dragonlady7

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So I wanted to make myself the kind of organizer that hangs over the back of your car seat to hold your stuff, to keep the things that ought to stay in my car in, because with my old car, I hauled so much cargo and loaded and unloaded the thing so often and wound up with so much random junk in there that I lost my tire inflator, foldable shovel, and most of the rest of it. I thought, if I just attach those to the back of one of the front seats then it doesn’t matter what I do with the car, if I’m hauling baby chicks or small humans, passengers or cargo or what, I don’t have to worry.

I shopped around but I didn’t see anything like what I wanted, so I went down in the basement and poked around.

Thus follows not exactly a tutorial, but a description of my thought process. This took forever but if I had to do it again I could do it faster, I think.

I had a weird but perfectly-sized rectangle of heavy-duty polyester canvas (twice as long as I needed, but exactly as wide, so I could use it double thickness), some suit interfacing, and then several yards of an all-plastic but beautiful brocade I bought from Jo-Ann’s back when I didn’t know how to shop for fabric.

So I bought myself a new tire inflator and folding shovel, and then measured the jump-start powerbank I already own, and made pockets exactly sized for those three things. I also guesstimated a pocket for my motley collection of ratchet straps. And then I laid those out on the bit of canvas, and figured I had room for a wide short pocket across the top– gathered the bottom, and put a channel at the top and pulled elastic through, then sewed two seams down it to hold it into three separate pockets.

I did french seams on the first square pocket then realized that made it too small so I had to piece a little extension around the back of it. Then I realized that all-plastic brocade ravels horribly… unless you run a lighter along all the cut edges. Bickety-bam instant selvege. So I melted the edges of all the rest of my fabric, and no more French seams means no more excessive seam allowances.

(I didn’t exactly follow this method but I did find a good tutorial here for how to make a cargo pocket https://sewmesomethingcourses.com/courses/cargo-pocket/making-a-pattern-for-your-cargo-pocket/. It might have worked better than what i did, LOL. I only made one pocket pleated, and one gathered, the others I tried mostly to make to size.)

[image description: a black panel of canvas lies on a table, with three pockets made of brown/black/gold polyester brocade lying atop it, chalked around like crime scene bodies.]

Laid them out, traced with chalk, futzed with the placement. Realized I didn’t have to center that top one, and if I off-set it, I could fit the ratchet strap pocket next to it.

Attached the pockets to the canvas, then spray-adhesived the interfacing to the back, then folded the canvas in half, sewed it right sides together leaving one short side open, turned it right-side out, gingerly ironed it (everything is plastic). I had some of those huge thick plastic strips they seal around big boxes sometimes in the garbage in the basement so I pulled those out, carefully ironed them flat under a press cloth, and then cut lengths of them– it was heavy-duty stuff, I think a dehumidifier had come in the package, solid plastic an inch wide– and used those as horizontal boning at the bottom, middle, and top, securing in place with a line of stitching above and below wherever there weren’t pockets. The top, I closed up by just folding the front over the back; it was the selvedge edge, so I left that raw, and zig-zagged it shut with the piece of “boning” inside, then pushed the boning up against the seam with my fingers and sewed the other side of the channel with a straight stitch.

I could not for the life of me figure out how to measure the straps. so i went out and sat in my car with a lighter, scissors, needle, thread, a pair of old shoelaces, a length of 2" wide elastic torn out of an unsuccessful earlier make (i have a roll of the stuff… at the farm, not here), and a length of heavy-duty twill tape I don’t know where I got.

I held the organizer up to the seat, safety-pinned the twill tape to the top, threaded it around the headrest, safety-pinned it to the other side. Decided it needed more support, as the upper corners wanted to flop. Used a drawstring threader to pull the shoelace through the flap at the bottom of the seat, where all the cabling for the heated seat is stored– there’s upholstery covering it, open at both sides, so I threaded the shoelace through that, just to pull the whole shebang in taut against the seat instead of letting it swing freely into the knees of whoever might sit back there. Sewed it down on one side, safety-pinned it to the other. Cut the shoelace off, then sewed the remnant to one upper extreme corner, wrapped it past the headset, safety-pinned it to the other side. Finally took the 2" wide elastic, sewed it firmly down on one side, passed it around the seat, measured it, then passed it behind the seat to sew it down un-stretched to the other side, then put it on properly. So the non-stretch fasteners are only sewed on one side, and can be unpinned on the other if I need to take the thing off.

Then I loaded it up with stuff.

[Image description: the rear of a car driver’s seat, taken from the rear seat behind it, with an organizer hanging from the headrest, brocade pockets stuffed full of objects. There’s a green object hanging from a keychain at the top left– it is a folding knife patterned to look like a leaf.]

Now the things that ought to just always be in my car can (mostly) just always be there. I should check that the tire inflator works, and I should periodically charge up the jump pack, but I already checked if the foldable shovel works (it does), and I carefully bundled up the ratchet straps into bags I made out of the cuffs of old crew socks, which sewn shut where I cut the threadbare foot off make perfectly-sized padded stretchy storage bags for light duty ratchet straps.

Top left to bottom right, it’s got:

Ratty old work gloves, a clipped-on keychain with a decorative rosary and a functional folding knife, a sock-cuff bag containing a multitool screw driver, a little baggie of tampons, and some Kleenex The tire inflator kit, the jump pack kit three ratchet straps, a folding shovel multitool thingy, and a bag of toiletries with spare socks, chapstick, hand cream, a travel toothbrush and dry toothpaste kit, and a couple other things– most of it is shit that was handed out the one time I flew business class on Icelandair.

Then, to the right, around my center console, I took a vintage like circa 2004 Old Navy nylon drawstring backpack, threaded those heavy-duty twist tie things they use to close disposable coffee bags through the drawstring bit of the mouth to keep it open, sewed some of the twill tape to the top, and added a magnetic catch to hold a plastic bag in place. The magnetic catch didn’t do enough so I have some half-broken old hair clips holding the plastic bag in better position: that’s now my car’s trash bag, and the backpack’s two tiny zippered pockets hold spare plastic bags.

Now the last thing I want to do is to get some hooks to hang from the passenger headrest, and get loops attached to my snow brush and squeegee, and hang those from the hooks, because otherwise they are always scattered around the floor of my car in the way of whatever I want to do.

Anyway. Ready for the inaugural road trip Sunday, when I drive back to the farm. (Your picture was not posted)

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So, thanks to the negative coronavirus test, Farmkid got to go to the beach with her cousins and grandma and grandpa. but she also got to bring her best friend, whose mom does the books on the farm. The two of them are inseparable, and hadn’t seen one another for… mm, maybe a week? Anyway they’d been mutually pining. And my mother was like, why not just have Other Little Girl just come to the beach with us?

So Mom and Dad took five children to the beach, with Farmkid and her bff among them (they’ve been telling everyone at school they’re half-sisters, which is hilarious; they are both blue-eyed blondes of similar-ish builds, so, but they’re also only three months different in age so their fictional mutual dad was a Busy Guy apparently), and BFF’s mom did the books for the farm.

I also had told her she should bring her serger by; we’d talked about it before, and she’s a really amazing quilter and such, and was like “oh I have a serger but I don’t know how to use it” and I was like Boy Do I Know How To Thread Those Fuckin’ Things (after the bent upper looper arm incident that meant I had to rethread my serger four hundred times), so she brought it over and in among all the other things, I threaded it for her. it’s an impressively vintage model but it’s actually much nicer than my much much newer one, i think. 

So I got that threaded and working, and she left it here for the weekend and I’m banging out several small projects I had with me that would be easier to do with the serger. I only have white thread for it here (argh, i have So Many colors at home, oh well), but that’s fine, that matches well enough with the stuff I’ve got. 

I felt very useful and competent for once, so that was nice.

[image description: a Singer Merrittlock serger on a brown faux-wood table with a rainbow and blue thing next to it sewn together with white overcasting on the seam.]

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Awoke this morning at 4:30, got out of bed at 5, and spent about an hour puttering around in the basement assembling myself supplies to bring with me for a hand-sewing project. Mostly, it’s two bits of fabric remnants that I wanted to make into larger remnants, so I cut them in half along the short edge and plan to join them up along the long edge. I want to use the by-hand bojagi piecing technique to make them be usable from either side with this method. I have no final plan for what to do with them, it’s just that I wasn’t using them in their long narrow configuration either, and so if they’re squares I’ll be more likely to use them as handkerchiefs or tablecloths or something, IDK. I also cut out some chunks of fabric with an eye toward making a tarot card deck container thing, but I haven’t got a pattern, I just figured out the dimensions it had to be and cut enough outer fabric, lining, and then a scrap of flannel for padding if I make it quilted, and I’ll try to find a pattern this morning and figure out what shape I should make it be. 

The Kindle case is nearly finished, and I figure I’ll do that this morning too.

Both of us have suitcases packed, and then I’ve hauled out carry-ons for both of us. Dude was like “but I don’t need a carry-on, I’ll have a personal item?” and I was like “I’m making you carry the food and some of the things I don’t want to carry because my bag will be too full otherwise” and he was like “oh. right.” 

So. 

Behind the cut, I’m going to describe the Kindle cover I’m making. I have some photos, but it’s not like, a tutorial– I didn’t actually take process photos really, and I don’t have any measurements. But anyway. This is my Extremely ADHD Sometimes This Works: Extreme Hoarder Edition method of object construction, for your edification and amusement.

So I wanted this to both hold the Kindle so I don’t keep hitting the off button while I’m reading from it, and to protect it– my old one died in Kyrgyzstan when a stressed cabbie shoved my backpack into the corner of an accordion in the trunk of his cab at three in the morning, so I’m acutely aware that the screens are susceptible to that sort of damage. 

I found several tutorials, and had somewhat intended to make this one [https://www.charlottenewland.com/2013/01/kindle-cover-tutorial.html]. But here’s the thing: I am not going to buy fabric, buy plastic canvas, and buy endless rounds of fusible interfacing, when I have a basement chock-full of Mysterious Hoarded Shit.

So I started with a scrap of canvas– actually I think it’s twill? bull denim perhaps?– of unknown provenance– virgin yardage, it’s not picked out of an old garment, but I genuinely don’t recall what it was offcut from. It happened to be the correct width, so I just cut several lengths of it. No, I did not measure, I just put my Kindle down on it and said “that looks right” with no regard for seam allowances or anything. Then I used that piece of canvas to measure everything else. Did this work perfectly? Mm no. Did I get something usable? Sure! Probably. I’m most of the way done and it seems like it worked, so. Score one for Can’t Understand Numbers So Just Looks At Stuff. 

It needs padding, I decided, and so I found an old sock with a hole in the heel. Nothing special, an old white sweat sock, which any sane person would have long ago discarded, but I am a hoarder so I had not. I lay it on the scrap of canvas, discovered I could cut off the holey part, and rejoiced. (It’s not that the hole would be a problem, but it would give a weird texture to have either a hole or a mend in the padding layer.) Then I discovered the foot part had enough length to it that I could do another layer, so both the front and back of the case can be padded. Huzzah!

I wanted something to stiffen the case. Interfacing isn’t enough, it’s got to hold its shape enough against the tension of the elastic holding the Kindle in place. So I found a plastic container in the recycling that had a large enough mostly-flat space in the lid, and cut that out. I refined that by holding the Kindle to it, and cutting carefully with my heavy shears so that the corners were rounded and it was exactly the size of the Kindle. 

I also dug out a scrap of some old microfiber sheets left over from my Christmas wrapping project, and got enough out of it for both a front and a back.

I quilted the sheet and sock in a layer, for the back of the case, and then sewed a quilt sandwich– put the sock on top, then the sheet, then the right side of the canvas, sewed around three corners, flipped it inside-out, then I had a bag. Clipped corners, refined it a little, then slid the cut out of the plastic lid into it. Perfect. Set it aside.

Then I did the top layer, realized I’d made it slightly too narrow. That’s fine, I’ll make the hinge section bigger. Cut a piece of a different plastic lid, which wouldn’t have worked if I’d made the top piece as big as the bottom piece, but since I fucked up, the narrower bit of plastic fit. Didn’t bother quilting the sock to the sheet, just sewed the three edges and clipped the corners, flipped it, put the plastic in it.

Now I’ve got two padded fabric boards, slightly different sizes. So I took a third piece of canvas, the same size as the front and the back, and lay that down to be the hinge. Had a narrow strip of sock left, and a narrow strip of the gray sheet. Stitched those down slightly offset from the middle of the canvas hinge piece, just turning the edges under with my thumbnail so that it was a relatively straight section– stitched right down the middle first to hold it all steady, then up the two sides to make it a flat quilted section in the middle of the canvas hinge.

Belatedly, I realized I wanted to stiffen the hinge, so I unpicked a tiny piece of the seams on either side of the center, cut two thick cable ties to the right length, and poked them in, so the hinge won’t be floppy. 

Now for handwork, no more machine. This won’t work by machine, because the plastic’s in there now so the needle can’t go all the way through. The nice lady’s tutorial would be better because it’s got all the correct order of assembly, but the bonus of using handsewing as therapy is that you can literally do it in any order because you can always painstakingly scrape your needle through just a few threads and sew a seam completely wrong and have it still work just fine.

I closed up the top of the front and back pieces– there wasn’t enough seam allowance to do it on the machine, and i wanted it good and tight anyway, so I just folded both sides in and did a decorative overcast stitch (a blanket stitch) over the edge. I may go around all of the edges and do a decorative overcast as a final finish, just to hammer home that this fucker’s hand-sewn. I like that kind of shit. If I were doing this again maybe I’d put more padding in, because the plastic’s got some ridges in it and it makes for a weird texture, but I didn’t have enough seam allowance and figure it doesn’t matter. Still, bear that in mind if you can’t find a perfectly flat sheet of plastic either.

I cut a broken hair tie into four pieces– well, get it right. I cut a hunk from it that looked right, sewed it to the larger panel which I decided is the back, and then cut another hunk and sewed it down, and then I had a piece left that looked like I could probably just cut it in half and use both halves, so I did that. Turns out I was right. Here, now I’ve got a photo to show.

[image description: looking down at an object that’s gray on the front and cream on the back, where black elastic loops have been applied at the four corners– you can really only see the top left corner, which is facing the camera. In the back is a very cluttered workspace full of spools of thread and scissors and needles and such. At this angle you can only catch a tiny glimpse of the blue pearl cotton I used for the decorative overcast stitch at the top edge.]

Just kinda poked buttonhole/craft thread through there with a needle until it looked pretty solid.

Holds the Kindle fine: 

[image description: a Kindle Paperwhite held by elastic loops at the four corners to a gray surface. Slightly confusing image because so much clutter in back; a loop of a broken hairtie extends above the top of it, and that’s the second broken hairtie I collected for the project and didn’t need. You know, how the elastic comes disconnected and then the fabric still holds but like, stretches out? That’s what I mean, “broken hairtie”. I could pave a highway with how many I have but using one up is a nice feeling. I completely stole that idea from the linked tutorial, so.]

Next I blanket-stitched the top and bottom raw edges of the hinge panel, and then I blind hemstitched the two side edges, because I figured doing the finishing sewing separately from the structural sewing would probably make both turn out better. I started to do boning channels along the cable ties in the hinge, but abandoned that– I’ll do that as a finishing touch once I’ve done the structural stuff. Just to keep things from shifting around and to give it a more finished feel. Not that this is ever going to look like anything but a handmade disaster, but that’s my aesthetic.

I lay out the top and bottom and hinge with the Kindle in it to figure out where everything needed to be, and pinned down the overlapping part of the canvas hinge panel, and then realized what I truly need is to join the edge of the gray panel in the middle of the hinge to the edge of the gray interior surface of the front panel. So I’ve done that, with an overcast stitch or whatever you call that. Ah, no, whip stitch, that’s what it is– joining two finished edges. 

Going to do the same for the rear panel, and then IDK what stitch you call it but I’ll have to attach the canvas hinge edges to the canvas layer of the front and back without going through the plastic, so I’ll figure out how to do that attractively somehow. And then I’ll be done.

[image showing all three panels laid out partly overlapping– front panel off the left edge, then the hinge showing the machine-stitched attachment of the gray panel to the cream panel, then the back panel showing the elastic loops and really shitty halfass quilting job where I mostly just wanted to make sure the sock wouldn’t shift around too much while I was sewing.]

Oh, and here’s a shot showing the plastic insert going into the front panel– it’s literally the top of one of those shallow rectangular takeout containers like Mighty Taco puts its Nachos Supreme in, for real. You can see it’s not totally flat, and that might bug some but I am out of fucks to give. It’s flat enough that it won’t break the Kindle, and that’s what I want, the Kindle not to break.

[image description: my fingers holding a piece of clear plastic you can see has been cut by a microserrated edge, protruding from between a cream layer on top, and on the bottom a layer of terrycloth sock and a layer of gray microfiber with a raw edge.]

So I’ll probably finish that this morning, which would be nice, because then I can pack the Kindle in it and perhaps protect it against whatever this trip’s equivalent will be of a stressed cabbie with a concertina. 

I also need to borrow some library ebooks onto this thing but. Baby steps. We’re getting there.

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Image description: solid gray and solid navy blue fabric jumbled up on a lap, with hand-stitched running stitch hems visible in blue on the gray, and gray on the blue, and a hand needle sticking out threaded with the gray thread.

This one’s made from bits of two old sheets, pieced, assembled on the serger and then topstitched and hemmed down by hand in blue silk and gray linen thread. The gray sheet’s a horrible polyester though, I ruined my first attempt by trying to iron it and it melted! So I couldn’t press the seams and had to just hold them down by hand. We’ll see how it holds up to a washing.

image description: the same fabric from above, but folded neatly, showing the intersection of the blue and gray fabric and the parallel lines of contrasting running stitch on each side. 

The blue stitches there are functional, holding the serged seam allowance underneath to one side, but the gray is just decorative. The whole thing is wildly not actually square or straight at all, but I’m presuming that doesn’t matter. Any real Japanese person would be horrified but I’m not striving for authenticity here. You can also see on the underside of the gray corner, there, how I serged the raw edges and then folded them under, and the serging is still kind of showing a little. Listen, I’m not entering this in an SCA arts and sciences thing; if I were, I wouldn’t have used old polyester bedsheets.

image description: a rainbow unicorn head needle holder stuck to a plastic box lid, covered in glass-head pins and a needle, with the edge of the gray fabric nearly overshadowing it.

My middle-little sister gave me one of these needle holder things. That’s great, except that if you sew primarily garments, you don’t, uh, usually put them into an embroidery hoop to work on them? So a needle holder, which is designed to attach to your work in a hoop, isn’t… super functional.

But I instantly lost the rear magnet– it flung itself wildly into the couch, and I found three hairpins and a very good pair of scissors, but not the magnet– and so I went and got a stronger rear magnet and managed to get the thing to adhere to a nearby plastic box lid, which happily gives me a spot to stick my needles. It seems to work so far, and is extremely appropriate for my haphazard-at-best work habits. So we’ll see! I’d been sad to think how I could never use this thing that my sister had such good intentions about (I guess she doesn’t know that you don’t sew clothes in an embroidery hoop? She does cross stitch and knitting so it’s not like she’d know, I guess), and I’m glad I could improvise, adapt, overcome.

image description: A swathe of pink fabric with lighter pink next to it, crumpled to show some extremely shitty fluorescent pink machine stitching with trailing loose threads coming out. In the background is a hank of embroidery floss, a nice skein of pastel rainbow embroidery floss, and a nearly-empty spool of white silk handsewing thread.

This is my example of why the fuck I’m doing hand-topstitching. A little of this is my carelessness but the vast majority of this shittiness is that my fucking shitty sewing machine can’t fucking straight-stitch anymore without throwing a fit every forty-five seconds. Fuck that thing straight into the sun. 

As a side note, the darker pink fabric is an old button-down shirt of my grandmother’s that got passed to me and i tried to re-dye it anything but grungy pastel pink and got… vibrant pastel pink. So like. Not my style but a nice fabric, I’ve used bits of it in other projects and I’m glad to pass the last of it along in something like this.

Future generations may puzzle over my niece’s possessions and be like huh somebody made this by hand at home, possibly while possessed? Neat, the serger edges mean it must be Great-Aunt B, she loved sewing and had a terrible case of demons. (Definitely wasn’t great-great-grandma, she never finished a seam in her goddamn life but also knew how to topstitch.)

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I don’t have good photos or a proper tutorial for this but I’m going to tell the story anyway. 

Last weekend my dude went through his closet and set out a pile of clothes he didn’t want to wear anymore. He mostly wears button-down dress shirts by day and t-shirts to sleep in, so the discard pile was just a huge collection of dress shirts, with two t-shirts. I went through them again, and sorted out three that weren’t badly worn, just didn’t fit or weren’t to his taste in some way. Those, I can donate or do something along those lines with. The others, though, all had worn or faded or torn bits, little stuff here and there, but it all meant they weren’t things anyone would want in their current form.

So I cut three of the shirts apart and used them to construct a muslin of a dress pattern I wanted to test. This is a thing that’s always stymied me, in sewing– the idea that not only do I have to cut into nice new fabric to make a thing, but i have to do it twice. I know you need to make a muslin (or a toile, whatever, IDK the difference) if you really want to make a garment that fits you properly, but it’s always seemed so expensive and wasteful. 

Now, using old shirts for fabric isn’t a new idea, but the twist I have on this is that my dude is a very thin person, and I am a rather fat person, and so I can’t just place a pattern piece on a bit of his shirt and actually cut it out. So to deconstruct the shirts, I removed the sleeves and the back yoke, and left everything else connected. And indeed, my bodice pattern pieces extended beyond the side seams of the backs of the shirts. Even the sleeves of the muslin were larger than any of the sleeves I’d cut out of his shirts, so I had to cut apart that third shirt to get the sleeves out of the big back panel. 

And then I needed the majority of an old twin bedsheet to get the skirt out of. I needed the skirt because it did change the fit of the bodice considerably to have all that weight on it. 

I may at some point cut the rest of the shirts up and then, carefully matching the grain, patchwork them into another large usable hunk of fabric. I might do that and I might not. Either way, though, this muslin would’ve taken three yards at least of new fabric, and I’d have been able to pick it apart to make a different muslin out of it maybe, but maybe not– the bodice includes several darts.

I might wear it as-is, but I might take it apart. We’ll see. It’d be a reasonably fun farm-work dress, if I get several pockets into it, but might not be so great for work-work. (The colors don’t clash but they only coordinate if you’re kind of. From a different planet, I think.)

The thing to keep in mind is that the drape of a bedsheet is markedly inferior to that of like, any nice fabric at all, so if I make this dress from linen or rayon, as I want to, it’s going to fit completely differently. However! Having the pattern adjusted correctly because I made a muslin is only going to help with that, and maybe it’ll get me to actually be able to bring myself to cut into new fabric…

terrible photos behind cut:

the three shirts in question (yes, very classy)

the only photo so far of it on me, featuring a weird lens reflection of a CFL bulb (that’s the weird green spiral in midair) and my armpit, pre-sleeve-attachment

you see how that needs a whole nother dart. Also you can see how I had to use the back and side of the original shirts, both of them, to eke out enough material for my ginormous hoots.

Yah this dress looks super awkward. If I’m going to actually wear it as-is, I’m going to refine the fit to update the pattern, and then I’m going to spend a ton of time and effort adding pockets and embellishments. I think a bunch of applique wouldn’t go amiss. Is it worth that much effort? Well, is anything worth anything?

I intended to continue on the hexagons at work today, waiting for the database, but I immediately realized I'd forgotten my scissors-- they didn't get packed back into my work bag, somehow, and went separately and I must have removed them somewhere.
I got by, with some dull paper scissors that were here, and got a few things cut out, and was all right until I realized the other thing that had gotten packed back separately from the work bag, which was my thread.
So.
No progress there.

I'm struggling to design the yurt-belt-quilt. I figure I have ten feet by eighteen inches, so I should do ten one-foot-square panels, and then have a top band and bottom band. Fine. But what kind of design shall I do?
I've decided I think I'll attempt applique, and I might as well try a few methods. So I'm pondering that. And then I figure, applique will leave a lot of weird little scraps, and I'll set those scraps aside for some foundation-pieced crazy quilt stuff, and maybe I'll wind up alternating appliqued squares with crazy-quilted squares. I surely don't have enough fabric to do the whole ten feet, but if I do the squares separately, when I do run out of fabric I can find something else and space it all out and lay it out nice before I assemble it. Surely whatever happens, I can make it work.
The important thing is not to be too precious; this is an experiment and a sampler, not a piece of art I'm trying to sell.

Just a progress report on my hexagons-- I need to find some orange fabric!


51, by my admittedly distracted count, completed so far!


I should stitch some together to see if my terrible habits of cutting the corners awfully close is a fatal error when the thing is assembled, before I make too many more mistakes. But, for now, I still have a stack of precut bits and another hundred templates or so, and I want to get a good assemblage completed before I decide on any arrangements.

I did discover the drawback to attempting to freehand your own template for making hexagons for a hexagon quilt:
If you're a dumbass who doesn't know the difference between a hexagon, say, and an octagon.
*facepalm*

Fortunately I'd only cut out a few templates, and no fabric.

A hint: Hexagons have six sides!

i’m such a dumbass i’ve had a headache for seven hours and i tried changing my hairstyle, eating something, drinking something, eating something else, drinking a bunch more water... i finally just took an ibuprofen and bam 10 minutes and the headache’s gone.

sigh

I did get to a tiny bit of sewing! I'm going to just. Make squares of quilt out of these old pajamas. That's all I got for a plan. Might as well practice hand-quilting on this basically-no-batting project, so that I'm good at it by the time I make something pretty.

Got home yesterday to find a package crammed between storm and kitchen door. I opened it to discover that my mother had knit me a shawl! Uncharacteristically for her, she had actually included a note: apparently, she had hesitated to make me a shawl because one of my sisters had bought me a cardigan for Christmas?? What?? but had been unable to resist trying out a new technique. Apparently it's called "entrelac" and it looks quite complicated. "Forgive the errors," she signed off breezily.


What errors???
Chita approves.
Unusually, she also did not append the yarn label with washing instructions, so I don't know whether I need to hand-wash this. I might anyway!!

(To any who don't know me well, I sew and embroider and have just learned how to spin, and I do hand-lettering and signpainting as well, but I do not know how to knit or crochet, it is sorcery and also off-limits to me because I have Too Much Crafting Shit in my house. Also my mother and two of my sisters and my best friend and my mother-not-in-law and my sister-not-in-law all do yarncrafts, and so I own more hand-knitted belongings of exquisite beauty than I do stuff I've sewn, despite that being the thing I do.)

In other news I've decided to make a quilt-as-you-go lap quilt to go on the couch made out of all my hoarded discarded pajamas, with the flannels on the outside and the fleeces as batting, and it's probably going to be hideous as shit but unlike sorcery yarncraft, sewing still functions as the intended thing and is approximately the right size and structural integrity even if you fuck it up ridiculously.
I've started off with, uh, eleven-inch squares, because that was what the fleece pajama pants I was cutting up went neatly into? So I'll just be... trying to make that a thing. I don't know what size a lap quilt is supposed to be. I feel like 44" is a good start. If I have 16 11" squares, I get a 44" square, right? And then if I want to make it a rectangle I just add uhhh four more on the end and that's 20 squares? Maybe?
Shit, I don't know how to make that math problem work. Some of this shit I can do in my head, some shit I can't do full-stop even with a textbook and someone holding my hand, and I just don't know which category a math thing is going to fall into until I stop and think about it.

Well, I have eight squares, so I'll just start with those and make them and then see what they look like and how many more I need.
I would like to make the flannel scraps into a pattern but I think I'm gonna just. Not. In the interests of fucking finishing this thing, ever.