we're getting all crazy up in here
Because nothin' says crazy like some nerdy crafts and home improvement.
So, when I started grad school, I decided (in my first semester, when I took-- no kidding-- seven classes and was working a part time job at the cable company. And I wonder how I burnt myself out) that I wanted to quilt. I'd seen what I now realize was a log cabin quilt in a catalogue-- I think it was like a pottery barn catalogue or something?-- and was so riveted by the pattern that I had to recreate it. Mind you, I did not go out and buy a book on it or anything (this is something I've only started to do recently, having learned it from P), I just went to the fabric store and bought a bunch of fabric and started sewing it together with the jacked up sewing machine that I bought at Woolworth's in Union Square (it was in the basement of the building at the bottom of the park... which I think is now a big ass music store). I wrote a bunch of random calculations to figure out how many blocks to make, and just went at it. I still have the pieces, and for something that I'd never seen done or heard explained, they aren't half bad. That said, the wacky log cabin quilt of my 1997 dreams will never be finished. I got about 50 blocks done and finally admitted that school was overwhelming me. I packed away the quilting stuff, along with my painting stuff, and did almost nothing but deal with grad school, and then dissertation writing, and then job searching and dissertation writing, and then job searching and moving and moving and job searching and searching and searching and moving and tada.
So, fast forward to about two years ago. I finally admitted that my Woolworth sewing machine had seen it's last. (Back in the day I made hats with it. I also took a sewing class at FIT that I dropped out of. I believe that was the impetus for buying it). I bought a new machine, but job searching was taking priority. Then about a year ago, I finally got around to buying a book on quilting, and then some fabric, and then cut some of it, pieces a few things.... Now that we've moved to the house that I don't plan to leave for at least four years and I'm not on the job market (for the first time in six years) and spending every waking hour searching for postings and writing cover letters, I finally, a couple of months ago, finished my first ever quilt. Granted, it's a baby quilt, so like a third the size of an actual bedspread, but still. And it isn't perfect, but, eh, it's cute. Too bad I don't know anyone with a baby currently (weird, since for a while everyone I knew was having kids). So now that I've completed a successful sewing project, I thought, eh, let's go for broke!
Yes, I made a clothespin bag. I needed one, as the previous homeowners left me with a bag that was barely better than a plastic shopping bag when new, and had disintegrated into a pulpy mass of grossness. It was full of damp clothespins and earwigs, which was just....*shiver*. I like this one much better. (And yes, we are line drying both because it is green and because we've got no money. Dryers are a total energy suck. And for what? I mean, hey, it's a thousand degrees here and the sun is out. Why should I pay Dominion Electric when I can dry for free? Luckily, the house is old enough that dryers weren't standard, and from what I can tell, the lines must have been put in by the people who built the subdivision, as many of our neighbors have the exact same laundry line set up. We had to replace the lines themselves, as they'd rusted through.... I suspect Mrs. S just paid the electric company).
This wasn't really going for broke, though, I must admit, since I got the instructions from a book (the Impatient Patchworker. Some very cute things in there.) I did also finish up another project, which was a little more of my traditional jump right in head first sort of thing. (though, admittedly, a terrible picture)
The other old skool thing I did recently was can. Now, I have mentioned that I come from a city people, so gardens and canning are foreign to me. (Once, when I was very very small, my parents got the idea to get a plot in a community garden somewhere around Boston. It was, I will remind you, the early seventies, when people got such ideas. Happily, people seem to be getting such ideas again, but that is another story. What I most recall about this garden was that our plot was wild.... I mean, like a jungle. And that there was some horrible accident involving a garden implement... I want to say a hoe, or maybe a shovel, that resulted in my mother having to go to the emergency room.) So, hey, I've got my very first garden, and it's producing edibles. We've had some fire radishes and a bounty of cucumbers. What can one do with cucumbers?
I also got a rain barrel so that we can store rain water to use for watering the garden.
We spent most of Sunday afternoon finishing the paint job on the living room. It's been half done since March, but we just haven't had the time to get to it. Finally, I just couldn't take it anymore. Mostly, I couldn't take the "window treatment" left behind by the infamously poor-tasted Mrs. S. Good GOD that shit was NASTY. The pole was nasty (just uuuuuugly), but the fabric.... UG. These curtains... lawds. Purple-y mauve-y shiny nastiness. These things were seriously synthetic. They were shiny from having not one single natural fiber in them. I feel itchy just thinking about it. I had to throw them away. And I am a militant recycler, and fabric I will nearly always recycle. But this? UG. Gross. Sadly, this was what was meant by the "window treatments convey" section of the real estate description. Why doesn't that ever mean "original late fifties full length bark cloth atomic boomerang curtains with no fading convey!" ? Though we did actually look at one house that had original barkcloth curtains. Sadly, they were in the basement, so they were for tiny basement windows. (Happily, this also meant they were practically unfaded. I wondered allowed whether the owner would be willing to sell them. The realtor looked at me like I was insane, or, hopefully, joking, I wasn't. These were original early sixties barkcloth curtains!)
So I don't have a picture showing the paint job, but this should give an idea of how long we had to spend doing it.... the window needed painting.
