Survivors

It's already November and my front yard tomatoes just won't give up! I can hardly believe it but I've got tomato plants with big ripening tomatoes and even flowers. I think the flowers are doomed, frankly, as it hardly gets above 65 degrees now. But the tomatoes that are already formed will ripen . . . slowly, slowly.

The taste isn't what it was in the heat of summer, but still. They're better than anything you'd buy at the supermarket. I'm using them for stews now, and chili. Yum!

The fall wreath

I was in Target day before yesterday, shopping for a few housekeeping necessities, when I spotted a medium-large door wreath of fall leaves. I thought it was pretty and went over to take a look. Well, I almost fainted - it was $90! And of course it was really only fake fall leaves on a circular wreath form made of twigs. $90. I don't think so.

Then I had a brainstorm, kind of born out of my stubbornness and dislike of being over-charged for something I know isn't worth that much. Michael's, the art and craft store, was just down the street. Bet I could make a wreath, maybe even a better wreath, for a lot less than $90. As soon as I was done at Target, I headed for Michael's.

Minutes later I walked out with a twig wreath, a spray of beautiful fake fall leaves, and a whole roll of really pretty wire-edged ribbon that had been on sale.

Home I went, fired up the glue gun, and 15 minutes later hung a beautiful wreath on the front door. It cost $11 and a few minutes of my time. My new wreath even has a bow, which the $90 model didn't have, plus I have extra ribbon for a later use.

Isn't life grand?!

Amazing Upholstery Adventure # 3

Just because I haven't written recently about the chair I'm upholstering (with the help - I should say he's doing most of the work, I'm learning - of my Upholstery Guru Rolando), doesn't mean there hasn't been progress. You would hardly recognize Wayne's grandfather's chair. Here are some recent photos:







                              The chair in its underwear:





The chair getting dressed:






 Here's Rolando adding yet more stuffing, even over the underwear. This chair is going to be a nap magnet!!









Here's the chair with half its dress on. Oh my, it's going to be beautiful!

So far away

Wayne's daughter Marja just left after a weekend visit. She lives in Los Angeles and is driving home as I write this on Highway 99 through the central California farming countryside - Modesto, Fresno, Chico. Marja's mom Mary also joined us and now she's gone too, back to her home in Santa Cruz. Our house is awfully quiet, and we're a little depressed after a full three days of chatter, eating, drinking, and laughter.

Two weeks ago we flew to Portland for a quick 3-day visit with my son Arthur and his family. It was great fun as they had made a lot of changes in their backyard and inside their home. Wayne helped Arthur re-wire a ceiling light in the basement. Jack, my grandson, was leaving for his first day of 7th grade as we were getting ready to go to the airport to return home. Two days later, Arthur called. "Hi Mom, I just wanted to know how you two are doing. We miss you." I think his house had become awfully quiet, like ours is today.

Why do we live so far from those we love so much? Our children have chosen to build their lives in places we don't really want to move to, except that they're there. But they're not in the same place. We live in the middle, between them. Not close enough to have day-to-day contact, but close enough that we can fly or even drive occasionally without too much trouble. It's the day-to-day stuff we miss. They seem to miss it too.

When we were young, we couldn't wait to "get out of town" and find our own lives. Wayne moved to California from New York, and I moved from Minnesota. We were really far from our families and yet we didn't feel any pull back. It has never occurred to me that my parents might have missed me in the way I miss my son, who lives considerably closer to me than I did to them.

Undoubtedly we and our children are closer emotionally than we were to our parents. Our kids are in their 40s now and we're still close. It's to be enjoyed, in the bittersweet way of enjoying something you miss and wish you could have more of.

Amazing Upholstery Adventure #2: The naked chair

We finished the first posting of the AUA (Amazing Upholstery Adventure) halfway through deconstruction. Of course, I finally succeeded in stripping all layers of the old upholstery and padding off the chair. In doing so I learned several important things:

• You find various levels of expertise when you deconstruct a chair that has been upholstered and re-upholstered. In my case the top-most layer was done by someone who was not an expert. Although I'm sure it looked good enough - after all it was used for years that way - it was not well done. The upholsterer put the new stuff right over a lot of the old stuff and didn't really know how to nail properly. Many nails were in crooked and/or misplaced on top of one another. They were hard to get out!

• The second (bottom) layer of my chair's upholstery was done by a master. Every nail was placed just as it should be. All the parts that hadn't decayed were intact and I paid close attention to how they were done. When someone years in the future pulls apart the upholstery I'm doing right now, I hope they feel the respect I felt for this person, probably living in the 1800s, who did this expert and careful work. I can only hope mine will be nearly as good.

• I would much rather be using a staple gun, as we do today, than hammering nails, as they did when both the first and the subsequent upholstering were done in the past. What a lot of work! So many nails, and having to pound each one in! Did I mention in the last post - there were hundreds of nails?!

• The original nails used in the first (the expert) upholstery were irregularly shaped, and I believe they were hand-forged. This makes the chair a bit older that we thought, maybe 1860s to 1870s. After all it was Wayne's grandfather's chair, and Wayne's mother was born in 1901, so her father could easily have bought the chair in the 1800s. It may have even been in the family before that. We don't know, but wish we did.

If I was going to spend the money to have a chair upholstered by a professional upholsterer, I would take all the old upholstery off it myself first. This is so much work, it's easy to see why it costs so much to have professional upholstery done. It makes sense that you'd save a lot of money by doing this part yourself.

Here's our chair, naked at last!! What's next in this Adventure?

Amazing Upholstery Adventure 101: Deconstruction!

My friend Rolando, who is a professional upholsterer as well as a fellow-bartender, has agreed to teach me how to upholster a chair. I am totally excited - I've always wanted to learn this skill. It all seems mysterious and difficult - obviously that's why it is so expensive to have someone else do it!

Our project is Wayne's grandfather's chair, a nice old wood armchair whose green damask upholstery is in sad shape. For years, the chair has stood in our bedroom covered with a throw. Now it's going to be liberated!! And beautified! Rolando says it will be easy - we'll see.

My first assignment has been to strip all the old upholstery off the chair. I had no idea how much was involved in this assignment, or how much I would learn from it. First thing I noticed was that hundreds of nails were used in upholstering our chair, and hundreds of nails had to be removed in order to strip it. Literally hundreds! Here's a photo of the seat in deconstruction - that's where I started.

And here's the seat with most of the (broken) webbing off. If you look closely, you can see another piece of broken webbing hanging down behind the right front chair leg. On this seat there was webbing on both the bottom and the top of the burlap cover. Apparently the upholsterer of the green damask left the original webbing underneath and just added new webbing on top.

I learned during this phase of the project that it is always better to remove all the old bits of everything when re-upholstering. Old webbing, for instance, disintegrates over time, although new webbing may last forever because of updated materials. Most chairs you will re-upholster have old webbing, but how can you be sure? Take it all off! All old chairs have cotton stuffing with the potential for bacteria and other undesirables in it. How can you be sure? Take it all off!

More to follow on My Amazing Upholstery Adventure soon!!

I learned something new today

I'm always amazed when I learn things (finally) that are so basic, it's hard to imagine why I didn't learn them before. There's the problem with the duvet on our bed always slipping off toward the foot end of the bed. And the problem of the duvet itself moving around within the duvet cover, so that it eventually all wants to bunch up at the foot end of the bed, with no duvet up by your neck where you need it. Gravity, no doubt, and also why the whole thing tends to slip off the bed.

Even worse, Wayne and I are always tugging the duvet up because we're cold, so not only do we wake up several times a night to do this, but every morning I have to re-make the bed from scratch because it's all torn up. Annoying.

Some time ago, I read of an easy way to get the duvet cover on and I said to myself, "AHA! The next time I change the duvet cover, I'm going to do this."  It was a simple thing, just reach in to the far corners and more-or-less turn the cover inside out. Then grasp the corners of the duvet and cover together, or tie the duvet in, and let the cover turn itself right side out over the duvet as you shake it a bit, holding on to those corners.

The words "tie the duvet in" stuck with me as a possible solution to the Other Problem, the one of slippage. Today I changed the duvet cover and resolved to sew ties in the inside corners of the clean cover and onto the corners of the duvet and "tie them in". I cut some cotton tape for ties. When I reached in to get the corners of the clean cover and turn it inside out, I felt ties. Hmmmph. Well, I'll be darned. Then I looked at the duvet itself, and there on all four corners were little tabs, exactly what you'd want to attach those ties to. I've had this duvet for at least ten years, and they'd been there all the time.

I felt pretty stupid, but also pretty excited. All problems solved. And when I got the original duvet cover out of the dryer, I checked it out. It too had ties. I learned something new today!