Frustration

I am getting NOWHERE. I know that is a bit of a hard leading line, but I feel that way sometimes. I was happy to give up my Saturday for friends and fun at the pumpkin patch (which was a real blast actually), but I am frustrated I didn't get out there and built the other 2 chairs. Seriously. It IS my fault I didn't work late on Friday night on any of this, but today was hard. I had to be responsible and an adult and sort laundry and clean and cook. Blah!

I did buy the extra 2x2s for the other chairs, but no cutting happened. I ended up sewing and that was it. I hate sewing. My sewing machine is cranky and not co-operating. I also ran out of thread and I just feel like whining. 

Since I have nothing nice to say, I wont say anything at all about this part of the weekend.

It appears I will only be allowed the time to work on this stuff during the week and not on weekends. I understand. So this last week I managed to build 2 of the 4 larger chairs. Or at least the framing of them are done. I made them wider and deeper and raised the back up a few inches as well. Here is a comparison of the size. Please forgive the mess. I DO have to do all of this in the garage and my woodworking is not the only use of the garage so I deal with the mess too.

These are the "captain's chairs" as my husband puts it. We are debating exactly how we will arrange them at the table, but it will be an experience either way. I put the chairs side by side so you can see the difference in height and depth pretty well. Naturally I will also be covering the larger chairs with the same 2 inch foam on the seat and 1 inch foam on the back. I also splurged on some 2x2 fir and I am going to replace the legs with this because it is a much nicer and stronger wood than the 2x2s I have used so far. 

Perhaps with luck, my evenings this week will be more fruitful than my Sunday has been. Happy building folks.

48 Hour Days

I know you have all felt this way at one time or another. Where you have so much to do and so much you want to do, but there are only 24 hours in a day and it's just not enough. Yeah, that was my weekend! 

First off, here is a bit of happy news for me. I got my eyes checked on Friday and the doctor says that while the optical nerves are still asymmetric (so there is still a little swelling in the right eye), it is a lot better than before so there is improvement. I believe I am close to 99% of normal and while the color is still dimmed through my right eye, I am happy with the progress. The doc said that I have had great improvement in a very short amount of time and that indicated there is a VERY good chance in the next month or so as my eye continues to heal itself it may even recover completely! Wooohoo!!

The down side to having your eyes dialed on a Friday afternoon, is that your eyes are wonky for that evening and it means I lost one more evening of work time. Oh well. Saturday I was able to get the bases for the first 4 chairs stained a Dark Walnut to match the table. I spend the better part of that day cutting and sewing the slipcovers for the 3 chairs. I worked as long as I could, but somewhere in there I have to sleep. :-(

Sunday brought with it cleaning by everyone in the house which makes me super happy. I LOVE it when my house is clean and it seems to so rarely be super clean anymore. It's hard with our schedules to find the time and energy to clean house when there is so much else we would rather be doing. We also had our good friends over for lasagna and pumpkin pie. I literally was cooking pie, prepping lasagna, and finishing the sewing of the slipcovers and cleaning all at the same time tonight. I really wanted to be able to sit on the first set of chairs tonight at dinner. I managed to get 3 at the table. The 4th needs to have a couple more pocket screws put in so I can attach the top and bottom. I LOVE how they turned out. I still need to do the final hemming on the bottom of the slipcovers, but they are looking good!

Coming soon will be the other 4 slightly larger versions of the same chair. :-) 

I am ALIVE!!!!

Hello!

After the 5 days of annoying IV meds, I thought I would be feeling better. What I was not warned about was the side affects of the medicine leaving your body is NOT FUN! I actually called the doctor thinking something was wrong because my whole body hurt and my skin on my chest, back, shoulders and even my ears hurt. Everything felt like it was bruised and I wondered if I caught the flu along with everything else. Turns out it is the normal process of the medicine. One more reason I truly don't want this to ever happen again. Once I took a day or so off work to sleep and rest, I started to feel human again. This was last Friday when I finally felt good again. I was ready to attempt to get back into the garage and make some sawdust. I had a slight delay as we watched our friend's kids while they took care of some funeral arrangements. 

Then came Sunday. I was ready to beg/plead/cry/anything to be able to get a few hours of ANYTHING done in the garage. I felt a lot better and I was ready to see what I could do with my eye (I will explain in a bit about that). Luckily my kids were in a calm mood and wanted to spend the day coloring and reading books with Daddy. 

I can't begin to tell you how I felt stepping out into the cold garage. I wished it was warm like summertime, but just getting out there and breathing in the soft smell of sawdust. I stretched and looked around. To warm up I did some rearranging and cleaning of the garage. I got my new workbench into its new position and got started. I was building the last bit of Anna's parson's chair. 

I had already built the basic form of the chair. Then I got sick. Since that was so long ago, here is a little reminder.

It sat there looking so close to done and taunting me as I was sick and not able to work. Anyway, I took those out to the garage and did the some more. I started by adding some 1/4 inch plywood to the seat and back. This would give decent support to everything. then I used spray adhesive to attach the 2 inch high density foam to the seat bottom. There was some old 1 inch foam left hanging around from when I took apart the old breakfast nook so I used that for the back cushions. I wrapped the whole thing with burlap to smooth it all out.

I really should have folded the foam over the top of the back. I forgot this step when I did it. I WILL do that on any future chairs. The top then met the bottom. :-)

Look Ma, a real chair! Okay, so we all took turns sitting on it and seeing how it felt. Everyone agreed it was comfortable, but it is a smaller chair. Our old chairs were huge and I always thought they were too big. But this just made this chair feel so small. It was comfortable (more than our old chairs) but the seat isn't very big. I worry I would rather have it reach all the way to the back of my knees instead of mid thigh and while quite supportive, my husband and I are a little wider in the hip than this seat. You don't feel awkward sitting on it. It is just smaller than what we are used to. It didn't help that without dining room chairs we have been using computer chairs which are huge and comfortable and more like sitting in a rocking chair than a dining room chair. Everything feels smaller compared to them.

I decided to finish the chair anyway. Even if I make modifications to future chairs, this one is plenty big for either of the kids with room to grow so it wont need to be disassembled or anything. (Why can't I ever use the word disassembled without hearing "Number 5 is ALIVE!" in my head. Darn movies). I followed Anna's slipcover pattern for sewing a slipcover for the chair. I used the extra fabric I had on hand from when I was building the bench that sits on the other side of the table. 

Here is my first attempt at sewing a slipcover!

So this is where I want to talk about my eyes. After steady improvement the first few days of the IV meds, my eyesight stopped improving at about 95% of my original site. With my left eye closed, I can feel and tell things are not quite right. Light seems brighter, or rather like someone turned up the contrast so I get more glares off of things. There is still a ever so slight haziness which makes me feel the vision is off. I was VERY careful when I went into the garage because I didn't want to take chances with things. The doctors can not say for sure if I will ever get my vision back to where it was before the optical nerve swelled. I am happy to report that while woodworking I didn't feel limited by anything and thanks to guides and settings on the tools, I felt confident that I was following along where I wanted to go.

Sewing on the other hand was a challenge. I LOVE this fabric, but if I moved it quickly the pattern seemed to throw off my eye. Like my eye couldn't keep up and took slightly too long to refocus once it was moved. So if I went slow, I was okay, but anything too fast and I could feel it. It was also hard because I didn't have any of my fabric cutting tools that I could find. So I was using a large woodworking ruler to mark off the fabric and it was hard to be precise. I felt myself squinting and really having to work hard to draw the lines and cut straight. Sewing again seemed easy enough since I just had to do straight lines and keep it 1/4 in from the edge which matched the edge of the sewing machine foot so I had a guide so to speak. 

So the consensus is that for now, woodworking seems to be okay for me, but cutting and a lot of detail cutting of fabric is best left to earlier in the day when I am not as tired and maybe my eye can focus easier. It did fit and looked wonderful, but it was hard and I felt a bit let down by my eye. I go back for a checkup on Friday to re-dilate my eyes and check to be sure the swelling of the optical nerve is gone. I hope it is. I don't think I can handle more medicine and lost garage time. There are precious few weeks between now and Thanksgiving. If we are going to host the whole family at our house this year, we NEED CHAIRS!!!! 

Still Stalled and Blurry

After an MRI and tests, we have confirmation it was a random swollen optical nerve. I have been doing a 5 day series of IV steroids to bring down the swelling. This is helping a lot. I was down to barely 10% eyesight left in my right eye with lots of pain on Friday. Now after 4 of 5 treatments I can move my eye with no pain but I still only have maybe 75% eyesight. That is an improvement, but I want it all back!

The problem mostly lies right now in that I am having more trouble just making it through these 5 days. I will be honest and say I have lost my temper and whined a lot more than I normally would have. To start with they said I would get a "heightened sense of euphoria" with the meds. I did not. Instead I seemed to get the angry aggressive feelings instead. Not fun for me or the family. Then I lost my sense of taste as well ruining my meals, and my attempts at comfort dessert.

They wanted to just do one IV for the whole 5 days. Naturally the best vein was in my right hand. So I lost my dominate hand since we left the open line in there. But it started to hurt where they left the IV in so we took it out today before round 4. Today was training day at the docs and one nurse I had tried 2 times to put a new line in my left arm. When both failed, a different nurse tried and also failed for a line in the left. So I ended up with it back on my right side forearm. This has made me further whiny because my left arm aches and my right is even more useless than when it was in my right hand.

I have been writing all this left handed and it is taking FOREVER to get this much out. I prefer to be calm and just deal, but this has been more than I can take calmly. I hate feeling this lame. Boo!!!! I am hoping soon to be back up to snuff and then gorge myself on woodworking projects and getting caught up on things.

Time Out, Eye Out

Please forgive me for no new updates. It appears that I have a swollen optic nerve. As such, I can barely see out of one eye and am in a lot of pain. This also means I don't dare use power tools until I have 2 healthy eyes again and I can be sure to be as safe as I can be in the garage.

Thank you for your patience as I go through the doctor's tests etc and figure out how to go forward.

Happy building to those still functioning with 2 eyes! Be back soon I hope.