Sunday Sundry 5-6-18

Spring has finally arrived, all of a sudden it seems.  Hard to believe that this was the backyard view just two and a half weeks ago.

Now the landscape has transformed into a sea of green, dotted with golden daffodils, dandelions, hyacinths, tulips, etc. 

(Mallards enjoying the new greenery and mud puddles at the park.)

I've done a little raking, some mulching, but no digging in the dirt quite yet (it's been pretty wet).  Looking forward to it, though.

Went for a walk and gained 10 pounds...
 
One glorious spring morning this week, as I hiked through the neighborhood enjoying the bird songs on the warm breeze, I noticed it must also be that time of year when the city crews pick up random household items, the stuff that doesn't go in the usual trash bin.  There were various piles sitting at the curb as I passed through the blocks.  Broken bed frames, pet-ravaged furniture, damaged dressers, ancient plastic flowerpots, etc.

Coming up on my walk in one such pile were a couple of hard-used Coleman coolers and shattered shelving unit.  As I got closer, however, something else caught the corner of my eye.

Sitting on the ground in an open cardboard box were two crocks, a smaller brown one nested inside a larger light colored one.  I stopped and removed the smaller crock so I could hoist the larger crock out of the box, because it looked like it could be—why, yes indeed it was—a Red Wing!

If I had been thrifting in a store, this would have been a "Start the car!" moment—when you find something too good to be true.  Your insides are jumping up and down, but you keep a poker face, play it cool, and make a beeline for the checkout and the safety of your getaway vehicle.

Back at the curb, it was 10 seconds, tops, and I was scuttling back down the sidewalk on my way home, now 10 pounds heavier, cradling a dirty, paint spattered crock.

A quick bath and a couple minutes with a razor blade to remove the red paint (talking about the crock here), it was spiffed up and ready for some "after" shots. 

I was expecting to discover at least a hairline crack or a chip or two, but it was pristine!  Now it's ready for some spring flowers—if I can bring myself to fill it with dirt, that is.  Maybe I'll find a pot that will fit inside.

What I couldn't quite throw away...

I was tidying up in the sewing room the other night when I grabbed what remained of Dad's three ties and took a couple steps toward the garbage can with them.  But then I stopped and laid the silky fabric back down.  Just toss it already and move on.  But am I really done with it?  There isn't much there to do anything with.  It was late, I was tired, so decided to sleep on it.

The next morning, I was still on the fence, but I started playing with the pieces on the table, like a jigsaw puzzle.  I laid out what could be sewn together into a slab of "made fabric" and then started doing just that.  Thinking this was probably an exercise in futility, but at least I'd spend a few more minutes playing with it, and mentally processing, before tossing it out, and maybe that's all I needed to do.

Eventually I had two slabs, each a little smaller than a sheet of paper.  I happened to have a 6.5-inch square ruler on the table and put that down on top of the slabs in various ways, looking through it like a camera lens for an interesting vignette.  

Finally, I cut a square from each slab.  The center of a wonky star, perhaps?  Maybe I could even squeak out some of the star points from the leftover bits from the slabs?

So that's what I did, using Dad's shirt scraps for the blue background and red star points.

And today I made a second one with the other center square from ties, the rest from shirts.  My thought is to make two 18-inch pillows from these big blocks.  I've got a large piece of denim from one of Dad's shirts that will make a great pillow back for one of them.  I'll rustle up something else for the other.

I guess reconsidering the fate of the ties was a good move after all.

There's a chain a-coming...

I also started cutting strips for a Carolina Chain quilt, a Bonnie Hunter/Quiltville free pattern, which can be found HERE. 

Started sewing a couple of these together, just to see how it might go.  Sometimes I have doubts about whether my "lights" and "darks" are going to work together overall.  That ever happen to you?

You wonder, will it be okay or just a beautiful mess?  After putting a few together, I'm ready to trust the process and let things take their course.  So we'll see.

Housekeeping and a boo-boo...

I checked my email subscription list for this blog last week and was surprised to find that during the time I had not been blogging much during the first part of 2018, over 1,000 new email subscriptions had been added.  Why all the sudden interest in this small, semi-neglected corner of the blogosphere, I wondered? 

Turns out, on closer analysis, these seemed to be bogus email addresses all ending in @outlook.com, likely planted by a bot of some sort.  A little maintenance/housekeeping was going to be required to remove these.  The bummer was, I was going to have to delete each and every one of the bogus addresses by hand, all 1,000-something of them.

But I did that over the course of a few days, a few hundred at a time.  Unfortunately, at one point I got a little carried away in the rhythm of it (click delete, enter okay...click delete, enter okay), and I accidentally removed a handful (maybe about 4) legitimate email subscribers.  If you have received this blog post in your email, you were not one of them, so no worries.

However, if you subscribed to the blog by email between February 19 and the third week of April, and you aren't seeing this post in your email, I sincerely apologize and ask that you kindly take a moment to re-subscribe. 

The bogus email subscriptions have no effect whatsoever on legitimate subscribers.  It's just something I need to be aware of and handle on my end if it comes up again.

As always, thank you all so much for reading!

Planter-ing

I'm taking the lazy minimalist approach to outdoor flower gardening this year.  I received a wonderful double impatiens basket from my daughter for Mother's Day that sits on the front porch (more of a stoop, really). The red and white blossoms look like peppermints.  Porch flowers = done.

Then I picked up a couple hanging baskets of impatiens for the backyard and some begonias for the planter barrel.  Otherwise, I'm just moving existing stuff around in the flower bed.  The hostas needed dividing so I started a ring of them under one of the big pines, and other things which had migrated from their original spots were relocated.  I had tried bringing a potted geranium indoors over winter and almost killed it, but now that I've put it out on the deck again, it's coming back like Lazarus.  Yesterday, I poked a slip of coleus into the dirt of the same pot, which I'd had rooting in water for six months.  We'll see how that fares.

Apparently, there wasn't enough dirt under my fingernails just yet, so I turned my attention to indoor gardening.  While browsing the greenhouse at Walmart, a low light variety of indoor plant caught my eye.  Our house is fairly well shaded, so low light is the key phrase.

I decided to pot it in a vintage Red Wing planter.  Found this one at an estate sale several years ago.  Clean as a whistle and just like new.  Figured it was time for it to realize its full planter potential.

First, a inch or so layer of rocks for drainage (river stones from the dollar store).

Good potting soil + plant. 

Then a bit of moss for mulch (also dollar store).  Ta-da!

If you frequent the thrifts, garage sales, or flea markets this summer, you will almost certainly find planters.  I don't buy as many figural ones as floral ware, though I have a few.  This cute piggy planter came from Mary last year.  (Squeal!)

They're handy for all sorts of things (like holding old photos I need to scan and return to my sister).

If you want more fun vintage planter ideas, Van at Thriftcore has several posts which are sure to inspire, here, here, and here.

Sunday Sundry 2-12-12

Cheap Sunglasses
I saw these at a thrift store yesterday.  They have "stitching" around the frames and down the bows. They fit my face and are a classic shape, so for a quarter, how could I refuse?  I could not.

My dear friends Kathy and Marie came over for breakfast yesterday, and we watched the movie The Help together.  The movie was very good.  My friends had both read the book, which, it turned out, was a good thing when I needed them to clarify something, though I had first told them to "shut up" when they started discussing how the movie differed from the book less than a minute into the film.  Sorry gals.  Why they put up with me, I do not know.

I realized recently that we three have been friends for 30 years this year.  We met when we all worked for the same law firm back in the day.  Our old boss passed away last week, which had me reminiscing on this fact.  He was one of those people who seemed larger than life, both literally and figuratively.  He ended up doing a stint in the clink for some shenanigans and was disbarred.  Yes, those were some strange times.  I will say one thing, though; he knew how to pick quality people for employees.  I believe he was a good judge of character, despite any shortcomings in his own.  May he rest in peace.

Thrift Spotting
So we're in line at the cash register at the thrift store yesterday when I suddenly spotted something 10 feet away that I hadn't noticed before that moment.  It was a funky green shallow bowl with a scalloped edge.  My vintage pottery radar was activated and I asked Norm if he would please go flip it over and tell me what it was.  

"Red Wing," he reported. 

Suffice it to say, that was a quick sale.

I trusted my gut on a plate too, which was all by its lonesome on a shelf.  I was immediately drawn to its mid-century aesthetics, the clean black-on-white design.

I don't know anything about the maker, but I bought it just because I liked it.  Made by Kyoto Fine China, the pattern is Mercury, according to the stamp on the back.  Named after the space program, I wonder?

I tried drawing the design on paper last night, like a quilting design.  My drawing skills leave a lot to be desired, but I think if I traced it, I could quilt it.  Wouldn't that be cool?

(Says she who has been procrastinating and freaking out a bit at the prospect of practicing free-motion feathers, this month's FMQ Challenge...)

The Day the Internet Died...and the Sewing Machine Hummed to Life
My internet and phone connections were hit-and-miss last week, and on Thursday they went down altogether.  While I waited for the cable company to fix the problem, and since I couldn't work while offline, I sewed.

I worked on another string Dresden for a quilt, which is my String Thing-Along project. I also finally got around to doing an introductory post over on the String Thing-Along blog.

I am loving how each of these string rings will be different, depending on what scraps are used.  I'm also noticing that if I throw in one bold graphic print per ring, it adds just a little extra something-something.  On the one above, it's the red/black print that overall forms a five-point star.  On the one I laid out last night, it's in blue (no pics of that one yet).

It appears that I am in need of a catnap this afternoon.  Lots of yawning going on right now.  Hope you finish out the weekend in a good way, and have a bright week ahead! 

Flitting through Red Wing

We stopped at the Red Wing pottery store and museum during our recent visit to Red Wing, Minnesota.  It was very interesting, indeed!

I am not a collector of Red Wing, and I didn't know that much about it.  I certainly didn't know they had made so many different things through the years.

It's funny; when I was a kid, our newspaper "rack" was a giant old Red Wing crock.  It sat next to one of the recliners and could hold several weeks worth of daily Milwaukee Journal newspapers plus the local paper, both spring and fall JC Penney catalogs, and whatever else fell into its gaping maw—odd socks, junk mail, homework, Ding-Dong wrappers, etc.

Likewise, my in-laws, when they sold their home, had several old Red Wing crocks in the basement.  They had been used to make sauerkraut and store pickles back in the day.  None of us felt attached to any of those old crocks but knew others got pretty excited about them, so we sold them.

Interestingly though, it was a 1950s Red Wing vase that jump-started my fascination with mid-century art pottery.  I was working at a law firm which was moving across the street to a new building.  In cleaning out the old basement, a pile was created of things to be donated.  There on top of the pile one day was a dirty, funky looking chartreuse vase from a bygone era.  It was ugly enough to be interesting, and I flipped it over to see the Red Wing mark on the bottom.  I asked if I could have it; the answer was yes, and it became one of the first things I sold on eBay, for right around $20.

It turned out it was a piece designed by Belle Kogan for Red Wing as part of the Tropicana line of art pottery.  It looked like the one in the photo here, but instead of the bronze glaze, it was solid chartreuse.

I couldn't afford didn't buy anything in Red Wing, but I did pick up two small pieces at a shop in Winona on the way home.  

These are from the Town & Country dinnerware line designed by Eva Zeisel, produced from 1947 to 1956.  (I totally Googled that after I got home; I had no clue when I bought them.  But if you want to see some funky-cool vintage Red Wing dinnerware, click HERE.)

The peach colored piece is a relish dish from a Lazy Susan set.  The blue piece is a sauce dish.  I just liked the unique shapes and thought one of them might be interesting in the newly painted half bath as a soap dish.  Or we could use them for salsa.

In the Red Wing pottery store, there was an interesting display of the various dinnerware patterns and years of production.  

I know I've passed some of these by in thrift stores.

More art pottery from the museum:

 

Hope you enjoyed these glimpses of Red Wing!