Projects for me! And weekly inspiration

These days (meaning in the last 13 years, since I was pregnant for the first time), I rarely make anything for myself. The last made-by-me sweater that I owned was a cute, short crocheted tank top, back in the days when I was still young and skinny.

But recently I stopped in at my favorite yarn store. I really wasn’t planning on going there and I certainly wasn’t planning on buying anything at all, much less anything for myself. I’d had a hard day and I wanted to go for a walk to clear my head; I just happened to choose a favorite walking spot that’s in the same neighborhood as this store.

I wasn’t looking for a retail therapy session, and besides, my form of retail therapy is usually very modest: a notebook or a magazine. I just planned to wander around in this store, looking at and touching the yarn. It was meant to be more of a quiet escape than a shopping trip.

But I ended up buying patterns and yarn for not one, but two summer sweaters for myself, one knitted and the other crocheted. Yikes! Neither is an in-front-of-the-TV project (as this is what tends to happen when I knit while I’m distracted), so I have to find some free time to devote to them.

The yarn and patterns have been sitting in their bag in my sewing room for a few weeks now and summer is fast approaching (although with our weather luck lately, we may still be wearing rainboots in August). I’m telling you about them in order to make myself find the time to work on them, instead of having them get buried in the to-do-someday pile. Keep me accountable, please. Just ask me how those sweaters are going once in a while.

***************

In other news, here are some fun ideas I found in my Internet travels this week:

Kathryn Ivy has a tutorial on dyeing yarn with Easter egg dyes.

Unplug Your Kids shows how to make beads out of straws and paper. You could use any kind of paper with this project—a couple of years ago Child Two and I used wrapping paper to make Christmas garlands.

Meg at Elsie Marley gives instructions on how to make fabric covers for tin cans. Hers are embroidered and she kindly shares her patterns.

Are your sewing tools little boring? According to Better Homes and Gardens, you can paint your shears!

At Big Huge Labs, see how to print eight photos on one piece of paper and then, using their folding instructions, turn it into a pocket-sized photo-album. I’m going to send some of these to far-away friends and family.

Bulletin board makeover

The favorite food of the former owner of this house must have been mushroom soup, because she painted every room either a light or dark shade of browny-gray mushroom-soupiness (except for Child Two’s room, which was bright red, and the kitchen, which is a dark gray). Now I know that mushroom soup is a trendy color, but when you live in one of the rainiest parts of one of the rainiest areas in the country and there is a forest in your backyard and when your whole house is this color, it gets somewhat overwhelming (not so overwhelming, though, to make me get around to painting more than a couple of rooms).

When I chose the color for my office, the coldest one in the house, I wanted something that at least looks warm. And I got it. Instead of the Tuscany gold promised by the paint chip, my walls turned out to be California poppy orange. It was a shock at first, but I loved it because (a) it’s bright, even on the dullest day and (b) I’m from California. Abandoning the calm Tuscan-inspired décor I’d envisioned, I’ve gone back to my roots and am slowly but surely putting together a fun, bright environment in which I spend the bulk of my day reading other people’s blogs working.

Last year I painted an ugly old metal filing cabinet bright red. This was my first attempt at spray painting (not a success) and then at brush painting metal and involved lots of whining to Hayley and hard lessons about paint and humidity (see “one of the rainiest parts of one of the rainiest areas in the country” above). Thank goodness Hayley is a goddess of painting and could help me even from 1200 miles away. I love this cabinet now and I’m covering one side of it with tacky, touristy magnets like you’d find in a beach-town souvenir shop.

Needing another bulletin board (because you can never have too many), this one to help me in my never-ending struggle to not overschedule my work, I started with an old one I happened to have lying around in our storage room. I sanded and painted the frame with some red acrylic craft paint I happened to have lying around.

I pondered for a while about what to use to cover the faded and cracked (and now paint-splattered, because I am not a neat painter) cork. I finally decided on some used California road maps I happened to have lying around. They weren’t the right dimensions, so I cut them into pieces and did a collage kind of thing. I printed up my current and upcoming schedule as well as lists of things to do for two long-term projects I’m working on; the yellow paper I happened to have lying around, left over from printing handouts for a children’s writing workshop I taught in a few years ago. I have lots of room for other schedule-helping notices (like a big sign that says “Just say no!”).
The whole project, then, was completed with things I happened to have lying around (the sheer variety and volume of which is scary), except for the hangers on the back. We probably have some of those lying around too, but finding specific tools or pieces of hardware is a major and sometimes dangerous undertaking here (I will say no more on that topic) so it was easier to buy some.

I’ve got other ideas for covering the cork when the maps get too full of holes: magazine pages, pictures from old calendars, scrapbooking paper (of which I have a big boxful, although I don’t do any scrapbooking), blown up photos. I may do a board for over my sewing table using old patterns. For my kids, both musicians, I could use sheet music. And yes, I do happen to have all of the stuff, including at least a few more old bulletin boards, lying around.