I got the cast taken off this past Friday — yay! I’m still in a brace much of the time for the next couple weeks, and it’s still somewhat painful, but definitely much improved.
At first I was sort of suffering from a delusional belief that once the cast came off, I’d be all better. This turned out to be entirely not the case, and there may have been a small amount of weeping due to a combination of frustration and a failed attempt to use the brace I was given at the hospital back when I first got hurt. (Long story short: That brace stabilizes my thumb by sort of lining it up with the side of my arm, which makes the rest of my hand turn outward which is seeing-stars painful.) But I’ve adjusted my expectations and bought a much more suitable brace, and I’m (slowly at first) working on regaining range of motion and strength.
I have approximately zero strength in that hand now. It’s slightly alarming, especially since I needed all those tiny muscles for spinning. I bet that spinning will be really helpful, though I expect at first I won’t have much stamina for it.
Okay, enough about my wrist. How about some pictures, maybe the awesome happy thing that came in the mail Friday, followed by the Stuff You Can Make With Only 1.5 Hands series?
So, Friday. I got my cast off, got home, had my little meltdown due to unrealistic expectations, and decided to have a quick nap before I got back to work. I woke up to a knock at the front door a few minutes before the alarm went off, already feeling a little better just from the mini brain reboot you get from taking a nap.
At the door was my awesome mailman, who always knocks when there’s a package that won’t fit in the box instead of just dumping it at the door. And in the package? I recently won a giveaway at Jacey’s stop on the blog tour for Alison Glass’s awesome new fabric line. Opening this package just absolutely made my day — all of the blah stuff from earlier just disappeared. There are fat quarters from three of the Sun Print lines (X and Plus, Party Streamers, and Bike Path) in several different colors each, plus a copy of Alison’s Color Plus quilt pattern, which is just gorgeous.
These prints are so incredibly pretty. I’m pretty sure I squee’d audibly when I opened the package. See?
(The white on the right is one of the Bike Path prints. Today was rainy and gloomy all day, so I got everything up near a window to take the photo to get enough light. Which mostly worked, but washed out the print on that one.)
I keep petting them and plotting what to make from them. I’m 99.9% sure that the olive and sun party streamers are going into a new sofa pillow or two. And there’s this bag pattern that’s been kicking around in my head now that I think the x and plus prints would look awesome in.
And… Stuff You Can Make With Only 1.5 Hands! After I got the first cast replaced with a shorter one that left all four fingers free (though my thumb was still completely inside the cast) I was able to do a lot more. Not very quickly, but still more than I could do before.
A while back I saw a post on Craftypod about using a pincushion stuffed with steel wool to sharpen pins, which sounded like a fantastic idea to me. At the end of the post was a link to these adorable bottlecap pincushions with the suggestion that those might be an ideal size for the project. A few days ago I decided maybe it was about time to make one out of the bottle cap that I saved months ago:
(Edited to add: This photo looks fine on my computer and on my ipod, but on Don’s computer the colors are oversaturated-like-whoa — not sure which is closer to how it looks on other screens.)
That was my first try at palestrina stitch (the knotted stitch around the top). Next time I might try marking out the spacing with dots. The top section is a little wonky-shaped in general — steel wool stuffing isn’t all that pliable, turns out. I’m very happy with it, though. It makes me happy to look at it. (DMC #5 perle cotton in colors 550 and 351, floss in 350 for the lacing around the palestrina knots. Yummy wool felt from Prairie Woolens in blue bayou and butternut squash.)
I also had a baby gift emergency. I absolutely love the quilted patchwork bib tutorial from Sew She Sews — definitely my go-to baby gift. I made two of them. Definitely not my best work, but having my arm in a cast is a pretty good excuse for that, I figure.
This one wasn’t a baby alphabet print as such and has random punctuation scattered in it, but it was the one I liked best with the other fabrics. And hey, dollar signs are appropriate for a baby, right?
