Head Pin Love

A matching set, what can I say. I love the head pins, but haven't quite tried my hand at making them myself. I've thought about it, that's all.

 Last year when I drove my son to college, it poured with rain. It was a wet, wet summer, and moving the new students in was slightly miserable, parents and attendant siblings huddled under the shelter in a parking lot inundated with kids vying for the huge bins on wheels with which to cart their worldly belongings up to their new homes.

Nothing of his was hopelessly wet even though we used a truck; luckily my brilliant child had the foresight (and the truck had a back seat) to put the valuables and water-permeable things inside.

This year, the driest summer in recorded history (plus or minus), the year that all growing things do not, when threatened storms turn out to be thunder, lightening and a thimbleful of moisture, it was of course raining as we left for college for his sophomore year.

At least it wasn't raining at the other end, and we arrived a few minutes early so we snagged wheeled bin; three trips moved everything into his room.

Actually not painful at all.

 I've been revisiting old designs.

Somehow I was never able to find a satisfying mixture of seed beads for the above two donuts (both of which I have in quantity: I had intended them for kits but was never satisfied with colours). I like them both!

No picture, but I finished the sweater (tee-shirt) I was working on before my trip in May. The colour is unusual for me (rather pink), but the yarn is fabulously drapey. The styling is a little schizophrenic: the neck and sleeves are lovely but the bottom half isn't quite as flattering as I'd like. I'll still wear it though - apparently I'm only slightly vain: enough to show off what I made, but not enough to care (that much) that it doesn't look as good as usual.

Dunno what it is lately, but I have ants in my pants about the interior of my house. My furnishings, to be exact.

Except for my one and only little apartment in South Africa back in the Dark Ages which I kinda loved, every other place I've lived in has been filled with, well, filler. Stuff, not possessions. Things I cart from place to place that aren't what I chose.

The sofa from the divorce was never to my taste, neither the design nor the fabric, so I made a cover for it, but still don't love it much.

When my parents emigrated around the time I was pregnant with my now-adult daughter, they sent furniture that they no longer needed, some of which I really like (the dresser that belonged to my father as a child, my maternal grandmother's dining room table, my maternal great-grandmother's brass bed), some which is OK (one of the card tables; don't ask, there are a few), but quite a bit which I don't like at all (the display cabinet which I almost object to on principle, and ugh, those two Art Deco chairs), and which is too fragile to be anything but decorative. And you should like your decorations, right? The word "decoration" has positive connotations, right?

I hate having chairs that look prissy and uncomfortable, not to mention too delicate and precious to actually sit on.

A coffee table that's too fussy, too small and a bit tippy.

My brothers got the Persian rugs. Those would have had a more secure home with me than all that dark wood.

At the time, I was instructed that anything I wanted to sell, I had to first offer to one of my brothers, so I've kept all these things, but I think I'm done living in rooms full of stuff that's inimical, that doesn't fit with me. It's stuff. Things that I'm storing for no one. And I'm not sending them to Australia: if a small care package to Switzerland cost sixty dollars, then a few antique chairs, coffee tables and card tables will be way more than I'm prepared to drop on shipping costs.

There's some clearing out in my future, some acquisition too. Some upholstery, some of which I will pay someone (no doubt handsomely) to do, some of which I will do myself, albeit grudgingly. Just because I can do it, doesn't mean that I love to. But I will.

Starting next week or the week after, perhaps.

I did upholster eight chairs, y'know.