Sunday Sundry 3-25-18

A few weeks ago, I sat here and composed a long, sort of catch-up post.  Spent a couple hours on it (I am not a fast blogger, especially with so much time having passed since the last entry).  Saved it to edit a bit more later, and went to lunch.  When I came back to it, I went to make one small change and just like that—poof—it was gone!  The "undo" button was of no use; the entire post had vanished.

Fate or fumble fingers?  Perhaps both.  Frustrating?  To say the least.  I was not about to repeat the effort in that moment, so just walked away.

Anyway, hello again.  I'm still here, doing the day-to-day, and hope you are too.

(My first wall hanging, made for Dad in 1993)

I spent a lot of time in January going through my dad's stuff.  He was kind of pack rat, but in the best way.  That is, if he kept something, it had meaning to him, nostalgic, sentimental or historical value.  Of course, in the end, it's all just "stuff," but in sifting through it and dividing it among my siblings, I wondered and mused, marveled and giggled (and even Googled).  It has been an interesting, cathartic, and healing process.

My sewing space was strewn with paperwork, photos, memorabilia, and other non-fabric related whatnots for a couple months.  I spent a lot of time there in the basement, not sewing.  But I got a lot done, things organized and dealt with, funeral thank-yous and other notes written, etc. 

And then there was the radon.

January was "Radon Awareness Month," per various plugs I'd seen online and in the media.  On a whim one day, I followed a link to order a test kit, and a week or so later had completed it and sent it in for analysis.  A couple days later, an email arrived with the results.  And I freaked out.

My sewing room, my Happy Place where I've spent countless hours in the past 20 years, measured four times the actionable level of radon.

Fast forward 10 days, and a mitigation truck was in the driveway.  A system (pipe and fan) was installed to vent the gas from where it collects under the concrete slab/basement floor to outside and above the roof line, where it is discharged into the general atmosphere.  Followup testing last week showed the level is now down to nearly zero.  Happy Place restored.

So there was that.

Meanwhile, I brought a sewing machine upstairs to the kitchen table and made a memory quilt out of Dad's old shirts and one pair of pajamas.  

I went back to using the living room floor as my design wall.

I needed to keep my mind focused on something productive, other than fretting about the stuff I couldn't see or taste or smell, much less control.  (You know, if radon smelled like manure or rotten eggs, I bet we'd all be dealing with it pronto.)

Soon, there was this.

I am going to send it out for quilting, although I haven't determined where yet.  My local long arm quilter has moved away to live with her elderly mother.  She did give me the names of a couple other local quilters, but I haven't contacted them yet.

Some of those shirts were a bit finicky to work with.  I ended up fusing interfacing to the backs of the thinner ones.  A couple others want to fray if you just look at them sideways.  I zigzagged the edges in the most troublesome areas.  But the sooner it's quilted, I think, the better.

I did another little memory project that I'll tell you about in another post. Hint:  It involves the three ties pictured on the table above.