A trio of corded pillows

Between visiting family, a retreat with my appliqué friends, and some big work deadlines, I haven’t had a lot of time to commune with my sewing machine lately. But when I got the samples back from shooting my video, I fit in a quick sewing session to make some siblings for the corded houndstooth pillow from the demo.

I really liked the original pillow’s black-and-white woven suiting framed with bright cord, so to round out the trio I used two more classic suitings, a herringbone and a nubby textured fabric, each with a different color for the piping. Using the envelope backing I show in the video made them quick, cheap, and easy additions to the sofascape, with just a bit of color and just a bit of texture.

What are your favorite simple pillow ideas?

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Happy birthday to the Father!

The Mother gets a lot of play round these parts, mainly because her interests align with mine so well. But any creativity I may have comes from both of my parents. The Father definitely has a creative streak, which sometimes brings out his inner engineer in bizarre ways.

For instance, what makes this lamp sparkle in the "after" photo?

None other than automotive engine paint. You might think it's just for jazzing up the V8, but not the Father. When he saw the under-$10 lamp the Mother had found for me at a junk shop, he knew it needed a paint job (that was obvious), but he also knew regular spray paint wouldn't stand up to the heat of the bulbs sizzling in metal shades. Ugly as the "before" version was, I didn't think there was any way to keep the detail of it—the lamp had three colours, including one metallic, and that sounded like a royal pain to repaint. But the Father disassembled the whole thing, sandblasted the hell out of each part (or maybe sanded them? At any rate, each piece was smooth as new), primed everything, and then sprayed each piece individually in one of three colours of engine paint. For the silver metallic, he even taped off rings in the center bit of the neck (where the three arms meet) to do detail work that not only replicated the original colour scheme but also added new detail! I couldn't believe it. If you look closely, you can catch lamps just like this (sometimes with different shades) on TV-show sets or at flea markets, but I've never seen one look this good, especially considering the deal we got on it (we probably spent more on paint than on the actual lamp!).

In the same vein, the Father was also responsible for repairing this lamp from an antique mall in Ohio. See how the base lights up as well as the shade?

We only discovered that it did this after buying it, but the base wasn't working. So the Father disassembled the whole thing again and determined that it must be a three-way socket running the show. He eventually figured out how to jury-rig a new socket—I distinctly remember him snapping off bits of it in mad scientist fashion—so the switch would turn on the base, the shade, or both in sequence. I don't know how he did it, but it's pretty impressive. And he was giddily impressed with his own handiwork, as I recall.

Happy birthday, the Father! You're the greatest.

PS—I'll stop bragging about my family now. I promise.

Getting ready for Christmas

With the last few work projects heading out the door, I'm scrambling to get everything else ready in time for the holidays. The tree, though, has been up for a while, displaying ornaments plucked from thrift and antique shops by the Other, the Mother, and me. I think the Other considers my colour coordination of the tree a little fascist. I can live with that.

Traverse rods: can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em

Here are the Other's lovely curtain panels, which we hung up yesterday over the sliding glass door in our living room. A little hard to photograph with light filtering through, but they're an immense improvement over the bog-standard vertical blinds inflicted upon us by the apartment complex. Would you believe he only paid $50 for seven floor-length panels? Not if you've ever priced midcentury textiles, you wouldn't.

The traverse rod instructions said installation would take 30 minutes, but it was more like the whole afternoon. Said instructions were virtually useless, and the instrux on the Home Despot website were only a little better—they were supposed to be for the same SKU, but they were clearly for a slightly different rod. (Plastic gates? What effing plastic gates?!)

If I weren't me, I'd be jealous of me

On a whim, the Other suggested we pop into a usually fruitless Goodwill yesterday. And look what we found! This saucy little coffee table is made of two pieces, joined with a peg, so that the lower surface can swing all the way around to make an L shape or a long table. Or it can be tucked underneath to save space and make a nice shelf for magazines and remote controls.

But that's not all! As we were rushing to get the table safely in our clutches, we spied one of the loveliest midcentury desks I've ever seen...

My apartment has always featured aqua and orange, so could it be more perfect? I'm criminally infatuated. The price tag left marks on the top, so I may need to refinish it, but the Other and I are already fighting over who gets to occupy the desk. Since I'm working from home now, it's obviously going to be me. (I shall have the most beautiful office/sewing room in all the land!) Felis Domesticus (that is, the Other's cat) has staked her own claim, basking on the desktop before the dust had even settled. She does know how to push my buttons—and she knows bloody well I can't spritz her with the water bottle if she's near delicate wood surfaces.

The cost for these two pieces? Less than $50 for the pair. (Plus taxi fare to haul the desk down the street—we looked ridiculous enough shuttling the table home on foot.) And both were pieces of furniture we kind of needed.

But that's still not all! The Other's had a set of dining chairs like this for a while:

Good, eh? I've always loved the pattern on the vinyl seats (click the photo for a closer look). Lo and behold, what did we find at an antique shop on Saturday?

Same pattern! Different colours, but given the Other's appreciation of flamingos and the like, the pink was perfect. There was a pair of the trays, so naturally we took them both home. Anybody know anything about the pattern's provenance?

We're probably moving apartments soon, so things aren't quite settled, but we're getting there. And I'm delighted to have a partner in crime to salivate over bargainous furniture with. (Watch for edits to the previous sentence if when we come to blows over the desk.)

So long, days of tidiness

I've been lax about posting since packing up my apartment has kicked into high gear, partly because the boxes, rubbish, and other various bits scattered round the place are making my brain quite a confused place. I just posted some photos on Flickr in memoriam cleaner days.

Quilting is more or less on hold, though I'll likely hit a fabric shop or two with the Mother when I see her this weekend for Middle Brother's wedding. I finished a backing for Spots so I can hand it off to her for quilting—I thought I had enough print scraps from the top to easily make the backing, but it ended up being a stretch. I'd show you a photo, but there isn't a clear surface available for picture-taking in the whole apartment! It's seriously making me bonkers.

Death of an ironing board

Has anyone even heard of a broken ironing board?

She made it from Stoke Newington High Street to Michigan and then to Philadelphia, but a year of quilting was too much. So when I move to California this summer to join the Other, I'll be sans ironing board. An upgrade is probably in order anyway given the amount of time I spend pressing.

That's my Spots quilt laid out on the floor, of course—better photo tomorrow.

For every quilt a pillow

Really, this post is to brag that my Column Inches quilt top is finished, but I like this picture better since it's one of my favourite corners of my apartment, perfect for curling up to read (you'd be surprised how comfy the fiberglass Eames chair is). But let me draw your attention to the pillow plopped on the chair, stitched together out of Column Inches scraps. Log cabin pillows have been floating around the Net for quite some time, and this is my first go at it. Am I the only one who wants to make pillowcases, cushions, and generally a complete set of bedding for every quilt he finishes? Here's a closer view:

The pillow was a good way to try out a quilting-thread color (white or off-white? Oh, the decisions!) before committing to the whole quilt top—which, by the way, is here:

I love the way it matches the chairs. It was a pleasant surprise, and Minty was quick to notice it on Flickr. The Mother took the top back with her when she and the Father came to visit last week, and I'm trying to get her to do some sort of cursive writing in the quilting. This is on the bottom of her quilting stack, though, since she put the Other's flamingo quilt to the head of the queue. (I was binding it all weekend and am just waiting for some better light to get a halfway decent photo of it.)

Column Inches was my second use of typography in a quilt (Card Catalog was the first), and I have a few other ideas knocking about for other forms of what I'd call, if I were a cheesy postmodern academic, "(text)ile art". I might call it that anyway—I never said I wasn't cheesy.

A beautiful family heirloom

Back in the seventies, my high-school-aged uncle thought this was a lovely gift for my grandmother. If I remember right, he proudly picked it out and payed for it himself. She, generally a bit more floral in her tastes, nevertheless dutifully displayed the African statuary in her living room for many years. It had become a gag gift by the time I reached an age of sentience, entered regularly into the Christmas white elephant swap. I think it's found its way into various wedding and/or baby showers, too, but somehow my parents ended up with it.

It lived in Middle Brother's room for a while, but it's now found a home in my apartment, where it looks oddly appropriate. With all the strong color around the room, the occasional black accent is help, so the Mother insisted I take it with me when I moved away (she was only too convinced that it looked smashing next to the lamp in the background of the photo; I'm sure her enthusiasm had nothing to do with wanting this thing the hell out of her house). The end table where the figure sits would look empty without it, but with Middle Brother getting married next summer, perhaps the time is nigh to regift such an elegant piece of our family history.

Funnily enough, the Mother and I saw an identical item, priced at $35, in an antique shop. I wouldn't have thought I could get more than a couple bucks! Of course, it wasn't exactly flying out of the shop....

Welcome to my apartment!

There's a story behind everything in my apartment, so I have to warn anyone who comes in to shut me up before I carry on forever. Of course, everyone's too polite to stop me. But on this site, I shall blither to my heart's content about things I've made or bought (usually secondhand) for the apartment—I hope you enjoy it, but I'll try not to be offended if you move along to another part of this vast interweb.