Unfinished business

It seems I have even more unfinished business than I thought. (see The Hutch)  While going through my closet for candidates for donation to the White Elephant Sale, I found three sewing projects I had started and never finished. Well, to be honest, one was passed on to me by someone else, but still it was a project to be finished. Aha! I thought. The White Elephant Sale takes unfinished sewing projects - I've seen the rack of them in the sewing section. I bagged them up and happily carried them to the Sale the next time we went.

Alas. The guardian at the donation door said they had enough unfinished sewing projects, thank you very much. And I had to bring them back home.

What to do with them? I hate to throw good fabric and hard work out, but I was never going to wear any of these. Well, the Sale would take them if they were finished, of course, and two of these projects had minimum work left to do on them. It's just that I had lost interest. So why not finish them and then donate them?

I told myself: I will finish one and then reward myself by sewing something "real" that I like and will wear. Then I will do the next unfinished one, and so on until I'm done with the three.

The first was a corduroy jumper I started maybe 40 years ago. Maybe even before that. I did a really nice job on it, lining the top with plaid flannel and finishing it nicely. The only thing left to do was the buttons and all but three of the buttonholes ... all the way down the front. I think the buttonholes discouraged me. So many dratted buttonholes. I hate to make buttonholes.

So I left it forever, moving it from closet to closet and home to home. The matching buttons, all 12 of them, lived in the pocket of the jumper. Until today.

Yay!!! I just finished the jumper and I did it without having to do 9 more buttonholes, or even sewing on 12 buttons.

I sewed on the 3 buttons that I already had buttonholes for, and added a fourth to make an even march of buttons down the front of the bodice to the waistline. At the waistline, I used a large heavy snap behind and under the button.

Then I used 3 more heavy snaps down the front of the skirt and left the front open beyond that point. Styles are less conservative today than when I started this jumper - well, in some ways. That would have been soon after hippie times, and that wasn't really what you'd call conservative, was it?

Anyway. No more buttonholes, no more buttons, and the jumper is finally finished. Yes, it still fits, but it is no longer my style. I have outgrown corduroy jumpers, but someone much younger will probably love it. I'm going to send it out into the world.

One more step toward finishing all that unfinished business!

Life is too short (to hang on to dishes you don't love)

It's White Elephant Sale time again! This is the mega-garage/warehouse sale put on by the Oakland Museum. Honestly, it's so big it's overwhelming unless you have something specific you're looking for.

This year Wayne was looking for vinyl records to add to our ever-growing collection. And what was I looking for? I didn't know. Then, on the first day, my friend Mary mentioned the beautiful sets of dishes they had. She didn't need dishes she said, but it reminded me that I had a whole set of blue and white sailboat dishes I had inherited from a long-ago relationship that I had never liked much. I mean, they were OK and there were a lot of them - a double set - so I used them whenever I had a big party and needed lots of plates or bowls. But they didn't give me pleasure. They weren't really my style.

So I went over to the dishes section at the White Elephant and looked. If I found something I liked, I figured I'd buy them and bring my old set in to donate the next day. Luck was with me - here's what I found . . .




9 of these gorgeous orange plates at $2 a plate, plus one salad plate to match for $1. Total: $19











And 12 of these raised-pattern white plates at $1 a plate (what a bargain!) plus 4 wide soup dishes to match at $2 apiece and a gravy boat for $4. Total: $24

These are both dish patterns I love and I bought all of them plus 4 brilliantly colored blue, green, and red salad plates at $2 apiece.

The next day I packed up all the sailboat dishes, including the platters and bowls and the baking dishes and the creamer and sugar bowl and the gravy boat, and donated them to the White Elephant. Someone would love them and buy them. Suddenly there was SO MUCH ROOM in my dish cupboard, which is the hutch I'm still stripping in the dining room.



Here are my new plates (plus a few Pottery Barn Colors plates I already had and love) on the shelf.  Yay!

I'm really enjoying my new plates and use them all the time. They give me great pleasure, as they should.


The hutch: New life for an old project

I've been working on my hutch for years, trying to get it back to its original finish - the one that matched all the beautiful dark wood in the house when it was built in 1917.  I finished stripping the paint off the windows above the built-in just in time for my son's wedding. . . in 2000. Yikes, that was almost 14 years ago.

Over the years, I've done a bit more here and there. Last week I picked up the project again after a long time of no action. I sanded the paint off one more drawer and replaced the drawer pull. Here's how it looks now on the left. You can see the drawer I just did - it's the large one on the bottom.

This thing sits in the middle of my dining room, and I can't believe it's taken me this long to do. After all I use it as a bar and display center for some of my dishes, and I guess I've looked at its unfinished state so long I hardly notice it. That's all changed. I'm still far from finished, but I have a new commitment. I WILL get it done this year.

So far, most of the work has been done with stripper. I tried the humane, not-dangerous-for-humans, green kind and it just didn't work on this paint. There are at least three layers, the bottom two part of an attempt at "antiquing" the hutch. They are dark gray and couldn't have been attractive even when they were new. Anyway, those two layers are gummy, and nothing gets through them stripper-wise except the really strong stuff. So I have to wear a ventilator mask to use it in the house, although I did the first part, the windows, without it. Hopefully I won't come up with some dread disease. The ventilator mask is a pain in the neck, and I really dislike it but oh well. Have to do it.

The drawers I did with a small sander, and of course I took them outside to sand. I'll do the same for the cabinet doors on either side of the drawers. I'm not sure yet what I'll do for the glass doors, but the remaining painted parts of the frame will have to be stripped in place with the stripper. And the mask.

When I finish stripping, I'll stain the whole thing and finally brush a couple of layers of shellac on it. That's how all the rest of the wood in the house is finished, and the trick will be to match it as closely as I can. Fortunately, none of the already stained and shellacked wood butts right up against the hutch, so 'close to the same' will be just fine.

I never thought it would take this long, but when I'm done it'll be a thing of beauty. Can't wait!