Curtains: Now with Mountain Goats

I may have just outdone myself in making the World's Cutest Curtains.

Yep.

It's ridiculous, the cuteness.

I hold this fabric responsible. The photo on Ikea's site doesn't do it justice.

Here. Let me show you. There are leaves and berries and cabins and pine cones and mountains and goats.

Did I mention there are goats?

P.S. I totally cheated and used fusible webbing for the entire things. Lazy lazy McLazerson. But sooooo easy it hurts.

Things held.

This weekend was spent camping and playing in the woods.

I held nature bits in my hands. Wood and earth and sap and stones and moss. I also made good use of bark and rocks as art supplies. The sign said "No gathering firewood." It didn't say anything about art supplies :)

First treasures: a morel and a pinecone. They can look a lot alike when skimming a dark forest floor.

And then some art was made.



And then I hid them all in the woods.

I hope that an adventurous explorer will find my treasures someday.

Big Team Scribble: Get your coloring book now!

Woo-hoo!

The BIG Team Scribble coloring book, which I wrote about back in February, is now up for pre-sale on Etsy!

It's 52 pages of coloring fun, and features the handiwork of over 110 artists - including me! I gotta say that participating was a blast, and I can't wait to see how our little trains look all connected together. Here's a sneak peek - my own personal little train car is the one with the goofy birds, on the right:

(And hopefully there will be another surprise from me at the end of the book, if it made it in - guess you'll just have to buy one to find out!)

After the pre-sale the coloring book will only be printed in a limited amount - so step lively! To get your copy, and for more details and images, go here. BEST OF ALL: a portion of every sale will be donated to UNICEF!

You can learn more about The Scribble Project here. And remember: I'm always whipping up some tasty doodles over at my other blog, Two Pound Press.

Swan dive

This old photo stopped me dead in my tracks.

It's just really really simple.
And really really gorgeous.
And just what I needed today.

Things acquired

When I see a GIANT custom-made banner advertising for a community wide rummage sale, hung in front of a huge stretch of subdivisions, I get big expectations. Driveways packed with bargains. Dozens of lemonade stands. Happy smiling home dwellers, thrilled to be getting rid of decades worth of acquired goods and ready for a good haggle.

HEY WASHINGTON. Five crappy items on a card table do not a yard sale make. And that whole "community-wide" thing? There were maybe 5 or 6 that we could find after driving through giant subdivisions with hundreds of houses. Sigh. Guess I'm spoiled by the Midwestern rummage sale.

We gave up on rummages and finally visited the antique stores in town. AMAZING. Packed to the brim with wonderful, reasonably priced odds and ends. I brought home:

"The Button" Polaroid camera. I was especially excited about it because it takes SX-70 film, which I've never used before. Now to stalk The Impossible Project shop and hope to snag some of that Silver Shade or Fade to Black. Sooo expensive but so so good.

And not really an antique, but I needed this:

To water my elephant plant, of course.

Also found the perfect chalk holder to go with our freshly repainted pantry doors, featuring chalkboard paint.

Yay! I freakin' love chalkboard paint. Sadly, I never took a before photo of the outside. It was all a sticky buttery yellow with gold handles. We used the Valspar brand chalkboard paint from Lowe's. 1 coat regular primer, three coats chalkboard paint. Works great and erases easy with a wet rag. The gray is "Wet Pavement" by Valspar.

The pantry was seriously gross when we moved in. I think there was a brown sugar explosion in there at some point, and the entire thing was sticky and dirty. That Mary Moo-cow contact paper had probably been there since 1986 and was totally crusted on. We made it nice and clean! (Click the pic to enlarge.)

Now to get the rest of the cabinets painted gray...

Pickle art

One of my favorite local burger/sandwich shops is pickle-themed. They have a pickle-y name, pickle paintings on the windows, and my favorite, a pickle-shaped pen to sign your credit card receipts. (Sadly, for some strange reason, you don't get a pickle with your meal. I won't ever understand this...)

Today's visit to the pickle restaurant was even better than normal because the ENTIRE place was filled with customer-created crayon drawings of pickles. It seemed like my entire town got together and had a doodle explosion. I definitely saw a broad scope of talents and age groups represented. There were giant pickles, pickle families, fashion model pickles, Miley Cyrus pickles (he he), pickles wearing hats, pickles in cars, pickles with canes, dancing pickles, pickles wearing bikinis - pretty much any scenario you could think of, someone had drawn. I contributed a Robo Pickle.

Ridiculous as it might be, I was completely in awe of the creativity in that little burger joint. People were having fun. Kids and adults were sitting down with baskets of crayons and coming up with the craziest pickle-themed stuff you could ever imagine. Remember my post about coloring from the other day? This was like a dream come true.

Spoon herb markers

Dave and I made our own herb markers from flattened old spoons tonight. We saw them posted on a blog somewhere awhile back and thought, "Hey, we can do that!" And while browsing at Goodwill the other day, we remembered the spoons and rummaged through the dingy bins of used silverware to find the "good" ones - metal slightly thinner than what you'd buy new today, with beautiful worn and almost-golden patina.

Dave flattened them out with a hammer, and I finally got to put my cheap metal stamping kit ($5 at Harbor Freight) to good use.



If you want to try your had at it, here are some tips:
- Clamp the spoon down to your work surface while using the metal stamps.
- Work on a really hard surface. Like an anvil or a solid workbench. I tried it on an old wooden cutting board on the carpet and that was waaaay too cushioned.
- Use a hammer with some heft to it. After all, you are trying to pound metal into metal. Those little stubby hammers don't work out real well.
- If you want the letters to stand out more, rub black paint on the surface and push it into the crevices of each letter. Wipe off the excess with a paper towel.
- I'd also recommend having a good dog nearby to guard your workspace. It truly helps.

(P.S. You can find people making these on Etsy as well, if you'd prefer to just buy 'em rather than make 'em.)

Garden: Early May 2010

Warning: This post is solely for me and my desire to log what is happening in my garden and document it for future reference. Read along, if you'd like, but it's not for the easily bored.

I wish I would have started this log in early April, after I had a chance to get my eyes on the smorgasbord of plants we inherited. It would have been nice to document them in various states of blossom. But May is also a perfectly good month to start keeping track of things.

After a long long stretch of wet, cool, and gray weather, this weekend was an explosion of sun and warmth. So very very welcome. This is my third spring in the pacific northwest, and it was the hardest. The longest. The wettest (at least to my still-newbie eyes). I think it was only made harder by the fact that I finally have my very own yard -- a yard that needs a little TLC -- and I have been so anxious for the rain to stop so I can get out there and get my knees muddy. But this weekend was well worth the wait.

The local plant sale on Saturday was incredible and I scored quite a few excellent additions for very little money:
- Mystery rosebush, which we'll try to grow in a pot on the balcony upstairs for the time being. We'll see how it does. Dave built the most lovely of trellises for it after we got angry at how expensive cedar trellises are in the store. Buy your own cedar strips. Nail gun. Done.

- Mystery lilac - not sure if it's going to be purple or white. We currently have a white one that's lovely, but it can't get enough sun because of the very naughty and very big thundercloud flowering plum. It's sparseness makes it look even more delicate and fragile. This new one will go in a sunnier spot with less competition.

- A Gooseneck Loostrife (lysimachia clethroides) which I am somewhat nervous about after reading about its aggression. The woman selling it told me to make sure I had room for something that spreads. I will definitely keep an eye on this one and perhaps build up a rocky area to help contain it. It's in a rather lonely patch of the garden right now and I was definitely looking for something to spread and fill. But I don't want it to take over the entire yard, and I definitely don't want to contribute to any start of a broader local invasion. I've got my eye on you, gooseneck, so keep it clean, or you're toast. Lovely plant though.

- Phlox, a white variety to grow nice and tall toward the back border of the garden.

And then there were a couple of purchases from the big box garden center:
- Purple Anemone
- "Baby's Tears" groundcover (lamest name ever. waaaah.)
- And thing with silvery leaves and tiny flowers that I cannot remember

Ground cover is desperately needed. I spent all weekend trying to wrangle a breakout of creeping buttercup. It loves my heavy wet soil and is relentless and evil. At first I was all, "oh look, pretty yellow straw-like flowers" and then a little research revealed its true colors. It's bad stuff that will probably come back after all the pulling I did. And I absolutely refuse to go the route of Roundup or other nasty chemicals. So my best effort was to pull and extract the roots and runners as deeply as I could, and fill in the space with groundcover and mulch in hope that it will get choked out.

The people who created the landscaping in my yard were probably well-meaning, but there is seriously a grab bag of stuff that seems to have no rhyme or reason. I'm still trying to learn what it all is, and furthermore, how to maintain it. And it's especially hard because I have NO FREAKING CLUE what I'm doing. I'm so fascinated by gardening and I want very much to learn all that I can. This weekend has been information overload, learning to deal with invasive weeds and groundcover and the various springing up of disease that my rhododendrons especially seem to be acquiring. Every 5 minutes I'm running from the yard to the computer to google some other strange ailment I've spotted. Poor, poor plants. I get the sense that they have been let to go wild and free for many years, and no one had thought to prune or inspect or work the soil back to optimal conditions.

The rhododendron out front breaks my heart. It is big and was probably once gorgeous, with deep deep red flowers (my favorite rhody color) but something is draining it. Half of the buds have serious blight and I spent all weekend pinching them off.

Other parts of the shrub look like they've been battle-scarred by root weevils - hard to tell how old the damage is, so I'll be keeping an eye out for bugs and new notches. And the algae that grows on our wooden porch seems to be jumping to the rhody's leaves, leaving them dusty-looking and sickly. I'm determined to nurse this beauty back to health - half of the plant looks healthy and is just about ready to bloom, so we'll see.

My other rhododendron seems to have leaf scorch, either from being in too sunny of a spot (which seems unlikely because it was sooooo gray prior to this weekend) or from fertilizer (a possibility, as I just did a light application to the lawn - there was probably runoff). It seems minimal, and I'm hoping it will heal. Lesson learned about the fertilizer.

I feel so garden-naive. Sure, Jess -- buy the invasive plant. And hey, why don't you apply that fertilizer that you probably didn't need anyways and scorch the leaves of your lovely rhododendron? And while you're at it, just plant whatever the hell you want, disregarding its needs for full sun or part shade. Sounds great! You're awesome at this! But you know what? You don't learn any other way. If I had the time and money to go to school for horticulture, I would. But I don't. So I'm just going to learn to screw up a lot of things in my own yard, and maybe by the time I'm eighty and wise with wild white hair, I'll have this all down pat. On the positive side, I have an excellent, excellent book to guide me through this. And the internet, of course. But this book, the Timber Press Guide to Gardening in the Pacific Northwest, is AMAZING. I've been geeking out over learning about weather patterns and soil pH and liming and diseases. I haven't even got to the part about actual PLANTS yet. Highly recommended for any beginning gardener in the PNW.

Oh yes. And then there are the moles. Damn them. I don't care if "every creature has it's place" or whatever other crap anyone wants to throw at me. Moles do not belong in my yard. They are making a tiny mole empire beneath my front lawn and are swiftly moving to the backyard. Or perhaps that's their satellite location. But whatever they are doing, they are tricksy and no amount of dried blood chaser, sonic doodads, and seemingly well-placed traps seems to help. Our neighbor gave us one of her unused traps. I think she's trying to tell us something. She said she poured bleach down their tunnels in her yard which seems...uh...a wee bit toxic to more than just moles. I don't recommend that. But we've researched this to death and want desperately to avoid hiring someone to do this for us. Perseverance. Sigh.

The good news:
- The wisteria is almost in bloom.
- The azaleas are yellow.

- The tulips are still lingering (and these are like 3 feet tall. Huge.)

- I am learning, learning.
- I have a gnome.

An office corner facelift

Oh ho! It's my first before and after on the house. It's not a big one, and it's not complete yet, but redoing my workspace has made a huge difference on the ol' happiness and productivity scale.

The spare bedroom was originally painted beige with a bright lemon yellow accent wall.

I wanted something a little gentler, so I painted two of the walls "Lime Light" by Behr (Home Depot). It's the weirdest color ever. It is not limey. It is barely even green. It looks downright blue in a certain light. But it was exactly what I wanted for this room. We also painted the remaining walls, ceiling, window seat, and trim bright white. And replaced all the crusty beige electrical sockets and switches with white ones. Because you all know how I feel about beige.

And what a difference. I probably could have tidied my desk a little nicer for this shot, but that wouldn't be very realistic, now would it?

We also took down what we like to call the "Burlesque Show chandelier" in the dining room and replaced it with a ceiling fan (another story for another day). Isn't she a beauty?

And instead of ditching it at the nearest Goodwill or running it over repeatedly with the truck, I cleaned up the dust, removed the sexy beaded shades, and replaced the flame-shaped bulbs with some old-timey looking round bulbs. (Which for some reason were clearanced out at 40 cents for each pack of 4). Five bucks for some white spray paint, and suddenly I had a really cool light to replace the old fixture...

...with this:

And now I have my own little corner of the world.

Other things of note:
- The oval mirror on the far wall was from Goodwill. It was icky and dirty and yellowed, but I cleaned it up and painted it white.
- The desk lamp also came from Goodwill for like 2.99.
- I had the shelves above the desk for years. They were previously painted a watercolory bright blue and green, but I repainted them in white.
- The desk and file cabinet were presents to myself, purchased at IKEA. The file cabinet was found in the scratch and dent section with nary a scratch or dent to be found. I sat there caressing its surfaces like a weirdo for like 15 minutes trying to figure out what was wrong with it. I finally gave up and happily accepted it all pre-assembled and perfect at 40% off.
- Not sure what to do with the octagon window, which is cracked and sad looking.
- Oh, and there's a reason why I only have photos of one corner of the room: the rest of the room is a tiny disaster to be tackled some other day.
- my husband is awesome. Thanks for your experiments with electricity, mister.

Circles

When I was in first or second grade, my class would hold "coloring contests" where the kids who did the best job coloring were awarded a novelty eraser as a prize. I seem to recall eraser collections being huge in the 80s, and the girls especially coveted little rubbery bits in the shape of roller skates, hamburgers, and Lisa Frank dolphins.

I was one of those girls, and I had a tin full of neon erasers. And I wanted more. And I was an awesome colorer. So naturally, I thought that I should always win. My eraser dreams were crushed one day by our awful teacher who really should not have been allowed to work with children, for many reasons. She pronounced my coloring sheet a failure because I had colored in some rocks in a circular fashion instead of with smooth linear strokes. It was pretty traumatizing to a 7 year old, and I never ever ever colored in a circular pattern again for risk of losing another purple boom box shaped eraser. Until now.

(Yeah hey mom, remember that thing about me swearing on my blog? Well it's my blog. And I can do what I want. And seriously, maybe 20 people read this. So I don't care if it's "unladylike.")

Anyways, me and the circles reached an understanding, and I can color in peace again.

On Saturday we went to a local farmer's market and sat down at a picnic table to eat cheeseburgers from a catering tent. At the table was a basket full of crayons and coloring books, and I set out to get some quality coloring time in while waiting for our food. The owners of the cheeseburger stand laughed at me (in a good-natured way) and told me if I finished my drawing, they'd stick it on the fridge. I was happy to oblige. The caterer said, "You'd be surprised by how many adults just sit down there and start coloring."

I'm not surprised at all.

Why is it surprising that people of all ages enjoy participating and engaging in art? It's soothing. It's relaxing. It's FUN. Why do we suddenly put on the brakes into adulthood and resist the urge to pick up/ask for crayons in a restaurant? I've seen parents with kids sneak in coloring time on their kids' menus. Why can't childless adults indulge in that same pleasure? They can. There's nothing stopping us. Let's start a coloring revolution. Let's ask for kiddie menus and our cup of crayons, because art is for everyone. I don't want to sit down and read the news. I want to color the news. I want to draw blue mustaches on the congressmen on the front-page photo and fill in the crossword with pink and orange.

Let's do it.

up. up. up.

Found my brown paper sketchbook the other day. Made me happy.