Come Stitch With Me

Several posts ago, I mentioned that I had been asked to make the school spirit banner that our reading bowl team members would carry at the reading bowl competition.  Here are three of the team members onstage during the parade of schools:

The finished banner size is 30″ x 60″.  The front and back are simply the quilting cotton from Joann’s that happened to be the correct shade of green to match our school colors.  A piece of very low loft lightweight batting is sandwiched between the two pieces to give it some body. This banner was simply stitched together along the edges and turned right side out with topstitching 1/4″ from the finished edge.  In hindsight, I think a traditional bound finish would have been easier as would using flannel instead of quilt batting.

The letters were made using the letter die-cuts at my school.  I fused lightweight paperbacked fusible web to the wrong side of a piece of wool felt.  (Wool felt doesn’t fray and withstands high iron temps needed to activate the fusible web.) Once cooled, I cut the felt into 5″ or 9″ squares (leaving paper backing intact) and ran them through the die cut machine.  Larger letters are 8″ high while the smaller letters are 4″ high.  To make the white background behind the HAYES, I simply fused the 8″ black letters to a piece of white felt and then cut them using my 28 mm rotary cutter and small acrylic ruler  to leave a 1/4″ outline.   Outline of the “S” was done freehand.  The large letters were machine stitched to the quilt banner.  The 4″ letters are simply fused in place.  I will go back and add more mustangs and some additional machine quilting before the banner is hung on the wall.  Honestly, I don’t think the 4″ letters need to be stitched down.  They remained securely attached even after a day of heavy use at the reading bowl.

A 1-3/8″ dowel rod with end caps will be used as the hanger.  I’ll add a sleeve before the banner is hung on the wall in the Media Center.  Some schools used rod & pocket casings at the tops of their banners to hold the pole.  Good idea, but with our banner layout and size constraints, it just didn’t look right on the mock-up.

Although the design is simple, it took almost as much time to work out the design details and do the mock-up on bulletin board paper as it did to construct the entire banner.  The sewing part wasn’t difficult at all.  Fusing the paper backed fusible web and cutting the letters took the longest amount of time.

Everyone was thrilled with the banner.  Final tally:  6 hours of time plus $40 in materials (not including hanging hardware). Fortunately, I was able to fuse and cut the letters during my planning time @ work.

        Here’s one of mine!

I cannot begin to tell you how much joy this 26 pounds of scruffy fur has
brought to my life (and others through our therapy dog work).

Our next door neighbor is giving him a big hug in this picture.

Adopt a shelter dog!

I work as an elementary library media specialist at a Title I school located in the second largest school district in the state.  The district has 100,000+ students.  Approximately 1100 of those PK-5 munchkins attend my school.  I also serve two very different schools within the same building.  Yes, this can be a logistical feat sometimes –  and a nightmare on other occasions – but we’ll leave it at that.

Faced with a 65 million dollar budget deficit, the district’s senior management team has proposed a number of cuts.  Among these is cutting the library media parapros (my helper) back to part-time.  Much discussion has gone back and forth on the district’s library media list-serv.  For the affected parapos, the potential impact is huge because this change would also bring a loss of health insurance benefits in addition to a 50% pay cut.  Say what you will about civil servants; however,  most of the parapros at my school are married to small business owners.  Their meager paychecks keep the family fed, lights on and provide medical insurance for their families.  That’s about it.

If my parapro is cut to half-time, this means half of my work week is now going to be spent covering circulation duties – you know supervising the library, helping students find books, checking out books and reshelving.  The other part will be spent handling the back office duties that still have to get done – library management, ordering, weeding, updating records, repairing books, analyzing the collection to see where we need more items, evaluating websites for teachers, collaborating on resources for projects, providing technology support and teaching.  Did I mention teaching?????  Yes, this is the one  responsibility that often gets pushed aside. I don’t like it, but I’m only one person and there are so many hours in the day.

Some of my coworkers have talked about how they plan to hustle to keep up the same level of library services…staying later…taking work home…working during the summers.  Blame it on our strong customer service orientation psyche.  We simply want to make our customers happy and will often go to great lengths to do so.

Enough is enough.  As much as I enjoy my work, I already do the job of two people (librarian and technology coordinator) and now I’m expected to pick up the slack of a 1/2 time position as well?   I don’t even get paid the full salary to do the job I was contracted to do (thanks to salary cuts, wage freezes and furlough days).  I have to agree with my husband on this one.  The job they have available is not the same job I had five years ago.  I may not like it, but that is the job available.  I can either accept it or resign.  Simple as that. And man, do I hate to admit it when he’s right.