I went to bed only half an hour late, slept well and woke up around 7. I had to cut my morning routine short again but at least I finally figured out one reason why I never do all of it: I added a few stretches for my feet before getting out of bed and that seems to be enough to throw the whole thing off. Huh. So I wrote morning pages but skipped yoga and meditation.
At least morning pages helped me realize why I’m stuck on the skirt-in-progress. Since the pattern pieces were too small and the seam allowance was 1.5 centimeters I decided to just make the seam allowance 1 centimeter instead – voilà: bigger skirt. I also made the waistband wider by 2 centimeters. My reasoning was: four skirt panels, each gets half a centimeter wider equals 2 centimeters.
Well. When I tried pinning the waistband to the skirt it didn’t fit. The instructions said that the skirt might stretch out a bit and if that happens to gather the top. I did a lot of gathering but the skirt still didn’t fit. Then I went to Italy, came back and spent a couple of weeks thinking I really should finish the skirt without doing anything. So. If you have four panels and make each of it wider by half a centimeter on each side guess what? The waistband needs to be 4 centimeters wider, not 2.
So the next step with the skirt will be to see if I have enough fabric left to cut a second, wider waistband (plus interfacing) or if I need to put the new waistband together from pieces.
But, of course, the waistband and the rest of the skirt didn’t fit together.Duh!
Other than that I did the usual breakfast, talking with husband, dishes and such and then rode my bike to the supermarket and back. My husband made comida caseira with fish:
The boy came downstairs at the end of lunch, ate and talked and I was left with only fifteen minutes to myself before teaching. Which was not a problem because I had that lovely one-hour break in between. The plan had been to fold all the laundry in that time but I didn’t.
Teaching was lovely, then I ate dinner in the middle of two people frying stuff on the stove one after the other (before waltzing off and leaving me with the dirty dishes), then the boy declared that he wanted to take a shower first, so I waited for an hour until he finally was ready (more than enough time to do the dishes, ahem) while playing Solitaire on my iPad. I found (not for the first time) that while playing Solitaire is soothing in a way it also makes me feel weird, almost desperate so I deleted the app. I think I’ll pull out the real physical playing cards again instead. That’s much better.
I have a bit of an uneasy relationship with Solitaire, my father used to play it on his laptop non-stop the past few years which always felt like life passed him by and his mother did the same with actual physical cards. So much so that she even had a dedicated Solitaire table in her apartment.
I myself started playing when I was in third or fourth grade, I got the set of playing cards I have on summer vacation, I think, maybe in Cornwall. My father taught me the way of playing he learned from his mother, a teacher from school taught me a slightly different one at summer camp and then I played on and off for many, many years. That was all before computer games, of course.
Playing with physical cards is nice because it’s tangible but it’s also a little frustrating because there is nothing to help you. No automatic sorting, no undo button and no hints. Still, it can be very meditative if frustrating at times.
Anyways, I started writing this post, did Duolingo, watched something and went to bed.
Today is the day my piano finally gets tuned. It has been overdue since November and the piano tuner needs to fine-tune the mechanical parts as well so that the keys feel less uneven when playing. I can’t wait to use an actually tuned piano again.
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