Chapter 3: Making Progress

One of the dog-eared areas in my life is my house.  Not all of it.  Just bits.  I bought my adorable little yellow house in May of ‘07 and jumped right into painting and arranging some rooms before I even moved in.  But then there are the sad, neglected spots like the back room.  Sometimes I call it the den because there is a step down into it (it used to bet he carport I think).  A lot of the time I call it the sun room because there are 3 big windows lining one wall.  But I’ve never really DONE anything to it.  For about a minute I set up a little couch and chair and coffee table and it was a sort of reading nook.  But then my cat basically declared war on the couch.  She hangs out in the back room and laundry room during the day so she’s not breaking things around the rest of the house and trying to make soup on the gas stove and setting the whole house on fire.  Also I don’t want to come home to find my pillow covered with 6 inches of Tonks fur.  I’m picky like that.

So eventually I had a furry room with a couch that looked like it picked a fight with my paper shredder and lost.  Of course it then became the catch-all room.  So it was basically just a wannabe Hoarders episode without the decaying organic matter.  I attempted a revamp on several occasions but it always fell right back into disarray.  And the nice positive of the room—all that sun—bleached my lovely curtains to, well, I don’t even know what. And this is what it looks like today.

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• Poster on the wall from Bikes, Blues & BBQ 2008 including tiny posting stating “You are Here” so my family wouldn’t get lost
• Papasan chair with no cushion because it either needs to leave my house or get more stuffing for the cushion which has done a pretty respectable job of trying to become as flat as possible in the last 10+ years
• Pile of various work in the yard shoes/hiking boots
• Canning supplies because I have the tiny kitchen from HELL and can’t figure out where to put my boiling water canner and beautiful mason jars :(
• Lovely Faded Curtains
• Insane cat
• Books, books, and some more books
• Bags and bags of yarn and fabric

The last few are what have really inspired me lately to get in gear and do something with the room.  Last month my mom fixed my sewing machine that wasn’t really broken I just thought it was for the past year or so.  I still think it was broken, it just took one look at her coming it’s way and said “WHOA….this is serious.  It’s a professional so I better straighten up and fly right!”  I know it always worked on me as a kid.

Sewing is another one of my dogeared pages.  I sewed anything I could get my hands on as a little girl.  My mom used to give us a needle and thread and sheet of paper to sew pictures at the kitchen table.  Come to think of it, that might be a good idea for the kids in Sunday school.  I better add that to my list.  But I digress.  When I was 7 or 8 (correct me if I’m wrong, Mom.  But I think it was the same Christmas I got my Little House Books) I got a kid’s working toy sewing machine for Christmas.  Shortly after that my parents decided they should have just bought me a used real one at a yard sale and I moved up to being allowed to use my mom’s.  I really did keep at it for a while off and on.  I have made two attempts in my life to make clothes.  Once in the 6th grade my final sewing class project was an outfit that I never did finish for some reason or another.  And in 9th grade I decided to make a skirt out of ties that attached to the tops of an old pair of overalls.  But we moved Southeast Asia before I was able to get enough ties together to finish it, even as tiny as I was back then. haha 

The sewing machine I have now was given to my by my grandma.  I borrowed in sophomore year of college and she never used it so she let me keep it.  At that point I was hemming pants and doing basic repairs or making Halloween costumes for my hall mates.  Looking back on it I should have put up posters and charged people. *sigh* another missed opportunity to build my evil empire.  Then I moved on to attempting to make a quilt.  I have a very nearly finished Drunkard’s Path quilt top folded up in the bottom of a stack of fabric.  Dogeared. 

So this is where I sort of kill two birds with one stone.

1. Pick one of the hobbies I have rudely cast aside and either develop it or get rid of it for good. (I’m about to become a sewing machine.  Hmm…that’s not exactly how I wanted that to work)
2. Pick any area of my house that I have neglected and stop treating said area like a college kid in a sleazy rental property.

The clincher that REALLY motivated me was This Lady's Blog.  She redid her studio and it ended up looking like this:

 

And I broke a Commandment.  Remember the one about Coveting?  Yah.  I covet the fact that this neat lady has an Ikea so close to her.  Because those fantasmical shelves would cost more to ship than they do to buy.  Lucky me, it’s back to school time and places like Office Depot, while they may have some real numskulls working for them (I’ll have to tell that story another time) do things like put these shelves on sale!

Mmmmm…Pretty.  So I bought two and hauled both the boxes home in my Saturn. ( I TOLD you they would fit annoying Office Depot guy who doubted me).  I had to go grocery shopping tonight so I didn’t have time to start putting them together but tomorrow night will be my night!  I am going to pop in Season 1 of Grey’s Anatomy and get started creating a beautiful space for creating works of sewing art!  And also knitting.  Aren’t those shelves going to look beautiful full of colorful yarn and books?  Woohoo!  It’s no Posy Gets Cozy and it’s definitely not quite Vanessa levels of cool just yet but it’s a start!