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TO: SELF
FROM: SELF
RE: STOP COMPLAINING ABOUT THRIFT STORES ALL THE TIME.
Because Tuesday, self, you got a pair of McCoy pots.
And Wednesday you found the World's Largest Christmas apron.
Not to mention a bowl full of ornaments, including frosted bells and elfin ones,
a spun-head girl inside a Jewelbrite case,
and a handful of glass indents and shapes.
As with so many things I tell myself, I'm sure this will promptly be dismissed. But for one day, at least, I'm not going to complain.
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A pretty good bouquet, especially for the middle of October in upstate New York.
The cosmos seem to prefer fall over summer - they've been at their best this past week (and they are so tall - at least six feet! - that I have to reach up to cut them. Must save seeds!)
Feeling very good about making the effort to cover these the two nights we had frost. Even one more bouquet of these would have been worth it.
We're having my absolute favorite kind of October Saturday - rainy, windy, chilly, with a dark sky that really sets off the fall colors. Fire in the stove, candles lit ... it's just about perfect.
Another house with flowers, also kind of perfect. (The photo's from an Etsy listing.) Just love this set, but it does not work in my house at all.
Seems I'm not the only one who likes flowers around here. Or dark, cozy, settling-in days. Especially when they come on a Saturday.
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I rarely have anything good to say about Thrift Store 'A,' and I'm not going to take it back. Its shelves are filled with terrible, terrible stuff. Sometimes things are ridiculously overpriced. And the people there drive me crazy. Yesterday, that woman absent-mindedly shaking the package of jingle bells she'd picked up? While she was invading my personal space? I wanted to absent-mindedly shake her.
But week after week I go back because there might be a gingham and rickrack apron so pretty and perfect that I'll violate the long-standing no-more-aprons rule.
And I'll certainly go back next week, and the week after that, because once every few years there's something really amazing. Like a set of Lustro Ware canisters.
Everything I've ever said about that thrift store is the absolute truth. I question my sanity every time I pull in the parking lot. But yesterday, for once, I was not questioning my sanity when I pulled out of the parking lot.
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Surely this has happened to you. You just want to find one thing in a cupboard, and when you can't find it, you realize you need to straighten up the whole thing. Which is how one room of my house yesterday came to look as if there had been a terrible incident at a fabric factory.
I very quickly tired of the task of separating fabrics into piles by color and era.
I turned on the television to find my beloved Steelers playing, and quickly decided the most important thing I could do was a) stack and sew little squares of fabric as thank-you gifts for Etsy fabric orders and b) root for the Steelers.
I honestly don't remember what I was looking for now. But I found a couple of things I kind of forgot I had.
I found a little scrap of fabric and decided
that if I ever take up quilting
I would want to use this for little squares.
I did not, however, get the cupboard straightened out. Its contents are now piled in a large laundry basket. And unless a team of elves came in overnight and organized it all for me, I suspect it's still waiting for me to tackle today.
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Our weather forecasters are just beside themselves about this weekend. They're giddy. They're saying things like it's going to be a Top Ten Weekend. Of course, being detail-oriented, I want to know whether that's a Top Ten for the Year, a Top Ten for all Octobers, a Top Ten for all time in recorded history. Apparently it's supposed to be gorgeous, and I'm fine with that. It's prime apple-picking and close to prime leaf-peeping season, and that's even better when it's sunny and warm.
So in honor of gorgeous fall weather, I thought I'd haul out some gorgeous fall fabrics. I adore these two. I want that tiny daisy print in every color, but I'm glad to have it in yellow. And I love the fall-color check. I might take some of it to the copy store and get some paper made - it would be great for one of those pumpkins that are on the cover of Country Living this month. I'm also going to pop a little of it in Etsy, but only because I have a lot of it. Otherwise I'd probably do what I always do and hoard it for a good long time.
An array of tiny fall prints, all from that great auction this summer.
A pretty fall-colored feed sack from a few summers ago.
Sewing notions in fall colors, also heading for Etsy.
(On the subject of Etsy, let me just say thanks for the Etsy love. I've been running to the post office most every day, and for a lot of reasons, one of them being that I really like the people at my post office, that makes me happy.)
(Also, on the subject of yesterday's comments, let me say that any and all of you are welcome to rent a room. Cheap. But you'll probably have to help me get my fall chores done, and that includes exterior painting. Also, it's very likely that at some point there will be a large dog on the foot of your bed and/or a fluffy cat that likes sleeping on people's heads. Just thought you should know.)
You might be able to guess, given today's general theme, what this squirrel charm is attached to.
Yes, things really were better in the old days. Well, cuter, at least.
Have a happy weekend - and if you're in upstate New York, have a happy Top Ten weekend!
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I'm not a part of the real estate industry per se.
Times have not gotten so hard that we've taken to renting out rooms. (Yet.)
Our house is not for sale. (Although if the right buyer came along, with plenty of cash ...)
I do not have an apartment, furnished or otherwise, to show you.
No, my only connection with the real estate industry is that I own a collection of signs that for some reason delight me. I spent the day with them, framing and photographing them, and now I'm listing them in Etsy. But I wonder: if I hung that "Rooms for Rent" sign on my porch, do you think I'd get any inquiries?
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Today feels like a real fall day. I was switching out screens for storm windows this morning when the truck bringing our winter supply of wood pellets arrived. There's a freeze watch for tonight, so I spent a lot of time in the garden. I'll cover what I can, but I can't cover it all, so I picked as much as I could.
This isn't a season's worth of cherry tomatoes. It's two days' worth. Four plants (which sowed themselves) = one quart of cherry tomatoes every day. A woman I work with barely gets by on her part-time wages, and you'd think I was taking her pieces of gold when I bring in cherry tomatoes. It makes me appreciate them all the more.
Scallions and dill. So good straight from the garden. I hope some of what's left out in the garden makes it through the chilly night.
There are many, many surfaces covered with winter squash, which needs to cure a bit before I put it in a basket. There's a wheelbarrow's worth of red and yellow onions in the garage, drying.
I nearly made a terrible mistake with this plate a few weeks ago. I bought it earlier this summer on a Jadite buying binge. I fully intended to re-sell it, because it's pretty hard to find this style, and I don't collect this pattern. (Well, I don't necessarily collect this pattern. I'm an equal-opportunity Jadite collector.) I was taking photos, getting ready to list it on eBay, and for whatever reason, it occurred to me to try something.
I got out one of my small bowls, and it fit perfectly in the center. Like it was made for that. (Which it wasn't, as far as I know, but still...) Anyway, I realized I certainly could not sell the plate, because it would be perfect at Christmas, for different cookies and treats.
Or for vegetables, with dip in the middle. (You'll have to imagine the dip. Which would be made with the fresh scallions and dill.)
Anyway, it was fortunate I came to my senses. There's no way I'm selling that plate.
I forgot to show you these - six McKee footed dishes, which I got in Pennsylvania. I honestly thought I was going to resell them, too. Until I got them home.
Now I'm thinking they need to be filled with chocolate pudding - the real kind, not the kind from a box, not that I object to it necessarily. Warm chocolate pudding. With a little bit of whipped cream, and shaved bittersweet chocolate. I'll light a fire in the stove. Maybe make a stew with some of those vegetables. Watch the leaves fall and listen to the geese out back on the neighbor's pond. It was a settling-in kind of day, and it was pretty nice.
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Even if I'm not quite ready to pull out the Halloween collection, I'm ready for some fall colors inside. The zinnias are doing their best to make sure I'm heartbroken when the growing season ends. But when there are no more fresh flowers to bring in, I'll still have some crazy quilts for color.
The crazy quilts in my collection are just samplers and squares, most of which have come in box lots. They're a good size to use on top of a table or the back of a chair.
The embroidery on this one makes my heart sing. (Just to the right of the orange piece is a worn strip on which you can barely make out the word POLICE. Love that!)
Not a lot of embroidery on this piece, but it has a cat in variegated cross stitch, which is hard to top.
Crazy quilts are pretty agreeable about being mixed and matched. The piece with the cat embroidery isn't quite big enough to cover up the top of this stand (which hides the television), so there's another small quilt (the striped one on the right) tucked underneath it.
I assembled this little quilt out of 6-inch squares I cut from an old quilt that was in shreds. The trouble with a lot of crazy quilts is that the old silks and satins are so fragile they shred. Sometimes the patch has completely disintegrated, leaving just the stitched-down edges and the back showing through. It really seemed a waste to lose the whole quilt, so I rescued as many good sections as I could.
Fortunately the initials were embroidered on a sturdy piece of brown velvet.
And the lovely gold flower is on a piece of black velvet.
A silky print that survives is a treasure, too.
An ambitious person might add some embroidery along the seam lines. And a person with a short attention span could do a little occasional embellishing on some of the plain squares when she felt like it. That's the beauty of a crazy quilt. They don't ask an awful lot of a person.
Nor do zinnias. Honestly, I don't think there's any bouquet at any flower shop that would make me as happy as these.
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