Random on Purpose

The Joys of Home Ownership

...are mixed, to be sure!  We're still working and working and working...  This weekend work continues on the bathroom and the guest room/office.  Question:  Was this color ever in style?

If your answer was, "yes, in the '70s", I have to say no, this is not Harvest Gold, and I was there (in the '70s), and never saw a color anything like this!  The glue from the wallpaper certainly doesn't help matters at all, but come on - eww!  A petite pink country-style wallpaper was applied over it, and I spent the entire afternoon removing remnants of it while Greg finished drywall and pulled what should have been caulk, but was actually silicone, in the bathroom.

I'm not typically a swearing girl, but I was certainly tempted many times.  Greg, too...  Here's a sampling of this afternoon's conversation:

Greg (pulling rubber base away from the wall):  "They used silicone to put the base on.  Haven't they heard of glue?"

Me (attempting to remove paper in pieces larger than 1/2 inch at a time):  "Maybe they used it all on the wallpaper..."

 A little later:  Me (getting aggravated that the paper is getting burnished to the wall instead of scraping off of it):  "What the holy hell (okay, maybe a little swearing) did they stick this up with?"

Greg: "Maybe silicone..." 

*Sigh*  I managed to get three of the four walls done, and most of the fourth wall will be hidden behind the new wall, so maybe I can get it done in one day when I get ready to torture myself some more.  I failed to wear gloves (my bad), and now they are very red and raw and blistered from the hot water, the Dif (totally useless), and the vinegar (Home Depot associate's advice - cheap and effective, for the most part)

We went and selected a vanity and granite countertop/sink and flooring, but we're in a stall with the faucet (he wants brushed nickel, I'm holding out for bronze).  At least he likes my color ideas and the flooring I found.  We agreed on the vanity because we each chose the same one independent of the other - happy days!

Anyway - that's why nothing new on the crafty front!  Too bad, too, because I have more new toys...  I had to buy a new heat gun because where it looks like my current one is pointing and where the embossing powder is actually melting don't line up - a little aggravating, and potentially dangerous, to boot! New stamps, new papers (yeah - I really needed more of both of those...) 

Ah well, tomorrow's another day - and that's when I'll be back!  G'night!

Getting Down to Business

I came to the conclusion (after being hit in the head with the obvious enough times to say, "Ouch - that hurts!  How can I make it stop?") that it's time to get serious about a career change.  I need to move into other areas that are more interesting and soul-satisfying.  I've also had several "coincidences" indicating that the timing is about right...  To that end, I went and bought myself a new toy today:

Yes - I'm going digital!  (at least a little...)  I needed a good way to get my drawings from paper into digital download form so I can put them in my etsy store, and this seems to be the most efficient way to go about it.  Being a novice and deciding that there's a learning curve here, it will be a bit longer before I'm proficient enough to have something worthy of downloading, but at least I took a step, right?  I played around with it for a bit after dinner, but I still have much "work" work to do, so I went upstairs and started cutting the bias strips I need for welt cord for the ten cushions I have to finish tomorrow...*sigh*...soon I'll be able to say "don't give me any more work", because I'll be happily engaged in artsy/craftsy income-making!

NOTE:  I did NOT say "soon I hope I'll be able to say" - that's too ambiguous and open-ended!  I'm setting a DEFINITE EXPECTATION for myself and the Universe!  I can't afford to be wishy-washy here - I NEED this change!

Okay - early start tomorrow and some loose ends to tie up before bed tonight, so I'm signing off for now.  Have a great night, thanks for stopping by, and please read yesterday's post and leave a comment so I"ll know if I should follow through! 

I'll Show You Mine if You'll Show Me Yours...

Weird post today, but I have no time to create anything except piles of cushions to make some money, so this is what I've got:  I've been rolling around the idea for a now-and-again challenge to institute on my blog here.  It wouldn't be like other challenges that occur at regular intervals (like every Tuesday or every other weekend or whatever) - I know me too well!  True to my lifestyle and the title of my blog, the challenge would be a RANDOM one!  The consistency would be in theme.

I also know that you all are very hesitant to play along with me, for whatever reason.  Any time I've posted a tutorial or invited you to join me in anything (Monday Muse comes to mind), there has been {insert crickets chirping here} response.  With that thought in mind, I've decided two things:

• I need to BRIBE you with a prize to encourage your participation
• I need to allay any fears that you might have about putting your stuff "out there" for others to see.

To address the latter, let me offer this:  The prize will be a random-generated number winner, not a "judged" competition.  Also, we all have to start somewhere.  I visit blogs that have amazing artwork on them, and I think that these incredible people must have always been amazing.  And yet...  Recently one of the blogs featured artwork from the design team of their early works, and it was comforting to realize that they had to start somewhere less amazing than where they are now, too!  They were wimpy, though (in my opinion), and did it anonymously.

I certainly don't consider myself amazing, but I know that I have grown considerably since I started this whole papercrafting thing.  I'm going to plunge ahead and share my early creations with you:

That's just a sampling, but you get the idea...  Hopefully I'm better at the photography thing now, too!  So, do you feel better now?  Will you play with me?  I'll be using Mr. Linky, so it's not like everyone will see what you've made here on my blog - just if they click through to your gallery or blog or whatever...

Leave me a comment, please, so I'll know if there's enough interest to even follow through on setting this up!  Meanwhile, I'm going to go upstairs to my getting-prettier-every-weekend room and SEW!  Have a great day! 
 
 
 

Under the Wire

Good evening, all!  I'm heading for bed as soon as I get this post up, but didn't want to be too much of a slacker during National Blogging Month!  I know, I know...I missed a day...  Work issues and random house stuff (electrician visit, the ongoing saga of The Wall...) have kept me busy!  I started sewing at 6:00 this morning, and just came down from my workroom to post this - long day!  I did break for lunch and dinner and make a couple of phone calls, so it wasn't non-stop, but close enough to say so...

As a result, I don't have any finished crafty, fun stuff to share (yet), but here's a little preview of what I'm working on:

I hope it turns out kinda sorta close to what's in my head!  Maybe I'll get it finished tomorrow... 

Here's a tasty (literally!) tidbit for ya:  I am a fan of hot chocolate (Stephen's when I can find it, Nestle's otherwise), but love it more with a splash of flavored creamer in it.  I usually get French Vanilla, but International Delights came out with Caramel Macchiato.  Oh, yeah, it elevates a humble kid's drink to gourmet heights!  Dee-lish!

Okay, beddy-bye time for moi - g'night! 

Under Construction

Welcome to NOVEMBER!  Unbelievable that the year is so close to being over...  Did you know that November is National Blogging Month?  Yeah, me neither - I just read about it on my niece's blog - she had a link to a website for it and everything.  Obviously, I'm not motivated enough to add it here for you - it's NaBloMo or something like that if you want to Google it.  (Fascinating that "Google" is now a verb, eh?)

Anyway, I've been absent for a bit, and thought I'd better post something!  Today I just have some random Same Subject musings, and just general tidbits, I guess...  An alternate title for this post would be "I Really Should Be Working", but I've hit total burnout on my "job" and can't seem to motivate or care about doing it (the downside of working for yourself - no one looking over your shoulder to see if you're actually working...or is that an upside...?)  I started dismantling a cushion cover to use as a pattern for the new ones, and that's as far as I got.

Have you seen the "Makeover Realities" show where people are remodeling their house and things go horribly wrong?  We're living that on a not-quite-horrible scale over here...  I've been completely offline for three days because the room where the computer lives looks like this right now:

That is the backside of the bathroom wall (note the medicine cabinet in its stark whiteness).  We're building a new wall in this room - technically a bedroom - it will be our office/guest room when we're done.  The bathroom is claustrophobically small (I have to stand in the hallway to dry my hair because there's no room in the bathroom for me to bend over to flip my hair down to dry it, for example), so we planned to bump one wall back 18" into the adjoining bedroom, and I had a painting fiasco, which bumped the priority for this project to VERY VERY HIGH!  

Here's the scoop:  We were having guests for dinner last Saturday evening, and I thought it would be a good idea to paint the bathroom so it would be all pretty instead of all patchy from installing a new toilet and patching holes in the wall.  I went off to Home Depot to get paint and chose what I thought would be a deep sage green to match the shower curtain (poppies and leaves), and got the new paint-and-primer-in-one on the recommendation of the paint counter guy.  DO NOT ATTEMPT THIS AT HOME!  The paint literally slid off the wall, didn't cover well AT ALL, and was a horrible smashed-peas-baby-food green.  I told Sherry about it and she said "It can't be as bad as you say", so I sent her pics, to which she responded, "Oh, dear God!  Ok, ok - you win!"  Here is the evidence:

That second picture is after Greg tried to cover the horribleness with sheetrock mud - it just pulled more paint off the wall - perfect!  Yeah - on to Plan B, which is to texture the walls with new plaster, then paint a considerably more neutral color.  We decided that now would be a good time to bump the wall back, so we didn't have to texture the old wall, then do it again with the new one later on.  Since demolition makes considerable amounts of dust and mess, I moved the computer out of harm's way into our bedroom until the dust settled - literally!

Here's where the Same Subject theme comes in...  I've known for quite some time that I need to make a career change and I see warning signs of moving back into depression because I haven't done it yet (refer to the burnout comment earlier).  As I was going about the busy-ness (not to be confused with business, which is a whole different thing) of this morning, I kept seeing that partially framed wall and thought it a fitting metaphor for my life - it's Under Construction.  Just as this house will always have something else requiring time and attention and re-working, so will I.  Every time I think I'm at an Ending Point, I will realize that it's just the Beginning of the next thing.  That concept is even in a song: "Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end..." (Closing Time, Semisonic)

Another tidbit on the Domino Effect:  I've been working in really poor lighting because a ceiling fan and its little bulbs don't really throw enough light across a wide enough area to do the job very well.  It's fine for ambience, but not for sewing and stamping and all.  I bought a couple of flourescent lights (yes, the ugly shop kind) to install so I could see what I was doing (not to worry - I do have a plan for camouflaging them into something pretty), but thought that I should paint the ceiling before I did that.  Then I realized that when I cut in the ceiling I would most likely get paint on the un-stripped wallpaper, thereby gluing it permanently to the wall.  Yup - I spent eight hours Saturday stripping the rest of the wallpaper, and two hours Sunday morning scrubbing off the glue residue.  The good news:  now I can start making that room pretty instead of just workable!

Just for fun, I'm sharing a couple of Halloween tidbits, too.  I was really short on time, but wanted to do something for the folks I work with/for, so I made witch hat treats that I saw somewhere out there on the Internet:

Bad pic, I know, but that's the best I could do before I had to run...  This is all you need to make them:

You just squeeze a little blob of icing onto the center of the cookie, then smoosh an unwrapped Hershey kiss into the icing.  The hardest part is unwrapping all of the kisses!  One package of cookies makes 40 hats, and I had kisses and icing left over...  I took them to the office of the parent company, Decor, and also to The Fabric Mill, where the girls were all dressed up for the occasion:

They were havin' a yabba-dabba-doo time, I'm tellin' ya!  Jackie was Betty, Della was Barney, Kim was Wilma, Keli was The Grand Poobah, and Cindy was Pebbles (isn't she the cutest?)  Here's the shot before this shot:

That's Holly disguised as Dino sniffin' around in the foreground.  She lives at Della's house, along with three other rescued chihuahuas (Holly is a mix and I don't remember where she was rescued from, Josie and Lola were puppy mill mommies, and Alfie is a neglected pup rescue).  Della refers to them collectively as "the Mexicans", and is goofy about them - totally attached and smitten and all... 

Well, I guess I've wasted as much time as I can on this blogging project, so I'd better actually go cut out the cushion covers or paint the ceiling or something...  I'm going to try to post every day this month for NaBloMo!  We'll see how that goes...  'Bye for now, and thanks for stopping by!
  
  
 

The Ugliest, Most Beautiful Thing

If you've been following my blog for a while, you already know my philosophy.  If you're just tuning in, here it is in a nutshell:  Your opinion of me is none of my business.  I'm not a particularly proud person, and this blog is to track my own life and progress.  If something I share here overlaps and/or helps someone else or sparks a thought that leads them to something useful, then hooray for us all.  To that end, the good, the bad, and the ugly all get equal time here.  I'm just Keeping It Real.

Since this house that we bought needs SO MUCH attention, and much of it must be done "before the snow flies", to quote a popular catch-phrase here in upstate New York, my upstairs, out-of-the-way crafting/sewing/working room is not priority on the Make It Pretty or even Get It Done list.  However, I did need a large worktable to facilitate making a living (working on the floor just wasn't cutting it - I'm getting too old for that...), so here it is:

What you're looking at is two adjustable sawhorses at 33" high, with 2"x6" boards screwed to them to support a 4' x 8' sheet of particle board, with an inexpensive "tile board" laying on top, which makes the table 36" high (same as a countertop).  I started to put fabric around the edge to cover the mess underneath (mostly materials for jobs), but only had enough to cover the side facing the door, so you don't see the mess walking into the room.  You can see some of the mess and one of the sawhorses in the second pic.

What else you're seeing is the partially-stripped wall.  That knee wall that the table dead-ends into took 5 1/2 hours to strip (three layers of wallpaper), and I kind of burned out on that particular joy, so I moved on to more visible projects like curtains for the living room.

When I pulled all my boxes and bins into play for World Card Making Day, there was very little rhyme, reason or order to where I put things, it was just OUT.  The clutter was making me claustrophobic and crazy, and ultimately less productive work-wise, so I took yesterday to impose a semblance of order on the chaos.  Here's the makeshift system for now:

This is the portion of the closet visible when the bifold doors are open.  What you're looking at here is two shelving units stacked on top of each other and housing my cardstock, embellishments and some tools.  To the left (farther inside the closet) are bolts of fabric, some batting and a shelf with pillow forms, trims and more fabric for various jobs.  I also have the ironing board, cutting board, and sewing machine in here.

The shelf inside the closet is created by the enclosure for these drawers:

The top drawer has sewing supplies (thread, shears, bobbins, Velcro, pins, zipper chain, etc.) and the rest have stamping/crafting tools and supplies - Cropodile, crimpers, brayers, embossing powders, chipboard, stickers, etc.  Here you REALLY see how hideous half-stripped, unpainted walls and trim can be!  On the other side of the door we have the most-used stuff:

Yup -the starving-student crate shelves!  (Hey, I told you I'm not proud - this is what I have to do right now...)  Mostly ink pads and stamps here.  Also Cuttlebug, paper trimmer, etc. Most of what I use every time I make anything gets grabbed from here and moved to the worktable like this:

What you see here is my large guillotine paper trimmer, Cuttlebug, stamping pad, small guillotine paper trimmer, stamp scrubber, acrylic blocks, and these:

 
Cuttlebug plates and folders, small drawer unit with adhesives, specialty pens (calligraphy, white gel pen, Stardust glitter pen, Write 'n Rub, blender, journaling, etc.) and small tools like stylus, sanding block, edge distresser, razor knife, etc.  The red caddy has scissors, tweezers, mat pack, Bow Easy, more adhesives, etc.  My beautifully filed and indexed patterned papers are in bins under the table.

I realize NONE of this is pretty, but I just need it to be accessible and serviceable for now, which it is.  I started making a card for the Featured Stamper challenge, but Greg wanted to go watch football OUT for a change, so I cleaned up and went with him.  Did you know it's about twelve billion percent faster and easier to clean up when everything has a place that it actually belongs?   Shocking, that!

I will, of course, share pretty pictures if/when this room does get the attention it needs and I get more permanent solutions for all the needs my job and hobbies require.  I do, in fact, already have the paint for this room - I just need to find the rest of the walls and finish patching them (that's why the walls look like chicken pox with calamine lotion where I did already strip them - spackle isn't pretty, but it's got to be done...)  I even have the fabric for the valance!  All in good time, my pretties!

Alright - enough blathering for one post!  Gonna go see how the current football game's going and how Greg's doing...  If I finish my card, I'll be back to post that, too!  G'night! 
 
 
 
 

Oops, I Did It Again...

No, I'm not Brittney Spears, and I'm not playing with your heart(!), but I did say I was gonna do something, and then not do it, and this isn't the first time - so sorry!  I mentioned that I had begun an experiment and that I would post the results over the weekend, but the weekend didn't quite go the way I'd planned...

Saturday ended up being a "house" day - rain gutters and window shades and I finally finished my curtains for the gigunda picture window (just the short privacy ones, not the long decorative panels for the sides),and so I couldn't finish the experiment then, and we'd already planned on doing this yesterday after our usual visit to Greg's parents:

After the benefit we went over to our friends' house to hang and it was too late (and I was too tired) to do anything but go to bed when we got home.  I didn't win any of the raffles at the benefit, but I did get a patch for my jacket and a sticker for my helmet:

I think the reason the "LOVE" is in quotes is because that was Brenda's middle name, so it has a double meaning.  It was an emotional day, and quite exhausting, but there's some closure.  We were talking to one of the guys who went up to the hospital right after they took Brenda there, and it was his opinion that she was pretty much gone on impact - felt no pain and all of that, so that was helpful information.  I got to meet her parents and her aunt and uncle, too - they came up from "Pennsyltucky" for the benefit - and it was great insight into where Brenda's openness and "I love everybody" nature came from.  Great people.  I don't know how many people were actually at the benefit, but they sold 2,000 advance tickets, and there was still a line out the door of people who were buying them there.  Standing in line for anything to eat or drink was a looooooong wait!  All the proceeds from the raffles, tickets, patches, shirts, stickers, etc., go to Brenda's boys (she has three, ages 10-18).

Greg is driving Chris' work truck now instead of the rusty beat-up van, and I rode with him in it yesterday for the first time.  Weirdness, for sure...   It has provided some humor, though.  I'm 5'6" and Greg's 5'9", and I think we're both at least several inches taller than Chris, and we're trying to figure out how Chris could see over the hood of this truck to drive!  Greg says Chris had the seat all the way back and all the way down, and so he had to move it up and forward to see out, and can't figure out how Chris was driving it the other way.  I was trying to figure out how he could climb in and out of the thing - even with the running boards it's tricky, at best!  We both had a good laugh about the whole thing, so that's good, right?  We can talk about him with humor and fondness and not so much with tears - progress... 

We're hopeful that the worst is behind us and that no more of our friends will die any time soon, and we're living our lives slightly differently now.  Things that we used to talk about in future tense are getting more priority and moving closer in timeframe.  Things that we feel strongly about are getting more time invested while petty time-wasting things are falling by the wayside.  We're quicker to tell those we care about that we do, in fact, care about them.  We're in each other's space more.  Little things that matter muchly...

I plan to carry on with the experiment later today, and I'll share that tonight or tomorrow, for sure!  Hope your week is starting off wonderfully, and thanks for stopping by!

Gonna Get Me Some Happy

Just a little heads-up for anyone still following here:  As soon as I find the charger for my camera I will charge the batteries and upload some pics to share, and I will be participating in World Card Making Day this Saturday, posting as I complete projects, so there will be some new things there, for sure!

My craft/sewing/workroom is VERY un-pretty, and not even remotely put together (as in everything is still in boxes, bags, and bins), but I plan to spread it all out anyway and PLAY!  Stay tuned for some FUN for a change! 

A little aside to those who've sent well-wishes and sympathy and all - thank you SO MUCH, and know that it did, in fact, help.  I'm on my way to "normal" (whatever that means) and plan to stay OUT of the doldrums for a long, long time!  We'll see if the powers that be will play along with that plan...

One More Update

One more "Chris" post, and then I'll move on...

In case you thought I was making it up that Chris was a "footprints in the heart" kind of guy, consider this: His calling hours were from 4:00 to 8:00 Thursday.  We got there just before 5:00, and there was a line out the door of the funeral home of people waiting to go in.  It took us over an hour to wend our way through the two rooms where they had pictures and videos of Chris and the receiving line of his family - brothers and sisters, wife, son, stepdaughter, parents.  When we came out, the line was twice as long as when we went in.

Every fire department in our county and the surrounding counties sent a contingent of firefighters in full dress uniform (white gloves and all) to pay their respects, as did every single ambulance unit.  People that he's done work for came, and all of his friends (many, many, many of those).  They had to have policemen directing traffic and stopping traffic for pedestrians to cross, because they had to use the parking lots of all of the surrounding businesses - the funeral home didn't have enough room for everybody.

I have never, ever seen that many people turn out to pay their respects to someone who wasn't famous.  It was incredible, and yet not surprising.  Chris just had that effect on people.  Never a harsh word for anyone, an open-door policy at his home, ready to help anyone who needed it.  At the services yesterday his best friend was speaking, and mentioned that several of Chris's friends actually moved to be closer to him (himself among them).

Greg and I are moving into acceptance.  Greg said the hardest part for him was seeing the obituary in the paper, and he sort of turned a corner after that.  He's pretending that Chris just moved away and is working at a different job, so he doesn't feel so awful when Chris doesn't show up to work with him.  He still has moments, though, and probably will for a while.  Example: yesterday he was dismantling the deck because the people who built it didn't do what needed to be done to control water, and there is significant rot where it ties into the house, including the sill and ledger board of the house itself.  As Greg was surveying the situation, he looked up at the sky and said, "Chris, what do I do?", then looked at me with a shrug and an expression like "...and so it begins"...

A lot of how this was affecting me tied into how it was affecting my husband, so as he gets more philosophical and accepting of this, it makes it easier for me to move into that frame of mind, as well.  Tears still come at random times, and there will be repercussions work-wise for some time, but we can talk about him with laughter and fondness, and that helps the healing...

Hey, Thanks...

Just a quick little post...

It's amazing how the smallest of things can help:  I was worrying somewhat that I would lose the few subscribers that I have because of all the boo-hooing lately, and lack of creative sharing (I did have one person un-sub, as a matter of fact), but had many reassurances via comments and emails that you all are hanging in there with me - thank you!

Today I went to my Feedblitz email folder to see whose updates I'd missed, and I have a new subscriber!  I'm always pleased to see someone else join us, but to have someone like what they see well enough to subscribe in spite of the downer turn lately, is really heart-warming!

The calling hours for Chris are this afternoon, and the services are tomorrow morning, so I had to get a sympathy card to take along.  That has to be THE hardest card purchase ever!  The one that said exactly what I wanted to say was all flowery and purple, and had the name of the person who wrote the sentiment plastered all over it, so I put it back in the rack.  I think I read every single non-religious sympathy card there (I'm not sure what Donna's affiliations and/or beliefs are and don't want to assume).  Do you know how hard it is to keep your composure while going through this process?  I was in a very crowded store and had all I could do to maintain before I reached the privacy of my car.

I asked Greg yesterday why it was so much harder losing Chris than it was losing my parents, and all we could come up with is that I knew for quite a while before my parents passed (my mother from leukemia, my father from complications of Alzheimer's) that it was coming, and with Chris it was so sudden and he was so young.  I almost feel guilty that this is the case, but there it is...

I asked Greg if he wanted me to clip Chris's obituary to save, and he said no - it was hard enough for him to see it in the paper the first time.  I figured that would be the case, but I had to ask... 

I don't know if this is what happens when any firefighter dies, but the fire department in the town where Chris died escorted him to the town line where they met the next fire department, and they joined in, and when they reached the next town line, that fire department joined in, and they went on that way all the way back to where Chris lived.  Pretty darn cool...

Okay - just wanted to point out a couple of bright moments in the bleak landscape - thanks again!  Gotta try to get some work done before Greg gets home to clean up for the calling hours...