Oodles and oodles

Heartfelt notions

Another Valentines Day arrives, and still I have not made this skirt to wear to my friend's annual tea party.

Nor will I be sporting this apron.

If there's to be a sewing theme for today, it will have to be with a vintage valentine.

Or two.

Happy Valentines Day, friends!


 

Upcycling

I've been sorting through vintage patterns lately, a few at a time - if you look up the word "tedious" in the dictionary, you'll discover a sentence that explains how to use the word: "Checking vintage patterns to see that they have all of their pieces is very, very tedious." However, the super-cute illustrations keep me going, and I especially like this one. I somehow feel it might be depicting the early stages of a toddler rumble. Like the girl in pink is telling the boy in blue that he wouldn't have fallen if he'd been more careful, and the toddler in white wants her to stop being so bossy. But I digress.

What was odd about this pattern was the inset photo in the corner, with a little girl wearing an oversized shirt. (If you look very carefully, you'll notice she's holding her fingers as if she were holding a cigarette. Extremely disturbing, but apparently she's pretending to be her dad.)

That's because the pattern was designed to be cut out of a man's shirt. The cutting diagrams on the inside show how to lay the pattern pieces on a buttoned shirt to take advantage of the ready-made buttons and buttonholes. That's how the overalls, with the buttons up the side, are made. Just adorable, and a timesaver, too. I'm picturing them in plaid flannel myself.

I thought the pattern might date to the World War II era, and the date on the flap confirmed it.

Sweet, isn't it? (Except for that child pretending to smoke.)

Thank you for the input on bows vs. spools. Fortunately I do not have to decide, because a nice person bought two sets of the blocks from my Etsy shop, and it's up to her. However, I'm taken enough with the pattern, a little different than the diagonal bow tie pattern I've favored in the past, that I would like to try to make some. I don't know if I need more hours in the day, or more days in the week. Probably both. 

 

Any way you look at it

A snow day for me, hurray! Once I finished the work I'd brought home to do, I was free to spend my day doing one of my favorite things: recreational ironing. Some people might say I should get out more, but really: I couldn't. I was snowed in.

These little hand-stitched quilt blocks were just the thing for a snowy day.

But they did leave me with one question.

Should they go this way, so they look like spools of thread?

Or this way, so they look like bows?

Either way you look at them, they're pretty great.

Pyrex Saturday

I've been a little worker bee lately, so I had a good plan for Saturday. Go to an estate sale (not because it sounded great - Hummels and silverplate - but because it was the first sale in ages), then come home and putz around. Maybe cook. Maybe bake. Maybe do something to the living room which has essentially remained bare since the Christmas decorations went down. A lazy Saturday.

I saw a lot of people I hadn't seen all winter at the sale. That's a good thing - that I hadn't seen them all winter, I mean. There are a few people at sales that I'm happy to see, and a few more that I have a nodding acquaintance with, but for the most part there are unpleasant, pushy men. The only good thing about unpleasant, pushy men is that they tend not to go for Pyrex, so I got the refrigerator set above. And I thought, you know, I should list that right now, because it would be easy.

Knowing that it's easier to list things that are similar all at one time, I thought I'd get out some pink Pyrex that I bought a long time ago.

These bowls looked so pretty with the pink and the green, I thought I might as well get them out, too.

These were stored in the same area, and since I had kind of a housewares thing going, I got them out. (There are five others ... cute set. They'd look awesome in my kitchen.)

Once you have the Pyrex out, you might as well go all the way and get out the Fire King and Anchor Hocking cousins.

I washed the pieces up and lovingly photographed them and thought how I've never been really crazy about these Kimberly mugs, but I do like these blue ones.

And how if I had a lot of space, I'd just keep everything. It snowed, and then it rained, and because it was so cloudy I guess I didn't notice how late it was.

Before I knew it, it was time to think about dinner. My lazy Saturday was gone. I hadn't had time to be lazy, and that made me kind of sad. But at least I spent the day with Pyrex.