Thrifting and Stitching

Yesterday was Estate Sale Day for me!  Thrifting is just about my favorite passtime.  I mean, I love hanging out with my child and all, but he's far more expensive than 12 vintage hankies for $2.  Estate sales, yard sales, garage sales, thrift stores.  I believe it's a genetic addiction passed down to me from my mom.  There is no cure.

Even better than a regular old ordinary estate sale is an estate sale at a mansion owned by a little old lady with her own thrift addiction.  It was the motherlode, baby.  She had one of everything.  In fact, she had, like a dozen of everything at least.  I was happy to find a cache of vintage needlepoint in the basement, much of it kitschy and framed, hallelujah.

I also scored a small blue pyrex mixing bowl, thus completing my primary colors mixing bowl set that I've been working on for years.  Finally, vintage linens, which I can never resist.  This one is part of a ginormous cross-stitch tablecloth in colors I could have chosen myself.

And this is from a table runner.

 Is it possible that the table runner is the most useless item on earth?  Clearly, I'm not the only one who thinks this; cast-off table runners are everywhere.  Since they are almost always stained, I have no qualms about cutting into them, scavenging their motifs for my own personal gain.  Honestly, although I routinely cut up vintage linens, I can't bear to cut into pristine pieces.  

I'm nearing the end of the farm piece, which is almost all upcycled linens.  The base fabric was a curtain in another life.  I purchased a full set of these curtains, which amounted to close to a billion yards of fabric, for $2.  These curtains were hand-made, well-used and faded from the sun.  I had no problem reusing them.  Working with someone else's handiwork is a loaded and significant act.  I'm thinking through the implications, but that is a subject for another post.

Meanwhile, I think I've finally gotten the hang of feather stitch.

I don't feel like I really know a stitch until I can do it without checking a reference book.  I am most comfortable with blanket stitch, split stitch and running stitch.  Lately I'm loving closed chain stitch, though open chain stitch continues to elude me.  It's loose and horrible.  My three year old could do better.

Maybe not.  Still, I'll stick to blanket stitch until I can get the open chain figured out.

Friday the 13th

Yesterday was the kind of day where one minute, your child is sitting next to you embroidering like the sweetest most perfect angel ever and the next minute, he's having a screaming fit because you won't let him hurl himself out the second floor window.  I'm thinking it's because we finally got our first real snow of the season.  Real snow on the ground raises the stakes.

A few words about embroidery with kids.  Ellis has been embroidering with a real needle for nearly a year.  He's not yet four.  He is possibly the most danger-seeking child I have ever met and he's never done worse than poke himself a bit with the needle.  For example, yesterday he built a tower of pillows as high as my head and tried to scale it and then leap off of it onto the radiator.  Next to a window.  I almost threw up.  But I do let him sew with real thread and a real needle in a real hoop.   If you're worried, you can give your child a blunt tapestry needle and felted wool, which is very easy to stitch through.  But they won't be fooled.  They won't settle for baby embroidery.  They want to sew with the big kids.  And frankly, the needle's sharpness works in your favor here.  It's so sharp that as soon as they start to poke themselves, they stop.  Because, ouch.  Unless they don't have enough motor control to not randomly just poke themselves in the eye, I say real needles all the way.

Here's what Friday afternoon looks like at our house.

That's what I get for making him new mittens, right?  Check these out!  I scored a fleece remnant today for $1.81, which should be good for at least 5 pairs of mittens.

And here he is stitching.

And resting after playing in the snow.

And what I did while he was at school (instead of the dishes or laundry!)

Winter, At Last

The snow arrived today.  We celebrated with snowmen and leftovers.  The camera's battery is charging so I don't have any pictures.  Today feels like one of those days where life just goes on as it should, announcing its place in the family of things.

Some mundane details.  My shower curtain, hanging up but unfinished.

A stitched diamond, in stem stitch.  Next time, I'm thinking split stitch all the way.

An older piece auditioning for a place in the new work.

The Enemy of the Good

For the past few days, I have let perfect be the enemy of the good.  I haven't posted because I was trying to write a sort-of theory-ish piece about line in embroidery.  But I couldn't get it just so.  

Instead, I wrote nothing and drank a bunch of wine. This, my friends, was a mistake.  Come on.  Who wouldn't rather see pretty pictures of my house and stitches than nothing?  Who was going to say, yeah, your house is really clean and it sounds like your dinner was awesome, but what do you think about the significance and validity of the blanket stitch when not used on an edge?

I'll try not to let it happen again.  Meanwhile, let's get back to the matter at hand.  Art.  Parenting.  Eating. That's what blogs are for, people.  The basics of life.  The mundane details.  Why I'm awesome and why I'm not.  Incidentally, I'm awesome for thrifting a totally sweet piece of embroidery plus two, count 'em two designer shirts for Ellis and making yummy dinners, like, all week.  Here's the embroidery:

I'm not awesome since I can't remember the last time I saw my kitchen counter.  Ok.  I can remember.  It was Christmas.  Just so you know, I don't have a dishwasher.  I'd show you the kitchen, but I can't get good pics of it that make it seem like some sort of glamourous mess as opposed to the real and yucky mess that it really is.  You'll just have to take my word for it.

Meanwhile, some new work.  I'm stitching on top of patchwork.

And from the back.

Embroidered motifs in waiting.

Fingerprints

Ellis had a good time yesterday taking pictures of his train set, Winnie the dog, and the last day of the Christmas tree.  Of course, sometimes when the three year old has the camera, he leaves a big ol' fingerprint on the lens that mama doesn't notice right away.

The latest embroidery piece.  I feel like I'm getting to the end of this process, of drawing and stitching in tandem, like I'm ready to move on to the next thing.  I'm not sure what that is yet, though.

In any case, the work of the day was deconstructing Christmas.  Although I love the tree and all the trimmings, I'm always relieved to see it go.  Let the true New Year begin!

Today is a Great Day

(This post was written yesterday, but I forgot to publish it.  Oops!)

It was freakishly warm here in Chicago today.  Ellis and I headed to the park after lunch and I swear it was at least 55 degrees and super sunny.  It felt like Spring.  A weird spring that comes while your Christmas tree is still up, but I'll take Spring weather whenever it comes.  On our way home after 1 1/2 hours, carrying sticks and handfuls of mud, Ellis proclaimed, "Today is a great day."  We spent another hour in the back yard making mudpie soup and filling up the water table and drawing on the sidewalk with chalk.

Today was so great, I didn't even pause to take pictures.  I'll just have to keep it in my memory.  And heart. Gag, I know, but I'm serious.  Parenting is incredibly hard.  Harder than you really think it'll be when every single person in the whole universe tells you that parenting is really hard.  Maybe for you, you think, but for me, it'll be the kind of hard that's also awesome because I am going to love parenting.  On balance, I think that's true, but there really are a lot of days where it's just the kind of hard that really sucks.  When days like today come along, you have to grab them.  You have to make mudpies while the sun still shines.

Lock, Stock, & Barrel

I only really learned to cook about ten years ago.  Sure, I could cook a few things from memory and follow a recipe for whatever else, but I really didn't understand cooking.  I would have been hard-pressed to just throw together any sort of interesting meal from what I had on hand.  Plus, although I didn't mind cooking, there were plenty of other things I would rather have been doing: reading, talking on the phone, watching endless re-runs of Law and Order.

 Really, I'd still probably rather do something else, but these days, with a kid and everything, I don't really have the option of just doing any old thing and not making dinner.  That's probably when I began to really like cooking--when it became as aspect of parenting.  And more to the point, when it became a break from direct parenting.  I could still take care of him but he didn't have to be actually touching me for awhile.  The choice was watch the kid for for the tenth hour in a row or make dinner.  Dinner won every time.  And it time, it became a kind of break for me.  Sometimes, cooking a meal was the only creative thing I did all day.

Since then, I've been doing some real cooking.  Hard-core mama cooking.  I even make my own vegetable stock.  I never thought I'd do such a thing, but there it is.  I save vegetable trimmings in the freezer and then use them along with a stock recipe.  Well, I sort of follow the recipe.  It almost always turns out at least fine.  A word of advice, though: don't use carrot greens.  They made that batch bitter city.  It's still in my freezer, actually, if you'd like to stop by and get it.  Also, I tried to save the odds and ends in the fridge, but if you don't use them fast enough, they turn into a nasty green mess that'll break your heart.

Tonight I made a mild stock for soup I'll be making tomorrow.  I used vegetable trimmings plus two onions, two carrots, a half a bunch of celery, two green onions, half a zucchini, a bay leaf, a teaspoon of salt, and a handful of parsley.  I saute the onion a bit in a little olive oil, then add the veggies and water.  Usually in the neighborhood of 4 quarts.  Bring to a boil then reduce heat and simmer about 40 minutes.  I like to drain it immediately so it doesn't get a blech-y.  I'm pretty sure that's the technical term.