Wrapped up: the literal and figurative

Something about winter’s early onset this year has me in gifting mode already. It’s the first fall in a long time that has me truly excited about winter and the holidays, about nights in, warm drinks (gluwhine, anyone?), and cold mornings. And maybe even, on a good day, about snow.

So while working on PhD applications has consumed the better part of my fall, I’ve managed to get going on the gifts, as well. In fact, two of them just couldn’t wait until Christmas: They hit the mail last week. The gifts themselves were handmade items purchased at the summer’s Renegade Craft Fair here in Chicago — one a pencil pouch for MFA friend Quinn and the other a “Future Crafter” onesie for mom-to-be (and MFA friend) Claire. But it’s their wrapping I want to share:

The hanging tags, also purchased at Renegade, came from Hive Design Studio, and I’m sure I’ll be ordering more to adorn all my Christmas goodies. In fact, present wrapping may be my favorite part of gift giving: It signifies that something is done and that it deserves being presented with the same care that went into making (or, in rare cases for me, selecting) the gift.

Oh, and of course there’s been some knitting, as well. Without giving too much away, here are some recent projects, which can be found detailed on my Ravelry page — where I know their recipients won’t find them!

Okay, this one’s kind of a giveaway, but I’m sure the recipient is far too busy writing my PhD recommendation letter to read this blog.

 

Afternoon light: Craft studio/music room

It’s not compleeetely finished yet — but what ever is? I’ve learned that if I put off writing about something until it’s perfect, it never gets written about. So here is our not-quite-perfect front room, which is Pete’s music room and my craft room. It’s best in the afternoon, like right now, when the sun is perfectly situated behind a row of trees out front, and when it comes in filtered by the leaves and the ugly security bars on our windows, which, oddly enough, cast the loveliest shadows on this purple-painted wall:

And here are some more shots of the room’s four corners, each of which serves its own function:

The Writing Corner

My writing desk — one of the few things that came with me from Oregon

Thrifted cup, blue and green paper clips from the Target $1 bins

The Bass Corner

Quite lovely, its details

Pete’s Charlie Parker score, with a song he wrote for me framed above it

The All-Purpose Corner

Projects, waiting to be finished (or started, I suppose)

Night. Light.

The Knitting Corner

Yarn purchased on our honeymoon in Lisbon, Portugal

Self-portrait. In pajamas, yes.

 

Art and music studio room: before

When I moved back to Chicago after grad school, Pete and I specifically sought out a two-bedroom apartment in our neighborhood of choice, West Town. We were lucky to find our ground-floor unit with exposed brick walls, and best of all, an extra bedroom at the front of the apartment that catches a perfect afternoon sun. This room, quickly designated the “art room,” has always housed Pete’s upright and electric basses and my sewing/crafting materials. But over the last year, it came, too, to house everything else we couldn’t find a place for. “Put it in the front room” became a mantra around here, a solution for our unwieldy supply of stuff.

The room became unusable, resembling a storage unit more than any sort of studio. So come Spring, we set out on a major overhaul. I won’t show the results yet, but I think some photos of the “before” (as embarrassed as I am to show them) are worth noting:

Cluttered shelf

Fabric in disarray

The whole mess

Now, as I embark on a teaching job at a new university, I’m glad we took the time to get the room in order. As I was preparing syllabi tonight in my newly appointed writing corner, Pete came home from work and settled into some bow-work exercises on his upright bass, and these last notes of summer rang through the room.

 

One crafty wedding: guest gifts

Here’s what we did for the out-of-town guests:

I filled these bags with loose-leaf tea and ironed them shut.

The mini take-out containers and round inkjet labels came from the Paper Source, of course. In addition to the pomegranate tea shown above, we also used loose-leaf blueberry and Earl Grey teas. Filling the bags filled the living room with the teas’ strongly sweet smells, a perk I hadn’t anticipated. And when we gave these to our guests, the first thing they did was to hold them up to their noses—so fragrant!

 

One crafty wedding: favors

One advantage of Pete’s and my year-and-a-half engagement was that we had plenty of time to dream up handmade objects for the wedding. Wherever possible, we made instead of buying—because it agreed with our budget and because we’re both of the DIY spirit. So, finally, let me show you one of my favorite wedding crafts. The favors, with an epilogue:

He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven

Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

—William Butler Yeats

This was one of three poems read in our wedding ceremony. Wanting our favors to be thematically relevant, we created custom magnetic poetry kits with the words to the poem, and packaged them up a la this Martha Stewart idea.

We ordered white muslin bags, and with the help of Rit dye in Golden Yellow, dyed them our wedding color. I’d like to thank the month of April for giving me a 70-degree day so the bags could hang outside to drip dry.

The magnetic poetry pieces arrived in perforated sheets, so we had to break the words apart and insert them in the bags, which we then tucked neatly into these white boxes.

And voila!

The paper and ribbon are the Paper Source’s “Curry” shade,
also used for our invites and programs.

 

Not a wedding post . . . yet

One quality of myself I’m aware of — aware, not proud — is that if something’s not perfect, I abandon it. It becomes the red-headed stepchild of my to-do list, only to languish there forever until I either cross it off or lose that particular list. This blog seems to have fallen into that category. There are things I’d like to change about it: say, learn to use the real WordPress instead of this canned one; get my own url; import photos via Flickr or Picasa (still deciding between the two) instead of uploading them multiple times; and so on. So, then, it’s not perfect in my mind. And so, then, it sits until the time to make improvements magically presents itself.

But summer is dwindling (July, already?) and my list of projects growing (repurposed book for the very kind woman who officiated for Pete’s and my wedding; knitting of various baby items for various people expecting babies; redecorating the “art/music studio” room in our apartment; and, oh, so many more). But all of this is just to say that I haven’t disappeared. I still want to come back here and spend some good time, uploading pictures and descriptions of items we made for the wedding that I’m particularly proud of, and Pete’s birthday picnic blanket — my first quilt, albeit a very, very simple one.

And writing, let’s not even discuss writing. Remember that abandonment mentality? It’s accompanied by an all-or-nothing kind of motivation. There are times when I write every day. I have to. It keeps me going. And then there are the nows. But I suppose this downtime is necessary to rebuild my material, to think about what comes next, and maybe to just enjoy the summer a bit.

 

Quick update before teaching

Before I head back to the college for this evening’s class, a quick list of exciting things:

Today I . . .
• Finished and blocked the Mead Scarf
• Futzed around with my grip on double-pointed needles until finally—finally—it clicked
• Got my first acceptance letter ever for a creative non-fiction piece! Hooray!

 

Malabrigo merino, thrift-store cashmere, and anticipation

Tuesday, by most standards a pretty lackluster day, is my favorite with this new teaching schedule. I teach Tuesday mornings from 8:00 a.m. to 11:00 a.m., and then am free for the day. This hearkens back to the last two years of grad school, when that was my schedule most days. But with just one day like this, now, I relish my afternoon activities all the more.

Most recently, I’ve been using the time to knit and nurture my newfound Ravelry obsession. My crafting preferences happen in waves, and knitting has been my mainstay this winter. Since December, I’ve been working on a “Christmas” (oops) scarf for Pete’s mom. It’s the Mead Scarf, and I’m making it with Blue Sky Alpacas’ alpaca/silk blend on size three needles. The pattern is easy, but it’s taking forever and feeling pretty redundant. So this weekend, I cast on a quick weekend project, the Felicity hat. It knit up quick in this worsted-weight Malabrigo, many thanks to today’s afternoon off. (I’m quickly learning why there’s so much Malabrigo obsession out there.)

Felicity hat, Malabrigo’s Dusty Olive

Today also required a quick trip to Goodwill—if there is such a thing for me—where I scored a stash of cashmere sweaters that I plan to unravel, wash, and then ply with my new . . . Louet S10 spinning wheel! It’s not here yet, as it’s en route from the Netherlands, but I’m already dreaming up what I’ll do with it and where it will live in this apartment.

I’ve wanted to try recycling yarn for a while, and these sweaters will offer a good chance to get to know my spinning wheel. Given that the colors aren’t really ones I’d pick, either, they may also serve as dyeing practice.

 

If you’ve wondered what’s become of me . . .

I should have known that, when starting a blog and getting engaged around the same time, one was going to win out eventually. Wedding 1, blog 0. Pete and I are getting married in just a little over two months—May 2. And every moment, now, that’s not occupied by teaching or other work finds me doing something wedding.

Ours has shaped up to be a DIY wedding, both because it’s more economical and because we’re both the kind of people who make, create and customize. Also, because I’m sort of a control freak, and the thought of signing off tasks to other people tends to stress me out more than just doing them myself.

I wish I had better documented some of my steps along the way, perhaps shared them on here. But there is a fine line between work and artistry, and much of what we’ve done thus far falls under the work header. But there have been a few fine creations, with many more to come, I’m sure, as we start fine-tuning details. (I am particularly excited about favors, but don’t want to give away too much for fear any wedding attendees might have their surprise spoiled.) But here are a few glimpses of the save-the-date cards that went out in December and the invites that will start their journey tomorrow.

For the save-the-date cards, we had custom one-inch buttons printed up with what’s now become known as our “wedding logo”—the ampersand. Besides being a beautiful typographic character, its symbolism of “and,” or, more originally, the Latin “et” (meaning “and”) signifies the addition of one to the other. It just sort of worked out that way, that the “&” button was the best of the ones Pete designed, and that there’s also some meaning behind it, contrived or not. We punched two holes in each card with the Paper Source screw punch (quite possibly my favorite tool ever), and then fastened the buttons onto the cards themselves:

Save-the-date buttons

The invites, themselves, I made in the letterpress studio at Oregon State when I was still living in Corvallis. And the envelopes I addressed by hand, all in this same sort of home-grown calligraphy. On the back of each envelope, we affixed oval labels with our initials embossed on them. (I ordered a custom embosser from Scribe’s Delight, and for $85, I think it might be the best wedding investment I made.) I feel so lucky to live in a city with three Paper Source stores, and for all their matching accoutrements which made the finishing touches possible. The color, FYI, is called curry.

Hand-letterpressed wedding invitations

Wedding invitation calligraphy—my own adaptation

Embossed envelope seals

 

Moving toward modernity: Notes on thrifty redecorating

Ever since P and I moved into our new Chicago apartment in June, it’s just never looked quite right. That’s partially due to the painters who overtook the place for a month with their tarps and trails of dust, and then too many nights with friends and too few nights at home, and then a book-editing deadline for me. And some laziness thrown in there, too. But in working from home for the past month, I spent a lot more time noticing little things that bothered me, that we’d never changed or refinished or gotten rid of as we’d promised ourselves. Thus emerged my inspiration for redecorating. (And the fact that redecorating involves many trips to thrift stores and virtual trips to the biggest thrift store of all—Craigslist—didn’t hurt, either.)

And I think, without realizing it, I’m making more of a move toward modern furniture. My little apartment in Corvallis was perfect for shabby chic decor, thick tapestries and florals and silk brocades. But somehow this larger apartment (much, much larger), with its exposed brick walls and long, open spaces, calls for something more sleek, urban, clean. A $50 CB2 rug (8 by 10 for fifty bucks! Craigslist, of course . . .) and a lucite console table later, we’re getting there. Our bedroom side tables, both Salvation Army finds, need to be refinished and painted white to match the lamps (local Ark thrift store finds). And the hanging lamps are still sitting on the floor, and there’s a really kitschy brocade loveseat (think Grandma’s sitting room) in the hallway, and will the “Lauren’s sewing studio (slash) Pete’s bass-playing room” ever be ready? They had best be, soon, because we have friends coming into town in a week for the Northwestern five-year reunion. It’s good impetus, and they’ll provide inspiration, I’m sure, for many more projects to come.

It’s work, but it’s good work. It digs deep into my ability to both rescue old things and make them look pretty. For me, there’s much more reward in this than in ever owning anything brand new.