Sick, But Sewing

It's a little bit gross over here lately. Husband was sick last week, and still hasn't entirely recovered. I picked it up on Tuesday, and have been alternating good and bad days since then. I take it for granted when I'm healthy, a fact which isn't exactly a revelation, I know...but still! I want to be taking it for granted again.
Yesterday, a healthy-compared-to-the-day-before-day, I managed to do some sewing: I started a few projects...
...and made lots of progress on another.
I am making a toaster cover for a friend whose cats love to jump onto her kitchen counters.* She's been trolling for a toaster cover for a long time, but they are apparently quite out of vogue and she hasn't been able to find one. I mean, people just don't have toaster covers anymore. Of course they don't! They're kind of twee, really--it's not like toasters are unsightly, or like a proud homemaker needs to pretend s/he is above using such a modern convenience...But for people like my friend, toaster covers aren't about aesthetics or kitchen cred, they're about not wanting to find cat hair on your toast.
I am not using a pattern. I am using rough measurements, so the cover is not going to be a very good fit. It might make the toaster look fat. But it will cover said toaster, so it will serve its purpose. My friend picked the fabric, and she even paid for it.
It doesn't have batting or anything--I considered putting in some of that pot-holder insulation stuff, but had a hard enough time getting the lining to line up with the outside, so I scrapped that idea. As a result, it is going to be pretty disappointing for my friend. I'm quilting it by hand, though, even though there's no "sandwich." I think it will look cool on the inside even though it won't quite look good enough to be reversible. Quilting by hand is kind of insane, and it's both more and less difficult than I expected it to be: it turns out the stitches look neat-o even when they aren't perfect (and mine sure as shit are not perfect), but that's really only when they're in a pattern. The few straight lines I've tried look downright wack. I bet it takes a really long time to get your stitches to look perfect. I was afraid of that, but I'm pleasantly surprised to see that there seem to be only two steps on this ladder of hand quilting: imperfect but passable and perfect. I mean, until my stitches are even and precise all the time, they will look like this:
and this is good enough.
Also, quilting by hand is really really time-consuming. But when a person is kind of sick she likes to watch a lot of movies and TV shows, and that's a great time to be quilting. She gets into a rhythm and watches her project come together and feels quite satisfied and less like a sad, lazy germ-ridden lump. How a woman ever finished full-sized quilts when she had to also wash clothes by hand and keep fires burning and have cholera and make soap...that remains a mind-exploding mystery to me.
P.S. Listen, I know these photos are shit. The toaster cover is a rumpled mess because we are a toaster-oven household, so I have nothing to cover with my toaster burka and therefore it is a shapeless heap. The in-progress pictures are meant to be enticing and mysterious, but it is a gray, gray day here and I'm a pretty bad photographer. They just look like scraps, but I spent a lot of time with scissors yesterday, so the small amount of sewing I accomplished was, well, an accomplishment. Perhaps not one worth photographing and posting on the internet, but so what? Who cares?
________________________________________________________________
*Rereading that sentence, I realize it's nearly impossible to refer to a "toaster-cover-trolling friend whose cats walk all over her counters" without making one's friend sound like a possibly dotty cat lady. Well, we are in our early thirties and this particular friend is married and her house is really clean. Plus she's hot-looking. It's weird to feel like I have to defend an anonymous friend on a blog no one reads, but lately I have been commenting on other Blogger blogs and my name's been a hyperlink, so odds that someone other than that one Russian gangster might stumble over here are sort of increased. So there you have it. Also, I am not a cat person at all, so maybe I'm prone to thinking that anyone with multiple cats is loony. Maybe no one else would read that without feeling reflexive cat-hater distaste for my friend's dilemma. But I ask you, what is a blog if not a haven where a girl can project her own prejudices onto her readers?