My Clothing Endeavor

It's March 6th, 2013. I decided today not to buy any new clothes for a year. What prompted this? I think it was the combination of having just moved--packing and unpacking my whole wardrobe--and listening to Macklemore's Thrift Shop on the radio, and watching Michael Palin's Sahara documentary.

I love clothes, I love shopping, but sometimes the rampant consumerism of our culture makes me uncomfortable. In the third episode of Sahara, Michael Palin spent time with a group of nomads in Niger. I was busy packing around the time I was watching this. Let me be clear: I don't want to walk around the desert. I like tea shops and watching Breaking Bad on Netflix and hanging out with my dogs in my temperature-controlled house. But it's amazing how little stuff those people need! I CERTAINLY do not need as many clothes as I have.  See below:

My drawer full of tank tops

My drawer full of jeans

My closet: sweaters and sweatshirts on top, then, from left to right, shirts, skirts, dresses, and pants

In addition to all this stuff, I have, of course, socks, tights, leggings, bras, underwear, pajamas, and workout clothes. I have jewelry and accessories.  I have 26 pairs of shoes. (Including these new ones!)

My new shoes! (Seen before I bought them, when I texted a picture to my mom to get a second opinion)

So. Here are my rules/caveats: 

• No NEW clothes. 
• That means clothes from thrift shops are A-OK. If the idea is to reduce consumption, buying from thrift shops makes sense. I also hope it will make me more creative and skilled in modifying clothes/
• Likewise, sewing my own clothes is okay. So I can buy material and a pattern.
• I am going to buy a new bathing suit. I had a fabulous retro-styled one, but I lost it. My current suit is a leopard print bikini top and men's orange swimming trunks. 
• If I need basics like socks or underwear because they've worn out, I can replace them. REPLACE, though, not add more.
• I can buy jewelry/accessories. This is like a release, to make it easier, particularly because I'm going to be traveling around Europe in May/June and I know I'll want to buy myself things to remember little boutiques.  This won't be a big deal, as I already have rules for myself regarding jewelry. I only buy jewelry if:
• It is made by an artist and is rare and special and high-quality OR
• It is really, really cheap

That's it! We'll see how it goes!

Canning Label!!

Check this out! My friend Jess made me this amazing design for my future canning projects.  Isn't it hilarious and awesome? I will print it on round stickers to put on the tops of the jars (which aren't reused much), rather than on the glass part, where I'd have to worry about scraping them off after each use.

Isn't the eagle fierce? Aren't the talons serious?

The Canning Eagle

I tried canning this weekend! My friend Rachael and I had been planning it for awhile. She'd grown up canning with her mom and grandmother; I'd wanted to do it for years but had been too intimidated to try on my own.

It turns out it isn't hard at all! (Although I did joke that we should make cute little gift tags for our jars that list the symptoms of botulism.) I made an Indian curry simmer sauce (it's just the base for most of the curries I make: onions, garlic, ginger, a bunch of whole spices, and tomatoes), and Rachael made a berry/peach jam.

The most difficult part was that I'd bought 25 pounds of tomatoes at the farmers' market, and that's a lot of tomatoes to wrangle.  But I took them down, because I'm the Canning Eagle (my new canning nickname. what, you don't have a canning nickname?).

OK, here's how we canned: We cooked our foods while simultaneously sterilizing our jars and lids by washing them in the dishwasher. Then we filled the jars with our sauce or jam (I used a canning funnel to make it easier), sealed them up, and dropped them in boiling water for ten minutes. We used a special pair of tongs made to grab jars, but you could use regular tongs.  Anyway, after they were pulled out of the water, they cooled, and as they cooled, they sealed! You can actually here a popping sound when they seal sometimes. To test them, you just push on the top, and if the lid doesn't snap back, it's sealed! (If it does snap back, just put it in the fridge and eat it semi-soon, instead of keeping it in the cupboard.)

In summary:

1. Sterilize (in the dishwasher or in boiling water for ten minutes)
2. Fill, wipe the sides, seal
3. Drop in boiling water for ten or so minutes (time depends on the recipe), remove

I made 16 pint jars of sauce!  And then, tonight, I made 6 pint jars of applesauce!  I am truly the Canning Eagle.

Photos!

So many onions!

Delicious jam!

We can can!

The finished product!

Pants Altered

I don't know what's happened, fashion-wise.  I was so convinced for years that flared pants were more flattering than straight-legged.  The flared ankle balanced things out and made one's hips look smaller, the theory went.  But the past couple years, as straight-legs have come back in fashion, it just doesn't seem true anymore.  Or, even if it's true, the advantage of smaller-seeming hips is not as big as the disadvantage of looking not-so-stylish.

I have two pairs of corduroys from Anne Taylor Loft that I love, one in dark brown and one in purpley-maroon (I call that pair my Peter Brady pants).  They fit well, they're in good shape, and most important they're decent non-denim pants I can wear to work.  But they're flared, and they just make me feel like any outfit featuring them isn't really a success.

So, at the advice of my friend Connie, I turned them into straight-leg cords! I laid a pair of straight-leg jeans over them and, using a quilting pencil, traced the sides of the jeans onto the cords.  Then I sewed them!  I think it went pretty well.

Here are the before and after shots.  As a bonus, the "before" photo is an action shot including the aforementioned friend Connie, and the "after" features my trusty sewing machine.

Before:

After:

Socks!

I finished a pair of socks that I'd started knitting in January.  The first of the pair went quickly - I completed the majority of it while on vacation in Atlanta, watching Arrested Development on DVD with a college friend.  The second sock took me much longer.  I got busy and kept putting it down.  But finally, almost a year later, they're done!

They're big, wintery socks to wear around the house on cold Wisconsin nights.  I might also want to try them with colored tights, a short dress, and my blue Converse low-tops.

They're made of self-striping yarn, which I love.  The yarn is dyed to create the pattern - I never had to switch skeins or anything.

Check them out!

Nail Art

I learned a new technique from Bust Magazine's website.  You can get newsprint to show up on your nails!  Here's a pic of how it worked out for me:

Here's the quick version of what to do: paint your nails, let them dry, dip them in alcohol, hold newsprint on them, peel it off slowly, apply a top coat.  It was pretty easy! My friend Connie did graphics as well as words, and those turned out cool, too!

Cross Stitch Finished

I finished my cross stitch with the quote from Muriel Barbery's The Elegance of the Hedgehog.  Here it is:

I don't know if you can tell in the photo, but the green embroidery thread is the exact same green of one of the types of tea bag wrappers that Connie used on the frame.  

I have it in my office, right above where I have my electric tea kettle, mugs, and box of looseleaf tea.

An Old Project

I thought I'd post photos of my first reupholstery project.  I re-covered my kitchen chairs about a year ago.  Like the ottoman, their original state was perfectly unobjectionable, just a little boring.  Also like the ottoman, now they are awesome.

Before:

After!

Ottoman!

A friend and I reupholstered my ottoman last night.  It was a sort of test project before we begin on the matching Queen Anne chair.

Here's the before picture.  It was perfectly nice but rather boring.

Here's the after picture.  How stylish!

Here are the intermediate steps.  Hardest parts? Pulling staples out of the original fabric (we eventually gave up and just ripped it out) and sewing the green cording around the legs.

A couple other views of it:

New Craft

One of my favorite quotes is from The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbury. 

"...The world may be blustering or sleeping, wars are fought, people live and die, some nations disintegrate, while others are born, soon to be swallowed up in turn- and in all this sound and fury, amidst eruptions and undertows, while the world goes its merry way, bursts into flames, tears itself apart and is reborn: human life continues to throb.  So, let us drink a cup of tea." 

I had the idea to cross-stitch the last sentence.  To go with it, as an absolutely awesome birthday gift, my friend Connie decorated a frame for me with tea bag wrappers.  

I've never cross-stitched before.  It's sort of soothing: four corners, just follow the pattern, make an X, make an X, make an X.  I used this free cross-stitch caption maker to create myself a pattern.  Here's my progress so far.

Here's the frame Connie made me:

Joseph Kanon

I've read three books by Joseph Kanon now (just finished Los Alamos) and I definitely have a grip on the template.  Tough sort of guy, maybe a journalist, gets involved in both a murder investigation and some romantic entanglements - usually with a woman who seems like trouble but is ultimately worth it.  World War II and communism are involved.  The murder is solved, and along the way deeper themes are explored (the responsibility of the scientists in the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, for example). 

I like them.  Is it bad when books are formulaic? Maybe it's not the sign of the most daring, original, wonderful books (Los Alamos is no Cloud Atlas, which I still can't get out of my head) but that doesn't mean they can't be fun.  Fun isn't even the right word, since reading about the destruction of Berlin in Kanon's The Good German is certainly not fun.  Maybe the word I want is worthwhile.  Plus, after a chapter or two to gain momentum, they're nicely un-put-down-able.

As soon as I find my stupid camera cord I'll post pictures of the blouse I finished.  It's the pink, floral 1930s one, and I adore it.  It's lovely.  I also created a tank top out of a shiny, dressy blouse that a friend gave me, an undershirt of my boyfriend's, and some black scrap fabric.  It has a few more flaws than the pink blouse, but I'm proud of it since I built it myself, without a pattern. 

Dresser, Jeeves

Applying a second coat of linseed oil to my dresser has been delayed due to frequent rain the past few days.  I'm hoping I can get going on it again tomorrow.  I'm sooooo close.  Also, for knobs I'm thinking something black, shiny and simply-shaped. (I can't help but feel like I just described a species of beetle or something.)  

I'm halfway through Right Ho, Jeeves, which is a novel, rather than the short story collections I've read in the past.  I've seen the episode of Jeeves and Wooster based on it, but it's still hilarious.  "The fact that he was fifty quid in the red and expecting Civilization to take a toss at any moment had caused Uncle Tom, who always looked a bit like a pterodactyl with a secret sorrow, to take on a deeper melancholy."

Book, sanding finished

I finished The Autograph Man.  It picked up towards the end, but I still didn't love it.  It was alright.  Should you read it? If you've already read something of Zadie Smith's and liked it, yes.  If you like books about semi-miserable twenty-somethings, yes.  Otherwise, eh.

Sanding is a lot easier than I thought it would be.  It turns out you don't need to do a thorough, meticulous job on every square inch of the dresser, only a quick, brusque once-over with each level of grit.  (I started with 100-grit paper, then 220, then 320, then 600.) The wood feels great now, super smooth.  We put a layer of linseed oil on after that, which was gratifying.  It makes the wood look fantastic.  I need to let it dry, then apply another few coats.

Unfortunately, I was informed today that my landlord is having my deck power washed tomorrow at 8am.  That means dragging the unfinished dresser and all the drawers, along with all the supplies, back inside.  Fun times.

Blouse

I cut out the pieces for my 1930s blouse last night.  Here's a look at the fabric I'm using.  It's a little sheer, so I'll have to put a tank top under it.

I know flower prints are very of-the-moment, and therefore perhaps not the best choice for a shirt I'm bothering to sew myself, but I thought it was really pretty.  It also reminds me of the 1930s (accurately or not).

Dresser Photos

Here's the "before" photo.  Notice the pink rim around the top.  A few years ago I decided to paint the whole top pink.  The top itself had a plastic veneer thing on it that wouldn't hold paint, but the wooden trim took it.  It's been slowly wearing off.

This is after quite a bit of scraping off the Citristrip.  You can see there was a weird black layer under the white paint before you get to the wood.  We weren't sure what that was about.

A close-up, mid-scrape:

The drawers, mostly stripped, waiting to be cleaned:

Where the dresser stands now, stripped and washed and waiting to be sanded:

Some Progress

The dresser is looking awesome (pics posted soon).  It's completely cleaned off, and now just needs to be sanded and then tack-clothed (I will have to find out what that means before I try to do it) and then have linseed oil rubbed on it.

As far as the book, not much progress.  I've been opening it up to read for a bit before I go to sleep, but I can only get through a page or two before my eyes start shutting.  The first section, as I said before, was pretty easy to follow.  Now it's just a bunch of interviews or short segments with several different people, all either talking about the two leaders of the visceral realists - Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano - or talking with them about a girl named Cesarea Tinajero.  It's hard to keep track of who's talking and what's going on when I'm only reading a page or two at a time.  

I think I need to ramp up my effort to get into this, or I'll never finish it.  I don't want to give up on reading it (two books given up upon this year is something of a record).

Stalled

The heat and humidity has stalled my progress on my dresser.  It's now almost entirely stripped of paint.  Once I get the remaining bits off, using more Citristrip, I'll then wash everything thoroughly, and give it time to dry.  That's my next step.

Is it possible the heat and humidity have stalled my progress on the book I'm reading (still The Savage Detectives)?  I got through Part One, and liked it, but I'm having trouble finding the plot.  And now Part Two seems to be dealing with different characters, and I'm not being absorbed by it as easily as I would like to be.

Absorbed is an apt word for how I feel when I read good books - like the book is a sponge and I'm being sucked up inside it, inhabiting it.  Finishing a book I love is a jarring wringing-out.

Refinishing

I've started refinishing my dresser.  Here are the steps I've taken so far, steps you, too, could take if you'd like to refinish something:

1. Take everything off the top of it and out of the drawers, and put those things somewhere else (on top of the dog crate and in some garbage bags, in my case).
2. Take off the handles.  Keep the handles and hardware in a bag together (also on top of the dog crate), but contemplate buying new, outrageously overpriced ones from Anthropologie.
(Interlaced Twigs Handle, only $18 apiece)
3. Lay down drop cloth outside.
4. Set drawers outside.
5. Drag dresser outside.
6. Apply Citristrip all over dresser.  Citristrip is a theoretically non-toxic paint stripper made from orange peels.  It's an orange goo, and I think it smells good, kind of like futuristic Push-Ups.  It should be applied in thick coats -comparable to how much Nutella any normal person would apply to a slice of bread.
7. After 30-45 minutes, start scraping it off with a putty knife.  If the paint doesn't want to come all the way off, apply more Citristrip.

That's where I am now.  I'm going to apply more goo to the un-scraped pieces tomorrow, then start washing and sanding.  It's all very exciting, though a little unnerving, as a ton of my stuff is now in plastic bags scattered throughout my living room and kitchen, and my dresser is dissembled on my deck, covered in goo.  There's no going back (though the thought of dragging it to the curb and buying a new dresser has flitted through my mind once or twice...).

Blouse Pattern

Here's the 1930s blouse pattern I bought.  It's from a company called Decades of Style that rewrites vintage patterns for contemporary sewers (sewers? is that a word in this context? looks like I'm talking about where the Ninja Turtles live...)  Anyway, this is a picture of the blouse, and this is the website: www.decadesofstyle.com

The Freedom of Quitting

Oh, I don't like this Raymond Chandler book.  Maybe at some point I'll finish it, but for now, I'm done.  It's not too long, and it's wayyyyy better than that Dan Simmons book I struggled with a couple of months ago, but I still don't want to continue.  Life is finite.  Time to move on to something more interesting.

Speaking of quitting, I effectively gave up on my "Sleepyhead" scarf.  The ribbon was a lot stiffer than the knitted fabric, so it felt weird and wouldn't drape nicely, plus it wasn't as beautiful as I'd wanted it to be.  But I don't want to abandon the idea altogether.  I started knitting another scarf out of the same yarn (gray and white, made from recycled pop bottles) and am hoping I can turn it into something.  We'll see.