The Garden

This year I decided it would be fun to plant a real garden.  The townhouse has a back patio that actually gets sun, and has a spigot to make watering a breeze, so I thought the time had come to try growing some veg.  We eat a lot of potatoes (as good Irish folks do), and I think we consume our weight in spaghetti sauce and salsa every month.  So I planted a small container garden of potatoes, tomatoes, chili peppers, zucchini, and herbs (rosemary, basil, parsley, sage, and cat-mint).

Shortly after I planted them, it looked like this:

But sadly, things did not quite go as planned.  I combated the bugs - beer traps got rid of the slugs that were eating all my basil.  I fertilized and Mother Nature watered consistently.  And still, the veg did not appear.  The plants grew green and tall, but without fruit.

Apparently, my back yard does not get quite enough sun to truly be full-sun.  So a few weekends ago I pulled out the tomatoes and the potatoes.  The zucchini strung me along for another three weeks, blooming with gorgeous yellow-orange flowers in the morning, which promptly fell off by dinner time, before finally turning yellow all over and dying. 

Now the growing season is over and I have no veg.  But that's okay.  You win some, you lose some.  At least it was a convenient excuse to by a spray-nozzle for the hose that not only has different settings, but has an honest-to-goodness throttle on it, which is, without question, awesome.

And at least the herbs are happy.

(Re)Construction: Side-table

For Christmas, I wanted to give J a coffee table and TV table. Unfortunately, troll the Goodwill though I might of a Saturday morning, I couldn't find anything worth converting. A stop by TROSA resulted in the purchase of Broyhill side-table that looked like a promising start for the TV table (as J's TV is fairly small).

But, a) I could never find anything that matched for a coffee table, and b) after thinking things through a little more, I realized it would be very hard to add a shelf to hold the DVD player to this table's rounded legs. So I made J's coffee table from scrap wood (more about that eventually), and decided to give the Broyhill to Kenzi, who is sadly lacking in furniture. But before I could turn it over to her, I needed to personalize it slightly. So, after pondering and combing the paint collection for ideas, I slapped on a couple coats of Kilz (I learned my lesson after the pink bed incident. Everything gets covered in Kilz first).

Then a coat of the same white paint that adorns my bookcases (Rust-Oleum American Accents in gloss white. I love this stuff with an unhealthy passion, and am heartbroken that they no longer make it). And then, to make it truly Kenzi-fied, I used Kenzi-blue (the color she most frequently has in her particolored hair) to apply this paisley stencil to the inset on the top.

The result:

I almost don't want to give it away.

(Re)Construction: Bookshelf

I am a book hoarder. One of those people who, with good intentions of clearing up some clutter, takes a bag of books to the used book store, only to walk out with twice as many as I came in with. Needless to say, all these books require storage space, and so roughly half of my furniture was either intended to house books or has been repurposed for that use. So when Mom said I could have the bookshelves that currently hold my parents' VHS collection, I was extremely excited. There was only one problem. They looked like this:

Which doesn't, exactly, suit my style. So, three coats of a white paint later, it looked like this:

Which was much prettier, but somewhat boring. So, after trolling some of the crafting blogs (This post at Twice Lovely, to be exact), I decided I wanted to do a little damask detail up the sides. So I made myself a stencil

and did a few repeats on each side of my bookshelf in a slightly yellower white. It's so subtle it's difficult to photograph, but it looks a little something like this:

3 repeats up both sides, and one in the center of the top. It turned out exactly like I wanted, and I couldn't be happier.

A Collection of Oddments

I posted a few of my patterns (r-link) to Ravelry yesterday, and have been compulsively refreshing the page to see how many people have added them to their favorites. It's just my armwarmer patterns so far, but I'll be adding other stuff as I finish setting up the patterns. Though I was proud of them before, it's kind of ridiculously gratifying to see that other people like them, too. Especially when I have been feeling rather dejected about my abilities over the last couple of weeks, it's nice to see that even though I can't manage to get a corporate-type job, I can at least produce a product people appreciate. I can't wait now to get the yarn for my baby sweater designs and see if they go over was well as the armwarmers.

The Swallowtail is doomed. That's the only possible explanation for why, ten minutes before I was going to unpin it from its blocking, the cat threw up all over it. Now the process must be begun all over again. Which I don't mind in theory, as I could certainly use the practice in blocking - it is a skill which does not come naturally to me. But in practice, I'm sick of the sight of the bloody thing, and would shred it into bits if only it wasn't intended as a gift for my mom.

Some other things I have finished lately include my lovely Lady of Guadalupe pillow. I quilted the image and then sewed it to a piece of fat-quarter and stuffed it with fiberfill. I had initially planned on appliqueing it to the front half of the fat-quarter and then sewing the whole thing up, but that resulted in an even more oddly shaped pillow, which I did not like. So this worked better, and I ended up with a very cute little pillow that cost me about $4.

On another snow day, I painted and decorated my earring holder, which Daddy built for me several months ago. White paint and the same purple and turquoise flowers that I put on those picture frames a few months ago, and the result is perfect. It made me realize, though, that I've lost several pairs of earrings, which makes me sad. I can't wait until I move and have to go through everything again, because I'm hopeful they're just hiding in the wreckage of my current half-life.

(Re)Construction: The Bed Saga

In my ever fruitless quest to encourage my dad to finish the construction upstairs, I decided to tackle some of the furniture that will eventually go in the bedroom I floored this past summer. It's going to be a guest bedroom, and after much arguing between my parents about the size and type of the bed/beds it ought to contain, my mom prevailed and we agreed to use the two twin pineapple-post beds we had up in the attic.

We've had these bed-frames for close to 25 years now; one of them was my first big-girl bed when I was 3. They originally came from the old tobacco farmhouse of a friend and neighbor, and are consequently of indeterminate age, although I would hazard a guess of at least 55-60 years old. When I got them down from the attic, they looked something like this:
I tried sanding them with 80-grit sandpaper, but nothing doing. The paint would not budge, but the wood that showed was getting worn down to nothing. So I went at it with a paint scraper, which was actually a lot of fun. I discovered that sometime in the past, both beds had been painted pitch-black, and that was covering a burgundy stain (remember this, it will be important later). After getting most of the paint off, I glued down the loose pieces of the headboards, filled in the really obvious holes, sanded the whole thing down with 220-grit sandpaper. The result?

Because I knew I was just going to paint them, I wasn't as worried about getting every bit of old paint off. I just made sure the edges were smooth.

Then I started to paint. And paint. And paint. Because it was quickly becoming clear to me why the past-someone who had painted these suckers black had been so avant garde for their time - it was the only color that would cover up the ridiculously strong burgundy stain that had been originally applied. I applied the first coat of the ecru paint - it turned pink. So I went at these babies with Killz primer, which I usually find is strong enough to take on God himself, and after three coats of it (so, four coats of a paint-like substance), the beds still looked like this:

It took three more coats of the ecru paint before the beds finally came out ecru-colored and not pink. But they're done, now, and aren't they pretty?

I can't wait to put up the rest of the trim and get the room finished, so they can be put in their place of honor.