We interrupt whatever sewing may have been happening for important BREAKING NEWS!

Ha ha…there hasn’t been much sewing going on here.   A little more on that later, but first, a puppy update!

Poor Camy has gone through soooo much in the last week.  I’ll save you the long saga, but she’s been diagnosed with Addison’s Disease.  Basically that means her adrenal glands don’t produce the steroids and other very, very important things that they’re supposed to produce.  That’s the bad news.  The good news is that with vigilant treatment, she should live a long and happy life.  She’s been prescribed daily prednisone (to replace the steroids) and a shot every 25 days to replace the other missing minerals.  Between those two meds, she should be good to go.  She had her first dose of the shot last Thursday  and has been on prednisone since last Wednesday and we see steady improvement.   She was actually in the puppy hospital on IV last week for a couple days, so she started out from a rather low place.  Right now, I’d say she’s about a 6.5 out of 10.  We see moments where she acts like she did two years ago (she’s 6 now), but right now she has those moments, then gets tired quickly and takes a nap.  I’m really curious to see where she is next weekend.

Addison’s Disease is scary because it can be life threatening if not caught and treated quickly, and to catch it, the vets have to be on their toes.  It’s commonly called “the Great Pretender” because it can easily be mistaken for so many other things.  The list of symptoms is so vague, and the only way to test is to run a fairly expensive blood test, so it’s not usually the first thing done.   We think she’s probably been coming down with it for some time, likely since the summer, because we had noticed things like she didn’t jump up on the bed anymore, she’d sometimes stumble while coming up the steps, and her coat had started shedding excessively, but we just wrote all those off as her getting older, or just one of those wacky dog things.  Addison’s is exacerbated by stress, and we boarded her while my husband and I visited my family in PA for Thanksgiving.  We’re pretty sure that’s what brought this attack on.  When we picked her up, she just flat out refused to eat ANYTHING and she was sooooo tired.  The moral of the story is…if you ever see those two symptons in your pet, its a good idea to get them to the vets immediately.  It could just be a bug…but it could be signs of something much worse.  Here’s a pic of her taken last night with my husband.  She jumped up on the footrest of the recliner all by herself (then fell asleep once she was up there.)

I have been working on the aprons, but so far, I’ve just cut some out.  I’m debating some of my fabric selections and haven’t quite resolved what I’m going to do about that.  One of the patterns I’m using is Butterick 5474, the view in blue and red below and there is a ton of gathering.

 

I messed around a bit today with the gathering foot on my sewing machine to see how it would work.   The gathering foot is actually from my Grandmother’s ANCIENT Singer and it worked!

 

I hope you can make those pictures to read the instructions (sometimes you can and sometimes you can’t with pictures and I’m not sure why that is.).  Anyway, I LOVE how detailed they are.

Here’s my sample:

 

Not bad, eh?? And so much easier than gathering by hand.  You can see at the right of the photo where it was sewing the gathering onto the straight fabric at the same time…soooo impressive.   I do want to experiment with my serger before I settle on one method, though.    Maybe I’ll feel up to that one tomorrow.  I came down with a pretty bad headache today (Aleve didn’t even get rid of it!), so that cut my sewing room time short today.  Oh well…c’est la vie.  It allowed me more time to hang out with the recuperating Camy!  🙂

Happy Sewing!