Flypaper thoughts: covid rules edition

• My daughter is very smart
• Yesterday she said to me
• People who are doing OK right now
• Are actually doing very, very well
• Some odd decisions being made around the place
• I dyed my hair on the advice of a 6 year-old
• That's a pretty good example of what I mean
• When small children chant "Do it, do it, do it"
• Best not too
• Particularly if this involves dyeing your hair
• Or new moves on the trampoline
• Take it from me
• It seems to me the present times have new rules
• Here are some of mine
• Stripes don't need to be matched till next year
• Current standard practice is to get out a pattern and fabric
• Cut it half out and then put it away
• And start something new and then decide the first project was more interesting
• Until you realize that those little scraps you threw away
• Were in fact the facings
• Amazon prime must be making a killing
• I ordered a $35 bar of shampoo soap 
• To save the environment
• It will come 2,000 miles on a plane
• Figured it might fade the hair
• Something has to
• Also
• It is sensible to spend hundreds of dollars on a projector to hang from the middle of the living room ceiling
• To project digital patterns onto the fabric
• To save money
• More detailed explanation to follow one day
• The Canada food rules have been revised to make rainbow sherbet its own food group
• Store was out of popsicles
• Someone must be hoarding
• Two daily servings recommended
• A lot of things are on hold
• There are no challenge projects being started around here
• And some things aren't getting deferred
• I have decided to sew my 92 year-old mother a new wardrobe and mail it to her
• And do you know about Jake?
• An aging dog who went missing over the weekend
• Sad signs on all the community mailboxes
• "Help bring our boy home"
• Well guess what
• Jake turned up yesterday
• Three nights unaccounted for
• Travelled several neighbourhoods over
• But Jake beat the odds and is home
• I knew a man once who was suddenly let go from a job 
• He was middle aged and devastated
• In angst for months
• Then his dream job appeared
• He went from selling newspaper ads 
• To selling sailboats
• Which is what he wanted to do since he was 14
• What he said to me was very interesting
• If he had known for those hard months
• That things would work out just fine
• He would have enjoyed the summer
• A lesson there
• One I had not considered
• But I think Jake did

The Hygge collection one of the cardigans

 I am a great cardigan fan. 

Cardigans are useful to hang over the back of your sewing chair. They are handy when the dog decides to do an extra 3:00 am pee and you have to put on something over a night gown and stand in the dark, look at the stars and say "go pee, come on go pee" for a good 15 minutes. Cardigans are useful and comforting. This winter I think they are going to be the anchor players of my hygge wardrobe.

Here is one I made this week.

I styled this in the old T shirt and culottes I wore to clean the bathtub, just before this, yet another motorcycle shot, was taken. The random hair is due to a thyroid condition that has been unstable lately, but not much I can do about that. The fabric is a bamboo french terry that feels like this:

The pattern I used was this old standby from Patterns4pirates It is a cocoon cardigan obviously, but the fronts, unlike many cocoons, meets generously at centre front which is useful if you want to wrap it around yourself like I did here. It has front patch pockets big enough for a cell phone on one side and a dog leash on the other.

As a sew it is an extremely simple pattern. There is a back and two fronts and a giant band that goes all the way around. This band can be narrow or wide. In either case it is hard to get the bands not to fold in a bit around the curves so I actually prefer a wider band as it turns this into a sort of shawl collar. I did the narrow band here but the next version which I will post in the next day or so is with the wider bands.

Here is a shot that shows, sort of, what the inside looks like:

The serging that attaches the bands can show a bit when the cardigan opens up, so on the next version I actually hand stitched down the band on that one.

Since I made this cardigan I have put it on at some point in the day, every day. We all need to sew more clothes like that. And I will.