February GG ~ I CAN SEW!

Hello, stitching buddies~  I hope you're all doing well and enjoyed your Valentine's Day.  I decided I've been healthy for far too long and spent the day groggy and coughing, yay!  Luckily it doesn't seem to be one of those that will linger forever (knock on wood).  We're set to get a few inches of snow today which is fine with me; I'll just snuggle up with some blankets and cats.

I'm starting to long for spring though...  we bought some special seeds I'm anxious to try.  What are they, you might ask?  Well... Carolina Reapers, Trinidad Scorpions, and Naga Morichs.  :D  We greatly enjoyed our Bhut Jolokia last year (more readily known as Ghost Pepper here in the States) putting them in all our various chili/bean dishes and my husband enjoyed sharing them at work.  But enough rambles, onto GG~

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before

after

I can count this for GG because it's being worked on the huck towel gifted to me by TiffStitches. Thank you! :D  It sort of has started to look a little more like nothing, or maybe possibly just random greenery.  I wanted to see if I had the widths right; it feels very weird for me to start at the bottom of a stitch but all of these towels have been like that.  It makes me nervous until I know for sure the width is centered, or at least centered enough that the "weight" of the design looks centered.  It's a bit difficult to tell in the picture, but there are actually two different greens in there now.

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yes, let's take pictures of PJs!

The sewing machine can actually sew! What a strange adventure this was.  Here is an unglamorous shot of a pajama set I made.  I figured my husband could have the first clothes made on the machine since he spoils me. :D  They look really huge but are somewhere between a medium and a large.  I suppose it wouldn't hurt to find a dressform at some point.

zig-zags!

I am glad I started with the pants. If I had started with the shirt, I'm guessing nothing would've been finished as I would've nuked the whole project. The shirt is a stretchy material, not quite jersey but almost like a poly-spandex blend. I'll have to get back into the store and see if I can get a picture of the bolt end to know for sure. These older machines do not have built-in zig-zag capabilities and zig-zag stitches are quite necessary if you don't want your stitches to break when the fabric stretches! So I got to play with one of my fancy little attachments. Let me tell you, after breaking three needles in a row, I was about to start stabbing things in the craft room and possibly the rest of the house.  One panic run to the store later, and armed with fresh ball-point needles, it finished up easy as you please.  I still need to master the tension needed with guiding this type of fabric on the machine.

look at that plaid

Not very perfect, mind you.  I am not so good at sewing in a straight line just yet.  The plaid on the pants sure helped with that though!  I think if I make this pattern again, I will change a few things.  Those buttonholes seem like they should be vertical slits in the waistband.  Maybe a different fabric for the shirt; something more T-shirt-y.  I really liked the raglan sleeves.  Waistbands in general will require patience and practice.  That was an adventure -- I redid it three times because I thought the elastic was twisting inside the band.  I am pleased that most of my seams lined up very well with the plaid.  Plus I got to use a button from my (new-to-me) stash!

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Seasonal Hearts

Next up, 2019's second Gifted Gorgeousness Giveaway!  I chose this one because of the hearts although it joyfully contains all the seasons~  This is a set of cute small patterns on a single leaflet by The Needle and I featuring four different seasonal hearts with a primitive feel!  I rather like the Americana one for summer.  And I like how they're all finished!  Once again, no fancy extras will be included in this giveaway to cut down on shipping costs but it will go worldwide!

Gifted Gorgeousness Giveaway Guidelines

1. Be a minion follower (upper right corner of my blog)!  Feedly, bloglovin', etc. do not count as there is no way to show it!  I am sorry; blame blogger for this one.
2. Comment and tell me you would like to be included in the drawing!
3. Open worldwide! 
4. No winning twice in a row (example: the winner of March's drawing would not be eligible for April's).
5. Closing date: February 28th, 2019 23:59 CST.

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blog: version desktop/FF

Lastly, I am requesting a little help! When I was on a different computer, I noticed something different about my blog. I normally use a Windows-based desktop with Firefox as my main Internet browser. This is how my blog looks on it.

blog: version laptop/Chrome

When I was on the laptop, I was using Chrome for the browser and this is how my blog looks. My banner is completely missing, as well as the little side images denoting the blogger widgets.  Don't mind the difference in flowers; my laptop's screen is smaller than the desktop's.

highlighting the weirdness

How does it look on your device? Do you see the banners?  What do you use (computer/tablet/etc)?  I'm hoping to figure out if it's my personal settings (I have very strict script blocking/anti-ads/high privacy settings on all my computers) or if it's a problem with the special code itself.  Thank you for your help; this really bugs me!

Random #1: Winner and Deliciousness!

Well now! January left me behind and it's February! I guess I'd better get my random post in before it turns to the next GG already. I do hope February will be a bit warmer on average; so far we're starting abnormally warm (I may even have windows open today!) after a week of terribly cold temperatures.  Of course, it will be back to Winter later this week.

image found through Google search

First up, the winner from last month's giveaway of the cute snowman by Homespun Elegance.  There were two entrants and the random number generator chose comment number one: Ariadne!  Yay!  Please let me know your address and I'll have it posted out at some point~

a pile of string

I've been working on a few items of interest, and this one doesn't get included in the GG posts.  It is affectionately grumpily known as the "rats nest" -- a veritable pain in the tuchus of a knit!  I'm trying to be somewhat mindful of our household waste production and plastic bags are up there with being everywhere when going shopping!  I have plenty of cold sacks and cloth bags for regular groceries.  This little bag will be for loose produce when it's complete.  It's very light and airy and is making good use of the mountain of crochet thread I have hoarded stashed.

little more open

I really love the idea of this project but I think I am just far too tight of a knitter to function well with magic loop method. :(  It leaves huge ladders between the "loops", not large enough to be a problem but they are noticeable.  Plus the random mistakes that would be a nightmare for me to pull out... I will finish it out of pure stubbornness and then find some other pattern to battle!  I had hopes of loving it and making it for gifts but alas, not this pattern.

This does make me sad because it limits my options of knitting smaller things.  I am fine knitting in the round or flat.  Maybe I should really focus on mastering double points (they still leave ladders too, though).  Bah!  Not every crafting endeavor turns out well.

we have a stem/leaf!

I also started the next Flower of the Month stitch, October's calendula (marigold).  I seem to be missing one of the colors in this despite it being marked as "owned" in my spreadsheet, hmm.  I have no other projects containing it so it is a mystery where this bobbin got to! 

his

hers

Totally random:  These scrumptious milkshakes were from a local ice cream shop. Oh, they were so delicious.  The one on the left is a cookies 'n' cream shake with chocolate dipped Oreo cookies and other deliciousness.  The one on the right is a vanilla bean shake with chocolate dipped strawberries and other deliciousness.  They are served in pint-sized mason jars with the rim dipped in chocolate.  My husband didn't want to waste a single second taking photos of them and dove right in ahaha.  It was a wonderful treat for us and totally counted as lunch, right? :)

it's possibly a thing

Lastly, there's this little teaser for the next GG.  Until then!  :D/

August GG ~ The Different Stitches

Greetings, world~ Thank you for the interest in my last post! It was so exciting to me to fix up the sewing machine and I know the post might've been a bit technical.  I've been playing around it; more on that later.

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For GG this month, the final side of the Husband Cube has had a good start!  And by good, I mean rough.  I picked out many, many stitches over and over (and there's still a couple left) before I finally got things rolling in the correct direction.  And I really goofed up making the pattern for this guy. Who would have thought the characters of v and ^ could cause so much trouble!  I should not have them next to each other, that's for sure!
 

Ceadus

Otherwise, this monster has a very pretty(?) interesting(?) weird(?) glyph.  Despite having 500+ hours in this particular game, I am not sure what that eye-like thing is supposed to be.  Best guess is that it's where his mismatched horns meet...?  He's also using two of the brand-new DMC colors - 02 and 03.  I had thought my husband would choose all four when he saw them but, nope, two of the older greys still won.   The new ones are the ones in his horns.

Side note: I think DMC is quite ornery for numbering the new colors 01-35!  That requires significant rearranging of floss boxes don'tchaknow!   Couldn't some be in the 3000s?!  I don't have them all yet but they are available individually at Hobby Lobby stores which is nice.

I'm also working on another gift (actually two others!) which can't yet be shown here on the blog because I'm being a sneaky hobbitses.  You'll just have to leave things up to your imagination for a while.  Don't get too wild, though.

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Not really for GG unless you count it as the gift of learning!  As mentioned above, I've been trying to figure things out with the sewing machine.  I have a nice assortment of different feet and attachments but little knowledge of what it is they do exactly!

tension control makes happy stitches

Firstly, I had to play with the tension or it wasn't going to matter what attachment I used.  So I adjusted it.  And then I adjusted it more.  And took apart the tension assembly, again.  And took the bobbin case out, again.  And adjusted even more. It wound up worth it as the pretty stitch is there!  I used white thread for the top and black for the bobbin thread so I could see what was messing up where.

zigzags and buttonhole!

Since my sewing machine is quite old, all it can do natively is a straight line of stitches so I have to add stuff to it to make it do all the fancy things machines now do straight out of the box.  The first things I tried once were the zigzag and the buttonhole attachments.   They're really neat little gizmos that do exactly what they say they do!

I'm really in love with the buttonholer.  I have three of them!  The first one I bought I'm fairly certain goes with my exact machine due to the circumstances surrounding its find.  One I bought because it had the extra set of templates and the price was right.  One I bought solely because it contained the eyelet template which is insanely hard to find and as a result, expensive!  On eBay, the eyelet alone can go for around $30 and I bought all three buttonholer sets for under $20.

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mysterious

Lastly, I've been busy making these little things. Any guesses as to what they are?  They're not particularly exciting but they are a bit amusing, so come back for the Smalls Edition of Ishkabibble Babble to find out~  :D/