New tables and warm legs

I designated last Friday as Do Nothing Day, but I discovered that I can't relax for an entire day. I was doing pretty good until about 3pm when Philip's parents called to say that they found our end tables at an antique store. I was so excited that I started moving the living room around to accommodate the new tables and the fabulous lamp that Sarah gave us.



After all of that I worked on the armwarmers for awhile and relaxed although following a chart is a lot more time consuming than I had originally thought it would be. Around 9pm there was a knock on the door and a bunch of people and beer came into our apartment, like a flash mob but a little smaller. It was really fun, but I wish we had more furniture in our living room so everyone didn't have to sit on the floor. I am refinishing the bar stools in the basement so there was only the sofa and the green chair for seating.

Saturday we checked out some of the local thrift stores. Two of the four stores that we had decided to visit were closed because of the Thanksgiving holiday which was a little disappointing. We were searching for a lamp and a lampshade for the living room, but came up with nothing except a pair of toe socks that Philip is going to use to make a sock creature. I am convinced that the thrift store bad luck was due to the fact that I didn't make a big donation before we hit the stores. I am a little superstitious in this sense, I always have great scores when I donate. I will try again next weekend with donation in hand.


As for knitting, I finished my legwarmers a little while back, but I just added some ribbons to hold them up and add a little color.



I am making slow progress on the hurry up spring armwarmers. I am also working on Christmas presents which I will have to save up and post after the holidays since I don't want anyone to know what they are getting. Let me jut say that so far only one of the presents I am making involves knitting, the others vary in process.

Happy do nothing day

Or Buy Nothing Day or Fur Free Friday or whatever you celebrate the day after consuming copious amounts of food. Yesterday, Philip and I hosted our first annual family Thanksgiving day feast. All of the foods were vegan and we got to use my great aunt's china that has been sitting in a box for five years. We pretty much stuck with the Thanksgiving Day standard dishes, just in their vegan form. We had green bean casserole, sweet potatoes, mashed potatoes and gravy (we're a potato loving bunch), cranberry sauce, etc. and for the main dish we had puff pastry cornucopias with roasted vegetables and a made-from-scratch vegetable gravy.


We found the instructions for making the cornucopias in the November issue of Vegetarian Times and it ended up being easier than we thought it would be. The hardest part was making the forms out of aluminum foil.

And of course the tiki bar was open for business with Philip tending bar.



I won't be doing anything productive today since the last few weeks have been decorating mayhem. We are taking a break from the apartment stuff to enjoy the weekend.

It's that time of year again

I went to the grocery store tonight and bought my first carton of Silk Nog of the season. This sweet and creamy drink might just be my favorite thing about the holiday season. Every year I come up with a new way to use Silk Nog so I will share my recipe for this year inspired by the cider chai I tried earlier today.

Silk Nog Chai
1 Stash chai tea bag (black)
4 oz. super hot water
3 oz. warm Silk Nog

Take the tea bag and seep it in the water for about 3 minutes, you want it pretty strong. Add the hot silk nog and enjoy. For an extra frothy drink try steaming the silk nog.

Busy weekend

So it has been a busy busy weekend. Yesterday morning we went to the farmer's market and score all kinds of beautiful produce including the baby potatoes and the yellow tomatoes that I will talk about later in the post. Then we ran to Michael's to get a frame for Philip's Flaming Lips print using our 50% off coupon. On our way back to our apartment there was some sort of parade downtown blocking the street that we usually take. We decide to go around downtown and come back towards our house from the other direction. As we were driving down 3rd street I noticed that Jonk, the vintage store that I though went out of business, moved into the space that used to be Alteriors. Philip and I decided to stop by and see what they had. We ended up leaving with this.


This is a brown 50's style sofa that is perfect for our tiki room. We have never been able to afford furniture at a vintage store, we depend more on thrift stores for the occasional find. This sofa, which is in excellent condition, was priced at $100. I love Lexington!

A framing project

I have a pretty large collection of 1950's pin-ups that I have never taken the time to display. A lot of the collection is reprints of original art, but I do have a few vintage pieces. A few years ago I found some pages from a vintage pin-up calendar. It was one of those free calendars that the autoshops give their best customers. I kept these pages put away in a drawer until the other day when I finally decided to display them. Since they are so old I didn't want to just slap them up on the wall so off to Michael's I went to find a simple frame to display them in. Since we are on a tight budget, we couldn't afford the parts to build a custom frame so instead we settled on a long frame meant to display three small images. The frame was a little bigger than what we needed so we decided to use a mat (or art paper) to scale it down a bit. After about 20 minutes of trying different colors of paper with the calendar pages we chose a nice bright red to go against the pages and a light green to go around the border. I attached the pages to the paper using acid-free rubber cement. I love using rubber cement with paper projects, it doesn't wrinkle the paper and if you only apply it to one surface it can easily be removed. I am very happy with the way it came out.




Since I was in the pin-up framing mood I also framed three pin-up postcards that we picked up from a little paper shop. I just used 4x6 inch clip frames that I buy whenever they go on sale. Just slide the cards in and in less than a minute you have a wall decoration that costs under $2.




In knitting news, I am still making slow progress on the legwarmers. The first leg is almost finished.

Today was a day of firsts

My dad called me this afternoon to see if I was going to be around for awhile. He had previously offered to put a new lock on our garage door so I assumed that was why he wanted to stop by. He pulled into the driveway and Philip runs into the house to tell me he has this loaded into the trailer of his truck.


Okay so the picture is just the knob, but you get the idea. My dad brought us a brand new washing machine to go with our barely used dryer. For the first time in our adult lives we can do our laundry at home. This mean no more Saturday mornings sitting at the laundromat, no more trying to find enough change to dry the last load, no more lugging all of our clothes, towels, etc. to the laundromat. Now all we have to do is walk down the stairs and throw our clothes into the machine. Another huge plus is if I buy new fabric I can use it almost immediately. I am in heaven.

My other first for the day is tied in with the new washing machine. It ends up we are out of laundry detergent so I couldn't try out the machine right away. We use Method detergent which is sold at Target (you can get it other places, but I am not sure where.) Since we live downtown in the land of no Targets I needed to get out to a strip mall where I would find a Target. I haven't driven since I arrived in town so I decided to see how far I could take it. I have never had much luck with bus systems. I can handle subways, but I never really got the hang of buses. When I was a teenager my friend Sarah and I had a bus day where we were going to ride the bus all day. We never got where we were going and we ended up using all of our cash trying to get there. In the end we were stranded in a shopping center and we had to call our parents to rescue us. After that I have pretty much avoided the bus system, until today. The transit station is less than half a mile from our apartment so I decided that would be the best place for me to catch the bus since every bus route begins and ends at the transit station. My trip was a success, I went to Michael's and Target and caught the bus back to my apartment. I even had the bus driver point out the stops for me so that next time I can take the stops closer to my destination and I will also be able to catch the bus 3 blocks from my place instead of going all the way to the station. I did get some knitting done on the bus which was pretty cool. I think I might try to bus it to the co-op tomorrow night, maybe I'll finish the first leg.

Fun in the shade

We are finally starting the decorating process for our new place. We unpacked all of the paintings yesterday and started figuring out what will go where. I also decided that the mini-blinds in the living room just weren't working. They were all the wrong size for the windows which makes them stand out, plus that is where we put the tiki bar and mini-blinds and tiki just don't mix. Since I never throw anything away when I move, I still had the bamboo shades from our old bedroom. They were the right width for the little windows in the living room, but they were way too long. I cut them down so that they are just the right size. You can do his with any type of blind or shade for a custom fit.

Here is what the blinds looked like when I first put them up. They extended about 3 feet beyond the bottom of the window and the cord went all the way to the floor.



The first thing I did was measure the window and cut the blinds about 4 inches below the length I desired.



Next I pulled out all of the extra bamboo pieces. This leaves the nice long pieces of string that I used to attach the bottom piece.



Finally, I attached the original bottom piece to give the shades a little bit of weight and a nice clean look.



I finished the shades by cutting all of the excess strings and shortening the pull cord.



There will probably be a lot of home decorating projects on my blog over the next few weeks, but that doesn't mean I am not knitting. I am working on the avocado leg warmers during my down time. Here is a picture of my progress.

Late night knitting and then some

This is an update of the last week's activities. First, we went to Santa Fe for Nieves and Jeremy's wedding. Santa Fe was beautiful, the food was delicious and the wedding was amazing. Our only regret is that we didn't stay longer. Here is a picture of Nieves and Jeremy taken by the lovely Julie. I wish them all of the luck in the world, I know they will make each other happy.



Since I have been working from home during the days I really want to get out of the house at night so I haven't been doing much decorating. Yesterday I reorganized Philip's record collection and started revamping our old bamboo shades to make them fit our new windows.

In knitting news I ripped apart the legwarmers I was working on an started over. I made a mistake early on and instead of ripping it when I had the chance I kept going (always a mistake.) I finally got to the point where I couldn't stand it so I frogged the entire thing and started over. I am only about 5 inches in, but I am sure they will fly once I have some TV viewing time. Nieves gave me a gift certificate to a yarn store in Santa Fe and I bought yarn and needles for the hurry up spring armwarmers. I am really focusing on body part warmers right now since we are paying for our heat in this new place so we are keeping the thermostat low.

Last night I went to my first Lexington snb meeting which was a lot of fun. A few of the girls from the group just launched a new knitting e-zine called the anticraft so if you haven't seen it yet I highly suggest you check it out. I think that I am really going to enjoy his new snb, but I do miss the girls from the Va. Beach group, hopefully I will be able to drop in when I have to go back to Norfolk.