Pink of Perfection

Remember that vintage fabric my friend sent me after finding it in a relative’s North Dakota attic? I didn’t know how to properly honor it, and a year later, here’s the answer I settled on.

I first saw embroidery hoops used as fabric frames at Purl Patchwork as a way to display their Liberty of London swatches. (I’ve always loved the black and blue feather print.) But when I kept seeing them in shelter mags and on design blogs, I thought it was a decorating device too “over” to do in my own house.

But you know what? Screw that. It might have taken me a few years to finally cop to my desire to get pretty fabrics on the wall any way I can, but now that I have, I find the results ridiculously cheering. Who cares if something is “everywhere” (Keep Calm and Carry On, anyone?). If you love it, make it yours, bring it into your house, and let it bring you a bit of joy every time you pass down the hall.

This project is just my kind of skill level: Iron your fabric. Then slip the fabric into the embroidery hoops, tighten the screw and pull the fabric taught. Cut off the excess fabric, and hang them on the wall on tiny nails. Done and done.

Since I came back home from vacation, I’ve been a bit obsessed with transforming our living room into more of a paradise (going away tends to seed grand ideas like this, have you noticed?). I’ve picked out a couch (just can’t decide if we need a chaise on one end), and am planning to recover two chairs with very simple white slipcovers. They are improvements that will likely total in the hundreds of dollars, but when it comes to making a house a comfy home, they seem well worth it.

As I was sharing all this yesterday with a friend, getting her thoughtful nods of approval, I asked if she had other ideas. You know, fresh solutions for my same old spatial problems. Her eyes traveled around the room.

“Is the printer usually on the floor?”

“Oh, um, no.”

“Maybe you could move it.” She looked around more. “And what are all those cords under your desk?”

“Well, I don’t know really.”

“Maybe you could corral them? I bet you could do it in an hour. Use some twisty-ties.”

At first I thought she wasn’t quite playing along with my game. After all, I meant big, sweeping, grand changes, like totally rearranging the furniture, not piddly, organizational tasks like moving the waffle iron and abandoned picture frames from the tops of the bookshelves. But then I realized, of course, that my eyes had grown accustomed to certain unpolished, cluttered bits in my apartment; getting those in ship-shape might have as much as an effect as a big white couch, and for a lot less dough.

In fact, I’ve hated the jumble of cords under the desk that snake out into the floor space beyond since we moved into this apartment twelve million years ago. Why had I just come to accept this eyesore?

It took only thirty minutes to corral those cords. Nevermind that I broke the internet in the process and am typing this on stolen wifi. It’s well worth it. Thirty minutes for one small corner of peace of mind. And eventually I’ll figure out how to get our internet back up and running. Here’s hoping. (I believe this is what Gretchen Rubin calls in The Happiness Project a “boomerang errand”––one completed task that supplies you with a new, fresh to-do. Lovely.)

So why is it so hard to get going on these little tasks? They drive us absolutely nuts and yet finding thirty minutes to empty out a drawer or deal with a mountainous pile of mail seems as difficult as finding the time and money for a two week vacation in Fiji. But the results, oh, the sweet results. The pay-off is so much greater than what you have to put in to get ‘er done. So why does it feel so insurmountable sometimes? What are the little annoyances around the house causing you to lose your mind? And what would it really take––in terms of money and time––to make them pleasing again?

print for sale on etsy

On Friday evening I packed up a picnic of cold tuna macaroni salad and watermelon and boarded an evening train bound for Massachusetts’ Pioneer Valley. We arrived in the dark and drank cold glasses of vinho verde before falling asleep. But in the morning, we awoke to a a town filled with red brick buildings and ringed by green mountains in the distance. We ate breakfast outside in the sprawling garden of a restaurant where they roast their own coffee beans and sell peanut butter chocolate chip cookies the size of your head. From there, we visited the kind of huge, creaky used bookstore that can only exist off rural highways, and here we get to the first point I want to make: of course I had to buy the book you see here the moment I saw it, even if it hadn’t cost $1.50. Please note the sentence at the top of the cover.

I got a little carried away at this book store, snatching up an M.F.K. Fisher book I didn’t have, a Joan Didion novel I’ve long wanted to read, and a cookbook that caused a staggering library fine the last time it was in my hot little hands. Sebastian found me a heavy anthology of personal essays. As the shopkeeper rang me up, he paused at that one. “Is this one free or $1?” As I might have mentioned, I love used bookstores.

We returned to home base for rosé and cold celery stalks smeared with pimento cheese. Everyone retreated into their books for a quiet hour or two. Later, we drove a few miles on empty back roads lined with coneflowers to reach a swimming pool tucked next to river. Here, a surly teenager served ice cold canned sodas and greasy hamburgers.

How delightfully far it all felt from New York! On the Sunday drive back to the train station, my damp swimsuit tucked back inside my suitcase, we got to talking about quality of life. How that can mean walking five minutes to your office and having the things you love––swimming holes, bookstores, bibimbap, and really, really good iced coffee––easily accessible. New York has everything anyone could ever want. But to get to those things, we have to travel; even my best friend lives over an hour away by subway.

Some day, perhaps, I’ll settle in that kind of perfect place where indie craft fairs and ethnic food are enveloped by a wide natural world teeming with trails for hiking and clear lakes for swimming. (Any leads on places that match this description, by the way?) Until then, my new goal is to focus on the living the charmed life at hand. That means sprucing up the apartment I actually live in (instead of dreaming about moving), climbing in bed with an old novel, its brittle, brown pages and that wonderful old book smell, lulled to sleep with the story of what happens when a group of Bohemians face up to love.

photo via thomas pix

I spent part of this past weekend waking up in my friend’s bed to a view of her balcony lined with potted plants and palm trees beyond. She had terracotta planters filled with succulents and feeders to attract hummingbirds. It was a wonderful way to greet the day, and I watched her tend to her plants the way I do to guests: keeping them watered, seeing if they need anything, making sure they’re comfortable.

I’ve never seemed to have much of a green thumb. My potted herbs always shrivel up and an orchid promised to live forever bummed out on me. The one thing I’ve managed to maintain are some mangy looking geraniums on my bedroom windowsill. Inspired by my friend, though, I re-potted these plants, and set them out in the hot air of our fire escape. It rained hard that day, and the leaves sucked the moisture out of the heavy air. They seemed to shoot up an inch. I felt encouraged.

So now I’m thinking of going hog wild with container gardens, possibly even window boxes (but how do you keep them from falling off the ledge? anyone?). There’s a big, leafy tree outside our apartment that puts us in a bit of shade. I’m thinking of staying tried and true with my red geraniums, a bit of ivy, and revisiting my failed herb endeavor. I’m feeling hopeful about the whole thing.

Do you keep plants in pots and containers? What do you apartment dwellers grow? Do you keep plants inside, and if so, what? Help me to make my garden grow. I’m all ears!

photo via LIFE

Mother, Washing Dishes

She rarely made us do it—
we’d clear the table instead—so my sister and I teased
that some day we’d train our children right
and not end up like her, after every meal stuck
with red knuckles, a bleached rag to wipe and wring.
The one chore she spared us: gummy plates
in water greasy and swirling with sloughed peas,
globs of egg and gravy.

Or did she guard her place
at the window? Not wanting to give up the gloss
of the magnolia, the school traffic humming.
Sunset, finches at the feeder. First sightings
of the mail truck at the curb, just after noon,
delivering a note, a card, the least bit of news.

–Susan Meyers

“Nor need we power or splendour, wide hall or lordly dome; the good, the true, the tender, these form the wealth of home.” — Sarah J. Hale

I have long thought that one of the biggest obstacles to making a house feel like a home is all those blank walls. That’s why we made this giant horse silhouette way back when, why I hang album art, and why I frame vintage sewing patterns. But there’s a project I did awhile back that I never told you about, and it’s the kind of crafting I love: pretty fabric + junk you have laying around the house = something pretty to hang on the walls. Instead of framing fabric, which is a lovely idea, I wrapped box lids with fabric (as you would a present) and hung it right on the wall. This was originally conceived as a grouping of box lids in complementary fabrics (kind of like a quilt for your wall). I can’t quite remember how I ended up with just the pink birds, but either as a solo piece or a grouping, the project is equally successful — it’s just another way for me to great colorful, cheery fabrics into my home without having to haul out the sewing machine.

Continue reading “Shoebox Art” »