My little rescue mutt and I are a regular R.E.A.D. (Reading Education Assistance Dog) team at one of the Cobb County Public Library branches in Marietta.  We are now in our third year of offering R.E.A.D. sessions after school the 1st & 3rd Wednesdays of the month.  We participate in celebrations with the public library, as well as special events with Marietta City and Cobb County Schools.  We also present summer programs for the public library and appear as a guest speakers at after-school pet clubs.

In the back of my mind has always been to be able to make therapy dog visits to some of our local children’s hospitals. Moving 20 miles closer in to Atlanta has made this a possibility, but as I learned yesterday, CHOA has a contract with two other area pet therapy groups, so Boomer and I are unable to visit the CHOA facilities unless we go through the hoops to become a member of one of those groups.  No, thank you.  We’ve already been through enough hoops to join the two groups with whom we are already affiliated.

You know where this is going, right?  Don’t tell me I can’t do something I really want to do…

Yesterday, Boomer and I made our first official hospital visit as a CAREIng Paws team at an area health care facility.  We visited with teens and young adults who are undergoing treatment for substance abuse.  Admittedly, it’s not what I originally had in mind for hospital visits, but another CAREing Paws member convinced me to give it a try.  I’m glad we went.

Living closer in means I can be almost anywhere in Atlanta in less than 30 minutes. Boomer received lots and lots of petting. I had some interesting conversations with the young people.  The one that really stuck with me was the young man who compared the various treatment facilities where he’d been a guest.  I kept my mouth shut, but I so badly wanted to respond “Why do you keep doing the same behavior that gets you back in rehab?  Don’t you want to go on to be a productive member of society?” We’ll be back next month and I hope NOT to see some of those same faces.

In case you were wondering, CAREing Paws is the organization that my sewing business supports.  If you purchase a pattern in my Etsy shop, take a class or commission a quilt, 10% of the proceeds goes to CAREing Paws.

Look in an elementary school classroom with tables and chairs instead of desks and you are likely to find seat back pockets on the chairs to help with student organization!  It’s basically a slipcover for the chair with a big pocket on the back to hold school supplies, library books and even textbooks.  They can be plain, multi-pocketed and/or blinged to your heart’s content.

My task was to figure out how to make sturdy “seat sacks” for a friend’s classroom that would have a pocket deep enough to hold a library book, writing journal and a pencil box. She has 12″ plastic stack chairs with the curved tops.  I spent a few minutes after school making a template of the chair back and taking some measurements.  A little web-surfing yielded some design ideas and I drafted my master pattern piece.  A quick trip to Hobby Lobby yielded the twill I needed to construct the prototype.

Will report back and post a tutorial tomorrow after the fitting.

Update:  The prototype cover fit like a glove, but there wasn’t enough room to hold everything that the teacher wanted to seat sacks to hold.  It was a little too fitted shall we say.  So, I went back to the drawing board, made the sack 1″ wider, lessened the upper curve a great deal, increased the “gusset” fold at the bottom to 1-1/2″ and added a gradual curve to the upper edge of the back seat pocket to provide a little easier access to student materials.  And being ever so mindful of the washability factor of the seat sacks, I picked up some 65% polyester/35% cotton bottom weight twill fabric at Joann’s.  It’s not the pretty marine blue that I found at Hobby Lobby;  however, the substituted fabric choice is certainly more practical and within my friend’s budget.  And I promise that a tutorial is coming once everything is the way we like it.

P.S.  Did you know elementary school chairs come in 3 sizes – 12″, 14″ and 16″? The 12″ is the typical K & 1st chair and the 16″ is the typical 2nd – 5th chair – at least at my school anyway.

I didn’t want to go to my day job this morning.  😦

I wanted to stay home and keep working in my quilt studio.

You see, the creative genie was finally let out of the bottle late Sunday afternoon after the company had gone and the house returned to normal after their visit.

By bedtime, I was totally immersed in a project to the point where I didn’t want to stop.

But I did.

I corralled the creative genie at work (somewhat) today.  My apologies to those who encountered grumpy librarian first thing this morning.

I spent two glorious hours in my studio today completing about half of the project.  Now that I know what I’m doing, it’s much easier to reach a natural stopping point in the process.