Gypsy Rose quilt top

In recent days I have had more time to spend in my craft room than I had had almost since I moved to my house. I have also cured my yarn-buying habit by displacing it with a fabric-buying habit. I also have my craft room half full of pillow forms and yards & yards of home dec fabric for the new house. As a result, I have sometimes of late cogitated on the possibility that there is such a thing as too much fabric. I sold a little on eBay, but most of it I love too dearly to part with. My conclusion is that I need to start using it up at a rate equal to or greater than the rate at which I acquire it.

Thus was born this little quilt top, made of one layer cake of Gypsy Rose by Fig Tree Quilts. I started out by making ninepatches, then debated whether I wanted to cut them in square quarters and sew them together again, or cut them on the diagonal and sew them together again.

Sewing on the diagonal won out, and I’m sorry to say that it was a failure. The middle squares weren’t appreciably diminished, and so from above when you see the whole quilt–like so–it just looks like it’s been sloppily put together, not as if something unusual and interesting was happening. Oh, well. It’s pretty fabric and still a passable little quilt. I shall practice my machine quilting on it, and not cry when I make mistakes.

Pudding, bless her little heart, supports all of my patchwork efforts.

Corncob cornbread

Sparks has access to a dazzling array of vintage oddities. On the one hand his family enjoys junk shops, estate sales, and auctions. On another hand he has received copious hand-me-downs from his parents and grandparents. On the third hand, he’s always looking out for interesting things left on the curb.

Thus was found, several years ago, the corncob cornbread pan. For a long time it was a paperweight, but recently he brought it home, cleaned off the rust, and oiled it up. Cornbread time!

I was impressed by how well the mold took. I’ve had such miserable luck with molded cake pans that I wasn’t expecting much, but Sparks obviously has a magic touch with baked goods, because these were beautiful.

One vintage corncob cornbread pan, ready for regular use.

Renovation news: late November

This weekend, feeling happy and fresh and fit as fiddles due to the roof finally being begun, we ventured to our darling new/old town to see how the house was going.

The roof is indeed going on. The house has such an enormous expanse of roof, though–and a passing neighbor reports that the roofers are delicate flowers who must go home at 3:00 every afternoon–and in spite of having been unable to work three days out of four for the past six weeks, they still needed the whole weekend off–that the roof was only about half laid at that point. No matter; it was laid over the part of the house that matters, and interior work need be delayed no longer.

The bathtub is in place! Oh, it’s a large and grand tub. It is 66″ long and 36″ wide, which is significantly larger than any bathtub I’ve ever had before. I am going to have legendary soaks in that tub, let me tell you.

And above it, the window has been installed! Having some light in that room makes such a difference. The glass of the window is frosted for privacy, and it is double-hung in such a way that the top sash can be pulled down, so the room can be aired and still be private. Woop woop!

Renovation news: mid-November

In the absence of any new photographs to show you, here’s a pretty mosaic of my Flickr favorites:

So. The house renovation. I am able to post about it this morning only because I have GOOD news to tell you. I have several pieces, in fact!

1) The new metal roof is being put on AS I TYPE. After one of the wettest Octobers on record, the new roof is finally, finally being put on. Once this is done, we can continue to make progress inside, without fear of soaking new insulation and drywall. Hooray!

2) The window has been installed in the master bathroom. Sparks has seen it, and reports that it transforms the space. Also, the new bathtub is there, and he says it’s bee-yoo-ti-ful and just the right size.

3) Our flooring guy tells us that to have 3/4″ hardwood put down will probably end up being the same price as having 1/4″ underlayment plus 1/2″ engineered wood put down, so we may as well go with hardwood. Probably. Almost certainly. But he has to run the numbers. Yes!

I have been quiet because it’s been a tense week here; for quite a while there wasn’t much good news about the renovation. It boiled down to two facts:

1) The roof hadn’t gone on, and the forecast is largely for more rain. There were three clear days last week which the roofer chose to devote to another customer. We have spent most of the last six days sitting quietly, with glassy eyes, worrying. Sparks even took to playing computer games, which I had never seen him do before.

2) Lowes yanked their Martha Stewart line of paint colors with no warning and no backsies. The colors are out of the system. We need more paint to touch up the formerly-big-orange-wall! Luckily, Sparks the Hero dug up the paint chip. We will have it color-matched. And hope that it really does match.

By the way, this means that “Bare Branches” is out of the running for the master bathroom color. There are other taupes in the world, but I’m taking it as a sign from above that I should go with Foxglove. So a pink bathroom it will be!

Bathroom colors

Sooooooo. Supposedly, the roof will be put on our house starting today, which means that drywall goes up soon, which means it’s time to choose paint colors. For real.

In the bedroom, my current thoughts are to paint each wall in a very subtle tone. One will be the same lovely warm white as the rest of the house, one an extremely subtle taupe, one an only slightly less subtle taupe, and the fourth a subtle pink… possibly the same Paris Pink that our bedroom is right now.

With that in mind… we have two bathroom wall color possibilities. Please keep in mind that Sparks swears up and down he is NOT going to use this bathroom. He apparently believes that separate bathrooms make a happy marriage.

Eddie Bauer “Foxglove”

This pink is actually redder, in real life. It’s almost a watermelon color. It’s warm and vibrant; much less the flat bubblegum that’s showing up on my monitor, here. I think it provides a lovely contrast with both the dark wood and the bright-white porcelain. I heart it. It does, however, lock me into having a pink bathroom. Painting over it in another color would require primer.

Martha Stewart “Bare Branches”

This is a lovely multifaceted brownish-taupe. It also harmonizes well with the wood and the porcelain. The advantages of it are that it is sophisticated and it would allow me to swap out different colored towels and knickknacks whenever I wanted. The disadvantage is that it is safe and boring, and means that there will be no less than THREE brown rooms in the house. Four, if you count the taupe walls in the master bedroom. That seems kinda blah and boring.

Thoughts?

Dad’s hurdy-gurdy

My dad had been talking about it for years, ever since we got Microsoft Musical Instruments bundled with Windows 95, really. But in the past year, he did it. He built a hurdy-gurdy.

The hurdy-gurdy is one of my very favorite instruments. Do you remember The Mummer’s Dance, by Loreena McKinnitt? It’s the instrument that plays the melody at the beginning. It’s bizarre… and oh, I do love instruments with drones!

To play it, you begin by turning a crank in the bottom of the instrument.

This turns a wheel that the strings all touch. The friction from the turning makes them sound. All at once.

Then, you play keys–just like a keyboard–to play the melody on two of the strings. Another one or two of the strings just play the same tone all the time; that’s the drone. Bagpipes have drones, too. Even some very old viols had them, but they aren’t made anymore.

Here’s a peek at the inner workings of the keys. My my.

At least one of the drones (dad is such an authority on this stuff that I’m hedging what I say) is set to buzz loudly. The person playing the hurdy-gurdy controls the buzz, by way of cranking technique, to create a background rhythm for the music.

Some hurdy-gurdys are large and meant to be held in the lap while you play. As it became a favorite instrument with travelling minstrels, though, it can also be strapped on to the body, for perambulatory playing. Here’s dad getting himself into the harness…

And here he is trying to get the darn thing tuned. The pegs work entirely by friction, rather than being on worm screws as the strings of most modern string instruments are. This makes it hard to tune, and hard to keep in tune.

How about that? Proof that my mother isn’t the only one with mad skillz, in the family.

Altered photographs

I recently discovered the joy of applying textures and overlays to pictures in Photoshop. Oh my, what fun! Now I know why some blogs have such stunning pictures… postprocessing, baby, it’s the answer to all things.

A texture is just another picture that you layer on top of your own picture, then decrease the opacity of so that your original picture shows through. Sometimes they are just a solid color that adds an emotional aura to the picture; sometimes they mimic the dark edges and blots of a daguerreotype or viewfinder; sometimes they have the texture of linen or canvas.

There are many, many free textures available on the web. Google “free textures” or search for the phrase on Flickr; you will find far more than you can sort through and use. My favorites freebies come from Les Brumes, on Flickr. There are also ones to buy, of course. Like many of the people interested in textures, I have found that the $40 set sold by Florabella are exceptionally good and exceptionally usable. I could probably keep myself occupied with only hers, and they are definitely my go-tos for the beginning stages of photo processing.

There are also tutorials all over the web. Any Flickr group dedicated to textures will have them; you can also google “textures tutorial” to find a plethora of information. The basic process, though, is to size one or both pictures so they fit each other, paste the texture onto a layer above your photograph, change the layer’s mode (usually to Overlay, which creates the most subtle effect), then play with the opacity.

Textures are a great way to enhance already-good photographs, and also as I am finding as I scan in decades-old family slides, pictures, and photo negatives, a way to rescue images that have already begun to deteriorate.

Autumn leaves

Every year when the leaves are at their peak, I take a walk and photograph them. I feel like the precious colors of autumn are every bit as much a part of the season’s bounty as the harvest, and that it would be a crying shame to squander their beauty and let it go unremembered.

Plus, there’s no canning or freezing to do afterward.

Last year, I tried taking pictures through the amber lenses of my sunglasses. This year I made an even more important discovery: that the leaves photograph much better on overcast days than on bright sunny ones. On sunny days, you see, they reflect bright-white sunshine, and the colors get lost between the bright-white and the dark in between. Overcast days eliminate the problem.

I think you’ll agree…

Fidget Pie

Sparks and I have been experiencing an unaccountable interest in “good Olde English” food recently. Perhaps it something to do with having recently watched Lord of the Rings, or perhaps it was the trip to Italy that made us pine for a trip to the UK, or perhaps it has to do with our buddies Si and Dave… but anyway, we have. There has been sampling of perry and cider, double gloucester and wensleydale, and last week we decided to make a fidget pie.

Fidget pie is a Shropshire speciality. It consists of a short crust filled with potatoes, onions, apples, and ham (or gammon, more appropriately), bound with flour and cream, and flavored with sage, nutmeg, and cider. Yum.

Sparks, good boy that he is, and his grandmother’s grandson, made the short crust. I handled the filling.

Apples

Potatoes

Onions–blanch these and the potatoes, to partially cook them and take the bite out of the onion

Ham

Fresh sage from the garden

The finished fidget pie.

It was quite a thing of beauty; we felt like hobbits when we ate it. It is certainly hearty, heavy stodge–excellent winter comfort food. I recommend it as an occasional remedy for particularly hectic work-weeks.

Farmer’s Market

I didn’t get to the Farmer’s Market all summer. There was just too much to do, and while it’s a fun place, it’s also a jumbled confusing place… and one that happens early on Saturdays, when I just want to take my time at home.

This past weekend we went, though, for one of the last markets of the year and because the Fall ones are always my favorites.

There will be time

And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;

One year ago this evening, Sparks dropped the question on my plate, and I said yes. It was the very best decision of my life, if you can even call it a decision. From the beginning, it didn’t really seem like there was anything to decide.

Happy one-year anniversary of our engagement, my dearest, sweetest, handsomest, funniest, kindest, adventuresomest, consideratest, perceptivest, forgivingest, lovingest, cuddliest husband-and-Sparks. I love you more every day.

Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

Doll dresser jewelry box

The first jewelry box is done! Woop woop!

To sum up: about six weeks ago, crazed by the excitement of jewelry-making, I realized that I needed a storage system for my handiwork. Many jewelry boxes are filled with confusing compartments and special holders, which I wasn’t interested in. All I wanted was a series of shallow drawers… and lots of them.

There are very very few jewelry boxes designed like this, and most have only 2-3 drawers. Grrrr. I found an acrylic version that was structurally acceptable, but not attractive. So I sat down and thought. And then I thought of doll dressers.

I ended up buying a set of two pieces. One is this four-drawer chest, and another is a three-drawer chest with a small swivel mirror on top. I fixed up the one with the greater capacity first… I’ll tackle the other soon.

First, I used a slightly damp cloth to wipe years and years of black grime off of it. Then I used a fine-grit sandpaper to rough up the varnish (it was in such bad shape that it would probably have taken paint anyway, but you can’t be too careful), then wiped with a damp cloth again.

Next came three layers of paint: green on the insides of the drawers, and oyster white everywhere else.

On Saturday, I spent a couple of hours in my sewing room making tiny patchwork quilts to put inside the drawers, to protect the jewelry from knicks and bumps. I just a-d-o-r-e this combination of fabrics, almost none of which were from the same line. I usually like to buy a whole line of fabric, but when I do mix things up, I’m always delighted.

And there we go. I have a drawer each for hair accessories, pearl jewelry, silver jewelry, and my own handmade jewelry. When I finish the three-drawer chest, there will be a drawer for watches, and two drawers for vintage celluloid jewelry. Weehee!

It’s fun to make something and end up with exactly what you wanted!

Jack-o-lanterns 2009

It is the morning of November 1, and it is oddly early for me to be up on a Sunday morning because it’s the first day of Standard Time… and we have also had our first frost. For the first time this year, it’s below freezing out there. How about that for a happy confluence of events?

Sparks had another great jack-o-lantern, this year. Here you can see it in progress. Oh my, how many small boys were FASCINATED by it, last night! One or two forgot that they were there for candy.

And there is it beside mine. I was very happy with the leer I achieved… I think that it has its tongue sticking out, too. Not quite enough pumpkin guts to be a “barfing” pumpkin. We want to keep those pumpkin seeds, you know.

And the evening grows darker…

And darkest.

And now on to… the holiday season. The stores always take November 1 as open license to put up Christmas displays. I’ve got my decorations pretty well under control and so don’t need to buy many this year, but it is time to begin considering what everybody will get for Christmas. Oh dear indeed. It’s so tempting, after the success of the wedding crackers, to buy a bunch of novelties from Oriental Trading and give everybody a stocking stuffed with them…