Terrible/Perfect

Free love

I love the cycle of free stuff in this town. I have no idea if other towns do this quite so much; I certainly don't remember people leaving little piles of stuff in front of their houses with cardboard signs exclaiming "FREE" on them where I grew up. Maybe I just wasn't paying attention. Whether it's a thing that other people in other towns do or not, people here do that all the time (when the weather's good for it anyway). One of our neighbors, who lives in the most intensely wooded city lot I have ever seen, in a falling apart house with broken windows, is clearing out some very strange and wonderful things. Including this old, old children's school desk. It was filthy when I carried it home. There was a spider living inside. One leg is about an inch and a half shorter than the others-even though the little metal baseplate is still on the bottom of the leg? Like it's always been this short?-so it is resting on a roll of Scotch tape. Klassy. I like my bedside reading, too: Frog and Toad, Angelina Ballerina, Beatrix Potter, John le Carre. The baby really likes espionage novels. I think at some point I will attach a little peg to the leg, but instead of trying to blend the finishes I will paint it flourescent pink or something. Anyway, love. Free love. 

Snooze

Wonky sleep patterns around here. Again. I think I need to get "This too shall pass" tattooed on my arm. I've been buying vintage pink pillowcases and they make me so happy, like a feel-good Sofia Coppola film if such a thing existed. It would be really nice to get a solid night's sleep on them.

The big kid has a birthday coming up. I asked her to write out a list of gift ideas for her dad and me, and she gave me this:

A Kaya doll (which her Grandma just got her as a huge, sweet "just 'cause" surprise...lucky girl!), a Lego Lava Monster (that little orange dude), and a bow and a sword. Not sure where that fighting vibe came from, but okay. I think we're done with theme parties until she's old enough to really commit to a theme, but she keeps telling me all of the costumes she's going to wear for her party: Link, a giant foam Rock Monster suit, Tintin. I love that she really sees all of that happening. She wants a Lego cake with all of her favorite things on top, including pictures of Kaya, Link, the Tintin crew, Moomins, Legos. That I think I can do.

I can't believe her birthday is only a month away. The summer gets away so fast.

It's the berries

It's Thrifty Tuesday! I just made that day up, there is no such day. But there have been some seriously good finds lately:

Fabric. It's the berries, which is funny because all along I thought it was the water.

An orange. Old. Japanese. Pure delight, especially with a bit of hot Earl Grey innit.

And...you might want to perpare* yourself.

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Okay. You ready?

Maybe no one will ever really be ready for this. If you're not, I'm sorry:

This is, without a doubt, the best and most wonderful thing I have ever bought in a thrift shop.

*I was going to fix this typo, but "perpare"? Yes. Perpare yourself. I'm letting it stand.

Making Christmas (possibly NSFW)

I've been wanting to show and tell a bit about our Christmas, but my mom is in town and in typical fashion everything becomes about making sure the girls get a hearty dose of Grammy. It was Christmas, then a day of rest, followed by an overnight at our house and then another one up at my sister's, so tonight is the first night I've been even remotely free.

And now I don't really know where to start.

First, I ended up making far less than I'd hoped. It had something to do with this:

{Yup, that's my bewb. Deal with it.}

So, yeah...OH MY GOD, RAISING CHILDREN IS EXHAUSTING.

Also kind of awesome.

Anyway, we made enough, because everyone here in this little house except poor S* had something made with love waiting for them on Christmas morning:

           

  

Top to bottom:

-Doll quilt for Thing One from me

-Knit cat for Thing Two from me

-Panda for Thing Two from Thing One, cut from an old t-shirt and a piece of linen, then embroidered and stuffed by Thing One

-Bird feeder made in secret by S and Thing One for me (needs a coat of sealer before heading outside, but totally my favorite gift of the day)

It was great. Truly. I couldn't have asked for a better evening and morning with my little family in our little, little, disorganized space. My girls were both lively and happy, and the big one was genuinely grateful and satisfied with her wee and decidedly low-tech haul. This Christmas was an affirmation of everything I have come to believe in and hope for over the last few years, and it felt, appropriately, like the start of a new year. What more can you ask for?

I didn't finish a couple of things I really wanted to, but I'm saying screw that and making those two or three little things anyway, just a touch on the late side. No one will know. Except you. And as for the making itself, it went well once I pulled my head out and bothered to ask for help and include my family. My favorite snapshots of our work and preparations, then onward and upward into the new year and its new projects:

 

 

{Ironing this vintage tomten tablecloth was my favorite part of Christmas Eve, besides the carols and candlelight at church. I'm really only showing it here because it is obviously the Airwolf** of Christmas tablecloths.}

*I had handmade plans for S, but thought it prudent to make sure I finished the two things for the girls and the thing I made for my nephew that I forgot to take a picture of. He is owed, big time.

**To emphasize: go to that website, scroll down a bit and click on track 04: Airwolf. Now. NSFW if your bosses don't find emphatic f-bombs appropriate in the workplace. Nothing is more Airwolf than Airwolf.

Morning out

This morning I really needed to do a big grocery shopping trip, but instead I headed out with just Big Kid to putz around for a couple hours. We went to the thrift shop and then got drinks and pastries together. I realized a while ago that I haven't had time with just Big Kid pretty much since Baby was born. It was lovely.

Since her bedroom is pretty much overflowing with toys, we focused on the books, which paid off handsomely:

I already know exactly which book I am going to be getting Big Kid for her traditional early Christmas gift, but A Little House Christmas looks pretty great. True and mildly tragic story about Half Magic: this was the book that my second grade teacher was reading to the class right when my parents divorced, and we moved to another town and another school right in the middle of it. I never heard the end, but I remember the beginning vividly, and that I was enjoying it immensely. Moving on. Ozma of Oz! This is the third  book in the Oz series, and the one we're on to next. Obviously this isn't a great copy, but it will do for now.

For myself, I bought some autumn-ish sheets and pillowcases that I didn't take a picture of because they're wrinkly and my dog just lay down on them. They're pretty awesome, trust.

And the big reveal here:

 

A $2 bag o' vintage buttons!

 

These were impossible to take a picture of. They are large black glass buttons made in West Germany (!), very cool (no, literally, they're super cold to the touch) and there's like eight of them.

 

These are, I don't know...bone? They're definitely not plastic, and I don't think they're glass. Anyway there's a bunch of them and they're super pretty.

 

I love this one. The picture doesn't capture it, but it's sparkly. Very special. Please imagine Eddie Izzard saying that last sentence.

 

These are just...um...wow. You know? Yeah, I think you know.

Falling

It's officially Fall, which you wouldn't know from the fact that it was 87 freaking degrees this afternoon. This week has been pretty horrendous on a personal level, by which I mean horrendous to my own personal biological system. I've had a cold, and haven't been able to get more than 3 or 4 hours of sleep at night mostly because of the offspring and their deep and abiding hatred of sleep and my life expectancy.

I've been grumpy this week, but today I was so tired I passed right through grumpy, made a brief and completely undetectable pass through incendiary rage, and out the other side to detached acceptance. It was a great day, once I got past the part where I wanted to eat my own head just to stop it from having to wake up.

I did end up escaping after my partner came home, and found this kind of awesome and kind of creepy fabric at the thrift store for $1:

I mean, whoa...what? They're squirrels! High five!

I need to lie down.

I also made a brand-new banner for this decrepit pit of doom that I call my life's work, which isn't half-bad considering I'm working in Paint. I'm not kidding. Someone send me $10,000 and I'll get the gear I'd need to make this place really high class, but until now we're in a booth by the kitchen at Shari's.

Mmmm...pie.

(If you can't tell what's going on in the banner, my oldest daughter just turned 4 and is in an Oz "phase", which for a 4 year-old means she talks about Oz nonstop all day long and hasn't taken off her Dorothy dress since last Saturday. At night she places her silver slippers* very carefully next to her bed, along with Toto in his basket, to protect her from bad dreams and the shadows that creep her out at night.)

*In the L. Frank Baum classic The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the slippers that Dorothy gets after killing the Wicked Witch of the East are silver, not ruby as they are in the 1939 film. The color was changed because the producers thought (rightly so, I imagine) that red shoes looked better in Technicolor .

Hello, sailor

I have an entire post in the works on thrifting, which sadly may be my life's calling, but this Goodwill find takes priority:

No, not the baby, the quilt top:

My, what a sexy quilt top. Let me take you on a sexy tour:

Oh, my, yes. Sexy orange.

And sexy geometrics, as well as sexy butter yellow with blueberries:

And, oh, what's this?:

That's right: it's all hand pieced (forgive the blur, my camera is crap). Who does this?

And perhaps more than slightly less sexy, the decidedly later-vintage pieces that betray the very possibly 1970s or later origins of this thing:

As you can see from these sexy photos, many of the pieces are...well, pieced. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that the 30s fabrics are reproductions (although they do look kind of old to me). BUT the 30s repros overwhelmingly dominate, the corners are all precise, each hexagon is made from different fabric (I haven't found a repeat yet, anyway), it's all sound and stain free, it's squared up at about 69"x84" (twin or a nice picnic size) and it's basically ready to quilt and bind. I paid an exorbitant $15 for it, which would buy enough 30s reproduction fat quarters to make less than an eighth of this top, never you mind the hours and hours of cutting and sewing that went into it.   

The whole thing speaks to me of the kind of experience in construction and skill in hand quilting that only older women who have done this since childhood have: it looks both totally precise and banged out at the same time. It also speaks of thrift, which is, in my opinion, just what a quilt should be.

Score.