New curtains

Step one: Remove old curtains. Make cup of tea. Pace several minutes, with furrowed brow.

Make a pilgrimage to the fabric stash. Stand several minutes, with furrowed brow.

Select old sheet, possibly vintage, thrifted at Salvo a blue moon ago, for two dollars. Tear five inches off the top. Tear in half down the middle.

Finish torn edges with sewing machine. Hang. Step back.

Ahhh.

The good, the bad, the ugly

The good: 9 5/8s yards of home decorator weight linen. Regular price: $49.95 / yd. My price: $3 / yd. Yee.
The bad: a shapely though very dog-worn sofabed gifted to us by Patrick's parents, the Airedale owners.

The ugly: Holes, holes, holes.

The plan: Re-upholstery. And behold, for I have never re-upholstered anything. This is my best attempt:

Oh, if only it was that easy.

I was seriously bouncing up and down at the cutting table when they put this fabric on the rollers and determined there was probably enough for a full-size couch. Lately I've been really into this palette: rust, turquoise, and lots of muted yellows and greens in between. And there are birds on it, too. See the birds?

Pete, for his own part, seems to like it. And we all know Pete's approval is important.

Stay tuned for an epic re-upholstery project sometime in the next... two months.

Holding on

Before we take down the tree, and officially commit ourselves to the long slushy wait for spring... I just need to clear off the dining room table, and spread my newly sewn table runner with the tiny leaping teal deer on it, and the sweet hollyberries... and stand back, and smile.

Happiness comes in the mail

Let me set the scene for a minute:

It was yesterday, about 3pm. I was making love to my kitchen, by way of a big pot of soup on the stove, and bread in the oven. My mind was in that peaceful, cow-like place where the most important thing on earth is the chopping or the mixing at hand-- very right now.

Suddenly, there's a thumping on the porch, the enthusiastic barking of a small dog (ours), the rattle and squeak of our metal mailbox. Patrick states nonchalantly, "It looks like your fabric's here."

Bang. Roused from my reverie, I hastily shuck off oven mitts and tear open the envelope. And then I sit. I sit, and stroke, and wonder at the beauty I hold in my hands. The bread burns, the soup bubbles over. Devil take them, my fabric is here.

Since the day I saw it, I had been pining to have some of this for my very own. And now, with a head full of projects waiting to come to life, I'm off to my sewing machine.

Reflecting on the year

Well, it's been a busy year. 2009: my first full year of marriage, the first year Binghamton has really felt like home.

I've lived here (nearly) three years already, and yet this was the year where I finally began to feel belonging. It can be a difficult thing to find, you know. What with the canning sessions and the garden, dinner parties and my part-time cafe job, I've deepened connections and made lots of new ones. Good things.

Other changes: I began the year with no job, and now I have two. The impact a job can have on your life-- not the job itself, but just the ability to stand up straight and say, I have a job!-- it's a terrific feeling. Moving forward. Making progress. Socking away some savings.

This new year should be a good one. Last year, we went to the Adirondacks. This year, we're looking at a two-week hellbender of a spring trip to Nashville--I'm already scheming up travel playlists--and maybe (just maybe) the promise of an out-of-country trip later in the year. Before spring arrives, though: a new bedroom floor, some fresh paint, and a massive slipcovering project. It promises to be a pretty busy not-so-busy time of year.

What plans and projects await you in 2010?

Christmas: three pictures

It was a quiet Christmas for us. Full of cookies and candlelight.

A small powdered-sugar flurry took place in my kitchen on Christmas Eve,

and a full Italian antipasto regaled us with its colors and flavors on Christmas Day.

I hope the holidays treated you well this year.

Sewing kit, 1967.

Her name was Marie.

She was an avid seamstress, a careful and resourceful wife, a mother. This was her sewing kit.

Usually, when I pick something up at an antique store, I don't give the previous owners a second thought. The old vase or skirt or lampshade is just old-- significant for its age and beauty, but revealing nothing of its past life. Though so many other people have owned the things in my house, I don't think about them. They existed, I suppose, but now are ignored by me, the neglectful curator of their cherished possessions.

And then I find something like this.

A hundred spools of thread, carefully coiled and stacked on wooden spindles.

Cards of buttons saved for dresses never sewn, some with their Woolworth's price tags still attached.

Clippings saved from the local paper. She was a Binghamtonian, then, like me. The date: December 3rd, 1967.

This isn't a mere antique, this sewing kit. This is an artifact. Every neatly folded piece is another piece of the puzzle, another clue to this woman's life.

Measurements of the windows of her house, for making curtains. I can see her then, tucking this note into her purse and heading to the fabric store, leaving behind the unorganized chaos of her new house to roam the aisles, maybe humming, fingering a bolt of this or that. This is what I do when I go to the fabric store. I get it.

In one pocket, I found a folded envelope containing six black glass dress buttons with a raised gold design. One of them was broken. A mystery. How did it break? Why did she save the broken one?

The return address on the envelope: The New York State Retired Teachers Association, Insurance Divison. More mysteries. Was she a teacher, then, or her husband? What did she teach?

Home economics, perhaps. There she is, in my mind's eye: pacing down between the rows of desks, in cat eye glasses and sensible shoes, lecturing on the importance of tidy buttonholes, or proper interfacing, or bias.

I understand. These things are important. The sweetness of neatly coiled spools, the fastidious perfection of little button-jars.

Packets of bias tape and seam binding standing neatly in rank, like a line of soliders.

And oh, that old and handworn tailor's tape.

How many times did she stretch it at arm's length, pins in her mouth, circling round and round a dressform?

How many projects did she dream and never complete? And how many years has this sewing kit sat, unused but never forgotten, in the attic of her sister or her daughter or her niece?

A perfect time capsule, a window into another woman's life, waiting for me.

And my, how much we have in common.