I’m having severe painting withdrawal symptoms (ie temper tantrums, surliness, self pity and alround discomfort), but I’m also too knackered to do anything really involved today. Napping a lot sounds fascinating! I’m only halfway through my house&garden chores, so it will perhaps be at least a week before I pick up my brushes again, depending on when I wake up from this fatigue, finish the chores, wake up from the next fatigue, yadda yadda more chores having arrived. 😉 I have taken some time this weekend to play a bit with my old macro lens and flowers, that helps in soothing my nerves and itchy fingers.

Today’s program got cut down to one physical assignment, needing perfect weather which will end tomorrow, and then I thought I could do little short sessions on my wardrobe situation. Not all necessarily, just a suggestion, mind.

1. Fix those sleeves on the denim dress.
2. Fix some other sleeves and then dye the offending sweater – see below.
3. Cut my green saori fabric for assembly (knit piece to be done) – I’ll show you that when it’s done.
4. Seam my blue woven tunic (which I haven’t shown you yet either)
5. Hem a pair of pants that I had already done with an iron-in clever thing that glues the fabric together until it’s been washed…
6. Wash my holey sweater before deciding if I want longer sleeves, YES, it is done, just need to weave in ends. When it’s dry. Unless I decide to shorten body and lengthen sleeves.
7. OMG there must be rhubarb in the “jungle” now, I need to cook something with it. Yum. I also have some lactose free cream that expires next week, fresh vanilla…

All done in little increments, such as:

• Put holey sweater in really hot water in sink. Leave it until you can touch it.
• Get the sewing machine from upstairs.
• Have coffee with PC while boiling a very large pot of tea and red onion peels.
• Measure and cut all your fabrics and do the zigzagging. Or one at a time.
• Reheat coffee in microwave. Watch funny video.
• Pin saori jacket together, try it on Mimi and determine whether the knit piece is really really going to be 15 cm wide.
• Lunch
• Nap in garden unless the wind picks up.
• Dogwalk. No shopping on the way home, eat leftovers. Or corn flour pancakes with extra eggs. Or both.
• Interwebs clicking
• Sew the denim sleeves (in portions of drawing wedges, zz’ing wedges, attaching wedges, find ribbon edge for sleeves) and the side panels on the tunic. Perhaps. Oh well, the machine is out anyway.
• Clear table in hopeful anticipation of some painting session or other. Put all the plants back that the kittens had knocked down.
• Put up electric fence on all window sills Daydream.
• Take pictures of projects with new broken pocket cam and post them on blog.
• Garden walk sit and dig up offending dandelions and thistles.

Anyway, on to my latest modification. Remember my orange sweater? While I love the pattern, I never really loved the sweater. I’d been too enthusiastic with my sleeve decreases AND it turned out the yarn is crazy itchy on the body. It’s cotton/alpaca and you’d never guess just touching it, on the contrary. And then there’s the colour. It just feels like an orange version of beige on me, not flattering. So all in all, I didn’t use it much.

So first I decided to frog the sleeves. Yes, I could have knit them again, wider, but I’m not in the mood, and it really looks best with nothing under = crazy itchy.

And now it’s a vest, and it’s had a large pot of tea. I’m always cold, but too many layers of sleeves really get in the way when you’re working with either water or paint. What do you think? The onion peels were a stupid idea since the vest isn’t mordanted, in fact the tea didn’t take either except to activate the iron afterbath. I guess I can always add blue acid dye at some point, or woad. Or green, since it’s already khaki. Pocket cam has horrible colour balance fwiw.

It may be an ongoing theme however, this remodelling of old clothes! Btw I didn’t have to worry about the dress I wanted to change for a smaller size coming out too small, it appears the whole return package (5 items) has gone missing and never reached the company. So much for buying cheap stuff when you can’t get your money back. That’ll teach me. Or not, possibly. Now that I think about it, we haven’t had any mail this week either. Odd. I’m waiting for a very special package.

It’s 4 pm and I’ve at least done the napping and the PC part of my list! No dog walk I think. Picked the rhubarbs earlier, now I’ll consider cutting them up and throw them in a pot with a pod. And I’m going to see if I can cut, zigzag and clear the table before bedtime. At least when I’m this poorly there is a greater chance of painting because I have to back off completely on the harder work for a while. My hands need a bit of mending too! More on the wardrobe mods at a later date if anyone is interested. I’ll try to get a photo of the blue holey on me, so you can help me decide on lengths?