So hey remember how last week my grandma broke her back, I had to spend a very awful night with her in the hospital, and then my laptop died?
Well we are apparently in a “season” because in the week after all that, I got sick, Luna got sick, and the AC in my sewing room went out.
Today I will spread out the whining with photos of random stuff I saw at the hobby store, like I did with pics of Luna and her money last week.
So last weekend Chase wasn’t feeling well, which we thought was allergies. Turns out it was a head cold that’d been going around his office. Because I caught it after him. Started with a sore throat Monday night into Tuesday morning and by Tuesday night I was having to guzzle Mucinex.
I get the same head cold nonsense about once a year I’d say, and it’s usually gone in a day or two, not so here. I think just being exhausted and worn out from the hospital night made me more susceptible. Here is is a week later and I’m only now just starting to get over it. I was SO tired, didn’t have the energy to do anything from like Wednesday through Saturday. Stuffed up and sinus pressure – sinus pressure also ended up being partially a migraine. I ALWAYS get a migraine on top of being sick, so once I started adding my imitrex in with the mucinex it helped a lot. But still just so tired. I had to take breaks in between sewing of just laying on the floor for a few minutes. Finally started to feel normal by Saturday – though I still have NO appetite at all.
Anyway, Chase had his back injections Thursday and we’re hoping they help. He took off Friday too so he could recover and work on a few things around the house. We ordered dinner that night and while we were sitting on the couch after eating (me feeling absolutely awful), Luna squated on the living room rug and peed on it.
We didn’t make a big deal of it, because we didn’t want to send her into freak out mode. We just moved the furniture so we could lift it up, clean it up and let it dry. Chase went and checked her litter box, he’d just completely changed it the day before, but scooped it to make sure it wasn’t that. Sometimes if she’s not happy with the state of her box, she’ll pee outside of it – but it’s usually like, right on the floor outside of it, not on the rug.
Then Saturday morning, she did it again. Now it’s concerning. Then she had a freak out when I picked her up a couple of hours later, which has to be a pain response, especially because she did the same thing Sunday to Chase. Hissing, yowling, lashing out. Again, after peeing on the rug for a 3rd time. We rolled the rug up and put it away, and put out a smaller, cheap rug if she wants to pee on that.
We’ve just been kinda leaving her alone, giving her space. She did act pretty normal last night, begging for chicken at dinner and sleeping in Chase’s lap. But we’re calling a mobile vet today. With her not wanting to be picked up we don’t know that we could get her in a crate to get her to a normal vet, plus stressing her out over it. We’re pretty concerned but hoping it’s just a bladder infection or something that’s giving her some pain when she tries to pee.
Saturday night I was finally feeling pretty normal and rocking away with my embroidery. I was re-setting the fabric to do a new panel when… the power went out. (Thank GOODNESS it didn’t happen in the middle of a panel!) My phone was nearly dead (it was about 8:30) so I told Chase hey I may need to go just sit in the car and let my phone charge off the battery. Then Kristie texted and asked if our power was out, because theirs was, too. So we asked if they wanted to go get ice cream. So me, Chase, Kristie and Rach all drove out the area to get ice cream. (Our entire area was out – I just googled and apparently it was an “issue at the substation.”) Ours was out for about 2 hours – we got a notification from our alarm system when it came back on. When we dropped Kristie and Rach off theirs still wasn’t on.
(Also I discovered the place we went to get ice cream has a dupe of the Florean Fortescue earl grey and lavender ice cream from Diagon Alley I love so much. Yay!)
So then Sunday I went to get started on my embroidery again, went in my sewing room, and noticed it was a bit hot so I turned the air down. That’s not unusual – my sewing room has it’s own AC unit separate from the house, so in the summer we keep the temp set a bit higher than we normally would so it’s not trying to cool it way down if I’m not going to be in there. It cools down very quick but I went off and did something else and came back a while later and it still wasn’t cooled down. In fact it was very hot in there, hotter than it should be. UGH.
So Chase started looking at everything and whatever was going on – he couldn’t fix it. The air is blowing, it’s just not cool. The whole reason I told the power outage story is because we are wondering if something happened to it when the power went out that night.
(Also yes this was randomly for sale at the hobby store. Right behind a Doctor Who tshirt. very tempting)
Thankfully the main AC unit is fine. We set up a fan in the hallway of my sewing room and it sucked the hot air right out and cycled in some cool air from the rest of the house and it was fine. But we’re still going to have to have someone come look at it. So much fun especially right after dropping $$$ for Chase’s back treatments.
So that’s been our last 2 weeks. I should have used “THATS ENOUGH SLICES!!” for the subject for this post instead of that one a couple of weeks ago.
Let’s move on to actual content now.
Last week (in between sick naps) I focused on finishing the Bail jacket, and working on the Padme embroidery.
I ended up “finishing” the Bail jacket 3 times. Each time I thought I was doing, hand-sewed the lining closed, called it a day… and decided it wasn’t done and needed to change something and opened it up again LOL.
Also tuesday night, Chase wanted me to look at a photo of the gauntlets with him – he pulls up a photo I didn’t have, and I said “IS THAT PIPING IN THE SLEEVE UGGGH NO” It was indeed piping in the sleeve I had to go back and add. Thankfully I’d bought a ton of grey piping for the Padme sleeves so I had plenty. Dyed it darker and installed it. While I was doing this, we decided to dump the sleeve lining. It was just annoying to him when we put it on, so I removed it.
One of the reasons I opened it up again was to take up the front edge a bit. And then again to fix the shape again.
It doesn’t look like much on my dressform but it’s done. Finished the hems… thursday I think? All that’s left is closures, but not going to do that until the mantle is at least wearable so I can place things correctly.
Next up will be the pants – I’ve got the pieces cut but he didn’t feel like trying them on a gazillion times this weekend, so haven’t really started on that.
As Bail was winding down I really dug into getting the embroidery files for Padme dialed in.
I had to shrunk them down a bit – I think now they might be a bit TOO small but I’m going with it at this point.
I started doing the large front panel. Honestly the hardest part is getting the next panel lined up with the last one. I discovered that if I start the next run, pause it, and line it up with a ruler to check it — if it’s not lined up and I stop it there, it’s very easy to unpick and start over. So that’s what I’ve been doing. It also helps to have Chase sitting to the side of the embroidery machine to line it up vertically while I line it horizontally.
The biggest issue has been the embroidery hoop’s frame popping. It happened twice.
this was the bobbin after the first time it happened. The embroidery hoop’s frame just popped out in the middle of a panel. It kept trying to sew and made a mess. This was on a front panel I just ended up tossing and I’ll recut it and do it again later.
But the second time it did it on the large front panel — on like the EIGHTH panel so I couldn’t just toss it and start over, I don’t have enough fabric for that. The panel was about halfway finished when the hoop popped out, it mis-sewed for only a few seconds before I stopped it – but enough was done that it took me THREE HOURS to unpick it to be able to cleanly start over. Ugh. Unpicking mis-aligned or mis-sewn panels and lining up the fabric correctly takes more time than actually embroidering a grouping. Each group of 4 takes 9 minutes to do.
But I am very pleased with the look. I told chase last night that in the time it’s taken me to figure all this out, the amount of test sews, the prep for each grouping, the unpicking of messed up panels – I could’ve had the entire thing hand embroidered by now. But that’s not the look I’m going for, I really like this machine done-satin-stitch look for this.
Here it is last night.
And this morning. Ignore the mess behind it, that’s where I had to take stuff out of the attic space so there’s room in there for when the HVAC guy comes to look at everything.
So I’ve finished that side of the big panel. Now I’ve got to measure out and do the bottom section – and then the other side I’m going to have an add an extension on so I can do the embroidery right at the edge. I thought I cut this wide enough to have padding on either side to hold in the embroidery hoop, but apparently I did not. If I do it with as much space as I did on the first side, I think it’ll be too narrow at the bottom.
I’m hoping to finish up the embroidery this week. Fingers crossed. Then I can get them all lined and finished. I’m still not sure how I want to actually attach this to the surcoat? I’m thinking maybe hooks and bars.
This coming weekend we’ve got an event Friday night… which I’m on the fence about. I signed up as a ‘maybe’ and still haven’t made up my mind. We’re also heading up to St Louis that weekend for a family event as well, so I just don’t know if I want to cram that much into a weekend. 2020 got me in a “no plans this weekend” state of mind.
Goals before next post:
-Finish embroidery
-start on Bail pants
-get chest mold done for SW (was supposed to be this past weekend but put it off since I felt so bad)
-line embroidery panels
-back to experimenting on lace appliques for skirt