It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like...

Harv and I won't be traveling anywhere this Christmas for obvious reasons so we actually bought a Christmas tree for the first time in several years.  We're normally in Connecticut or Minnesota for the holidays and working hard right up until it's time leave so the Christmas cheer gets put on hold and the decorations stay in storage. 

But since we're going to stay home this year I wanted to make sure we made the season last as long as possible!

I'm the oldest of four and when I went off to college my family started buying a Christmas tree the weekend after Thanksgiving.  The whole family was together then and wouldn't be again until Christmas break.  The tradition has stuck, even now that the youngest in the family has graduated (yipes!) so I was quite open to getting things started as soon as the Thanksgiving leftovers were in the fridge.  Of course it's much less idyllic picking a bundled up, pre-cut tree from the lot in front of Lowe's than it is taking a sleigh ride out into the middle of a Connecticut tree farm and tromping through the snow to find the perfect tree, then cutting it down yourself.  But hey, we live in Southern California, what choice do we have?  We actually did go to a Christmas tree "farm" our first winter out here.  It was underwhelming to say the least.  The trees were crazy expensive, growing in a dirt lot not too far from the freeway and you didn't even get to cut them down yourself!  Not worth it.

 

We also dug out plenty of other decorations including this somewhat sad little tree that last made an appearance in my craft room.  I'm not sure where he'll end up but he's working as a centerpiece for right now.  This little guy and the grand master tree are both in need of tree skirts so I'm putting that near the top of my list.

I want to say I'll give a prize to anyone who was reading this blog when I made these pillows but all I have to offer is Christmas cheer.  I hadn't quite worked out my style back then.  This was me trying to be Denyse Schmidt-like and not really succeeding.  But they're out on the couch anyway.  As I've learned from decorating our tree with every single ornament Harv was given or made as a child (his mom has long since moved on to a color coordinated tree) Christmas decorations are as much about memories and sentimentalism as they are about style.

But I have finished a Christmas quilt top that is more my style, using my Mod Beads pattern.  As I was designing it I knew it would make a great Christmas quilt and I can't wait to finish it up to show you.

And last but not least, if you live near a Trader Joe's go buy these right now.  They are so good.  I'm a real sucker for seasonal treats and these babies do not disappoint.

New Addition (Part 2 of 3)

Ok, it's not Friday as originally promised but you've probably come to expect such tardiness from me.
After hanging my lovely new kitchen curtains, my eyes fell upon the sad, ragged, always dingy kitchen rug. It simply would not do.

This rug is made from curtain scraps and fabrics chosen to match, all of which I had on hand. The fabric was cut in two inch wide strips and braided together. When I reached the end of a strip I just added a new one, overlapping about an inch.

When I had a lot of braid, I started sewing rows together, using the zig-zag stitch on my machine. My rows are 21" wide. I sewed almost to the end of the braid and needed more so I kept braiding.

Some tips if you want to try making your own rug:

1. This is a super way to use up fabric that you don't really like. As long as the colors work, the pattern is indistinguishable once it's braided.
2. Never have a made something more conducive to watching movie upon movie while working. This takes .2% concentration.
3. You may have to lift your presser foot to get the rug underneath. I didn't even know that was possible until making this rug!
4. Speaking of presser foots (feet? No, foots), after lifting it and cramming your rug underneath it, you may forget to then lower the presser foot lever as the foot itself already appears to be down. Do not be fooled! You must still lower the lever for if you do not you will encounter (seemingly)inexplicable tangled mess after tangled mess. Not that it happened to me. No no. I just heard that it could happen. From my friend. Biz.

Part 3 of 3 tomorrow, I swear! And man is it the best of all parts!

New Addition Part 1 of 3

Intriguing, eh?
As I am the #1 cook in the house, Harv is automatically the #1 dishwasher. We both work fairly late which means dinner is late and Harv is often doing dishes at 10:30 at night. We haven't had curtains in the kitchen since we moved into our house 3 years ago and he gets a little creeped out being in there so late, knowing the neighbors and any creatures of the night could be watching him.

We bought this fabric a long time ago, I believe when the line first came out. It's from Anna Maria Horner's Drawing Room collection. The colors couldn't be more perfect in our kitchen.
It took me some time to get motivated to actually make the curtains. I wanted cafe style but I didn't want to just make a sleeve at the top of the curtain. Instead I sewed equally spaced tabs to the backs, copying some Ikea curtains I bought recently.

I chose the kitchen wall color before we moved in and have always been a little unsure about it. It just seemed like it was a little too much. The yellow Kitchen-Aid balances things a little but I think adding the curtains really ties everything together. Now, I love the wall color. It works.

So, here's a little sneak peek at part 2, coming Friday. You're all pretty smart, I'm sure you can guess what it is. Part 3 on the other hand, hoo-boy! It's a doozy. You'll just have to wait and see.

What is up.

What is up around here? A lot of nothing, perhaps too much. But also some gardening. Enough to make me so sore that I have to walk straight legged everytime I sit for 5 minutes because my calves are so unbelievably tight. I don't even know how that happened. It's good though. I don't exercise at all so every little bit counts. And is felt. For days afterward.

I'll bet you can guess what I haven't been doing. Crafting! Yes, it's true. I have roughly one month of hiatus left which may seem like a lot to you but I know how fast it is going to go by. My fear is that I'll go back to work feeling like I squandered my time off on hours of surfing the internet and too many episodes of "What Not To Wear".

So I'm blogging outside right now. It's pretty amazing what a difference it makes to poke around the internet from your newly degrossified and beflowered backyard rather than your your much loved but far too dark living room. Look at me, enjoying the great outdoors.

So because I have absolutely nothing crafty to share with you I'm sharing the fruits of my gardening labor. So far I've cleaned out the entire backyard (there was a lot to clean, logs, moldy lemons, garbage from the previous tenants), chainsawed a huge pile of logs and a nasty old picnic table and benches, planted one of the garden beds back there, planted a bougainvillea with a trellis to cover part of the hideous back of our house, put up some reed fence over the old ugly chain link fence at the back of the yard and planted the nice big garden bed in front of the house.

There's more that I want to do but the yard is still so enjoyable at this point. It has gone from a spider infested garbage heap to quite a pleasant place to "chillax". You can see a few more pictures here.

Hello?

Internet, no! It can't have been three weeks since we last talked! Please, give me another chance, let me back into your life!
The sad truth is, I've been doing next to no crafting in 2008. I know! It's a super stink. Life just hasn't been very craft conducive lately. Work has been great, but tiring. We've had lots of family in town, also great but also tiring. And now I'm sick. I spent all of yesterday on the couch. For real. I literally did not do a single thing yesterday but lay on the couch napping, snacking, tv watching and interneting. Today I feel a tid bit better so I ventured out to the farmer's market with Harv to buy some tasty French pastries that I was seriously craving yesterday. Well worth the trip.
Since we last met, my mom came in to visit and go to the Annie Awards with us. I lost, by the way. That was lame. But I'm still quite pleased to have been nominated and I couldn't have lost to anyone more deserving than this guy, our good good friend Eric Towner, so it's okay.
Then I had a birthday, February 13, the day before Valentine's day. It's quite a birthday to have. I think it has a lot more character to it than a lot of other birthdays. I'm pretty certain I share it with this little crafty blogger who I'm sure you're familiar with.
Then Harv's family came for a visit and by Harv's family I mean his entire family, parents, all siblings and all spouses here at the same time. They are nice nice people and we had a great time introducing them to artichokes and living room karaoke. Harv's mom made me a cozy new quilt for my birthday, perfect for sick day snuggling on the couch.
Oh, I know you're so bored by all of this. I'm sorry! I've just missed you, is all. I want to tell you everything! But I won't. Here are some things for you to look at instead.
For my birthday, Harv gave me this:
I know next to nothing about photography but I'm trying to learn. Today I took some pictures around the house. Everyone loves to see pictures of other peoples homes, right? That's what I thought.

We'll start you off easy, with somethings I know you'll like. Such as: fabric, waiting for me to not be sick.

Wonderful Wee's!
Vintage sewing machine.
A big ol' mess.
Cuckoo! This was a Christmas gift from Harv's parents, a memento from our trip to Germany last year.
View from the front of the house through to the back, living room, dining room and kitchen.


Living room is a bit misleading. The couch is where I've been doing all of my living. Living couch seems more accurate.
Bathroom doorknob. Our house was built in the 1920's and I assume these doorknobs are original.
Drippy bathroom faucet. So bad, I know! We need to do some handy man-ing.

Green a little green

I am pretty far from being as green as a girl can be but I try. I have found many little ways to be greener that are so easy and really don't take any extra effort, just a different kind of effort. One of my longest lasting green habits is the use of cloth napkins. The habit started in college when some friends and I lived in a house we called "The Green House". It was a theme house and the inhabitants were supposed to come up with a theme that would benefit the campus community in some way. It was really just a ploy to get ourselves into a house sophomore year and only one of the five of us was a staunch environmentalist beforehand. (Hi Allison!) She first made us a stack of cute little cotton napkins and I think she would be pleased to know that to this day a paper napkin has yet to be used in my home. I have a lot of them and they even have their own little hamper in the laundry room (which is right off the kitchen) where we toss the napkins when we're done with them. Then I can just throw them into the wash anytime I have room in a load of laundry.
Of course, after three years of marriage and using the same napkins, my stash is getting awfully dingy. They still work fine but it is much more enjoyable to dab your lips with something pretty. And so:

Pretty little napkins, kind of made from the pattern in Last-Minute Patchwork + Quilted Gifts. I used 18" squares and jumbo rick rack. I made two of each because I only had enough rick rack for four but that is just fine. There are plenty of dinners for two around here.

Door Stopped

It has been hot hot hot here lately and we only have air conditioners in the two bedrooms. The rest of the house is unbearable, especially my craft room, which has an entire wall of windows that face the morning sun. The heat gets trapped in there and stays into the wee hours of the night. So last night I grabbed my sewing machine, my iron and my small ironing board and holed up in the bedroom.
We like to have our cats join us at night in our "family bed" but they need to be able to come and go as they please because, well, they're cats. When it's air conditioner weather we try to keep the door as close to shut as possible to keep the cool in while still letting the pusses out. Up until now our doorstop of choice has been a Minnesota Northstars water bottle filled with change. Not ideal. So last night I made the perfect cool air keeper-inner, this doorstop from Lotta Jansdotter's Simple Sewing.
I followed the pattern and even went out to Ralph's at 11 'o clock to buy five pounds of beans. This is how it turned out.
Pretty cute and definitely functional but kind of a droopy sad sack. So this morning I ripped open one of the top seams and stuffed some fiber fill in on top of the beans.
Much better!

Special Cases

New bed for us, old bed went into the guest room. This means that my parents didn't have to sleep on the fold out couch when they came to visit this past weekend. I think they appreciated that.
Now that the guest bedroom has an actual bed we have taken a little more pride in making it pretty and welcoming. With that in mind I embroidered a pair of pillowcases, an "H" monogram with some little wheat motifs.
The patterns are from Sublime Stitching, a great book full of tons of sweet iron-on patterns.
I don't have any embroidery experience but I just love the idea of embellishing all of my linens this way. I started with the guest linens as a little warm-up before starting in on the nice new sheets I bought for our new bed. Soon my friends!

Crafts of Late

Harv and I have had this week off from work. It has been exceedingly pleasant and super relaxing. I've been reading a lot, making some yummy dinners, had tea with some friends at the Huntington and spent a couple of nights camping at Big Bear. I have not done too much crafting however. I very often feel a lot of pressure to be productive make the most of my spare time. When I have two+ months of hiatus I feel lazy and purposeless if I am not sewing every possible moment. I typically like there is no where near enough time to make all of the things I am inspired to make and that can feel kind of stressful. I made a conscious decision this week to just take it easy, do what I felt like doing and try to relax. It actually worked! I feel refreshed and ready to go back to the studio, not disappointed about all of the projects I didn't quite finish.
I did manage to complete a few crafts this past week, crafts that didn't interfere with my lounging and hammocking. First, a table cloth for our outdoor table that always looks very gross and dusty.
Now we can just cover up the yuck! Note the handy slit for fitting around the umbrella.

Second, I finished the bedside rug that I started a long time ago, inspired by the new bed we bought this week.
Stabone really digs the rug.
Lilly digs the new bed. The quilt was made by Harv's mom as a wedding gift.
Speaking of parents, mine are winging their way west as I type this and will be arriving at Chez Us tomorrow morning. With all of the relaxing I've been doing this week, there hasn't been much time for cleaning. Yeeps. That's my night. Hopefully I will be able to whip up a pair of slippers for my Ma as a welcoming gift. I also wanted to make some napkins to match the outdoor tablecloth so we could have an extra classy meal out back while they're here. We'll see.

A Soon-To-Be Becurtained Craft Room

Having my craft room functioning again has really made any time that I am not at work utterly craft filled, as it should be. But yesterday I just wasn't feeling so hot all afternoon and I made the declaration that "Tonight, I am going to take it easy."
Nuh-uh. That was until I came home and saw this on my doorstep!
Twelve wonderful yards of this fabric ordered from Repro Depot; cafe curtains for 6 of the 7 windows in my room. (Actually there are two windows, one door with a window and a set of French doors that lead into the rest of the house in addition to the 7 windows that actually look outside. Those will not be curtained.)
Of course I got straight to work. Here is one set finished:Here is the rest of the windows, still naked:
And here is the pile of unfinished curtains, cut, sides sewn, awaiting my return tonight:
I just had to finish and install one set last night so that I could see how pretty they would be with the light shining though them this morning. Pretty. I am very satisfied with my choice.

Done (Enough)!

Oh sad sad blog...I am sorry I have forsaken you.
The painting is done, minus a few touch ups. I finished the floor on Saturday, we went shopping for shelves and other necessities Sunday afternoon (Ikea was out of the shelves that I wanted so I didn't actually get any) and we then had to move everything out of the living and dining rooms and back into my room and make the house presentable in less than three hours because we had friends coming over for games and karaoke. I am still in awe that we pulled it off. We went from total squalor, not even able to open the front door all of the way, every seat and table covered in crap to our cheery, comfortable, never-quite-totally-clean-but-as-close-as-we-can-manage house in less than three hours, PLUS I had time to run to Trader Joe's and whip up some easy treats for our guests! Company has always been our greatest cleaning motivator.
It feels so nice to have our house back. For four weeks it was increasingly overrun with all of my crafting stuff, with many other messes weaseling their way into any nook or cranny they could find. And let's not forget the most important thing of all...my craft room! It's back! Well, not totally back...as I said I have no shelves so things cannot be properly put away but the room is usable. I have many many ideas. I think this crafting drought has caused a sudden flood of creativity. It's so exciting! I told Harv that I don't want to do any entertaining this weekend...I want the entire weekend to myself and my room. It's going to kick a lot of ass. I can't wait to share with you again!

The Truth

Oh Internet, I'm so sorry! I feel as though I have abandoned you and I can tell that you are fast losing interest in my non-craftiness. Well I haven't been completely honest with you. I am working again and that is a huge crafting deterrent but that's only half of my problem. The other half is this:
The day before I returned to work I decided (unwisely) to embark on a craft room overhaul. Why did I do this? I really don't know. I guess I just wanted my little clubhouse to be a little more cozy and inspirational, not merely functional. But let's be honest. It was barely even functional. It was a big mess.
Here is what it looked like, moments before I took everything out of the room and put it all everywhere, in every room of the house, in every space I could possibly put things. Shortly after, the nightmare started.
You see, this is not our house. We rent it for a very reasonable amount of money from a man who is cheap yet lazy so he doesn't really mind if we do things to the house at our expense as long as we don't destroy it. So painting seemed like no big deal. And it would have been no big deal, except for the fact that the people who lived here before us (who are our friends and still have some of their stuff in our yard by the way) did not use this room as a craft room. It was their "tiki room" and their tiki decor included sheets of bamboo hot glued to the concrete walls. I know! It's ridiculous! So when they removed the bamboo, they also removed huge chunks of paint and left globs of glue in many a spot. In addition to that mess, the trim had been painted over roughly 50 times and was barely recognizable as its original shape.
So what did I do? I decided to remove the paint. Oh what a mistake that was. Well, maybe not a mistake, just something that I really wish that I hadn't done. Here's a bit of wisdom for you: paint removal is A LOT OF WORK. I really did not want to do a lot of work. I still do not but guess what! I'm not done yet! And I'm such a doofus that I started the removal process in such a way that it was impossible for me to not follow through with it. Yes, Internet, mistakes have been made, Ladies have shown themselves to be capable of great stupidity but at least all of the paint has been removed.
The room is primed and partially painted. The only thing I did this past weekend was work on the room. Seriously. I am really hoping that this Saturday will bring the end of the painting and I can have all of Sunday to put everything back in and get things really nice and organized and maybe even work on something. We shall see.
I miss crafting so much and I might miss my room even more! I don't know what to do without my little craft room. It's my default place to go when I don't have anything to do. I can do whatever I want in there and it doesn't affect Harv or our frequent visitors. *Sigh* Soon it shall be returned to me!

The Complete Package

I know that I said I was sending out my doll quilt a few days ago but I didn't actually do it until yesterday. That's just me. You know how it is. Well maybe you don't but Harv knows how it is, with me at least.
But it is now in the mail so I thought I would share with you some little peeks at packaging Lady-style.
First, there has to be a very Denyse Schmidt-y card. This one is a little mini card with a mini envelope that is leftover from our wedding (we had a weird postcard theme that extended to little mailbox favors with mini mail inside).
Second, I stuff the card and the sweet little quilt (goodbye my love!) into a lovely handmade (by me) envelope. The envelope is made out of craft paper and sewn together, not glued. I fold over the top, sew it shut and then,
step three, add a handmade Lady Harvatine sticker! Voila.

In other news, look at what I did!
Can you see it? I installed a sprinkler! Yes, I know, hold your applause. We had this ugly patch of nothing in front of our house and since I wanted to plant some vegetables this year I thought this would be a perfect spot for them. There was already one sprinkle in the ugly patch but it didn't reach the entire area so I dug up the pipe, chopped off the end, added more pipe and another sprinkler! It was great! Then of course I buried it all and planted my vegetables. So fingers crossed. This is my biggest gardening attempt ever. I'm hoping to be up to my eyeballs in tomatoes this summer. It's going to be great!

Hatching new friends

Sweet little birds are hatching all over the place here in Make Out City. First, I took my new treasures from ReproDepot along with some frames from Ikea and put together some easy-as-pie artwork.
I love love love these fabrics and picked them out especially for this purpose. But of course now I have a whole bunch left over, ripe for the sewing. It's always so difficult for me to come up with projects that I deem worthy for truly wonderful fabrics like these. I definitely think that the bees may be destined for a purse though.
The second hatchling is this:
I made the pattern myself. I think he may be a little too fat but he will be added to the Easter tree nonetheless.