My funny and early real life Halloween...

The following is a sequential description of Thursday, Oct 27...

The "day" started with a scheduled building-wide black-out, when lights went off at Midnight, sharp, leaving entire building in darkness... Maintenance, was the reason for it, they said... Notice was given a few days in advance, assuring the power will be back by 6 am... During the black-out, the building must have looked like a dark tower...

We unplugged all our electronics carefully, set the alarm on the phone, and got the flashlights ready too, thinking the light will not be back in time... I got abruptly awakened by a strange noise, which frightened me quite a bit at that moment - I forced my eyes open, and found myself sitting on a bed in a room, lit with ghostly white light, with the radio on in the middle of the night.... The power came back three hours earlier, than scheduled, and, even though we unplugged the electronics, we forgot to flick off light the switches and the radio... I waddled round the home, flicking off lights, then waddled back to bed...

My morning appointment with a client got postponed - of which I was quite happy, as it allowed me to have, all day to myself, working on my stock bags....

I was making good headway on two bags I was sewing on Thursday, till it was time to swap a dull needle for a new one. It was a long serving needle, I used it ever since I got the new machine. I got a screw driver, hoping it will help me loosen up a screw, which I thought was holding the needle in.

I should have stopped trying to work that screw, when none of my screw drivers really fit it... With a tiny screw driver I finally forced it to loosen, and it fell onto my lap - along with a small thread guide part, while the needle remained unmoved. It was not the screw for needle replacement. I investigated the needle holder, and located a tiny pentagon shaped slot, which MUST have been the one to loosen the needle arm... But first, I must put the thread guide I just mistakenly removed, back into place...

My tiny screw driver did not fit the thread guide screw, and eventually the screw went flying off out of my sight, and the thread guide part fell onto the work table. I did not hear the screw land on the table, or the floor, so I started looking for it... I looked... and looked... Soon, I was clearing everything off the table, combing through it all with my fingers, with no tiny screw in sight, I moved onto the floor, crawling on my knees under the furniture of my studio, looking under the heaters, countless wires, moving the couch, under the shelves - no screw in sight.

Some dust flew off the floor, and it caused me to sneeze -- which shook my upper body, and... pulled out my back... Here I was, on my fours, on the studio floor, looking for a 3 mm screw, sneezing and now with sore back... I was getting increasingly frustrated, and decided, in order to feel like I have achieved something that day, I will give this place a scrub it deserves...

... which is not the best decision, with a sore back... Nonetheless, I started fiercely vacuuming every nook, every corner, still having my eyes peeled for my missing screw. I shoved the couch across the living room, and moved onto window panes, radiators, under the plant pots - and everywhere, where I have not vacuumed in weeks - sucking up real, and imaginary dust, desperately seeking more of it. On my frantic way, I sucked up a replacement battery of our remote control to the TV...

.. and a wheel of one my storage bins, I removed for cleaning the day before... Needless to say, that forcing an industrial vacuum cleaner to open with a freshly injured back, in order to get my accidentally sucked up valuables out, is a tougher job, than usual. I got nowhere with my attempts to open it, till I finally gave up.

I finished vacuuming the studio, and decided to get back to sewing before supper time. I no longer had the thread guide, to angle the thread perfectly into the needle eye. I did replace the dull needle though... But sewing did not go well either. Even though the thread guide, which was now missing, was not that important for sewing forward, it was absolutely necessary for reversing. Now, the thread was entering the needle eye from the wrong angle, and the moment I attempted to reverse, it got sliced part way by the needle.... I got my new machine because I needed a more consistent one, than the one I had before, and I could not bear the thought of going back to the kind of by-the-chance sewing and countless trouble shooting, like on the old machine. Very slowly I finished both bags I set out to complete that day.

But, so far, I had lost an important part of my sewing machine, vacuumed up a remote control battery, another part of my storage bin, and painfully pulled out my back. I decided that was enough trouble for one day, and instead of starting another project, I would read a good Halloween appropriate story -- Clarimonde, to be exact.

Peter came home in the evening - and I had to fess up to all my misadventures of that day. He offered to help looking for the thread guide screw, even though I had given up on finding it. We checked the table and the floor again, but no luck. By then, my back was getting quite bad, and I retreated onto a chair, while he opened a side plate of my sewing machine, to rule out the possibility of it falling inside.

And there it was - my screw, fallen into the open feed-dogs, and stuck there, quietly, waiting to be found. That explains why it disappeared from my sight so swiftly, and why I did not hear it land on the table, or the floor; and why I did not see it while I vacuumed the place down. Then it was TV remote battery and my bin wheel's turn to get rescued from inside the vacuum cleaner. Then he poured me a glass of red wine.

I started to feel better about the strange day, and I really enjoyed "Clarimonde". I was glued to the screen reading it, with a cushion tucked behind my back, a blanket over, sipping wine - and then my hand missed the glass and knocked it over, breaking it and spilling the wine onto counter... Apparently, the day was not over for me. It had one more hour of mischief to go...

That's when I decided to end it, by heading to bed....

Below are my achievements -- Tack, Brief Duffle bags in Birch and Oak:





Posted by Jolanta http://jolavdesigns.com