More Aunt Stephanie's Room

The guest room is officially done! The neighbor girl who plays with Dorothy walked in, not having been in the room since we were using it for post-move storage, and gasped. It was so gratifying. And then she was so impressed that we had a whole room just for guests that it made me remember Anne of Green Gables and Aunt Josephine and I secretly vowed to invite her over to sleep in it sometime. It does feel sort of indulgent to have a guest room after we seemed so cramped with the four of us in our two-bedroom six months ago. I made up the bed with clean sheets today and am feeling that much more settled here. Ignore that the brass bed really needs to be polished. I augmented store-bought bedding (Target and IKEA) with homemade toss pillows and I sewed homemade bias tape along the bottom of a plain store-bought bed skirt.

In such a bright room I wanted bright photographs too. I painted old gold picture frames black, then snapped photos of the kids posing against a backdrop of the (uncut) curtain fabric. It's not like you'd walk in and notice that the photo backdrop matches the curtains, which is just as well, but the overall effect does help tie everything together in this bright and colorful room.

I wanted to bring some of the room's black accents onto the bed so I made one pillow using this terrific owl fabric I found online. It didn't quite work, though. You remember that Sesame Street game from when we were kids?  Which of these things doesn't belong?  It was totally this pillow. I thought that if just one owl could be orange then it would really make everything look harmonious, so I grabbed an orange Sharpie marker and colored one owl in. Let's hope the cat doesn't puke on this pillow because I have no idea how orange Sharpie would wash, but I love the way it turned out. Now the pillow looks like it belongs perfectly.

I also embellished the white pillowcases that go with the plain white sheets on this bed. I used more of the homemade bias tape (do I need a support group for my recent bias tape problem?) and some of the decorative stitching on my new machine.

My success in painting the hokey flowers on the thrift store rocking chair inspired me to try something similar on an old milk can. I bought this jug at a yard sale when we lived in Oak Park and kept it on our front porch at our last two houses. It was already black but was starting to look sort of pathetic and rusty, so I sprayed on some new black and painted on the flowers and our name. I may get tired of looking at my own unprofessional art work every time I enter my front door, but it shouldn't be hard to spray on over the decoration when that time comes.

Some wearables

Happy birthday to my sweet niece!  I can't believe it was two years ago that I videotaped her amazing and beautiful birth at the home of my brother and sister-in-law.  I crocheted the flutter sweater as a gift for Maggie, and it looks completely adorable on her.  The bottom and front edges curl up on purpose in a really cute way. The pattern was easy, but it was such a start-and-stop project for me that it took forever.  I'd intended to give it to her for Christmas but couldn't find my hooks in the move, so it became a birthday gift instead.  I did it in a lightweight organic cotton yarn so hopefully she can wear it on in to warm weather.

I mentioned in my last post that I got some new tees to craft up for summer.  A friend pointed out that they are also very nice plain--which they totally are. These two shirts remained plain (and nice) all winter while I meant to do something to them but never got around to it.  These came from Target months ago. I finally took some time to embellish them this week, and here are the results.  On this green one I appliqued some owls on a branch by using fusible web and the zig-zag stitch. 

This one I was especially pleased with.  I used acrylic yarn left over from another project and machine stitched it to my shirt using a wide zig-zag, three bands around the neck, bottom edge, and each arm hole. Then I washed it, just to make sure nothing terrible would happen to it before I blogged about it.  :)

And while I was doing that--just so no one thinks I have more hours in my day than any one else--my house descended into utter chaos.  The kitchen came to look like it had never been cleaned, the girl fed yogurt to the boy in a messy and indiscriminate manner, and the boy "painted" my sofa with his yogurty hands.  There is, um, no place like homemade!

Some clothes for the boy

I picked these overalls up at a yard sale last fall.  For weeks they sat in my sewing basket, ready to be camper-ized, then then got abruptly packed away in a box, only to surface recently.  I was worried Worth would have outgrown them already but fortunately he had not.   These overalls had a baseball patch sewn on the bib, but were otherwise cute.  (No offense to baseball.)  I picked off the ball with a seam ripper and made my own camper patch out of a scrap of fabric left over from my camper sewing extravaganza.  The patch is just a wee bit big for the size of the bib, but that was the only intact camper I could find to cut out from my scraps.  Not a bad use of scraps and $.25 overalls, really.

Unbelievably, my baby will celebrate a birthday in just over a week.  Mind-blowing.  I thought Dorothy's infancy went quickly, but at the same time I felt like she (as a little person) was half-grown at a year.  Worth, by contrast, still seems like a tiny baby to me.  I think it's partly their personalities and partly a first-child/second-child thing.  Dorothy was always so independent and concentrated on fighting her way, tooth and nail if necessary, to her next developmental milestone.  She would see bigger kids do things and not rest until she had figured out how to do it herself. Worth is more content to by the baby.  He's reasonably motivated and enthusiastic about the world, but he doesn't have Dorothy's ceaseless drive.  Dorothy was also the first grandchild in the family, whereas Worth is now the baby of four cousins.  So when you combine these factors you get a first birthday that seems like some sort of trick the calendar is playing.

I was not sure how to dress a boy child for his birthday. Boy clothes seem to be overdressy or very casual--there is no "business casual" equivalent for boys--but I came up with this.  I made a little pair of cuffed pants out of some nice, soft thrift-store sheets.  I just traced around one of his store-bought pants for a pattern.  Then I put his initial on a blank t-shirt with the same fabric.  I thought about doing the number 1 instead, but then he'd only really be able to wear it once.  It's an outfit that I think it going to be both cute and comfy, and I feel good to have taken the time away from house stuff to make something special for the birthday boy.

A busy week

When we arrived home after our camping adventures last weekend we noticed the refrigerator was making an odd noise, sort of like a zombie.  Being the (apparently) stupid and ineffectual people we are, we just noted the noise and moved on, not stopping to check on details like are all the frozen foods thawing?  And unfortunately they were, but we didn't realize it until it was too late and much of the frozen stuff had to be thrown out or cooked.  So we bought a new refrigerator (with some odd combination of an Energy Star rebate, appliance disposal fees and a Columbus Day sale making it more cost-effective than buying used), and we've also once again lowered the priced on our house.  Perhaps someday so the new buyers, wherever they are now, will use the new 'frige for something beautiful like leftover wedding cake or champagne to toast something wonderful and we will stop banging our heads against the wall over our housing situation.  A girl can dream, right?  In the meantime we're eating meals of baked chicken with a side of fried fish, since both fish and fowl were saved from the freezer, and being glad it's not worse.
Then on Wednesday, the very busiest and most hectic day of the week, as I was recovering from the new refrigerator blues but beginning to suffer a sore throat, Dorothy informed me at approximately the halfway point on our drive home from preschool that IT WAS THE DAY, the very special and most important day, that she got to take the traveling classroom gingerbread person home, and that she had accidentally left [him? her?] at school.  I considered making the gingerbread person wait until we were already back at the very same building for choir practice later that night, but instead I rallied my inner good mother and turned the car back around.  "Gingy" was fetched, along with [his? her?] tote bag, and brought on home with us.  Gingy listened to our daily chapter from the Little House on the Prairie book, then settled down with Dorothy for a nap.  A couple hours later it was time almost time to leave for ballet lessons and I realized I should look in Gingy's journal to see just what was expected of us with regard to this plush traveling pastry.  About a half dozen of Dorothy's peers had already brought Gingy home (Gingy visitation being determined by drawing names), and those students' caring and creative mothers had written long and lovely essays about Gingy's stays with their families.  Things like "in honor of Gingy, we made gingerbread cake!" and long tales of Gingy-inspired adventures.  Those bitches, I thought.  Never mind that enthusiastic parent involvement is actually one of the things I treasure about our preschool.  All the mommies who get Gingy after us will love me, though, because I took things in the journal down a notch or two out of necessity.  We sent Gingy back today with just a few brief sentences about our busy day and one potentially embarrassing (given Gingy's uncertain gender) home-printed photograph of Gingy wearing a pink tutu.

Returning to my regular blogging business, these Lego cufflinks were a Christmas gift to Rob last year.  They are Legos from his own childhood, and I glued them to cufflink platforms I purchased from a jewelry supply store online. He loves wearing unusual cufflinks, and there aren't very many opportunities to make gifts for him. I snapped a picture of them when he was on his way out the door this morning.

And who can stay mad about houses and refrigerators with this juicy baby around to squeeze on?   He's wearing a t-shirt I did before he was born, an inkjet-printed lobster applique on a plain white tee.  He's turning into some adorable little butt-scooting backwards-crawling cherub-demon, and I'm afraid I'm having to babyproof this house already, even though I'd hoped to just do that in the next house!

Some projects and a nap strategy

This tank was an embellishment from earlier in the summer. I thought I'd photograph it on me to show how the sun design wraps around, but I never remember to. I love how it turned out and I've worn it over and over. It was another $5 tank top from Target, and I used a compass to make pencil circles on fabric for the sun design, cut them out and attached them to the shirt with double-sided fusible web (Wonder Under), then zig-zagged around them on the machine. It was inspired by a beautiful shirt I saw on someone at an art fair last year.

And after all my fussing over kids' sunhats earlier in the summer, Baby Worth went and outgrew his and I had to go at it again. At least by now I think I've been able to establish a good work flow for hats and this one came together quickly. I used Simplicity 5695. It looks very New Orleansish to me, in a good way. Definitely not a sweet teddy bears and bunnies kind of hat, but I think he likes it.

And speaking of that baby, he's taken a high-maintenance turn the last few days. He's waking up screaming at night, is spending less time contentedly playing with measuring cups on the floor, and is refusing to nap for more than fifteen minutes at a time. I'm not sure if the source of his discontent is teething or a new develpmental milestone (he's creeping backwards--watch out world!), but I'm trying to strategize how to keep us all sane and happy and I seem to have worked out a good nap plan, at least. He seems to be sleeping lightly and will wake up fully after just a few minutes if he doesn't see me there with pats and reassurance, so today I put him down for his nap on the sofa next to me and I sat there with my crochet and coffee for an hour while he slept. It ended up being a sweet hour where I got to admire his perfect little sleeping body, take a quiet and restful hour myself, and make some progress on a crochet project too. Now I might be disappointed after this stage passes and I can tuck him in upstairs by himself again!