Brimming

I just quit my day job.

Gosh, doesn’t that look all “leap into the void”ish? But no, not really. See, I sew for a living, and I still sew for a living (well ok, I sew for a pittance, really, but it makes me feel like I’m contributing if I say ‘for a living’), but I’ve just told my theatre group that I won’t be their “house costumer” any more.

I have been dithering and waffling and whining about this for ages. I love costuming, it’s fun, it’s always different, there’s always some kind of crazy challenge and problem to solve… but I put too much work into the shows for not enough return, and I can’t bring myself to cut all the corners that could and perhaps should be cut. So I love it, but I’m tired of being tired, I’m tired of spending 10-12 hours a day in an unheated studio all winter, I’m tired of missing two seasons out of every year – I’m not tired of never cleaning the house, but I am tired of the house being dirty!

Designing for the stage is very different than designing a single outfit or even a set, and sewing for the stage means pretty things that just aren’t always quite as pretty when you get up close. Like those Dorian dresses. On the one hand, they’re really cool. On the other hand, what I want to do is make “real” dresses like that, not “period cut/modern finishing” sturdy cotton knock-offs. It’s all part of the jonesing for quality, I feel like I’ve got nothing to be proud of as a seamstress when all I ever get to do are “fakes”. I know that on some levels that is a ridiculous way to feel, and I am proud of my work in its own context… but as a historical costumer I can do more/better, and not doing so irks me.

Not that I expect recreationists to be beating down my door or anything, I’m sure I’ll be doing nothing but quilted satin and crazy stuff like that coat. But that was fun and challenging too, and didn’t eat my life! (Plus it was the wimpiest resignation ever, and they will still hire me to do stuff – I really just arranged it so that I can say “no”.)

Life. I like my life. We’ve been out here for four years and I am still pleasantly surprised every day to find how much I like my life. I mean, I wasn’t kidding with that Laura Ingalls crack a couple of entries ago, I’ve always known that I could live like this, but finding out how much I enjoy doing it, how I’m just freakin’ happy to be getting up in the morning… it’s like being a kid again, a kid in summer vacation. Even the things that you have to do are kind of “fun”.

And just at this moment there is compounded awesomeness going on… some of it is still “imminently awesome”, and I’m not 100% sure it will all work out, so I can’t tell you about those parts yet. (Because I’m superstitious.) But here are few awesome things (non fibre related, as Emily guessed) that are already happening/have happened. I’ll start small, but they get big pretty quick:

Raven put the carriage lights up in the upstairs bathroom. That hole in the wall over the mirror was where the old fixture was – one of those bars of bulbs like in a dressing room, only they were huge round bulbs and the bar was wooden instead of chrome. (Because I guess if it’s wooden it somehow looks classy and antique in a big old house? I dunno.) I hated that stupid bar of too much yellow light. It was ugly, it was a waste of hydro, it didn’t go with either what we’re doing to the poor house, or what anyone else had done in the past. So we got these lamps, which are supposed to go outdoors, but what has that got to do with anything? I was still a little nervous about it, but now I’m not, they look great. Granted, the above picture does not show them to their best effect – and obviously I am still in the process of painting that wall. I had to stop because Raven was going to need to cut holes in it to install the lights, of course.

See, that’s what’s happening to the wall. In purple, eventually. So I am confident that they’re going to blend in quite well. (Yes, I’m just gratuitously showing you my walls. I like my walls, they make me happy too. See? Just like a kid. Wanna see a picture I drew? Like that.)

Ok, next piece of awesomeness-in-progress. This one and the third are maybe about the same calibre, but I have pictures of this, so it goes first.

This is our bog. As in “john”, as in toilet, as in we haven’t had indoor plumbing since christmas, and it hadn’t been working well since the previous September. I will not go into details about the arrangements that have been made, but let’s just say that the return to a simple lifestyle has been taken further in the past few months than most people are entirely comfortable with. So, Raven is constructing this do-it-yourself composting toilet system, otherwise known as a “tree bog”. Inside the box is a big hole in the ground. The box itself only really exists to a) hide the pipe outlet b) vent the hole and c) be lockable, just in case. We know people with children now, y’know?) Around the box will be a willow hedge, which will both conceal the box and – well, recycle – the contents.

Outside the box, comfortably ensconced in the bathroom just like a real toilet, will be a chair with a fancy hole in it. I’m painting the chair now, it’s salvage from someone’s dining room set. And the rest is up to gravity! (Well, gravity and a little water from the charming pitcher I will provide in case gravity requires some assistance.) See, even that sounds kind of fun, don’t you think? Water from a charming pitcher? Ok, it’s not everybody’s cup of tea, you might not want to live here, but you’d visit me, right?

EDIT – If you want more information on this ‘bog’ and how it’s put together, there’s a page about it here, which I will be updating as we run and debug (not too many actual bugs, I hope!) the system.

That hen in the bog picture is Brat the Erstwhile House Hen – she was being a diva, so I took a couple of pictures just of her:

They have perfectly nice nesting boxes, you know. Full of soft litter, all dark and safe…

Whatever. On to the third Awesome Thing of which I have no picture (yet): Last night we bought a wood boiler! We are going to have heat!

Let me slide that into context for those of you who haven’t been to my house, since you vastly outnumber those who have – I live in Ontario. Which is in Canada. Now, there are many places in Canada much colder than southern Ontario, and I assure you that in February I am mostly glad I don’t live in them. It is quite sufficiently cold right where we are. Which is in a field, in Canada. With no heat. We have a charming little franklin stove, which really outdoes itself in trying to raise the ambient temperature – in December we can sometimes get the room where the stove is up to 70 degrees F. In January/February we’re lucky if we can hit 60, beside the stove, and it takes all day to do it. Mostly in Winter it is 45 degrees when I wake up, and 55 all day. The kitchen – and it is a great kitchen – becomes The Room You Don’t Go In, because it is (ironically) the furthest from the fire and also the least well insulated. I chip ice off the dog’s water in the mornings.

(I feel the need to insert here that for me this is still “fun”. Cold, damp, and sometimes painful, but “fun”.)

Every year, the plumbing (which was crap to begin with) freezes, and we have no water for however long it takes to get it going again. This year we were about two months with water running to one tap, and it kept trying to freeze. Meanwhile, poor Raven has to crawl under the house and shout bad words at the pipes until they work again. That part is not ‘fun’. So this year, the toilets will not freeze because they will be completely off that system, and soon we will actually have heat! I don’t expect that the boiler will be running this year, because there is still quite a lot of piping to do, and there are other jobs higher on the list of Must Be Done. But it exists, and if not this year then next year, we will have heated floors.

Awesomeness.

Ok, one more picture, so there’s at least some fibre in this post: Remember that white fibre from Emily? Boiled it in the leftover walnut dye yesterday:

 

I am stalked by UFOs

How is it that I ever get anything done? Oh, that’s right – I don’t. Well, obviously that’s stretching it a little, but…
During my week of “oh stupid shoulder please stop hurting now”, I spent some time wandering about and staring at all the projects I wasn’t working on. Here are some things that are soooo clooosssse to being done – and have been, for months:
The walls and cupboards in the kitchen

the upstairs hall floor (ok, it’s not even half done, miles to go there!)

The bathroom floor

Xanadu – this is a jacket that needs one sleeve and about a pound and a half of embellishment

And that’s only the stuff I feel like admitting to right now; the projects that are really bothering me for not being done. There’s twice that lurking in the wings, ready to pounce as soon as I actually accomplish something. (Pounce from the wings? Talk about your mixed metaphors…)
But as previously mentioned, what I could actually do last week was knit. You will notice that none of the pictures above have knitting in them. This is because I do not (did not) have an unfinished knitting project. So in order to knit, I had to start one.

Yeah. Couldn’t just make a hat or something, couldja? Noooo, that wouldn’t be “fun”.
As you can probably guess by the patches, this is intended as a stash-reduction project. Ironically and perhaps inevitably, I had to go get MORE yarn from the Incredible Yarn Stash (which lives at Stalkermom* and The Ed’s place), because I didn’t have a pale gray in the right yarn. I did have a pale gray in the wrong yarn, which was might I add, a much nicer fibre than the cheap-arse stuff I’m using up here, and I wish to heck I could do the project in that, instead – but that would involve actually going out into the world and purchasing yarn, which is verbotten.

Theoretically, once I get it figured out and finished (look, I’m journalling, I’m journalling! I’ve written down every single thing so far!) I could re-knit it using nice yarn. This will actually happen at around the time Hitler purchases his second pair of ice skates.

Yesterday I could finally sew again – good thing too, as I’m way behind on one of those things I actually do get finished – you know, the ones that are for other people? – and had to catch up. I did – but I would have got farther still if I hadn’t slipped in a little pink dress for the baby. Remember the baby?

I’ve never actually made baby clothes for real babies before. They’re so tiny! Look, it fits on my teeny tiny dress form! (Something to do with dresses for bears, I don’t remember exactly.) It is her two-month birthday on the 17th, and Raven, who is completely ga-ga over the kid insisted we buy her a “happy birthday from your favorite uncle” card and send her a present. I still haven’t actually met her, and I both want to and am afraid to – everyone who comes in contact with the wee thing seems to come back with their brains turned to mush! She’s going to rule the world by age two, and does anybody really want an Empress of the Whole World who is in the Terrible Twos? But here is her little little Peter Rabbit dress:

Last but not least (well, ok maybe it is least) is some wool. This is actually last week’s news, but I never got around to posting it. Now remember the First Spin?

(this single ply is pretty close to actual size here, AND this is the good bit)
It was so bad, I was able to comb it out and re spin it, and I didn’t lose any. Really, really bad.

However, I was able to re-spin it, and now instead of four or five yards of very tight roving, which is pretty much how it came out, I have 20 yards of actual, knittable, plied, and surprisingly even yarn.

So yay for me.

*Stalkermom, who hates that nickname, is in fact my mother, if you hadn’t figured that out. She’s wonderfully talented, plays with dolls, hasn’t got a blog and creepily zoomed in on my house with Google Earth. Hi, Mom!

 

Knitted rag rugs

How to knit a rag rug:

Cut strips of fabric. You can cut or rip strips of fabric across the grain, but then you’ll have to either stitch them together or work them in like yarn ends, which is just a pain (and in the latter case, very bulky!) If you cut your chunk of fabric like this (lines are cuts):

you’ll end up with one big long strip that looks kind of like this:
(not remotely to scale).

The lumpy bits are the cut-ends where the strip changes direction, or goes around a corner, however you want to look at it. They will make little texture flaps in your finished mat. If this is going to bother you, I’m sorry, you’ll just have to stitch flat strips together. Ditto if you want to get all fancy and work in different colors/fabrics. This can be done with a quick zigzag on the machine, or hand tacked, whichever you find faster and more convenient. Just lap the ends over each other by half an inch or so, and tack them together.

Wind your long strip of rag into a ball, for your own peace of mind (if you are using woven fabric it will also reduce the horrible tangles that come from fraying).

And then: Just start to knit! Garter stitch works fine, and as long as you are content with something “approximately so big”, you don’t even have to swatch. If you’re picky about the finished size, of course, you’ll have to swatch same as anything else, but your swatch will have to be pretty big – four inches isn’t really going to tell you much, as it’ll wind up being only about six or eight stitches wide. Use big needles – 10 mm and up. (What is that in American, size 16? Something big, anyway.) I think I used broomsticks for the bathmat, but I honestly forget. It works with wovens, and they don’t really seem to fray once they’re knitted together – I suppose they would deteriorate eventually, but I put my mat in the washer and dryer all the time with no deleterious effect. It is 100% cotton weave, ripped on grain, and it frayed like the very devil while I was making it. You can do this with knit fabrics too, though that may seem redundant, and if you try it with something like panne velour on 10mm, it is soooo soft and yet so thick and sturdy! Solids will be solid, stripes will give you variegated effects, prints will give you more visible effect the larger they are, but since most prints are darker on the “right” side, be aware: some of the “wrong” side of your original fabric is definitely going to be showing on the “right” side of your knitting, the fabric won’t lie flat and you don’t actually want it to. The exception to this is if you use a knit – it will usually roll under when cut, so you will have mostly the right side showing in your work.

This is my bathmat, knit from 1” wide strips of striped cotton:

The whole thing cutting and all took two, maybe three hours, and having made braided rag rugs before, I can join with the anonymous 19th c. housewife in saying that this is a LOT faster!

A few other notes:
If you are using new fabric, pre-wash it the same as you would for sewing it (you would, right? I thought so.) If you’re cutting up old garments or using scraps, cut to get the longest strips you possibly can, but obviously you’ll have some piecing to deal with. The thinner the strips and the lighter the fabrics the more likely you’ll be able to just knit in the ends – heavier and crisper fabrics, you will notice a bulge where you’ve got double thickness, which is why I prefer to lap and stitch. Cutting fabric on bias hasn’t given me a huge problem, but if you were making something that wasn’t going to just lie on the floor, a coat or a wall hanging eg., it might pull the shape out of true. This problem could probably be solved by knitting the bias fabric together with yarn or string or something to stabilize it.

For a plain square mat, garter stitch gives a good thickness, and a bit of springiness that’s nice to step on. Once you get the hang of the size though, knitting with rags is the same as knitting with yarn, texture stitches, increases and decreases, all the same. So of course, you could make a round rug, or a patterned one, or play with texture like basket weave, or a big cabled border. The details of fancy stitches will not show up particularly well, especially if your fabric is print or stripe – you will probably have better luck with large texture areas. But ribbing or seed stitching, although they may not show up visually as clearly as they would in yarn, will still have the same elastic or stiffening effects as they would in another medium, so they could still have uses!

 

An Almost-Finished Object

In about half an hour, I’m leaving to pick up Raven. There are still some things I wanted to get done in the bedroom (how did a relatively small room get so BIG?!) but on the whole I’m happy with it. I’ve stripped and painted that door, but it still needs stenciling done on it. I painted the bookshelf, ditto. There is nothing I can do about the ceiling except hope that everybody will be so wowed by the walls that they won’t look up. I did get the new blankets made, I did hang the drape I wanted, I did manage to make a shaker peg board (woo! Almost like carpentry!), I even managed to sand and stain the badly-abused headboard. And of course, I painted the walls.
So here we go:
Before

After

Useless wall

Still useless but pretty wall

Painted door (with a working mortise lock, which I have wanted since I was FOUR

Pegs

And new blankets

Total cost of redecoration: About thirty seven dollars, and all the time in the world. I bought the lock. The red paint was left over from painting the back room a couple of years ago, but I bought it then. (Paint Barn – literally a barn full of paint, at six bucks the gallon!) and the red sari that is draping on the useless wall was seven bucks on ebay. Everything else is Found Object. That mirror I cleaned up and painted after it came in a truckload of “firewood” – mostly old and broken furniture – that The Ed picked up off Freecycle, and the trim paint is freecycle also. (That white? “Dove Wing”. Whatever the heck that means.) The wood for the pegs is from an old shed or something, we’ve got a pile of it kicking around, and the dowel I found in a pile of salvaged dowel and moulding in the utility room. The blanket fabric is all from the Incredible Stash, ditto the pillowcases. (Oh yeah, I made pillowcases.)
So I still need to finish that door, and I haven’t found a solution for the floor either, but I’m thinking rag rugs are really the only way to go. Ever try knitting a rag rug? It works. Got the idea from an old Ladies’ Home Journal (really, really old – 1873) and I’m using one for a bathmat now. Soft, puffy, washable, and way faster than braiding and stitching!

 

So… very… tired

I have done almost nothing except the bedroom. And it isn’t done. I refuse to admit that this job is too big – it can’t be, I’m on the declining side of my pile of “to do” jobs – but time she is a tickin’ and I’m not sure whether I’ll get everything done by the time [hubby] comes home or not.

I got slowed down by the ceiling, and it’s a darn shame because it doesn’t look good at all. It looks like my ceiling was patched by narcoleptic raccoons. And I’m probably risking being sued by a raccoon rights organization for making that kind of a judgement about the abilities of dyssomniac procyonidae, who are just trying to make a living like anybody else.

Right. So then the next problem was painting the walls. The plan was to paint two walls red and two walls in this kind of a creepy neutral color that was going to look good with the red, really it was, trust me. Except that I couldn’t do it. Oh, I had enough paint. I had enough time, and I even managed to move that (HUGE, OMG) bed out from the wall. But I wasn’t able to “just” paint a wall. Those of you already familiar with the history I have when left alone with paint and a flat surface will know what I’m talking about. For those who don’t I refer you, if interested, to the skeleton closet eg.

So I cut stencils. Stalkermom asked yesterday what the stencils were, and I described them – I didn’t realize until I was off the phone that she was probably just afraid I’d been going to say “skeletons”. But no, nary a skeleton in sight:

I also managed to sand and re-stain the headboard while the bed was moved (because I am not moving it again!) and I’m making a shaker-peg type thing for the wall. Also on the list is a cover for the filing cabinet in which my husband insists it is reasonable and convenient to keep his clothing. In his defense, he usually keeps it very neat and organized, but it is still a big metal filing cabinet in the bedroom, which irks me for some reason.

there are some clapped-together bookshelves I’d like to paint-or-otherwise camoflage, and in a fantasy world I will also make duvet-cover things. Not that this is so hard, I just keep adding to my list every time I take something off. Meantime, it’s April, which means that people’s xmas bills are paid off and they’re getting married, so they keep trying to buy things from me, with the result that I have to stop what I am doing and make said things. Silly people, can’t you see I’m painting a bedroom?!

I did finish the big socks, you know! Days ago! I’ve started new ones now! I still haven’t got decent pictures of them (they are really big and don’t seem to look very attractive when lying out flat – I have to try them on legs.) and I’m still procrastinating on posting the pattern – I think I have this fantasy that when the bedroom is finished I shall flop out on the bed and feel all happy and relaxed and type out a sock pattern in celebration. So, um – we’ll see how that goes.

 

New things and nifty presents

I think I’m committed. I’m committed to doing something with the bedroom – or perhaps I should be committed. Whatever, I have begun to move stuff out of the room. Oh, the stuff – the stuff! I have no idea how I’m going to move that huge bed. Not only is it enormous and heavy in its own right, but the mattress is full of water. Not one big bladder, thank goodness, but several skinny tubes full of water. I think I can move them separately – I sure hope so, because it’s getting cold again and there is no way I’m going to empty and refill them. I don’t think.

Right now I’m washing the walls, which I’m embarrassed to say I haven’t done since we moved in. I am blessed/cursed with one grandmother’s high standards of cleanliness – and the other grandmother’s lack of initiative to maintain those standards.

The other night I marbled some paper for the first time. Mixed results, but lots of only-somewhat-messy fun! First I mixed a tray full of gelatin, which is supposed to allow the (oil) paint to float and also provide sizing. I later discovered I could have used way less gelatin.

Then I mixed the oils fairly thin with [some kind of paint thinner I found] what was supposed to be either turps or paraffin but wasn’t, and drizzled them into the pan. Here’s a picture of them floating on the size:

Then I laid a sheet of paper on top very briefly, (hold opposite corners), which I haven’t got a picture of because I was doing it at the time, but I’m sure you can figure it out), and put it on newspaper to dry. I did two “runs” per oil-paint-drizzle-session, the second one was very faint and subtle, which wouldn’t be too much use if you were looking for end papers or something, but since I was trying to generate stationary I actually liked them better.

On the first sheet I tried to get all fancy and block out a portion in the centre so it would only have a marbled border. This would have looked really nifty, if I had had/used spray adhesive or something to make the stencil, instead of taping an ad for a phone company there and hoping it would work. It didn’t.

So on the rest I just dipped the whole page. Here are the first and second of one run drying

In other news, I finally made a drop spindle. It is totally thrown together out of a leftover end of dowel from the masks and a chunk of softwood I had lying around for some reason – I think that last broke off an old long-gone dresser. I’m sure I could do better, but I’ll need more practice before I can determine how much its general half-assedness is contributing to the fact that my spinning sucks eggs. I’m going to tentatively suggest: Not much. Practice needed, fer sure! I “get” it now though, which is more than I can say for the first time I tried spinning, lo these I’m-not-going-to-think-about-how-many years ago. So there’s that much hope, at least!

More on that subject later, for now I’m just going to give you some setup. About a year ago, my in-laws travelled to Wales to visit family. They asked us what they could bring back for us as a souvenir. Both my husband and I said that we didn’t want anything ‘touristy’ or cheesy pseudo-historical, we wanted something real, something that was actually from Wales. Who needs another fridge magnet? Never the kind to back down from a challenge, they duly brought back our gifts: To my husband, they gave a rock. He was very happy, and is keeping it safely somewhere until he can think of something to carve out of it.

For me, they brought back wool. About an ounce or so of right-off-the-sheep wool, which my father-in-law found stuck on a thistle in a field. It was best present I’d received since my high school graduation, when a fellow I knew from work gave me a brick, with my name written on it in Sharpie marker. My name was spelled wrong; I still have the brick. That was a great gift.

Here is the clump of wool, thistley-bits and all:

Next episode: follow the progress of the clump of wool, as I attempt to make something I am not embarrassed to show my in-laws!

 

What a misnomer!

Why do they call it drywall? It is not dry… I’ve spent two days now on this freakin’ ceiling. Put on spackle, go away for a long time. Come back, sand, put on spackle, repeat. Possibly this wouldn’t bother me as much if I knew I could make it look decent by this process, but if I were trying to make a list of my skills? Drywall spackling would, if it even appeared, be very very low on that list. At this point I’m counting on the fact that trompe l’oiel appears slightly higher on that list, so maybe I can hide the hole bump in the ceiling that way. Did I mention it is the ceiling? And did I mention that I am on the less-than-tall side? I am at this point looking forward to painting the ceiling as a nice change.

That’s ok, I have a way to pass the time while I wait: I can write a letter to my new knitting pen pal! Actually, having looked through my meagre supply of stationary, I can make some pretty paper, then use it to write to my new knitting pen pal. Yeah, that’s the ticket! Otherwise, oh person who I shall not name because you don’t know who you are yet, you’ll be getting something on three-ring notepaper that looks like a letter from camp! Not cool.

(Note: although it crossed my mind, I am not actually going to make the paper. I’m just going to make some boring paper look nicer. Unless that doesn’t work, in which case I’m off to the blender.)

Nothing to look at today, but if you’re jonesing for pictures, I posted a couple more masks and a dress on the projects page… the dress is actually from a show I did back in the fall, but it’s really cool and I wanted to show somebody. It’s made with several layers of fabric quilted together and then set on fire. Candles, soldering irons, and sewing – one of my favorite combinations!

PS – Speaking of things to do while I wait, I am only a toe away from finishing the second Giant Sock Of Doom!

 

In which our heroine makes a list, and encounters certain obstacles

So. My time is my own, my husband is out of town, the seven chickens who were running amok in my house have been evicted, and while the dog and I reclaim our territory and adjust to the quiet, I am trying to determine whether I can actually do anything with this horrible, horrible bedroom.

While I decide, I am trying to patch the hole in the ceiling of said room. Now, technically this counts as starting the project, because I can’t do anything else until the holes are repaired. But it’s a big job in a small room full of stuff I have nowhere else to put, so part of me is still shying away! I think, assuming I can “fix” the ceiling (where “fix” refers to a moderately visible lump rather than a gaping hole) I’m going to keep at it. Even if I can’t achieve House Beautiful, I can at least achieve House Less Ugly! With that in mind, I started making a list of all the things I need to do. There are a lot. Pretty much everything, in fact, except (as stated previously) the floor, which I’d still like to cover.

The floor:

Here’s a shot from one corner – doesn’t look so bad, does it?

Ah, but here is a close up of that window

And the foam around that window, with orange sponge blob trim:

And the wall

Here’s a good one – in a room where one wall is a slope, another wall is missing:

We found this door in our friend The Ed’s barn, can you tell?

Here’s that hole in the ceiling I’ve been going on about – the roof is fixed now, but the damage remains!

So you see what I mean. Now, there are a couple of obstacles (or shall I say “challenges”) involved in this job.

One, I haven’t got my own car, because our truck done got broke and ain’t been fixed. I’ve been borrowing StalkerMom’s car, but I’ve had it for a really long time and she wants it back. I can hook rides with her and/or The Ed if they’re going anywhere, but without my own transportation, and with the nearest town (which has only got the “general store”) a half-hour walk away, my ability to procure -well, anything – is severely limited.

Two. I haven’t got any money anyway. That’s just flat-out true, the few resources we’ve got to play with have already been allocated to other projects. Important projects like “make plumbing work” and “stop the front of the house from sliding off”. Projects I don’t really want to embezzle from.

So! Any changes that I make to this room will have to be accomplished with tools and supplies that are already in my house. This is not totally unreasonable, because since the house is overall a work-in-progress, we are constantly scrounging materials. We’re packrats and scavangers generally, plus our strange and varied hobbies mean that a wide range of skills (or at least theoretical know-how), tools and stuff-what-can-be-turned-into-other-stuff are readily available. I think I can do this. When I’m done, it may be weird, and it will probably have a bumpy spot on the ceiling, but it will be mine, and most important of all: No more blobby orange!

 

The internet is a strange toy…

Aemmeleia got me looking at my blog stats, partly out of curiosity and mostly as a way to stall while I figure out what I’m doing today. It was thus that I discovered someone clicked on my site after doing a search for “blog dockside prostitutes”. What is going on with my meta-text? Admittedly, I had been joking with Kate about “Dorian Gray and the Syphilitic Dock Whores”, but not here!

I think I’ve been sharing a brain with the Yarn Harlot. To some degree, of course – to a fairly large degree, as far as I can tell, lots and lots of us share a brain with the Yarn Harlot, and I can think of worse ways to be! But I became slightly alarmed over the whole redecorating the bedroom incident: My husband is going away in April, and my shows will be over, and I have been planning for months to redecorate the bedroom while he’s out of the way. Like Stephanie, we live in a big old house with many a broken bit. Like her, we’ve been ignoring the bedroom in favor of the more public parts of the house, and like her I have finally reached my break point and realized that I want/need a bedroom retreat that does not make me feel like I’m camping out in a small storage facility. A small, broken, ugly storage facility. With sponge painting.

Our room used to be a child’s room – the actual master bedroom I took for my studio, because it has a giant wall of south-facing windows. (I live in Canada; south facing windows = light and heat.) Also because it was, when we moved in, big enough to contain the fabric, yarn and various other supplies that make sense to me, as well as my machines. Four years later, of course, I’ve got yarn stashed in nooks all over the house, and have formally co-opted half the guest room for extra fabric storage. But I digress.

Obviously, at some point, the child whose room this was was allowed to make decorating decisions, and help with the painting. Probably this was a fun and healthy exercise for said child. The room is pale blue, with dabs of white sponge blobs everywhere, and orange sponge leaf patterns as a border. These last are fairly symmetrical where done by an adult or older child, and blobby orange and crowded where done by a helpful younger child. The two techniques meet under the window. The window (all unreplaced windows in this house need very badly to be replaced) has had its drafts sealed with expanding foam, which (like The Harlot again) we have not cared enough to cut off. There is no floor, just sub-floor – and that will not change when I redo the room, as I haven’t a solution yet for that particular problem. I’m thinking at least a rug might help!

I don’t know whether I’m kidding myself – Raven will be gone long enough for me to get the job done assuming that I’m not swamped with other work, but “other work” is in fact starting to back up a bit, and I may be in denial, thinking about all this ‘free time’ I’m going to have in April. But I’m still planning to give it a go – at the very VERY least, I am going to get some paint on the walls and at last see the end of the sponge blobs! (Orange sponge blobs were quite the theme in this house – someday I will tell you about the bathroom!)