After The Sweater...

Saturday, I worked on the skirt and finished it. I enjoy making each piece look neat and crisp. Not with any kind of pressure. I just try to do my best at each stage and that brings together the best project possible. The facings are made from lining fabric. It's light, neat, and pretty. This is the stuff I picked up for $1.00 a few weeks ago in the bargain section. It's quite good quality. Great buy.




My friend Barb has spent a lot of her time going through lists and researching food on the Internet. She says this is fun to a food scientist. Good because it looks both boring and completely overwhelming. I'm EXTREMELY grateful. I now have lists of ingredients with notes beside them as to their source and likelihood to contain ingredients I'm allergic to. She has worked through the extensive corn list, the yeast list, and will do soy next. I already had a gluten list so only a few more - LOL. This is good. YES YES!




We made these muffins. Actually, Barb did and I watched. They are "okay" at best - look great and are crunchy on the outside and doughy on the inside. Howard LOVED them. That made me laugh. I told him if these are great, I'm going to stop worrying about making good food. Apparently it doesn't matter although... we also made some cinnamon raisin scones that were fabulous and a pasta dish that Kyle had seconds of. Progress.

The sweater is still in progress. I didn't wait for it and wore the skirt on Sunday with a black t-shirt, cardigan, belt, AND my favourite fuchsia shoes. The plaid lines match up pretty good. I didn't like the way they appear to run uphill from the sides after the curve of the hip. Apparently that's geometry. No matter what, they will.




The sleeves are finished for the sweater and I'm working on the right front. To avoid putting the buttonholes in the wrong spot, I've pinned a strip of paper to the back. I took the finished length, marked a button hole 1/2" from each end, and then folded it to get the exact placement of the seven buttons and now I'm knitting to the pattern. So far, so good. Three down, more to go.




Kyle has an exam this morning and then is off for the rest of the day so I'll pick him up instead of making him wait around all day for the bus. He'll walk over to Fabricland where Barb and I plan to wait for him, see what's on sale, and pick up buttons for the sweater. I've decided to finish it before I start sewing something new. My brain is not totally functional. It's amazing how much energy it takes to feed yourself when you have to read every label and how tiring it is even when you have your very own food scientist to run everything by. I'm going to miss her friendship and her expertise when she goes home tomorrow.




After the sweater... I'm not sure. Possibly the Vogue 8146 jacket. This swing style is a long time favourite. In black, it would go well with the SWAP items so far.

I'm hesitating about what to sew because my measurements show that I'm going to drop down a size soon. Not that that can be changed but it makes it a bit difficult to choose sizing and is somewhat of a problem in that I was going to wait until the end to photograph the pieces. Now, some will look too big. Oh well... what is, is. I remind myself that I'm enjoying sewing with a guideline and NOT competing.

Talk soon - Myrna

Grateful - Barb's expertise and willingness to help

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Personal Growth - Knowledge is power. - Sir Francis Bacon, 1561-1626

I mentioned earlier that I'm reading The Naturopathic Way. Learning that all illness stems from the same source, the body out of balance, and presents in different ways was eye opener. It's motivating to do the things that need to be done to stay in balance.

Equally enlightening was learning that fat is an accumulation of puss and water due to inflammation ** (see note below). This explains why - as strange as it sounds - I can literally feel myself losing weight right now. By avoiding the foods that irritate me and eating the ones that don't, I am healing. I knew that fat cells swelled and enlarged. I didn't know why. This explains it and why, when my hormones began to shift, I put on weight and couldn't lose it. Inflammation.

This is both comforting and motivating knowledge. By avoiding these foods and restoring whole health, my body can heal, regain health, and function effectively once more. YES YES. I came home from the Naturopath on Friday with a plan to desensitise certain foods, to heal the intestine, to rotate foods, and to improve overall health. The plan means a minimum four weeks without certain foods and much longer - months or years - without others. I will never get back shellfish and most likely not gluten and dairy but quite possibly all the others, maybe even eggs. It can be done. Good.

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** Edited 2:41 p.m when Hatty wrote: ... but I have to say that while inflammation is the cause of many systemic illnesses, I doubt very much that fat is an accumulation of pus and water....

Thanks for commenting Hatty. Of course when I went to find the page this info was on to see if I had taken it out of context, I couldn't. That's always the way it goes. Barb and I discussed it (with her being the scientific one) and without proof of the right page, here is what I think the context was.

Foods that I am allergic to are toxic to me and cannot be broken down by my body so they accumulate and have to go somewhere and get sent to the tissue and cells which then become enlarged due to inflammation. I remember reading somewhere that we don't produce more fat cells but that they enlarge due to too much food. I'm thinking too much or toxic.

Barb thought that the word pus may have been used out of our usual context and/or we wondered if it was because the author is European and using it in a different way than we do. Definitely, I didn't pull it out of nowhere and definitely, I do not want gangrene - LOL. I'll take that pinch of salt.