The sleep of a champion
He got home from CrossFit yesterday around noon and came into the bedroom to see if I was awake yet. “Hm, she’s not in bed and she’s not in the bathroom or living room, so where is she…? Oh. There she is.” Sometimes I’m asked how I can regularly sleep in until noon or 1:00 or sometimes even 2:00 in the afternoon when I’m catching up on sleep. It’s pure skill, people, it’s pure natural talent that can’t be taught.
Red apron for swap
My partner for the Cheap Hot Mama Apron Swap requested “RED<RED<RED<” and chose the Wild and Crazy theme. We were supposed to use only things we already had, thus the Cheap part of the title, and red is not one of my main stash colors. I could do anything with a blue or green request, and I was struggling with finding enough red for her. I pulled out my few pieces of reddish fabric and let them sit for a few weeks. Several days before the deadline I remembered a new full apron I won in a contest last fall and I decided to refashion it.
The pictures make the apron look more orange than it really is. The ruffle is a shimmery sheer orange and the rest is red. I covered one of the existing pockets with a darker red print and did two bands of tomato across the top and bottom. I used the original apron’s narrow ties. It’s the first apron I’ve made for a swap that’s not lined or reversible. When taking a picture I was asked, “What theme did she want,’gaudy’?” I said she requested “wild and crazy”. “Ah, that works too,” he said.
Sewing Room Progress! Plus fabric drawers
I worked in my sewing room tonight for almost two hours, unpacking several bags and boxes of what turned out to be a lot of garbage. I found a picture of me from senior year of college looking softer around the edges than I realized at the time — 15+ extra pounds will do that to a woman who is 5′2″. I also found quite a few stamped addressed envelopes with nothing in them. Apparently I planned to send a lot of letters whatever year stamps were 37 cents and didn’t follow through with all of them.
I put away the goodies I won in a Confessions of a Sewing Dork giveaway awhile ago. As I picked up the fabric, I experienced a twinge of anxiety as to where I would file it. With the yellows because of its chartreuse background, or with the purple because of the print? When I opened my drawer I saw the fabric and said out loud, “Oh!” in delight. For some reason, the yellows and purples were right next to each other in the drawer! I didn’t have to choose! It was so perfect! Perfect for today, anyway, I’ll do a rainbow-order update of the drawers before the end of the 28 Day Organizing Challenge.
In other news, I found a lone unwrapped Swedish Fish in a sack of old papers and cds, sitting in the collection of lint and occasional dog hair at the bottom of the bag. It had been there for at least 18 months. After much consideration, I did not eat it. Barely.
New swap apron!
I received a delightful apron from Ruth in the latest Hot Mamas apron swap. I wore the apron that very same day — within an hour of opening my package, actually — while making cupcakes and I didn’t want to post about it until it was out of the laundry pile and ready for a picture. It’s a perfect apron for me: vibrant colors with a precise ruffle at the bottom and simple as I like it (not a lot of unnecessary frippery mucking things up with cutesy-ness) and I know I’ll use it frequently in the kitchen. I love the red fabric. As a certain man said, “It looks like an apron a dinosaur might wear,” meaning the pebbled pattern could be the skin of a dinosaur. It even looks good with my workout clothes, short socks and all.
In addition to the apron she gave me a set of salt & pepper shakers, a votive candle, and a bag of Lindor truffles. I set them on an open shelf in the kitchen and I looked forward to enjoying the chocolates as a fancy treat when I wanted an indulgence. Several days later I picked up the bag to find it already open and half empty. I walked into the office and asked, “Did you open my bag of chocolates from the swap?”
He looked around at the empty wrappers strewn across his desk. “…Yes. I thought you didn’t want them because you hadn’t opened them yet.”
“I do want some, so don’t eat them all, ok?” I said.
“Ok,” he agreed, before excitement got the better of him and he continued, ” The yellow ones are white chocolate and the red wrappers are milk chocolate and the blue ones are a darker milk chocolate and they’re all truffles, all of them, within creamy chocolate filling inside!”
Yes, they were all truffles. I liked the white chocolate ones the best. Thank you Ruth, from both of us!
Sewing room curtains!
I made some curtains for my sewing room using a twin-size flat sheet that was on sale for $3.50 at Ikea. I am generously calling this a refashion because hey, these sheets are up in my window instead of on my bed so it sure sounds like I did some refashioning from their original purpose, doesn’t it? I didn’t even have to hem anything, I used the side and bottom hems from the original sheet.
My sewing room used to have blinds. It stopped having blinds the day I pulled on the string to open or close them and the whole thing came crashing down on me. That was awhile ago, last spring I think, and since then I’ve simply let anybody who goes down the street at night look into my window and see whatever I’m doing in there. They can see in during the day too just without as much visibility. I tried to keep the sewing room door closed so that passerby wouldn’t get an eyeful of anybody walking through the hallway, coming out of the bathroom right there after a shower, for example.
After I had already put up the curtains I realized that the bottom was creased in a few places and they weren’t hanging right. I didn’t want to deal with taking them down, yet again, so I taped some quarters to the bottom on the backside to weigh it down. Working beautifully so far.
The second picture shows that I took the doors off the closet on Sunday, see the empty hinges on the left side of the closet? They were just getting in the way because I never had them closed, and after the 28 Day Organizing Challenge is done at the end of February the closet will be organized and beautiful and won’t need any doors to hide behind anyway.
28 Day Organizing Challenge: Before Pictures
Remember the Great Space Clean-Up of 2009? Yeah, that didn’t work out so well. There was a narrow band of time that showed improvement, followed by a relapse to possibly greater depths. I’m trying again, this time with a shorter time window, the possibility of prizes, and the knowledge that others just like me are tackling their own spaces, small and large. I’ve joined Org Junkie’s 28 Day Organizing Challenge. Here are the Before pictures of my sewing room. (If you want to see a trash pile in more detail, click on a picture for a bigger version.)
Jewelry display frame
I made a jewelry frame to hold my small collection of earrings and necklaces in the bathroom, using a project from One-Yard Wonders as inspiration. Oh, I just realized I should have taken a Before picture of my jewelry to show the improvement. It used to be a piece of ribbon stuck to the wall with thumbtacks in assorted colors, and before that they usually just lay in a pile on the counter.
I bought a white frame for $1.50 at the Goodwill 50% Off Saturday yesterday then painted it the same color I did the dining chairs last month. I removed the glass, then covered the mat with a layer of batting and simple sea foam green fabric (the same as the back of napkins I made a couple weeks ago) using the same technique as my quickie swap party jewelry board.
Any suggestions on how to reuse the glass I removed from the frame?
Pajama Pants Resizing
I made my gentleman friend a pair of pajama pants for Christmas. Due to an oversight on my part with the amount of fabric I bought, they had an extremely low rise. And they were a bit too short. He ended up with floodwater pajama pants that exposed half of his butt while also being too big around the waist. I could fit one of me in each leg, because they were also huge. Better luck next time, eh? I finally resized the pants to a better fit — a better fit for me, that is! Now I get to wear soft spaceship flannel pjs — I’m wearing them right now, actually — and I’ll try again for him with new fabric.
There’s still extra material around the waist because I simply made the elastic smaller and narrowed the legs without changing the amount of fabric at the waist, so now it’s just more gathered, especially in the back. I added some of the scraps to my new and growing ball of fabric strips, which I will one day turn into a rag rug.
Please-Don’t-Run-Me-Over Vest; also, Half-Marathon!
At CrossFit I usually wear black shorts or yoga capri pants and one of my five black tank tops. We regularly run outside on the quiet back road without a lot of streetlights. There are rarely cars on the street so it’s pretty safe, and at the same time the lack of traffic means drivers aren’t expecting a runner on the side of the road. During this half of the year it’s dark during my usual evening CrossFit session and my workout clothes don’t help with visibility. Yes, my pale pale white skin helps a little, just not enough.
I finally made myself a please-don’t-run-me-over-with-your-car vest with reflective tape on the front and back to throw on before running in the dark. Better safe — and supremely stylish!!! — than sorry, eh. I’m sure any parents reading this approve. I refashioned it from an old long-sleeve t-shirt. The stripes are neon yellow iron-on tape from Joann; you can’t tell that they’re yellow because they’re reflecting in the flash, just like they should.
Getting an ok picture of the back view was surprisingly hard. Either the flesh at the back of my shoulder and armpit area was too fleshy and doughy, or the backs of the arms themselves were thin and stringy with Madonna-esque zombie muscles (how could my arms look soft and doughy in some pictures and thin and stringy in others?), and then when I pretended to run for an action shot it just looked like I was sticking my butt towards the camera and holding my arms weird. “How does this look, is this better?” I asked as I tried a few poses. “It couldn’t hurt to try,” he said. “It’s not like it’s going to be worse!” and we both laughed because it was true.
There’s another reason besides CrossFit that I made a vest to wear when running at night (or in the wee hours of the morning, but let’s not kid ourselves here): I’m now in training for next January’s P.F. Chang’s Rock & Roll Half-Marathon. That’s right, a half-marathon, 13.1 miles. Sometime in the next few weeks I’ll attempt a full mile without walking, for the first time in about 15 years. Yep, I’m pretty sure middle school was the last time I did a full mile, and I’ve never done much more than that. I have almost a full year to add 12 more miles to this first one. There’s a 4-hour cutoff for the half-marathon, which means an 18-minute/mile pace. One of my CrossFit friends said her grandmother has done it, mostly walking, so I should be able to finish. My current uneducated and naive hope is that I’ll be able to aim for 3 hours (~13 min/mi). As the months go by and I get a better idea of how I’m improving and what my walking pace is I can adjust my objectives.
Swap party success!
We had seven women at the swap party on Friday and it was a success. Everybody went home with at least a few items, and three people left with a stuffed garbage bag of new clothes. They made out like bandits. My best items are a jacket and some jeans. The consensus is that I wear my jeans too loose in general and too baggy in the butt specifically. I can’t find the new jeans to take a picture — I think they’re in the bottom of the laundry pile — and I’m told they’re much more flattering. They’re definitely tighter than my usual pairs, at any rate.
I turned a weird maroon crochet below-the-knee skirt with a fringed scalloped bottom hem into a nice skirt to wear to the office. I hadn’t even tried it on during the party and tonight when I picked it up to put in the Goodwill pile I felt that I should give it a try. I chose to listen to my intuition, if you want to call it that, rather than the rational thought that I was considering keeping a weird maroon crochet below-the-knee skirt with a fringed scalloped bottom hem. (Thanks, Jonah Lehrer interview on NPR last Friday!) I didn’t take a Before picture, unfortunately, to show what it looked like before I cut off six inches plus the fringe. I also snipped into the too-tight elastic waist to make it a little more comfortable. The crochet overlay and black lining don’t appear in danger of fraying, so I might not even have to deal with hemming.
I took a black Asian-style dress with the tags still on that looked pretty terrible on all of us in unique and special ways. I plan to cut it apart to make a top for one of my friends who looked great in it on the upper half, and then use the extra material to make a purse or clutch.
Here’s some of the aftermath of the swap party, which I finally got around to cleaning up a little today.
