{My First Sewing Attempt!}

The Before

The After

Today I finally pulled out my brand new sewing machine (a gift from my mom this year for Christmas!) and sat down to conquer my very first sewing attempt - curtains.  A few days ... or maybe more like weeks... ago, I showed the wide open window we have in our living room.  I love the big old windows we have in our apartment, but they can certainly be a little exposing when you're stumbling around in your pajamas in the morning... So my first attempt at my sewing machine was to sew a curtain for our living room window.  I am not domestic at heart, and although I love artistic endeavors, I rarely am very good at them without either some major help or copying them from someone else's design.  Sad, but true...



So, with that in mind, I'll show you my first attempt - not great, a little shorter than I intended, and quite a bit crooked, but I'm excited just because I threaded my machine (on my own!), made it work (on my own!), and sewed a curtain (on my own!).  For me - that's a big deal!  I'll take this little victory for today. 

Here I am...back again.

It feels good to be back to the blog again.  Honestly, I'm not feeling quite up to it yet... the weeks after Christmas have quite honestly been tough for me (although full of wonderful things at the same time).  I have battled some anxiety that has flared up again with being more alone and unstructured after Christmas break.  I'm working on it in the best way I can, but am seeking out new ways to deal with it even more - I'm committed to being back to the best self I can be!  Part of that will be returning to blogging.  Not only do I love writing, but it is therapeutic and helps to process what is going on around and inside of me. Paired with more outdoors time, more walking, and more sleep, I think things are going to be looking up.  And even if that's a slow process, at least it's progress in my process.


For Christmas, I got so many wonderful things (more than we expected or asked for!), including a sewing machine.  I have to admit, I'm not actually much of a sew-er, as in, I don't know how to!  (except for watching my mom as I was growing up, which I'm hoping will come back to me quickly)  I am determined to learn how to use it, and I'm excited to try my mind at a few things.  First on the list, these draft dodgers from Martha Stewart and curtains (I guess more like valances) for the kitchen door and the living room window by my desk.  It is a huge window that is wide open and lets in a beautiful amount of natural light (I love old windows!) but is, well.... a little exposing.  If you're walking by out of the shower, or wearing pjs, or doing Zumba, it can be a little embarrassing.  

Here's the before:

Back deck door

Living room window

 
I'm going to be working with some fabric we have from other curtains to make shorter, half-curtain, valance type of curtain so that this window still has lots of natural light.  More to come in the next post with after pictures!

Today, I'm praying this prayer from Spoken Worship by Gerald Kelly:

Give me grace to not be, gracefully, the parts I am not called to be and to play with elegance the roles I'm given.

Fill me in somewhere in this giant jigsaw, God, somewhere in this work of art you're working.  Weave your wondrous tapestry until the twisted threads of me, surrendered to your artistry form an image that is beautiful to see. 

- R.

it's beginning to look a lot like christmas {over here}.

Pictures from a Rainy Weekend.

Rainy weekends call for none other than a good house cleaning.  There's finally no excuse to ignore the piles of dishes, dust, and clutter that has accumulated (at least that's what usually constitutes cleaning at our house...).  This weekend we did all of that, thanks to the help of my willing husband and some laundry assistance from my parents.

I took advantage of some down time on Sunday to start working on better organization for my kitchen.  I made a good start, but I know I have more to do, which first will involve reading/researching a few good ideas for organizing a small apartment kitchen.

Just a few before and after photos of surface-level organizing:

Before

 (Yes, I do like to watch Hulu while

working in the kitchen.)

After

And then I was finally able to get outside and survey the state of our very wet fall garden.  We still have a few things going - kale, pumpkins, eggplant, tomatoes, and hot peppers, not to mention a few cantaloupes and maybe squash (we're waiting to see what will happen with those).  I would have snapped more ground-level photos, but the bugs were at me non-stop, so I made as quick a stop as I could!

Tomatoes, squash, kale, and pumpkins (look hard!)

LOTS of tomatoes!

(You can see the effects of a few days of rain 

from looking at the pots on our fire escape!)

As you can see, we still have burgeoning tomato plants, which means that more salsa is in the works this week (maybe with a little extra kick since we have so many hot peppers and we're not really spicy-eating people.)! 

I am already looking forward to next spring and the garden planning and experiments that it will bring.  But for now, we will enjoy the last simple pleasures of our wet fall garden. 

"...I have great faith in a seed.  Convince me that you have a seed there, and I am prepared to expect wonders."               -- Henry David Thoreau

Yesterday, In Pictures.

 

Yesterday there was an extremely successful pickle canning, thanks to:

1 - Tons of cucumbers, 

2 - Seriously, as big as my hand! (See the comparison?)

3 - Target canning equipment, which has been so much better than I would've thought

4 - A happy kitchen, looking out on a reorganized porch (more on that later in the post)

5+6 - Coffee (always a must-have for me!) and a new apron from my great friend, Amanda.

Ben and I tasted the pickles a little later that evening, and they are delicious (Ben said even better than store-bought!).  We devoured the first jar so fast, we are now glad we have six more pints of them in the pantry!

I was also feeling inspired to reorganize our porch.  Since summer has been drawing to a close (although I'm not believing it quite yet...), our porch has kind of become a little...straggly.  My plants have mostly died since our last vacation, and the deck has become somewhat of a shelf for all the last minute things I drop there and neglect to put away later on.  SO, it was most definitely time for a clean-up!  I think it's much better, and mostly because it feels so much better - cleaner, less haphazard, and more shabby-chic (at least I hope so!).  

 Happily reorganized and clean porch!
1+2 - Before photos: Not proud of these...
3,4,5,6 - Salvation Army purchases to organize/decorate the porch
7 - All for $13.29! (everything else I used was what we already had around)
8-13 - The "afters", plus curtains from our closet and tie-backs made from dishtowels... I had to work with had we had!

Once again, I'm reminded of an article I read in Psychology Today a few weeks ago, that an unexpected source of happiness is to do something with our hands.  Psychologists have actually found this effective as a source of therapy - to have their clients begin pottery, art, writing, journaling, playing piano, etc.  You can read more about it here.  It makes sense to me, though - after a full day of doing something productive, I feel more completed myself, more at peace with my life (but maybe it's also because I don't have to trip over the things on my porch anymore!). 

RE-Arranging the Bedroom

Lately, Ben and I love to dream of having our own house, with our own spacious backyard, on a city street with lots of neighbors, and old floors and "bones" to work with. On our walks through the city, we love to pick out houses we would love to own someday, and dream of all the things we could do there: raise chickens, grow veggies, plant flowers, grow grapes (well, maybe those are more of my dreams...but you get the idea). Don't get me wrong - we love where we live! It's just so fun to dream of what we one day will get to invest in.

I also love to look at other peoples' kitchens. I loved the kitchen we had at our house in Maine the past week: high ceilings, open cabinets, and a center island with gas range and hanging pots and pans everywhere. Not uber-chic and glamorous, but it has such a great feel!

Cooking range (with my brother working hard...what a guy!); Bar stool seats at the island; and in true Maine style, lobster and wine glasses, side by side:

a

A kitchen like this just isn't in the cards for us yet - as students, twenty-somethings, and in transition - we know this is a dream for the future. But I still love to dream! Earlier this week I went to the library and got a stack of books about making your own beauty products, organizing your home, and making soap (a project I'm hoping to get to...eventually). While paging through a home organization/simplification book, I kept reading how important to sleep and peace of mind it is to have a calming bedroom.

(Source:Amazon.com)

When thinking of our bedroom, I usually think of it as a place where we crash at the end of a busy day, plunk down our books, computers, etc., and leave clothes and discarded outfit options around the floor. Not quite the picture of a calm, serene environment...

So I set to rearranging our bedroom. The first step: rearranging furniture (something I am terrible at!). I enlisted the help of my selfless husband to experiment with moving our furniture to find a new order. Second step: moving wardrobe dressers, laundry baskets, and bedside tables to face on opposite sides of the room to make "his and hers" areas of the room. Amazingly, this has already simplified our getting ready for bed and getting ready for the morning processes to have everything of our own right where we can get to it, and to discard our laundry in our own baskets at the end of the night. Third, decorations to hang, that have been sitting for quite awhile amidst the clutter. So now we have our engagement picture up, Ben's favorite Phillies caps, and the beautiful quilt hanging we received for our wedding, all up!

So, well I can't work in that dream kitchen/house quite yet, I'll be content working in the one we are fortunate to have.

Here are some pictures of our before and after bedroom arrangement (sorry, the before pictures don't give a good sense of how it looked!):

Before

After