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I’ve been tagged by Paula of Sew Confused. She describes this as “a few questions designed to help us get to know one another a little better.”
WHAT WAS I DOING 10 YEARS AGO?
I had just escaped 
from the best-paying, but most stressful job I’ve ever had. Since then I’ve been working at regaining my health. I’m still here, so I guess it’s working. 
WHAT ARE 5 THINGS ON MY TO-DO LIST TODAY?
Trace the two tops in Kwik Sew 3115
Select fabric and cut out the camisole (above)
Weeding the garden for a half hour or so
Prepare for tomorrow - clothing washed, Father’s Day card ready for my dad, check written, etc.
Paid work (one hour; it’s Saturday!)
SNACKS I ENJOY:
I am a big fan of raw almonds. Easy to carry with you. Keep well.
On the other hand, I’m always ready for a chocolate chip or oatmeal cookie. Well, one without casein/milk in it, anyhow…
I love strawberries…but they don’t love me —>> Itchy welts
THINGS I WOULD DO IF I WERE A BILLIONAIRE:
Hire someone to help me organize the house where I live. And repair and paint the barn. And someone else to paint and do the other prep work needed at the other house.
Expand my online businesses by hiring help (neighbors and friends.)
PLACES I HAVE LIVED:
Armington IL
Goshen IN
Hyden KY
Matalgalpa Nicaragua
Urbana/Champaign IL
Henry IL
Tiskilwa IL
Peoria IL
Chicago IL
not necessarily in that order…
WHAT TYPE(S) OF WORK HAVE I DONE?
Tractor driving and other grain and hog farm work
Crew chief of corn detasseling crew
Pizza factory line
Waitress
Crafts director at summer camp
Student Travel service clerk (university)
Food service director
Postal service rural carrier
Fabric store clerk/assistant
Natural Foods department head clerk
University graduate teaching assistant
Univ. graduate research assistant/associate
Self-employed dissertation editor
Contractor for Univ clothing research study
Univ teaching: “Cross-Cultural Aspects of Clothing and Dress” and “Consumer Science Intro”
Investigator for court-ordered custody studies
Quality Assurance Coordinator
Quilt shop clerk
Farm & trucking company office work and general go-fer
Online businesses (book sales, textile collectibles, magazine subscriptions, used farm equipment)
Several volunteer positions over the years: head cook, cookbook recipe testing, mediator, office work/Excel input, banner artist, musician, ‘community host’ for an online forum, etc.
SIX (6) PEOPLE I WANT TO KNOW MORE ABOUT.
This is hard, especially since I waited so long to respond to Paula’s nomination…
If you haven’t had a chance to do this yet, please write to me…
Thanks, Paula. That was fun. It’s been a long time since I’ve tried to remember all the places I’ve worked. It’s always interesting looking back. It did occur to me that this list is the ‘outer’ view of what was happening in other parts of my life… family and health issues, for instance.
Take a look at the fabric I just noticed on two of these swim suits…
Are you familiar with this brand? “merging the worlds of high fashion and hip-hop style”
Some of the others are tagged Nomad, but I haven’t found much online about that…
Seriously. Would you like one or more of these? Leave a comment and I’ll contact you. I could send one anywhere in the US for about $5.00.
My other options are our annual yard sale. Or donating them to the local thrift shop.
Okay, I’ve got an odd problem. I have about twenty two piece swimsuits, all brand new, sitting here in a nice Rubbermaid sweater box. And NO, I’m not EVEN going to try one on as I don’t think bikini and/or halter tops would look too great on this nearly 60 year old bod. They are a lot like these, but not the Roxy brand:
similar suits
How did I get them? Well, my son had this idea that I might be able to sell them, so he special-ordered several different styles in eleven different fabrics and brought them with him when he came home from Bangkok to stay a couple months last fall. He even managed to get some photos taken, but I don’t have the URL (or more accurately, I can’t find it right this minute.) But no, he didn’t tell me HOW to sell them or even who might want/fit them… I’d guess he had some help from his good friend Chayanith when selecting the styles, etc. as they seem to be stylish prints and well made.
I don’t know all the sizes… I’d guess SMALL, but several have a size Medium tag and at least two are labeled Large. Some have adjustable ties on them which would help them fit a larger range of sizes. But the cup sizes these will fit will be relatively small, I think. The knit fabric appears to be mostly nylon with some lycra. The tops all have knit lining in the cup area.
So…any ideas? Know any teenagers or twenty-somethings who have a lot of friends? You think I should send them all off to Lindsay’s daughter?
This is a third post in a series on my thoughts on integrating this blog with my web site.
There are some good reasons NOT to promote my web sales here on this blog. For one thing, I’ve never considered my readers to be likely buyers of the items I sell. Secondly, I’ve heard that WordPress doesn’t allow commercial sites; now I’m not sure exactly what that means, but it worries me some. I definitely would not be selling things on this blog, but where is the line drawn on promotion?
I’ve seen people mentioning their online classes. And links to books they’ve written. I’ve spent some time looking through a bunch of pages and help files for WordPress but haven’t found specific guidelines yet. I’m not even sure what I’m looking for. Or what sort of promotions I’m likely to do.
My sister also sells on the goodworks1.com website under the gw4music.com URL. She’s one of the biggest fans of my sewing hobby, but she doesn’t do too much sewing beyond mending and making / designing costumes for her son. She does do very nice hand needlework - crewel and crazy quilting embellishment / embroidery.
I have sold a few used textile-related books on the goodworks1 site, but most of my books are listed elsewhere and I don’t really see any particular benefit of linking to those sites as the books are quite a hodge-podge of subjects and origins.
I could promote a few of the products that sell well on the site, like the beginner quilt kits, the scrubbies and dishcloths, precut quilt fabric squares, and the back issues of weaving magazines, etc. However, I guess I still wonder if that’s a good idea.
Some of the stories behind the development of the products might make interesting blog posts, though. Hmmm.
What do YOU think?
I’ve updated my post here with some tags to other bloggers I read regularly with my Google Reader. Check them out!
Sharonb has started a textile related social group at ning.com
Check it out!
I hadn’t heard of ning.com until Sharonb announced her group today on her blog, In A Minute Ago. Take a look at her announcement to see more of the possibilities of such a group.
Paula tagged me for the latest literary meme. Here are the instructions:
1. Pick up the nearest book.
2. Turn to page 123
3. Find the fifth sentence
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people and acknowledge who tagged you.
This was harder than I thought.
The nearest book on my right was Julie Parker’s All About Silk, which has 92 pages.
The book under that was Wrap and Drape Fashion: History, Design & Drawing by Elisabetta ‘Kuky’ Drudi and there are only pictures on page 123.
To my left, stacked under my mouse (I’m standing at the computer these days) is Textiles in America {1650-1870} by Florence M Montgomery. Luckily it does have text on page 123. I found the fifth sentence; the next three are on page 124:
“The reverse was also practiced; from the late seventeenth century some furniture was finished in muslin over which was placed a richer covering of damask or velvet made as a slip case. A set of Queen Anne chairs in the Victoria and Albert Museum finished only in coarse linen is provided with slipcovers of handsome red and green patterned velvet neatly fitted to the seats and backs. They are held in place by tabs of buckram with eyelets made to slip over nails beneath the seat frame.”
I’m tagging:
Eva who has the most fabulous SWAP shown on her blog, Das Morzel. Eva lives in Germany and she started sewing in 2006!
Becky of Sew and So blog who has refashioned a J Crew man’s long sleeve shirt into a Anthropologie knock off she calls the Doolittle Blouse.
MaryPat who writes her Merry Patter blog about the sewing she does for herself, is “a work at home mum, running an Irish Dance costume company.” Mary Pat writes from Canada.
Jan has a blog, jansblog, where she shows us a lot of vintage sewing articles and patterns and talks about her life as a dressmaker in Shropshire, UK.
The Everyday Sewist has been writing about what motivates us to sew and do some of the other things we know we should do; she’s trying some unusual ways to make it work… Check it out!
Since I’ve not been productive sewing-wise, I decided I could show you some items from my past…
This quilt was pieced and hand quilted by my mother-in-law as a gift nearly 15 years ago. She was taking her first steps toward quilting as a hobby and said she’d make us a quilt if I picked out the colors. Since I wanted a ’scrappy’ quilt I also got to pick the fabrics. Such a sacrifice. I also cut all the strips. It’s huge: 120″ x 120″ but it still looks great as the topper on our king size bed. The blocks are about 20″ square.
The fabrics for the logs came from my great-aunt Mary’s bits of indigo, leftovers from my sister’s quilted jacket (I show you that later), scraps from my MIL and mother. The fabrics I purchased included prints that reminded me of parts of our past and present lives: sewing tools, golf clubs, chickens and chicken wire, ladybugs, buttons, needles/thread, morning glories, dogs, batiks, birds, radishes and cows. Yes, my husband and I both grew up on farms in Illinois. I have always been of the opinion that a person should stretch the boundaries of “what goes with what’ when picking fabrics. On the other hand each of the fabrics did have to more or less fit into either the dark blue or the white sections of the cabins. I do think fabric selection was somewhat more difficult in the early 90s, than it would be currently with all the nice reproduction fabrics that are currently available. In any case, it was fun!
The centers are 4X the standard size to emphasize the red and yellow centers. I had seen a photo in Quilters Newsletter Magazine of a similar quilt taken in front of a quilt shop in Paris in the 1980s sometime and had written myself a note to remember the colors and layout! It would still be just a memory if it weren’t for my very practical and productive (and wonderful!) MIL.
Some day soon I’ll need to replace a few of the antique fabric strips. I’m still looking for just the right indigos.
For more than a week now I’ve been considering what to write here. For the first three days I just felt like crying and whining and I’m pretty sure no one wants to hear that. Even I was getting tired of listening to my inner self rehearsing what I might say.
Then I had a lot of ideas for blogging; realistically though, I couldn’t manage to locate the resources I needed to get it done.
So now that I’m a little less emotional I can tell you all that I’ve spent the last week either lying flat on my back or standing or walking. No bending, no squatting, no sitting, no reaching, no lifting. That translates to no sewing (for those of us who do most of our sewing by machine), no pattern prep or cutting, not even able to pick the asparagus that is just beginning to emerge in my garden.
Turns out I had done WAY too much the past few weeks (although it seemed like so little at the time) and now I’m paying. But at least this time there’s a payback–my back does seem to be healing; very gradually, but definitely improving. Yesterday I was given the go-ahead to do some gentle stretching, sitting for five minutes at dinner, and a few careful squats (asparagus!) in addition to the standing, walking and lying flat diet.
But every hour includes at least 30 minutes of being flat. I’m not very good at switching gears; once I start writing or emailing (standing at one computer or straining a bit to see the laptop while I’m flat) I hate to stop. I’ve been using the timer and that does help, at least when I don’t reset it!
So my goal to help overcome this inertia is to write several short posts each day; I’ll be allowed to edit them or combine them later if I hate the result, but I do want to develop the regular writing habit. I’ll be back with some of the ideas I’ve had for posting while without my sewing fix…
Today I am allowed to sit for a maximum of 15 minutes at my computer (since it’s got a good supportive chair) after lying flat for several hours… I have to say I’m getting impatient with this recovery. On the other hand, I’m grateful that I really am improving, finally. Wednesday we got to the real reason for the back pain - a dislocated rib - and today I can see real progress for a change. Thanks for all your good wishes.
It will be several more days before I can evaluate whether or not I’ll be able to finish my SWAP 2008. I do have more than half of the garments in place, but that still leaves some sewing and even some cutting-out to be done. We’ll see. My main goal for SWAP this year was to have wearable clothing for my day to day life - I’ve met that goal! I’ve worn my SWAP items to both medical appointments this month! (the total of my sojourns from this house since March 5…) lol
sharonb’s Take It Further Challenge is up for February.
This month the Take it Further challenge concept is a question. What are [you] old enough to remember?
Or we can use this palette:
In her List of 2008 UFOs and WISPs sharonb mentions that
I do have some other sewing tasks. Last month I cut out some shirts that I need for work…I have 3 cut out waiting to be made up. I also have a denim jacket half made. I won’t be blogging this sort of stuff as I think people will find it boring. I can’t believe that anyone would find this at all of interest….
Well, Sharon, I for one would love to see your sewing projects. But I totally understand if you don’t have time to do so.
Here’s the OOP pattern Sharon’s using:
Now if I could just see better photos/descriptions of her fabrics….
