Two fabric-jewelry books and what I do with them

Our kitty Tisha is back from his third (and, we hope, final) surgery for the not-abscess-after-all on his neck. He’s all groggy, poor tiger. The vet calls him her “mystery cat” because she’s still not sure what’s wrong with him, but she says not to worry, it’s not life-threatening. We’re waiting on more lab results and such. I really hope this is the end of at least the surgeries; Tisha’s been through so much in the past month, and he’s still as active and sweet and nice as ever… such an affectionate, good-tempered cat really doesn’t deserve to be in and out of the vet’s every week!!

How to deal with actions that are important, yet not urgent

I started the morning with my usual pages and then my weekly review. This is, what, my third or fourth review now? Every Monday I’m reluctant to do the review because there are so many other things I’d rather be working on, but afterward I’m always thankful I did it. And it’s taken me all morning, too, every time. One thing I realized during today’s review was that I’m behind on a lot of those kinds of things that are not really urgent, and yet have a vague but definite shelf life. There are never enough hours in the day, and so I’ve been pushing myself to only work on what’s highest priority… but this means pretty much everything else gets neglected, particularly the stuff that doesn’t have hard deadlines (and therefore doesn’t register on my internal urgency meter). For example, I’ve been meaning for months now to do a little research (and I know it won’t be much) so I can start offering international shipping in the shop. The sooner I get this done, the better, but it’s not really urgent, and so I still haven’t gotten around to it. I’ve got tons of these kinds of things waiting patiently on my action lists. Likewise, while setting up my new site yesterday, I was aghast to find just how miserably disorganized my web directories are; it’s going to be a mild nightmare to reorganize them and clear out all the clutter. This kind of reorganization is never really urgent, in that “I’ve lived with it this way for so long, another few days/weeks/months won’t hurt” way, but the longer I wait on it, the worse the situation becomes. I guess it’s like credit card debt in that sense!

So I’ve got tons of these types of actions on my lists, but I still don’t know when I will do them. I’ve got a few options that I might try out. The first is I could allocate a certain amount of time each day to tackling these tasks, which will trim my action lists a lot and probably give me a lot of satisfaction, though I’ll have to be careful to really limit the time I spend on these things. The second is I could do them after 5 PM each day, when my urgent-work day ends, but then these tasks will be competing with household duties. The third is I could do them on the weekends, because I’ve noticed I enjoy doing less-urgent tasks on the weekends; they let me feel productive while maintaining a more leisurely “weekend” feel. We’ll see how it goes.

Today’s crafting: two (sort of) book reviews

I had a headache this afternoon — I think actually I’m not quite recovered from the weekend bug — so crafting was much less fun than usual, but several of my crafting books are overdue at the library and that forced me into going through them!

In one of the books, Fabric Jewelry by Teresa Searle, there are instructions for a time-consuming stunner of a necklace made from embroidery thread-wrapped twisted fabric strips, and beads. I’m not sure I want to go through all the trouble to make the necklace, but the wrapped twisted strips really fascinate me. Basically, you cut long thin strips of fine lightweight fabric (like silk dupioni), twist them, and feed them through the sewing machine on the zigag setting, thus creating your own cord. Searle used embroidery floss for hers, but I didn’t have spooled embroidery thread, so I just used regular thread, which just means the end result is a little less lustrous. But I love the overall look, so uneven and yet so eye-catching!

The coiled cords remind me of some kind of ethnic jewelry — I’m not sure exactly what culture I’m thinking of, but maybe Maasai beadwork? I don’t know yet exactly what I’ll make from them, but I am thinking of a cuff bracelet, or necklaces, or who knows what else? I could even try braiding the cords and see what that looks like. Making the cords is a little tedious, but it’s a good thing to do when I don’t really feel like thinking. 😉 So I may make lots more cords every time I have some appropriate-weight fabric strips to use up. It pleases me to think I now have a use for these strips, since they’re not as suitable to rug-making as the heavier-weight fabrics!

Another one of the library books, Fun-to-Wear Fabric Flowers by Elizabeth Searle (wait, they’re both Searles? hm!), also had a lot of jewelry projects, but they were all based on flower designs. I liked this book less than the previous one, because the instructions weren’t always clear, and some of the projects require you to cut the fabric in a way that just scandalizes me. If she wants a 36″ bias-cut strip of fabric, that means I’m taking almost a full yard of fabric and cutting it down the diagonal… am I missing something, or is that ridiculously wasteful? Other projects also asked for really long strips of fabric, which — since I don’t buy fabrics new, and many of my pieces are small — isn’t the best way to use my materials.

I was looking through the book, getting more and more annoyed about these long strips, until I finally found a project that I thought would work for me: a fat poppy. It only needed 6 3″x6″ pieces of lightweight fabric, so I used some lining fabric from a vintage dress I’m deconstructing. I did the cutting and ironing, but the sewing instructions were quite confusing, and I messed up on two different steps because of it. Eventually I figured out how to do the petals, but I got lazy and tried to machine-sew them together, which didn’t work so well. So I added two yo-yos I had sitting around, and made this weird hot mess of a pansy instead of the poppy I intended!

It’s actually kind of cool-looking I think, and looks especially nice pinned on clothing. Now that I understand how the technique works, I plan to give it a try with some different fabrics when my head is feeling a little better! And the project did teach me to machine-gather… that is, the book didn’t teach me how, it just alluded to machine gathering frequently, with no actual instructions, but I looked it up online and it wasn’t hard at all. So I feel pretty satisfied with the whole thing.

I also got some writing brainstorming done later in the afternoon, before going to pick up Tisha from the vet. And that’s been my day. Let’s hope the rest of the week will be nice and uneventful and productive!!