Countdown 1 week to new knee

1 week to go. It is very distracting. I can't focus on anything creative. So...I'm taking care of all the little chores that need to be done and don't require creativity. You know.  Those thingies that hold the screens on the windows that get broken.  Requires more of the thingies and a screwdriver. Next came the leather furniture. Rag and leather cleaner and they look pretty good despite dogs and cats using and abusing them. Next The Craft Trunk. Yes we have a trunk. Not a box or a crate but a trunk and it was packed.  One artistic kid,  one enthusiastic kid, and one artistic parent leads to the necessity of a trunk.  I threw out all the dried paint, paint kits for little kids and discarded partially finished projects. Now its half empty with the bag of multi sized pompoms because they could become little animals with the glue gun I found at the bottom. I also found 3 watercolor pads!!! Creativity later! 

This reminds me of being pregnant the first time. Lots of people have done it successfully but I have no idea how it's going to work for me.  People say the pain was awful, the pain was not bad, physio was great, physio was terrible. It goes on and on.  It's hard to prepare when you don't know how it's going to go. I can only do what they recommend and guess the rest.

At least the medical community are not such morons about pain meds the way they were when Del had his shoulder surgery (1986). I take it back, not all the medical community.  Dr. Lenzner was pissed at the nursing staff for making Del wait for his pain meds when he was clearly in pain. He had written the orders so that they could give them to him when needed, but they chose to ignore that part of the order. Too much work I guess. These days there is a device that the patient controls that lets you stay on top of the pain.  

New knee. Knee replacement surgery journal

At the suggestion of a friend I am keeping a journal of this transformative event. At 52 I am considered young to have a knee replaced until the severity of the original injury when I was 20 is understood.  I am young and that's my point. I should be able to do so much more than I am currently capable of. I don't expect to be able to run but ride my bike, do some hot yoga, walk the dogs everyday and explore a city without relying on codiene. 

I decided in May 2015 that I had had enough of this knee. I thought I was looking at a much longer time line. Several years at least but it went amazingly fast. Just over a year since I made the decision to pursue this!

Today was pre op tests, meetings and class. The anesthesiologist was a lovely woman. Very funny.  She was born and raised here. Her comment on Vancouver was "any city that needs to keep reminding everyone it's a world class city is not a world class city". So refreshing to meet a Vancouverite that does not think Vancouver is the center of the universe. 

I wish I could show you one of the X-rays.  It shows how collapsed the joint is and how out of line the leg becomes. The femur and the tibfib make a 15 degree angle.  Imagine how that must pull so many muscles and ligament out of alignment. Happily my left leg looks good. 

I have been taking Zija's Supermix, 1 packet daily for 8 weeks. The result have been outstanding. Significantly increased energy, much better quality sleep, virtual disappearance of the daily fibromyalgia ache and weight loss.  I can't think of any negatives. I will take the Supermix until the day of surgery and start again when I get home.  The expected stay is 2 nights. I may double up and use 2 packets a day. The nurse was insistent that we stop dieting at this juncture as we need to prepare our bodies to heal with good nutrition. Yay Moringa oelifera for that job. I decided that rather than add the calories back with just more food I would add some coconut oil to my daily intake I don't deliberately cut fat in my diet but it tends to be low fat and increased fats improves healing. 

Freezing butter

This is a deeply personal question. Do you freeze your butter?  I do. That's how I store it. Butter from Costco is significantly cheaper that butter from the grocery store. I keep a couple of pounds in the freezer so we don't run out and I have extra for baking. 

One of the problems of freezing a pound  of butter is only half a pound fits in the butter dish. Until today I have chipped the frozen pound in half to get a lump about the right size. Frozen butter is not particularly cooperative in this regard. 

Here is my solution 

Cut the pound in half

Wrap in heavy duty aluminum foil

Label and freeze. Now I only have to thaw the size butter lump that fits in my butter dish. 

Simple! Why did it take me this long to think of it? 

Yoga mat bag a different pattern

Finished another bag for sale. So many design decisions!  Colors and patterns and words for the pocket. All take longer than the creation once all those decisions are made. 

Gentleman's vest

My latest project is a gentleman's vest. I used an online pattern calculator that gives you the means to graph a fitted vest based on the person's measurements.  It was very accurate and only required some adjustments to the back neckline and shoulder width on the back piece.  I placed the darts once I had the muslin and could see where they darts went on the body.  

Then I got out the upholstery fabric.

This fabric looks lovely but was not easy to work with.  It had stretch.  Not an elastic stretch but something in the weave.  Based on the muslin I under stitched the front dream by hand, switching

at the fold so the underside of the lapel was stitched so it rolls the right way.  In this instance the fabric was very forgiving and the under stitching is virtually invisible.  The perfectionist in me wouldn't mind the under stitching to show so the perfectly placed pick stitch could be seen but it looks nice the way it is. 

I though we might go with self covered buttons but my son thought it would be too furniture-y so I'm off to DressSew to find some buttons.