Phew!

This little bit of floral knit and stretch elastic is finally in the mail on its way to a wee little unborn friend whose mother and I played together as children (including writing an entire musical about woman's suffrage, and eating only things that began with "Pop" for an entire day (popcorn, poptarts, popscicle)). Congrats to her on near motherhood; an endless imagination and willingness to play goes a long way in raising kids so she's got a great start.

In the same post office trip I sent out some grown up versions of the shoes I make for babies and a knitting needle case for my mom's birthday. I had no dimensions to work with for the knitting case so I winged it (wung it?) and made up for total lack of knitting knowledge by using the teal velvet of the previously mentioned chair to make the case. I think she will love the velvet so much she will not notice the bunchy zipper or the small hole at the base of the zipper that no sewing machine needle could ever close, or the fact that her knitting needles might not actually fit. Here's hoping.

And the aqua and green floral dress for my sister whose birthday was February 23, for crying in the night, is also finally in the mail. So you see I'm making progress, even if I'm about a month behind.

A good Reminder

From Maira Kalman's The Principles of Uncertainty

Teal Velvet

My lifelong dream to own a teal velvet chair has been realized--strange lifelong dream to have I realize, but you must understand how I feel about teal and it's family of colors (aqua, robin's egg blue, cerulean of course) to know how truly momentous this is. I found the original arm chair from Salvation Army for 7, yes 7 dollars after overlooking it for two straight weeks and then giving in when it got marked down once again. I had already eyed the dream fabric at Mill End locally here in Portland and quickly snapped it up once the chair found its way to our porch. I found an excellent matching broadcloth for the non-showing details and for the first time purchased upholstery cording for the trim. I only ended up using it on the cushion itself because it proved so swear-worthy and I couldn't get the sewing machine close enough to the edge to make it tight. But the over-all end result worked pretty well, if you don't look closely and you don't look at the back, and you don't go fishing for loose change in the cushions only to find a bent nail holding the fabric in place. So you know, mostly a success. My upholstery skills have improved since the Christopher Lowell, duct tape and staple gun era, that's for dang sure.

By increments, the chair moved throughout the house. From the front porch to the foyer (where I pryed off the arm-rests one of which broke free, flung through the air and whacked me square between the eyes) to the basement to be covered and back up the stairs on my back in the middle of the night clunking against walls and railings and casements to be plopped on the couch and then wrangled into the corner where the large dirty recliner had been. So you see I've had a very personal, physical relationship with this chair and it has only been here three short days.

But it's a vast improvement on the living room--what with the recliner gone to the basement and the bright pop of color in the otherwise very neutral room. And even those cursed arm rests sort of match the other darker wood throughout the room. The chair is decidedly more modern than anything else I have, which we needed, to grow up and have real furniture that someone might actually buy from a real store for real money--not pick up off the side of the road. So we are on our way. One modern dream chair down.

New etsy Store!

Here's hoping my mom isn't the only one to buy something from me.

Truecerulean.etsy.com


Hoorah!

there's no place like home

New handmade shoes for the youngest--very easy and satisfyingly real-shoe looking in the end. The bottoms are synthetic red leather which seems to cover dirt quite well so far. I got some more leather scraps to make more shoes for the not-too-far-off-on-the-horizon-etsy shop. And last night I stayed up tinkering with shoes and trims so late that the late night television gave way to infomertials. If that's not commitment, I don't know what is.

In an attempt to keep some really amazing t-shirts that my husband had in the goodwill pile, I made the boys some repurposed t-shirts and one-piece outfits for spring. The t-shirts were super easy--just cut out the smaller version with the top seams and neck staying the same--requiring only two total seams and one hem. And the one piece outfits have been a bit hit or miss. I've decided the best t-shirts to work with are thicker cotton without any extra lycra to them because a few turned out a little katty-wompus leaning to the side. They've all given me some great serger practice on easy projects and the boys look pretty rockin if I do say so myself. Cause seriously, how many baby onesies can you find with Viking ships?

And now I'm even thinking about starting up an Etsy shop with some more t-shirt projects. I'm feeling pretty ametuer but I also think that's part of the hand-made appeal, so we'll see.

Fresh herbs make me very happy. I love the look of them in the grocery cart, the smell of them in the fridge, the satisfying way that the kitchen shears chop through their little stems and leaves and then the way they have of making any old dish look extraordinary.

My one misgiving about these lovely bunches of fragrance comes from my inability to use the whole bunch in any given dish and so the inevitable mushy mass that heads for the compost some days later, filling me with regret. The most recent near casualty to the compost was this bushel of parsley I used for a bacon rice bowl calling for about 1/4 a cup fresh chopped parsley. I put the already drooping bunch of leftovers in this green pitcher and on a whim thought i would give the poor leaves some water while they waited for their certain death by coffee grounds. But then something miraculous happened. They stayed lovely and alive for many days. And this morning when I photographed them they looked as spry and healthy as the day I admired them in the cart. And I started thinking that as beautiful as they are, and as little room as my budget has for fresh cut flowers, herbs in lovely vases may be my answer for all these relative problems. So here's to delicious smelling $1.29 bouquets for kitchen tables! Hoorah!

Welcome home big sis!

My sister arrived in Texas on a commercial jet yesterday after flying for many days on many types of aircraft from a little base in the mountains of Afghanistan where she had been serving a nine month deployment with the US Army. She has been away from her husband and little one-year-old son so she is obviously missing them most. But when I was asking her what she might like me to make her for her birthday she said, anything that isn't an army uniform! And I realized for the first time that she really hasn't worn anything personal during the entire time she has been deployed. She even wears her hair in regulation--tightly pulled back in a bun and all stray hairs pinned in place. So I think she might also be missing girly clothes and wearing her hair down.

I'm sending her this little dress that I made this past week out of some great fabric from a local store and for the lining, some repurposed aqua gingham that used to be Finn's nursery curtains. I'm quite proud of it actually. It represents the first project that I used my serger and though the light weight gingham caused me some trouble, the overall end product was a success. And I think with army-green camoflauge to compare it too, my sis might be quite impressed as well.

When I was photographing the dress, it needed a belt to hold it together on the hanger. But once I fished this blue ribbon out of my gift wrapping stash, it looked so great with the fabric that I decided to send it along with the dress--in case she is feeling really girly.

Champagne taste, beer budget

So many ideas for things I set out to make originate in a trendy store or a high-end catalogue or a friend's house where I have an intense moment of pure, green envy. My husband calls it my privileged upbringing, where I see something I want and I have no sense that it cannot be mine by some method or another. And so I have developed a sort of creativity by jealousy. I want-- so I make.

Our living situation (we live in a big old house with another couple and their young son) makes dinner gatherings an automatically numerous affair. I've found that my tendency towards dainty, old chairs with smatterings of paint and missing rungs in the back support does not lend toward good hospitality as our housemates and guests tend to sit carefully in their chairs, wobbling gently and worrying that any stray move might land them atop a pile of chair shards broken to peices below them. So our two reasonably stable chairs will no longer do. What I really wanted was a set of mismatched vintage chairs, painted robin's egg blue. But stable, vintage chairs are hard to find for cheap or in my case, nearly free.

I sat looking at the old bench I use as a coffee table and thought how easy it might be to build furniture. That I had not used a saw or a power drill for anything other than assembling ikea shelving and hanging frames on the wall worried me only slightly and within hours I had a pile of lumber from Home Depot leaning on the wall in the laundry room.

A few hearty splinters and some sawdust accumulation in my contacts later, these benches emerged. I had to take the legs off and screw them back in wider to lend stability and I still worry a bit that they might tip over on a small kid pulling himself up by its edges. But they are actually benches. And people actually sit on them, all the time. So that's something for my first furniture building forray. Next I have my eye on an armless sofa

Hiding out

This blog represents my blog bigamy. I started out with one simple blog where I recorded the process of becoming a parent, trying to bring some creativity to a very visceral and practical life. I still have that blog but I've found that the only people who really read it (or I guess the only ones who ever commented) were my mother, sisters and grandmother, all of whom had the capacity to get offended by what I did or did not mention about my life. So here I am on this second blog--an anonymous infidelity of sorts--leaving my personalized nostalgia behind for this new format.

What is that new format, you ask? Hopefully this venue will provide a sort of clip board of projects from idea stage, in process to finished product. I have high hopes that the accountability of writing about my projects will make them better or make them done, a victory in itself.

So I am True Cerulean. True because I plan to be quite candid in this more anonymous forum about my inspiration, my family life, my creative motivations and on a basic level, my tendency to swear at the sewing machine and wear the same sweat pants for a number of days in a row. And Cerulean because it's elegant and lovely, a warm coppery blue that makes you think of sailing and old libraries and deep velvet wingback chairs and an anthropology catalogue spread all at once. Who in there right mind doesn't love the sound of that kind of elegance?
Also, it's a play on true-blue. And I'd like to be a true-blue kind of girl--loyal and genuine, rambunctious and quick witted. So it's a sort of aspiration. True Cerulean. Honest and Elegant.