Thursday, August 09, 2012

Oh, irony, how you make life interesting

Katie broke her streak of daily accidents this week! Of course, she had one the next two days in a row, but it feels like progress. I'll take it. I got a text from the adoption coordinator at the shelter and someone has been inquiring about her. I'll bring her to the meet-n-greet at Petsmart on Saturday, and hopefully she will be going home with a new family for keeps!

I've been having this urge to sew lately. Some of my friends have these cute little Japanese knot bags, and I've got fabric laying around and there are free patterns on the Internet. It doesn't look too hard (famous last words, ha ha!). But I don't have a good space for my sewing machine. There is room on the kitchen table, but then it gets in the way of eating. I have a whole spare room that has nothing in it but a few boxes I haven't looked into in a year, but no furniture in there. It's all just enough of a pain to make sewing a low priority. Until yesterday.

Having reduced every dog toy in the house to floppy shells, Miss Katie has taken on new, giant stuffies to destroy--the dog beds. When I first brought her home, I had three dog beds in different rooms of the house for Zen to lounge around on. Within the first week, she'd peed on one. It was a pain to wash, and I rationalized that Zen had two other beds and threw the smelly one away. Then a second one got torn to shreds. Last night, I was absorbed in a book, and only vaguely registered that she and Zen were play wrestling around me. I finished the last chapter, closed the book, and looked over to see what the dogs were doing.

That's the guts of the last bed. I wasn't really mad; puppies chew, and to her, it was not much different than any of the stuffies I'd allowed her to destroy. Just bigger. I felt worse that Zen now had nowhere soft to sleep, and was mildly annoyed that this little foster dog was going to cost me so much money in unexpected replacements for the things she's chewed up.
 
On closer inspection, I realized that she'd ruined the zipper of the outer cover, but the inner pillow was only torn at the seam. Fixing it wouldn't take much. So I pulled out the sewing machine and set it up on the floor of the spare room, and fixed the inner bag as best I could. I wish I had photos of the yoga poses I had to make up with the foot pedal at the same level as the sewing machine! It would be like trying to drive a car when the steering wheel was next to the gas pedal, and there were no seats in the car.
 
Now that the sewing machine is out again, I've really been bitten by the sewing bug. First, though, I'd like to have some sort of table to set up on. I spent my lunch hour at a flea market kind of place on the south side of town, but didn't see anything I really liked. I'd rather have an antique-type sewing cabinet than a new craft cart. The old ones are made of solid wood and are much better quality than the new laminate-covered particle board most places seem to sell. And they cost less.
 
Tonight, I set the sewing machine up on a TV tray in the spare room. It's not ideal or even a long term solution, as it's kind of wobbly and there's not enough room. But it will do for now.
 
 
A few months ago, I bought fabric to replace the tapestry side of the couch throw pillows. They don't match my living room decor. I cut the fabric for all four pillows, finished one, and set the project aside. (Probably because I needed the kitchen table!) I did another pillow tonight, and realized that in order to make the new pillow not be lumpy, I have to re-fluff the poly fill before cramming it back into the case and sewing it up.
 
 

In other words, I have to tear the stuffing to shreds.