Kid House

Yup, I'm a kid-house.

As many of you probably know by now from reading my FB page, my husband & I are expecting our first child in about a month.  I say "about" because the little darlings never show up when they say they are going to.

While this pregnancy hasn't been a piece of cake, it hasn't been totally horrible either.  At this point we have a very reasonable expectation of a living child.

I spent most of the first trimester on partial bedrest.  We were so afraid of losing another one, it was worth tracing the tiny cracks in the plaster of my bedroom ceiling over & over & over & over & over again. 
The second trimester was like "wee!  energy!" tempered with "Don't Lift THAT!!!"  I was able to go for walks, sew a little bit and regained a touch of normal life. 
Third trimester has been up & down.  Bed rest again for a bit, followed by some minor prego issues & borderline test results.  Nothing to indicate an unhealthy pregnancy, but things that do need to be managed.  When I push myself is when I get into trouble.  So no pushing.  I've been assured that we really are healthy, but I won't downplay the paranoia.

Mommy Brain is absolutely horrid.  I couldn't sew if I wanted to... it's as bad as being drunk, though not quite as bad as it was after the mini-stroke of last year.  The boy will be getting a lot of reenacting clothes with crooked seams & bad hems.    Somehow I doubt he'll notice or care.  I've sewn the wrong things together, linings to outsides, squiggly seams, cut original patterns vs. tracing over & making new ones, misaligned things, and a whole host of other bone-headed mistakes.  I'm told this will pass rather quickly & I'll look back on it with humor.  I certainly hope so.  I swear they steal a bit of our brains to make their own.

Upcoming Projects

All of this means that the business is closed for the next few months.  Tentatively we will re-open in February or March depending on how things go.  Once I can wrestle dummies around & take pictures of all the "new" stock that I never uploaded onto the old website, we'll have the new website up and running.  Though we haven't been taking custom orders for a while, when the new website goes up it will be purely off-the-rack.

Please feel free to call or e-mail and ask about what we do have in stock, but don't ask me to sew anything!  We'll both regret it!

Tentative plans are to attend Ft. Frederick in the spring, either as a vendor or as a camper.  This will entirely depend on how the boy & I are doing and if I have an assistant, and if they let me in after I skipped out on them this year (see First Trimester Coma).

Between now & then, I'm focusing on research (ha!  try that with Mommy Brain!) via photocopies, highlighters & notes in the margins.  Once I have my head on straight will any of it make sense?

- The main project is a timeline of patterns with research summary going from 1000 to 1500 for men & women in S/M/L.  These are outfits, not just one-off garments, and they all require fittings.  I will post the research & some pictures either here make a new blog specifically for this project and link to it.  It's an SCA thing and I have no intention of publishing or marketing the patterns.  Right now I have 4 outfits done, 6 to go.  I won't do much until I can actually sew things together to check how the patterns work, but I'm not in a rush to finish it.

- Spinning has been a wonderful no-impact past time.  I've slowly managed to make a few more skeins of yarn and I'm not unhappy with the results. 


- Moving the store out to the stone building (which is still dirt floors & broken windows) is on the back burner.  It must be done because the child will need his own room soonish, but there is a lot of heavy lifting involved that I'm simply unable to do right now.  I would like to have the floor poured before it gets cold, we'll see if that's possible or not.

- Diapers & Kidlet Clothes.  Yes, I've been making those silly cloth diapers that so many people love.  We managed to score some pre-mades which will fill out about 1/2 of what we need, and the rest I can do as he grows.  Reenacting clothes for the boy; trying to keep it fun, simple & functional.  Using quite a bit of scrap fabric.

The benefit to cloth diapers is both economic & environmental.  Also, much, much cuter than the plastic things.  And no chance of latex, perfumes, dyes or mystery chemicals.  I always wondered why I choked up around Huggies, and IDK if you know this, but they contain latex!  Uurgh!  So great, I need an eppi pen to change my kid's poo sack.  No thank you.  Cloth it is!
I got better at making them as time went on... this one - not so good.  It'll catch poo, but it's kinda ugly.