Incremental progress [projects, knitting]
Nov. 12th, 2023 07:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rebeccmeisterI can at least report some incremental progress on three projects this weekend, accomplished by way of procrastinating from grading:
-Chair refinishing: I deployed some Dremel accessories to strip some old finish out of some spots on those old dining chairs. The Dremel was slightly too aggressive, but I'm feeling better about things because it worked for some areas that had stymied me. There are still a handful of other spots I want to tidy up before I re-stain these chairs, but this felt like progress, at least. The hard part is, with the cats around, I don't really feel like I can work on this project in the basement, because it produces too much dust and we don't have any tiny face masks for the cats. So I'm limited to working on it only on good-weather days, out on the back steps.
-Catbed quilt: I finally trimmed down the edges on the "quilt sandwich," so the catbed quilt is now finally ready for binding. I, however, am not quite yet ready to bind it, because there's some complex geometry involved in certain spots and I need to re-watch some stuff on binding quilts so I can go at it with a plan. So, forward progress, but not yet that sense of satisfaction that comes from FINALLY completing a lingering project.
-I finally started piecing together the Angwin cardigan I've been working on since 2019.
There's just one small hitch: I got the first sleeve sewed closed, then looked at it and went, "That's not right." Then I went back to watch more videos on the mattress stitch, where I discovered that I'd been doing it backwards. You're supposed to use the mattress stitch on the RIGHT side of the pieces you're working with, not the WRONG side. Argh.
I took the stitching back out of the sleeve. I now need to decide whether I should also go back and do this for the shoulders and the sleeve caps. On the one hand, that's more hours of stitching. On the other hand, it's far easier to fix this thing now rather than later, and I learned from my very first (and only other) sweater that if I'm too impatient, I'll regret my haste later. (in that case, it wasn't so much "haste makes waste" as "haste prevents waist," as in, the sweater's just a little too short-waisted).
The only challenge is that I'm hoping to have the cardigan at least pieced together by mid-December, so I can bring it with me to knit the collar while on long airplane rides. I really can't be working on piecing it together while traveling - that benefits from a big table. I just have to somehow find the time. Somehow.
-Chair refinishing: I deployed some Dremel accessories to strip some old finish out of some spots on those old dining chairs. The Dremel was slightly too aggressive, but I'm feeling better about things because it worked for some areas that had stymied me. There are still a handful of other spots I want to tidy up before I re-stain these chairs, but this felt like progress, at least. The hard part is, with the cats around, I don't really feel like I can work on this project in the basement, because it produces too much dust and we don't have any tiny face masks for the cats. So I'm limited to working on it only on good-weather days, out on the back steps.
-Catbed quilt: I finally trimmed down the edges on the "quilt sandwich," so the catbed quilt is now finally ready for binding. I, however, am not quite yet ready to bind it, because there's some complex geometry involved in certain spots and I need to re-watch some stuff on binding quilts so I can go at it with a plan. So, forward progress, but not yet that sense of satisfaction that comes from FINALLY completing a lingering project.
-I finally started piecing together the Angwin cardigan I've been working on since 2019.
There's just one small hitch: I got the first sleeve sewed closed, then looked at it and went, "That's not right." Then I went back to watch more videos on the mattress stitch, where I discovered that I'd been doing it backwards. You're supposed to use the mattress stitch on the RIGHT side of the pieces you're working with, not the WRONG side. Argh.
I took the stitching back out of the sleeve. I now need to decide whether I should also go back and do this for the shoulders and the sleeve caps. On the one hand, that's more hours of stitching. On the other hand, it's far easier to fix this thing now rather than later, and I learned from my very first (and only other) sweater that if I'm too impatient, I'll regret my haste later. (in that case, it wasn't so much "haste makes waste" as "haste prevents waist," as in, the sweater's just a little too short-waisted).
The only challenge is that I'm hoping to have the cardigan at least pieced together by mid-December, so I can bring it with me to knit the collar while on long airplane rides. I really can't be working on piecing it together while traveling - that benefits from a big table. I just have to somehow find the time. Somehow.
