Project of the Week Digest, Without Much Reupholstering

After my last post, I dove into preparations for making progress on my reupholstery. But I got thwarted by a missing zipper foot! I needed it for making cording before I could proceed on the chairs, and though I scoured every store in Tallahassee that should have had one, I had to give up and order one online.  

While I was waiting, I had to channel my ramped up motivation into something, so I made Elora a nightgown and a library bag.

I made some Greek yogurt from fat free milk. Have you ever tried making your own yogurt? It's delicious, easy, and economical. You wouldn't believe how creamy and thick it gets. I use the instructions found here. 

I like to store it in serving-sized glass tupperware. And I love to look at this tidy stack once my yogurt is ready to go. =) 

I also made a plastic bag holder.

And a birthday present with this wonderful free bag pattern. 

 When the zipper foot arrived, I made my cording. 

And now I can commence my actual reupholstering. Whew. 

Project of the Week: Reupholstering Chairs

I start most of my projects with a bang, and I love it when I chug straight through until I can stand back and look at a job accomplished. But too often a new project propelled by the fervor of actually beginning sputters into a languishing partially-done. Do you have any of those?

So I'm going to make myself accountable. I'm going to leverage the power of (self-inflicted) potential for "public" shame to light a fire under my heinie and finish some of the things I've begun! Alright!

This week, I'm going to re-tackle the reupholstering project I started back in July. I started with gusto, see?

Cutting a continuous bias strip. It was extremely thrilling, seriously. 

Sewing piping onto the ottoman cover.

Bias strip for piping. Just look at that luscious pile.

Don't you think identifying "roadblocks" in order to address them helps get momentum going again? I hope it does. Anyway, I'm going to try.

A few things derailed my progress, among them the giant proportion of setup and cleanup time to actual work time and a move. Now the move is over, and I have a room that I can  temporarily dedicate to finishing the project. 

Bonus: This room is currently a catch-all for boxes that are partially unpacked. Committing to making reupholstering progress means I have to get this room cleaned out.  

"Reupholstering room." Sigh. I better get cracking!

Since this is a project I've already begun, my before shots are of my work-in-progress.

Note the white (old fabric) cushion, the stuffing hanging out, and the pathetic blanket fringe trying to hide it.

Motivation: When I'm done, our two living room armchairs will look as complete as this chunk does.

My favorite part to look at. Seeing slices of what the whole will be helps get me going again.

What unfinished projects are you itching to work on? What project will you commit to this week? Misery loves company. No no no. Birds of a feather flock together. ;)

It's Okay to Be "Me"

It must have something to do with the same entrenched mechanism that causes people to fall into the grammar blunder that I hate the most. We're so afraid of the dreaded "me and her" that we go overboard and skirt the utterance of me whenever we can. But me isn't a bad word! It's a valid part of speech!

Here's an example of what I'm talking about, and I've noticed that it usually happens when we're on a formal phone call or we're trying to sound particularly polite: "When you've filled out your form, please submit it to Steve or myself." No!!!! Give it to him or give it to ME!!

Neither is myself an acceptable placeholder for when you're unsure which part of speech to use. You can't say, "He joined the class with Brady and myself" just like you can't say "Lydia, Dave, and myself will be taking on that project."

This mistake, like so many, I feel, has its roots in people not understanding parts of speech or other grammatical and syntactical constructs. I was fortunate enough to go to an "alternative" elementary school (really, a traditional* one where they still taught boring, old fashioned things like grammar, even to the extent of sentence diagramming, if you can believe it). And you wouldn't believe what the entire first semester of my freshman highschool English class consisted of... (I'll save that for another time, same place).

Myself is a reflexive pronoun, and you can think of it this way: Any reflexive pronoun (myself, herself, himself, themselves, ourselves, yourself) must "reflect" a pronoun (and we'll just stick to personal pronouns here) that is also in the sentence. Each reflective pronoun goes with its own pronoun: I and myself; she and herself; he and himself; they and themselves; we and ourselves; you and yourself.

Each of these pronouns, you'll notice, is in the subjective, or nominative, case, meaning they all act as subjects of the action occurring in the sentence. Any of these subject pronouns in the list above could go in the place of a proper noun or vice versa. This also means there's no reflexive pronoun for objective pronouns like me (unless you're my two-year-old daughter and you want to do everything "meself").

Back to reflexive pronouns reflecting... A reflexive pronoun standing on its own - and I just learned this five minutes ago - has a name: an untriggered reflexive. The name for this flub in itself (non-personal reflexive pronoun alert!) should remind us of reflexive pronouns' need to be triggered. I myself love it when this happens.

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*I'm all for "non-traditional" teaching methods and institutions that update our model of education, but not at the expense of instructing students, one way or another, in things that simply must be known, in my opinion. If grammar is boring, don't axe it, find a way to make it interesting, find a way to make it come alive - as great teachers, given the freedom, have found ways to do.

The Outraged Grammarian Speaks

So much has changed for us in these blog-silent past five months. Here's a (not exhaustive) sampling of what I've done between the "other things" and now:

Said goodbye, unexpectedly, to a beloved aunt.

Moved from Atlanta to Tallahassee.

Discovered St. George Island.

Taken up reupholstering.

Watched our new house begin to emerge from the ground.

Check back Wednesday for some (long-awaited, much anticipated -- right??) actual grammar talk. See you then!

I Do Other Things...

Believe it or not, in addition to running around ranting and raving about grammar, I do some other things,

like making Irish soda bread,

cloning the only African violet that's ever been nice to me by blooming again,

and making dresses out of $2 vintage sheets!

Preserving the Freedom to Fail

The following is a response to Michael Goodwin's video.

When limitless possibility to succeed is replaced by a system that shuns failure, "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" becomes a hollow concept. Not having the freedom to fail robs us of knowing what we can do, and ultimately, who we are.

Even small defeats are significant learning opportunities. Parenting psychologist Jim Taylor explains: "Failure connects children's actions with consequences, which helps them gain ownership of their efforts."As my daughter attempts a puzzle, her initial exasperation eventually yields to the pleasure of success. I see through her satisfied smile and triumphant claps that she has discovered she can do it! Why would I take this away from her? It's a gift of confidence, of knowing the rewards of determination, one I hope she carries with her through life.

Allowing our children to fail is just as important in education. Echoing Michael Goodwin's statement that "without failure there is no way to measure success," educational psychologist Theodore A. Chandler states that "there can be no meaning or value in success without the experience of failure." There must be the sting of consequence – really, the pain of failure – when there's a lack of effort, or our children will never know what their best is. And how much sweeter is the victory when what our children attain is commensurate with their own hard work?

Conquering failure is not the only benefit of experiencing failure. Having the freedom to fail can point us in new directions. As an undergraduate at Cal, writing poems during chemistry lab might have clued me in that I was in the wrong classroom, but it wasn't until I failed – big time – that the lights went on.

I walked, awash in Berkeley sunshine, clutching a calculus test with a score of 9 out of 100. After the initial horror wore off, I laughed. This was ridiculous. Why was I doing this when there was something else that I was much, much better at? A few months later, I was reading poetry on the steps of Wheeler Hall, barely believing that I was in "school."

Like many others who've been afforded the freedom to fail, I couldn’t be more grateful for the end result: a stark contrast between an attempted pre-med path in which I floundered and the obtaining of a summa cum laude English degree, which I enjoyed, which gave me the opportunity to excel, to shine, to be who I am today – by choice, not passivity. J.K. Rowling put it eloquently in a commencement speech at Harvard: "Rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life."

Not having the freedom to fail precludes our children from actuating their full potential. Without this freedom, they may never know the rewards of hard work or how much their destiny rests in the exercise of their own volition. Our youth must know – experientially – that they have the liberty to choose their own lives and that happiness is within their grasp.

Works Cited:

• Taylor, Jim. "Fear of Failure." Keep Kids Healthy. April 6, 2005. March 20, 2011.
• Goodwin, Michael. "Goodwin on the Freedom to Fail." Templeton Press. YouTube. June 30, 2010. March 12, 2011.
• Chandler, Theodore A. "Commentary: Teaching Students the Value of Failure." Education Week. November 6, 1985. March 19, 2011.
• Rowling, J.K. "The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination." Harvard Magazine. June 5, 2008. March 19, 2011.

Monday Madness

Things, read and heard, that made me cringe. I'm sure they'll do the same to you - and make you feel just a little more knowledgeable today because you, grammar friends, know better. ;)


"Our newest little kissable edition..." (Arguably, this could have been done intentionally, poetically, but I'm pretty sure the author meant addition.)

"But homework and reading are extremely important to my husband and I..."

"Max overheard my brother and I yelling at each other."

"Look whose front and center."

"It's not going to put you and I back where we belong."

"...and that the seatbelt or LATCH system are installed correctly." (This last one was on CNN.com, folks.)