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Hello everyone,

A much belated post but better late than never. I have been busy trying to get as much sewing as possible and opted to use my blogging time towards sewing. This was an attempt to complete my SWAP2017 wardrobe before the April 30th deadline. Unfortunately I have missed this deadline by 4 garments (I have 2 cut out and 2 that need hemming and buttons). I am rather annoyed with myself given that I had six months to finish this but allow me to justify……..

Blog space – you my have noticed my penchant for having plenty of pictures per garment I make – I love pictures – I am such a visual person and when I look back on my younger self I want to have PLENTY of reminders of what I liked wearing and how I wore it etc. Consequentially I have run out of media storage space. WordPress.com blogs come with a free 3GB of space of which I used up 99.8%. I cant add pictures at the moment and I find it ever so hard to do a post without any pictures. So I have been holding off – weighing my options. I could pay for more storage here on this platform or I could move to wordpress.org and self host which sounds very attractive to me. I love learning new things and to me moving represents a learning opportunity. The problem with moving is that I have a huge amount of pictures (and from what I read pictures tend to be the most problematic when moving platforms) hence my dilemma. I will think properly about it when I get back from the US in June – I have quite a lot on at the moment and whatever decision I make requires me to have time to handle it which I don’t have at the moment.

My SWAP plans were going swimmingly with more than 50% of my garments done before April came around. I did find it very (very) challenging to sew things so far in advance especially when I couldn’t start wearing them straight away. My capsule is essentially a summer one and I was still in the groove of sewing cosy knits. But I did do well with a lot of discipline. With the kids off for 2 weeks in April and my OH away with 2 of my offspring for a ski trip – I was guaranteed a large chunk of time to sew away to my heart’s content. At my sewing speed I could have finished the remaining 4 garments in that time.

Best laid plans of mice and men…

We had unexpected house guests – 3 sets over the month of April. Family and friends who just happened to have realised they were coming our way and would be staying with us for a few days. All good – my kids love it when we have sleepovers. Being a hostess and sewing don’t go hand in hand so I fell behind my schedule. One of the guests, however, brought a dog. An Anatolian shepherd dog to be exact. Readers – it is a huge dog – so big my 7-year-old could sit on it without his legs touching the ground. Now, one of the highlights of this particular breed of dog is that has a thick double coat which sheds profusely, especially in the spring. And we happened to be in spring. It was shedding – a lot. I and 4 of my kids are allergic to dog fur (also asthmatic ), when we visit family members with dogs we start taking antihistamines about 3 days prior in order to be around dog fur without swollen eyes, blocked sinuses and wheeziness. My allergy is so bad I start using my steroid pump 2 weeks before a visit to reduce the rate and intensity of my asthma attacks when I am around dogs for an extended period of time.  Alas I only found out 4 hours before arrival that a dogsitter could not be found so we had an extra houseguest. Having never actually lived with a dog (apart from the various overnights in dog owner homes) I actually had no idea how much a dog sheds fur when its malting. Taking antihistamines and trying to set up a dog only area did little to contain the spread of dog fur to the rest of the house. It got everywhere – after a while I just sort of gave up and told myself that I will have to clean afterwards. After 2 nights and 2 days (it also happened to rain most of the 2 days so the dog was housebound) there was a lot of fur. The clean up started in earnest with a hope that in 24 hours I will have eradicated all traces of dig fur from the house and return to the previous pet free home state. Boy was I wrong – not having a pet means I didn’t have the equipment (or knowhow) like rubber attachments which apparently make it easier to remove fur from settees and curtains. Furiously going over and over with my vacuum cleaner wasn’t lifting all the fur I could see embedded in the carpets. 1 day turned into 2, 2 days into 3 days and so forth. Still 2 weeks later I find dog fur when I turn a corner several times a day. The plus side is that I actually ended up doing a very thorough spring clean of the house which took up most of the rest of time that I would have been sewing. In truth, I was mad about how much time it was taking to do but after some reflection – it wouldn’t have been so bad had I actually sewn everything up in the 5 months prior to the deadline.

I have bought a rubber brush which I am using to slowly get the hidden dog fur. I have accepted that there will be some fur for the next unknown  time period. Moving on from my obsession to remove all dog fur from the house (I generally , for the most part, love our large home but I have cursed its size more than I can count in the last 3 weeks :-)). Naturally when I spring cleaned the house I couldn’t stand my cave as it was – so I started on it and got sidetracked rearranging things, sorting the stash – getting rid of some of the stash etc. It’s now been spring cleaned and is a lovely room to retreat to, more so than before. I will do another tour blog piece to share the changes (and indeed the reduced stash).

If you have read this far I thank you –  if you haven, thank you none the less.

Until next time,

Hila