Sew-crastination

I’ve been busy tending to all the things that don’t really need doing around here. I used to be one of those people who would start packing two weeks before a trip, but these days I seem to wait until the last minute. Instead, I’ve been doing a bit of sewing in my spare time.
I rearranged the living room, as you know, part of which was swapping a bookcase for a bench to hold my turntable. Now one doesn’t have to magically know where the buttons are as one reaches under a shelf to play a record (although that did keep people from wandering into my house and messing with my vinyl). Look how festive, with the pumpkin. I have to put the grilles back on the speakers, but they need to be de-cat-fluffed first. Speaking of, Beany quite successfully snuck into every photo I took of my living room this morning. But then I had to redo this one, by which point she’d fallen asleep elsewhere.
One of my sewing projects was this quilt, which developed from a few needs — the need for something better to keep cat hair off the back of the sofa, the ‘need’ for something autumnal, and the, well, desire to not finish a patchwork project that I’d started a while ago. I had cut and pieced together some strips, planning on making a throw blanket, but I quickly grew bored with it So it wasn’t TOO much additional work to turn it into a long, narrow, sofa-back cover.
I also have been working on dresses/tops here and there recently. I made this one a few weeks back, although it’s probably my least favourite of the Japanese patterns I’ve tried out. You can read my various complaints on flickr, but mainly it just comes down to it being too ‘cute’ for me. I like this one much more, though. I think I have fairly narrow shoulders, in relation to my other dimensions, and both of these recent dresses fit ‘just so’ with the sleeve placement — better than most store-bought clothes, and I’m not even having to tailor it to myself. Obviously, I like to wear dresses over jeans; I think people generally fall into two camps (love it or think it’s stupid), but you can politely keep it to yourself if you’re not a fan.
I suppose that now I’ve run out of things to sew, I should start thinking about packing. Although I still don’t have the perfect camera bag…