SOPA, Snow, and A Small Project

Okay, so anyone who's been on the internet today has probably already seen the whole thing that's going on with SOPA and PIPA. But in case you haven't, here's a really, really quick explanation: SOPA and PIPA are two bills that are going before Congress with the aim to stop online piracy. However, these bills are doing much less of that and much more CENSORSHIP instead. It's a scary proposition for anyone who values free speech and as a result much of the internet is going on strike today (even Google and Wikipedia are in on it). Now, I've done my part to sign the petitions and add my name to the list of protesters, but...well, this might make me a bad American and a worse writer, but....a girl's gotta write when she's got the chance, and since today was a snow day, I've got a little free time on my hands. So...uh, do as I say and not as I preach. Resist SOPA and PIPA! Oh, and in case you aren't taking my word for it, here's a link containing more information. Now....onto the blogging!

As you can see, we got a whole whopping 7 inches of snow between yesterday and today! And, honestly, it was probably more than that considering I didn't even get out my very old NFC ruler until it'd already settled and even rained a little bit. But, I digress. SNOW. Lots of it (for Seattle, at least). Which of course prompted me to make....

A snowgirl! However, she ended up being considerably less cute than my normal snow creations and a little more, uh...creepy Kewpie-ish. See what I mean?

Yeah. Not my fave. 

However, that didn't stop me from getting down there and having my picture taken with the ol' girl. After all, she's the first snowman (I mean, snowgirl) at our new house. Now, let's see...we've covered SOPA, snow, and...oh, yeah! A very small project! Well, here's how it started.

See this scabby looking cork board? It'd recently been rescued from a previous life as a school project (mine, of course). But, alas, life as a school project is hard work and it had many war-wounds to show for it.

See all those bare spots? That's where I'd taped things to it and then attempted to...um, un-tape things. It didn't work.

So I decided to cover up it's multitude of blemished with some pretty fabric. I laid the fabric down, laid the board down, then snipped carefully around the edges, leaving enough room to staple them down.

Next, I ironed the fabric to give it a smooth appearance...

Then simply began stapling that puppy together! I didn't do anything special except to make sure that it was pulled taut on all the sides. 

And then, of course, to make the corners look as nice as I could.

Ta-daaaaah! Mission Staple Fabric complete. 

I hung it up (using my new best friend the two-foot level)...

And there it is! Much less ugly and still fully functional. Oh, and you probably haven't seen this yet, have you? This is my studio as it slowly gets more moved-into. See that desk? It was a kick-A deal (aka: free from my Mom's work). I haven't had much of a chance to use it yet since we just finished it a couple days ago, but I already love how I have tons of little cubbies to store my knick-knacks in. Oh, and what's that hanging from the ceiling, you ask?

Why, my pink Rockstar light. Don't you have one? I guess not, since it's a one-of-a-kind original made by my Mummy for me for Christmas. I love it. Not only is it funky and PINK, but it also casts light into that otherwise dark corner. And speaking of corners...

Here's the other end of the studio. Yeah, it's less neat and organized. Well, I guess that's not necessarily true, since it's actually very organized. It's just less pleasing to the eye, I suppose. There's all kinds of stuff huddled over there as you can see, including a lot of things that you can't. Like a box of paper flowers, two containers of yarn, half a dozen dried gourds, some un-assembled Adirondack chairs, and...oy. I could go on. But I won't.


Anyway, if you've made it through this long, rambling post: I thank you. I promise I'll get a little more cohesive as I get back into the swing of things. But until then, damn....it just feels good to be writing again.

Where does a platypus learn a word like 'hodgepodge' anyway?

Sorry the title of this post is so random (it's from an old commercial, I believe), but this post is going to be equally random. For example...

Here is the wreath that I made for my Mummy last week! It's very similar to mine, except it obviously has a different color scheme. And it's double-wrapped, since the main wreath body was green and one layer of white yarn resulted in some pretty nasty show-through. Just another fun project to share with you guys. Oh, and this...

A more complete photo of the fence, as promised...what, like last Monday? Kind of late, but better than never, I suppose! It was taken from the window of Denny's office, right over the roof-line of the garage. I got lazy and took it from inside since it was raining so hard that day. :)


AND, last but not least, a little poll for my small readership.






See, I want to move this blog over to WordPress, which has (in my opinion) a better format for blog-writing and inserting images. However, I don't want to move it if you all won't come along with it...so...be honest. Answer the question. You won't hurt my feelings either way.


And that concludes the most random jumbly post I have ever written! Looking forward to hearing from you!

...3 burned out bulbs, 2 sets of shades, and a partridge in a pear tree!

This weekend, I got ambitious. (Alright, so doing something that you’ve been meaning to do three months isn’t all that ambitious. But it was productive. So maybe I should start over.)

Ahem…

This weekend, I was productive (sound better?).  I finally got myself up on my stepladder and dismantled my disgusting dining room chandelier. I knew that it was dusty and could do with a good washing, but, trust me, if I’d known how bad it was I would have done it sooner.

Pretty gross, huh? And I’m sad to say that it gets worse.

I can’t tell you how embarrassed I am to show you this. But since I’ve promised to show you the good, the bad, and the ugly in my home adventure and this falls into two out of those three categories, here it is.

To start cleaning this beast, I began by pulling all the small shades/globes down.

Cleaning the glass was really simple, if disgusting. I used a dry paper towel to get out the bulk of the dust, then wiped down each shade/globe with a wet washcloth. I patted each dry with a different towel, then finished off with some Windex . When I was done, this was the difference between the dirty and the clean:

Well, once I saw how clean the small shades got, I knew I couldn’t just do a quick wipe-down of the large shade, like I had originally planned on. I had Denny help me take down the large shade (which ended up being easy, but definitely a four-handed job) so that our poor chandelier looked like this:

Although, oddly enough, I rather liked this bare bones look. If I had been able to find a way to make the bottom portion presentable, I might have considered keeping it like this. Instead, I cleaned the large shade and the two of us put it back up. I put the small shades in, then popped in new bulbs. The end result was this:

I know it looks nice in this picture, but even this doesn’t really do it justice. It’s amazing what a little elbow grease and some new bulbs can do for a fixture. Wait! I didn’t tell you about the bulbs, did I? Oh, yeah. They were quite entertaining. There were 8 different types of bulbs. Did you hear that? 8! Want to see? I know you do. Here they are…

      1)   New, large 60 watt bulb

2)   Burned-out, small 15 watt bulb

3)   Two small, burned-out chandelier bulbs

4)   Small, working 15 watt bulb

5)   Small, clear 40 watt bulb

6)   Burned-out, large 60 watt bulb

7)   Small, working, soft-white 40 watt bulb

8)   Large, working chandelier bulb

Nine bulbs, only two of which are the same (ie. the small burned-out chandelier bulbs). Anyway, so I got rid of the whole lot and put in six new 60 watt bulbs in the small shades and three new chandelier bulbs. Weirdly, though, the only chandelier bulbs we could find (admittedly, in Safeway, which doesn’t have such a great selection) were blue bulbs. See?

They’re supposed to put out an exceptionally clear light—no yellowing. Which it held true to; I've never seen prettier light.

And no blue sheen, which we were worried about. The whole thing looks beautifully clean and white. And, now, since Denny is begging me to just wrap up this post already, I’ll leave you with this little reminder of just how pretty my “new” chandelier is.

WWTGS (aka: What Would Tim Gunn Say?)

Last weekend, I decided to tackle my plain-Jane curtains. So while Denny was doing this,

I was turning the lower living room curtains into something slightly more impressive than they were. Which was this:

As I said before, I had this idea of putting some kind of ribbon border along the edge and fancifying it up (like that word?—yeah, I just thought of it now). So I went to Joann’s and came home with several different spools of ribbon, ranging from an extra-wide, white “lattice” pattern to thin, old-fashioned, pale-teal ribbon with a loop border. In the end, though, I decided on a ½” bold teal. It contrasted nicely with the color of the curtains and wasn’t too…quaint? Is that the word I’m looking for? I suppose. The ½” teal was the only one that didn’t look too countrified (a word which I decidedly did not make up but which fits the situation perfectly). So, on it went!

I began by laying out my curtains on the floor in front of the TV with You’ve Got Mail playing (is anyone surprised?) and used some double-sided “Peel’n’Stick” to start laying down the ribbon along the seam at the bottom. I simply took the tape, cut it in half, and pressed it along the ribbon, being careful not to get any outside the edges. However, once I got it finished with the first row, I realized that it needed a little something more, so I got out the 2” painters tape left over from the cabinets and used it to create an even spacer along the entire first ribbon.

The next step is exactly like the first step, except…well, I used double-sided Scotch tape on the ribbon. This is due to the fact that I had to cut the other stuff with scissors to get it to the right width (it was about a ¼” too wide) and therefore gummed up two sets of scissors by the end of the first curtain. However, for the second curtain, I was a little more innovative. Instead of using double-sided tape or trying to cut the “Peel’n’Stick” adhesive with scissors, I got out a box cutter and cut it directly on the roll to the size I wanted. Easy-peasy.

Next, I continued to carefully lay out the ribbon in straight lines with the Peel’n’Stick (which I recommend over the Scotch tape), then finished off the rows neatly. To make it look less like…well, taped-on ribbon, I made sure to line up the edges of the ribbon with the hem lines and also made sure the edges were carefully cut and not frayed. Now that I think of it, I should go back and add some non-fray glue to the ends…

And there you have it! A chic, simple addition to plain-Jane curtains! Of course, I didn’t stop there, though. After hearing about Mom’s new curtains, which have tab backs and thereby a nice pleated look, I decided to create a similar effect on my own curtains. I decided to be resourceful (aka: cheap) and use the extra Peel’n’Stick and ribbon to create hanging tabs on the back of the curtains (thanks for the inspiration, Mummy!).

Again, out came the blue painters tape (I love that it gives me a consistent and removable guideline). Next, I Peel’n’Stick-ed a bunch of four inch cuts of ribbon along the edge of the tape, using a piece of cardboard as a space measure.

I then laid out my curtain rod along the ribbon tabs and used more “permanent” P’n’S to attach the other end of the ribbon (those quotations are sarcastic by the way—can you see where this is going?).

Simple, right? But right away, there were problems, because although the top looked mighty spiffy…

…the hem was just a wee bit shorter than I liked.

And it got worse, because by the end of Sunday night, the whole thing looked like this:

Yeah, “permanent,” my butt. Oh, well. I guess that’s what you get for going the lazy route and trying to tape your curtains up. So, now they look like this:

And, while that is still an improvement over the ribbon-less curtains of a few weeks ago, I just can’t get the memory of those nice pleats out of my mind. Sewing isn’t an option (because I don’t know how to sew them on in such a way that the seams won’t show through the front side) and it’s clear that adhesive simply won’t do the trick. Oh, well. I guess that leaves me two options: either get over it, or get my Project-Runway on and “Make it work.” Which leaves me to wonder, what would Tim say about the tape fiasco? No doubt he’d give me the chin-holding-elbow-propped-stare-down, then shake his head in disappointment. I can just see it now…(and you can, too, right around second 22 of this clip!)

New Beginnings

So, as promised, I return for yet another weekend post! That’s something that might become a more common occurrence in the coming weeks, as things pick up at school and I become progressively more brain-dead by the end of the day. Just sayin’.

Anyhow, yesterday I left off with us having dug up one dead cherry tree and left with an empty hole in the ground. Usually I’m totally fine with leaving things half-finished (kitchen cabinets, anyone?) but for some reason that empty hole really depressed me. I simply couldn’t wait. Off to Home Depot we went. However, when we arrived in the garden section, happily anticipating hauling home a baby tree of our own, we were saddened to see that the whole garden center had been practically cleared out of trees! We could either have a mangled arborvitae or a stunted magnolia. Hmmm…not what we were imagining when we set out on our little adventure.

Feeling extremely disheartened, we made do with a bag of tulip bulbs and were in the process of dragging our sorry butts home when—There they were! Turns out that the HD folks hadn’t gotten rid of them, they’d just moved all the trees out front and around the corner, completely out of sight of the entrance but only two steps from the exit. The selection here was much better and after much hemming and hawing we decided on this guy:

A flowering “winter king” hawthorn. Lovely, eh? Only…uh, it doesn’t look quite like that just yet. It looks more like this…

Kind of scrawny, right? However, Denny thinks that its lack of leaves is most likely due to it having been stuck in the middle of a bunch of other trees, resulting in a very sparse middle and a leafier top. However, if it turns out that we’re wrong and its leaflessness is due to something else, HD has a one year guarantee on all plants, so we’ll be able to get our money back. And until then, we’ve lovingly dubbed it “our Charlie Brown tree.”

So, I’ve been living under the impression that tree planting is really strenuous work. Actually, I’ve been living under the idea that any type of planting is tough. Turns out that planting trees (or maybe just tree, singular) is really easy.

Step 1) Dig hole.

Step2) Position tree. Make sure it’s centered and straight up and down.

Step 3) Throw some of this stuff in with the tree roots to fertilize:

Step 4) Have your husband do some move shoveling, because God knows he hasn’t done enough shoveling today to last him a lifetime.

Step 5) Observe and record as Husband finishes filling giant hole with dirt. This is a very important step (right?).

At this point, you could skip right ahead to Step 6, which is level soil and water liberally. However, remember that bag of bulbs that I dejectedly bought earlier? Well, there was all that lovely fertilized dirt (I can’t believe those words just came out of my mouth/computer) and since I was in a planting mood (instead of a “ripping things out” mood for a change) I took advantage of the moment and stuck a bunch of bulbs in the dirt. Denny helped.

Of course, these won’t come up until next spring, but it’s still really exciting for some reason. Hopefully Mom’s squirrels won’t dig them up before they can do whatever it is that bulbs do on their way to becoming flowers (I call them “Mom’s” because she feeds them when she comes to visit and has even asked about their wellbeing on occasion…)

After our bulb planting, we went back to Step 6 and this was the lovely result. We love him. So much that we should probably give him a name. Wait! And he will be my squishy and I will call him Squishy! Squishy, Squishy, Squishy! (Oh, pardon me. There’s a chance I’m a little more tired than I thought…)