New Adventures With Sharp Needles

Men are so hard to sew for. Many of them don't have a finely attuned sense of the transcendently adorable. But one does persist in making them gifts. For my father's birthday I made him this bag out of black duck (that's a heavy cotton fabric) with a leather pocket and bird. The bird is legit; he will probably use the bag for bird-watching. I learned quite a bit about sewing with leather, namely that I don't know how to do it. As I sewed, it stretched dramatically. The pocket began as a rectangle and ended up trapezoidal. I kept trimming and re-sewing, and it got wonkier each time. It finally ended up acceptably, but I'm going to have to work on it more, because I really like leather, and there's plenty of it out there to reclaim.
Here Shanga poses with the bag, suggesting they go for a walk immediately. Isn't she beautiful?

Oops... More Deer and Eggs

Nothing says crafty godparent like softscupture. At least that was the case in my childhood and I've taken up the cause with these eggs for my Olive. They aren't quite as, well, egg-like as I intended, a little flat-bottomed, in fact. I don't know why. I'll have to work on it. How cute is that fabric?
The background betrays yet more deer in my decor. I feel a little sheepish. But it also shows another terrarium, one that has flourished after all. It's the only fully closed one I have. I wonder if there are different rules for those that aren't a closed eco-system. Probably. Anybody know them?
My issue with fully closed terraria, besides the difficulty of finding bell jars, is that it rains all the time on this poor little deer. And, yeah, it's cool that there's a little water system in there. But poor deer. I'm ready for it to have some sun. And the rest of us.

Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Faux Bois

As far as I'm concerned, the only thing Easter really has going for it is the accessories. As a child, I received a new dress, bonnet, and gloves every year in addition to the all important Easter basket. When I have a daughter of my own she will no doubt refuse to wear anything that doesn't have Hannah Montana or the Nike logo on it, so in the meantime I'm plaguing other people's children. These Easter baskets are for my niece and nephew who we are visiting in Spokane this weekend. They are really big, but then it turned out we had a lot of things to give them, including an Easter tambourine and an Easter bug catching kit. I am obsessed with ticking right now. That's the stripy stuff, used for mattresses in days of old. I just can't get enough of it. It feels especially right for children, a little old fashioned, a little sweetie, but very plain and hardy also.
And then there's this--faux bois. What is it about faux bois? I love it. But damn it, Portland, so do the rest of you. I always feel bitter when my enthusiasms coincide with other people's. I mean, I saw this coming, what with the Doug Fir and all. Scott and I were several years ago contemplating my oh so trendy swallow tattoo and wondering what little animal would be the next trend, and realized it was bound to be the deer. Indeed. And it's brought with it faux bois. Thank you, deer. But I can barely stand not to buy this fabric and then feel so trendy when I do. So I only use it for children.

PS Aren't eggs gorgeous? Since the little bird phase has passed, I no longer feel angst about celebrating eggs. I only wish I had some of Emily's to model my baskets for me.

PPS Ah, what the hell...

Something to Sit Upon

I found this chair and a matching Captain's version at a thrifty-vintage place in Hollywood. I was immediately smitten, but they were quite damaged.
I'm pretty confident with fabric and a stapler, and reupolstering was no problem, but the whole refinishing and painting thing was a little challenging, in that it requires some degree of attention to correct form. I'm going through a phase in which I'm experimenting with doing things the way you're supposed to--just to see if maybe there's something to it. In this case I primed the chairs and sealed them with miniwax. I wish I hadn't primed them because the color would have been nice with dark undertones, and a slightly more distressed look. The miniwax just seemed silly; I couldn't tell it was there except in the places it dripped. Now I know. I'm going back to doing things catch as catch can.
I decided to indulge my passion for turquoise and red, but the turquoise is much bluer and vivid than it appeared on the strip. Vivid is the best descriptor for these chairs, in fact. They would fit well into a children's book, maybe something illustrated by Hanako Wakiyama.
How they fit into our house is another matter. I always forget that our home is actually rather stately. It's got a lot of red, but not so much of this vivid blue. Time to introduce it, I guess.
Overall I'm very happy with the chairs, though they may not spend too many months in these colors. I like, also, that under that spiffy paint they retain a memory of their previous bumps and bruises. There's some long mystery life there that's come into our kitchen.

Photographing the Wild Small

I would like to take this opportunity to complain about my camera. I must insist that I am really quite a competent photographer, even in the face of all this blurriness. I was, after all the Marshfield High School Yearbook Photographer, very Winona Ryder. But those were the sweet days of all manual 35 mm. My current camera serves me quite well unless I want to get closer than, oh, three feet from an object. It's a shame, because I notice that so much of what I want to show you all, so much of what beauty and creativity and making things with your fingers is about lies in the details. At least my cats photograph pretty well.

Lisa requested more terrarium photos, so here is the best I seem to be able to do.And finally, here is A with his nose in a particularly photograph-resistant terrarium. Scott is out of town. Perhaps he misses him and sees a resemblance in the little gnome I whittled. At least my cats photograph well.Yes, they are all lidless. I began with lids, but found that for the most part the glass I had chosen pretty much obscured the view. I have one bell jar, and I've been looking for something spectacular for it. Perhaps I will find just the thing soon.

(Once, when A and I were still living a bachelor life, pre-Scott and B, I got him some beautiful guppies named Persimmon and Guanabana. For a good week he sat in exactly this pose, nose in the fishbowl, until they died, either from fright or kitten snot. He wanted to eat them post-mortem, but my human sensibilities got in the way.


Here he is, seven years ago, slimmer, head in an empty fishbowl. There should be some homilie or koan about this. Oh, I just recalled that once the fish had moved on to their next life as tigers or whatever, I stuck a wooden Buddha in the fishbowl. Have you all gotten to the age where you notice that you're quite consistent in your personality? It feels rather unoriginal.)

Following Directions

These might not be the most beautiful cakes you've seen come from the Noland-McEachern oven, but my God they're good. I've been on this "I should really use a recipe occasionally" kick and I chose, for my first, the orange juice and olive oil cake with pine nuts from Apples for Jam,
a cookbook that is truly a delight to read and, it turns out, one that has at least one really amazing recipe.

The ingredient list contains only orange juice, olive oil, pine nuts, eggs, flour, sugar, and baking powder. The simplicity is very appealing. It's got a rusticky peasant feel, but with an awful lot of refinement. It was delicious. Sweet and subtle. I served it with vanilla Greek yogurt and a dollop of marmalade. It's going in the Permanent Record.

I can't say I followed the recipe to a T. A tee? Neither one. I always feel like there's a lot of room for interpretation in a sentence like "beat the yolks until sturdy." It's like taking multiple choice tests--if you think about it hard enough you can make a good argument for at least a couple of answers, generally. But I always managed to do okay on tests, and this cake turned out beautifully. Next time may be another story.

Terraria Hysteria

I've had little luck with my terraria so far. Lisa and I had great fun picking out likely looking glass bits at the Goodwill, but everything I've planted looks wan, or just dead. This is new today, in a family liqueur glass. The tiny chair is one of my Best Things. It's right at home here. I'd like to be able to sit in it.

Lisa's terrarium is doing well, I hear. Let's hear the advice, Lisa.

Something New

I just learned to cross stitch. What with one thing and another, I've had my hand in a whole lot of craft pies. Between Campfire (which, yes, I was in until I was sixteen) and my parents' commitment to providing me with awesome things to do, I hooked rugs, made coiled bowls from rags, carved stamps out of soap, made quite elaborate puppets (a paper mache and fabric cat named Gorgeous who had a rhinestone in her nose was one masterpiece I remember from grade school), made paper, learned to spin, to weave, joined knitting 4-H and knit one long row while listening to Vanilla Ice over and over again, embroidered "Stacy + Bryan" and other similar phrases on pillows for my middle school friends, made a soft-sculpture telephone, and, well, more. I didn't do much of it for long, but I have a basic understanding of a lot of crafts, especially those involving needle and thread. I did not, however, learn to cross stitch. In fact I had no idea how or with what it was done.

Turns out you get some special fabric with squares on it and you just embroider x's.

But here's the thing that is interesting to me about cross stitch right now: it looks pixelated. I kept looking at cross stitched stuff and wondering what it was that made it look kind of hip. Then Scott saw the awesome Russiany lampshade I got on clearance at Urban Outfitters and saw pixels where I saw needlework. Oh, of course, I thought. That's what it is that's appealing about these designs I'm drawn to--the weird overlap between the retro dorkiness of cross stitch and the retro dorkiness of pixelation.

And then, of course, there's just something so pleasing about all this revival of the most quaint needlecrafts. Not your granny's cross stitch and all, you know.

My dear friend Mary Mac got me interested in this. She admitted she enjoyed the art form, but didn't like the patterns she could find. I pointed her to Subversive Cross Stitch for inspiration, and found this pattern and others like it on Etsy, created by WabiSabi. Then I decided to do them myself. Sorry Mary.

And, yes. I followed a pattern. But I see no reason why you couldn't create your own with relative ease. The drawback to cross stitching is that it is time-consuming. This took me five episodes of My So Called Life (in a row). And it's a super simple pattern.

Gifts for an Inscrutable Age

I know a lot of children under the age of five. After that, they get a little vague to me. I know the month by month adventure up until reading age so thoroughly that my occasional observations of older children seem pretty inconclusive. I know I was once between the ages of six and twelve, but I don't remember it very well; instead I remember Island of the Blue Dolphins and Are You There God, It's Me Margaret and Anne of Green Gables. I was reading. What other children do or think or feel or like, I'm still not sure about.

But there are a couple of them who I am fond of. A month ago my very sophisticated twelve-year-old friend Leo melted my heart by saying that if he ever grew up to be very very rich he would have a whole jar of guitar picks in every room of his house. The moderate nature of this aspiration seemed so childlike, and yet he usually seems quite grown up (at least to me.) So Scott and I decided to help him toward his goal a little. Scott ventured out to the guitar pick stores to see how many we could reasonably get, being not at all very very rich ourselves, and then I found a Moleskine composing notebook I included, just in case. I found the above music-themed fabric, which I'm hoping is more rock and roll than lame, and made a little pouch for it all so as to better hold on to his picks when traveling.


His nine-year-old sister Fiona had mentioned that she wanted either to be an actress (of course) or a reporter or an author. She's well on her way with the acting career, but we felt, naturally, that we should foster the writing bit. I discovered that they have just brought out Moleskines in bright pink, and we bought two, one for a journal (adventures and secrets) and the other for a writing notebook (important thoughts, overheard conversations, new words, drafts of stories). We also bought a reporter's notebook (big stories and breaking news). And I sewed a little bag for her as well, after spending about an hour at Fabric Depot, trying to channel the aesthetic of a girl so big as nine. We went perhaps a bit overboard supporting the institution of Moleskine, but I think there's something powerful in taking children's aspirations seriously, and in giving them adult-quality tools.


All this made me think there might be some redeeming aspects to that long stretch between preschool and adolescence, and that perhaps we won't have to send any children we have to boarding school for those years after all. As long as they let me sew for them.

A technical note: I tried fusible velcro for the first time, and was very disappointed. It pulled away from the fabric when I tried to open the bags. I have to admit though that I bought it by the yard and so the packaging (with the directions) stayed at the store. I think I probably did it right... but hard to say.