This is what out of control looks like

I know it has been a while since I have posted.

Well let me tell you what's been going on.

First off Miss Daisy is recovering, as much as you can tell when someone doesn't talk. She is on light duties, no running, jumping, horsing around and no walks.

Only the last one can we really control, that and keeping her off stairs and things she can jump down from. When she gets too wild she goes back in the Pack and Play where she "moans" to quote my middle granddaughter.

End of the month we go back to see the vet. Hopefully he will think she is sufficiently healed to go slowly back to normal life and we have dodged the surgery bullet for the time being. 

I have to tell you that I am a little stressed about the next month with her. 

Next week my husband goes back up north for his final round of duty and I hope she continues to improve so I don't have to drive two provinces over with a sick dog on my own. And third week in September we are away at the wedding and I am not sure what to do with her. The original plan was a dog sitter friend of my daughter's was going to stay here with her own and our three family dogs but I am thinking that is going to be too chaotic and I need someone who can take fairly careful care of her here until I get back. So far I don't have anyone to do that but am working on it.

Good news though is she is getting better. Trying to keep an energetic dog in pain quiet and still has not been all that easy to date.

Other news is I am winding down the end of my last term, only marking left, and going to be taking the fall off completely, and after that doing only a course or two a term of my favourite classes, and by distance. This is a huge life transition for me and one I am getting my head around, but in a good way, very good.

I will be teaching a few local sewing classes however when I get back from the wedding, and am looking forward to that.

Now to the title of this post and the picture that follows.

Last Saturday my husband and I made 107 eight ounce jars of blueberry jam. I drove to the country and got the berries right off the farm and we moved fast to get them all done when the berries were completely primo.

I have to say that it was quite the operation.

My husband prepped the batches for me, crushing the berries by hand, stirring in the lemon juice, and sugar. Being a systems guy he did several large bowls at a time so I could just move from one to the other.

In theory it was a good approach but right around noon this happened:

For reasons that would take too long to explain that man has a full sized double door fridge in his office in the house. He figures he needs stuff handy. Well at any rate he was using this fridge to store his prepped bowls and, moving at typical top speed, he slammed one into the door when he was putting it on the shelf.

What you don't see here is that this sugar berry mixture went all over the room too, right over his desk and all over his computer monitor. 

For once I was speechless and that hardly ever happens, I can tell you that.

When I heard his yell I left my post, temporarily, at the stove to go see what was up and all I could say was "well I guess you had better clean that up."

He had more or less figured this out.

Many sticky footsteps later he was back at it and about 10:30 that night we had screwed the last lid on the last jar.

Since this jam is destined to be handed out to wedding guests we are going to be sticking little circles of Nova Scotia tartan onto the lids.

But I think we might take a little break first, what do you think?

Near miss

To follow up on my anniversary present, the Narwhal earrings, my husband told me he was torn about what to bring me home for a gift.

It was either the earrings or a pair of polar bear pants.

Now the thing you need to know about my husband is that if it is nutty it is also probably true and something he really is considering.

Polar bear pants, he explained, are made from the limb hides of polar bears, yes that's right, two arms sewn together.

"But they would be incredibly warm," he said. "Great for winter."

And here I was worried that elastic waist linen pants would make me look fat.

In case you think I am making this all up here is a shot of some incredibly warm Inuit men:

Other news is Miss Daisy seems brighter this morning.

Update rainy Sunday afternoon

First things first. 

Miss Daisy seems to have picked up. She played around a bit with her ball in her baby bed and fussed to be liberated. I let her out to walk around but when she took a few stairs, back she went. Her spirits have improved enough for her to be annoyed with me, which is welcome.

My son's Bordie Collie, Birdie, who is with us while Ben works in a project in Texas has been a prince. Always the gentleman Birdie has been staying by the bed Daisy is in and every time she looks at him she wags her tail.

Speaking of Ben I have been on the phone with him on and off all afternoon. Someone dumped a mangy puppy on the job site (Ben is doing quality assurance at a huge windmill installation) and since he was at work I have been making the calls trying to find a no kill shelter in southwest Texas for him. Not an easy job but in the end Ben found a woman who is running a private shelter and specifically dealing with the local outbreak of mange. She has agreed to treat this puppy and Ben is going to visit every day to follow up and give her a donation to cover all costs. Apparently an excellent, bright little dog and hopefully they can find a decent home for him.

Ben is my child who so far I can say has most inherited my feelings for animals. When he was four, and our first dog had died the spring before, I found Ben sitting on the front steps with the old dog's leash in his hands crying. Such a small boy and so sad. Needless to say there was a new dog in the house within the week.

My other news is that the flower girl dresses are done.

I kept waiting for something to go wrong on this project. 

You know like cut a hole in some bodice by mistake. Spill tea down one front. Burn a sash. When a job really matters it is my experience that I am going to do something like that.

However nothing went wrong and no one was more surprised than myself.

The basic pattern was pretty standard but I adapted it to match a picture the bride showed me so the skirts were very full and there was a very wide band at the front and extravagant bows with long ties that fell to the hems at the back. I made four in slightly different sizes working from two standard sized muslins I made in the RV in the winter in Florida.

I was able to try the  muslins on the two sisters who are going to be in the wedding party when we were visiting DC at Easter, and did the same with my two granddaughters when I came home.

Of course that was then and this is now.

I remember only too well how much kids can shoot up over the summer, so all of these dresses have good hems I can let down at the last minute in the days before the wedding - but of course I sincerely hoping the sewing gods continue to be with me and that will not be necessary.

Here are the pics, taken carefully staged as all my shots are, in the bathroom:

All four dresses, you see why I am going to take a steamer with me.

Back view

Front view, I hope you can see how wide the band at the front is - it has actually been sewn into the seams.

Other news is, as I mentioned in passing, my husband is home for a few weeks from the North Pole, and yes he is now going to spend our anniversary helping me make blueberry jam.

He actually brought my anniversary present with me - Narwhal ivory earrings (I think they are in the shape of polar bear claws) made from the tusk of the Narwhal.

This is what the Narwhal's look like, this really is a strange part of the world and my husband is lucky to be able to see parts of it most people don't:

Now of course Narwhal are protected, and I am as aware of that as you can imagine, I mean my dog is in a Pack and Play, but the Inuit are allowed to hunt them because the Inuit actually eat whale meat as part of their standard diet up there and the tusks are a by-product.

So here are my earrings, which I am pretty sure are not something you see every day, not unlike the man who gave them to me.

So that was my day.

Time to decompress and make something fun and easy next to cleanse the palate, I am thinking Louise Cutting's Ageless and Cool pattern, looks to me as if it will go exactly with Narwhal earrings. I am going to do the shirt and if I feel sufficiently ageless and cool try the pants, although they are not my usual style. What do you think?

Rainy Sunday afternoon

Just a quick update.

Miss Daisy is on no activity and tons of meds until we see the vet again Tuesday for an assessment - basically to find out if her back is healing up or do we take the drive over to PEI (two provinces away)  because only the regional vet college does this kind of surgery.

There was no way she was going to be OK in a cage again however, so I sent out my husband (who thankfully got home from the North Pole for three weeks on Thursday) to get a second hand Pack and Play for babies instead. We have set that up in the living room so she can see us. It has wheels and we can take it into the bedroom with us at night. It is a pretty good solution, it confines her but doesn't make her feel trapped I don't think.

I really hope she turns to corner soon - my instinct is to just want to put her in the car and start driving to Charlottetown this afternoon.

Things like this expose a person's weaknesses.

I am proactive but at the point of it being a fault. If there is something wrong I want to get it fixed/done right away and there are situations when you have to give something some time.

Waiting is not my best thing, particularly when those black eyes are looking at me like they are now.

The upside is that I have spent the weekend quietly hand sewing the linings into the bodices of the flower girl dresses. 

So far so good.

I will probably post pictures tonight when they are done.

My plan next was to start a muslin on my own dress but I am not ready to start such an intense project yet. Just don't have the focus right now and my being careful quota got a bit emptied out with these taffeta dresses for the little girls and I am going to need some moments for it to refill.

I am thinking I might take a break from the serious stuff when these little dresses are done and make say a loud camp shirt or some pull on linen pants in say purple.

As usual my sewing reflects where I am at the moment, and most of all, what I need.

Being with a dog

Miss Daisy sleeps on our bed. I put her there when she first came home with us from the shelter and was so confused. It was the one place that really settled her down.

In the middle of the night last night I woke up with her pressed next to me on my pillow trembling and panting. In the morning she couldn't go for her walk, was in obvious pain, and I took her into the vet right away.

The day was spent waiting for tests and calls at home. 

A bunch of things were a little off, but more or less normal and her only real symptom was severe pain. The final diagnosis later in the afternoon was a ruptured disk in her back - this is probably going to mean surgery in Prince Edward Island at the vet college and in the meantime pain control, other meds and bed rest, about a month, no activity, at home if we can do it. Small dogs with short legs and long backs are prone to this.

As a crate or cage is out of the question for her the vet suggested I baby gate (got lots of those) off my bedroom and keep her in there, carefully carrying her out to pee etc. a couple of times a day. I go back tomorrow to see how this is working out.

So that's where we are now. Of course my son's border collie Birdie doesn't want to be left out so he and I and Daisy, who has gone to sleep, are all on the rug beside my bed, pressed up against my leg, waiting for dad to come home from the north pole. 

We have the windows all open and can see and smell the backyard, a lovely night and no one is saying a word. We are just being here together - something dogs do particularly well and people not well at all.

My daughter said to me today that I am a dog person but it is more than that. We all have our ways but for me dogs are part of my spirituality. In moments like this one you know they absolutely know what's important without any need for words. 

Dogs look ahead and are well aware of the sight of things unseen. 

They know that things don't last and they know that doesn't matter. 

They know that the time you spend next to someone you love lasts forever so that's pretty much all they concentrate on.

While I waited for the vet to call I put in the four invisible zippers into the taffeta flower girl dresses. When I looked at the last one I realized that it was a different colour, I had reached wrong. 

I will fix that tomorrow. Right now I am sitting.

A sewing update

I had big plans not to do anything or even blog until I got the flower girl dresses done.

However I have given up on that recognizing that there is a time to stop for the day.

All sewers know what I mean - it's the opposite of the sweet spot - it's that time where you say just one more buttonhole and then you cut through that last buttonhole right through the entire front of the jacket (yes I did this exact thing in a jacket I was making for a girlfriend in about 1975), or you get impatient with taking out a few stitches and rip a hole near the neckline.

I once snipped a thread on my sister's grad dress hem as she was going out the door and cut a hole in the skirt.

You see where I am going with this.

This particular project, these four silk taffeta dresses are going really well and I am being careful. Which is why I knew when to call it a weekend tonight.

I have the skirts all gathered and even hemmed and the bodices finished with the ties in the side seams.

All I have to do now is attach the bodices to the skirts, insert the zippers, and hand hem the linings in place.

Silk taffeta is interesting. It picks up every mark and adopts every wrinkle. I sure wish I could remember who I lent my steamer to, I am going to need it when we unpack in DC. It has made me realize too that when you see those Old Masters portraits in museums and the dresses still have fold lines it is because they were silk taffeta and there was no outlet nearby to plug in an iron or a steamer.This stuff remembers the folds.

When I was doing the hems I got nervous about pins and so used big paper clips to put up the hems when I hand stitched them. This was so fast and easy I think I will use this idea again when doing normal hems:

In my spare time I also made my daughter a simple dirndl style skirt so she could try some pattern mixing with a bought top, to be worn at the meet and great after the rehearsal dinner.

After I made this up, she was away for the weekend when I worked on it, she told me she actually wanted the stripes horizontal. I told her I could take it apart and do that, but I really was thinking if she says yes to that one I am just going to quietly leave town so I don't have to. 

Some things you just say to show off.

Fortunately she said it would be OK so we left it as it was although I did have to take the waistband off and take it in about 3" because apparently no one in my family can be trusted to take their own measurements, and I should know that, so it is probably my own fault. 

A mistake that will not happen again.

Here she is in the skirt out her backyard after a day at the beach with the kids, so you are supposed to take that into account when you look at her hair and make-up less face. 

It kills me that she was surprised I didn't do the stripes across - after all these years of sewing I had more or less assumed that any person wouldn't want their bottom half to look any larger than it is - that is at least what I would have thought. As it is she thinks this outfit makes her look fat. Considering she has a 27" waist despite three kids I don't think anyone would think that.

Finally this is Miss Scarlett who saw me with the camera taking pictures and wanted to show you her being a butterfly, that is fabric from my stash BTW:

Once I have the flower girl dresses done I think all I have left to do is one for my step-daughter and then me.

Mine is this Marfy pattern which arrived in the mail a few days ago - they come in an envelope just the pattern pieces no picture even of the garment and no instructions. I should be able to figure it out and for once in my life may even make a muslin for this one:

Before I get going on this I have to get my 75 jars of blueberry jam made for the wedding welcome baskets for guests.  I have been in touch with a farmer and am going to go out and pick up 40 pints, which I hope is enough, in about ten days, so I better have all my sewing except for myself done by then. 

Somehow this dress doesn't look like something a person who is making all that jam would wear - so I guess my plan is to go to the wedding in disguise.

My husband is coming home Thursday and he just emailed me to suggest a golf over night at a resort for our anniversary.

Little does that man know he is going to be spending his anniversary sterilizing jars for me instead.

For better or for worse, and I am pretty sure he remembers what he signed up for.

Now off the bed. The dogs are looking tired. 

My husband's northern blog

My husband started this blog largely for the entertainment of the extended family when he is away. He inspects big jobs and most of those are remote.

Funny just after I posted my last one he sent me an email that he had put up a blog post about polar bears. Since they are not a day-to-day thing for most people, I thought those who might find this interesting might find this post interesting.

Needless to say the husband is himself a bit of a character.