Reorganizing

I've made a promise to myself that I'm going to make a first pass through my house and start culling out what we no longer need and organizing what I want to keep.  I made a minor attempt a while back at cleaning out the linen closet and did manage to get rid of a bunch of stuff that was my daughter's childhood collection.  (No, I didn't throw it away, I sent it home with her to deal with!)  I need to repaint the shelves there, but got distracted by the small guest bedroom.

The small guest bedroom is where I've stashed stuff that I needed to get out of the living portions of the house, usually because company is coming, or things I want to keep but haven't found a place for yet.  It is the place in my own home that reminds me the most of my mom's, so this weekend I tackled it.  I sorted through a number of boxes of papers, and went through a filing cabinet that I haven't been in since I closed a craft business 20 years ago.  I ended up throwing almost everything in it away, but found a treasure I thought was lost...a silly manuscript that a friend and I wrote in high school.

I washed the walls and window in that corner; washed, ironed and rehung the curtains; and vacuumed the carpets.  I reorganized my doll furniture, quilt tops, and photos into storage containers instead of boxes that were falling apart.  My next task is to go through the books and yarns in the room.  But it is amazing how much I've already been able to throw away and how much floor space I've gained.  It really makes me feel good.

~Jane

Kitchen Curtains

As I've mentioned before, I've been going through my Mom's things, and we've had a couple of garage sales.  While packing up from the last sale, I noticed several curtain panels and a piece of matching fabric that I thought might look good in my kitchen.  My kitchen is pretty much decorated with black, white, and red.  These curtains were really old-fashioned, a sheer white with little white chenille hearts with red rectangles in the center.  I brought them home and washed them, mainly to make sure they weren't going to just fall apart.  I have a kitchen door with a window in it that is directly behind someone sitting at the computer in the sewing room, and my husband had borrowed one of my aprons to kind of hang from the curtain rod to block the glare on the computer screen.  I was thinking these curtains would work for that window, but when I tried the first pair they were much too long and I hated to chop them off.  I looked at the remaining curtain and realized it was shorter and that what I thought was a piece of yardage was really the matching curtain without its top casing or hem.  I sat up until 1 a.m. Friday morning sewing the casing and hem to match and then ironing the pair of curtains.  Take a look - they look great!  Thanks, Mom!

Searching for Pemberley

Have you ever started a book that looked wonderful, only to have it fall rather flat?  That was my problem with Searching for Pemberley by Mary Simonsen.  The book had good reviews and seemed interesting at first. Its premise was that Jane Austen based Pride and Prejudice on people that lived in her neighborhood.  By changing a few names, etc., she didn't really make up the whole story, she retold it, or at least most of it.  The story involved a young woman with an interest in Jane Austen delving into letters written by local people that prove she used her neighbors to provide her story line.  A second thread to the book was the romance of the young woman and her friendship with two different guys.  A third thread was the family of one of the descendents of the Darcy (Lacey) family and their story.  I could accept the theory that Jane Austen got her stories from things she heard happening around her, but I didn't really need to read all the supporting letters to prove it.  Even when we got past the Jane Austen part of the story and moved to the story of the young woman, the book failed to really catch my interest.  Ah, well.  On to the next one. 

~Jane

Cake Baking

After being inspired by the Julia Child movie, I decided 2010 was going to be the year of the scratch cake.  I have been making cakes - angel food cakes, sponge cakes, spice cakes - all year from scratch with good results.  (Even the spiced figgy cake turned out without the figs.)  So, rather cockily, I started making a chocolate cake for my husband's birthday.  I was halfway into mixing up the cake when I realized I didn't have enough cocoa powder.  I looked up the equivalent amount of baking chocolate to use, only to discover that if I used the baking chocolate, I would have too much butter in the batter. Ack!  Well, I decided to soldier on with the recipe and the layers baked up beautifully.  But sometime between last night when they came out of the oven, and this afternoon when I went to frost them with my from-scratch chocolate buttercream frosting, they settled and became a lot denser.  And after frosting and sitting for a couple hours, they settled even more.  The cake looked good, tasted good, but the layers were pretty dense.  I guess this is another cake I'm going to have to try again in my quest for perfect scratch cakes.

~Jane

On My Soapbox

My wonderful, 80-year-old, mother passed away this spring.  I loved her so much and we had so much fun together over the years.  But she left a house stuffed with possessions that I am now having to deal with.  I don't even know what to do with most of it.  Boxes and boxes and boxes of stuff.  Stuff she had collected with hobbies and interests in mind, and stuff she had purchased with an eye to reselling.  She had a large inventory of things that had been in her antiques business. We had a huge garage sale a couple weeks ago and hardly made a dent even though we sold things very cheaply just because we knew it had to go.  It is so depressing and very overwhelming.  Once in a while anger flares at the situation I've been put into.  While I would like to just take time to grieve for her and remember all the happy times, instead I find myself trying to deal with all the stuff.  The whole situation has really made me re-evaluate the amount of possessions in my own home.  Yes, I am bringing home some things from my mom's house, but I am also getting rid of some of our clutter.  As I have more time - after dealing with her house - I'm going to seriously organize and clean out my own home.  I have promised my daughter I will not leave the same kind of mess for her to deal with. 

As much as I want to clean out my mother's house and get rid of the stuff, I am appalled by the number of women who come up to me at a garage sale with an armload of things and make comments like, "My husband is going to kill me, I already have a houseful of this stuff, don't know why I'm buying more?", or "I'll have to wait until my husband goes to bed to sneak this stuff in."  After hearing these comments from people at the garage sale, and incidentally, from people on all the list serves I'm on, from knitters to quilters to doll collectors and costumers, I really wonder about why we all feel we need so much of everything.  We need to think about how big our stashes are, why we buy so much, and how much we are realistically going to accomplish in the rest of our lifetimes.  If you have such a large stash you have to sneak it in, you probably shouldn't be buying more. 

My mother's stash finally grew to the point where family and friends couldn't visit because there wasn't enough room unless the weather was nice enough to be outside.  It was a huge source of contention between my parents at the end.  We couldn't bring either of my parents home for hospice care because there wasn't any room.  She got to the point where she was spending all her available free time trying to liquidate it instead of doing things with family.  She found out how much of a burden acquiring more than you can ever use is.  I don't want to make the same mistake she did, I want to learn from it.

Okay, off my soapbox now.  I have to get to bed early so we can do another garage sale tomorrow. 

~Jane

Quote

I came across this quote the other day and it seemed appropriate for someone in the process of rethinking and reknitting their life -

"Take your needle, my child,
and work at your pattern —
it will come out a rose by and by. 
Life is like that . . . one stitch
at a time, taken patiently."

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

Knitting

My mother taught me to knit when I was about 7 years old.  We lived in France at the time and I remember her taking me to a small French yarn shop and buying me some red transparent plastic needles and a ball of yarn that was 1 strand of blue and 1 strand of gold plied together.  I thought it was magical yarn and knit and reknit it several times in my attempt to make it into a scarf.  I don't think I ever finished it.  All I learned to do at that point was the garter stitch.  My next memory of knitting is from when I'm in the 7th grade and knit garter stitch squares for the Red Cross.

When I was in high school, my mother signed me up for a sweater class at our local Sears store.  That was when department stores still had a fabric and yarn section.  She enrolled me in a knit-to-fit class where you knit from measurements and didn't really have a pattern.  I ended up with a sweater that was much too short with arms that were much too long.  I think my mother eventually unraveled it and did something else with the yarn.

My next venture into knitting came when I was pregnant with my daughter and knit all kinds of sweaters and booties and blankets for her.  After that the knitting went on for years, with mittens and hats and sweaters being churned out all through her childhood.  Eventually though the knitting stopped as other pursuits took its place.

About ten years ago I discovered knit socks and knit dozens of pairs until everyone I knew had an extensive sock wardrobe.  Now I have the little guy to knit for, my daughter, and I'm even contemplating knitting a sweater for myself.  My current projects are a pair of socks with an interesting heel, a deer sweater for the little guy, and a market bag for myself.  I have yarn to knit up into hats, booties, and washcloths for baby shower presents.  The possibilities are endless. 

~Jane