What I'm Wearing - Hazy Shades of Winter

sources: jacket, slacks, shoes, belt, necklace

I'm doing my best to take this god-awful depressing gloom of winter weather in Seattle and make it work for me... fashion-wise, that is.  We in Seattle love our grays and blacks.  Everything is a neutral shade of something.  You may call it boring - we call it sophisticated.  The grayer your palette, the more sophisticated people assume you are.

Today I am meeting up with a couple of friends for drinks in the bar of a high-end restaurant downtown frequented by rich mucky-mucks, so when I got dressed this morning I wanted make sure I chose something that would make me look nice enough to fit in, but still a little playful.

I decided on tailored gray slacks and built from there, adding the patent leather shoes and belt to keep my outfit from getting too conservative.  Nothing worse than being the least sexy woman at the bar.  I don't have to be the sexiest, but I hate coming in last.

Weekend Sewing: Bricks and Mortar

A couple weeks ago PB gave me two bags of gray and black fabrics to play around with.  I knew instantly that I wanted to pop it by adding in some obnoxiously bright fabric. This is what I sewed over the weekend.  And I'll tell you something: you ain't seen nothin' yet.  My wonderfully patient fiance has let me take over the dining table for this endeavor.  I am giddy over this project for the simple reason that I would never typically choose any of these fabrics, including the bright ones, to work into a quilt and yet here I am.  Feels good to break free from myself a little bit.

Dressing for the Drizzle

sources: shirt, cami, capris, shoes, necklace

It was absolutely pouring this morning in Seattle, and I knew I'd be walking to lunch with a friend, so I had to be calculated about choosing my attire this morning given my two biggest rain peeves: wet toes and pants that are soaked at the bottom.  It was too chilly for a skirt today, which means it's time to bust out the biz-capris.

These capris look frumpy dumpy if I wear flats, so I had to choose a sexy pair of closed toed heels to keep it looking put together.  Had I realized I was choosing a black tee, and not the navy one I thought I was grabbing, I probably would have opted for black pumps instead of brown snakeskin, but I'm rolling with it.

Todays playlist:

Selections of Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughn, and Dinah Washington, inspired by a story I heard on NPR, Morning Edition this morning on my way to work about Ella Fitzgerald and how fabulous she is.  She really is.

In other news, I quilted in my sweats all day yesterday.  It was fantastic.  I'm excited to go home tonight and do more of the same.

my little project

 

Isn't he cute?

 

...and her too?

 

This is what my past couple weekends have been devoted to.  Andrew didn't like the velvet throw pillows that came with me when we moved in together.  I still love them, but I love him more and decided it was time to recover them with something he liked.  We have two identical gray (reclining!) wing back chairs in our living room, one of which has become"his."  So I decided little his/hers throw pillows were just the ticket.  I love them in a major way.  I think, were I to do it again (and I will!), I'd invert the color scheme so it didn't blend into the chairs too much.

 

Andrew came home, loved them and said, "Hey!  You could sell these!"  Light-bulb!  That was the birth of Home Snugg, my newly-established online etsy store.  We're keeping these ones for ourselves because they're his favorite, but let me show you what else I've been working on....

 

Pink/Navy

  

  

  

  

Swooning from cuteness, aren'tcha?

  

I just put baby in a corner

  

 ...and here comes Johnny to tell me what's what.

  

 Shocking yellow hasn't been this much fun since the windbreakers of the 90s!

  

  

  

  

 

I'm going to be posting these shortly on my little shop window.  Yay!

everything is just chair-y

Remember this?

...which became this?

Well, I took a couple evenings and made it into this:


(Yep, I'm still uploading pictures from my camera phone.)

Let me just say, I feel triumphant!! I have had this charcoal gray felt in my possession for nearly a year, and it's been just sitting there, taunting me. The last time I reupholstered the chair I used that brown/gold grandma-style floral jacquard. It was ugly and DIRECTIONAL, which made for quite a challenge. The idea was that I rip off the original fabric to use as a pattern for my pieces. I think the first project was a month in the making; I whipped this baby out in two evenings. Not having to pry out hundreds of staples and not having a directional fabric changed the turn-around time dramatically. It was actually invigorating to see the chair come together the way it did.

I also learned which portions could be fitted as slip-covers first and then stapled into place, rather than trying to stable each individual piece on. My favorite part was actually the most time consuming, but came out great: the detail stitching on the foot rest part (sorry it's hard to tell in the picture I uploaded). I ended up having a lot of scraps that weren't big enough to cover any single piece of the chair, but cut into strips and sewn into "stripes" on the foot rest ended up being just the way to use them. I may even have enough left over to do my second chair the same way. Really, I couldn't be happier with the way it turned out.

Here's the question of the hour: Do I spray paint the legs a glossy black, or just leave them with the dark wood stain? Your thoughts?