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.


When life gets busy. . .

LIFE has really been fun the past couple of weeks. And busy.

First my son Arthur and his family came to visit from Portland, Oregon. They were interviewing schools in Petaluma to see whether they might want to move back to northern California. YAY! I'm in favor of that! They'd be so much closer!

One day Jack, who is 10, stayed with us rather than traipsing around to schools with his mom and dad. We went to the Pacific Pinball Museum in Alameda, just a few minutes from here. Totally cool - you pay $15 for adults and $7.50 for kids and get to play as much as you want on 85-or-so antique and modern pinball machines for free!

We had a great time while they were here and, too soon, they were gone back home.

Then I got scheduled to work quite a bit slingin' drinks at the Claremont Resort. I love to work, of course :-), but it's a little unusual for February. Usually, once the holidays are over it's pretty slow for awhile. Yes(!) to money though.

This last week it was Wayne's birthday plus Valentine's Day. Wayne's daughter, The Beautiful Marja, came up from L.A. for a week to help celebrate, and her mom Mary came over from Santa Cruz for a few days too. Marja and Mary are my thrifting buddies, so we went back to the White Elephant Sale (see previous post), this time to donate and shop. This time it was so much better because, while we certainly weren't alone, there were lots fewer people there and even more WE's (White Elephants) than before. We found many bargains. Best of all, I got to clean out a whole bunch of "great stuff" from my home. I didn't want it or need it, but someone else might love it! My house feels good!

Then, Marja and I decided to paint my bathroom. Oh God, once you start it's endless. We scraped the ceiling (yuk), and the cabinets (Mary helped with this), and bought gorgeous new knobs for the drawers, and painted and painted and painted some more. Now it's beautiful and pink and new looking, but what a lot of work. So worth it, though.

As of today, everyone's gone and it's very quiet. Wayne and I are amusing ourselves by putting up towel racks and pretty shelves (see the fancy wooden supports on my Thrifting post), and soon I'll be hanging artwork back up on the walls. The bathroom will be finished. I love it.

Tomorrow we'll join our friend Rina and our friends George and Maureen at their daughter Julia's benefit party for the launch of her new company Blackbird Underpinnings. It's vintage-inspired intimate apparel and loungewear...how fun is that? And the party's at Bar 355 in Oakland, a new place to experience!

LIFE keeps on being fun! And busy.

White Elephant Hunt

My thrifting buddy Mary and I, plus my boyfriend Wayne, went to the Preview Sale of the Oakland Museum's huge White Elephant Sale a week or so ago. Last year we had gone to the actual sale, a free 2-day event held in a huge warehouse off Fruitvale Ave. here in Oakland. There was so much great stuff at such fabulous prices (I bought a beautiful wicker table for my guest room - $25!) that we resolved to go again this year. True - it was packed with hundreds of people and the line to get in was massive - the only serious drawback.

This year we decided to go to the Preview Sale and pay the advance charge of $15 each because we'd get to see everything first. Surely there would be fewer people since everyone had to pay. Not a chance! When we drove up, comfortably on-time for the opening at 10 a.m., it was obvious our optimism was unfounded. The line stretched from the warehouse door, 4 or 5 shoppers deep, down two city blocks, around a corner, down four more city blocks and out onto Fruitvale Ave, the main road going into the area. Someone said it had been like that since 6 a.m. Yikes.

We let Mary off at the door, since she has some trouble walking long distances, and went to park the car. Just up the street, neighbors had opened a little lot for $10 parking fee (which benefited local artists), so we did that and went to get in the Incredible Line, which had diminished somewhat since they had opened the doors. Soon we were all inside, separated and each of us looking for treasure.

Man, it was a crowd of people, and now there was an air of urgency about the shopping that we hadn't felt last year. Probably it was because the professionals came to the Preview Sale to get the really good stuff first - just like us, except we're not professionals. Long story short, we lasted an hour and didn't buy much because each purchase involved 45 minutes in line to pay for it. And there were just too many people.

Lesson learned: Go to the regular sale March 2nd and 3rd, which is free and not so hectic. Besides the weather is warmer and the warehouse isn't freezing cold! Enjoy ourselves and still find good stuff.

Second lesson learned, because we got new information from a savvy woman in the entrance line: Donate to the sale. People who donate at least $50 worth of goods on certain days of the week get a free Donors Pass to shop that day between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. We're going next week to both donate and shop. I've had a very productive couple of weeks cleaning out bookcases and closets with good stuff to donate. Yay!! Thank you, Savvy Woman!!

Special Bonus: The good neighbors where we parked our car (we'd do that again, it was so convenient) turned us on to a very cool local coffee shop, Kefa Coffee just up the street on 29th Avenue, where we satisfied our after-sale hunger with delicious fresh-made ham-and-egg sandwiches and even more delicious Ethiopian coffee. Hunting white elephants had left us famished!