As you remember, Bob, 2023 is the year where I am determined to complete all the half-finished projects in my closet. I have extended that to include the purchased and not-yet-worked-upon projects stashed in the craft room because hey, why not?

As of today I have completed:

• The Pacific Sunset quilt top for my niece
• A green velvet dress for myself
• A black jean jacket
• A stand mixer cozy
• A food processor cozy

In progress:

• The Garden Paths quilt top (which should be done by next week)
• The South of the Border wall hanging

Coming up:

• Quilting the Pacific Sunset, Garden Paths, and SotB projects
• A Log Cabin wall hanging with fabric I got from Arkansas
• A formal jacket in rust red twill (bought the fabric in 2009 for another project and it will make a faboo jacket)
• A Grandmother’s Garden quilt (kit)
• A Sunflowers quilt
• A He Brought Me Roses quilt
• A Cathedral Windows quilt (kit)
• A black and silver dress

Then there are the multitudinous bundles of associated fabric that I bought with no idea of what to do with them except they were cute. I think I’m going to start making either wall hangings or lap quilts with them and give them away to readers (because I don’t need any more bedding in this house).

Don’t even get me started on all the yarn. No new yarn is entering this house until I’ve finished all of the sock projects and made at least one sweater to replace the one that the moths ate.

I have no idea why, but today I was absolutely overwhelmed with the urge to make a cover for the food processor so that it coordinated with the cover for the stand mixer.

Which I didn’t show here, did I? I bought a little over a yard of prequilted fabric years ago for a knitting needle organizer, then during my Finish All the Projects planning I realized it would work much better as a stand mixer cover. Took a couple of tries to get it to fit just right (added a smaller back and took in a wedge at the top to fit that) but I’m quite pleased with it. And yes, I made the piping myself and designed the pattern.

Anyway, the food processor cover. As you may remember, I bought the fabric the same day I had the Code Brown at Joann Fabrics. It was impossible to find more fabric to match the stuff I used for the stand mixer cover (believe me, I tried) so I decided to go with a coordinating green floral to go with the kitchen’s white curtains with green leaves and purple grapes.

What that meant, however, was that I had to quilt the fabric myself. It was a little time consuming but no big deal—the underside is the same fabric I used for the piping and I used a basic diamond pattern for the quilting. At first I was afraid I’d have to quilt the entire yard and a half of fabric, then I had the brain wave of cutting out the front parts to size, layering them on batting and backing that was a little larger, quilting each piece individually, then trimming to size before sewing up the cover. It worked nicely and I didn’t have to wrestle a huge wad of fabric through my machine, which is always a plus.

And yes, I know this is a little extra but the covers keep the machines clean and ready for use at a moment’s notice instead of getting splashed with stuff when I’m washing dishes and slowly accumulating a layer of dust. I have a bunch of extra daisy fabric so I may make a cover for the blender as well. If this means I’m turning into my grandma, so be it.

This was so much fun. Now I want to design one from scratch!

Since I’m Olde™ and really don’t need anything these days, it makes buying me presents for my birthday and Christmas somewhat challenging. If I can’t get some sort of an experience I try to make it easier on the Brit by finding something cute on Amazon and sending him a link. Last year, I got a really cool skull cup for my birthday, but I was kind of stumped for Christmas.

And then I saw it.

As you may remember, Bob, I’m a miniaturist from way back. And last year there was a huge craze for super cute book nook scenes that you could build and put on your bookshelf. So I thought, yes, this would be an appropriate Christmas gift for me.

So the Brit dutifully ordered it and wrapped it for Christmas, and I was delighted to open it Christmas morning. It was brought upstairs and sat there until yesterday when I was cleaning the bedroom and thought, “Hmm, I’d like to take a crafting break from the quilt. I should put this together.”

Dude. Dude. First off, the kit was of very nice quality and comes with almost everything you need, including glue, paint, and an eensy paintbrush. The instructions, which appear to have been translated from Chinese, are a little dodgy here and there (the glue was labeled as “latex” and I was using my own glue until the light dawned halfway through the kit, and it keeps saying to paint the “frames” of a piece where it should be “edges”) but the pictures are good enough to figure out what to do. It also helps that I’ve been building miniature kits for over 45 years.

The only problem for me? The kit is roughly in 1/24 scale which means there are a buttload of tiny parts, including a lot of printed cardboard ones, and I have at least one cat who loves to chew on paper. This means I have to keep the office door closed, and it’s cold out here right now in north Dallas so without heat from the main house my office is more than a bit chilly. I’ve been wearing a cardigan and looking wistfully at my fingerless gloves but I can’t wear them while handling glue and paint.

So far I have the kit halfway constructed (and it has a COOL lighting system where an induction pad connected to the hidden battery box is screwed behind the little stepped wooden piece at the bottom of the front. I was wondering why they’d printed the On symbol on a piece of wood, but if you turn on the battery box and touch the symbol with your finger it turns on the lights. I so could have used this tech 14 years ago when I was building the Nevermore shadow box, but now that I know it exists I will be using it on the book nooks I’m going to create from scratch, tra la.

Anyway, pics are incoming once I finish the kit. And figure out where to place it, of course.

I have been, shall we say, derelict with the cleaning of the house for the past couple of weeks, mainly because I’m trying to finish this dratted novella and the rest of the time I freely admit I’ve been sewing something.

But when the dust rhinos come out from under the foyer table and start nipping at your toes you know it’s time to break out the vacuum and go medieval on those suckers. I figure I’ll spend the weekend deep cleaning the guest room as well and getting all the bedding put away in the closet (if we keep it on the bed Jeremy turns everything orange within a week with his fur. I have no idea how one cat can produce so much fur but he manages), as it’s starting to look like we may have guests this spring, yay!

Going back to sewing, I finally got the buttons for the denim jean jacket (they’re little fleur de lis buttons to match the embroidery on the jacket) and I pulled out the yard of double-sided quilted material that’s been in my closet for yonks in preparation for turning it into a Kitchenaid stand mixer cover. Of course, once I get that done I’ll need to find some complimentary fabric so that I can make a coordinating cover for the food processor. And before you laugh, both utensils tend to gather a lot of dust and I’d like to keep them as clean as possible so covers are a damned good idea. I’ll post pic once everything is done.

More sewing stuff ahead to veer off if you’re not interested. I promise, I’ll go back to writing stuff this week.

So I’ve been spending the evenings working on this black jean jacket, as you do, and I’ve been trying it on at points to make sure it fits. Earlier today I noticed that the shoulders were hella wider than I needed, to the point where it wasn’t so much a drop sleeve as a plummeting sleeve.

I grabbed my very favorite jacket that fits me like a glove and measured the shoulder width. It was a full 2.5″ shorter than the jean jacket pattern. Knowing that this might be a huge mistake, I sketched in the necessary correction curve into the fabric and cut it out, then sewed in one sleeve.

I’m now grateful that I’d added so much extra fabric to the sleeve because damn, that was a challenge getting it fitted into the new curve, but I got it in. Unfortunately, there now seems to be a fairly large bulge of fabric immediately behind the armhole. I’m going to put in the other sleeve and see if that reduces it; if not, I’ll look into methods of pulling it in somehow.

I really wish I had a tailor’s dummy that matched my own dimensions. One of these days…

I’ve been fighting an uphill battle against carpet moths, which despite their name eat other things than carpets. Any sort of natural fiber—wool, cotton, linen—is a salad bar to them, as I discovered during the Christmas freeze when I went to get my lovely (and muy expensive) sweater I’d made last year out of Malabrigo Rios yarn and found holes punched through it like it had gone through a sprocket.

We have mothballs in our closet now, as we do in the downstairs guest room, and they certainly seem to be doing the trick. But apparently I need to put them in my office closet as well because I pulled out some denim fabric for a project and I found one of the little bastards fluttering around on it, plus another wafted past my face while I was selecting a podcast for my listening pleasure while I sewed.

Since I need to run to the store tomorrow anyway for korma sauce for my experimental chicken korma Chelsea buns, I’ll pick up one of the hangers then and shove it in there. My office will reek for a few days, but I can always open a window and if it means I won’t have any more little winged office mates I can deal.

Oh, the project—I’m making a black denim jean jacket. The denim is embroidered with gold fleur-de-lis and should look fantastic once it’s done.