Oddities

Mary, my landlady, tells me all the time that I attract wackjobs.  She sees them come and go, as her business is right next door to mine, and after having been open for business where I am now for over 4 years, I have to say she's right.  I mean, most of my customers are "normal" (If there is such a thing) but there are quite a few who are...well, quirkier than most.  I like them the best.  Well, most of them (some of you are familiar with the Jock Strap Incident).  Mine is an alterations shop; not really the sort of place where one would think to find a high concentration of odd people congregating, which makes me suspect that maybe it's not the business, it's me.  Let's not delve into THAT theory too deeply.

But I have found a place that makes my weirdest people look boring.  The Science Channel has a series called "Oddities" and I am completely fascinated and grossed out.  It is a reality series sort of like "Pawn Stars", only the shop deals in antiquated medical equipment and quackery, taxidermy, skeletons, jewelry made from kidney stones....but still, I'm not sure if the title refers to the items in the store, or the customers. Nothing I could say here would do justice to their clientele;  you really have to watch the show.  The day we discovered it was a day there was an Oddities marathon, and we sat glued to the TV for over four hours and blew the better part of a nice afternoon because we just couldn't tear ourselves away.

The proprietors of Obscura in NYC, and hosts of "Oddities".  They LOOK normal, don't they?  Oddities airs on Saturday nights at 8:00 and 8:30 on The Science Channel (NOT the SyFy Channel), followed by the all new "Oddities: San Francisco".  Bicoastal lunacy.

This has been the view out my door for the last week.  Pretty much.  We did have a couple of non-raining, even briefly sunny days, but today it's raining AGAIN so I don't remember when they were or if I just dreamed them.  It's actually not a bad view now that I look at it, I just wish it was drier.  Where my sister lives, way up north in California, it rains all winter.  She once said she sure hoped spring would come before she had mildew growing up her legs.  I know how she feels. One day last week, in the space of 10 minutes, it was cloudy, then pouring, then sunny and thundering.  When they say if you don't like the weather in New England, wait a minute, they mean that literally.

So I've been just laying low and getting a lot of work done, and fun stuff too; got inspired a few weeks ago to make some patriotic kids clothes, and I actually have them almost finished in time for the 4th!  

Watched Dropkick Murphys live from Fenway Park last night on Palladia (I love the Palladia network.  You can only get it if you have HDTV, and I don't know how I lived without it!)  I had never seen them perform, and since Boston is their stomping ground it was no surprise that the audience was totally into it.  They look, for all intent and purpose, like a bunch of random guys who were hanging out in a bar and said "hey...we should start a band".  And then they called on stage members of the Mighty Mighty Bosstones for THE song, "Shipping up to Boston", which I tried in vain to find for you on YouTube.  All I could find were videos posted by people in the audience, and this was the best one I could come up with.  If you have Palladia (and if you have HDTV you do, it's a free channel) I highly recommend checking this out.

Nosy neighbors

 I was so looking forward to the holiday weekend!  two days off in a row!!  And the weather was beautiful, and for the first time in at least 5 years, we got our garden planted on time!  I found a guy on Craigslist to come rototill and I can't say enough about him.  He was friendly and respectful and showed up when he said he was going to, his price was more than fair, and he did a great job. He does all sorts of other yard and garden stuff too, I highly recommend him to anybody in the RI area. Thomas Reilly, 401-749-5296.  And he's a military man, so that seemed appropriate too!
So here's the view from my garden bench!  The garden is about twice this length.  Tomatoes and peppers and beans, oh my.  And my nosy neighbors.  Some people say cows don't have much personality, but these two couldn't be more different; the one on the left enjoys being sprayed in the face with the hose--in fact she'll come closer and open her mouth for a drink--the other one doesn't like it at all.  On the other hand, the one on the right will let you pet him on the nose, the other one won't come close enough to be touched.  But they BOTH come running when they see someone in the garden, they're always looking for a handout. 



Yeah, so we got our garden planted, and Preston welded his trailer.  He offered to let me do it, but I have to admit I'm leery of the welder.  I'd probably zap myself and that would be the end of me.  But he requested that I model the helmet, very sexy.

And my muses won't shut up; the more stuff I make, the more loudly they clamor.  The other quilt top is sewn together, but I was compelled to begin this one.  This, too, was triggered by something else.  I made a little purple gingham dress, which sold in my shop before I could even get it finished.  Inspired by that and by the fact that gingham makes me happy anyway, I cut out four more dresses in the shades you see here.  And of course, there were scraps so you know what transpired.  I should have tried to hunt down a couple more colors, but I'm still on a mission to see how much stuff I can make out of materials I already have, so that's what I did.  As I said before, I'm not really a quilter.  I have a Judy Martin book with lots of great quilt block designs, and I've used them on small one-block projects, but to make a whole quilt--even a baby quilt--with anything more complicated than squares takes too long because they really should be hand-quilted instead of tied, and I get bored.

The Voices in my Head Said, "Make Another Quilt"

 And we must always obey the voices.  Actually
what happened was that I was making this little flannel baby jacket, and as I was looking at the colors in the print I thought, those would make a really colorful baby quilt!  So of course I had to go get my tote o' scraps immediately, because you know if I wait I would never get around to it.  I'm not really a "quilter" in the true sense of the word, but that's ok.  If I had the time and patience to make real quilts nobody would be able to afford them anyway. 
Quilts are not something I do all the time, but I guess my brain was still in quilt mode from having just recently finished this purple and turquoise one.  Sparky doubted, she said those two colors fight...and to be honest, I think I've lost all perception of what colors go with what.  I can not think of a color combination I've never used in the making of powwow regalia.  After a while everything I learned in art class in elementary school just lost meaning (and believe it or not, I DID learn that in art class;  they showed us a color wheel and informed us that these colors go together, and those do not.  As you can see, I didn't pay a lot of attention in school).

 Anyway, my response to Sparky was, "if I put them together, they're going to have to learn to get along".  And they do.  Apparently it's not just me, because the quilt I made was inspired by this little afghan I made out of a skein of yarn I found at the local consignment shop;  purple and turquoise all variegated together.  It also inspired several purple-and-turquoise baby outfits, which brings us back to the voices in my head.
People talk about their "muse" all the time, what inspires them to do what they do.  I would picture myself as having two muses, sitting on each shoulder like in the cartoons, and egging each other on;  "hey, look at that yarn!  Why don't you make an afghan?  I bet you remember how to make the broomstick stitch".  "You know what would be fun?  Some little clothes that match those colors, cause you don't see THOSE colors every day in the baby department".  "While you're at it, why don't you take the scraps left over from the clothes and make a quilt?  You weren't really going to throw them away, now were you?" (I wasn't.  And to be fair, I think that last one might have been my Dad.  God forbid I should throw anything away!!!).

Oysters

Prom season is almost over!  While I always welcome the extra work, it just so happens that at the same time the prom gowns start coming in for alterations, everyone else also decides they need stuff done so my shop fills up with piles of work to be done!  But I made it through another year, and people have been really patient with me so I'm thankful for that. 

In between the prom stuff and all the other stuff, I've still been working on new things for the store.  It makes me happy, and at the end of the day (literally) you need things that make you happy to balance out your work day stress.  This is the collar to a little dress I'm making...indeed, it's almost done now that I found out how to make little buds using this Oyster Stitch.  Thanks to Carol, who posted this really cool link on Facebook at exactly the time when I was thinking about trying to find some stitch that would replicate the buds in the fabric.  Embroidery is not something I do a lot, so I learn stuff as I go when I need to.

Another thing I don't know a lot about is crochet. There are a few stitches I know, and I DO know how to make granny squares, so I make the most of that.  I always seem to have at least one crochet project going, and I work on them at night while we watch such enriching shows as America's Got Wackos. ("Hey, you could do that!!"  "Yeah, but WHY???")  The current project is going to be some sort of afghan;  maybe for a baby, maybe larger.  Someone gave me this yarn, and I don't know what she had planned to make from it but I looked at it and saw granny squares.  So we'll see how many squares three big skeins of Red Heart will make. 
And then there's THIS bunch of really bright colors:

I have them left over from my first-ever Grass Dance regalia (more on that later), and I thought a baby afghan made from them would be a good idea.  People come in to the shop all the time looking for baby stuff and I just can't keep up!  So I worked up this one square to see how big it would be if I used all the colors, and how many squares I'll have to make.  As it happens, I had picked up some extremely cute polka-dotted fabric last week that has these same colors in it.  So we'll see what comes of that.

And now, it's time to get back to my REAL job!  Those prom gowns aren't going to hem themselves, and in spite of every fairy tale I've ever read, the mice do NOT come out at night and finish all my work. 

Tumbleweed Season

Do you know what this is?  This represents about 45 seconds of combing my dog. And I could comb her again 5 minutes from now and get another pile at least this big because we have a Husky, and she sheds like it's her job. At my house we call this time of year Tumbleweed Season, because the floor must be swept SEVERAL times a day in order to keep up with all the hairy tumbleweeds that magically appear.  On the plus side, she looks like she's lost about 30 pounds in the last couple of weeks just from losing all the fluffiness!

You can't see her big fat tail (always the last part to shed), because she's wagging it so hard!  She loves to have her picture taken for some reason, probably because it means I'm looking at her. 

Not much else going on at the Compound this weekend, Sparky bought a flat of pansies yesterday and now it's pouring out so there'll be no playing in the dirt today.  Figures, it didn't rain for weeks and now it's my day off.  We so needed the rain though.  I'm really looking forward to having time this year to plant some vegetables!  Haven't had time for a garden in a couple of years.  OH speaking of growing things, I really dropped the ball on the Zombie Amaryllis!  Here's how it turned out...really pretty.  But there was no grandson-of-the-zombie-amaryllis, so the fun ended when these big-ass flowers died.  Now the remains of the stalk are sitting on the deck, dead.  Or are they....

Surreality. For Real.

For someone who writes quite a few blog posts, it really occurs to me that I'm not very good with words. Oh I can go on and on about what I'm making that week, or complain about crap that irritates me, all the unimportant stuff. But when it comes to the real stuff, that's a different story. Which is a shame, because it makes me seem like kind of a jerk sometimes. I guess that's a common thing, to hide behind humor or sarcasm, but it leaves a people not knowing how you really feel. And then sometimes stuff happens for which a person just plain doesn't have any words. If you have one of these,

then you'll understand at least some of what I'm going to prattle on about today. Isn't he cute? My boy. He was just a joy to raise. Sweet, funny kid, always singing and always moving, unbelievable imagination. He fell in love with music when he was barely old enough to walk; I have a picture of him in diapers at the Rocky Hill Fair, boogying down to Ronnie Profitt in concert.
Well the years go by and life goes on, and then this happens:How can he be old enough to get married? It's scary. But our daughter-in-law Kaela is a wonderful girl, and they adore each other. I've never seen two people happier to get married. Coming up on a year now, already. I grumbled and joked about doing the mother/son dance at the wedding, mostly because I hadn't danced in over 20 years, partly because I was nervous about the wedding day. I wished I'd kept my comments to myself, but then it wasn't about me so nobody paid attention anyway, least of all the groom. Good thing. I wonder what my dad went through when he had to give me away, what went through my mother's mind. I never gave it a thought. Even when things are GREAT and you know you're not really losing him and you are more than OK with the person he's chosen, it's a surreal thing to have your kid get married.

So then a year goes by and then THIS happens:

Ok, so that doesn't happen to everybody's kid. But it's happening to mine!! That was the whole reason for them moving to L.A. in the first place, and now it's really happening. I can hardly believe it but only because it's just so surreal. I always knew he had the potential to be a star, and that's not just the mother talking, it's the musician. He has talent that WELL exceeds mine. The really, really cool part is that he was fearless enough, with the wholehearted support of his lady (who has talents and dreams of her own which also needed to be transplanted to the west coast), to pick up his life and haul it 3,000 miles away from everything and everyone he's ever known just to make his dreams happen. And then to get there, and do it. There are just no words to describe how proud and inspired I am.