2007 April 26 | Suzanne Earley

I’m pretty sure I’m not going to make Mother of the Year, so I thought I’d try for Wife of the Year.

Several months ago, my DH came home wearing a shirt that had a hole in the sleeve. I’m pretty sure that he had probably GONE to work with the hole, but I don’t want to think about that.

He spends a lot of his day with his left elbow on his desk, his left hand on his chin, keeping his head up while he endlessly clicks things on his computer with his right hand on the mouse.

He handed me the shirt and asked if I could cut off the sleeves and turn it into a short sleeve shirt. Other than the rather noticeable hole in the elbow, the shirt was still in pretty decent shape. He dug into his closet and handed me another short sleeve shirt that had a sleeve length he particularly liked so I had an example to work from.

This was winter time, so I wasn’t in any hurry to do the job. I hung the shirts in my closet thinking I’d get to them some day before he needed them. Over the course of several days he began to hand me other shirts with similar elbow holes — a total of 4 of these, in fact.

On the hanger they went, as I tried to ignore the fact that he had probably worn all of these to work several times with the holes already hole-y.

It’s nearly time for him to wear them, so I finally decided that today was the day. I’m not really sure why I avoided doing it — I guess I thought it was going to take me forever to do it. Yeah right. Maybe an hour total and he has 4 new short sleeve shirts to wear to work:

Unfortunately, because of the position of the holes, I had to cut the sleeves slightly shorter than the sample shirt, but they aren’t too far off.

I think I mostly avoided this project because despite the fact that I’m a quilter, I don’t really “sew.” My garment techniques are woefully inadequate. You’ll notice that I am not showing you a close-up of the hems, as the stitched lines are little bit wobbly. They do the job, though, which is all that really matters.

In case you are wondering, the reason why I am not a candidate for Mother of the Year is because I have forced the boys to eat school lunches TWICE this week. If looks could kill, Joe would have had me dead about a million times over this morning.

After school, I asked him how lunch was today.

“Kind of Good.”

Uh-huh. That’s what I thought. Twerp.

I’m going to try to angle for Mother of the Year with supper tonight, though, pancakes and scrambled eggs…better get cooking!

TTFN -

Suzanne

So after I got through whining about my fusible web tracing issues from yesterday, I went back to the studio to try again. THis time I managed to get it right. I’m making this piece up as I go along, so once the letters were fused, and I did a quick zig-zag in matching thread, I had to decide what was next.

Beads.

Figured it couldn’t hurt to try.

I had this red bead mix that is packed with various shades of red (true red, pinky-red, purpley-red, goldish red, matte, shiny, silver-lined, clear). So, I started picking up groups of 2 or 3 beads (stab the needle in, whatever comes out on the needle is what gets sewn on), and began outlining the Q. Between last night and this afternoon, I’ve got the “C” and the “Q” outlined.

Yum.

I adore beads.

Don’t know what exactly I’m going to do with the all of the plain white fabric in the rest of the block, but I’m sure I’ll come up with something. Maybe more beads.

In case you are wondering, Salt Creek Quilt Company is the name of my business, thus the reason for the letters.

(Don’t forget to click to view them full size. These tiny thumbnails do not do the beads justice.)

I think I need more beads. Anybody want to share their favorite bead source(s)?

Thanks,

Suzanne