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Buttons!

Last week I washed a bunch of my buttons.  I picked up a huge bag of them a couple weekends ago while we were out antiquing and they were pretty filthy, so I figured it was a good time to collect the buttons I had stashed here and there and give them a bath.  I filled a shallow container with warm water and a dot of dish soap and let them sit for a while, then I scrubbed them a bit with an old toothbrush and laid them out to dry.  The water was very dingy, so I think the bath was a good idea.

Last weekend we went to my favorite antique show -- Sandwich -- and I picked up a few more old canning jars.  I love the ones with the glass lids.  And now I have a pretty way to organize my buttons.  I'm all about organization because this week I'm moving out of my office so that the remodel can begin -- forget that I have no workers lined up, no cabinets picked out and nothing in the works.  Once I'm all moved out and shoved in the spare bedroom with all kinds of things, I'm sure the fire will be lit underneath me and things will get rolling!  Wish me luck!

Two Sewing Books

 

Lately I can't seem to get enough of sewing books.  I love Amy's book -- Bend-the-Rules Sewing -- which I thought I reviewed here, but I can't seem to find the post.  Hmmm. .

Now I have two more books to love!  First (and my favorite of the two) is Last-Minute Patchwork + Quilted Gifts by Joelle Hoverson.  It's filled with beautiful photographs of incredible projects.  Many are super easy and could be tackled by any first time sewer.  Just some of the projects I want to try from this book:  Flannel Baby Blanket, Super Quick + Easy Baby Quilt, Kelly's Pincushions, Puzzle Ball, Peanut the Wee Elephant, (Sort of) Crazy Quilt -- and there are others.  I mean, almost every project in this book looks like something I would make or build off of. 

The projects here are modern and fresh.  The instructions appear to be well written and there are photos (like on the puzzle ball) to get you through the tricky parts.  I also like the full size patterns glued inside the back cover on regular weight paper.  This is a very impressive book! 

Next up is Simple Gifts to Stitch: 30 Elegant and Easy Projects by Jocelyn Worrall.  There are 30 projects in this book -- everything from bags, to scarves, to kitchen items and blankets.  While the projects are for common items, each project has a little added twist that makes it fun.  The baby bib has a cross-stitch bear on it, there is a pillow that is shirred, and the pattern for the Botanical Tiara shows you how to make your own flowers out of ultrasuede.

All in all I liked the projects in this book.  There is a nice selection of different items and a few fun ideas to perk things up.  I guess that most of the projects were just a bit too simple for my taste.  If you are just beginning to learn to sew, there are easy projects here to get you started.

I'm so glad to see fresh sewing books hitting the market -- keep 'em coming!

Cyanotype

While most of our flowers are at the end of their blooms for the season, there are still plenty of interesting things around our yard.  Leaves with delicate, lacy outlines in the garden, ethereal feathers over by the bird feeder and all kinds of leaves -- well, everywhere.  So I decided to take Maddie on a hunt around the yard and we collected all kinds of things.

After that we grabbed this book:

It's actually a book/kit called The Sunlight Print Kit and it comes with 12 sheets of treated paper, a nice book which we will be studying in school (homeschool) and a plastic cover and box for making the prints.  This is really a lot of fun and can be educational too.

Basically you take a treated sheet of paper -- which is photo sensitive like film -- and place things on top of it.  You want to do this inside away from direct sunlight.  Then cover it with clear plastic or glass (to hold the items in place) and take it out into the sunshine.  It only takes a minute or two.  Come back inside, remove the items and rinse the paper in a shallow tub or pan filled with plain water and a couple drops of lemon juice.  It's really like magic!

You can also make cyanotype prints on fabric.   The most excellent book -- Complete Craft: Making Beautiful Projects at Home by Katherine Sorrell -- has a nice chapter on cyanotype and it's different applications.  Her feather floor cube is printed on silk and is just gorgeous!

Good Garage Sale Day!

Well, the drought has ended.  It seem like the last month was just terrible for garage sale-ing.  Rain, storms, lack of sales -- you name it.  Maddie picked up a few books, but that was the extent of it.  Today it all changed!  I stumbled across all this Frankoma at one sale.  The woman who was selling it was a Frankoma collector and said she had picked up pieces here and there -- mostly at thrift stores.  She was selling each piece for only $1.  So $5 got me this great haul -- a canister (without lid, but not a problem since I want it to hold craft tools in my office), two different creamers and a couple of mugs.  Sadly, one mug has a crack, but I still love them.

At the same house we found this little demitasse set -- Maddie had to have it and at $3 it was a pretty good deal.  They had it marked $5, but I could tell it wasn't old because of the box and they were willing to bargain (I love that).

Now this may be the deal of the day -- a big stack of old postcards and greeting cards for $2.  Quite a few of the postcards were actually mailed, so I have postmarks to date them by -- 1909, 1910, 1916!  It looks like whomever owned these was a collector because prices are written in pencil on the back of about 1/2 of them.  Considering they were purchased for for anywhere between $.25 and $3.50 each, I would say paying $2 for the stack was great luck!

Not too bad for one morning.  I'm so glad things are improving, I was starting to lose hope!

Getting caught up on the reading list

I have a couple of finishes that I haven't blogged. . .

Divisadero by Michael Ondaatje -- author of The English Patient, was a really interesting read.  While the stories he interwove in the book were quite engaging, the books structure was what really turned me on.

I'm not sure how to describe the structure.  I would almost call it a story within a story -- an old trick used many times by plenty of authors -- yet this book had an interesting twist.  Basically the stories reflected upon each other -- the second (which actually took place at an earlier time) becoming almost a retelling of the first.  However, the two stories are different.  It was circular in some respects and gave you the feeling of life repeating itself -- the circle of life, as it were, but at a much deeper level.

The stories are of love, loss, desire -- human emotions we can all understand and I I would highly recommend this book. 

The next book I read was Suite Française by Irene Nemirovsky.  Wow!  This is just the kind of book I enjoy.  Historical fiction based so much on fact that I get a feeling for what it was like to live in a different time and place.  The book is set in France as the Germans attack and people flee Paris.  She follows several families, individuals and soldiers lives.  Very engaging storytelling.

There is more to this though.  The story of the writing of this book is tragic and amazing.  Nemirovsky had originally planned 5 books that would be part of one volume.  The first 2 parts of that book are Suite Française.  It was written during the war and she handwrote the pages in tiny writing to conserve paper and ink which was scarce (the endpapers of the hardcover show examples of her handwritten pages).  During the planning and writing of the remainder of the story, she was taken to a concentration camp and died (or was killed -- it sound as if she were very ill at the time).  Her husband continued to search for her, not knowing she was dead, and he was eventually taken by the Germans to be killed in the gas chamber.

Her writings only survived because her daughters insisted on keeping their mother's papers as they were shuffled from home to home as orphans.  Wow.  It took over 50 years, but the first two books were finally published and it's a tragedy that she never had a chance to finish because it would have been a masterpiece.

I don't mind when things aren't nicely wrapped up, so I didn't mind that all these stories were left unfinished.  Isn't that how life is anyway?  I also highly recommend this book.

Now I'm reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life by Barbara Kingsolver and I'm enjoying it as much as I hoped I would!  I actually purchased this in hardcover because I couldn't bear to wait for the paperback and my library system has all books checked out and many holds.  It really is that good!  A full report when I finish.

Apple Pie

The other day when we were at the library, Maddie told me that she wanted to make a pie.  So we headed on over to the cookbook section and I grabbed The Joy of Cooking: All About Pies and Tarts.   She decided on apple pie -- perfect since apples are in season!  We headed out to pick some up yesterday and I searched through my other cookbooks since I can never follow a recipe outright.

I ended up pretty much using a combo of the pie crust from Martha Stewart's Baking Handbook and the recipe for Apple Pie I from The Joy of Cooking: All About Pies and Tarts.  Maddie helped me decorate it with Dala horse cut outs and we popped it in the oven:

Of course the filling leaked out in places -- I'm no professional.  I think you could count the number of pies I've made on one hand.  However, using the food processor for making the crust has converted me.  And homemade crust is so much better than store bought!  I see more pies in my future!

Oh, by the way, Maddie didn't care for the pie.  There were tears.  I think she was so excited to have it since she helped me make it that it was really a let down for her.  She's a bit picky when it comes to sweets, so I'm not surprised.  Poor kid!

Chevron Scarf

I've been seeing lots of Chevron Scarves from Last-Minute Knitted Gifts -- and I started to have a craving.  You know the one. . . the air is getting cooler at night and one's thoughts turn to knitting. . .

So.  I ordered up the book from the library (we have a great library catalog system that allows you to order books from all different libraries -- and it's quick too!)  and dragged out my bin of Koigu.  Yes, I have a bin.  It's a small-ish bin, but a bin nonetheless.  I had a bit of a Koigu obsession for a while about 3 or 4 years ago and purchased a skein or two at nearly every yarn shop I visited that stocked it!

I'll show you two color combos and you tell me which one you think would work best. 

Combo #1


Combo #2

Okay, so what do you think?  Combo #1 or Combo #2?  I'll tell you what I thought -- Combo #1 hands down!  In fact, that's what I chose and I started knitting away.  After about 2 inches I thought it was going to be a problem, but I figured I just needed to knit a bit more. . . so I did.  And it got worse.  Muddy pools on one side and bold striped sections on the other -- how weird is that?

So on to combo #2.  While it doesn't give the the bold contrast that I see in some of the scarves I have been admiring online, I do love the effect:

It's simple and quick and I'm feeling the return of my knitting mojo!  Here are some more links concerning Chevron Scarves:

• Chevron Scarf Flickr group
• Chevron Scarf KAL
• Last-Minute Knitted Gifts

Pincushion Challenge & Notebooklets!

I have posted the September/October theme for the Pincushion Challenge. Since I'm thinking about Fall the new theme is autumn.

And I made some more KNIT notebooklet, including some in a cream/olive green colorway. I even included some graph paper in case you need to sketch out something to scale or want to chart out a bit of lace. And I'll be happy to make custom colors!