good pens and bad pens

in which our plucky heroine is baffled...

Yesterday started with a dreadful mess! I was enjoying a morning zoom with my pal Leslie when I looked down to see black smears all over the place. It was ball point pen ink, so very sticky indeed, and somehow the base of the pen exploded in the pen and pencil cup next to the computer zone. I got ink not only on both my hands, but all over the trackball, the right side of the keyboard slider, and all over my pinafore front.

Fortunately I was able to clean most of it up, though it required not only scrubbing my hands with dishes soap but also with denatured alcohol! I was able to get it off the trackball (very carefully) using some paper towels and careful application of the alcohol solvent while keeping all liquid away from the interface parts. Cleaning the actual sphere took quite some doing, but thankfully it all still works!

I tossed the entire pencil container in the bin, and my pinafore cannot be salvaged either. It was my oldest one reserved for garden or messy jobs, so it might will go in the bin as well. It would be dreadful to have that ink spread over other things in the washing like the pink in The Cat In The Hat Comes Back"

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~ a special request ~

Despite it being September, Kestrel let me know that all her tinyfolk wanted shorts, and one pair needed to have yellow polkadots! There will be another two pairs, one brightly colored and one either brown or green/red, so all her dollies will have still more new clothing, as well as the birthday surprise Pokemon tops that I plan on making. Thanks to the magic of Sharpie art pens, the white dots became yellow. The two finished pairs are being modeled by Kenya...

The second pair is made from my last scraps of Kaffe Fassett quilting cotton with big colorful spots. I think these fill the bill of Young Kestrel’s request for “something bright colored” for her little friend Zinnia. (Zinnia is Nandina’s older sister, and Kenya is their mother) Kenya is patient with my looking for a good spot to take photos; when I out riding my bike I found a tree with huge mossy burls on the trunk and realised it would be perfect. I will be making one more pair for Kestrel’s dollies from a bit of green/red shot linen to be stitched in my spare time this week. (It also occurred to me that the new method I have for tinyfolk pants or shorts construction will make it easy for me to make Almandine a pair to accommodate her fox tail)

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It is time for me to return to my raincoat project, before the seasonal rains return... I think I have finally figured out how to negotiate the place where the lining and the facing side of the coat intersect with the exterior. Since I have pretty much had zero instructional help due to the peculiar fabric I am using, the construction details have been more of a challenge than I imagined. I am just going to go forward as best as can be managed at this point since it would be dreadful to NOT have a raincoat after getting this close. If it isn't as excellent as I would like, it will at least be wearable (and fit me better than any RTW garment, and have massively deep pockets in just the right place, and be long enough that my pinafores should stay mostly dry)

I have four steps left to complete and it will be done: The toggle fastenings, setting up the intersection of the facing and the lining prior to edgebinding, attaching the lining to the hemline (or not), and edgebinding the entire coat

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September SMART goals (x=extra)

#	THINGS MADE	THINGS FIXED	THINGS GONE
1	a dozen tetras	porch valance	plum logs
2	tiny doll shorts	-	oldest pinafore
3	-	-	-
4	-	-	-
5	-	-	-
6	x	x	x
7	x	x	x
8	x	x	x
9	x	x	x

today's gratitudes -
1. I get to meet most every week with my newest set of friends, Mischa and Stef, and every week I get to know them a bit better...
2. Turned and fully lined construction solves the problem of how to make pants for Almandine the Fox-girl.
3. the long conversation yesterday with Karen sparked additional synaptical interconnections in my brain, and I may have solved one of the difficult four remaining parts of the raincoat project!

Time of Isolation - Day 1515