Maren's first day of Preschool

It was a success! Hip Hip Hooray!

After the rain

Photos just taken out my back window. It's a double rainbow and the color was absolutely brilliant!

A few weeks ago I blogged about a sweet friend who lent me her absolutely darling curtains to hang in my kitchen. Rachel is a dear person and I wanted to make her a little something fun to thank her. I had just read about these charming rickrack dahlias and since Rachel and I share an obsessive love for rickrack, I tried my hand at making a few.

Rachel loves pink, black and white so I chose those colors from my considerable stash of rickrack. I put pin backs on them so she can pin them to her bag or whatever.

I also made her a little stationery set:


I used a PSX template to make the little folder--I've loved that template and have used it over and over. Before I folded it, I sprayed the cardstock with spray adhesive and lightly pressed a vintage pattern piece to it, intentionally keeping the folds and ripples. The button and hook/eye cards were from my stash, but the spool of thread and the ruler on the side are from a great little K & Company packet I picked up at Michael's. And it's hard to see in the photo, but for the tie I used some cute twill ribbon printed to look like a measuring tape.

Inside are a set of cards made from the images on vintage patterns:

Easy stuff, but I'm happy with how it turned out. Hope she likes it!

Summer Reading

Hello, friends! Last week was crazy busy--three evening events (two of which were held at my house), days spent getting ready for said events, an out-of-town guest, swimming lessons for Maren every morning, and the usual running around--a week that didn't lend itself well to blogging. I'm going to try to be more regular about blogging for a while.

For me, with the warm weather of summer comes the desire to READ READ READ! I think it is a holdover from my youth--from middle school onward through college, summer meant the end of school and long-awaited freedom to finally read whatever I wanted, instead of books assigned by teachers and professors. I'm a long way out of college now, but my desire to devour books in the summertime hasn't disappeared. Here's what has been keeping me busy the past few weeks:


Bringing Home the Birkin, by Michael Tonello. This one caught my eye at the library--I'm not ashamed to admit that I totally judge books by their covers! The clever cover and intriguing title piqued my interest, and by the first chapter in I was sold by the chatty and entertaining prose. It's pretty fluffy--the topic is *the* status symbol bag for the glitterati, after all--but not every book needs to make you contemplate the cosmos, KWIM? A good beach or poolside read for sure.


I'm seriously late to the party for this one (it's been an Oprah book for eight years) but I finally got around to reading The Poisonwood Bible because a friend lent me her copy. It's long and involved but amazingly well-written and the story is very moving. This was one I had a hard time putting down, and I'd like to explore some of Barbara Kingsolver's other works, now that I've gotten a taste of her talent.




Somehow I managed to get through school without ever being assigned to read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. I have always known about it, but never read it for some reason--I think I always associated it with The Yearling, and didn't want to read a book about a deer. I finally checked it out, so now I can cross that one off the list of Classics everyone should read. I thought it was only okay; I didn't love it. I know that I was very bothered by the fact that people just seemed to be so mean to each other. I read that the story is rather autobiographical, so I wonder if that was an accurate representation of people, or simply how the author remembered it as a child? Anyone want to weigh in?


Tuesday night my book club met to discuss Under the Tuscan Sun, by Frances Mayes. If you're on a diet, this is not the book for you! The author's descriptions of the glorious, fresh, earthy food she found and prepared in Tuscany never failed to leave me ravenous. The book was slow, but its pace seemed to mirror the slower pace of the author's time spent in her Italian home. The book also includes recipes, and for book club we each chose one to make at home and then bring to share. And I've never seen the movie, but from what I understand it's completely different from the book.

I checked out Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression after seeing it mentioned on this blog. There's no particular plot, rather it is a collection of the author's memories about her childhood. It was very interesting to read about life on the farm--how and what they cooked, what they did to have fun, etc. I find it interesting that although this covers the same time period as A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, the whole feeling was much different--there was none of the meanness that I mentioned being bothered by before.


Along the way I also started Lonesome Dove (which has 800 pages so I'm in no hurry) and Pawley's Island, which I've designated my official pool book. Next up for book club is These is My Words, a book I think I'm really going to like even though I haven't opened it yet. I've also checked out Water for Elephants, a book I've seen recommended practically everywhere (what is my obsession with the Depression this summer?).

What are you reading this summer?

Pikes Peak or Bust!

Saturday was a big day for my little family. DH has been the Company Commander for a Military Intelligence company here in the Colorado Ntl. Guard for two years. He built the company from the ground up and has done an amazing job! He has really won the respect of both his superiors in Colorado and Vermont and the soldiers under him. His time as a commander is over now, so he chose for the change of command ceremony to take place up on Pikes Peak, a nod to his company's status as part of the famed 10th Mountain Division.

It's quite a drive to the top of the mountain. It takes about two hours just to get from here to the base of the mountain, and then the 16-mile drive to where the ceremony was held took nearly another hour. This is not a drive you want to take if you have any fear of heights! One of my passengers did, so she spent the drive looking straight ahead and trying to ignore the sheer dropoffs and dizzying views just outside her window, bless her heart. Very narrow roads (most without guardrails!), hairpin turns galore, and a grade so steep we were in 2nd gear most of the time. Whew!After the ceremony was over we drove three more miles up to the very top of the mountain. The summit of Pikes Peak sits at 14, 110 ft. above sea level. Needless to say, the views are incredible! In fact, those views are what inspired Katherine Lee Bates in 1894 to write the words that later became "America the Beautiful."
At the summit we took in the view,

snapped a few photos,
and sampled the famous Pikes Peak donuts, which have been made with the same recipe for the past 100 years (although they're now fried in oil, as opposed to bear fat!).

This coming weekend is the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb, an event that can only have been thought up as a dare. The first race was held in 1916 (it's the 2nd oldest auto race in the U.S.) and racers go up those same twisty, narrow, nerve-wracking, guardrail-free roads that we drove, only they do it at speeds up to 130 mph! Just the thought of that makes me want to wet my pants, I'll tell you. The current record of 10:01 minutes to the top was set last year and there's a $25,000 bonus prize offered to anyone who can break the 10 minute mark this year. I'll be watching for sure!

It's curtains for you!

Window coverings seem to be the bane of my decorating existence. On HGTV they make it look so simple but for me, finding decent window coverings and actually getting them installed has been a monumental task. A task that is still not complete, even though we're inching up on FOUR years spent living in this house. I don't know if it's just us being home-improvement idiots, but hanging curtain rods always turns into a ridiculous affair replete with curse words, extraneous holes in the wall and stripped drill bits (it would appear that all our doors/windows are framed out in titanium).

Last year we finally hung curtain rods over the kitchen window and the adjacent sliding glass door and ever since then I've been on the hunt for appropriate window fashions. The slider is a problem all its own: it needs full-length curtains because we get the dreaded fish-bowl effect from the house that backs up to ours. I found some plain but serviceable insulated curtains from J.C.Penny, which finally arrived in February and have been sitting in their bag at the base of the window ever since. Ahem.

When we installed the curtain rod last year, we did so ignorant of the important information that curtains are generally sold in specific lengths. So naturally, the height at which we hung the curtain rod (a feat that was only achieved after the aforementioned swearing, etc.) is COMPLETELY wrong, so now the curtains hang about 6" above the ground: the drapery equivalent of high-water pants.


Remedying this problem means we're going to have to reinstall the curtain rods, something I dread so much that I'm very seriously considering hiring a handyman. I may be cheap, but not having to deal with that blankety-blank curtain rod again would be worth the money, plus I can have him install the matching rod over the sofa window at the same time. I ordered matching valances with the curtains, so it's possible that I could actually have real live curtains on not one but three windows in my house! At the same time! A new personal record!

Lucky for me, the kitchen window is already taken care of, thanks to the generosity of a dear friend. My sweet girlfriend Rachel shares my love for vintage design and offered to let me borrow a set of curtains she and her mother made.



They ordered the fabric from Repro Depot and Rachel's mother hand cut and sewed all those adorable scallops at the bottom. The fat red rickrack on the top is the perfect touch. These are the curtains of my dreams! I love them so much that I want to marry them.

Here's another photo of the valance where you can see the vintage repro light fixture we hung over the kitchen sink. It's from a fancy-schmancy place called Rejuvenation and I bought it at a thrift for a buck! It is unfortunately yet another in my litany of home improvement projects that should have been so easy but turned out to be nightmares--if you look close you can see the extraneous holes in the ceiling sticking out from under the silver base. Nice. What's the number for that handyman again?

Shoes, School and a Swap

The only thing better than new red shoes for me?


New red shoes for Maren! Jen posted about Salt-Water sandals the other day and that reminded me that I wanted a red pair for Maren. Thanks to the wonders of eBay and quick shipping, I had them just a few days later, right in time to wear with her cute Fourth of July dresses.

Our Fourth holiday was good--quiet, but still nice. We grilled hot dogs and ate outside on the patio, then headed to a neighboring town for the fireworks show. We'd actually never been to watch fireworks here in Denver--for two of the previous three years we were in Utah and the one year we stayed here it rained so we stayed home. We've been a bit unsure of the best place to go to see fireworks so took a gamble and drove a few miles south. We ended up with prime seats and with a big bag of fresh kettle corn for Mommy & Daddy (really, they should call that stuff kettle crack) and a brand new tube of glow bracelets for Maren, we sat back and enjoyed what turned out to be a really great show.

This morning Maren and I walked down to the school where she will be attending preschool to meet her new teachers and see her classroom. The school is on a year-round schedule so while three of the tracks begin tomorrow, Maren doesn't start until the end of July. That gives us just enough time to fit in a couple of weeks of swimming lessons, which will start next week. Maren will only go to school two days a week for about three hours in the morning, but that will be enough for her to have some fun and learn new things and for me to have a little break (yay!).

I received the most amazing package from my Parasols, Pink Lemonade and Polka Dots swap partner, the fabulous ArtsyMama! I can tell that Kari took much time in selecting items that I would love--and she was right!

Among the treasures she sent were a lovely blown glass bottle in my favorite turquoise color, a darling vintage hankie and apron, a fun bag with an ice cream cone on the front (perfect for the pool!)

a trio of vintage paper parasols--so perfect for the theme!--a gorgeous vintage hat and a bunch of neat old millinery flowers, the cutest little ice-cream patterned pennant banner, a little pink wagon for Maren, and one of Kari's pieces of original collage artwork, which I have happily displayed in my craft room.

There were lots of other goodies as well, and it was such a treat to pull out treasure after treasure. Kari was a fantastic swap partner! As usual, I forgot to photograph the package I sent to her before I got it all in the box (WHEN will I learn? Sheesh.) so you'll have to check out her blog in a few days when she returns from vacation. Also, if you're a fellow swapper and haven't yet uploaded your photos to the Flickr group, please head over there and do so! I love checking out all the ways that people interpreted the theme. I'm heading over to upload my photos right now!

Happy Fourth of July!

This is my country! Land of my birth!

This is my country! Grandest on earth!

I pledge thee my allegiance, America, the bold,

For this is my country to have and to hold.

What difference if I hail from North or South

Or from the East or West

My heart is full of love for all of these.

I only know I swell with pride and deep within my breast,

I thrill to see old glory paint the breeze!

This is my country! Land of my choice!

This is my country! Hear my proud voice!

I pledge thee my allegiance, America, the bold,

For this is my country to have and to hold.

*lyrics by Don Raye*

Hurrah for the Red, White and Blue

One of my favorite things to do is to decorate my house for each holiday. I do it with gusto even when the holiday's traditional colors look a bit out of place with the rest of my decor (orange & black with navy & scarlet? Yikes) but I must admit that I take a special pleasure in decorating for Flag Day and the Fourth of July. The walls in my front room are a beautiful shade of red and the walls in my family room are navy with red and patriotic accents I keep out all year round, so my Fourth of July decorations look right at home! I took a few photos of the things I decorated with this year and since there are so many photos, I'm making them small (click on them to enlarge).

One new thing this summer is an idea from the book Celebrating Home by Seasons of Cannon Falls. I've been on the lookout for this book for a while since I read about it on this blog. My library does not have it and I hate to spend money on a book sight-unseen. I was thrilled when I found it used in a booth at the antique mall! This was one of my immediate favorite ideas:


So easy, but perfect! A big glass vase filled with poker chips and flags stuck in the top. How many times have I passed up poker chips while out thrifting? Not any more!

Here's my version:I already had the apothecary jar and the flags which left only the poker chips to find. Be advised, this project takes a whole lot of chips! I found a box at the thrift store, came home and dumped them in the jar and they filled up about two inches. I kept looking and shortly found another larger box of chips, and the addition of those chips made enough to anchor the flags. I did notice one thing--the first box of chips I bought were red, ivory and navy but the second (much larger) box were red, white and royal blue. I like the look of the ivory and navy much better but I didn't notice the difference until I got home with the others, and that thrift store doesn't accept returns. Oh well! It works, but just keep that in mind if ever you want to do something similar.

Next is some great old sheet music that I bought for a song :) at an estate sale a few weeks ago. The "Yankee Doodle Dandy" music was a treat from a sweet friend last year.

I was tickled to find this darling kit from Jenni Bowlin and was lucky enough to buy one before they sold out. It was very easy to put together (a series of large & small chipboard stars, embellished with patterned paper and trinkets) but I LOVE how it turned out! I have mine in an old blue glass jar that is partially filled with rock salt.
Last is my old chippy dresser and mirror. I loved using the fringed red/white/blue striped cloth that I bought in Alamosa earlier this year. The vintage arithmetic flash card in the flags from a local store called Patina (my new favorite place to shop in Denver) and the picture frame was from my neighbor's garage sale back in May. I've since replaced the bucket of lollipops with the jar of Jenni Bowlin stars, which I like better and aren't such a temptation for Maren!

Thanks for checking out my decor! :)

A "Banner" day

When I saw the banner project featured in last year's July Country Living magazine, it took me about five seconds before I ran for my purse and jumped in the car to head to the craft store for supplies--I loved it THAT much! And since I knew I would be visiting my mom over the Fourth of July, we decided to have a fun little joint crafting session and make these adorable crepe paper rosette banners.Well. When's the last time you made a craft that elicited swear words? I can answer accurately: last July. What we had was a fun joint crafting session all right, however it turned out to be not-so-little. The editors at Country Living need to employ the services of a technical writer or at the very least check out one of the myriad paper-crafting magazines in the market and learn how to write coherent, specific, step-by-step instructions that don't leave your readers confused and foul-mouthed after trying to guess at what they're supposed to be doing.


Though we worked on them for several days, neither of us actually finished our banner. I know I was so frustrated when I got home that I stuffed the pieces in a box and figured I'd just deal with them next year. Well, next year arrived a few weeks ago when I dug out my box of patriotic decorations and found my rosettes waiting patiently. A year away from them definitely gave me fresh inspiration and a willingness to tackle them again. The last hurdle to getting them done was figuring out a way to hang the rosettes, a subject about which the magazine article was again maddeningly vague. I finally figured out something that would work and although it wasn't perfect (colored crepe paper+liquid glue=not a good idea, something I clearly repressed from last July) for this project my mantra has become "DONE is better than Perfect!" I got the banner finished and hung in no time, so now I can share it with you!

The original article called for hanging the rosettes from a chain made of sparkly pipe-cleaners. I have far better things to do with my time, and I had a much better option: this cute Americana tissue-paper garland by Bethany Lowe. Much easier and much cuter, in my opinion. I hung up the whole thing with push pins (no one is tall enough to see the holes I left in the wall) and to cover up the visible pins on the ends, I sewed up a few little rosettes using some red/white/blue striped crepe paper streamers.

I quite like the banner now and I'm glad I made it, even though it was a headache-and-a-half! Mostly I'm just glad it's DONE! (as always, you can click on all pictures to enlarge them.)

Corn on the Cob-cakes

Is this not HILARIOUS? This picture is from the July 2008 issue of Family Fun magazine and I literally laughed out loud when I turned the page! You can click on the photo to enlarge it and read the text. This is from the new book Hello, Cupcake! (the author is an editor with Family Fun) which I haven't yet seen but am anxiously awaiting from the library. I'm SO making these cupcakes this summer, if it means I have to create an occasion to do so. They're just too darn clever to pass up!

RED is best

I know in today's fashion climate that it's considered passe' to match your shoes to your handbag, but I'm willing to be called a fuddy-duddy when the shoes and bag in question are a) shiny and b) RED!

Apron Love

My aunt Janice is an incredibly talented seamstress and crafter. She taught Home Ec for nearly 2o years, if that gives you any indication of her level of skill and creativity. She now has a side business designing the most adorable apron patterns that are sold in local quilt shops, and I wish she'd start an etsy shop so that everyone could see her work! As a wonderful surprise, she made me this apron a few weeks ago:


Is it not SO CUTE? Oh my gosh, I love it! The fabric is awesome, and there is black rick rack AND black ball fringe to boot! I want to wear it all the time.

I love how she made it with one tie longer than the other, so the bow sits jauntily on my hip.


I love it so much I think it is now the Official Apron of Vacuuming in High Heels and Pearls.

Tagged!

I've been tagged by Jillian!

What was I doing 10 years ago?

• I was home from college for the summer and working at some boring office job I found through the temp service. I did a different one each summer so I can't keep them straight.
• I had just started dating my now-DH that February. He left for the summer for some ROTC training camp so I'm sure I was very sad.
• The most exciting thing was I was getting ready to leave for LONDON for study abroad in August!

Five snacks I enjoy:

• Chocolate. Anything.
• Ice cream. Preferably chocolate ice cream, or ice cream with chocolate on it.
• Anything gummy or chewy, like red licorice.
• Chips and homemade guacamole.
• Did I mention chocolate?

Five things on my TO DO list:

• Schedule cleaners for the living room carpet and couch. Even though we just had the carpets done a few months ago, it already looks terrible. Having a potty-training 3-year-old is not helping.
• List some of my mountain of stuff I've bought for eBay so I feel slightly less guilty about bringing more junk into the house when I yard sale.
• Read and plan my Sunday School lesson for tomorrow. How did it get to be almost Sunday again so fast?
• Go to the pool with Maren and work on my skin can...uh, tan.
• Work on my swap package for Kari. Tell my muse to hurry up and get her little heinie over here, as the deadline is approaching!

If I suddenly became a billionaire, I would:

• Rent us a week at a beach house. Heck, maybe two weeks. I'm going beach-crazy right now!
• Have all the carpets in my downstairs ripped out and replaced with beautiful hardwood floors and fabulous area rugs. (see the carpet cleaning note in the To Do list section)
• Schedule a vacation to somewhere tropical for me and the DH and drop Maren off at her grandparents' on the way.
• Book a trip to Disney World for October for all of us so we could see the Halloween decorations
  
• Buy a whole new wardrobe from Anthropologie. I love their clothes so, so much but they are just so expensive.
  

Five jobs I've had:

• Bookstore employee
• Office drone
• Scrapbook store employee
• Mom, which mean yesterday alone I did at least five separate jobs: personal chef, chauffeur, maid, construction foreman, wrangler.

Five things you may not know about me:

• I still haven't put our wedding album together, and we've been married for 6 years now. My excuse is I don't have anywhere to display the finished album anyway.
• I've recently decided that I think it would be fun to keep chickens. My HOA does not agree however, so that will have to be postponed.
• When I sleep I have to have the covers pulled up to my chin. If it's hot, I'll just use a sheet, but I have to have something. It's a weird security issue.
• I love rhubarb!
• My all-time favorite dessert is Texas Sheet Cake with a scoop of vanilla ice cream. That's heaven on a plate, it is.

Thanks for the tag, Jillian! Jillian has a collection of LuRay dinneware that makes me drool on my keyboard! She also has an online antique shop --go check her out!

And because I hate posting without photos, here's an old one of some great sheet music from the antique store and some yard sale jewels. Have a great weekend! I'm off to the pool. :)

How NOT to Care for Vintage Canisters: A Cautionary Tale of Woe

In my dream kitchen, the antique white cabinets with nickel hardware and lovely wavy glass inserts would stretch all the way to the ceiling. In my actual kitchen, they are boring builder oak, have no glass or hardware, and they stop short of the ceiling by about 15", leaving a weird empty space at the top. I've been able to use that empty space to display some of the vintage kitchen stuff I've amassed, so maybe it's a good thing that I don' t have my dream kitchen yet. The downside to the arrangement is that the items I have up there become coated with a film of grease, which then combines with dust to create a nasty sticky mess. Once in a while, far less often than I probably should, I haul things down and clean them and rearrange.

This past weekend I wanted to rearrange the items to display some of my new Jadeite bowls, which of course necessitated a thorough cleaning of what is already up there. Because I'm lazy and hate to scrub that yucky film off by hand, I decided to put a few things through the dishwasher, including two of my vintage kitchen canisters. I chose the "light wash" option with no heated dry, just to be safe. Or so I thought.

When I opened up the dishwasher to dry everything off, I found this:


and this:

ACK!! The heat from the dishwasher melted the paint off and just destroyed them. That one on the top had the cutest strawberries on it, and the other one was in really great condition with a yellow lid. And not only that, but the trap in my dishwasher was all clogged up with chunks of the paint, so I had to pick out what I could by hand.

Immediately all I could think was, well--What was I THINKING? I should have known that was a bad idea from the very beginning! I am very careful never to put my vintage Pyrex in the dishwasher because I know it ruins the finish. The vintage stuff just wasn't made to hold up to the high heat & abrasion of dishwashers today. I should have known that would be the case for the vintage canisters, but my laziness temporarily outweighed my reasoning abilities.

So, the moral of the story is that laziness doesn't pay off! You can bet I'll be scrubbing the rest of my vintage treasures by hand, no matter how grimy they are!

**Edited to add: I just found out the hard way that you should also not use 409 on vintage canisters. The lid to my darling, almost perfect condition Krispy Kan is now ruined. I think I'm going to stop now before I ruin anything else. Cleaning is overrated, anyway. Pfffftt.