I kept telling myself that it hadn’t really been that long since I last blogged. And here we are, one week shy of two months since my last post.

I’d have rather been blogging.

What started out as a weeklong visit to my dad turned into twelve days. His health kept getting worse, to the point where he could not be left alone, and my mom needed help. I stayed as long as I could until my aunt (my dad’s sister) was able to fly out and take over.

I came home, moved apartments, and discovered that my internet access didn’t move with me. I filched flaky wireless from a neighbor for three days.

That’s when I got the call from my brother to get on a plane ASAP. I flew out less than 24 hours later. I arrived on March 4. On March 17, my dad died, surrounded by the entire family.

They say that modern medicine has made the concept of death foreign to most of us, such that many of us are incapable of recognizing the signs that death is near.

I say that as long as you have heard of the “death rattle”, it doesn’t matter if you’ve never heard it before. The second that sound starts you will know exactly what it is.

I am ok-ish. I have the best support network a girl could ask for, honestly. While I will miss my dad and am sad that he’s gone, he doesn’t have to suffer anymore and that’s important.

Mostly I am exhausted. If I take the Life Stress Test, the events from the last two years add up to well over 300 points, which means

High susceptibility to stress-related illness
Daily practice of relaxation skills is very important for your wellness. Take care of it now before a serious illness erupts or an affliction becomes worse.

And I didn’t even add the additional 20 points I’ll incur next week when I fly to Taiwan, not for “vacation”, but for “my dad’s second funeral, and this time I get to speak in Chinese” so it’s probably worth more than 20 points. No wonder the grey hairs are sprouting like weeds. Yet I feel like I’m shamelessly whining. My mom is still chugging and her stress test comes out to over 400.

So please forgive me if I take it a little easy on the blogging for the next month or so. If nothing else, I need a knitting break to catch up on my hideous backlog of work. I imagine I’ll be back up to full speed May-ish.

Background at Danwei, translation and analysis from China Digital Times, and more commentary at my language learning blog!

Fabric: Two fat quarters
Pattern: Pencil Bag

When we last left off with the Pencil Bag, I was having issues installing the zipper.

Is it also called frogging if you’re ripping with a seam ripper? Anyways, after lots of that, and re-sewing, I wound up with this:

Acceptably-straight topstitching. Woohoo! I trimmed off the excess at the top and bottom of the zipper, overlocked the edges, and then turned my attention to the binding.

I had started with two fat quarters and so had plenty of fabric left over. I decided to make a single-fold binding out of the lining fabric. After several stages of FAIL:

I had two strips of binding that were the right length. Although the pattern suggests 13″ of binding, I needed nearly 14″ to have enough to fold over the edges.

I tried for a long time to topstitch the binding on, but the corners were too thick to feed easily through my machine. So I used a hand finish instead.

There’s a little puckering, but it’ll do. The other end looks a bit better. Also, note the perils of sewing with flimsy fabric.

I’m supposed to show you the inside too, so:

Ta-da! From this angle it looks like a tissue-paper holder. With a zipper. For a very strange size of tissue paper.

This will probably be my last sewing post for the month. Next week I’ll be heading out to visit my dad, whose health has taken a downturn. For a while we thought he might actually beat this thing against all odds—Tarceva is a wonderful drug—but now things are a bit uncertain.

And after that, my husband and I are moving apartments. I should have a much better workspace in our new place, but I’ll have to pack up the sewing stuff before I go so he can more efficiently clean and pack while I’m away.

Other entries about the Pencil Bag:

• Project Problems