A few pictures

I once again have the writer's block. When in bed at night, my mind is FILLED with subjects I want to write about. But as soon as I drift off to slumberland, the blog imp comes and steals them all away from me. So, I manage to write pretty much nothing. Thankfully the camera still works, and each picture is worth a thousand words, so I'm gonna have a slide show.

First, the boy's 5th birthday was at the end of August (so sue me, I'm a slacker). I had a modest goal of serving him a cake not purchased from a grocery store's bakery. He wanted a Transformers-themed party, so I had my work cut out for me. Jumping to my aid was my friend Kaia, who owns a car-shaped pan, so I embarked on my first cake decoration attempt: The Autobot named Bumblebee. I used to think that I'd like to decorate cakes as a hobby. It turns out, I do not. (There's a chance that I would have enjoyed it more if my pastry bag and bag tips hadn't been MIA, forcing me to use only a Ziploc freezer bag and my gumption to frost the cake)

It's completely lopsided, but the boy was happy with it, and it tasted pretty good.

Next, I owe you a picture of my kitchen. There's still a soffit to be built around the sink's vent pipe, but the wallpaper is up and the painting is basically done. Even in its unfinished state, it's a 382% improvement over how it had looked since we moved in. If only I could afford to have the floor and counters replaced....


Lastly for today, I owe you a picture of knitting. However, the knitting I've been doing is too boring to bother turning on the camera. I've recently been knitting neck gaiters (the pattern spells it "gator" but I don't think that's right), one being an exact replica of one I knit in the spring, for Citizen Sam. I don't think I ever posted about this before, so I'll show you a picture of its older twin. (You can see that I made a hat in the spring too. I haven't made another hat yet, but I have more yarn, so it's probably just a matter of time).

If one 9" knitted tube weren't boring enough of a summer knit, I've cast on another one, this one navy blue, for keeping in the family. I think all this k2p2 ribbing is finally giving me the motivation to get back to more challenging projects. So that's good.

I really hope to keep up with the posting, and not put writing off enough for another month. But we'll see. My slacker-fu is very strong.

Kitchen pictures

I'm in a knitting slump. I made a sock, it got set aside, I finally picked it back up and made it too short. I pulled out the toe and re-knit it, made it longer, and it's still too short. It's just par for the course lately. A while before that I crocheted a granny square. As I rounded the last corner of the second round, I realized that I had made a granny triangle. I also have a sweater that I started, and I keep thinking that I'll never be able to finish it, so why bother working on it at all. See? I have lost my mojo.

The upside to failing at the yarny arts is that I have been working on the long-suffering kitchen. (By the way, I do mean to say that it has been doing the suffering. The poor room has been terribly embarrassed at its state for more than three months now.)

This last weekend, I finally primed the walls (with a miracle product called Gardz) and then painted the ceiling. Of course I dislike painting ceilings on a good day, but painting over a mushroom-colored glossy ceiling is a special brand of Hell (should that be capitalized? I assume it's a proper noun, right?). After about three coats of ceiling paint, I was left with this (see what I mean about a sad kitchen?):


Yesterday, I decided to tackle the wallpaper. I was a little intimidated because A) it's only my second wallpapering project, the first one being the dining room a couple of years ago, and B)this random-looking wallpaper has a repeat which I really thought I was unable to find. But I pressed on, found the three tiny dots that signaled the pattern's matching point, and dove in. I was left with this.



It's the only wall that is done so far. I hope to get wall #2 done today. It's slow going because it's all windows and cabinets and doors everywhere, but I have hope for the future of my kitchen. Now if I could only happen upon a spare thousand dollars to have the floor replaced...

While the rest of life speeds up, Norm goes retro

I have a problem. The more I have things I need to finish, the more projects I choose to take on. It can be seen in the many WIPs in my yarn cupboard (not to mention the things sitting around the rest of the house, as my knitting ADD has outgrown the cupboard). It can also be seen in the fact that my kitchen isn't much farther along now than a couple of weeks ago when I posted pictures. I could blame the weather (wettest spring on record here in my neck o' the prairie), but the truth is, I decided to knit in public, and it took a lot of time.

While my kitchen cabinets remain doorless, and the walls remain paperless, I signed on to knit at an event celebrating my town's sesquicentennial (that's 1859, in case you didn't feel like doing the math). Never happy to do something the easy way, I decided to make a dress for the occasion. This is a bit of a silly idea, because I am not an experienced seamstress, nor have I even sewn more than a button onto anything in well over a year.

But I had the idea in my head, and would not be dissuaded. Of course I had to start out by spending a week trolling the internet for ideas of what to sew. Then I realized that any real pattern would set me back $15 or more, not to mention that my procrastination precluded me from really ordering one anyway, so I asked my mom to help me out. She took a blouse that fits me and drafted a pattern from it (talented family members are a must, when daring to craft beyond your skill level).

I managed to follow her directions and ended up with a bodice that fit (although not quite period-appropriate), and then decided to do the skirt the way a gal would have done it 150 years ago. I ended up with a sore hand and shoulder from pleating all 135" of the top of it, then hemming the other end and attaching it to said bodice, all by hand. It sure was fun, though (no kidding). The apron is a pillowcase, gathered and sewn to a band of old tablecloth. Luckily, I can whip up an apron pretty easily, so that was done last-minute with a minimum of cursing.

In the end I ended up quite pleased with myself. The garden plants I bought last week may still be languishing in their flats, the kitchen may be unfinished, the dining room is still unusable, being filled with the kitchen's misplaced bits and bobs and shelves and glasses, but I got lots of compliments from people who saw me yesterday. And then I went grocery shopping in the dress -- I figured if I spend an entire week making something, I'd better get some mileage out of it!

I'm such an attention whore. Sometimes I think that's why I craft things at all.

Too humid to paint, so I'll show you some progress pics instead,

I need to paint another coat on the wainscot. (This is a fancy misnomer. It's really beadboard-shaped paneling installed by previous owners. It was a very dark wood color before I got paint-happy with it.) Unfortunately, we're having an excessively wet spring and once again it's too humid to paint. That means that the refrigerator sits in the middle of the kitchen for at least one more day. *sigh*

But that does free me up to do some house cleaning. The work in the kitchen has caused a cessation of regular tidying in other parts of the house, although I wasn't exactly a fastidious housekeeper before. I need to reclaim my front room. It's become the wooden train set/Barbie spa room for a week now and it's bothering me. It is the only room that I really love, so it pays to keep it that clean. Also, I've been slacking in the laundry and dishes departments. Ugh. There's always a lot of those.

Anyway, back to pictures:
In February, Mr Deplume had had enough of the ugly kitchen, and started to strip the lower cabinets so we could repaint them.


There they sat, mostly stripped, for almost two months. Finally, last week, I started priming and painting, and also ripped out the soffits above the upper cabinets-- that amount of wasted space makes me twitchy. I did find that I really love the original wallpaper from when the kitchen was installed (early 60's maybe?)


Under the soffit I found a lovely copper sink vent, and some rather dodgy wiring for the over-sink light.


Here's the north side of the kitchen, before I started to paint the "wainscot." Please don't judge me by the mess inside that cupboard. It's where I cram all the stuff that doesn't fit neatly anywhere else.


The other end of the sink vent. And the 3" of window trim that was removed for the soffit. Ugh.


Bye Bye, ugly wallpapers!


So that's where we were the other day. I started to put the doors back on the lowers, but the hinges I bought were too thick (or maybe just poorly made), and I had to buy new ones. Of course the new hinges' mounting holes don't match up on the door side, so I need to break out the drill and make some adjustments. Nothing is ever easy peasy in this house.

And now I'm going to get the boy dressed and head to Menards to return the 10 pairs of hinges that I cannot use. We're all very excited about that. whoopdedoo!

Can't talk now

Too busy ripping apart the kitchen. And as always, every little job ends up ballooning to thrice its original size. But finally I'm seeing progress. We've repainted the lower cabinets and wainscoting, and after several days of humidity finally were able to put the new pulls on the drawers and re-install them.

Unfortunately, we've hinge replacement issues, so the doors remain on the front porch floor. Actually, there is one door that couldn't go back on its cabinet yet anyway, thanks to the boy who "accidentally" got his dirty foot on the wet paint.


what do you think?