TEARS, SHOCK AND YES, EVEN ANGER!

Today is not what I want this BLOG to be about. Yet, if I am going to record what is going on in my life and is important in the moment I can not ignore it. We have experienced another mass shooting. It was not a foreign terrorist event. Once again it appears to have been committed by an American citizen. Once again the means used to murder 12 people was a gun.

There have been tears and shock, but mostly what I have experienced is ANGER! What have we become as a country?  When will people wake up, see, and acknowledge that there is a lot of anger and hostility here. There is a lot of mental instability. There is a lot of supposed need for retribution. And there is a lot of fear of the "other"--those unlike ourselves. When will we as a country acknowledge that the ready availability of guns and ammunition made possible by our gun laws make it all too easy to plan and commit a mass shooting. Where are the leaders of our country? What are they doing to protect us?

Look at the statistics around the world. Where there are strong gun laws there are fewer shootings! I do not want to hear our leaders in Congress or the White House once again say their thoughts and prayers are with the victims and their families. Do something to reduce the possibility of this happening again. Then you can offer thoughts and prayers.

I live in a state where it is legal to obtain a permit to carry a gun.  I know many people who do carry one on a regular basis. I also know that many people I don't know are out there with a gun somewhere on their body. THIS DOES NOT MAKE ME FEEL SAFER! If anything it makes me feel less safe. What if I am at a movie theater or a restaurant and some one at a table next to me ticks off someone at a table on the other side of me and one of them decides they feel so threatened that they need to pull out their gun to "protect" themselves. Then the offending person feeling threatened pulls out there gun and guess who is caught in the middle. ME! This is not the wild west folks. We are supposed to be living in a civilized country. When I look at some of the things going on right now here in America I have to wonder.

Enough of this. Tomorrow I will get back to my reading, cleaning, sewing and crafting.  Maybe that there is the problem with our country. Things such as mass shootings take place and for a moment we cry, are shocked and even angry. Then the next day we go back about our life as if nothing happened.
Except, I think subconsciously we are waiting for the next tragic and traumatic event to occur.

A Week of Learning and Embroidery

I may be 69 but I am still learning new things.  I've always loved learning and discovering things. At one time in my life I thought I would have loved to be a professional student. Maybe that's actually what I am just not in a formal educational setting.

So what did I learn this week?  I learned more about what Floriani Total Control Universe is capable of doing and then how to actually begin doing it. Never in my wildest imagination did I think I would spend so much time on the computer learning and creating with various software products. Sometimes I wonder if I actually prefer creating projects on the computer more making the projects. I've played with designing quilts for years. Now, I'm working with machine embroidery designs.

Project number one involved taking an embroidery design which is too big for my largest embroidery hoop and breaking it up to stitch in multiple hoopings.  My largest hoop is 9-1/2" x 14".  To learn how to break up a design I chose one which was 6-1/2" x 15".  Turns out the splitting the design in the software is really easy.  The computer and FTCU software does it with a click on one button and a few inputted information such as what size hoop do you want to stitch it in.  Since my design was just under 7" I decided to stitch it out in a 5" x 7" hoop.  I did this in three separate hoopings.  The trick to learn was how to get the material perfectly hooped  so the design match up and stitch correctly in each hooping. I didn't get it done perfectly, but for the first attempt it turned out pretty good. I did learn some things that will help make it easier to do again and hopefully correcting the problems with lining the design up. For this design though  broke it up for a 5" x 7" hoop, I think it would have been easier if I actually stitched it out in my 8" x 8" hoop.  I could then have use my camera on my machine and had room to move the design around a bit to get perfect placement.

So here is the results of my learning.

It has a fair amount of puckering, but I know it will quilt out when I put it into a project this fall.

It's destiny is to be the front pocket in a reading pillow. 

Learning project number two was taking an applique pattern, in this case a VW Beetle, and turning it into a design to be stitch out on an embroidery machine.   Once again I used the FTCU software. I also had to use my Canvas Workspace software to change the JPEG scan I made into a .FCM cut file that I could import into FTCU in order to work with the design. It took some trial and error (actually it took a lot of trial and error) to get the design so it would stitch out as I wanted.  It's not a pretty design as far as how the stitching goes. I still have a lot to learn, but the end result was something I was proud of. For now I will accept for myself that the end result is what is important not how I got there.  I will keep working on it though and fine tune the process. 

Here is the outcome of this experience.

In the process of stitching this out I did discover corrections I needed to make and have made them to the design should I was to stitch it out once again.  

This learning project was inspired by a good friend who has a pattern for an appliqued quilt that she wants to make, but wants to do it on her embroidery machine.  The first project was undertaken for a class that I teach once a month on using FTCU.  

So the learning continues.  I have a few other things in the works. Hopefully they will show up here in the future. 

WHAT IS TAKING UP MY TIME?

It's now been over a month that I have been in my new life as a true retiree. So what have I been doing with all this free time?  I can honestly say not what I thought I would be doing.  I thought I would be sewing and embroidering like crazy.  I haven't even touched my Dream Machine. I think about sewing a lot, but always seem to find something else I would rather be doing.  I though I would get back to joining some Village craft clubs, but other than getting back to the Machine Embroidery and Quilting group I haven't done so. I've pretty much just been hanging out at home being more or less unsociable. Maybe I used up all my extrovert skills during the five years I worked and taught and now I need an extended period of nurturing my introvert self.

I have been enjoying reading.  In the last month I've finished 5 books! 😲 I thoroughly enjoyed them all! All but one was fiction.  My favorite was Where The Crawdads Sing. Read it in three days as I couldn't put it down. I've also been hand sewing and working on my Tumbling Blocks quilt of illusion. I started it on the Seminars at Sea Quilting Cruise I went on this winter. Karen Combs taught a class on English Paper Piecing which I took. I am determined to finish the top. Here is her quilt sample for the class. She is a great teacher and a fabulous quilter.

English Paper Piecing (EPP) is not new to me. I did a fare amount of it before I went back to work.  I forgot about it when I lost myself to creating classes that quilters wanted at the shop. Most don't want to do hand work. It takes too long. Or lets face it at our age, being senior, we can't see well enough or shake too bad. Fortunately I don't shake and strong readers helped the vision. I actually find hand work relaxing. It slows me down and I can enjoy the process.

Here are my Tumbling block units and the start of stitching the blocks together.   I'm about 25% done.

 The biggest change and challenge for my new life in retirement is I need to drastically reduce my spending. The easiest thing to cut out is eating out.  A benefit of eating at home besides saving money is I am rediscovering another love I had lost while working. That would be cooking. I still need to work on cooking for one. Somewhere there must be a cookbook on doing so. A con to not eating out is I eat most meals alone now rather than with friends. I guess in life there are always pluses and minuses.

One thing I need to do more of is cleaning, tossing and organizing. I guess that is what I will work on in the next month of my retirement. My goal is to have a house I am willing to invite people to. At the moment only a very select few are allowed in.

Well so much for another day. Tomorrow is going to be errand day. I will leave the house!

RETURNING TO THE WORLD

My return to blogging.  Primarily for myself as a journal of my journey though this stage of my life (though anyone is welcome to join me on this journey). The last blog post on my old site was five years ago (it has since been shut down so this is why a new site).  A lot has been happening in those intervening years. Some good some not so good. One thing I now realize is I lost myself toward the end of those years. I didn't realize it at the time. Maybe it's more accurate to say it was a stage of my life where at the time I loved what I was doing, but over time I realized it was not where I wanted to be for the rest of my life. So this is now a transition time. A time of repair of things that went wrong and a time of change as I explore who I do want to be and how I want to be living the rest of my life.

Where will this all take me I don't know. It will be a journey. Hopefully it will be an adventure. Some days will be boring and in all likelihood unproductive; others will be exciting and full of discoveries and activity.

So here I go. Welcome to my life!