Rayen

I had the latest tea-stained bag to turn into something, and I could have easily used the sewing machine for that once I'd picked it apart. I have accepted that the machine is going to be my primary way to sew going forward. Yet I'm also choosing to do a little manual sewing now and then when my hands are up to it, so I thought, this time I'll hand stitch. I think I can still make small projects like this without hours and hours of stitching, and it helps me spiritually to reconnect with my past self. The finished bag. Nothing special, really, unless you're me. :)

Seeking Persephone is a short four-part historical British romance series based on a novel written by an American romance author. Yes, you may cringe. It has a somewhat sparse production (likely to save money) and a storyline that is not particularly historically accurate or even remotely plausible (my opinion, of course.) Given my upbringing I found the whole thing gruesomely fascinating, and spent a couple of hours being very grateful I escaped my past while watching it. The author, screenwriter (or perhaps both) follow in the LDS footsteps of Twilight's Stephanie Meyer, which makes it safe for any tween to watch, not that I would recommend that. The lead female, a penniless woman of questionable nobility, is sold to a Duke for over $100,000 pounds for him to marry. Considering marriage to a duke was the ultimate achievement for any woman of the ton, him paying for someone of no rank is so implausible as to be laughable. His reasons for buying this girl are because his...

When you're wired differently you see things from an uncommon perspective. It's why people like me are unable to join in groups and behave like others, and why we're often made to suffer because of it. The herd demands uniformity and obedience to their demands, and from their persepctive when you don't fit in or obey them, you have to be corrected and punished. The tragedy is that you're really no different from anyone in the herd, except that you don't need or want to be part of the herd. You're fine on your own. Your crime, if you want to call it that, is that through your independence you make the herd see that the herd isn't necessary. That is in their view unforgivable. I came to the realization that I've tolerated the herd's bullying for much of my life because I regarded myself as defective -- as missing something important that everyone else has. This need to herd, to be part of something bigger and (questionably) better than ...

Since my attempt to actually coffee stain something failed, I'm going to try to stain the same bag with tea, since that seems to work better for me. Recycling tip: when your black tea bags expire, don't throw them away. Save them in a jaw and label it for tea-staining. I didn't leave the bag soaking in tea for long -- about an hour -- but the difference is remarkable. No more coffee staining for me. :)

Once I put together and machine quilted both panels of my calendar project's September tote, it was time to make handles and assemble it. I sewed together more of the vintage fabric strips for the handles, and then sewed them and the panels into a tote. This is the first quilted project I've ever made entirely by machine. This also represents basically all the quilting I can do going forward, because hand quilting has become impossible for me. I need a lot more practice with quilting by machine (I might look into an online course, too, if they have one with captions), but I'm happy with what I was able to do, particularly under so much pressure at the moment as a family caregiver.

Once I had all the strips for my calendar project's September tote sewn into blocks, it was time to sew them into panels, batt and back them, and machine quilt the patchwork. Here's one panel, completely finished. The machine quilting was a bit hairy for me, probably because just before I started working on it I had to deal with yet another drama situation. Lesson learned: never try to machine quilt when you're distracted and upset. The backing (this pink fabric came from the thrifted bundle.) It's absolutely not perfect, but I learned a lot from doing it.