dragonlady7

So far I have finished the seams, hems, and neckholes of two of Z's Pennsic tunics with the decrorative and functional stitches on the new machine. (She needs a name, don't you think? I'm bad at names, though.) It took hours, but I feel like I know the machine a bit now. The two worst-fraying tunics are now masterpieces of I-don't-have-a-serger-but-can-do-fancy-zigzags as an artform, so I suppose I'm glad.

Tonight I skipped practice and instead went down into the basement with a scrub brush, a bucket of bleach water, and a will to succeed. I scraped loose paint and scrubbed the mildew, dust, and dirt off a big chunk of the corner of the basement, and have left it with a box fan blowing on it, so that tomorrow I can primer it. I will probably leave it primered and unpainted-- white is what I want anyway.
Maybe I'll finish up and do more than just that corner, but I want to get started on that corner, at least. I plan once I've painted it to take the carpets from the Florida room, put up some shelves, arrange some furniture, set up a lot of lights, and set up the sewing machine and storage tubs down there, so it'll be a usable craft space all winter. I bought a space heater on sale last winter, to use so that I could start seeds (it's too cold for most things to germinate, down there), and had rigged that up with some old drapes of my mom's, so that corner was heated. (It settles down to a pretty uncomfortable 52 or so down there in midwinter.) A little bit of heat would help keep the odors and dampness down in the basement, too. So that'd be nice, and would help me in my attempt to reclaim the living room as a comfy sitting space with less of the um, crafts exploded in here situation. Hopefully the basement will stay nicer too because I can't leave the fabric lying out too long, so I'll have to remember to put it away every so often.
Also I'll be more likely to press my seams and all, since the ironing board is set up right down there too.
And then I could have the new machine set up, as well as one or two of the old machines, so I could work on different things ~~schizophrenically~~ concurrently, and I could have friends over to do real productive things, etc... And maybe this house won't seem so tiny this winter.

Changing the subject entirely, Chita became extremely interested in the fridge, or more accurately the space under it, on the back porch this afternoon. And sure enough, as I was sewing, Z came running in, and Chita had captured and killed an enormous mouse. It was definitely a mouse and not a rat, but it was huge for a mouse. And she'd killed it. She wouldn't eat it, either. I guess the little baby ones are more tender?
Anyway, huge mouse. In the house. Why is it that we have mice now, when we never did before we had a cat? It's not like we're messier now than we used to be. But I dunno.

Tonight I have been working on sewing wristwarmers. Like gloves, only with no fingers of any kind. So easy to make. I wear them a lot, too. I'm totally going to come up with an improved pattern and make them for everyone I know instead of real Christmas presents, because they're a) easy to make, and b) a lot of fun to make. So. We'll see, though-- currently, I have one done, not two. So pairs may prove tricky, as with anything-- doing one is easy, making one to match it is nigh impossible.

edit: removing boxes from LJ security breach. I wondered what those were. I never look at embedded media either! I figured it was just a glitch in my f-list display. Thanks for pointing it out, chargirlgenius; I'll just hope they don't do anything heinous with my email address. Boo.