We finally put together a project we’ve been meaning to do in Casco — a shade for the skylight in the upstairs bedroom. Charley likes rooms very dark. He’s been tacking a piece of cloth over the skylight over the bed when he sleeps there. Since he and Nicole and Emma are here this weekend, covering the skylight is high on the agenda. We had bought a room-darkening windowshade, but there’s really no way to support it on the skylight. We finally used the sewing machine that I fixed a couple of months ago to sew a piece of fabric (remnant Marimekko from the Crate & Barrel outlet in Kittery) to the room-darkening shade material to make a skylight cover that’s the right size, is reasonably opaque, and looks good from the inside. And the sewing machine cruised through the job!
In birding news, there was a ruffed grouse standing between the living room window and the lilac bush thirty feet away. It stayed there until Charley went out the front door to try to photograph it.
We tried making crabapple jelly, but I didn’t have directions for the powdered pectin that I had, and I didn’t have as much sugar as the Ball canning book called for. So I have no idea whether or not it will ever jell. Of course, there’s no telling how it will taste, either.
I finished Order of the Phoenix and started right away on The Half-Blood Prince.
And, really most significant if least interesting, I have my new laptop set up so that I can connect to work and work from home in the event of bad weather.