Ten Tales of Woe

Cotton warp, 
paper weft

I finally finished the warp I put on in September, saving 8 inches or so at the end for testing weaving with paper.  It survived wet finishing! I now have quite a few samples and 3+ yds of petit point that I intend for a vest. (Sorry, no photos of the petit point).  I did do some research on petit point. It's a treadling system to produce a patterned plain weave structure on one side of a fabric, and large floats on the other side; mine is an overshot pattern. It's similar to swivel, but swivel doesn't allow for repeated pattern pick. 

Now on to the Ten Tales of Woe.

1. The shirt pattern for DH... The 36 is a little small but a preliminary fitting shows the 38 as too big. I talked it over with my friend B and the next step will be to widen the upper back on the 36 by adding a little fabric... I looked over DH's other shirts and it seems like there are two common ways of doing this on men's shirts; a box pleat in the center back or two small outward facing pleats at the shoulder blades. I'll have to take out the side seam, remove the sleeves and dissect the yoke and I'm not there yet.
2. The vest for me... Two woes here. One, I need another 1/2 yard or so of fabric; it's not long enough. That's okay, though, I have some light weight denim which I can use for the sleeve bands and front bands, and add a band to the bottom of the vest as well. 
3. But when I sewed the muslin, nothing fit right. Immediately I assumed there was a problem with the pattern but then quickly realized that this particular pattern maker would have fixed it by now... I went back to the paper I traced from and Hey! apparently now I can't trace a pattern. I need to redo this by next week.
4. Not sure if I mentioned the two needlepoint pillows with the shredding backs. I've been meaning to recover these for year. So I ordered velvet and gave one of them a try. There's a knack to piping on needlepoint pillows and I don't have it. After some tears I decided to get rid of them. They had black mold on them (probably from living in a plastic bag). They're an awkward size. They spent years living in a bag in mom's closet, then in my closet too. I just pulled them out because I found the box. I think it's time to say goodbye.
5. While I was in a getting rid of kinda mood, I threw away this woven piece I made a few years back, shaped on the loom. I've tried numerous times to do something with it that will make it attractive enough to graduate to my wardrode and it ain't gonna happen. 
6. I tried to salvage some of the yarn from #5 (there were some knitted bits); it became a knotted mess. I evaluated; it's maybe 50 yards? Into the trash it went. Incidentally, when DH asked what I'd been doing that day his comment was "You mean it took you 6 hours to fill up one small bag of trash?" Yes, Darling Husband but it was an emotional 6 hours.
7. There's a mistake in the shawl I was working on, about 4 rows back. They are SUPER long rows and I'm dreading pulling it out, but it's too obvious to leave...
8. So I started a summer sweater with that orangey cotton I got in Florence... K and I are doing the same projects, mostly stash yarn. I had issues making gauge so ended up dropping down a size. I finished the short sleeve before I got around to finding a tape measure to check gauge in the round... Turns out in the round I'm right on gauge. Grrr. The sleeve fits, but probably not with a shirt underneath. So I've restarted the sleeve in the larger size. The good thing is that it's pretty fast going.
9. The rug for the den slider... Well... I had warped up a good deal of it and ran out of one of the colors, which is weird because I had calculated it carefully... then realized I'd wound a slightly longer warp AND had gone by pattern inches not by thread count, which will yield a wider rug but needed more light blue yarn... Luckily they had the yarn in stock so it arrived quickly and I was able to keep winding.  Sadly the inches vs. threads thing affected heddle count so I stalled while waiting for more heddles to arrive.
10. BTW, it's a bit over 1100 threads... Today I started to put the threads through the raddle and onto the apron rod, I realize that I have 2-3 inches too of one color sequence too many. So I would have had enough of the light blue without getting another cone.

I do have two projects on the spinning wheel but so far they're not causing woe. The mosaic is neglected and also not a problem. 

 

Result of the construction project and
the next major distraction

What is the common thread here? Between all this and the construction projects (and cleaning up the dust from them) I am distracted beyond belief and have found myself working on one project while thinking about another. I need to say "in the moment" and leave the mental planning for long walks or dedicated planning time.