In an effort not to be bored I was crazily productive over the weekend. I made some feta (needs to age for 2 weeks), baked some bread (note to self, flour is important for gluten), started a new batch of wine (apple/tart cherry) I finally have all the perennials IN the ground and not just sitting on top of it. I put stakes in for my tomatoes and sugar snap peas (I used some of the millions of shoots the hardwood stumps are sending out, thanks for the idea Mom!) I took all the animals to the vets. I was very productive!

I finished the other two skirts. These are the three skirts that I picked up fabric for at the quilting store last week. The major lesson with these skirts is: If I don't know exactly what I'm doing I should pick up 3/4 to 1 yard of fabric, not 1/2 to 3/4 yards.
The brown gradient on in the center would've fit perfectly if the waistband was 1-2 inches wide instead of 2-3 since I only had 3/4 of a yard. But I'm still really proud of it. I like how the waistband fades from lightest in the front to darkest in the back. And I like my solution for not having the seams stand out in a bad way.
The blue one with the lace is a 12 gore skirt (meaning it's made of 12 wedges that are narrow at the waist and get wider) gored skirts can flair out a lot, but I kept this one more tame as it's meant to be an office skirt. The lace at the bottom and the white ribbon that I turned into a waistband are from my stash (why yes, I have a sewing stash as well as a knitting stash. Is there a problem with that?) I ended up picking up an extra 1/4 of a yard to make this fit nicely (so 3/4 of a yard total). Luckily no one had decided to use all the bolt of fabric for the backing of a quilt or anything.
The last one makes me feel like I'm wearing a chocolate layer cake - in a good way. I knew I wanted it tiered with elastic at the top. But I didn't want to buy yet more fabric and I only had a 1/2 yard of this brown. And then I realized I had some perfect light pink floaty fabric in my stash that matched the tiny pink dots in the pattern of the brown fabric. One of the trickiest things for me (in sewing) is having randomly, but evenly bunched fabric. I'm much better and even, spaced, pleats. I think I did pretty well on these layers and I LOVE this skirt (it may be my favorite).


All in all three really pretty skirts that are exactly what I wanted. And I spent $17.98 total, for three skirts - I win! If I'd had to buy zippers and elastic and lace trim it would have been more, but probably not more then $25 total. Now I just need it to be warm enough to wear my cute skirts and not my nice clean sweaters.

Oh yes, I also did some mending and washing of the woolens. You can probably imagine this is no small task in my house. Usually mending and washing happens when I put them away for the summer, but this year I did the mending and washing and I'm still wearing them, but it was time.

It's like a where's waldo in my living room. But I'm not sure if you're looking for all the woolens or looking for the living room beneath them... I washed 5 sweaters, 4 hats, 3 vests, 3 scarves, 2 mittens, and 1 jacket (not hand knit, but still 100% wool) Not pictured is Neil's india sweater which needed major reconstructive surgery on the cuffs.

I had a reason behind doing this all at once. My awesome front loading washing machine has a spin-only option. So after hand washing all these things I can just put them in the machine and it wrings 90% of the water out. WONDERFUL. But the machine is smart and carefully balances the load by tumbling it a bit first, so it doesn't walk away (or break) during the high spin speeds. We've tried putting just 1 thing in the machine once. It spend 30 minutes before it (somehow, I don't know how) got the item balanced against the door so it was mostly centered with itself for the spin. The machine may be smarter then me. Now I make sure it has enough in it to balance easily before spinning the water out.