Shoes and Pie

Blah Blah Blah

I still can’t seem to get myself back into the hang of Tweeting (should that be initial capped or not?) so I thought perhaps I’d, you know, write another blog post. Raise your hand if you remember when I used to do it five days a week!

So let’s see…

Okay, since I was working on The Catalog at 10:30 last night and again by 7:30 this morning, I’m taking a deserved, if guilty, break to write this. Which I mention only because the guilt, I feel it. But thbppppt. Also, I paused to make coffee. Cawwwwffeeeee. Slurp slurp slurp.

MAKE COFFEE* should be the permanent first item on the whiteboard I finally hung above my desk yesterday. Hey, how’s that for an accomplishment? I finally hung the whiteboard! And was able to erase HANG WHITEBOARD from it. Ta-da!

Aaaaaand I completed another project yesterday that had been in limbo for an even longer time: my very own vintage-plastic-storage-container pendant lamp! And let me tell you, it was a bigger pain than you would imagine. This tip is coming from someone with mad craft skillz, yo. If you love the concept, and you should because it’s nifty, buy one pre-made from the originators of the Tupperlight, Boots N Gus. That’s their spiffy work shown at the top of this here post. They have a better assortment of Tupperware and Tupperware-like products than I could find at my local thrift, and they have done the work for you. For a very reasonable price.

I would love to see if Gogobigred is available to hang today, but I’m stuck at home until FedEx arrives with my new stereo receiver. My trusty Aiwa bookshelf system died after 15 years of faithful service, and I had three requirements for a replacement: I have to be able to afford it, I need to plug in my AirPort and my turntable, and I require enough room to set my turntable on top. HOWEVAH, it seems that the fancy, newfangled bookshelf stereo systems these days are mostly vertically oriented. And they have unnecessary bells and whistles like iPod docks and, well, that’s actually the only new feature that my old system didn’t have. But I still don’t need it. With the AirPort plugged in (thankyouverymuchoverandover @Chartier and @PensAndPaws), I can access my entire iTunes library wirelessly. And a CD player? Ha! Again, no need. After discussing with my dad the current quality of various manufacturers, I came to the conclusion that anyone still manufacturing components is most likely going to take it seriously. They’ll have lower-end models, but a cheapo consumer-oriented company like the now-defunct Soundesign isn’t going to bother with components. And so I ordered one I could (in a normal world) afford and have had a very quiet house for a few days while I wait. Today is the day that music will once again sound throughout my home, and I perk up at the rumble of every truck that drives by. The power company is working outside today, however, so I’m frequently disappointed. But that just means the anticipation lasts longer!

Now my coffee is ready and so until next time, be well.

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*My handwriting is all caps, with limited exceptions.

Welcome. Now leave.

Messy Stuff: My life is a bit upside-down right now. That’s all you need to know, but it’s why I’ve been generally absent from all of my usual online activities. And from a bunch of in-person stuff too. Now go away.

Oh, wait. I invited you here by writing this. Okay. Well, then. Umm…

One Thing: The catalog project that a friend and I have been contracted for is finally reaching the point where enough copy is written and photography is completed that the thing is starting to look darn good, if I may say so. Many-many-many thanks to my partner-slash-boss, who is so very skilled at Tetris-ing seemingly impossible demands into visually stimulating layouts. Also, we did three straight days of studio photography with about 300 babies/toddlers (okay, more like 19) and I didn’t break out in hives. Also, I learned that I am damn good at putting together flat-pack furniture. I suppose it comes from years of decorating my living spaces on a college student’s budget, which was all I had to work with even many years out of college. Perhaps my next tattoo should be of a set of Allen wrenches (hex keys to some of you).

Another Thing: I’m still toying with the idea of selling off my shop‘s inventory to any interested vintage vendors. Or of hoarding what I have, buying (with what money?) as much as I can get my hands on, and opening a brick-and-mortar location (also, with what money?). Which is 13 shades of crazy, but finding meaningful full-time employment working for someone else has been, let’s be generous and say: difficult. What I would love is to work at a vintage store, if it would pay enough to cover my living expenses. Which are pretty low, if I don’t maintain a savings account or 401k or, you know, eat.*

Also: I promise that I have more fun stuff to list in the shop as soon as I am no longer Trapped Under Something Heavy. Thank you for your patience, and let me know if you’re looking for anything specific. I may have it in my unlisted inventory, you never know. Well, you know when you ask.

And Then: I never intended to leave Twitter for so long, but I was surprised by how much I don’t miss it. I still plan to come back, but with a greatly thinned Follow list. As soon as I figure out how to do that, because I only follow accounts that I actually care about in the first place. Some of you need to shut the hell up a bit, though. A good copy writer once told me, “pretend every word costs a dime.” Which is a bit of advice that, if you read my blog posts (and you do, obviously, because you’re reading this) you know that I myself often ignore.

For Drewseph: Hi! Halloween is coming. Which means that Halloween Costuming Blog Posts are coming. Plotting is afoot, and a couple of preliminary purchases have been made, but that particular plan may be out the window already. Time will tell.

When All Of A Sudden: It is entirely likely that a certain red (mostly) headed friend will come over today to help me re-dye my horrifically ignored hair, which has been neither cut nor colored since my beloved Lacey worked her magic on me for Viva. Which, if you don’t recall, was the first weekend in April. Do the math. It’s not pretty.

Th-th-th-that’s all Folks. See you soon. Maybe.

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*Cheese, I love cheese, rahhlly I do. And I love cheese that costs $24.99/lb. although I don’t BUY cheese that costs $24.99/lb. Not while I’m so precariously underemployed, I don’t.

Three cheers for the red, white, and blue!

July 3rd. I’ve been invited to join some friends on the 4th for a very casual evening at their house. I recently swapped my “Sailor Betty” dress so I needed to figure out what to wear! My closet may be vast, but wasn’t spitting out anything red/white/blue and casual. Somehow, a red velvet party dress didn’t seem appropriate, you know?

My regular readers may recall that back in April, I had purchased some red-white-blue striped vintage fabric that was begging to be made into a summer dress. I bought some patterns, wrote a post, and then proceeded to do nothing about it. Now, on the evening of the 3rd, I remembered the yardage of striped fabric! It was getting late, but could I whip up a dress in the morning? I went through my patterns and decided on Butterick 5214, a reissue of a 1947 pattern for a halter dress, belt, and fitted jacket. The dress pattern itself is simple, but this would be my first attempt at making chevrons from striped fabric. Had I bitten off more than I could chew? I read all of the reviews at PatternReview and knew from the outset that I’d need to add length to the skirt. I could handle that. I just hoped that the fabric store would be open on the 4th so that I could buy the correct length zipper!

Come morning,  I started cutting out the pattern and my fabric. I was trying to be extra careful with my cuts, so the stripes would line up perfectly. It took a while, but I finally admitted that the old fabric just wasn’t printed evenly! I had to keep refolding it to get each piece cut as closely as possible. But when I actually started sewing, things were looking pretty good! I wish I’d taken a little more time with the skirt front (center seam), but I’m generally pleased overall. The fabric store was indeed open so I didn’t have to shorten a zipper from my stash, and I finished off the halter straps with a vintage button from my mother’s (and once her mother’s) button box.

Voilà, completed dress by 3pm (with a few interruptions for Twitter and blip.fm):

It’s a bit gappy on top and I’ll make a couple of vertical darts to take up the slack before I tack down the bottom of the bodice lining, but it was close enough to wear for an evening with friends. I didn’t have time to make the matching jacket or belt. Yet! For the time being, I paired it with a wide belt which really didn’t “work” with the look, but I had to fetch my Flag Bag and head out!

photo by @jgamet

Detail photos of side darts and button:

Mid-Century Coffee Table

While reading the entries for Atomic Indy‘s current giveaway, I realized that in all these years I’ve never written about my dearly beloved coffee table.

While I have never physically climbed into a Dumpster, I am not above grabbing interesting things that I can reach from the ground, the two most memorable being a complete Mac workstation (older but functional) and my coffee table. Both came from different apartment complexes in Boulder, CO although neither were anywhere near any of the fab MCM architecture which lurks in that city.

SPOILER ALERT: The following may offend purists. Please forgive me my trespasses, and read on.

The finish on the coffee table was abused, and the legs had been reduced to stumps. But the boomerang shape was wonderful, and I had to try to salvage it! The shape screamed MCM, the Brown-Saltman logo on the bottom was a dead giveaway, but I had no other historical information with which to work. This was 1998, and while the World Wide Web seemed vast at the time, it pales in comparison to the amount of information that’s available now. I may have been able to find the table mentioned in a book at the library, but I pulled it out of the trash. It couldn’t possibly have any significance, right? So why would it be in a book? Nah, that would be a waste of time.

In my under-ventilated apartment, I stripped off as much of the original finish from the table top as I could, leaving the apron untouched. My boyfriend and I then hauled the table up to his parents’ house and sanded the top down to a smooth surface. My intent had been to varnish the top back to the walnut color I found it in, but the grain was so striking that I changed my mind and switched to a tung-oil finish instead. I KNOW, IT’S NOT ORIGINAL. The artist won out over the preservationist. Moving on…

What to do about those legs? When found, the table had three stumpy peg-legs, all pointed straight down, and all sawed off at the same awkwardly useless height of about 5 or 6 inches. I could see where a fourth leg probably used to be, but from the standpoint of physics it seemed gratuitous. My hypothesis was that the three-legged table, even with four legs, had proven unsteady, and the previous owner kept hacking away in an attempt to achieve some stability. It being Boulder, the idea of a table that sat 6 inches from the floor wasn’t the oddity it might be elsewhere. It’s a college town, and a pot-smoke-filled one at that, so it was easy to imagine this table surrounded by oversized floor pillows in a room decorated with gauzy curtains and tapestries. My local hardware store, in exchange for a few dollars, provided me with a set of screw-in replacement table legs in a tapered cylindrical shape that I felt befitted the obvious mid-century heritage of the table. AGAIN, NOT ORIGINAL. But, I thought, probably very close. I tung-oiled the legs to match the refinished table top. To better stabilize the construction, I used the angled option of the legs’ screw-in plates, and voilà! Well, no, it was still pretty unstable. But hey, we have a really snazzy looking coffee table!

I continued to use the table* until, tired of it tipping over, I bought my first bit of Brand New, Real Grown-Up Furniture—a very sturdy, four-legged, Shaker-style coffee table—a few years later. Still, I couldn’t bear to part with my Boomerang, and so it was stored, disassembled, in a closet. When I bought my current home, I reassembled it and used as the table for my rarely-visited basement seating arrangement. In time, it was covered with the assorted rubble typical of a finished basement in a house with no other storage area, and mostly forgotten.

Mostly.

But not entirely.

In November of 2009, I decided to resurrect the Boomerang. I cleared off the layer of office supplies that had settled on top, I brought it upstairs to the living room, I immediately tired of it Tipping. The fuck. Over. I moaned and whined about it. I moved the legs, now numbering four, into what I thought would be a more stable arrangement. It still tipped. I still whined. Nick, who is Good At This Kind Of Thing, rearranged my rearrangement, and for the first time in 11 years, the table doesn’t tip! But how a furniture company could manufacture a table so unsteady didn’t, well, sit right with me. If you’ll pardon the pun. And I once again started researching the table, this time armed with an Internet filled with considerably more information than the last time I looked.

Brown-Saltman Coffee Table, Original Construction

I now know that my Brown-Saltman coffee table dates to 1955, and does appear to have had what was left of its original walnut-colored finish when I found it. It was designed by either Paul Frankl or John Keal; on that, there is some disagreement. And the original (four) legs did indeed go straight down, but those three stumps that my table had been left with used to connect to a base of (three) paddle-shaped feet which would have indeed been less tipsy than the tapered jobbies I had imagined and attempted. To be perfectly honest, I don’t much like the original base, and I prefer the tapered legs that my table now sports. I also found that, were my table restored to its original condition, it would be the most valuable thing in my house. As it is, it’s worth considerably less, but its value to me is unparalleled.

*This is the time period during which a friend managed to somehow scorch a plate ring onto the table’s surface, which bugs the heck out of me but not enough for me to refinish the table again.

Clothing Swap

In a three-pronged attack involving 1. Getting Out Of The House, 2. Meeting New People, and 3. Cleaning My Closets, I participated this weekend in a clothing swap. Outside of an informal “hmmm, I think this would look better on you” with my friends, I’d never done anything like this before. Lucky for me, the gals who organized it (mostly, I believe, members of LUPEC) do it every year, and had their proverbial act together.

Capelli Floral provided beautiful (and sizeable) studio space, clothing racks were wheeled out, tables were set up, and a system of organization (t-shirts here, slacks there, sportswear over on that table, etc.) was put into place. Organized, that is, until some latecomers—myself included—took over a second room all willy-nilly.

I arrived with my yard-debris tote filled to capacity, and the excess packed into my Ginormous Suitcase. If you’ve traveled with me to Viva, you know the hideous orange one to which I am referring. And lo, it was full as well! Didn’t I just donate three trash bags full of clothing and handbags to VVA a few weeks ago? And a box full of dresses and shoes to Adams 12 School District in April? My closets apparently open into Narnia.

Knowing that any “leftovers” would be packed back up and donated to local charities, I planned to head home empty-handed. Well no, I’m no fool. But I planned to head home with a small fraction of what I’d arrived with, and at that, I succeeded. It turns out that one gal and I have similar taste in clothes, and are similarly sized, so we both wound up with a bag of each other’s things.

The photos throughout this post are of my “loot,” some of which is vintage. Not shown is one squee-worthy vintage black party dress, omitted only because I immediately put it in my Fancy Dress closet and forgot to fetch it when I was taking photos. So, um, I need a party to attend. Anyone? Anyone?

I succeeded in emptying out a chunk of space in my closet, got some new-to-me wonderful things, others picked out new-to-them goodies, and three local charities (Goodwill, SafeHouse, and Father Woody) got boxes full of the leftovers. I’d call that a win-win-win-win situation.

Many thanks to Michelle and Andee for including me in the fun!