Sew What

This morning, before starting what turned out to be a long day of work, I did some sewing. I realized the day before last that the umbrella that protects me from the sun’s rays a lot of the time was filthy with dust and mildew. Realizing that this was connected to it never having been washed in its seven or so years in my possession, I set about removing it from the frame (a task that involved 16 screws, interestingly) and popped it into the washing machine. It emerged with a lot of the mildew greenery still attached and so I soaked it for a while in diluted bleach* and then rewashed… It emerged rather splendidly clean, but then I noticed that all those years in the sun and other elements had rather taken a toll on a lot of the stitching in various places (perhaps the vigourous cleaning contributed a bit too?), and so before putting the thing back onto the frame (that in the intervening 24 hours somewhere I’d re-coated with a protective varnishing, and that was now dried and ready for another seven years of service) I decided to repair those stitches.

Well, it turned out to take a bit longer than I anticipated, as a huge number of the longer seams and some other connective bits had begun to unravel. So I spent a cheerful time in sewing mode. It’s rather therapeutic… sort of. There’s something about a simple task with a clear beginning, middle, and end, with just the right amount of fiddliness (not too much, but some, so that it is not boring) first thing in the morning, that can really set up the day nicely. Once done, I put it all back together, 16 screws and all.

Well, that’s it. Nothing profound. Just reflecting idly after a long day, full of craft of one sort or another. On The Project, I inked the last page of one of the stories today. It was a big splash page with lots of city details that took forever -forever!- to do**. But it was fun. And now, after three days of several sessions on that page, I know intimately the details of the relative layout of so many buildings in the subject city. Might be useful one day. Who knows.

-cvj

*Only remembering a bit later that I had a giant bottle of Simple Green in the supplies I could have used. Bah!
**Yeah, I know. Not quite forever…