The Button Box

Have you ever read anything by Wendell Berry?

His nonfiction is really good - even though I disagree with some of his ideas, overall we're on at least a similar page, with most of the same aims in mind. 

More recently, I discovered his fiction, and that's been a whole new (old) world for me. He writes about a fictional town in Kentucky whose residents over the years have been fleshed out in many books and short stories.  Most at least partly take place in the 1940s, the dividing line for farming communities - pre-war "old" ways and post-war "new" ways and technology.  Berry comes down firmly on the side of the old ways, or at least the ways of respect and stewardship for land and life before everything speeded up and got "easier". 

In "Andy Catlett: Early Travels" there's a quote that I think you all will enjoy (if you're still with me by this point):

I went to the closet - "press" was her term for it - behind Grandma's chair and took out her button box.  Every house I visited as a child had a button box.  It has disappeared now from every house I know, but then it was a necessary part of household economy.  No worn-out garment then was simply thrown away.  When it was worn past wearing and patching, all its buttons were snipped off and put into the button box.  And then when something old needed a new button, or when something newly made needed a set of buttons, the button box provided.  Grandma's was an old shoe box better than half full of buttons of all sorts.  It was a pleasure just to run your fingers through, like running your fingers through a bucket of shelled corn.  My old game with it was to paw through it in search of matching sets of buttons, especially the intensely colored glass buttons that had come off dresses.  I sat on the floor by Grandma's chair with the box in my lap and fished out a set of shapely black buttons and lined them up on the linoleum beside me.

My great-grandmom, who died when I was 8, had a button box.  So did my great aunts Margaret and Violet, and my aunt Betty.  My mom had a variation - she kept hers in discarded pill bottles and jam jars, by color.  

Inheriting all their button boxes gave me way more than buttons.  And I, too, have run my fingers through the button box, just for the pleasure it gave me.

Did the women in your family have button boxes (or jars)?  Do you?

Another non-sewing post

But a legitimate question, anyway:  what the hell season is it?

My vegetable seedlings have been in for a couple of weeks, the lilac has bloomed and gone, the blueberries are almost done flowering and the other night it was in the mid 30s.

Today it's humid and thundering and supposedly going to 80 degrees.

What happened to spring?  How did we go from early March to late July?  Where's April?  And what happened to May?

I'm not amused, and my tomatoes are just downright baffled.  They keep trying to start blooms and then it gets cold and they drop off.

Not sure what we'll be eating this summer.

I leave you with a few of what the garden is producing right now - irises in abundance (how exactly do they spread that quickly?  I tore most of them out last year and I still have 4 clumps the size of armchairs) and the first yellow rose of the season.

There are pink and red roses blooming as well, but I've got a soft spot for yellow roses, always have.

And that second iris is one I've hunted for for years - when I was little, my great grandmom had a whole bed of those in her back yard.  She called them "flags," not iris, but it was the same thing.  My aunts never liked this one, said that flowers should be pink, not brown and yellow, but I always thought it was pretty.  It's taken me years to track down: I never saw anything similar in the garden catalogs, but finally I saw them blooming in a yard here in my neighborhood and the owner let me dig a few to bring home.

Now, being iris, I have about 30 of them.  Along with the purple shown above, some lavender, 3 varieties of pink and a few pale yellow that I brought from Mario's house.

I'm seriously thinking about digging out all the iris beds and just making one big one with a handful of each color.  It'll look like a blooming Crayola box each spring.

Now that would make me happy.  If only they would then smell like a blooming Crayola box.

Did anyone else love the scent of a brand new 64 crayon box when they were a kid?  Crayon contact high.  They don't smell the same anymore.  Or my  nose grew up.

Tweed Bears . . . Finally

This blog is supposed to be for my personal sewing, not the craft show/business sewing, but since there hasn't been any sewing for me since the recent top-fest, I thought I'd share what's been coming out of the workroom anyway.

These recycled tweed teddy bears were the biggest seller at the craft show in April, which of course means I should have had the remaining ones listed on Etsy ASAP, right?

Except I didn't.  Because there were only a few (so I made 8 more).

Because I didn't have decent photos of them, and I couldn't decide how I wanted to photograph them, and I didn't have a decent backdrop, and every time I wanted to do photos outside it was too early, or too late, or it was raining.

The hell with that.  I was walking back from a friend's house the other day and I saw these great wooden pine slats sitting out in the trash.  There were 6 of them, but I could only carry 4, since it was nearly a mile walk home.

Since it has been raining, these were set up this morning in my downstairs hallway, which gets good light, and I just got down on the floor on my stomach and took the damn pictures.  Uploaded them, tidied them up, got them listed on Etsy.

Why was that so hard?

Why do we put off things that need to be done until we can do them absolutely perfectly?  These may not be the photos of my dreams, but you know what?  They exist, and they're up on Etsy, and now people have a chance to actually see them, and if I ever get around to taking better photos (which I will, now that I at least have something, I can always swap them out.

Procrastination is my friend.  I think we need to stop spending so much time together.

A new day

Big old button sculpture on the Penn campus.  I don't know why.

You might be wondering what my day is like now that I'm a lady of (cough) leisure.  It goes pretty much like this:

7:00 a.m.   Alarm goes off; Mario gets up for work and I feed the chicken and then go through the house, feeding cats and cleaning litterboxes.  Generally I grind my coffee and set up the pot then, so all I have to do later is turn it on.  By then it's about 7:30.  Some days I stay up, but often I  am joined by a cat or two and I go back to bed for an hour.  Because I can.

8:30 a.m.  Second alarm.  Turn on computer, go downstairs, make coffee and breakfast, feed Lily a little of my breakfast, check my emails, Etsy and do a little blog reading over breakfast.

From 10:00 - noon is a bit of a blur.  I shower and dress (not letting myself get into the habit of working in my pjs).  Then I generally go out back to check on Bonnie, which ends with me puttering in the yard for a good hour or two, or coming into do some cleaning if the weather isn't accommodating.  Slowly, the house is getting cleaner.  It's amazing what you can ignore when you're too busy to deal with it.

Noon - 2:30 p.m. (at least) is time in the workroom, doing whatever project I set up the night before.  I've been trying to do things for the Etsy shop in assembly line fashion - it makes it go much faster - so the other day I watched a movie while stuffing 8 bear bodies and 32 arms and legs.  Then I cut out 2 toddler dresses and left them on the table.

2:30 or so, I walk down to the post office if I have anything to send out.  The vintage shop is slow but steady, so most days there is generally something.  From there I'll also hit the fruit and veg vendor if we need anything, or maybe pop my head in the thrift store to scope out what might be on half price sale on Saturday.

The garden is starting to bloom - and I'm home to see it!

4:00 p.m. - Good afternoon light, so usually I take photos for the Etsy shops then, on big white boards on the kitchen or bedroom floors.  I'll upload and clean them up for posting later.  Usually I'm in the living room on the computer when Mario comes in from work.  Then he generally goes up to his office to work on whatever he's been doing and I go in the workroom, clean up the earlier mess and arrange the next day's work.

7:00 p.m. - dinnertime.  Sometimes this has been started earlier, depending on what I've gotten up to (yesterday I made a big pot of soup).  This is generally eaten upstairs on the couch so he can get in an hour or so of news viewing before we both can't take it anymore.  Then he generally works on a project on the laptop and I'll either bring out some handwork (finishing on bears, embroidery, sewing on buttons) to keep him company, or I'll retreat for a bonus few hours in the workroom.

11:00 p.m.  Daily Show/Colbert Report - a must have unless one or the other of us has fallen asleep on the couch, and usually the survivor watches anyway.  I get more news from them than the actual news anymore.

After that, it's bed.  I tend not to fall asleep right away because late night is my best time to plan.  It's also my best time to obsess that I'm a complete and total failure and my venture will never work out, so the planning is also an attempt to quiet the other voice.

7:00 a.m. - the alarm goes off . . .

Fabric, Two Ways

Even though I didn't make it to San Francisco for PR Weekend this year, I thank all the ladies for sending their mojo eastward while they were busy drinking mimosas and buying fabric.

This weekend, I sewed for myself for the first time in ages.  I just haven't felt like it; it's not as though I've put personal sewing aside to work on the crafty sewing.  But Saturday afternoon, with a pile of work on the table, reproaching me, I pushed it aside and went to the fabric shelves.

They've been neat and tidy ever since I got my new shelving unit.  Even when the rest of the room looks like someone's been dumpster diving, the fabric shelves have looked good.  Fact: they still do, there's just one roll missing.  (I have to be neat somewhere, I guess).

A while back, before I left work, Andrea showed me this free pattern she'd found, the Tessuti top.  I was a little skeptical - it looked a little shapeless.  But some of the examples she showed me were cute, so I downloaded a copy of it which has been sitting on a table in my living room ever since.

Andrea got down to it and made the top almost immediately, and it was way cuter in person.  It doesn't have a lot of shape, but it doesn't make you look shapeless, if that makes sense.  And don't we all occasionally need something cute that drapes but doesn't cling?

Friday night I taped the pattern together, and considered my shelves.  There were a few fabrics that called out to me, but I chose this NY print (purchased at Mood a year or two ago, I believe in the company of Elizabeth).  It originally was going to be a dress, but I decided that the knit was too soft and t-shirty to successfully make it as a dress.  And I hate when I make something out of a fabric that I love and it just doesn't last.  This didn't have dress staying power, so I decided to use it for the Tessuti top.  Since it's only one pattern piece front and back, I could use a large swath of the print  uninterrupted.

I only changed one feature about the top - I absolutely hate just turning edges under and stitching on knits.  There's too big a chance that it's going to ripple or stretch or do something unspeakable that will make me not wear it, or have to cut around it and end up with a bigger neckline.  So I made a binding, which went on quickly and looks much cleaner to my eyes.

There was a good bit of fabric left over.  Considering the size of those single pattern pieces, I was surprised.   KwikSew t-shirt?  Tank top?  I thought about making a tank to wear under the Tessuti, so there would be no inadvertent flashing, and I had figured out I wanted to combine my leftover print wtih a solid aqua remnant that I had, but when I looked for the fabric, it wasn't there.  (Actually, I can't find any of my knit remnants, not just the ones I recently gifted to Andrea for her super secret project).

So I decided to go for a top that I've made before, but not for a while - KS 2694.   I wasn't sure if I'd have enough fabric, but I went for it, and somehow I did.  Even enough for sleeves.  Once again, I banded the neckline instead of turning it under.

So there you have it.  One fabric, two completely different looks, and two tops in one weekend from someone who hasn't sewn for herself in about two months.

Now if I could just find three spools of black thread, I could coverstitch these babies and call them finished.

Judging by the smile

it went well.

Anyone who knows me knows just how much I love having my picture taken.

As in some days, I would have gone under the table rather than face the camera.

But on other days, despite frozen feet, you feel just too damn good to be camera shy.

And apparently that came through.

Note to self: only have cameras around on really good days.

Second note to self:  have more really good days.

Surviving the Craft Show

Saturday dawned bright and chilly - way chillier than I was hoping.

On the other hand, the rain had stopped and when I checked my email at 7:30 a.m., there was no message saying the show was being postponed, so the worse we could expect was cool breezes and some boggy ground underfoot.

The show is held in Woodland Cemetery, which is a beautiful old cemetery not far from where I live.  The entire front section is just open ground (so we're not actually selling our wares amongst the graves).  Behind where we were is the cemetery itself, loaded with blossoming trees and looming Victorian angel grave markers.

We loaded in at 9:00 a.m., which felt really early, but it took more time  than expected to set up, and with over 100 vendors participating they had to stagger the arrival times so we didn't all end up there at exactly the same time, clogging the narrow roads and tripping over each other.

A nice piece of luck - I ended up back to back with two other vendors I've worked with in the past, so I had someone to talk to throughout the day as the crowds came and went.

But they mostly came.  These photos were taken around 10:00 a.m., after I was mostly set up, but before people really started arriving.

After the fact, I'm not completely thrilled with my set up - the baby clothes and pillow covers on the line seemed like a cute idea and a good use of my limited 6x6 space, but with the wind the way it was, most of them spent the day flapping into the next vendor's space.  Good thing she wasn't doing anything similar!

Quite a few friends (and ex-co-workers) showed up to be supportive and frequently to make purchases.  Thrilled as I was to see them, I was even happier when complete strangers bought things!

It was a good day overall - it gave me a chance to see what sold and what didn't, what attracted people, even if they didn't make a purchase, what was ignored (not much) and pointed out to me that I'm going to have to find more tweedish fabric because apparently I'm going to need to make more bears.

Way more.  And soon.

The bears were the biggest seller of the day, by far.  And while I'm not totally surprised, I was hoping for a more even sell with some other pieces making more of a showing.

The other big seller was my discount basket, and that was full of small quilted bags and mini cosmetic size bags that I've made for years and that I'm absolutely sick of making.  I reduced the price on them to get them out of stock and, thankfully, most of them are now gone.

There's another show coming up on June 15th down at the 30th Street train station.  Because of the price and the size of the spot involved, the organizer suggests pairing up with another vendor.  I did just that with one of the sellers who was behind me (she makes really fabulous one-of-a-kind jewelry) and we'll be out there selling our souls that day.  Hoping for better weather.

I'm pretty happy with Saturday's results, though.  I went in with an optimistic number for sales and a realistic number, and I came in somewhere between but closer to optimistic.  For my first time out, selling face-to-face, that makes me really happy.

I certainly more than paid my table fee, which is the most important, and then spent part of my take on a 10x10 pop-up tent for the next show and any future ones where I might want to look a tad more like I have my act together.