They Wore Blue Velvet

You guys.  I'm learning upholstery.  Our scrappy, mildly-neglected library started out with these sloppily upholstered chairs we got for free on Craigslist.

They were in such rough condition that the first thing I did when we got them home was patch them just so the stuffing wouldn't hang out.

They're actually a his and hers pair, so each chair is slightly different. They sat in our sad, unloved library like this for a looooooooooong time just waiting for me to get up the gumption to learn upholstery. Finally:

And all that was just building back the seats and structural components. On a side note, when I bought the velvet for these chairs, the woman at the cut counter called it "dreamy."  I can't agree more.

Next came the inside arms.

Then the backs, which in this case are channel backs.

Then came the fun part: using this Rifle Paper Co. fabric to close up the outsides of the chairs!

Finally, I finished the pair and moved them up to our now much-loved library.

Complete with Nancy Drew mural!

And a newly curated landscape artwork wall.

It felt way great to spend our first lazy Saturday enjoying our brand new library!

We read The Spider Sapphire Mystery, of course!

Tons of people on Facebook expressed an interest in upholstery, so here are some links to Kim's Upholstery, which is basically how I learned every single thing I needed to know along the way. She's incredibly generous and helpful as is the community of upholsterers you will find on her various pages, so feel free to check her out!

• Kim's Upholstery Website: https://kimsupholstery.com/
• Her Facebook page, where she offers a free live course every Wednesday morning: https://www.facebook.com/kimsupholstery/
• Kim's DIY Upholstery Hangout, where you can ask and answer questions with other upholsterers: https://www.facebook.com/groups/172433936288031/
• Kim's YouTube Channel with tons of free videos showing how to re-upholster: https://www.youtube.com/user/KimsUpholstery

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The NyQuilt

I was sick pretty much all of January and spent most of the entire month begrudgingly confined to bed.  In the middle of the night, fueled by a large dose of NyQuil, I had what can only be described as a vision in which I designed and created a quilt for our dining room table.  My NyQuil brain remembered a fabric background that my conscious brain had long forgotten I had squirreled away, it designed the overall layout of pink hexagons against a green field, and it designed all of the golden quilting.  When I returned to the world of the living in early February, I set to work making the quilt exactly as I dreamt it.

Here's the fabric I completely forgot that I owned.

It took me about half an hour to find it packed away amongst my bag-making supplies.

Next I quilted this N + E decorative motif on the background fabric.

It's actually a little hard to read in this picture. This is what it looked like in reverse.

Next, I set to work making approximately one gagillion fussy cut hexagons.

Then I began attaching them to the background in the arrangement given to me in my cough syrup hallucination.

Here's an in-progress shot or two of quilting the hexagons.

And here's the finished quilt!

My first quilt of 2018 and it came to me in a dream! *makes ghost noises while backing slowly away*

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Nancy Drew and the Case of the Mural in our Library

This spring one of my goals was to finally give some attention to our library upstairs. We've always really wanted a library space where we could sit and read together, but we've just never quite gotten it all the way together for one reason or another.

My first project in this room was to create a mural. We deliberated long and hard over what to paint and finally settled on an image from The Spider Sapphire Mystery from the Nancy Drew series.

It's always been one of my favorite images from the series and we've both gotten really into collecting and reading the books over the years. Here's the blank wall we started with.

First, we borrowed a projector from Eddy's workplace over the Thanksgiving holidays, which seems to be a tradition for us!

Then I set up in our library for a few weeks with tons of gold metallic paint.

The metallic nature of the paint means that it's difficult to get a great picture of the final result, but it also means that as the light changes throughout the day and as you change your position in the room, the image changes as well.

It's sort of like a mystery.

A Spider Sapphire Mystery.

Here's an hypnotic gif of what it looked like as it went up.

Hypers! (As George Fayne would say)

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Valentine's Surprise

I have always maintained that the easiest way to ensure that someone is surprised is to present them with something at a time not in any way affiliated with that holiday. At least, that's what I'm telling myself. In reality, I just booked January 14th instead of February 14th by mistake and then later decided to leave it. He'll never suspect a Valentine's gift in January muahahahahaha.

And he didn't.

So early on a January morning, we headed out to one of our favorite neighborhood joints, Helser's, for breakfast. If you eat here on the weekend, plan on waiting multiple hours. If you show up around dawn on a Friday, you have the place to yourself.

We weren't long on the road before we started seeing the white stuff.

Norman was not impressed.

But it really was a very beautiful drive.

Finally, we got Eddy all outfitted for skiing.

In the evening we met up for some Cosmic Tubing complete with laser show, live DJ, and no walking or pulling your tubes back up a freaking hill!

Next morning, we headed out to the Timberline Lodge because we wanted to see some stuff from The Shining.

Turns out, what we liked most, though, was this crank meat slicer at the breakfast buffet.

Thanks so much to my dad for the skiing gift certificate!

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We Went to St. Louis One Million Years Ago

I *must* get better at updating this blog more often.  For instance, we had a totally fun trip to St. Louis to see my mom, brother, and sister-in-law but that was in October.  Let's check out the cute pictures anyway, what the hey?

This was the first thing we saw when we stepped off the plane, so the trip began with a pretty good omen.

We adhered to the family tradition of sticking our head through stuff.

My brother's the best.

This is maybe the best picture from the trip. My brother looks thoroughly sick of my shit.

I drug everyone to see the penguins.

Then Evan drug everyone to the Renaissance Festival. (Well, not really because we all wanted to go.)

Mom and Eddy got real excited about snakes.

We also revised some of our special St. Louis romance spots.

That's a view of our old apartment! The first place we ever lived together.

And a picture of the mural at Mangia.

Did I mention we went to the City Museum?

Classic.

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