Better Than Chicken Soup

I found the cure for the common cold.  OK, perhaps not the cure, but certainly as medicinal as chicken soup, and far longer lasting.  It’s the new magazine Primitive Quilts and Projects.  I read it three times in three days.  The surprise in this was the rug hooking project which I didn’t notice at first. Indeed, when I bought it I did so for the cover, and then my cold hit…hard.  But as my wits and energy returned, not to mention my mental and visual acuity, I picked it up and found the articles and projects so intriguing and delightful, I almost forgot about my cold.  Almost.

It is filled with wool projects for applique, altered clothing, and a bonus pin cube that I intend to make with some recycled cardstock.  The fonts are large and readable, and there is a conspicuous absence of advertising, which surely will change given the potential of this wonderful periodical.  There is a pull out of patterns; some full-sized!  How often do you see that?

I just subscribed, and look forward to getting the back issues I’ve ordered as well as future ones.  I found my copy at JoAnns but also saw it at Barnes & Noble.   It’s a little bit of West Virginia heaven!  Check it out.   www.primitivequiltsandprojects.com

And it’s hard for me to admit it.  I’ve been walking, no strutting would be more honest, around Florida espousing the miracle of Zicam and hand washing, and that’s why I RARELY get colds.  It’s been seven years since I moved here, and seven years since I’ve had a cold.  I’m at day four and counting, clearly making up for lost time.

Every morning I get up from a hellish night thinking surely I will feel better today.  Only I feel worse.  And not just worse, but exponentially worse, like the Richter scale of 6.5  is ten times worse than 6.4.  If colds were earthquakes, this would be a 9.5 which I believe is the highest ever recorded.  Maybe I’m a 9.6.

So while laying here unable to do anything other than roll over to blow my nose I got to thinking about allergy sufferers who walk around all spring with runny, burning noses and sneezing.  Forgive me, but I’d get those shots in a heartbeat.  At least I have an endpoint to my misery.

But the worst part is not having the energy to work on crafts.  Just writing this little post will surely knock me out for the next three hours.  Thank God.

The Buckman Bridge

I have a friend who writes a blog that causes me to think about myself.  She is always asking questions.  She frequently has a challenge.  She is a complex, highly intelligent woman who thinks deeply.

Something I just read on her blog was about courage, and I wondered if I thought of myself as a courageous person. I don’t think I do.  Perhaps I did at one time, but age and attitude have kept me off mountain peaks, out of wars, and quiet when I should have been loud.

Once I was in a thrift shop and I watched a woman smacking her child around.  She was holding him aloft by his arm, and as he dangled a foot off the floor, she swung hard at his bottom and legs which had him spinning back and forth.  He was howling.  I glared, and moved closer to see if that would stop her.  It didn’t.   She was a big woman and she was wild-eyed.  I could see that I might have joined him in harms way had I come to the boy’s aid, and to this day I regret not taking that chance.  I should have at least gotten her tag number in the parking lot and called the police.  I’m surprised my shame has allowed me to even mention this.

But once I was driving behind a car that went airborne, flipping 6 to 7 times, high in the air, right in front of me.  I watched the driver be ejected, and can still clearly see his body flapping like a flag while coming out of the driver’s side window.  One second he was in front of me, and then whoosh, he disappeared.  I was out of my car before it came to a complete stop.  I was running in circles looking for his body, which landed in the middle of I95 behind my car.  Vehicles were dodging both of us, but I got to him first.  He was still conscious, though barely, and he begged me to not let him die.  There was blood coming out of his mouth and onto me.  I told him I was a nurse and I wouldn’t let him die. And then he went unconscious.

I had no “crash cart,” but I organized his stabilization, checked for bleeding, got him covered, directed others to secure the area, and waited for the helicopter.  His injuries were internal, and all I could do was wait for his pulse to stop and start CPR.   He was alive when they took him.  To me, that was the most courageous thing I ever did.  But then aside from being struck myself, there was little fear for my own safety.

I think we all like to see ourselves as having courage, but compared to the person who, just this afternoon, came upon an accident on the Buckman Bridge (a span of over three miles), watched a man ejected into the St. Johns River, grabbed a rope ladder out of his car, climbed down and saved the drowning, injured man, I think my story pales in comparison.

There are so many heros among us.  I wish the news would tell us more of these people. Courage happens every day, but unless it is caught on camera, and makes it to Youtube, we don’t hear too much about it.

Do you have moments of courage in your life?  Will you share your story?

Who really is the bad girl?

I already know what happens.  I’ve seen it.  And I almost envy you who have not because this week will be worth the wait.

The buildup to the finale is tension filled, yet with humor and, of course, spectacular imagery.  The final scene literally took my breath away, making me feel as if I was in a large theatre and not in my tiny bedroom with a tiny TV.

All my guessing was for naught.  Much of what I was sure of was wrong.  Villains changed.  But then they didn’t.  Then they did.  I’m not sure anymore.  I am so ready for next season I can taste it, yet they haven’t even started filming, and won’t until April. How will I cope?  How will you cope?

No, actually, we don’t have a DVR, or even a DVD player that can record on one station while we watch another.  We don’t have pay channels, but rather just the very basic cable that comes with the our association dues. Except for sports and good PBS programming, we don’t watch TV.

I can recite dialog from last season’s Downton Abbey.  But I can’t tell you who won last year’s Superbowl, or even who played in it!

So you know where my vote’s going.

What will you watch?

Looking for a way to level, center, and artistically write words on a rug, I went to Youtube today and found this video.  What a gorgeous shop!  It makes me want to jump in the car and move to New Hampshire, which doesn’t sound like a bad idea frankly.  I’ve been to New Hampshire, and it’s beautiful!

You will LOVE this video, and maybe absorb some of their enthusiasm for this amazing craft.  I am definitely “afflicted with an addiction to wool!”  P.S.  The “Patsy” is not me!

This morning I awoke slowly and remembered my dreams, and they were about new designs for punch needle; all of them.  Or perhaps I never actually got to sleep, and just spent the night thinking about designs.  It doesn’t matter because I feel fine this morning.

Maybe I should clarify this here.  It’s not necessarily the punch needle activity that’s got me obsessed at the moment, but rather punch needle is the vehicle of the month, or perhaps year.  I’m always dreaming up designs.  In fact, the other day I found a missing file box of original designs that I drew years ago for needlepoint.  My designing is constant; it’s the needlework that changes.  And all of those designs can be used for punch needle, which really has me excited.

Last night, before I went to bed, I did some experimenting with the Paternayan wools and my new needles, and my results had me fidgeting before sleep.  I kept wanting to get up and draw.  I speculated that the larger canvas would go as quickly as the smaller one, and it did.  Perhaps even faster because I could punch looser and get the same results with the three-stranded Paternayan wool.  I did a two-inch circle in about a minute and with my heart beating fast in anticipation I turned it over and gasped at the sight.  The loops were even, they were not too tight and not too loose.  The monks cloth is the best cloth I’ve found so far for holding the wool, and these new Amy Oxford needles are to die for. Ergonomic. Lightweight.  Easy to turn.  Smooth needles.  I can thread them without a needle threader – EASILY.  I am in heaven.

I’m back to Lowes today for more two-by-fours and those carpet strips.  My goal is to make a rug frame large enough to hold the whole rug which is approximately 2′ by 3′.  I have visions of pulling out that electric puncher to see if it would be useful for large backgrounds.  I also want to look at more yarn, but you don’t have to mention that to my husband, thank you.

Once you have the design the size you want on paper, how do you get it onto monks cloth?  I read books and blogs and decided upon copying the design through a layer of tulle; the idea that once on the tulle you can retrace it with a dark magic marker that will go through the tulle and onto monks cloth.  So I took an hour meticulously tracing the design from paper to tulle, constantly readjusting the sheer fabric that my tape simply wouldn’t stick to.  Once I completed that transfer, which was barely visible on the open weave tulle, I attempted to retrace it after placing it atop the monks cloth.  Who’s idea was this?  It’s messy, difficult, and the fabrics just shift constantly.  It’s too poofy with the two fabrics together to get any real straight lines.  It just didn’t work at all.

But a better solution is not only simpler, it’s easier.  I taped my design which is on heavy artists tracing paper to the window.  Doing so provided lines and right angles to follow because the window is rectangular, like the rug.  Then I taped the monks cloth on top of it, using the graph lines woven into the fabric to keep things lined up.  It worked perfectly.  It’s straight and because I drew right on the fabric, I didn’t have to press hard with the magic marker, which, by the way, must be permanent so that you don’t have bleeding if you wash the rug.

I’m now ready to start punching this rug, once I gather all the necessary yarns.  I can’t wait to use my new Amy Oxford punch needles.

If someone has had success with the tulle option of transferring patterns, I’d like to know what, if anything, I did wrong.  But my opinion is that this is not a good technique, and using a window as a back light was quick, simple, and will be my chosen method for all future projects.

This is the manual. There is also an electric model.

I have belonged to meetup.com groups in the past. Normally I let official memberships lapse and instead make the friendships and then have more personal work-arounds to those big meetings. Most meetings are in the evening, and it is “in the evening” that my husband is at home and in need of tending, like food and conversation.  I feel fortunate to be so engaged.

But I am so head-over-heels with punch needle and now possibly rug hooking, I wanted to find others in the area with similar interests.  So I started Punch & Lunch, a group of one, (me), so far, but it has not been uploaded to the Internet yet.  I believe I am being vetted by Meetup, and I am happy that they keep the venue as safe as reasonably possible. I got a letter saying the site should be up in a couple of days.  I only bought a month’s worth to see if it is a go or a total flop.

Actually both punching and hooking are quite big in the northern states.  I imagine there are enough snowbirds (those coming to Florida just for the winter months) that might be interested in some new friendships.

I found some small completed projects, and even tools (like an electric puncher by Rumpelstiltskin’s) in the attic.  I think they are out of business because I could not find a presence on the Net, nor was the phone number with the instructions still viable.  That’s how old my rug hooking stash is.  I also found quite a bit of monks cloth with only a few relatively small pieces cut out.

My library contains about ten books on the subject, many of which I reread today. Apparently there is more disparity on the correct way to punch a rug, just like in miniature punch needle, so I can see another learning curve coming up.  But I’m ready.

www.Meetup.com/Punch-and-Lunch