Sunday, May 16, 2010

Thrift Find – Pink Kimono

More thift find sharing.  I don’t think this kimono is vintage, but I liked the pattern and color.  For now I have it on hanger on closet door to please my eyes when I wake up in morning.  Later I thought I might use the fabric in a remake project.  Which reminds me that I need to snap some photos of the wonderful linens I found when I was thrifting with my mom in her town earlier this year. 

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Big Blue Bottles

On the return route home from our Mother’s Day drive to Cathlamet and Puget Island last weekend, we stopped at an Antique Shop we have bypassed on our several trips south.  The house and location was a dairy farm, per the owner, and now that they are not farming, they rearranged the space into a home-owned antique shop.  I got to browse the shop finding several items on my mental ‘must have’ list.  But my mental list and our pocketbook are often not in agreement, so I did what I typically do – fill the shopping cart in my head until it is time to check out.  Then I decide on what item(s) are an absolute must – may not be there when I come back someday.  My pick for today were a set of oversized blue Ball mason jars.  That was a must. And a small extra tidbit purchase was the tea cup and saucer.

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Crocheted Open Weave Mesh Scarf for Spring

Looking for a light weight spring season type scarf to crochet, I came across pattern for open weave mesh scarf.  First I tried the pattern on some ribbon yarn my mother had brought for me, but I would have needed about two more balls to get the scarf to a long enough length.  The ribbon yarn made up into a neck scarf and that may work well too.  I had some lemon colored light weight acrylic yarn that I used and it gave me the longer length scarf I wanted.  It does crochet up quickly.  I’d like to make a few more of these mesh scarves.

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Colorful Palette of Scarves

I can’t help it, in my thrifting, when I run across a colorful scarf that appeals to me I just have to add it to my collection.   I don’t wear them very frequently, mostly when I have reason to dress up, ie, going to town, meetings – that sort of thing.  After years of 8-5 employment and dressing for the office, I don’t regret that I don’t have to do the ‘morning routine’ each and every morning any more, but I do miss career dressing sometimes.  Scarves work well for career dress up.   

This is not the full collection, nor are all the scarves vintage, but I liked the color palette combination and it is cheerful to wake up to each morning.   I have about 3 more collections that are more vintage.  One includes a Japanese motif pink silk scarf that I just love. 

 

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In the Pink – oil painting

My most recent oil painting drying in the kitchen.  I didn’t name the painting ‘in the pink’, although it does have pink tones in the sky and water.  But sitting on my pink formica table with chrome pink chairs, ‘in the pink’ seems to fit for this photograph.  The oversized Ball blue mason jars in the background were a find from antique shop a week earlier.  The card is artwork note card my stepdaughter created and send me for Mother’s Day.

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Saturday, May 15, 2010

Can we make it?

Don Delillo's White Noise.

"Here we are... knowing all these great things after centuries of progress but what can we do...? Can we make a refrigerator? Can we even explain how it works? What is electricity? What is light?... Name one thing you could make." from blog post at fair companies



Sustainable living continues to intrigue me on many levels. As I am sure I have said before in one of my blogs somewhere, the term has been upcycled over time encompassing everything from waste not want not thriftiness, frugal cost saving, simple and/or meaningful living, do it yourself, homesteading, living off the grid, recycling, green or eco-living, but whatever it might mean to you, I have a stronger sense of what it has meant and means to me.

A few years back I set upon myself the task of learning to do more that would equate to what is today’s term of sustainable living by trying to teach myself more of the old homemaker skills that seem to elude my grasp. It was both fun and challenging and I learned some few new skills, but not nearly enough to survive if the way of life as we know it does not sustain.

I keep thinking I will blog about it, make a website collection about it and I do go about getting projects started but fall seriously short of goal. Enough years have elapsed with the internet now that there are many such blogs, websites, groups, forums, social networks that cover sustainable living far more comprehensively than my meager collection efforts.

So what is the point of this blog entry? I have One Note which is a great piece of Microsoft software that works like several expanding file folders. For the most part that is where I keep my collections. There is no need to blog it as a means to harvest or collect information intended for my personal use. Blogging then has changed shape for me as blogging is a sharing of information enterprise, and I am not sure what I have to share that hasn’t been shared somewhere else by someone else.

I’ve seen a number of blogs that serve as collections of source links pointing to other peoples accomplishments. I could perhaps do that as well, and find I am likely unwilling to devote the time to keeping such a blog updated regularly, nor spending great amounts of time searching out the internet. So this blog will be a bit more random and irregular in it’s purpose, theme and what catches my interest to share. Mostly though, it still feels to me like the overarching theme for me is what amounts to sustainable living – on several fronts.

Having taken all my blogs and integrated them into one, I find I have far too many category tags for the tags to be functional. Yet I am unwilling to spend the time to condense the category tags for each blog post into more functional categorization. Wishing any interested reader well in trying to sort through the too lengthy list of tags, but I sure wouldn’t blame you if you gave up after seeing the list.

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