Hello All,
Hello all you wonderful, brilliant, shining beings of light! (How’s that for an intro?) Anyhoo, I had the coolest thing happen this morning. And yes, this does have to do with my recent sewing obsession! Don’t be surprised if every post on my blog from now on has something to do with sewing. Ha! Yesterday, I was wondering how to make ruffles in fabric. I thought about it several times, but forgot to look it up online. Then, just before I woke up this morning, a helpful spirit gave me a tutorial! I saw a close up of some fabric in my head, a large needle, and then the needle went through the fabric at the points marked. Then, the thread was pulled and voila! a ruffle! I said thank you to the friendly Spirit who helped me with that.
One of the things I’m looking forward to is connecting more with my grandmother and Mark’s grandmother, both of whom were avid sewers. My grandmother on my mom’s side sewed clothing all the time. She also knitted clothing. I’ve already told them both that I expect their help in my newish hobby. I say newish because I had a sewing machine when I was younger. It lasted several years before the foot pedal broke. I didn’t realize at the time that I could have just bought a new foot pedal. I think we gave it away to a woman who wanted to sew for her children. Then, I took a sewing class in high school. I made a very structured top but didn’t choose the right material, so I never wore it. Then, I tried making two different dresses. One was a semi-disaster. There were many fitting issues, and I eventually gave up. Now that I’ve read a million reviews online, I realize this is a common thing. The second dress ended up looking more like a sack than a dress. A very well made, pretty purple sack, but a sack nonetheless.
This sewing experience I AM SURE is going to be much more enjoyable and successful. For one thing, I’m reading everything I can get my hands on about sewing and fitting garments before my sewing machine gets here. For another, my first project involves sewing the edges of a bunch of flannel squares. You know how Mark and I are making different changes to be more eco-friendly? One of the ways is by not buying boxes of tissues. We read and saw a video about tissues and toilet paper and how they are made from ancient or virgin forests. We’ve been rethinking parts of our disposable lifestyle and figuring out how to do things differently. Mark had some monkey print flannel fabric he bought off etsy, so we cut it into squares for tissues. It is so great! We tested our creations at the perfect time, because I had a little head cold last week. I think he cut about 50 flannel squares for me. Here’s the cool part – this is just like an infomercial. I spent a day while I was all snotty at my mom’s, so I used regular tissues while I was there. The skin around my nose was rubbed raw! Now, this has happened many times before in my life, and I always thought it was because of my cold or allergies. However, once I got home and started using my flannel tissues, no more sore nosey!!! It wasn’t my nose that was the problem, it was the tissue! My mom even uses the nice kind with lotion. It still was too rough for my skin. The only issue we’re having with our monkey tissues now is that when we wash them, the edges are fraying. Enter new sewing machine! Tah dah!
We also got rid of our paper towels. We started using fabric napkins while eating and cut up an old towel for cleaning rags. Yesterday we went to a Chinese restaurant nearby, and they had paper napkins. They were so scratchy! I never realized it until I started using the good stuff. I read an article that was talking about how we had to be trained to be in this disposable mindset. After WWII, everyone was still in the save and reuse mode. Then, there was a huge advertising push to get people to buy things that was saying how it made life easier to just have everything disposable – plates, napkins, tissues…you get the idea. It was even on the cover of Life Magazine – I just looked for it online again but couldn’t find it. It showed a woman with a trash can in front of her, lots of disposable things going into the trash, and big happy smile on her face. I can see how this makes sense on the one hand. Who wants to do dishes, right? But when I realized that my trash doesn’t really go anywhere – that almost everything I use stays around FOREVER, it seems crazy to me to keep living the way that I have been. So far with tissues and paper towel change, which actually make my life better, I’ve saved a lot of paper = trees = plastic packaging.
I’ve also made some pretty other cool changes. Stay tuned for my toilet paper and tampon blogs! HA! The funny thing is that I’m serious. 🙂 Tampons – sheesh. I think I’ll post that one today. It’s called The DivaCup Diary. Check it out in the Eco-Living section of my site.
I hope you have a lovely day,
Melanie
