simple joys

Here's one of my favorite things in life.

You're inside on a breezy, not too cold and preferably sunnyish day. You are perhaps on your bed or favorite chair, reading, writing or drawing. The windows are open a bit and the pretty curtains billow back and forth in the breeze. You hear birds and maybe some kids or cars far off. The air smells sweet.

The curtains fall flat and billow open, moving back and forth, sometimes swinging high and sometimes just swaying back and forth.

Sometimes you stop what your doing and just watch them.

Last weekend I did two things that I have been meaning to do for a long time. 

1. I finally found this fabric I bought a year or more ago and made the very simple alterations I had to do to them to make them in to curtains.  I don't really know how to sew. I took one short class when I was about 11. 

The window is quite big and the all white is kind of a lot. I am thinking about adding some trim to the sides - which gave me a great excuse to not hem them. But, I love white curtains in the bedroom, especially in spring and summer.

2. The other thing I did last week that has been on my to-do list for a couple years is make a video clip for my Dad's film.

I got my Dad's film on DVD in 2009 and last week I finally got into the hard drive that it's stored in and created a clip (it was much easier that I thought). Now people can see a bit of the film. This is really awesome as before now there was no clip of it anywhere on the internet.

I hope I can cross of a couple more things this week. It feels so good when you do something you've been meaning to do for a long time. And, trust me, I've got a long list!  Hope you all have a good week!

(This post is 100% April Fools free)

nice smells

Don't you love yummy smelling soaps? I don't mean perfumy stinky soaps like you often find at at some chain stores. I mean rich earthy smelling soaps made from natural oils. But really, how often can you go through those soaps? It takes forever and I actually don't even use soap as much as shower gel, so then I have an abundance of soaps (especially if you are also gifted with lots during the holidays).

My favorite thing to do with them is distribute them in drawers and linen closets and between sweaters and all over. The smell seems to last even longer than sachets and you get to keep the soaps in their lovely packaging.

There's something about holding a bar of soap in nice packaging. It's smells nice, looks pretty and feels good in the hand - like a rock covered in fabric. Is this just me? I'm kind of weird that way.

I love opening up my linen closet and having the most wonderful scent come out.

These small Sweet Petula soaps are some of my favorite to use for this purpose. I just love the way they look, too.

Do you have any tips for making the closet and things smell nice? I would love to hear them. I am in serious cleaning/reorganizing mode these days. Nice smells make clean closets even nicer.

Happy February!

christmas forest

Today has been all about Christmas and I still got stuff to do. Christmas came way too fast this year and I have taken to doing things like printing out new Christmas tags instead of trying to go through my packed closets and find the many, many I already have. Yeah, it's been like that.

Last Sunday I did finally get to the decorating. My nephew came by and kept me company while I untangled Christmas lights and set up the Christmas Forest display. I'm pretty happy with this years new additions (the bright green and turquoise tree - bought to go with the new snowman - and the small orange and pink tree). There are little white lights under the "snow".

The snowman and small trees were purchased from MagpieEthel who I wrote about earlier this month. I just love this little guy and I love the yellow and green colors on him.

The Christmas tree I put up is the same artificial one I have had for the last ten years. It's narrow and small and it works for my small space. But it's getting old and every year I say it's the last year for it, but then the next Christmas comes and I pull it out again.

This cuckoo clock is my newest ornament. I got it last year at that all Christmas store in Lincoln City. I 'm pretty fond of it.

Below is one of the oldest ornaments I have. When I was a kid my mother got a queen ornament (with a hot pink long fluffy skirt) and 2 princess ornaments. Every year my sister and I would put on "our" princesses. It's a very sweet memory. This princess here is about 40 years old! She looks pretty good.

Hope you all are having a nice time getting ready for Christmas. Here it comes!

mcclure it

I just got an email from Buy Olympia telling me that the new Nikki McClure calender is out for 2011. That reminded me that I kind of wanted to write about the Nikki McClure catalogs and what you do with them when they are done.

As you probably know, they are beautiful. Each page is a gorgeous paper cut layout celebrating the simple pleasures in life. Usually the calender is worked into them in a way that makes it pretty unattractive to extricate it from the image thus making it difficult to cut out the calender and just hang it on the wall (she does sell wall prints now of many of the images). Yet, the images are so beautiful it is impossible to throw them away.



So, I save them and put them with my wrapping paper and use them for wrapping gifts sometimes. I also recently used some old pages to line a drawer.



Lining a drawer is an interesting thing. It seems like such a old fashioned kind of thing to do and I never really thought it was that big of a deal, and yet I will often do it, just out of some domestic tradition. This particular drawer I had not lined and I wish I had as a bottle of lotion got loose and damaged the wood. See, that is why you should line drawers! So, I did with the Nikki McClure pages.

These pages would also be nice to use for scrapbooks. You couldn't use the whole thing of course, but little pieces like leaves or something would be nice.

What do you do with your old lovely calenders?

iced tea concentrate

Here is another post with an idea inspired from a blog post by fellow Portlander Amy Karol. I wanted to share with you "The Iced Tea Plan" that has been very successful this summer.

We moved offices this summer at my day job and we did not have any hot water for tea for the longest time. Add to that the hot summer we have had and you can imagine why I have been drinking iced tea almost exclusively. However, since I cannot have caffeine later in the day, but I did indeed want it in the morning I needed two jugs of tea going at a time. As Amy also mentioned in her post, finding the space for it in your fridge is difficult.

So, after reading her post I began making very very concentrated jars of tea. My jars are kind of small. I use about 3-4 tea bags in them. I don't cold brew as she does, but use hot water, let it steep and then take out bags and put in fridge.

Sometimes I just use a little for a glass, sometimes I use half for a small pitcher. When I take it to work I put about half in a liter bottle and then fill the rest up with water.

Most of the summer I have had a jar of caf tea and a jar of decaf tea in the fridge. I have really been into using the Harneys and Sons Midsummers Peach Tea for the decaf. A flavored tea like that really benefits from some sweetner. It brings out the flavor in the tea. Otherwise, I often feel like I am smelling it, but not tasting it. It was a perfect happenstance that I recently noticed that Trader Joes carries an inexpensive simple syrup. It is perfect for adding to tea, either by the cup or the jug.

Keeping tea concentrates in jars helps you save room in the fridge and makes it a lot easier to make a quick glass of iced tea. Hope you are having a good summer. I am off to a swim party.

detours

Sometimes my household cleaning activities are not planned, but snowball out of one action. One of The Farm Chicks talked about this recently on a post and she called it a detour. I detour a lot when I am puttering around the house. Sometimes, each room I enter creates some sort of temporary amnesia in me and I begin working on something in that room instead of just looking for the thing I went in there for and returning to some work in the kitchen. I don't blame age. I have always been like this.

Anyway, about a month ago I got a new faucet in my place and since then I have had a grocery bag full of the under-the-sink contents in my kitchen. I just keep moving it around. Today I finally tackled it. I sat on the floor and went through all the items (really I had very little idea what was down there. A lot of the stuff is hardware that Steve has brought over and I have no clue what it does and am not intersted in learning. I regret to say that I am not one of those tool girls). Once I was on the floor I thought I might as well go through the towels drawer, it is too crowded. So, I weeded out some items from there and then I went to a cupboard I haven't organized in years and I rearranged and weeded out that. Then when I went to put something away in the utensil drawer I saw some of my tarnished silver and remembered the Farm Chicks blog post.

Recently The Farm Chicks blog had an entry on this very subject of housecleaning detours and in it they showed a really easy way to clean silver. I have a few pieces of silver flatware, or maybe it is silver plated, that I have collected over the years at thrift stores. I grabbed several of them and did the experiment.

You line a foil pan and cover the flatware in baking soda and then add hot water. Then you let it set for a while. Some of mine looked shinier in the pan and some did not. So, I did it again. They looked a little better, but the worst of them were still horribly tarnished. Then I just took one out and scrubbed it and the tarnish came right off, now all of them were shiny and way better looking than I have ever seem them. Here is the before:


And after:


I like collecting one-of-a-kinds of these old nice pieces. It is fun to use them for tea parties or entertaining. Sometimes they're marked. I have a appetizer fork from The Westchester Country Club and some spoons from The Palace Hotel.

my custom quilt

Here is a photo of the quilt my mother made for me. I requested it for my birthday and Christmas present last year. I had a hard time finding some of the right fabrics for it, so it took a while to finish it. I had a strong vision of what I wanted.



Since I moved into this place about 3.5 years ago, I have been slowly making my room over into a yellow and green room. I originally wanted it to be more vintage, but it was too hard to find the particular vintage daisy/fern look I had in mind. This quilt is the major piece that brings it all together. I love it! There were some fabrics my mother wasn't sure about and I had to fight her on it, but when she saw it in my bedroom, she admitted I was right and it looked perfect.



I am pretty pleased with it. I chose a simple yellow gingham for the back. I decided the stitching would look better on it and the gingham would look less dated. The stitching that is on it is in different leaf shapes.



I love it so much. My favorite gift ever from my Mom. She put so much work into it and we worked together on it since November. Thanks, Mom!

in the tree

Found outside of my neighbors back door:



The tree:

just a regular day

I took these photos mostly on Saturday. I love photos of everyday moments and things.

trip to the nursery

I finally got to the nursery today. Don't you think it is sweet how they call the place where you go to buy young plants and seeds a nursery? I also got to a place to get a few cut flowers, as well.

My living room is normally always dressed for autumn. We are alike this way. The walls are maroon and the furniture is all dark wood. The other colors are burnt orange, winter white, forest green and brown.

So, it is kind of a challenge to try and lighten it up when spring comes and I start craving brighter colors. Today I got to get it all taken care of with a few plants and by pulling out some pieces I had put away last fall.

Here are some images. There are more on my flickr.

little chest of drawers

I spent some time this weekend putting together this little chest of drawers from Ikea. It isn't hard, but it isn't easy either and it is't quiet. Lots of nailing, lots.

Anyway, I wanted it for my my work table in the craft den. Once it was together I set about painting it.

I just used acrylic paints that I already had, not the paint they sell at Ikea for this purpose.

I chose turquoise, which is an odd choice if you know me, but for some reason I like it in room decor and it would match my curtains. I wanted to do three colors for the drawers in different shades of green. I had to mix one to make it work, but it turned out how I imagined it, which is always nice.

I really like the combo of turquoise and avocado green. It was used a lot on the early 70's and I think it is due for a comeback.
















After the paint, I put on a light coat of Mod Podge. I chose glossy and should have chosen matte. After I did it I remembered that glossy always seems to stay a little sticky, whereas matte doesn't seem to. But, it seems okay.


Here you can see it a little with the curtains. This little chest of drawers will soon have stuff piled up on top of it, I am sure. But, for a little while I get to see it like this.

little green things

I am ready for spring to come. Usually each year I am a little sad when winter leaves. People are always so ready to get rid of it, complaining about the cold when winter is not even halfway through. I never understood that and enjoy the quiet sparse grey days of winter. I like home bound activities and winter is a season that compliments my homebody nature.

The winter in Portland this year has been a proper winter. Lots of cold and even lots of snow. Usually in Portland when it snows it is a big deal, blog posts and twitters are busy with the reports. This year, it is old hat by now. This morning I drove to work with snowflakes as big as chicken feathers floating down and I wasn't giddy with it. It was pleasant, but did not seem to be a noteworthy event.

So, spring is due to arrive soon. I have been craving pretty stuff. I want to see some new things and I long for some sunshine and sweet green leafy items.

I know terrariums are all the rage right now and I do like them, but I am rather smitten with Jenny's project of potting small succulent plants. She makes great terrariums, too. I like the idea of using old vintage teacups and small pottery items to create a collection of succulents.



I also noticed this nice big planter on the table in the home of another Portland artist, Tess of Egg Press. Design Sponge did a showing of her home and it is beautiful. You can see more here.


So, maybe I will get to the nursery and make up some little pots of green things. It should be warm enough to start some gardening soon, fingers crossed.

valentines banner

I decided this year that I wanted to make a flag banner for Valentines Day. Although my significant other is not that big on the day, I thought he would like the decoration of the house since we would be dining at home. Plus I can then use it other years.

A woman I work with told me a couple years ago that she decorated the house for Valentines Day every year and I was very amused. I thought it was a neat thing to do (she doesn't do it now that her kids are in college), but it did seem odd to me. It wasn't like we ignored it in my family, but we never had decorations. This year I decided that decorating might be a good way to make the day festive without spending lots of money.


I got a pendant template on some website and used it in photoshop. I used the same template and copied 2 on one page. I cut them with extra space at the top and folded them over. I then taped them and strung with small vintage white ric rac.

I got this unopened package of vintage Valentines on Etsy. I can't bear to open it. I love it all together. I am guessing eventually I will open it up, but for now I will just display it as is.


I guess the display isn't as valentiney as I imagined. I really don't own much stuff in this color scheme. Maybe the mister will bring me some flowers to add to the display.

I hope you all have a wonderful Valentines Day!

the 2nd day of 2009

We woke up to a bit of snow this morning. A New Years snow is supposed to be lucky, but does that count if it's on the 2nd day?

My family and I celebrated Christmas on New Years Eve and New Years Day, so you are going to get some belated after Christmas posts from me.

But, first I want to share with you my after Christmas deal that I am so pleased with. I got these dessert plates half off at New Seasons (a local grocery chain that has the best gift items).

I am so smitten with them and think they could be good for year round. Although my living/dining decor is more towards brown, burgundy and rust. I am think I may need to eventually get some placemats and plates that complement these. I found them online here.

snow days

It has been very cold and snowing off and on here since Sunday morning. I took these pictures when I went for a walk on Sunday. The bottom one is of a plant nursery that is in the neighborhood.

I am home early from work because it is supposed to be icy this afternoon. All morning at work I watched snow twirl around outside. I watched the birds fluff their feathers and visit the bird feeder. A very hungry squirrel came by, too.

I am happy to be home and safe and warm. I love the snow, but hate the feeling of needing to go somewhere and feeling stress about driving.

This afternoon I want to do is this:

drink cocoa*
eat cookies/bake cookies
wrap Christmas presents
Make out Christmas cards
Clean up craft room
watch Little Women while I do these things

Hopefully I will get a few of these things done.

Here is a image from my Christmas decorations. Keep warm!

























*regarding the cocoa: I don't usually drink milk. I am not that fond of it and it kind of makes me sick now since I have been off it so long. And I never go through soy milk fast enough to warrant buying it. I always end up throwing it out. So, now I get the little juice box sizes of soy or rice milk. They have chocolate silk in it, too. This makes great hot cocoa and if you wanna chocolate it up more, just add some hot cocoa mix with it.

As Marilyn Wann said to me once, You can make any chocolate dish better by adding more chocolate.

scary cupcakes

I had to make some cupcakes last night so I could use these cute Halloween cupcake toppers. Since I will be out of town for a few days this week, I wasn't sure I would be able to fit it in unless I did it soon.

I got these toppers from abelemporium during the summer when she had a sale. They are really neat. The cupcakes I made are pumpkin with a butter cream frosting. I got the recipe from Martha. I sprinkled a little cinnamon sugar on the top, too. I recommend the recipe. It turned out pretty good and it was easy. They are almost muffins, but not quite.

Today was a neat fall day and I had a neat fall outing. I will tell more tomorrow. What is your favorite fall event? I can never fit them all in. Baking is definately one of them.

art of display

Unlike many of you I have never really gotten into the Flickr thing. I have an account and use it sometimes, but I don't check it regularly and don't contribute much. But, today I finally took some pics of my house and actually added them to a group. My first time! The group is the Art of Display. I knew about it because Poppytalk blog often posts images from it. Here are a couple of the pics I uploaded. See the comments on flickr for some details.

grey - or maybe your prefer gray

I love grey skies. The layers of different greys in the clouds are so pretty and I love the way grey skies soften everything, making the twilight time so beautiful and cozy. Tonight after I got home I went outside to have a glass of red wine and enjoy it.

The cat came out to join me, but was very camera shy.

I gathered some basil for my dinner and watched until it got dark.

I made the pie from Alicia's blog this weekend. I got regular pie crusts and not deep dish, so I ended up with 2 pies! It turned out great as I could send one home with Steve. It was very good and easy. I think there will be more sour cream apple pies before the season is over.

sunshine

This weekend was very warm, sunny and dry. I spent a couple of hours today running around looking for black paper for the Current Resident zines. I never found it. I finally came home and ordered it online. When I came home the sunlight was hitting the garden so perfectly. They were so bright and beautiful. I don't think these photos I took really captured it.

In the background of this photo you can see the little bit of my geranium that is coming back.

I added a cute new print in my shop this morning. It is made from a vintage game card and vintage wallpaper. It comes in the oval black mat with backing.



Oh and by the way I added a poll to the side bar of my blog. Please chime in, won't you? I would appreciate it. Hope your weekend was grand.