Chipping away

It’s taken me 3 days of chipping away at it between other tasks, but I now have 160″ of LY’s custom baby wrap woven. The natural cotton weft makes such a difference in the value of those warp colors; I really like it. Only about 40″ to go. So I plan to finish it tomorrow, at which point we’ll be waiting for the silk for EK’s weft, LY’s wrap sister, to come in.

I’ve got some good ideas for the chair cushions. As soon as I finish LY’s wrap I’ll check out my stash to see if it lends itself more to one design or another. I WILL NOT buy more yarn for these seat cushions!

Meanwhile, I think I have my living room done. Except for curtains. The prior owner had mini blinds on all but the studio windows, which is great. They function. But they don’t exactly give a soft look. So one of these days/years I may add curtains, or replace the blinds with curtains. Maybe I’ll even weave curtains in a very open lace pattern or transparencies. See why it might take years?

So what did I finish? A few weeks ago I bought this (what I think is) attractive storage bench. It’s a very similar color to the 2 small tables in that room, and serves 3 functions: extra seating, storage, and, when I’m sitting in that chair, a place to set my tea cup. It had to be assembled and was a pain, but it all worked out in the end.

But what took more time was figuring out what I wanted on that wall. I tried a few things. In the end, it all started with the large image, a drawing of my husband that was made in 1989. (I struggled with lighting, and had to choose between flash bulbs glare on the pictures or sun reflection on them.) I hung it on a hook that was already in the wall. What would I put around it? I started photo by photo. First was the 3 pictures on the right side. Of course, I had to buy some frames so they were all black and created a unified look. I’m committed to using Command hooks, and had to hang one photo at a time so I could decide on the specific placement of the subsequent one. That meant an hour between each photo (Command’s instructions)…more since I was doing other things in between and would forget to go back and hang the picture.

Then it clearly needed something on the left, in different shapes. I had to spend quite a bit of time looking for things that I thought would work. The bigger image is one of my kids when they were little – like about 3 and 6. Underneath that is a collage frame with 4 small photos from when I was little. Me and my 2 sisters, me and my sisters and mom, mom and dad, mom and dad and other relatives. First I had to get my sister to email me the digital images, then I had to get them printed, then, of course, back to the store for more black frames and more Command picture hanging strips. More deciding and waiting. I’m happy with the general placement, but I do want to replace some of the photos on the right with more current ones, and have plenty of space on the right to add more pix over time.

Completely unrelated, the grass is starting to grow in my backyard. And the sparrows and starlings can’t stay away. I don’t know if they’re eating grass seed or grass shoots, but especially in the afternoon, my yard is alive with small birds. I’ve tried getting a good image of them, but taking pix through a window screen provides pretty poor quality.