love forever

California Milinery Supply Company

If I lived in LA, I would spend most of my time in the California Milinery Supply Company. Rows and rows of feathers, flowers and trims are stuffed into boxes and drawers and apparently they are always digging up more stuff to sell. Sorry the photo quality isn't the best; it's a little dark in there!

Here's what I bought:

and

Aren't these mushrooms the cutest?

A few of my favorite things

A friend dropped by my place on Sunday to drop off this vase that she found for me on one of her thrifting trips. It was a lovely surprise and looks perfect with a few of my other favorite objects.

Good Things

It's been quite a hectic week around here and I have been an all-out grump today so I thought it would be nice to remind myself of a few wonderful and happy things in my life.

*These flowers from my CSA that I picked up last night. I am so excited to have fresh flowers every couple of weeks!

*Lots of other delicious things from the CSA- asparagus, arugula, mixed greens and strawberries. We made the perfect salad last nights with fresh greens that tasted like they had just been picked from the ground. The great thing is, they actually were.

*I got a copy of my book yesterday in the mail! It's actually a real-live thing.

*I won a big bunch of quilt squares of Marimekko fabric on ebay. Looking forward to making some pretty things with these.

*Renegade NY is this weekend and I actually get to walk around and enjoy it.

What great things are happening with you?

New to me.

The fruits of a recent Ebay fabric splurge are pouring in. I got these gorgeous vintage cotton fabrics in the mail this afternoon. They arrived heavy and shining with starch so I threw them in my new Wonderwash. Now they are soft and whisper thin and blowing in the breeze on the line.
By the way, the Wonderwash is a small handcrank washing machine that uses 90% less water and detergent than traditional washing machines and it is amazing! Normally when I get new fabric I wait to wash it until I go to the laundromat but now it can get laundered right away and I can throw in a few tee shirts and some socks too!

Slow Sunday

This has been a summer of setting the alarm even on the weekends, there have just been so many plans and so many people to see. I love nothing more than having lazy slothlike weekends so I have been craving a slow quiet day like today for months. A quiet Sunday in pajamas with lots of good food and public radio equals my idea of heaven.

I love the idea of a big Sunday dinner with leftovers for days so I made good use of these amazing tomatoes from my mom's garden and made a tomato sauce with leeks and spicy sausage. I think leeks are my new favorite vegetable; they are so good! After that, I made a peach crisp with peaches from the farmer's market. I would have taken a picture but it takes a much better photographer than me to make peach crisp look appealing. It was delicious though: I am trying to eat with the seasons more and it really makes foods seem more special when you only eat them during their peak.

After that, I cleaned my kitchen and stared lovingly at my growing collection of Catherine Holm pieces. My grandmother had lots and lots of Catherine Holm and I have no idea what happened to them. Even though these aren't hand-me-downs from her, they remind me of childhood.
My soundtrack for the day: archives of WNYC shows I have missed and a new-to-me podcast, Geek Farm Life, thanks to my friend Cal!

Living Room Progress

Things are starting to happen around the house. Mr. Loveforever and I have finally decided to stay put in one place long enough to really nest and I have been doing some re-decorating.

Our living room is kind of a joke of a room, just big enough for a couch, a coffee table and two bookshelves, so we don't have a whole lot of furniture arranging options. We live in the typical Brooklyn railroad apartment, lots of thin long rooms and not so many windows, so my goal is to make the living room bright, graphic and comfortable.
We found a new-to-us bookcase at the Salvation Army and repainted it with a glossy white. I've been so inspired by all the color organized bookshelves that I've been seeing around the net lately that I decided it was time to take the plunge. Although I have no idea where any of my books are right now, it certainly looks a lot nicer. Plus, it was pretty fun to take books all the books out of two bookshelves (there's another one on the other side of the room not pictured) and throw them on the couch.

I've been collecting paint-by-numbers paintings for a while now; I buy them on Ebay or at flea markets. A couple of them are paintings that I did a couple of years ago in an attempt to find a more calming hobby. I have a strict price limit of $15 or lower and I usually leave them in whatever cheap frame they came in. Paint by numbers have suddenly become trendy and hip New York vintage stores are trying to sell them for fity bucks lately. I find that horrifying.
I decided that I wanted to hang the paintings so that the collection would be seen as one installation, that the (mostly cheap and crappy) paint-by-numbers would have value as a whole. Eventually I want to build them up a little more on the far end of the wall so it looks like an explosion of paintings but the collection takes time and is subject to my wildly fluctuating and totally erratic income.
Someday, I will also make some new pillows and get some drawer pulls for the bookshelf. I am thinking black lucite but that is definitely going to have to wait until late May, when I get some extra money. For now, it makes me smile every time I come home and that is enough.

The Neverending Fabric

I just keep making stuff from this fabric: CD covers, patchwork and now a new bag! I think this was the best Ebay purchase ever.
The bag is from an Amy Butler pattern, I added the details. It looks like they don't carry the pattern anymore but she has some newer adorable patterns available on her site. The patterns are a little labor-intensive but worth it! You can tell that Amy Butler is not a fan of shoddy sewing and likes to do things right!

Feedsacks

It's no secret that I adore patterns (sometimes I like nothing better than to stare lovingly at my fabric collection) so you can imagine how excited I was to score these vintage feedsack fabrics on Ebay.

I started buying feedsack fabrics a few years ago because I love the texture of the cotton and the crisp, clean and colorful patterns but I had no idea what the term actually meant. It turns out cotton feedsacks of flour, sugar and animal feed were recycled by generations of ingenious women who transformed mundane consumer packaging into clothing, quilts, curtains and more.
Between 1840 and 1890, cotton feedsacks started to replace barrels as packaging for farm and food packaging. Initially these feedsacks were plain cotton except for the stamp of the logo of the company and women had to soak the fabric in lye or bleach to get rid of the labels.
By the 1920s, manufacturers realized that women were re-using the fabrics for their sewing projects and started printing patterns on the fabric, even pasted paper labels to thee for easier removal. Women continued to make things out of feedsack fabrics into the 50's, which explains the range of patterns of feedsack fabrics you can find today, from romantic florals, to deco geometrics to atomic 1950's patterns.
Women have been making beautiful things out of trash for generations so let's take a cue from them: this is your grandma's craft and we should celebrate that!
Oh, and times have changed guys so you get sewing too.

To find out more about feedsack fabrics, you can check out these resources:
All about Feedsacks
Feed Sack Quilt History: Feedsacks, Frugal and Fun
Feedbags: From Rags to Riches

You can usually find scraps of feedsack fabrics on ebay and at thrift stores and flea markets. Just don't try to outbid me!

New Fabric!

I just won this fabric on ebay! It's actually six barkcloth curtain panels so it's a lot of fabric. I am definitely going to make a bag and maybe a pillow or two. I am trying to stock up on extra fabric since I am no longer buying anything "new". That and my current bag is looking a little worse for wear.

Rewards

I have this little tradition (some say tradition, others say addiction) of buying myself a pretty dress or two after a big job ends. While I am not buying any new (as in unworn) clothes right now, I am always happy to buy something "new to me".

I always manage to find one or two perfect dresses that fit me like a dream amidst the shapeless polyester mumuus. I have a vintage body so vintage shopping is actually less difficult than shopping at a place like the Gap! Not that I would be caught dead in the Gap. Horrors!
Lest I sound like a crazy spender, I have some ground rules: I never buy a dress that costs more than 30 bucks (unless it is the most amazing thing in the world!), it has to fit perfectly and it has to be something I will wear out of the house. I once found a Pucci dress for 5 dollars at a thrift store that just looked awful on me. It sat in my closet for three years because you can't just cut up a Pucci dress, crazy! Anyway, I ended up selling it on Ebay because I couldn't justify owning it anymore. It needed to bring someone else some joy.