Watched this the other night and thought that they brought up some good questions. As a person who has always struggled with justifying my existence and why I choose to do with my limited time on this earth what I do, the question seemed like a good way to maybe form some thoughts beyond – I don’t know. I just do.
It’s so easy to just drift along on the seas of fate and (to continue the salty metaphor) not do the difficult work of tacking into the wind and setting a deliberate course. So much of my life has been focused on survival that there was limited time for reflection, planning or plotting with an end goal in mind. It’s only now that I’m getting a wee bit more time to take a deep breath and take a good long look around and decide which path to take.
So, why do I create?
All my life I’ve been altering the reality I find around me. The methods have changed greatly over time, everything from building dams and waterways in the swamp behind our house as a child, to more hedonistic pursuits that pushed me beyond thought as a teen and young adult, through words in poetry and prose, photos to show what I saw and now the creation of tiny worlds.
I’ve always wanted to get the thoughts, memories and origin story out of my head and offloaded somehow so it doesn’t rattle around anymore, popping up unexpectedly in the most intrusive ways.
Photography and words, whether they be prose, poetry or non-fiction, have been my primary means of creation for so many years. That and food. There is so much that can be conveyed through the creation of food, for me mostly the good stuff of love, comfort and helping to keep body and soul together. Lately though I’ve been drifting towards more tangible means of translating the inside world to the outer one through the creation of tiny worlds.
I’ve only managed to finish up two so far (Tiny Study and Horgon8) but there are at least 3 more tiny worlds plotted out to greater or lesser extent in my big red book. I refuse to let myself start the next world until I finish what’s already three quarters of the way done (I’m looking at you Tiny Cliff) because otherwise I’d never finish anything. Coming up with ideas is never a problem, neither is starting them. It’s always the finishing up where I fall flat.
Bouncing around is allowed in the more practical creative endeavors like mending or making a pair of functional potholders. (recently realized that my favorite potholders were coming up on 25 years? so it wasn’t unreasonable that they’re falling apart to the point of being unusable). There I allow myself to work on what mind and body desire and can handle in the moment.
It took a while (like two years while) to figure out how to build the tiny figures I need to finish up Tiny Cliff. Turns out I’m working in something that is probably 1:500 scale. Wish I’d figured that out sooner but most of that time was just the issue churning around in the back of my head, not ass in seat, hands on the project.
Now I have to actually put in the time, ass in seat hands on the project to finish it up. That’s always difficult when mind and body have to be both able and willing at the same time.
But words count, right?
Why do I create what I create?
To bring order to my chaos while sharing it with the world outside my head.
The youngling and I recently attended the annual ConnectiCon and has a blast as usual. We masked at con wherever possible because that’s what we do now. We both have health issues and try to avoid picking up every little bug. It’s just our lives now. Going into the store or school? Put on a mask. We went to a post funeral dinner in a restaurant last fall and it felt strange to be out in public, sitting next to people, without a mask. For people like us it’s not paranoia, just common sense.
Driving to and from con every day wipes me out, as well as all the walking and the people, so I stocked the fridge and pantry beforehand so I wouldn’t have to go to a store afterwards and planned on working at home for the week. Even the laundry was caught up, a practical miracle when one doesn’t have a dryer and it’s hot and humid in the summer.
The Monday after con I was fine. A bit tired and sore but that was to be expected. Tidied up the chaos of a busy four days and sent the youngling off to her father’s for the usual weekly custody change. Woke up Tuesday feeling like crap but figured it was con crud or maybe the ever changing weather, or how about both? Looked up Covid symptoms on my phone because that’s where my anxiety ridden brain goes since December 2019 but the listed symptoms didn’t quite align with what I was experiencing so I shoved down the anxiety hamsters and told them to take a nap because damn was I tired.
Spent three days, including my birthday day, on the couch. Sorta ate when I could manage to get myself up. Went through an entire box of tissues in 24 hours. Part of my pre-con stock up was finally buying Dune part 2 and The Mandalorian seasons 1 & 2 for post-con recovery binge watching. At least the brain was entertained while the body rested.
The youngling returned on Thursday. She didn’t feel great either but we both figured it was a melody of maladies just ganging up on her.
As the weekend came up I saw that the upcoming week was going to be rain on and off and some really intense heat. The garlic we planted last fall really needed to be harvested before it rotted in the ground. It probably should have been done weeks ago but we were both busy with con crunch and work. The cukes and peppers were buried in weeds. Had it really been since June since I’ve weeded? Bad urban homesteader, bad.
So I spent three hours on Saturday in the heat at the community garden. Got the garlic up, planted the zucchini babies I’d started a couple of months ago in the now empty space, excavated the other half of the bed from the weeds. The poor peppers and cukes were so damn sad. Went through 64 oz of water while at the garden and polished off a fair amount of cream soda when I returned to the house. I’d washed and hung all my bed linens before going over so those had to be pulled from the line and the bed made. Then there was a well needed shower and dinner to make.
Same bed as the picture above, just 3 hours later. Don’t worry, they all perked up after some water.
Sure I felt like shit and sat down every 5-15 minutes but it all got done. My peasant ancestors on both sides should be proud.
Sunday was another 3 loads of laundry and when the youngling said something about body aches and pains something clicked and I pulled out the Covid tests.
Both of us managed to avoid testing positive over 4 years of plague. There’s been a couple of exposures but we’d always managed to doge the virus. Once she tested positive I took my own test and it was popping up with that second line before 5 minutes had even passed let alone the recommended 15.
We knew that this was a possibility before going to con. It’s a hellava lot of people. Beforehand we both checked with our doctors that we had the right boosters and we masked as much as possible. Due to the timing I’m thinking I’m the one who caught it and then gave it to her.
Talk about maternal guilt.
There’s been a lot of talk about how this new variant is extremely contagious and how another wave is sweeping through. Under every article I see on social media there’s the laugh reactions and the comments about how it must be an election year and how the pharmaceutical execs must need a new yacht. It’s all just a joke now, right?
There’s less often an article or even a comment about people like us who never stopped masking in crowds and stores, who worry about the possible long terms effects when we eventually become infected. People who have disappeared from public life to one extent or another because they have varying levels of acceptable risk. The youngling and I are not even all that bad off compared to some and it’s still a strange no man’s land that we now exist in.
While spending a couple of days on the couch, in between binge watching whatever, we spent a lot of time talking. The death of Dad3 came up and I mentioned that if he had to go before he and us were ready at least he died before the plague. He wouldn’t have dealt with lockdown well and while he was sick we were able to gather and support each other for that long, harrowing month at the hospital. We were able to be there when he died. We were able to mourn together, everything from packing into the funeral directors office to write the obituary as a family to holding a wake where we needed police to control the traffic. My hand was held or I was hugged by literally hundreds of people who came to pay their respects. Yeah we all ended up with a cold afterwards but the odds were against us and we weren’t worried about getting anything worse than the flu.
Can’t even imagine taking that kind of risk now.
So we took our chances with con and plague is now upon us. We sit here on the couch trying to keep the anxiety hamsters under control as we wait to see what our fates will be.
I’m cautiously optimistic because I’m 7+ days out but I’m still waiting to see if this wakes up my underlying pneumonia. The youngling has her own anxiety hamsters to squash down but she’s an adult now and handling them well.
All we can do is wait and hope it passes without causing permanent harm
I let Greg up on the couch last night so the youngling could have the comfort of the orange boi. She needed him more than I needed not to want to claw my eyes out from allergies.
That’s what love is.
Do those laughing emoji people with their snarky comments know what that is?
Never saw a firefly until I was an adult and I certainly never expected to see them dancing in the middle of the city.
Living on .07 acres in an urban environment, there’s more concrete, asphalt and buildings than dirt. The house is 20’x40′ on the first floor. There’s a 900 square foot garage on 3 sides of the property line in back and an asphalt driveway. What little open space there is in the back has been covered with years of mulberry mush and somewhere underneath there’s the remnants of a brick patio.
Most of what little dirt there is I covered up with landscaping fabric to keep the feral cats from using it as a litter box. When we lived next door, there was a pretty sizable colony that just formed over the years. Then the local cat rescue people came through to help out the colony. They put down a few due to feline leukemia and kitty aids to prevent them from suffering. The ones that could be socialized were adopted out. The most recent batch of kittens went down that path. A few truly feral cats were returned to the site with our permission.
Princess Kitty had her kittens in the compost pile. Look at that little face!
For many years they did their thing and we did ours. They really only wandered through on one mysterious errand or another. Then my ex decided that I needed to start feeding them after he moved out.
He took 2/3 of the household income with him and thought that was a good time to be dropping off a 20 lb bag of Meow Mix so that I could feed the ferals. Really dude? But I am a softie and the core group was getting up there in years.
There was Bob the brown tabby, Nero the void, Mr Fluffy a grey and white monster who lived up to his name. The queen was Princess Kitty, named by a four year old in the full grip of princessmania. She was a calico and the largest of the bunch. It was her batch of kittens that were socialized and adopted out.
PK in her young mama days.
So I started feeding them and kept on doing it. At first they would stay pretty far away and wait for us to go back into the house before coming to eat. Over the years they got more comfortable with us but they were still feral. PK let me pet her head on my birthday once. Best gift that year.
Eventually I set up a couple of plastic tote shelters. They’re double walled and insulated and wrapped in those silver thermal sheets. They’ve had many winters in there. We even deliver the food to them when the weather gets bad if possible. If the snow is deep we put it on our back steps and they will come that close to eat. Neither I nor the youngling are going to shovel across the yard to the shelters under the garage awning. The kitty trails just aren’t wide enough for us.
Even before the lure of dry kibble we had a fair number of critters wandering about. There was always the occasional opossum, skunk and Chuck the groundhog lived in the yard next door. The ferals would occasionally leave us a gift of a headless snake or mouse carcass. The raccoons spend early summer getting drunk off the mulberries that ferment in the puddle on the garage roof. It’s hysterical to hear them chittering, fighting and throwing each other off the roof, especially at 3 a.m. I’m up anyway so why not enjoy the show.
Princess Kitty became eternal this past winter. In true feral fashion she just left one night, never to return. We had been having problems with a new feral, Hank, who was trying to take over the shelters. We were down to just PK and Nero so they weren’t able to fend him off. We did what we could, but we couldn’t be there all the time to run him off.
I think PK was just sick of his shit. Sick of shit in general. I can completely understand that. She’d had problems with her left front paw that eventually cleared up. When she started having dental issues and couldn’t comfortably chew the dry kibble, I started feeding her wet food. That really perked her up for a few years.
She was so old though. So tired. I hear you kitty. Her last couple of years she just hung out in her shelter, slept and emerged for breakfast, dinner and the occasional walkabout.
15 for a feral is about double their expected lifespan. I hope her end was warm and peaceful. I hope all our ends are the same.
Hank and Nero eventually came to an understanding. They were even able to be side by side in the shelters during the worst of the weather. They both wander a lot though. Haven’t seen Hank in a couple of weeks and Nero was last here when there was a crazy racoon in the yard. It was late afternoon and the racoon was looking everywhere for food. He even went into my clothespin bag that was on the retaining wall ledge and chewed up a couple of pins. The youngling and I watched his antics from inside. Usually raccoons are heard, not seen, because they come after dark. I went out to rescue the pins and it ran into one of the cat shelters and was hiding about as well as a toddler.
The gnawed pins will live forevermore on the clothespin bag.
We left it in peace and it was just hanging out in the shelter. The next time I went to check the fireflies were out. They live in the rotted woodpile up against the fence. Once upon a time I used to sit out in the backyard and burn things in a fire bowl. Now it’s a urban oasis for all sorts of interesting things so I just leave it alone.
I was inside the house, looking out the back window, watching the fireflies dance and the racoon was across the yard doing the same.
Am I finally evolving into the bog witch I always wanted to be? My favorite place to play as a tween was in the swamp behind our suburban house. Here’s me, just hanging out with my racoon friend, watching the fireflies.
For the past week it’s been life under the heat dome, a hot and humid nightmare. The last few days it’s even been doing that Florida thing of the heat and humidity building up during the day till the air can’t take anymore and then afternoon monsoons. Afterwards, the heat and humidity return tenfold. Eww.
We’re lucky enough to have a couple of window ac units. The central air died during the plague years and I don’t have the $12K to replace it. This has led to an odd existence during a heatwave. Moving about the house from somewhere reasonable to disgusting, to an area that will be decent in a few hours when it’s time to go to bed because we just turned on the ac unit. It’s better than nothing so we cope.
After about a week it starts to get really stuffy inside though. The air is stale and everything is sticky. I don’t like sticky.
This morning a new front blew through and had cooler and drier air behind it. I opened up every door and window to blow out the hot and sticky. Washed all my bedding, changed the sheets and was even able to get another 2 loads washed, hung and reasonably dry on the clothesline because of the stiff breeze.
When I was pulling the white sheets off the line there were these long, oblong bugs on them. I shook them off before bundling it into the basket. When the firefly show started up again a couple of hours later I realized that’s what they were. The mosquitos aren’t out tonight because it’s too windy but I guess that doesn’t bother the fireflies.
So I stood there in the window, watching them dance. Enjoying the cool breeze and thinking about the hot shower and stiff, clean sheets to come.
Once upon a time, in another life, my 3rd floor, raw attic space was finished off with Sheetrock and carpeting and became a bedroom. Then when it was no longer needed as such it became storage space for things that wouldn’t be happy stored in the damp basement, especially the craft supplies. There were vague thoughts of making it a crafting space but nothing definite. It was more of a case of lets put all these associated things in one place and we’ll eventually figure out what to actually do with them.
Paints and other liquids are in the former kid crafting drawer in the kitchen to keep them from drying out or exploding but everything else found it way up two flights of stairs and got dumped on the floor, in drawers, in piles and boxes.
There were things from the basement next door where we used to live. Things from my years of creating in this house that were found literally all over the house from the dining room table, to a dresser in my bedroom, bags and bins in the basement and everywhere in between. There were supplies the eldest left behind, things from my mother’s horde and items that found their way to us from the girls Bonus Mom and from her mother.
As the crafting items came together in one place, it became obvious that there would need to be a serious effort undertaken to get them organized. The eldest helped out with a pre-sort of the supplies before she fled back to her life across the pond but the bulk of the work was left undone. I worked in the space con crunching last year late into the night (it’s slightly cooler in the evening after the sun is off the roof) but it was a chaotic work space that annoyed me to no end. When I was done I unplugged and drained the iron, shut the door behind me and walked away for 10 months except for occasional trips up the stairs for something in particular for a small project or repair.
Early spring of this year, the youngling asked if she and a friend could do their con crunching in the crafting aerie. They’re cosplaying two characters from the same universe and wanted to work together. We have the space so why not? My only condition was that we organize and clean it up first. Not everyone is as comfortable creating in chaos as I am.
So may piles, boxes and bins to sort through.
So we spent several weekends up there, sorting, storing, organizing and trying to figure out where to put what. Should the pliers go with the jewelry making items since that’s what I use them for or is it better to just put all the tools together? Should the yarn be sorted by color, fiber or weight? Why do I have two boxes of 500 glue sticks each? Where did this, whatever the hell it is, come from? So on and so forth. Decision fatigue was an ever present foe to conquer.
Eventually it was done enough that items could be found again and like was with like. The youngling even vacuumed the floor.
Mostly done. I don’t feel like walking up two flights of stairs for a more done pic.
The last two things to be done were organizing all the thread/floss not sewing (all the sewing stuff is in the red desk under the sewing machine) and the buttons.
I took on the thread/floss as I’m more patient untangling thread. There was a fair amount to be sorted through and now all the items of a similar size are together. We also needed to incorporate the floss collection from Bonus Mom’s mother. Most of it was already wound up on bobbins with the DMC number attached.
I’ve only heard good things about Zoomie. My girls never met her as she passed before Bonus Mom and their father married but she’s still fondly remembered in a way that’s incomprehensible to a person with my particular flavor of upbringing.
I was happy to add a bit of her craft horde to ours. Loved the way she was tidy and organized. Even if the thread is decades old, as long as the thread has its DMC number attached it can be used with a pattern that was just created.
We have these handy dandy floss winders to help move the floss from the hank it’s purchased in to the bobbins where we box and store them. While working with Zoomie’s floss I realized that if I used the floss winder I couldn’t put the numbers on the bobbins like she did.
So I hand wound it just like her. It seemed right to take the hanks she passed down and prep them the same way she did.
For several nights I sat on the couch watching movies, imagining Zoomie doing the same thing in her time. It was a surprisingly sweet thought. I’m not used to those when thinking about the past.
Craft hordes and creating as a way of contact and connection with those who came before.
I’m guessing she wasn’t watching alien invasion apocalypse movies though. We all have to put our own spin on things after all.
Except for one Star Trek convention my best friend and I went to in high school (it was right downtown, a bus ride away so why the hell not go?) I came to con life later in life. An ex convinced me to go to the local one (local takes on a new meaning once one has a drivers license and car) in 2013 and I fell in love. A bit terrified by the crowds (not a fan) but absolutely loving the ability to be surrounded by fellow nerds and oddballs of all flavors and universes. With a couple of years off for plague I’ve been going for more than a decade and over the years have increasingly dipped my toe into the cosplay pool.
The youngling and I did a Chihiro and No Face cosplay in 2019 in The Before Times. Even got to have Jim Butcher sign his latest while in my 8′ tall costume. By the end of the day I was covered in bruises from the backpack I had the entire getup rigged onto and lost so much in water weight that my pants kept falling off the next day. It was totally worth it.
It was so much damn fun, wandering around the con, offering people gold coins (foil wrapped chocolate – con is one of the few place it’s okay to accept candy from strangers) and having them react as if we were in Ghibli’s universe. Even just leaning on a solid surface to catch my breath for a few and then startling people when they came around a corner and saw me. Adam Savage talked about this suspension of disbelief and immersion into another universe in a TED talk. He also did No Face and had a similar experience in that some people were excited to see a beloved character and others were deeper into the lore and refused the gold as it’s bad luck to take it from a spirit.
2023 was our first year back and I wanted to take it a bit easier on the cosplay (No Face needs a serious upgrade to make it a bit more wearer friendly and I did some serious damage to it during that day’s wearing. Can’t recall how many times the hem got caught in the escalators) so I went with a haori jacket inspired by the moss suit in Animal Crossing. I’d been playing it a lot that year and love moss so it seemed like a logical enough cosplay.
As often happens with projects, I started late and didn’t completely finish up in time for con. Since I’d never drafted a pattern, made a muslin and then a final jacket this wasn’t a big surprise but I was still disappointed. I wore it, but without the Animal Crossing logo on the back as intended, I’m not sure how recognizable it was. I did get a lot of work done on the logo at con so at least my hands were kept busy. Eh, at least the jacket was comfortable.
We buy our membership for the next con as soon as they’re available right after con (that’s when it’s cheapest) and they send you updates and announcements throughout the year. A few weeks back they sent a friendly reminder that con is in 100 days. The youngling has already informed me that once her coursework is done for the semester, her and a friend will be crunching hard to get their Genshin Impact costumes done in time. Friend will be living here during the con (they’re riding back and forth with us) and possibly before as well while they work on things. Whatever, working on costumes is definitely more wholesome than what I was up to at their age.
Last year at the end of con, freshly showered and curled up on the couch exhausted, I jotted down some thoughts on how to make next year go a bit better. “Feed the youngling on time” otherwise things go south quickly and “take a couple of days at the beginning of the week afterwards as recovery time” were logical enough and I might have remembered even without writing it down. The big one though was “Finish up cosplay in advance. Don’t start the con tired” would be all too easy to ignore. I’ve always been the all-nighter type (looking at you 2019 No Face – finished up around 2 am and then was up at 9 am to leave for the day) but the aging body doesn’t agree with this m.o. anymore.
So I pulled out the haori jacket from where it’s been mashed into a ball on the craft table since last year to assess what remains to get it to done. It definitely needs a wash and ironing. The logo is so close to being ready to attach to the back. And then there’s the idea that’s been rolling around for a couple of years of converting my generic Browncoat cosplay into a full on Jayne Cobb complete with cunning hat and Vera his favorite gun.
What exactly can I get done in the next couple of months? The vision always exceeds my reach but con crunch is part of the fun.
Sometimes, when the world is literally burning, flooding or otherwise turning to shit, I just have to retreat to shore up the internal defenses before venturing out to do battle once again. I’m not unique in this and in this day and age of virtual connectivity it’s easier than ever to keep one toe in the world while remaining physically separate from it. My home is my castle yada yada and all my stuff is here and I like the quiet so why bother with the wider world when its turned so inhospitable?
If I’m going to be surrounded by the same four walls might as well make sure that things are functioning the way they need to and if there’s a problem with something why not make it better? The William Morris concept of “Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful” can’t really apply to everything but why not bump the numbers up where possible? Marie Kondo and her idea of household items sparking joy is just a modern iteration of this.
I spend a fair amount of time at my desk and while it’s chaotic it works for me. I’m not in here every day or always while the sun is up so Hortense needs to live between the curtain and window so it can get the full sun necessary for growth. When the plant first took up residence in this spot I unfortunately knocked the first few nublings of growth off moving the curtain back and forth. So I took a chunk of tissue box and taped it to the pot as a shield. Useful yes but deeply unattractive and not even all that functional as the tape holding the cardboard onto the pot popped off on a regular basis.
More thought than I want to admit to went into a possible solution as a replacement for the taped on cardboard shield. I wanted something functional but not ugly. Nothing purchased because that was just silly. Something homemade from scraps made the most sense but what?
I was wandering through YouTube one night and came across a post about the Chicago rat hole and the concept of #dumbart. Not everything needs to be deep and full of meaning. Sometimes I just want to create and have fun with it and that’s okay. Between this and a recent conversation with the eldest about castles in Scotland the concept of a castle for Hortense was born. What better way to protect it from the depredations of the curtain?
Using some thin cardboard packaging I managed to force into a curved shape and with the thin chipboard of a file folder box I made an insane number of rounded edged blocks in two sizes, larger for the floor and slightly smaller for the walls.
Getting the flat chipboard to adhere to the curved surface took a bit of figuring out. The little buggers kept popping off. Tape is our friend and held things in place till the glue dried. The tape pulled a bit of the chipboard surface off when removed but once sealed and painted it just added to the texture and made it look less like a file folder box and slightly more like dressed stone.
Several layers of Mod Podge, paint and sawdust flocking later and Hortense has yet another new home. This one will keep it safe and in the sun, hopefully for years to come and I now have something more attractive than a ratty tissue box bit to look at on my desk.
Sometimes you just need to make dumb art that makes you smile.
The battles of the world can wait for another day.
In the never ending quest to Tidy Things Up I was updating my website binder. I’m old school so things are printed out as I post them (not the social media stuff – too many dead trees!) and popped into a binder.
It’s been awhile since I’ve updated the blasted thing. Lots of major life events – so many dead, plague, job loss (and there went the color printer) so I spent a bit of time the other day, leafing through things and punching a lot of holes in paper.
I didn’t realize my first post was at the tail end of 2013. It covered the misadventures of a family of 5 and navigating the holidays. Never would have imagined then that I’d be where I am today. Down to 1 part time housemate. Single and thanking the gods for that. Otherwise he would have met an untimely death during lock down. I’m on the firmest financial footing of my life thanks to a combination of luck (strange to call my mother dying some of the best luck in my life) and being willing to sacrifice immediate pleasures for future good – whatever that entails.
How very strange and varied the changes that can happen in a decade, personal and otherwise. It’s been an interesting life and an interesting time in history to live it. It would have been nice if things had been a bit more boring all the way around but one finds peace where you can.
a woman whose main occupation is caring for her family, managing household affairs, and doing housework, while her husband or partner goes out to work.
a small case for needles, thread, and other small sewing items.
A while ago I realized that there’s an awful lot of sewing that should be happening in this household. Things that need repair, small sewn items that would make daily life easier, so on and so forth. The main issue that’s keeping me from this necessary work is that I generally do such work parked on the couch with the tv running and the sewing supplies are two flights of stairs away. Who wants to trudge up two flights of stairs and then down again when you’re warm and comfy on the couch?
I’ve tried keeping supplies in a Ziploc bag but they’re ugly and plastic should be used only when absolutely necessary. Save the planet and all. But I can’t just leave a needle and thread out or it’ll disappear and someone will get hurt. It’s not a baby or small child anymore I’m keeping sharp, pointy things away from but a not-so-small furry creature. Gregory specifically. He loves to steal sewing supplies. He can unwind a spool of thread faster than a sewing machine.
I thought about the options beyond a plastic bag. There are sewing baskets but none of them really struck my fancy and I really didn’t feel like laying money out for one. There’s the classic Schrodinger’s cookie tin option. Does it contain cookies? Buttons? Sewing supplies? That would be a free option and there are appropriately sized tins in the house but it would all just be thrown in and I wanted a bit of organization if possible.
So I stepped back into history a bit and decided to make a housewife. I’ve dealt with them in collections before. They were usually quickly made for a specific purpose, generally sending a soldier off to war and on the small size. I wanted something a bit bigger, a bit more customized. And if I was going to spend time making something from scratch, the materials used might as well have some sort of meaning behind them beyond being scraps that I pulled from the crafting horde.
Creative projects get jotted down in my big red blank book so I started there with ideas and what I wanted the housewife to actually hold. That led to a paper pattern and playing with the tools that would go in it and how big pockets needed to be to hold them. The next step was digging through the bins and drawers of fabric scraps to find bits and bobs that were the right size and would go together in a colorful, pattern filled way. I had a large enough piece of fabric to do the outside of the housewife and spent many nights doing French knots and beading to make it a bit more interesting and colorful.
Please excuse the cat hair. It’s everywhere.
Fabric was purchased second hand for the interior lining and binding edge (LOVE YOU ECOWORKS!) but that was only a couple of dollars. I also purchased thread for the binding because one of the things I learned as part of this project was that a well matched thread makes stitches disappear and the blues I had on hand weren’t quite right. I spent less than $10 on the entire project and used up a fair number of scraps that otherwise might have just ended up in the recycling. That’s a good thing.
I also learned that 90% of sewing is actually done with an iron. Every time I considered whether or not to press something before sewing I would hear the eldest in my head yelling at me to go upstairs and spend 5 minutes with the iron. Another lessons learned is that slow and steady makes for fewer mistakes. If it took me a week to get a pocket just right, so what? I also need to go back to kindergarten and work on cutting straight lines. I’m bad at it, even when I’m going slow and steady. When I messed up cutting even using a straight edge and rotary cutter I just had to laugh. It’s either that or scream and I’d much rather laugh.
When I finished up the housewife the other day I recorded it in my red project book. It annoyed me when I put in the end date and realized I’ve been working on it since August. Why the f did it take so long? It’s just a sewing kit. A roll with pockets tied with a ribbon. But then I look at it, use it and it’s so much more. It’s the brown twill fabric that a work friend found and brought in because she knows the eldest sews. The eldest then turned around a made a quilted skirt and dapper hat with the yardage. I bound the edges of that pocket with scraps trimmed from the hem of her wedding gown. The ribbon that ties it all together is from her bouquet. The pocket that holds thread and other notions is made from the same fabric as the curtain that I made for the youngling’s closet. The yellow floral print came from my mother’s fabric stash (c1975) that the eldest used when teaching the youngling how to sew a pinafore. Even the tiny scraps I used to stuff the pin cushion have a deeper meaning. Of course that took a while to pull together.
So many tiny stitches.
Recently I caught up my office calendar that deals with creator name stuff. I mark when and what I post about to remind myself of what I’ve done so I don’t repeat too often I could do endless posts about the dumbass way Greg has chosen to hide or what I ate. Trying to ride that fine line between interesting and idiotic and writing it all down helps.
So, the calendar has been flipped to April since April 2023 because I’ve been busy. As I updated the calendar the other night, marking things down I realize that I’ve actually been rather consistent about posting and that a lot of wonderful things happened in 2023.
Finally finished up Tiny Study and it was accepted for a gallery show.
A tiny preying mantis friend made an appearance in my urban driveway before moseying along.
I saw Jupiter from my front porch.
So what it took 6 months to make a housewife. The making was an experience in and of itself and now I get to use it and see it every day on the table next to my side of the couch.
The little things of life can be so heartbreakingly beautiful if one only slows down enough to see it.
I’m not going to unduly whine and tell you about my lifelong hatred of summer before I get to the damn not-recipe recipe so here it is.
Pasta of your choice and availability, cooked and cooled.
Veggies, I used green peppers, cucumbers and finely chopped red onion.
Greek style salad dressing. I’ve been liking Ken’s Steak House Greek dressing these days.
Bulgarian white cheese. It’s softer than feta and has a milder flavor so those who still have intact taste buds might like it better. Feta will work here as well but you won’t get the creamy effect with mixing that the Bulgarian white cheese gives you.
Grill some chicken. I sprinkled mine with some Penzy’s Turkish seasoning before throwing it on the grill. Rough chop the chicken once it’s cooked and cooled.
Combine all the above and add a splash of lemon juice for extra zing and salt and pepper as desired.
Skip the chicken to make it vegetarian. Add more and different veggies as desired. Olives would be a classic to add to this but no one here likes the fatty little globes. It’s a pasta salad, make of it what you will. The Bulgarian white cheese is really the key to it. Tastes even better the second day.
Which is really good because the only thing I hate more than summer is having to cook when it’s hot.
This post got lost in my draft folder from Spring 2021 but I still like it so why not post it.
Several weeks after my mother died I finally made it to her house to sort through her hoarder paradise. It was a house I’d never been to before, hadn’t seen in any pictures so it was a foreign place in that respect but it was full of things my mother had been dragging about for decades and smelled like her.
I stumbled in, late at night, after driving 1300 miles by myself over two days. I’d never traveled so far by myself let alone during a pandemic I was at high risk of dying from. My aunt had been kind enough to leave some lights on and warned me that the front door stuck. So I yeeted my things onto the kitchen table after I cleared it off, took a hot shower in the nasty smelling sulfur water and collapsed into the bed my grandmother once slept in.
The next month was non-stop sorting, chucking and packing, in a strange house alone. There were a couple of trips to the grocery store that had surprisingly little food, a trip to the lawyer to prove who I was and set the legal process in motion and an uncomfortable trip to the funeral home to pick up her ashes but otherwise it was just me, the house and lots of stuff.
I don’t mind being alone but this was extreme isolation, even for me.
Standing at the kitchen sink, looking out the window, wondering if there was anyone else out there alive (seems people in the Florida panhandle don’t go outside much in the summer, it’s just too damn hot) I noticed that there was a spot of green on the windowsill. It was a tiny little chunk of plant that had been left behind by my aunt when she rescued the houseplants before I arrived.
The nubbling was from a plant my mother had for years. She had acquired the original nubbin sometime around the time my eldest was born in the mid 90’s. I was working for the family business at the time and remember her showing up with this scrap of plant that she actually managed to root. In time I took a nubbin from the plant and it’s upstairs safe from the cats behind my bedroom door. Seems it’s a delicious plant.
This nubbling on the window ledge in Florida was still green even though it had been a month or more since it had fallen off the mother plant. I was avoiding dragging another bag of garbage to the curb so I found a container, scooped some dirt out of the yard and planted it.
The rest of the time I was there it lived on the nightstand next to my bed. It felt good to know that there was something alive in the house beside myself and the palmetto bugs. I named it Hortense for no particular reason and started every day by saying good morning and ended every night by saying good night.
The dirt from the yard was horrible stuff that packed right down into hardpan but luckily I found an open bag of potting soil in the garage that was too full of literal garbage to ever fit a car. Hortense didn’t do much growing while I was spending my time chucking and sorting but at least it didn’t die and seemed to even get a bit plumper and more green with the new surroundings.
Driving back to New England I kept Hortense in the cup holder right next to me and brought it into the hotel when I stopped for the night. I didn’t want it to fry in the hot car or get lost in all that I was bringing back.
I stopped for food in New Jersey because even though I was only a few hours from home I knew I wouldn’t make it through NYC without sustenance. Bolting back onto the highway from the rest stop I pulled a fry from the container and accidentally knocked Hortense over. It fell down between the seat and the console and disappeared into the darkness of the car. I pulled over on the ramp and looked for Hortense but couldn’t find it in amongst all the chaos. I figured it was gone.
It seemed silly to cry over a plant nubbling even as I was doing it but sometimes it’s easier to cry over the silly things. If I cried over the big things I’d never stop.
Once I arrived home, the youngling and her father, all of us masked because I’d been traveling through plague country, helped me unload the car. It was horrible to not be able to hug her after a month away but I was in quarantine for two weeks to make sure I hadn’t brought anything deadly back. Once the car was empty and I was alone again, I did a hard target search of every nook, cranny and dark space of the car looking for Hortense.
I found it, replanted it for a third time and put it in a place of honor, and good sun, on my desk.
A few months after we got home, Hortense started to produce a little bud right on top. I was so excited to see proof of life. Tragedy struck again when I knocked off the bud when opening the curtain so we could share the sun. So I took a piece of cardboard and built a shield to protect any future buds from the curtain and my clumsiness.
The other day the girls and I went to the garden center for the first time in over a year. It’s time for pansies and lettuce and it’s a safe place for a socially distanced outing. I’d noticed the other day that Hortense had four buds on top and I wanted a new pot for it. Found a purple one I liked but then the eldest picked up a beautiful cobalt blue one for only a couple of dollars more. So I bought the blue pot, proper succulent potting soil and lots of pansies.
It’s Easter and the younglings are with their father for a few hours so I figured it was as good a time as any to re-pot Hortense. The day before I’d found some pretty rocks to put in the bottom of the pot for drainage and a bit of landscaping fabric to keep the dirt where it belongs. I snuggled it into its new home and gave it a good drink.
Now we’re sitting here at my desk, the window cracked for a bit of fresh spring air and Hortense is settled into its new home. Adventures hopefully over for the near future.
I looked up the meaning of Hortense, its from Latin and means gardener.
Can’t think of a better name for a plant. Maybe someday it’ll grow into the name.
April 2021 and February 2022 – growth, however slow, is still growth
