Mish Mash

This has been a crazy week. We just moved our daughter into her first real bed. Which meant that first we spent the weekend sanding, painting, and making a mattress base for the antique bed we found free on the side of the road, then spent part of the week scratching our heads trying to figure out where to wedge the bed into our teeny one bedroom apartment, then moved all the furniture in the house (or so it seemed). Finally we moved both the bed, and the crib into our bedroom, and squeezed our bed into Jade's cubbyhole bedroom. Then I spent several DAYS trying to make sense of the mish mash of things that were discovered behind furniture, under beds, and generally shoved into corners (hey, out of sight out of mind, right?). Then I spent another day catching up with the dishes and housework I had not done while trying to sort out the aforementioned mish mash...

Today I've finally gotten around to sewing, except, unfortunately, what's on the top of the to do list has been the mending. I loathe mending. Even though as a result of a misspent youth that involved making period costumes for all my dolls by hand I'm really quick at hand work, it's just dead boring, and not terribly rewarding. But I have several skirts with torn out hems, or run to holes, and my poor husband has been down to one pair of jeans for weeks because he's torn the belt loops off all his other pairs (how does he DO that?). So today, during naptime, I have dutifully sat down and mended... until I decided to blog....

But, as a ray of proverbial sunshine, my mom delivered a box to me containing the attachments my Great Aunt sent me for my featherweight:

L to R, that's a zig zag attachment, a buttonholer, and a ruffler. I also have a rolled hem foot (one of the only ones I've ever met that actually works) an edge stitcher, and a couple as yet unidentified gizmos that look like they were designed by Rube Goldberg. Of course I discovered what the ruffler did immediately after I finished this dress for my daughter.... 

Oh well, I'm planning on making another, with even MORE ruffles out of this fabric very soon:

Sadly the camera doesn't do the green justice. I think I have enough to make a matching hat, and I might also knit up teensy lace mitts to match... although that might be overkill. And because my daughter has enough church dresses and I'm just doing this for fun anyway, I'll probably put it up on Etsy. 

The attachments for the Featherweight are phenomenal. It makes the jump from just a great machine that only does straight stitch, to wondering why I'm bothering to keep my viking (Oh, right, free motion quilting... but other than that it's an expensive doorstop). If you're so lucky as to have a featherweight, I really suggest you take the time to figure out what all the little rube goldberg gizmos do. If you didn't get any rube goldberg gizmos, you might look around at purchasing some. Especially the buttonholer. I can't say enough good things about how nice the buttonholes it makes are, and how little fuss is required to produce them. 

With that I'm off to use my spandy new attachments to finish up a stack of commission work that's been waiting on my getting out the Viking to do buttonholes and zig zag.