The Family

Ever have one of those weeks?

I told Chris and Christina it would take about a week to make these curtains. Ha!

When i got home i washed all the fabric. Then i ironed it all, a total of about 20 yards. All the pieces went pretty well except for the 5 yards of light blue. (well there was the episode with Penelope nesting in the end of the green that was hanging off the ironing board… She went berserk when i moved the next section of fabric up to iron and it took a long while to detangle her. I was afraid she would tear the fabric because she considered it a personal challenge to hang on to the fabric and every time i got a paw detached she went berserk again and re-tangled herself. Fortunately, though she poked a few holes, she did not do any permanent damage.

Back to the light blue. I had ironed the fabric, thinking that it was kind-of soft and would probably be better if i starched it. About 3/4 of the way thru, i refilled my iron with water and dropped the water container which hit the floor and splashed water everywhere, saturating a good portion of what i had just ironed. I re-dried it and decided to starch it this time. I got my can of spray starch (which i have not used in quite some time) and sprayed. It sprayed very badly, soaking a strip of fabric and missing all around it. I kept working with it thinking it would straighten out till i had a thorough mess. I rinsed and re-dried the fabric and bought a new can of spray starch. It sprayed on nicely and the fabric ironed to a pleasant crispness. I was about 3/4 of the way thru when i filled my iron. This time i am not sure what happened but my iron dripped all over. (I suspect that an ant got into the spray part. Yes, i have ants in my iron… tiny little ants. Why they wanted into my iron i have no idea. They wander everywhere. I rinsed the water tank of the iron and got the 2 remaining ants out and did the shot of steam thing to clean the steaming part and all was well. Unfortunately where the water dripped on the fabric it marked it. I thought about leaving the water mark and washing the fabric after i sewed it, but decided to just rinse it again and not starch it. This time i actually got the whole piece ironed. (sigh of relief)

I decided to make the green bedroom curtains first because if i made a mistake it would be hidden in the bedroom. The curtains are a solid green with a burgundy binding all the way around. I measured and estimated and measured and counted and carefully cut 4 – strips for the sides and 2 to cut in half for the top and bottom, as well as 1 for the tabs on top. Then i cut a index card to use to make sure i was ironing them all identically. I ironed a crease down the center of each strip that was to be sewn to the curtain and a crease on each side to turn under. It was not till i ironed the next to last strip and reached for the last one that i realized i had cut one strip too few.

There was nothing to do but slit the 1 strip I had for the top and bottom so i could sew a border onto the front of the curtain, but not the back. That way the sides would be bound on both front and back of the curtain but the top which does not show on the back, and the bottom because it was unavoidable would be bound only on the front side. This meant making all the strips just a little narrower because i would have to make the top and bottom a little narrower so i had to re-iron the turn under on all the strips to make them about 3/8 inch narrower.

It was about then that i also realized that the long strip which i was going to cut in half for the top was going to be about a half inch too narrow, but i figured i would just trim a half inch off the width of the curtain.

Still in planning mode, and knowing that the side strips were plenty long, i snipped 2 inches off one to use to lay the curtain out and make sure it all fit together right. Satisfied, i picked up the strip I had just CUT 2 INCHES SHORTER and slit it to make th top and bottom. When i realized what i had done, it was too late. Now the top and bottom strips were each about 1 1/2 inches narrower than the curtain. Sigh…..

To cover that i decided to make the strips that run up and down the sides lie on top of the top and bottom. It could work…

I re-ironed the strips to make them all the same width again. It was tedious, but i wanted the strips to look right..

This done i made the tabs for the top. I had cut more fabric into tabs than i needed, but it was too late to do anything about that.

I began to construct the curtain……  Let me see…. I put the tabs on the wrong side of the curtain – fortunately i caught that one when they were only basted in place. Then i put the tabs on to the right of the marks when they should have gone to the left. Again i caught it early. As i made the curtains i checked and rechecked and managed to get them together with all the parts in the right places.  I pinned the binding to the sides and did the necessary hand work to the ends. They are ready to stitch. The curtain is looking good.

The sewing room was a wreck. The cats have all been quite interested (and occasionaly in the middle of) what i am doing and have been furring the fabric when they watch from afar. The floor was strewn with threads and strings and snips of fabric. I decided to clean and then sew those last seams. When i was cleaning i moved the stack of extra cut tabs and discovered that it was not all tabs – on the bottom i found the missing strip, neatly folded.

So here i am… I have to decide what to to. I could rebind the bottom of the curtains so the binding shows on the front and back like i wanted, like would be so much better when the curtains are pulled to the side and the bottom moght show on the back side.

It reached the point of being a comedy of errors a couple of days ago. At the moment i am just tired of it.

Now Christina, in case you are feeling bad, Ramona can tell you i secretly love a mess like this. It has become me against the curtains. I know that i could do whatever and you would be happy. It is me who is being the perfectionist. I have this idea of how i want the curtains to look and i am bound and determined to make them do it. I do feel bad that i have not finished when i expected.  I want to get these curtains up before the baby comes.

One nice thing is that i have the strips for the blue curtain cut and ironed and ready to stitch.  So far i have not had any problems with it (other then the many ironings).  Perhaps i have made all the construction mistakes now and the blue and nurcery will go smoothly.

I’ve been talking about the new place a bit so I’ve taken a few pictures to make a brief tour of the new apartment.

When you first walk in the entry, there is a closet directly to your left. In front of you is a partial view of the dining room to the left and the entry to the kitchen is to the right.

Walking forward a little and looking to the right, you see the kitchen

A little more into the house and looking to the left you’ll look into our dining room. This is also the staging area for most unpacked boxes and where we put the fish tank. During the day this area receives the least daylight, so we won’t need to deal with strong algae blooms or other annoyances. Not in the picture (to the right of the boxes) is a set of wall inset shelves that go from the floor to the ceiling.

Looking back on the kitchen from the living room; note that we now have the kitchen aide mixer out! It’s been in storage for the past year; we are happy to see it again

Now we’re looking into the living room. You can’t really see it, but the bottom left of the picture is the very front of a couch that matches the single seat chairs. This room is nice and large.

Looking back towards the kitchen from the living room; I took over a small corner to setup the computer.

This is looking into the baby’s room. We’ve set the crib near the window so it can get light if we want. More importantly, we can look in to the crib from the door easily.

Here’s a good shot of the changing table/drawers. The top of it folds down to make the changing table. You can also see the rocking chair that Christina’s mother brought us. It has family history to make it a special chair.

In the bedroom we have managed to put our cat tree next to the dresser. We wanted to see how the cats would react to having the tree in the room with us instead of elsewhere in the house. So far so good

Now, just to make sure that this post has something to derail the tour, I’ll get into a little story. Christina’s mother is visiting today. She brought up a bag of baby presents (from her, from Christina’s grandmother, and others) for us to get into. I was watching as Christina went through everything and I decided it would be a good idea to lay down on the floor. Naturally this meant I fell asleep. After an hour or so, I woke up quite quickly when Christina’s mother said “Whoa, hey! There’s a scorpion on the floor!”

That was enough to wake me up. Especially when, in the slight groggy state, I realized she was pointing at the floor about three feet from my face. I grabbed a glass and some paper, captured the scorpion, and took pictures. This is the first scorpion that Christina has ever seen, believe it or not. Since it was her first, I told her which end was to be avoided and that they don’t sting really bad; sorta like a bee does. (feel free to correct me on that if I’m off) Then I let it go outside so Christina could see how fast a scorpion can run when motivated. She was appropriately impressed with it’s speed as the poor little thing didn’t waste any time in running far far away from us. A neighbor that was outside reported that they had seen a larger one in their apartment earlier, but their dog found it before anyone else. I think the implication was the dog ate it.

We no longer have keys to our old place. Everything has been moved to the new place. Most of it isn’t in place yet, of course, but it is all here. Spread over more of the house than I want to think about, but it is all here.

Tomorrow is our day of hanging up posters and doing easy unpacking. Then we’ll move into the stage of unpacking the last few boxes that we don’t really want to mess with but need to anyway. After that’s done we’ll have a huge stack of boxes that we don’t need. This place also doesn’t have space for them; not something that I see as a problem as these boxes have gone through a few moves already. The boxes have reached the time for retirement/giving away to someone that needs them more than we do.

Since it’s late, I’m going to ramble on about a few things here. Fish are doing well; we’ve bought them some new food that they have been enjoying. We got a recommendation from a fish pro about feeding the fish a few things to keep them healthy. Cats are adjusting. They continually want to go outside. That isn’t something that we want them doing yet as we haven’t built a good barrier around the porch yet. Before we didn’t need to, living on the second floor (or higher) and all.

Lastly, Christina is doing good and sleeping better now that we’re in the new place. To further the ‘relax, it is taken care of’ vibe, I put together the baby bed. It is good. We also put together the changing table today. This whole ‘we’re having a kid here soon’ thing is really sinking in now. Of course, the full on reality will hit soon enough.

Anyway, we’re here and getting things done. Kitchen is almost completely finished. Bedroom is almost fully unpacked. Baby room is well on the way to being ready to receive. Front room has the furniture arranged but full of boxes/other stuff. Dining room table is now revealed and usable; dining room itself is still full of boxes.

I’ll keep the updates coming and maybe I’ll put up pictures in the future.

We have completed the major part of the move.  All of our furniture has been moved, the fish tank has been relocated, and full boxes rule the land.

The first thing we did was setup our bed so we have a place to sleep.  Nearly all of the bedroom material has been setup so we have one room that is a peaceful retreat for us.

Our kid’s room only has boxes that belong in that room; we made the early decision that we would keep that room free of extra boxes.

The living room has everything in it, but we’re still debating how we want to set it up.  We may end up not keeping some of our chairs for space/comfort.

The kitchen has some of our stuff put up.  Right now we can fix.. err.. cereal.  That is partially due to us not having moved all of our food over here yet.  Not to mention that we need to do some serious shopping.  For the past month we’ve only bought what we absolutely needed and ate everything we could.  Makes moving food easy.  (Note: a new membership to Costco will greatly help this.  Note 2: we have a brand new, opened last weekend, Costco near us. )

Anyway, there’s an update posted from the computer on the floor in the living room.  And, of course, this means we already have our new internet connection setup. Doesn’t everyone get their internet setup before the end of the first day?

Well, we have our Christmas Cat.  If i were Chris, I would put a picture in, but you have all seen it on ebay and it looks exactly like it should.  Anyway it has arrived.  Now who gets it first?  Wasn’t it supposed to go to Chris?

I’m testing a new feature in Word 2007. The feature in question is the ability to publish to a blog from within Word. Most people have called this feature a silly waste of developer time; personally, I think it is a great way to get more people interested in Word 2007 as blogging is becoming popular with a greater number of people. Anyway, if it works this could lead to more posts from me.

EDIT: well, it did work but the post was saved with a date of “December 31, 1969”. Opps. Did some looking; it’s a known issue. Should will be fixed by the time Word 2007 gets out of Beta.

 

Second edit: I’m seeing if I can edit things from word too. So, let’s see where this goes. I will add more details on what I’m doing here in a while, possibly in another post.