Wednesday, September 16, 2009

Too many ideas stuffed inside one little brain

I feel like my head is about to explode. I picked this up at the thrift store the other day. Ugly, no?




I have a soft spot for both industrial furniture and recycled furniture. This chair isn't exactly my style, but I saw so much potential. And it was only 5 bucks.

With an afternoon's work, it is looking a little better. I took the brown off and recovered it in white. Next time I'll use muslin, but this was what I had. You can see the Two Young Street I'm going to cover it with.
Then I spent an entire day making  bias tape and making the bias tape into piping. My seam rippers were AWOL, and I had to tear out my seams no less than four times for various reasons. Finally I got everything right, so I cut it and sewed it into piping. I was all proud of myself. Puffed up like you can be only when a very simple task has proven absurdly difficult and it has turned into a personal thing. When my husband came home I said "Look! Look what I made!" As though he really cares about my piping making exploits. Which, bless him, he does. Love that boy. He asked me what bias tape is, and I went into a lengthy discussion about the merits and uses of bias tape. Getting puffier and puffier by the moment. And he says "Well this isn't bias tape." All I could do was stare at him. And I am pretty sure I said something exactly like "You didn't even know what bias tape was 5 minutes ago. Of course it's bias tape. I spent the entire day making it. You don't know the first thing about sewing." Um. He started pulling at one of the threads and says "See? This is running parallel to the cord. That's not on the bias." And I pull on it some more and it gets a smidge closer to the center, fraying it a bit. "See? There you go." And he says to me "That's not a 45 degree angle. That's like a 1 degree angle". Did you cut it on a 1 degree angle? I think you would cut bias tape at about a 45 degree angle." Grrr.

I put the littlest kid to bed, and when I was done, he is sitting at my sewing machine. "How do you get that foot to go down?" I smirk and show him. Next time I walk by, he is spinning the flywheel backwards and says "I think those feeder things are moving in the wrong direction. I checked to make sure the machine was doing everything right, smirked, and left. Next time I came back, he had a raggedy piece of continuous loop bias tape in his hand. To Jason it is all about function over form. 'Well that's just like mine." "No, it's not." So we put them together and compared them. We had one raggedy piece of bias tape and one long string of non-bias piping. Damn. I hate when he's so smart. And, to my defense, I have to tell you that Jason is an abstract thinker. He things in numbers and shapes, and puts himself to sleep solving complicated math problems. So I was both miffed at and fascinated by this boy I love.

 
So today I made more bias tape and piping. It didn't take me half as long, because I didn't have to rip it out four times. Plus, I already knew how to do it, thanks to my clever husband. 
I know I could have used the non-bias piping, but it was a personal affront by the piping, and I wasn't about to let it go. So now I have a large amount of unruly piping, and a large amount of ruly piping.
 
 
That's better.
 
 
 

*****By the way***** if anyone has an idea about formatting in Blogger, please tell me the secret! I thought I had it figured out, but suddenly my words are jammed up against my pictures no matter what I do. It's enough to drive a girl crazy.