Sunday Snapshot: Finished

Here is a peek at the new living room drapes that I finished the other day.  They are made from the same fabric as the ones that I made two years ago for the dining room. The style of these two rooms is very similar, and you can easily see from one to the other, so I wanted the window treatments to match.

Family Room bay window with new drapes!

Dining Room, with matching drapes.

The difference between the drapes in the family room and the ones in the dining room is that the family room drapes are finished.  Really finished ... not mostly, you-can't-really-tell-that-they're-not-hemmed almost-finished like the dining room. 

My goal for 2015 and beyond is to try to stick with projects all the way to the end.  It's been a struggle at times, as I fight the lure of other things that tempt me to start or work on, but I'm getting a lot of satisfaction out of stepping back and basking in the triumphant feeling of FINISHED!

(Tutorial to teach you how to make your own drapes will be posted in a few days.)

Happy Sunday, Everyone!

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Sunday Snapshots are posts that are devoted to a moment in time that represents a slice of life in Hartwood, or wherever else I happen to be.

Snow Again

It snowed again yesterday (Thursday).  This storm was predicted well ahead of time, and we were prepared to deal with whatever we got ... which turned out to be four to five inches of snow, on top of about a half an inch of sleet that fell first.

I spent most of the day in my sewing room, making drapes for the family room and watching the snow fall.  The view from up there is beautiful.

A little bit of snow.

A little while later, lots more snow.

It's cold today, but the sun has been shining.  This morning, the young man next door came over and plowed our driveway, and I shoveled our steps and sidewalk this afternoon.  Yesterday evening, I had to shovel and sweep a path and spot in the backyard for Winnie to do her 'business'.  Ruby just runs out into the snow and has a grand old time ... Winnie is too small for that.

Yesterday morning, right before the storm got going, I set up my game camera, programmed to time lapse mode, to see if I could make a video of the accumulating snow.  The result ... 450+ photos (one every five minutes from 10:30am till 6:00pm), compiled with Movie Maker with one-tenth of a second between photos.  An all-day snow storm, condensed into 45 seconds.





I'm not going to complain about the snow, even though we have had more than our usual share of it in the past few weeks.  We are warm and safe, and that's all that matters.

(I promise that I will share my new drapes with you very soon ... tutorial, too!)

She's a Very Stinky Girl ...

Winnie got a bath yesterday.  She really needed it.  Wearing a sweater like she does 24/7 during the fall and winter, she gets pretty 'fragrant'.  I bathe her in the kitchen sink, with a bar of organic herbal pet shampoo, and I rinse her under the faucet.  (Sorry that there are no photos of the actual bath to show you, since I was home alone at the time.)

"Bath time?  Oh, no."

Today, Winnie smells awesome ... and I have been singing her my own version of the classic Rick James song (as it is in the title of this post).  There might also be some dancing involved.

All together now .... "She's a very stinky girl ....."  (Rick James video HERE)

Sweet, patient Winnie.

A Huge Pop of Color in the Dining Room!

Our dining room hutch is seven feet tall.  With our nine-and-a-half-foot-high ceilings on this level of the house, the top of the hutch looked naked.  I have tried arranging baskets, art, and assorted other things up there, and nothing looked right ... until I tried this ...

I have had this stained glass window for YEARS.  I bought it on Craigslist because I loved it and it was cheap, but without any idea of where or how to use it.  The color and finish you see is exactly how it was when I bought it.  Thought at one point about reworking the framing in the shack to use it there, but decided that I didn't want to subject it to the weather.  It has been stored in our basement, moving from spot to spot, as I schemed and plotted.

I showed it in the basement workshop THIS post from 2010.

At one time, it was upside down in the corner of our pool room, practically hidden behind all of this crap that I have since sifted through and dealt with.

It was a fit of weird inspiration that led me to bring it upstairs and try it on top of the hutch.  My husband and I agree that we love it.  With that decided, it was time to make it safe and secure up there.

I screwed three pieces of scrap 1 x 6 to the bottom of the window to make 'feet' as a base.  With the window in place on top of the hutch, I then screwed the feet into the top of the hutch.  This thing isn't going anywhere now!

The 'feet' screwed to the base of the window with two-inch screws, and I used 1 1/4 inch screws to attach it to the top of the hutch.

Eventually, I hope to add another thing or two up there with the window, to fill out the space and add some more interest.  For now, though, I think that it's close enough to perfect exactly the way it is.

Flowers on Friday ... Blooming in the Basement

Three of the baby roses growing under lights in my basement workshop are plants of my Yellow Seedling.  One of these developed a bud, which I was technically supposed to have popped off when I first noticed it.  This would be to allow the plant to put its energy into growing leaves and roots (instead of a flower), but I didn't have the heart to do it.  This is a strong healthy plant, and I reasoned that it could stand the strain of flowering.  A few days ago, the bud opened and this was the result:

If you follow Hartwood Roses on Facebook, you have already seen this photo.

In a few weeks, I will send two of the three plants to friends in different parts of the country.  This is the next step in my goal to eventually make this rose commercially available ... gotta see if it performs as well in other places as it does in my garden here.  The third plant will stay here as a back up copy, in case something happens to the original.

It has been almost a month since I transplanted the baby roses out of their propagation containers and into small pots of their own.  (click the link to see a post from when I did this).

Happy Friday, Everyone!  

Cabbage Rose Fabric and Another Future Project

More snow falling today.  Looks like about three-or-so new inches.  It's beginning to taper off as I'm typing this, so I doubt there will be any more accumulation.  Still can't work on stuff outside ... as a result, my brain keeps scheming new projects, even though I have plenty of current, in-progress stuff to keep me occupied.

I put one of those schemes to rest a few minutes ago.  Years ago, I bought a huge roll of gorgeous cabbage rose fabric, with no particular use for it in mind ... had to have it because I loved it and I knew I would kick myself for all eternity if I didn't buy it.  I don't remember exactly what the price was, but I do remember that it was low enough to barely be a consideration in the decision process.

The selvage on the fabric says, "Cyrus Clark Co., Inc. 'Warrington' MCMXCIX"

Months ago (maybe longer than that), I was in the sewing room working on something else,  and I spotted the roll of fabric leaning against the wall.  I said to myself, "Self, this fabric would be awesome as drapes for the living room!"

That's as far as the idea went until this morning.  I carried the fabric downstairs to the dining room, which is our room with the longest open space when I push the dining table over to the side, and rolled the fabric out to see how much of it is on the roll.

Maggie was helping.

I am excited to tell you that there is more than enough fabric to make the four panels necessary for living room drapes!  I stopped rolling and measuring when I counted16 yards, and I hadn't reached the end of the roll.  That's plenty.

Just like the process I described about decisions for our front porch railing, now that I know I have enough material for this project, I can put this idea to bed until it's time to actually do something about it.  Frees up brain space to dream about other stuff.

Pondering Porch Patterns

It has been cold and windy all week, the ground is covered with snow, and I have been limited to working on things indoors.  Couldn't even do stuff in the basement workshop, because it's not heated and the temperature in there dropped to 48 degrees.  I'm not one to sit, so I puttered with things in the warmer parts of the house and I schemed about long-delayed projects that I can work on when spring finally arrives.

One of those things is our front porch.  Long-time readers of this blog are well acquainted with the fact that our front porch is structurally sound, having been mostly rebuilt in 2005.  The posts, railing, and other ornamentation on the porch at that time weren't the originals, and we found absolutely no clue as to what the details might have looked like in the beginning.  It's been stressful for me to try to design something that fits with the house in its current state, and that will be appropriate for what it may have looked like when it was new in 1848.

This photo of our house was taken in the 1950s, before it was stripped of its Gothic gingerbread decoration.  The porch posts you see are not the originals.

This may be the earliest photo I have of our house.  I think it was taken in the 1930s.

1933

1940s or 50s

Our house was extensively remodeled and added onto in 1967.  The dormer and all of the gingerbread trim was removed and replaced with plain trim ... to 'simplify' the house, according to an article in the local paper that was published at the time.  (that article is HERE)  Notice that the porch now has single posts at each front corner, instead of the earlier double posts.

1960s

1970s

1980s

Our porch looks mostly like this right now.

Imagine that the front door and ceiling are painted blue, which they weren't in this photo from 2011.  The utilitarian cedar posts and 'temporary' railing are still exactly as you see.

The first bit of inspiration for its redesign came from the porch on this house in Keyser, West Virginia.  A friend kindly traced the gingerbread corner brackets for me.  The cut outs in the brackets are a lot like an element in the design of the original gable trim on our house.

Inspiration porch in West Virginia.

Cardboard cut outs of pattern for corner brackets.

The brackets are perfect!  It has been a struggle for me to come up with a design for the porch railing.  I have my heart set on Victorian sawn brackets.  I fiddled with a couple of designs at one time, but nothing felt right to me.

photoshop facsimile of our porch with the gingerbread brackets and sawn balusters that I posted in 2011.  The brackets are awesome, but I couldn't get comfortable with that baluster design.

Last week, in a fit of cabin fever from being snowed in, I sorted through my photos and I came across this:

2002 photo of Idlewild porch railing.

It was a photo that I took of the front porch railing at Idlewild, an abandoned Gothic Revival mansion surrounded by a modern subdivision in the city of Fredericksburg.

File photo from Free Lance Star.

photo of Idlewild porch that I took in 2002.

2002

While I was at Idlewild taking photos that first time in 2002, I brought along posterboard and markers, and I traced the porch balusters ... thinking that I might be able to use the design for something at some point.  It's a good thing that I did because, in the succeeding thirteen years, Idlewild has been neglected and abused, set on fire twice by arsonists, vandalized, and shaken almost to the point of ruin by the earthquake in 2011.  What was once a grand, restorable home is now all but lost.

photo taken by a firefighter during the blaze in 2002

2008 photo

2008 photo

December 2014

As you can see from the photo below, it's a good thing that I traced the porch balusters when I did, because they are all gone now.  Whether they were removed for preservation or stolen, I don't know.

December 2014 photo

The Idlewild balusters are only 25 inches high, far too low for a legal, safe railing on our porch.  I decided to use my rough 2002 tracing and see if I liked the design if I stretched them to 30 inches.

Cleaned up posterboard pattern of the original Idlewild baluster, based on my 2002 tracing.

To stretch the pattern, I cut it into one-inch strips, gluing each strip 1/4th of an inch apart onto another piece of posterboard.  

I cut out the new pattern, clamped it into place on the front porch, took a photo, and played with Photoshop again.  The facsimile railing on the left represents three whole balusters in the space between the posts.  The one on the right is arranged like the balusters were at Idlewild, with half balusters attached to the posts and whole ones between.

Un-photoshopped photo of the baluster pattern, cut out of posterboard, taped to a yardstick and weighted with clothespins.

Through the magic of Photoshop, I can see what the railing would look like with these balusters in two different arrangements.

I like the one on the right best.  It looks like my long search for a final design for our porch may finally be over.  I love the way the balusters look in the Idlewild configuration.  It reminds me of the lacy appearance of the original trim on our house.

As far as I'm concerned, I consider the hardest part of this project to be complete.  Design is finished, materials are sourced but not yet ordered.  In this world of composite and vinyl, it took a while for me to find reasonably priced true one-inch thick boards that I can order when I'm ready to sit down at the band saw to start cutting the brackets and balusters.  (not gonna happen any time soon, and I'm okay with that.)