Finally

I did some applique today for the first time in about eight weeks. Some of it was fun and some was very frustrating. The fun part was the obvious and the usual. Choosing the fabrics to make the pieces, carefully making the templates, getting each piece cut out. The frustrating part was various issues including not having sewn in eight weeks--muscle memory does play a huge part in most of what we do with our hands so if we are out of practice, our work suffers. I kept pulling the needle off the thread, necessitating re-threading. The re-threading was also fraught with problems relative to the new/old house.

I don't have my sewing room completely set up yet so I am sewing in the living room section of the great room that forms the main part of this 1737 house. There are multiple windows but the stone walls (all the window sills are more than a foot deep) and the big eaves make those windows very shaded and relatively small so depending on the hour of the day the sun might not be where you want it. In a modern house we overcome that difficulty by adding light fixtures but in a house of this age even the light fixtures are few and far between. Don't get me wrong--I am still enamored of this old house but until I get my sewing room set up, I am stuck in what is a pretty formal living area. And even that is my choice since I don't ever have a TV in my living or dining rooms, not ever in all my years of marriage or even in my childhood. Of course here the previous owner did have TV in this room so there are wires and fixings and gobbledegook that is  ugly and intrusive that I have been coiling up and tucking as best I can into the built in cabinets.

 But eventually, I will have my sewing room set up with adequate lighting and I will be back in the groove with my own muscle memory of how to thread a needle and how to make small stitches. So far the rabbits are just looking in from the outside at the new plantings but my Beatrix Potter memories tell me that they are known to dig under chicken wire.