Tour de Fleece

Some of my spinning friends have joined a challenge to spin during the Tour de France. I thought I'd give it a go for a little bit; however, I can't spin and watch the race, so I don't think I'll be doing to much tour de fleece. But here's a look at what I'm working on:

Here's a look at some of the plied result:

Reveal #1, without furniture

The guest room is finished. It's empty and ready for furniture...and stuff. I thought I'd take some pictures before it gets filled up.

But first, a "before" picture. However, I didn't take one before the demolition and I couldn't find any good photos of the room before we redid it. The best one I could come up with was one I took of a purse and skirt I made...with a bonus action shot of Felix about to jump up on top of a cabinet. There's not much to say about it really. The room was mint-green and had one window. And it had wood floors, but they were in pretty bad shape and there was water damage in the middle of the room (waterbed?).

We changed the window to French doors and added a window on the right wall. The paint color is a light purple-gray - Lowes Olympic paint "Bad Lands", to be specific. My husband refinished floors. We also added the ceiling light and added and moved some wall outlets. Ok, to be clear, the contractor did the electrical and put in the door and window and we had a drywall guy redo the walls. Although we're capable of doing the work, we just don't have the time anymore. I did get out the drywall mud and patch the inside of the closet though! I'm pretty good with the hawk (it's a flat surface with a handle that you use for holding the mud while you use a putty knife to apply it). And I also painted.

I designed the closet shelves and our contractor built them. I included a pull-out ironing board, which was expensive, but worth it I think. The closet doors are 3 sliding doors. The outermost one, which is visible here, will eventually have a tack-board mounted on it.

Here's a view of the closet doors closed. Two of the doors have mirrors on them.

Since I'm showing pictures, I should also show off the hall bathroom, which we also redid. This is actually the second re-do, although the first was only partial. About 10 years ago (wow, has it been that long?) we painted and changed out the vanity, sink and mirror. At the time I was into a beachy look so we painted the walls a sea-green and I added a little bit of decorative fish. Here is the before:

We didn't redo the bathtub at that time, which was a one-piece vinyl surround.

And here's how it looks now! The entire room was gutted and we had a skylight put in. I designed everything, from the tile layout to the vanity, which our contractor made for us out of walnut.

Here's a closeup of the vanity...and yes, there is a knob missing. Actually three knobs are missing. Some of them were damaged and I had to reorder and just haven't gotten around to putting them on. Originally we were going to have a Caesarstone counter but the walnut was so beautiful I didn't want to cover it up.

The bathtub is an airjet and it makes lots of bubbles.

I should also share photos of the master bedroom and bathroom, which have long been finished but I'll save that for another time.

Fabric is bought...now I have to sew it

I bought all the fabric for the bedroom along with some ribbon and trims to use on pillows. However, when I had the purple leaf print and lilac stripe fabric in the cart, the fabrics felt a bit too young. I also decided that the stripe fabric might look like I hung a sheet on the wall, so I browsed the store for a different fabric for the window curtain. I ended up going back to a fabric that I'd seen before but wasn't quite sure of. Unfortunately I don't have a picture of it because it was on clearance and no longer on the Hancock website. It's from their Kathy Ireland collection. Yes, I could take a picture, but it's late and dark - i.e., flash picture only...anyway it's not very complicated to describe. It's purple and green large scale plaid - I think it's called window pane? There a little touch of gold thread in it too. Oh, and it's fairly sheer. I'm hoping it will make the room a little more sophisticated looking. I also found a deeper purple fabric for the other side of the duvet cover and maybe a pillow or accent on a pillow. I bought extra of the striped fabric for the bed skirt - I'll still use the striped fabric on the design board.

Duvet covers take a lot of fabric! I found this handy yardage calculation in the book Sandra Betzina Sews for Your Home:

A = width of comforter + 3 inches
B = length of comforter + 3 inches
C = width of fabric - 4 inches
D = repeat of fabric
E = B+D
F = A/C (round up - this tells you how many widths of fabric you have to use)
G = E x F

And finally,  G/36 = number of yards to buy for one side of the duvet.

One side. I emphasize that because I calculated I needed about 6 yards of fabric (oh yeah, add 1/2 yard if the fabric will shrink) for that one side and this is for a twin size bed! No wonder we're not all making our duvet covers unless we make them out of sheets bought on clearance. Even with my coupon for 40% off one cut of fabric, I decided to not make the cover entirely out of the $9/yard cotton fabric. Besides, there wasn't enough on the bolt (I think a new bolt only has 10 yards anyway). I found a perfectly lovely deep purple ($3.99/yard) cotton blend to use for the other side of the cover but it's such a nice shade that I think it won't be the underside all of the time.

The guy cutting my fabric complimented me on my coordination of fabrics. He envied my sewing room plans and I got advice from him on how to rig up the roman shades on the French doors. All in all it was a very successful shopping trip.

Home dec fabric shopping in my future

Wow, where has the time gone? My last post was over a month ago.

The guest room/sewing room #2 is almost done. I know I said that last month, but now it really is. I just have to paint the trim on the window frame and touch up the trim elsewhere in the room, then I can move furniture back in. And there will be pictures.

I've been shopping for fabric to make the window treatments and other stuff. The walls are a light purple/gray color and after looking at a few online sources as well as some brick and mortar stores,  I'd given up finding home dec fabric with purple in it that didn't contain grapes or hyacinths. I didn't want a floral because I didn't want the room to be overly girly. Ideally I wanted something modern, a la Merimekko, and was even (sort of) willing to pay the bucks for it. But I couldn't find anything that really fit the mood or the scale. They have some fabulous prints if you have a large space to carry it.

I found the perfect fabrics nearly in my own backyard. No, not my existing, vast fabric stash currently housed in the cargo trailer in our driveway (no, the trailer is not full of my fabric even though my husband jokes that it is). I found the fabrics at the Hancock Fabric store about a mile away. I have made all my calculations and think I know the right amounts to purchase so I'm going to do that this week while the sales are on and the fabric is on the shelf. But fortunately it's also online so I have a backup.

For the roman shades on the French doors:

For the curtain for the window and as the covering for my design board (mounted on one of the closet doors):

For the duvet cover:

I plan to use some of the houndstooth and the stripe for neckroll pillows for the bed and also maybe introduce some yellow as an accent color in the pillows. I'm looking for a darker purple to use for the bedskirt and maybe I'll incorporate that into the pillows and/or duvet as well.

I flipped when I found that leaf pattern fabric because I have found so little with purple in it that wasn't (overly) floral or juvenile. It's a cotton fabric and it didn't really sit well with me for the shades, curtain or design board cover but I think it will be perfect for a duvet cover.

I really hope I can make these items. I don't doubt my abilities to sew them, but it's my motivation to do home dec that is lacking. I hate working with large volumes of fabric. But I am inspired by my choices, so I will just have to set my mind to it and just do it.

Measuring tape fix

I stopped by Daiso at lunch today because who can resist a little bit of cute overload at the Japanese dollar (actually $1.50) store? Check out this little bear measuring tape:

And it is "convenient for the sewing and the body check." Perfect! Now I can do a body check. (click the picture to see it larger, if you can't read the expression at the top).

Since the "Bear's faced measuring tape" is metric I thought I'd keep it in my knitting bag for those times when I'm working on non-US patterns. But in the process of opening the package, which was maybe a little too easy to open compared to the indestructible rhino-proof plastic shells most things are packaged in these days. The measuring tape slipped out of my hands onto the wood floor and...

AAAAAAARGH!!!!!!

Actually the picture doesn't make it look as crazy as it was. Everything scooted under the coffee table, and I tried to find all the parts without knowing what parts I needed to find. The coil had completely "sprung" but I rolled it up and held it together with a clothespin until I could figure out what to do. Miraculously I found everything, including a little tiny spring. Now most people would throw the whole mess in the trash. After all, it was from the dollar $1.50 store. But not me. I'm an engineer. And I'm cheap and don't like to put stuff in landfills, so I fix things. But I didn't have a clue what went where or even how retractable measuring tapes worked. I searched online but found the same answer: throw it away and buy a new one.

So I had a glass of wine to ease my disappointment over the demise of my bear measuring tape and decide if I wanted to accept the challenge of fixing it. Of course I did. I love a mechanical challenge.

I'm going to share my discoveries in case you want to fix your retractable measuring tape instead of chucking it in the trash, because I suspect these little plastic ones have pretty much the same internal design. I figured it couldn't be too complex given that it was so inexpensive. I also figured that every notch and hole and piece of plastic served a purpose. I just had to figure out what went where. The only thing that was partially intact after the crash was the tape; it was still mostly wound around the outside of the black wheel, so that meant the coil had to go on the inside.

I was almost correct in the above picture. It turned out I had the assembly upside down but in this view, you can see how one end of the coil fits into the notched, plastic center post. There are four notches cut into the sides of the plastic wheel: the looped end of the tape slips onto the two notches that are closest together and the other end of the coil is secured in the other two notches. When the wheel is wound, the coil, being secured now at both ends, tightens and stores energy. I found that the way to get the tape onto the wheel was to wind the wheel so that the coil tightens and at the same time, guide the tape around the outside. But that's not all. When the coil is as tight as it will go, carefully undo the tape from the wheel but leave the looped end attached. Then you reverse the direction of the wheel (slowly!) and the tape will wind back onto the wheel in the opposite direction as the coil unwinds. When all of the tape is reeled in, the coil is no longer fully wound and ready to fly off. But when you pull the tape the coil winds up; release the tape and the coil reels in the tape again.

The next part was figuring out how the middle button (bear's nose) fit. The tiny spring in the center post was a key piece and made me realize I had everything upside down. It's correct in the above picture. See those plastic tabs in the inside of the wheel? Those are the "brakes" that are disengaged when the button is pressed. This is also why these type of measuring tapes go click-click-click when you don't depress the button.

So there you go. My little bear measuring tape is happy again and I solved a puzzle, saved a bit of plastic and metal from the dump, and best of all I have a cute tape measure for my knitting bag.

And if you're wondering, the bear measuring tapes also come in blue and yellow. I didn't see any other animals, just bears.

Sewing...in my head

The guest room/sewing room #2 renovations continue. We painted last weekend (3 coats of primer and 2 coats of paint) but it turns out the guy doing the drywall wasn't quite finished. Ugh. Fortunately it's only affected one wall. We thought the window just needed trim but actually it needed drywall to finish the opening. So now there's a bit more primer and paint to do. Fortunately we have plenty of paint left over. The contractor is going to start working on the closet next week and either this weekend or next we'll get to the floors.

In the meantime I've been thinking about what I'll be sewing when the room is done and I can get both sewing room #1 and #2 back in order. Unfortunately it will be home dec. It's unfortunate because I am not very fond of home dec sewing. I hate wrestling with the large pieces of fabric. But since I can save so much money by doing it myself, I think I should do it. Originally I thought I would splurge and have someone make the Roman shades but I'm guessing that they'd cost around $400 or more. Am I right?

Here's the list, probably in order of priority:

1. Roman shades for French doors in guest room
2. Curtain for window in guest room
3. Window seat cushion for master bedroom
4. Duvet cover for daybed in guest room
5. Pillows for daybed
6. Pillows for window seat
7. Curtain for master bathroom window
8. Curtain for hallway bathroom window

I'm afraid I have to buy fabric for items 1, 2, 4, 5 and 8. Yup. I have to go fabric shopping. I really do wish I could use some of my stash but it's mostly full of wool, knit, and ITY jersey in 2-3 yards pieces. I do have some home dec fabric, some of which I purchased in Paris, of all places, but I don't think the colors will work since I bought those fabrics for a different room that was gold, brown, and green-toned. The walls of the guest room are grayish-purple. Had I gone with my second choice (and my husband's first choice) of green, then the fabrics would have worked. But I was feeling purple for this space...and I'm not repainting the walls. I should probably dig out the fabric just in case because it's been a long time since I've seen it and my memory of the colors might be different. And who knows, it might actually work. I'm always happily surprised when some orphaned piece of fabric in my stash matches perfectly with something else. Although I realize that's probably just a sign that I have way too much fabric.

I can see light at the end of the dusty tunnel

We're making progress on the guest room/sewing room #2 renovations and I'm excited that I will soon be able to get back to sewing. The drywall will be finished today and this weekend I think we'll be priming the walls. It'll take a couple of coats since there's new drywall  on the walls and the once textured ceiling has a couple coats of drywall mud on it now to make it smooth. I'm so glad we're hiring contractors for this work because we simply don't have the energy anymore to put in a full day's work and then work on house renovations in the evening. I also enjoy coming home and seeing the progress. It's like a surprise every day and they're doing a very nice job.

It's been at times stressful but loads of fun to design these renovations. I especially love that I've been able to customize things to fit not only our taste but how we use the space. Since this guest room is also used for my some of my sewing activities, I have been able to make some design details that will be very useful for me.

The room is a basic bedroom. It had one rectangular window, which was fairly high up on the wall and a closet with two heavy, mirrored sliding doors on it. The bed has a pop-up trundle bed underneath it. My cutting table sets up in the middle of the room and pretty much occupies all of the space, so I'm glad it folds up and can be wheeled away.

The major change to the room was replacing the window with outswing French doors. The doors lead out to a full view of two peach trees and to what will be a deck, which will wrap around the side of the house to the right where the new window is located. This new window is taller, with a casement window below and an awning window on top for ventilation. The view from the new window looks out on our side yard fence (covered with a Jasmine bush) and the neighbors well-kept back yard. And we can finally see the hills! This is the only south facing window of our house that is not blocked by the neighbor's house. 

The pattern cabinet is a custom-made dream of mine. I used to have all of my patterns scattered throughout multiple cardboard and plastic organizer bins. Finally they will all be in one place. The cabinet replaces a much smaller bookshelf that was really a re-purposed small IKEA china cabinet. I will share pictures of the new pattern cabinet later when I do my big "reveal." The cabinet turned out a bit larger than I anticipated but it stores all of my patterns and has room for lots of sewing and knitting magazines. I also designed it with a pull-out shelf, which will be convenient for browsing the magazines or, as I've found, setting up my yarn swift and ball winder.

The other noticeable change is with the closet. The original closet had a standard clothing rod and some crooked wood storage shelves a previous owner put in. The new closet will have custom-built shelves, drawers and hanging areas and a pull-out ironing board. This ironing board is probably 20 times more expensive than your standard ironing board, but it'll be worth it. I had the contractor put in an outlet in the skinny wall space between the door and the closet so that it's handy to plug in the iron. Another custom change is with the closet doors, which will be triple doors on sliding tracks. Two doors will have mirrors on them and one will have a design board affixed to it. I plan to make the design board removable so I can change the fabric cover whenever I want to change the look.
There's still stuff to do like paint and refinishing the wood floors, and then I'll have the big task of organizing and putting things away. My first sewing project will probably be window coverings. The new doors and window let in a lot of light and although we bought them with super energy efficient glass, all that light will translate into extra heat too.

So there's an end in sight, and I am looking forward to it! It'll also be nice to finally be done (?) with the renovations inside the house, but I will have no excuse now for not cleaning things, especially dusting. The inside of the china cabinet is quite dusty from lots of floor refinishing and dry wall dust over the years, but as long as there was more to do....So I guess I'll be putting that on my to-do list now.