Kathleen Knits

Home improvement projects take quite a bit of time when you really only have one full day per week to dedicate to them. Maybe that makes it all the more satisfying though. When we bought Eugenie (the name of our little Victorian house), there was much wallpaper from the 80’s.

Once the wallpaper was down, we found horsehair plaster covered in wallpaper glue and full of nicks and cracks.

After weeks of scrubbing (thanks dad)……

mudding, sanding, and readhering plaster that had lost its keys (I’m learning much cool technical language during this process)…..

(many, many thanks to Ken)

with a subplot that involved an electrician and roofers with lovely new black shingles

and multiple breaks for beer and sunshine…

We put up primer (thanks mom).

Then we finally painted the dining room. We went to Home Depot to get a nice sage green. Instead we bought several gallons of Asparagus, which we have renamed Holy-Cow-Green.

After many years of living in apartments with white walls, we are super excited about the color and plan on coordinating the rest of the dining and living rooms around the green. Keep checking back for more to come as we discover the exciting worlds of Ikea dropleaf tables, Pottery Barn carpets, and lovely old wood chairs.

For those of you who haven’t heard, Adam and I have joined the homeowners’ club! Hooray for having a mortgage!

The house is a little Victorian with a Mansard roof, a style inspired by the Paris of the Second French Empire. We’ve named her Eugenie for the wife of Napoleon III, author of the Second French Empire. I spent a great deal of time researching and deciding on that name, only to find out that she was through a grandfather a Kirkpatrick! Very exciting.

For the last 2 months we’ve been cleaning wallpaper glue off of walls, patching wholes and other bits of ugliness in the horsehair plaster, and readhering loose plaster with Big Wally’s Plaster Magic! Saturday we started putting up primer and we are hoping to have the dining room, living room, and hallway painted before Thanksgiving. It’s a long process and we’re very grateful to everyone who has been helping us, including Adam’s parents and Ken. We’ve been taking before and in progress photos and once the paint is up, I will post them all.

Alright, so it’s been a VERY long time since I last posted. This is my excuse:

Instead of making Christmas presents (as mentioned in one of my last posts), I got an eye infection and the medicine they gave me resulted in about 6 weeks of walking around with one eye dilated. Needless to say, not much knitting or sewing got done for quite some time.

Since then I have knit a vest, sewn a bag, and started a large quilt project. Photos to follow “soon”……

I’m teaching a hand sewing class at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education next semester. It’s once a week for 6 weeks, and we’re going to make several small bags. I’m very excited. It should be great fun. If you want more info about the class, it’s under fiber arts at .

Here are my latest two projects.

Tammy!

Nothing really new here in terms of lessons learned. I can’t tell you how much I enjoy knitting these. The wool I bought last fall on a shopping trip to Webs in Northampton with Kirti. If anyone wants to learn how to knit these, let me know. They are definitely in the category of “easier than it looks.”

And one crazy bag.

I love leftover projects. I started with wool that was left over from my mom’s steeked cardigan. I knit a rectangle in the two blues and then added the white stripes with a crochet hook. Then it went in Wendi’s washing machine while we watched the War. The corduroy is leftover from a skirt project. I cut it really close with this one (pun not intended - “he who would pun would pick a pocket”). The direction of some of the wales is not what I intended because I didn’t have enough to cut it the way I wanted. The lining is a very nice khaki, bought for a different project that never happened. This was my first attempt at inserting a snap. It went well, although next time I will probably try to do the hammering later in the day. I did this one at 9:00 AM on a Saturday and the other people in my building tend to be late night people. Can I help it if I’m a morning person?

I probably won’t post much for a few weeks as I’m now concentrating on Christmas presents and I don’t want to give any surprises away.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Here are two weeks worth of projects and the lessons learned:

A little pouch (hand sewn):

I never though I would have interest in fussy cutting, but I found this great brown fabric with long leaves that begged to be cut out. Notice the tip of one on the little snap flap.

A scarf (machine sewn):

This is the scarf from Amy Butler’s In Stitches. It’s the first time I’ve ever had to cut fabric on the bias and insert trim. Getting the trim in was a bit tricky. I first stitched it to one half of the scarf end, and then stitched the two halves of the scarf together with the trim on the inside. I think the work would be neater if I had done the second half of that operation with the piece of fabric that already had the trim sewn to it on top. That way I could have made sure I was working inside that line of stitching so that none of it showed when the scarf was turned.

Cocktail napkins (machine sewn):

I learned how to miter a hem. I also learned that it is absolutely NOT worth it to sew ones own napkins. I think it’s the repetitiveness of the task. I hand stitched a hanky a few months ago, and would definitely do it again. It was very satisfying. The napkins were a little frustrating. Maybe if I hadn’t done them all in one sitting.

In the meantime I am working on a wool skirt and the cool weather is inspiring dreams of knit woolens. I pulled out some alpaca/merino blend yarn that I got last fall at Webs. I’m thinking of knitting a tammy.

Friday night Marika said to me “Project-a-week, eh? August 6th, eh?” and I stared at my feet and said apologetically “I know, I know,” because Marika (like all Mediteranean woman) has an amazing gift for making people feel they need to excuse and justify their actions (or lack thereof). Now I further went on to explain that I have been sewing, I just haven’t been posting. So here they are, in no particular order:

My new skirt:

With a bound hem:

And a drawstring cleverly hidden in the back seam (the pattern called for two buttonholes in the front of the skirt, but my machine is too old to have an automatic buttonhole maker, and I was not about to make them by hand.)

A cute little pincushion from Quiltmaker magazine:

The front and back of a lavender eye pillow from Amy Butler:

And last, but not least, a tiny bag, with an embroidered front, a snazzy lining, and a ribbon handle:

I’m also working on another little bag (this one with fussycutting, something I NEVER thought I would feel compelled to do), and will post that by next weekend. (I promise this time, Marika.)

Here’s this week’s project (although admittedly I made it over the course of several weeks).

Lessons learned:

1. I’m finally getting comfortable with the quilting stitch. It’s still slow going, but my stitches are getting more even and more than half of my stitches are making it through to the backside of the work.

2. I love the bias binding. It’s so neat and clean looking. I’m already planning a skirt project with a bias binding instead of a hem.

More next week………

FAILURE! I missed this week’s deadline. Damn. I wanted so much to be disciplined about this and make every deadline. I know one should never offer excuses in these moments, but…

First I picked a project that is more involved than the others
Second on Wednesday I had a date with my friend Wendi and Harry Potter
Third on Thursday I was just tired
Fourth I went away for the weekend

So next week I will definitely have the project with the quilting finished.

Here is this week’s project. It’s another pattern from Kumiko Sudo’s Omiyage. This bird is a little pouch. I’m going to fill it with jelly beans and give it to my niece for her birthday.

Lessons learned:

1. Even within my own stash, I can find color combinations that go beyond my normal pallete.

2. Seaming the wings and tail in was a challenge. Since I had to put them between the two layers when I seamed the body, the curves fought against each other. I dealt with this first by doing some heavy duty basting. I basted the wings and the tail to one of the pieces of the body. Second, instead of trying to manipulate the piece of fabric with the wings and tail basted to it, I manipulated the other, more flexbile piece as I sewed the seam.

Next week, a little quilting…….