Queen of Hearts Costume from Thrift Store Finds

Just when I've been floundering around for a creative challenge, Halloween arrives! Well, it's not halloween for another month and a half, but this is the season of prepping for Halloween.  A few weeks ago I said to my husband, "well, it's almost time for Halloween prep" and he looked at me like I was insane.  We live on a private road with 3 houses and practically no one sees the front of our house so he knew I was not talking about decorating the outside of the house.  But I digress... (as usual) 

I'm excited because I'm going to a Halloween party.  I'm not into gory, gross Halloween, (I'll pass on the rubber face masks of zombies and the fake blood everywhere) but I love making costumes and getting dressed up.  I've been tossing around a few costume ideas and this weekend I settled on the Queen of Hearts from Alice in Wonderland.   

There are LOADS of costume and make-up ideas on Pinterest for the Q of H. There ARE really nice costumes you can buy, but I like the challenge of making one myself.  In the past, I've gone to the fabric store, picked out a pattern and fabric and made my costume that way, but that method can be QUITE expensive.  AND time consuming.  Plus, I'm just not into the nitty gritty details of sewing a costume from scratch.  And my sewing machine has become temperamental. So this morning, I took a trip to the local Savers (for those of you not in this area, it's a thrift store chain) to see what I could find to fit my costume goal.  

When you start with pre-made pieces you have to be open to different options.  You can't go in there looking for a very specific thing because it's quite likely you won't find it, but you WILL find something that will work. The most important piece I needed was a top in either red, white, black or pink.  I needed a base to sew the skirt onto - something that could attach a skirt to and I could tailor to fit me.

I found a few options:

A corduroy stretch blazer from Loft.  I liked it, but I wasn't sure the buttons in the front would work.  Plus, it was not really red, but a kind of plum-ish red. And it wasn't long enough for me to attach a skirt and have it hit me in the right spot.  AND the stretch might be a problem if I sewed a lot of trim or embellishments to it.   

A short, brocade shirt from Forever 21.  I liked the brocade on this, but while it was appealing, it was also sort of a drawback.  It was black and white with silver and white seed beads on it, the print was a little bit geometric and I thought it would detract from the hearts theme.  Plus, this was borderline crop-top, and while it had a zipper in the back that would allow for me to custom fit it, it would again be really short in the end, creating an empire waist dress.  Because of those two cons, this one was out. 

A stretchy front zip jacket in red. This one would have worked, but it was XL, and I want the top of my costume to be fitted so this would have required a lot of alterations.  More importantly, it just didn't excite me.  Gotta have some excitement. 

A few different vests in grey. These were options, but one had a modern print to the grey fabric, and both were too short for me to make their buttons work.  Out. 

The above Lord and Taylor, linen jacket in black with the FABULOUS buttons. ($7.99) I was totally attracted to this jacket because of the buttons.  They're was made me notice it on the rack.  When I looked at it, I noticed - hummm, nice and long, so even though it has buttons, I can make my dress a drop waist dress if I want to, and the buttons will work.  There are SO many buttons, it will be secure enough for me to wear without an additional shirt underneath if I want.  It does NOT stretch, which will be a plus when sewing on embellishments, and it is pretty much my size. I scooped it up.  

I got a fabulous red curtain/tablecloth (for $2.99) and a pink tablecloth (also $2.99) as well to make my skirt.  I plan alternate the red and pink in stripes.  The pink is an oval tablecloth and I think I can use the rounded parts for the front of the skirt.  For the top, I'm going to 1. round out the neckline, take off the sleeves and add embellishments, then attach a skirt.  

I'm pretty excited with my start.  Next, I'm going to check out the fabric in the fabric store and see if I have any clothing items at home that will work with this project. 

Pallet Heart - Hmm, how to finish it?

At work, every year in late summer, we get a shit-ton of deliveries.  Some of them, for example, copy paper and text books come on pallets.  Last summer I got the brilliant idea that I was going to use some reclaimed pallet wood to make a few of those decorative wall hangings I see all over Pinterest.  I had been to one of those pallet wood stenciled sign classes and and I was a little disillusioned that the sign wasn't actually made of pallet wood, but with NEW wood that was made to look old and weathered.  I love the idea of recycling something old into something new and I had just bought my own jig saw the year before so I thought wood signs in shapes was the way to go.  

I stayed after work a few days and cut up the pallets with my jig saw after I tried at home to actually take one apart (see my post Pallet Problems). Our head custodian took pity on me (a jig saw works, but not well - it is the WRONG tool for that job) and cut up a few more pallets for me to use. I was inundated with pallet wood, but for the plan I had, I needed some really long pieces, and I did not have many of those.  

I created a template out of oaktag and arranged the wood on the floor so that I would be able to get the most out of the pieces I had.  I kept all the "good sides" up for the front, put the "bad" sides on the back and arranged the wood to get the most mileage out of each piece.  Then I glued them together with Elmer's Wood Glue.  (I realized that the edges of pallet wood are not really parallel, so there were some problems with this - I invested in a mini hand plane after I spent quite some time sanding with a palm sander to get the edges to match up.)

The glue held really well.  I placed my oaktag pattern on the glued wood and traced the heart shape.  I cut it out with my jig saw, and sanded and still, the glue held.  It held so well, in fact, that I didn't realize the cross pieces I had also attempted to glue on had never made contact, so they weren't stuck on at all.  I leaned the heart up against the wall in the living room to decide what I wanted to paint on it and as it got jostled around during vacuuming and whatnot, it eventually came unstuck and I got disgusted. 

Fast forward to THIS summer, and my continued attempts to finish projects I've started.  

I got some screws of the right length from Home Depot, reattached the support pieces and painted the heart read with watered down craft paint so that you could see the woodgrain through the paint.  That was another disappointment - I thought I'd be able to find STAIN in different colors, but apparently, that either doesn't exist or was not easily found.  (I looked for orange to paint a pumpkin I had also cut out.)

So now here I am, with my pallet wood heart all finished EXCEPT for the lovely quote painted on the front.  I'm not sure what I want to paint on it.  I want it to be something down to earth.  I love poetic quotes, and literature quotes like: 

"My heart is and will always be, yours." Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility 

But I still keep thinking I should go with something like Adam Sandler's song from The Wedding Singer:

"I wanna make you smile, whenever you're sad, 

Carry you around when your arthritis is bad.  

Oh, all I wanna do is grow old with you.  

I'll get your medicine when your tummy aches, 

Build you a fire if the furnace breaks, 

Oh it could be so nice, growing old with you."

I really like it because you know, that's what marriage is really about.  BUT IT'S TOO LONG TO FIT!

Help!!  Any suggestions?

I’ve been thinking an awful lot about this blog.  Should I continue it? Refocus it? Give up entirely?  Should I start a totally new one? What the hell am I blogging about anyway?  

Way back when I started this, I wanted to give myself writing practice because I loved writing, and I wanted to practice it with a potential audience (I think not many people want their creations of any kind to sit in a total vacuum).  As my lack of recent posts shows, I’m also not so productive without the pressure of a looming deadline.  But that doesn’t mean I can’t change.  I was WAY worse when I was younger!

When I started this, I intended to write, just write.  And I thought some of my posts were pretty good.  Admittedly, some sucked.  But sometimes it sucked to see that people were just not looking at the posts that I thought were really pretty good.  Then I posted some things on Facebook, but in so doing, my friends found out about my blog.  Which was good, and bad.  Good, because people saw it, but bad because then people I knew in real life saw it.  LOL.  I went through the internal dilemma of, “What am I going to write about that won’t compromise someone’s privacy?” because there were some good topics I could have written about, but even disguising names and details would not have been enough to completely hide whom I was talking about from other people that I knew.  This doesn’t necessarily mean I wanted to talk about BAD stuff, but you know, everyone’s different.  What you think is cute or funny, they think is not funny, or too personal ("I don’t want the world knowing that I shell my peas!").  My kids went through a period of time where they were always asking, “MOM, are you gonna post that on your blog?” and usually when I asked them if I could, they emphatically said “NO!” 

So I didn’t.  

Throughout all of this, I posted about crafts, and art projects, because I like doing them, and because throughout my life people have always said things like, “Oh, that’s cool. How did you do that?” So I did some posts about that stuff, and I saw that people, (people I didn’t know in person!) were viewing them. And that was SO COOL.  I made scenery for a few plays at work and at my daughter’s school and posted some projects and a considerable amount of people viewed them, and that is still so cool, but the play scenery thing did not work out logistically the last time or two, and so it’s not going to be in my immediate future.  The play people I know like work on a VERY intense time schedule where everyone’s schedule depends on everyone else’s and I just don’t enjoy working like that.  Maybe it will be possible for me to do play things further down the road and if so, that would be great. But I'm still going to make things, even without plays, and maybe I'll even make some things that can be used in plays. Who knows what the future will hold. 

All of this introspection has made me realize something.  I’ve been on a journey to find my thing, the thing that I most enjoy doing, and that was what I wanted to blog about, but I realized..

 my thing… is searching for my thing. 

So yeah, let me clarify:  this blog is about me searching for my thing.  And when I say thing, I mean the “work at what you love to do and you will never work a day in your life,” thing. (It’s like the “One True Love” of arts/crafts.)

Months ago, while I was pondering all of these questions about what I should be doing with my life, (creatively speaking) I had a psychic reading.  The woman reading me seemed pretty accurate - she told me some things that were pretty specific to me and my family that she really would have had no way of knowing.  Both of my grandmothers came through and said that this is “my time” and that I have “gifts that I’m not using.”  Jeez, I was kind of upset by that one.  I told her, “BUT I JUST DON’T KNOW WHAT THE GIFTS ARE!  WHAT SPECIFIC GIFTS ARE THEY TALKING ABOUT, CAUSE I LIKE TOO MANY THINGS!”  Is it writing?  Is it paper mache? Is it photography?  Is it costume design? Does it involve power tools, because I LOVE power tools! 

I don’t yet know what my thing is, but I know that there MUST be other people out there with the same exact dilemma because Pinterest is LOADED with great creative things that people feel passionately about, and it’s also loaded with people like me who are trying them and doing some well, and some not so well.  All I know is that this blog is about, and is gonna continue to be about searching for my Holy Grail of creativity.  I’m gonna have some bombs, surely, (I’ve already posted some!) but I’m gonna have a few successes, too.  And I’d LOVE to hear about your searches and your successes because if you’re reading this, you love to create and you are part of my tribe.  

So now that I’ve written my rallying cry, I have to go to bed cause tomorrow promises to be a LOOONNGG day at work - I get paid to be a secretary and school starts in a scant few days. Goodnight, friends!

Between what is known and what is not known, there are doorways...

doorway in Bellport, Long Island

I am obsessed with doorways.  I've realized this over the last few years, when I've gone on picture taking outings and I've found myself looking at multiple doorway shots.  I can't help it - doors and doorways speak to me.  

Some say, "come on in" and some say, "Stay Away!" Some are casual and inviting and some are snobbish.  When my attention is caught by someone's front door, I can't help but wonder what that family's life is like inside that house.  

doorway in Bellport, Long Island

I love the exotic doorways I've seen on Pinterest - doorways from far away countries - but I also like the doorways right here in my own country, and some of the towns I know so well. 

Country doors...

Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia

... and city doors

Manhattan, New York

Manhattan, New York

"Between what is known and what is not known, there are doorways"

I found that statement about doors on Pinterest (where else?) a week or two ago and I can't stop thinking about it.  It's got a mysterious ring to it, doesn't it?  Perfect for contemplating doorways.  

I see more pictures of doorways in my future.  

Enjoy. 

My obligatory trips to The Purple Gym

Years ago, I joined Planet Fitness, a.k.a, the Purple Gym.  My husband joined as well, even though he's a gym snob. When we went down to check it out and sign up, its biggest attraction was that it was cheap for a gym, and it was close to the house.  We signed up, and after just the first visit, my husband was skeptical.  "It has no squat machines... " "the dumbbells only go up to..." (whatever he said, you can see it was irrelevant to me at the time).  Still, I thought, 'eh, what do I care?  I'm not a gym rat, I just need to go and work out for a bit and go home... and it's cheap.  You can't beat the cheapness.'  I knew this would not be a gym for hardcore gym rats, but I thought the benefits would outweigh the drawbacks.  

Now I'm not so sure.  

I am no gym rat, but I HAVE been to other gyms.  One weird thing about this place is... Candy on the front desk.  CANDY.  It's a gym.  I mean, you're trying to be healthy, maybe more healthy than you are now, so why the candy?  You can work out for an hour or so and then grab a handful of candy on your way out and cancel out any caloric gains you may have made. Awesome.  I hear there are also pizza parties every once in a while.  I've never been to one of them, but this just astounds me.  How about a grilled chicken and salad party?  Now THAT might inspire me. 

Another thing that annoys me about the Purple Gym is, for a place that calls itself "a Judgement Free Zone," It sure is full of judgements.  

This is the classic Planet Fitness sign.  I believe it used to be featured in their TV ads - you know, you behave incorrectly and the Lunk Alarm goes off. I had thought this was BS until one day I was there and the damn thing actually went off! A guy was standing too close to the mirror, and he misjudged his barbell distance, smacked his weight into one of the mirrors and broke it.  As if the crash wasn't bad enough, the damn Lunk Alarm went off, too! The thing I find most funny about this sign is that, apparently, drinking a lot of water makes you a lunk... And the poor guys named Ricky get a bad rap!

But how about this one:

It's my favorite.  Or shall I say, my ANTI favorite.  What I can't stand about the gym are people who hog certain areas and won't move, even if they're not doing anything, but I couldn't give a single shit about what they're wearing.  Are there people out there who are intimidated by boots?  So you can't wear boots, but you can wear, for example, sandals, and maybe get your toes squished?  Are there people who go into the gym and actually get intimidated by people wearing jeans?  and those intimidated people would then NOT be intimidated by those SAME people if they were wearing SWEATPANTS?  I'm not buying it.  

Not to mention - what happens when someone is using the equipment incorrectly? Let's say their form totally SUCKS and they're going to hurt themselves.  Someone should be walking around, monitoring people to help them, no?  Although, I don't remember that happening much at REAL gyms either, but still. The improper form thing happens much MORE at the Purple Gym.  I've seen a few things myself that made me think, WTF?

You can't wear certain things, you can make certain noises, you can't even drink out of certain containers. The most JUDGEMENT going on here is by the Purple Gym itself.  LOL.  Talk about irony!

Lately I've been wondering if maybe I can't drag myself to the gym more often because it's just too cheap.  I hate to say that, but I think there's something to it.  When I was going to karate, it was nice to see and talk to people and become part of a community, but it was also more expensive, which definitely makes you take it more seriously.  Even the Black Card Membership is only 20 dollars a month, so you think to yourself, "Even if I only go once a week, that's still only 5 dollars a visit." If you're paying 40 dollars a month, that's 10 dollars a visit - you have to go twice a week to get that same bargain.  See where my convoluted thinking is going with this? 

So now I have to wonder if the Purple Gym is really a bargain after all...  I'm content to slug through my workouts and not take them very seriously.  Maybe because I'm not Gymtimidated.  Maybe I NEED to be a little bit GYMTIMIDATED to be properly motivated.  

Let's Go Take Pictures...

Sailboats docked at Bellport Bay Yacht Club

It was a nice day today, although quite humid.  I've been getting a whole lotta nothing done this summer.  All school year I look forward to the summer so I can "get a lot of things done" and then when the summer comes, I talk myself into procrastinating about just about EVERYTHING - even FUN things I procrastinate because:

it's too hot

it's too humid

I don't want to start _______ and make a big mess

it requires me to spend money that I don't feel like spending

it requires me to plan ahead, and I didn't do that

I'll do it tomorrow

I should have done it last week

I have no one to do it with

I have too much to do already today

I need to clean

I need to make dinner

I should really go to the gym

now, what did I want to do?

why did I want to do that, anyway?

oh, jeez, it's too late, why start that now, I should just go to bed

Whatever the reason is, it's never a really GOOD reason.  After several days of dawdling and spending WAY too much time checking Facebook, Instagram and Twitter (for what, I don't know) I decided I needed a reset.  I don't know exactly why, but I seem to need a job list in order to function efficiently.  I made myself one first thing this morning and lo and behold, I got some stuff done.  

A photo shoot purely for fun was on my list, and my daughter is always game to go for a ride, check out a different place and maybe take some pictures.  I knew the perfect place.  

We hopped in the car and drove to Bellport Bay Yacht Club for a quick photo shoot.  

Bellport Bay Yacht Club

It was a nice day.  Windy, but nice.  Not the best day for curly haired ladies, but still lovely. 

The birds still had a great fishing day, though.  We actually watched this little guy pluck a fish right out of the water.

Bellport Bay Yacht Club

We didn't stay long, just long enough to get a taste of the salt air and pick up a few pieces of beach glass.

Bellport Bay

FINALLY, I stopped procrastinating!  Looking forward to seeing what tomorrow brings.  

Making my list already. 

Ladder Skills

        When I was around six or seven years old, my father was still building our house. It looked kind of like a house from the outside, but there were still a lot of things missing.  We had windows, but no interior doors. We had floors but no interior walls, and no stairs anywhere.  We got in the front door by way of a stack of cement blocks, piled neatly with their open ends up, holes filled with sand.  Ladies who wore heels complained a lot about those steps when they came to visit us.  We got from the main floor of the house to the basement by way of an 8 foot rung ladder. 

One summer day I was wandering around our house looking for something to do.  My mom was outside, doing laps around the house with my sister Veronica in the stroller, and my sister Bernadette holding onto the stroller practicing her walking skills.  My dad was at the back door of the house, in his shorts, t-shirt and work boots, fitting and installing the door sill.  There was nothing for me to do.  I decided to play in the cellar.  I loved our cellar.  It had no floor yet, and so it was full of sand. It was a lot like being at the beach in your own home, and if you ran around a lot down there, you could also make a dust fog that we kids thought was great, but the parents HATED.  I went to where the cellar stairs were going to be, and I carefully turned around and lowered down one foot at a time to meet the round rungs of the ladder. I held the edge of the floor with my hands and backed down a step. I was familiar with this process - I had already done it dozens of times.

I must have fiddled around too much with my feet. Suddenly, the part of the ladder that had been leaning on the floor I had just left was no longer there.  It must have sunk down just far enough into the sand so that it was no longer tall enough to lean on the floor above.  I felt the ladder tilt away from my now dangling feet... I saw it in slow motion… falling, falling... until Pfit!  It landed with a soft thud and puff of dust in the sand below.  Luckily, my hands were still in contact with the floor. I looked down at the ladder lying uselessly on the sand far beneath me, and then I looked up at my hands above me, grasping at the flat floor I had just stepped off of, and I did the only thing I could think of..

“DADDYDADDYDADDY!!!I screamed for my dad.  I heard him drop his tools at the other end of the house and come running. It took him literally 3 steps to get to me. I counted them… ONE and he was almost though the kitchen, all the way from the back door, TWO and he was halfway through the playroom - almost there! THREE and he was crouching low in front of the stairwell and lifting me up by the wrists. He placed me gently back on the floor.  

“Are you ok?” he asked me. He knew I was. He knew that I was just scared because I had hung off the edge of the world for a second. I shook my head, yes, yes, I was ok. 

Years and years later, I asked him, “Dad, do you remember that time the ladder fell out from underneath me when I was going down into the basement?”  

“OH yeah,” he said.  

“I just remember that it only took you like, 3 steps to get there,” I told him.  

“Kids yell all the time,” he said, “but sometimes…” 

“Yes,” I said, “I know exactly what you mean.”

That day, I just remembered that my dad had gone back to his work, and I went outside and found my mom and told her the story, but I always thought to myself, 'Wow, I never realized how fast Daddy could run.'