forgive her, even though she hasn't apologized.

Anyway, I bought some wool blend felt and steeled myself for the adventure/nightmare that lay before me.
I wanted to use red felt, it had a nice black undertone, but was persuaded to buy brown.  The brown is nice, but the red would have been easier to see.

This was pre-eye surgery, had to use the Mag Eyes, every lamp and light in the room, raise the blinds and roll up my sleeves.  I would not be defeated by a machine.  The cd player was cranking out  jazz to keep my spirit up.  Bobbin full-Check!  Pedal working-Check!  and so on... Breathe, one, two, three...I can do this!  Can I?

First I practiced on some scrap fabric. Practiced and tried making every adjustment known to womankind.  Tension, threading, direction of thread, etc...  All I got was the dreaded loopies on the back of the fabric.

Cut to the chase (don't you hate that expression?)  Five hours later, told you I wouldn't give up- I had the Mag Eyes on, holding the flashlight, leaning a mirror, using a hand held magnifying glass, wearing my reading glasses, too, and for the umpteenth time I had rethreaded the machine and IT FINALLY STOPPED GIVING ME THE LOOPIES!  It turned out that the thread was not between a tension wire/spring as it should have been.   If I had to rethread the needle one more time....  

So, after getting the machine working properly and hoping the bobbin would make it through to the finish I made a nice little rosary case with a lining.  The problem was that I should have not tried to make it and then turn it right side out, I discovered that the felt was too thick to maneuver. I should have just sewn the fabric on with the right side showing and then folded the front closed and sewed the side seams.  Live, Fail, Learn.  I'm considering turning it into a Pin Cushion.  Not a Voodoo Pin Cushion, remember, I forgave her.



The rosary case you see is the third try.  The second one was a bit smaller than I wanted. So, by the third time, I said, it's good enough.  I hand sewed on the four corner buttons, they are just decorative and put four of a different color on the back, too.  I used regular thread to sew them on, though using embroidery thread or yarn would have made them stand out a bit more.


Instead of a semi-fancy closure, I just cut a slit in the felt large enough to go over the center button.  I pinned a holy medal on to the case, but decided against it in the end. This one is sans lining.

I bought the rosary chaplet from Susan Lloyd on Etsy.  It's a beautiful piece in gemstones.  The praying hand statue was in perfect condition, I found it in a thrift store.  Statues are a little unsettling/creepy to me, but for some reason, these hands were peaceful.  I can't explain it.

What household tool or machine do you have a hate/hate relationship with?  I never wanted to use an electric carving knife, but once I tried it, I wield it like nobody's business.  En garde!  ♥

December's Golden Hours

Not counting my eyes, which are now doing very well (yay) and hopefully will be in good shape into the future, December sped by with a few bumps in the normal rhythms.  Golden Hours.

Go to the bottom of the post to click on the video-lovely music-  and then come back up here to continue reading.

While I was living on tenderhooks thinking about surgery and possible outcomes the furnace broke- it was repaired the same day, but boy is it cold to wake up to a house with no heat in the middle of a cold December.  One thin wire, about 14 inches in length was the culprit.

Lucy needed extra care and attention for a painful ear infection- her ear is all better now, unfortunately I found out she has cataracts in both eyes.  They're small, but it wasn't news I wanted to hear.  Anyone know if there are any foods or lifestyle choices to help Lucy's cataracts grow very slowly? She just had her 11th birthday on December 15th.

Yarn Wreath was Coca Cola showered and broke into three pieces. A little soda goes a long way when it's airborne.  You can picture that, soda all over the walls and floor, what a mess.  Thank goodness I was out of the direct hit on that one. lol  Scrubbed 3x- stains still there.  Wall painting next week for someone...  

I didn't see this one coming:  with the new healthcare bill, our prescriptions are going up in price by 300%, that's right, a whopping 3 times more than 2012.   Then, to add insult to injury, the cable company sends its annual, "your rate is going up" letter, this time they blamed it on Congress.  What?!

But the mother of all breakdowns was the refrigerator on Christmas night.  With a freezer full of uncooked food, bags of veg and assorted other foods- well you can imagine.  I spent most of the 26th cooking and baking what had thawed.   One recipe I came up with was a chicken and hot sausage stew/gumbo with spinach, carrots, and potatoes.  That was nice and hot after shovelling snow.

The bright side is that it has been so frigid and snowy that we haven't lost any food.  It's out on the deck and we have to go back and forth in the cold, but that's better than the alternative; it could've been summer and we'd have bags of ice to buy and pour off the melt; plus me worrying about the insects, chipmunks, and squirrels coming through the doggie door and finding the food.  This is as close to camping as I ever want to be!

The repairman made it here on the 27th, we had a snowstorm on the 26th so no one was going to come that day.  He said the compressor would cost more to replace than to buy a new fridge which should be delivered on the 2nd.

(It was delivered and we are now back to normal fridge wise.)

If that's the worse to handle for a while, I'm very grateful, either way, I'm thankful.  I hope that the beginning of January and the new year will bring hope, comfort, and relief  to everyone dealing with hardships, especially Sandy Hook families, Superstorm Sandy survivors, and  people needing encouragement and help.

I'll leave you with the poem, "The Flower" by Alfred, Lord Tennyson:

Once in a golden hour

I cast to earth a seed.

Up there came a flower,
The people said, a weed.

To and fro they went

Thro' my garden-bower,

And muttering discontent

Cursed me and my flower.

Then it grew so tall

It wore a crown of light,

But thieves from o'er the wall

Stole the seed by night.

Sow'd it far and wide

By every town and tower,

Till all the people cried

'Splendid is the flower.'

Read my little fable:

He that runs may read.

Most can raise the flowers now,

For all have got the seed.

And some are pretty enough,

And some are poor indeed;

And now again the people

Call it but a weed.

Yarn Wreath with Burlap, No Glue Needed RHONYC Made Me Do It

Take one Styrofoam wreath form, start wrapping yarn around it until you are dizzy, or your hands give out, whichever comes first.  Then you keep unwinding and rewinding it to get it all nice and lined up perfectly, but realize you look like a hunched down Rumpelstiltskin working endlessly at the spinning wheel and decide to take a break.

You turn on the tv and start watching the spectacle called, "The Real Housewives of New York City Reunion"  and that's where the yarn winding starts to go really astray. There's something about yelling and threats of bodily harm that is so uncomfortable to watch.  No, wait, that's RHONJ,  Theresa and company. Anyway, you put your wreath down and walk away, but you don't change the channel because you hope they will make nice with each other and have some sense, hope springs eternal, doesn't it?

So you just tie the various colors of yarn together and make big lengths and wind, wind, wind around the wreath form.  That little part where it went haywire is where Ramonja and Aviva were going at it.  Can you feel sorry for any of them? Back to winding the yarn and since this is a NYC production, the colorful and the avant garde creep in to the color choices.

In the end, I used these colors because that's what I had on hand.  Down in the basement, in a big box of craft supplies where I have embroidery hoops, projects started and some waiting to commence or be framed, there is a stash of balls of yarn and crochet hooks.  I found a neck warmer/scarf in two shades of blue that I'd crocheted  long ago.  I was mildly impressed, it was nice, neat, and pretty.  If I made that scarf back then, I can learn to do it again, or as I said, "hope springs eternal."

To finish off the wreath, I cut some petal shapes from burlap, painted the edges with gold metallic paint and a little glow in the dark to see if it would actually glow at night, stacked them and placed a button in the center with a florist pin through the button holes to secure them.  The other accent is several fabric leaves, a little burlap, then a button in the center which is held in place by opening up a paper clip, cutting it in half, and pushing it through the button holes.

There was no glue used on the wreath or loop, nor would I; watching RHONYC and a hot glue gun- bad combination.  Then I made a burlap loop and tied a ribbon to hang it on the door.

Do you ever watch any tv train wrecks to distract you from the normal day to day? When I need a distraction I've usually got a cd on, and sing which makes Lucy a little on edge.  I wouldn't call my voice a train wreck, but...


    

Gardening with Men and Framed Embroidery

This is one of the pieces I finished years ago.  When I look at it now, I don't know how I had the patience, but I'm glad I did.  The phrasing is special to me, as I do love to garden.  I'm pretty shocked the colors haven't faded, but the fabric looks like it has moved a titch, there is almost a rhythm in the stitches to match the words and the sweet breeze from the birds' wings.  I used the bottom part of this embroidery piece to make the label button in the sidebar. 

When I was young, my backyard neighbors were an elderly couple. The man loved to garden and had a combination English Cottage style garden and then rows of precise and upright flowers.  He enjoyed everything about his garden.  The pear tree he had along the dividing fenceline gave us an abundance of delicious pears each year.  Our lilac bush grew up huge and he asked for cuttings to give to his wife.  Sometimes I think the request for lilacs was his way of thinking he was getting paid for his pears.  We used what fell in our yard and never crossed over the fence to take more.

He introduced me to foxgloves, lilies of the valley, bluebells, and other small delicate looking plants and foliage.  Between he, my grandfather who grew veggies, my uncle who was a powerhouse planter who grew, canned, and shared his harvests, and my father who planted our yard with roses, hedges, mimosa, forsythia, apple, lilac, poplar, pine, and more- I feel blessed to appreciate the work and the value in gardening and farming.  My  disappointment is that I can't do as much as I would like and every single houseplant that I have brought home to this house in the past seven years, has expired, nearly on contact.  I've never had that happen anywhere else, I think there must be something in the environment inside the house.  Bouquets of cut flowers don't last here, either.  My outside plants are growing well.

When we moved the last time, I had to give away my plants, that hurt, this was the only trip where things had to go into storage and obviously, plants can't live in storage.  Do you have a green thumb?

Crewel Work Crazy, Embroidery, and the Good Old Days

Here's a freehand flower embroidery I'm working on.  I had to stop to buy smaller needles for the beads.  I decided to embroider on colored felt for an almost 70's throwback look.  The felt is embossed and adds to the movement in the embroidery.  

I used to do embroidery and crewel work on a start to finish and frame way, but my auto immune diseases have taken away some of my visual and physical limits, so my enjoyment and attention to these pursuits have to be in measured amounts.   What I'm really trying to say is that for ten years I have been fighting to keep my eyesight and the auto immune and other diseases are digging in their

 heels and the fight is a tug of war all of the time.  But I digress.

Way back when, WHEN?, when I was doing embroidery on a regular basis, including for some friends from school and wearing it on my jeans, jackets, bags, and so on I was crewel work crazy.  I'd sew until I couldn't focus any longer.  Everything I wore did not have embrodiery though.  I also loved to raid my Mom's closet for her clothes from her younger days.  Wedges, Peeptoes, Pretty Belts, and Jewelery.  The good old days.   I wish I had photos of those designs and clothes.  Sometimes I buy a cute item just because it has embroidery.  Crazy, right?  You ought to see me with the MagEyes on trying to thread a needle and holding a magnifying mirror up to the sewing machine needle, too.  Now, that's crazy effort!

Do you go all out and extend yourself to the limit for your crafts and art?  Or something else you are committed to finish?

Distracted and Delighted Organizing and Saving Tips

Yesterday I went to the craft store to return an item which had a container which was really difficult to open, I figured I would be annoyed with this every time I wanted to use it, so I intended to return it for a different brand.  I left the store without even looking for a replacement!  Do you ever do that- get distracted by all of the other items and the ideas start to flow and then when you get home or in the car and that's when you remember what you were going to buy in the first place?

I spent far too long in the craft store.  I couldn't remember if I had certain items and took a lot of time picking out what I thought I wanted, only to put them back since I was frustrated with the choices available.  I often buy what I don't really want to try to make it fit my needs.   Or, buy something because it might come in handy, and then don't use it.

The good thing with all of this wasted time was that today I have been sorting out boxes, drawers, and jars and finding things I'd forgotten about!  That saved me money from yesterday's store trip, but I still have more stuff than I'll probably ever use.  Since I sorted a bit today, I can now return two things I bought yesterday as I found some I already have.

I found some embrodiery threads with price tags so low, leftover lace from my bridal veil, snippets from old clothes and hats, and bits and pieces of sentimental value.  It was sad to look back,  and yet uplifting to remember some happy times.

My embrodiery hoops are now hanging from a tension rod at the top of a closet,  embrodiery threads are sorted in a see through box,  paint brushes are in cups ready for using, transfers and books are on the shelf...but so much more to sort through!

I wanted to take a photo, but this morning the batteries quit on me and I didn't charge the next set.  We had snow again, it's so boring talking about the endless winter, so I stopped telling you.  But, the batteries gave out when I was photographing the snow winding its way around the tree as if it was a whipped cream piping.  Here's a little savings tip:  I tried these rundown batteries in my portable radio and remotes and they work fine, there is a little juice left in them for a lower use item.