THERE.

I've gotten rid of all those links labeled "Ooh" and "hee" and "holy crap" - and the one big bookmarks folder they were in.  Everything's organized into several folders and subheadings by category and color scheme and style, with descriptions of why I bookmarked them and the source, if available.

It took me two hours.  @_@

1. Yes, I really have this much free time on my hands at work.  :| 
2. I really wish I could get my shit together poop in a group this easily at home, LOL. 

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This Time of Year

I don't really *do* "Fall decor."  I don't change my color schemes or put brown leaves and things all over my house.  Not that there's anything wrong with that, it's just not *me*.

Mostly, it's because Fall in central Texas doesn't mean the same thing as it does to the rest of the country.  None of the regular four seasons do - green Spring, bright Summer, red Fall, snowy Winter...not so much.  We have two seasons:  Hot and Christmas.  In my neck of the woods there's barely even any foliage turn - instead of reds and golds and browns and everything in between, most of our trees go directly from green to dead near the end of October.   Decorating with brown leaves and pumpkins and stuff never seemed to jive with the Fall that I actually experience...it's pretty, but it feels a bit alien, like borrowing traditions based on a natural cycle I've read about in books but never experienced firsthand, so there's no personal meaning in them for me.

ripe seedheads of Cosmos flowers

Fall is more of a Second Spring around here:  vegetables and flowering things put on a vigorous last show. Live Oak trees, which are green year round, grow a new set of leaves for the season and shed the old - the trees look like Spring and Fall at the same time for a couple of weeks while they change, which is really, really neat.  And people take to the streets and parks in droves, trying to squeeze out a few last weeks of enjoyment before the sticking, seeping, gray mess that is Winter sets in.  Bleh. Winter here sucks.

Sweet Autumn Clematis (C. ternifolia) going to seed in September

 So, Fall "decorating," for me, is more of a feel thing.  The season itself is a rejuvenation, a siesta between extremes, though heavily laden with a sense of expectation and excitement that Spring doesn't carry.  This is the time of the year I throw the windows open every chance I get, to air out a house that's been shut tight and shaded against the heat for 7-9 months .  The sheer curtains billow in the breeze (which is why I love them so much), and I have incense and candles going nonstop to scent and freshen and cleanse the house.  And bread baking.  Mmm, homemade bread.

last year's Lavender harvest

One thing I do enjoy in the Fall is bringing that sense of getting back outside for the last few weeks that I'm able to, into the house.  I cut flowering branches from the bushes in my backyard, and herbs from my garden, and scatter them in vases all over the house.  I cut Lavender and Rosemary and Basil to scent drawers and closets (and my truck, tee-hee), and spend as much time as possible on my back porch, separating flowers and seeds and leaves to dry and bring in for my spice and herb collections. 

the amazing flowers of my Mexican Orchid Tree (Bauhinia mexicana)

I guess really, Fall, for me, is not just about bringing the outdoors in, but also going outside.  :)


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Hee.

Hee.

Heehee. 

various places on the internet

 

Earthbound Trading Co.

:)

Squee!

My BFF and I, in addition to all the other crazy junk we do, often sneak little gifts and joke-gifts into each other's homes, hiding little surprises here and there just to see how long it takes the other one to notice.

Friday night when she and I and Kress were at my place catching up on our Vampire Diaries, I noticed she'd done it again - a little brass Ganesh statue that she tucked into my meditation corner!

Squee!  *dances*  

I don't have pictures, because I'm still in the middle of freshening up the corner (my cats "meditate" there, too, so it gets covered in fur and I have to wash all the cushions once a week) to include my new elephant god - I'll try to get pics tonight so I can post them tomorrow. 

The camping trip I'm taking this weekend is another spiritual retreat for women like the one I go to in June, where there's a raffle, a couple of swap meets, and many vendors with beautiful wares to buy.  I'm hoping to come home with either new piece of fabric to add to the corner (a blanket/sari/sarong/etc.), or something for my little Ganesh to rest in/on.   :)

My BFF, by the way, is pretty freakin' awesome - her first fiction novel, which is her third book, just hit the shelves a couple of weeks ago.  Check it out! :)
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Derailment + Hat

Instead of working on the craft room, or the gardens, or anything, really, this weekend I was...asleep.  Due to the weather change (I think?) I had a migraine headache that lasted for two days, and only broke last night once the cold front finished coming in and the air pressure settled out a bit.

BLEH.

The good news - aside from the fact that I'm functional now, which is pretty freakin' awesome - it's 65º outside! Holy cow! Fall is here, yay!  *dances*

Also, I may be going camping this weekend.  I don't know for sure yet; but I'll likely be spending most of the week (after work) putting my camping gear in order and figuring out what to bring.  That and working in the yard, since the weather tells me that if I don't put down some grass seed RIGHT NOW I won't be able to fill in the spots in the front that I removed last week.

So.

In lieu of a project update, today I bring you:

HAT.

Which I guess sort of counts, since I made it, when I learned to crochet two years ago.  

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More Sewing Room "Afters": Storage Boxes

Remember the, uh, "storage" situation in my sewing room?

I know.  UGH.  Ugly, beat-up, naked cardboard boxes.  Too-big-for-the-shelf cardboard boxes.  Stuffed-full-of-crap-I-don't-use cardboard boxes.  

Today I browser-window shopped while I was at work*...and then I scavenged the Box Graveyard that the people in shipping keep making in my nice, organized file room (grrr) and...brought home several more cardboard boxes.  New, crisp cardboard boxes.  Smaller cardboard boxes.

After work, I busted out some black stripe and black-white flocked damask-print gift-wrap that I'd been saving for a rainy ugly-cardboard kind of day, and...

Cheater!  Fronts only, to conserve both wrapping paper and tape, which I discovered tonight is in pretty short supply around my house - also because the sides of the boxes won't show when they're put away. (They won't, right?).

Et voila!

Much better!

Not that I'm "done" or anything.  Off camera to the right is a mountain of BS I still have to sort through, most of which will be recycled or thrown away.

Also...

 Whatever.  ;)





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Wildebeests: Candle Lanterns

Well, okay, I guess this one's a "mini-beast."
 

1. Frosted glass vase/jar/bowl/etc.
2. Candle or tealight
3. Fire-safe candle holder (or sand in the bottom of the jar)

Candle lanterns!   

The smaller containers (bowl & giant shot glass-looking thing) started out clear - I hosed down the insides with glass-frosting spray. It looks awesome with colored glass containers as well. 

I use these in my guest bath for parties to light the way for guests, and on my back patio to provide soft ambient lighting outdoors. 


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Pushing Furniture + Time Travel + Unmentionables

I'm writing this last night (woo, time travel).  That piece of information will come in handy in a minute, I promise.

I got all of the shelves moved tonight! I emptied and removed two from the sewing room, and brought in two others from the garage that I'd painted black to coordinate, then loaded them up:

 "organization"

Um...yeah, I know this looks like ass.  It's not an "after" photo so much as a "during" photo - miles to go.  I need to go through the boxes and throw at least half the stuff in them away, and get nice storage containers that match and coordinate with the room.  But at least my sewing table no longer looks like this:

no, it's not always like this.  only tonight while I was moving furniture around

One of the shelves I removed from the sewing room became a "dresser" for my closet (after shoving the stupid step-shelf out to the garage).  Shelving unit + baskets =  dresser, right?

WRONG. 

I mean, the shelf works great in there, but the baskets I had are totally the wrong size for it, so now I have to get more/different storage-container-type things (baskets? trays? take off and nuke the site from orbit?)

Also - this is where the time travel things comes in - it's 9pm, I haven't eaten since 1:00, and I just spent three hours pushing shelves around my house, and I'm freakin' tired.  So tired, in fact, that I took a scadzillion photos of my closet all of which ended up containing (a) a tube of deodorant, (b) a pair of boots so dusty that they look twenty years old, and (c) open baskets full of panties.

Oops.  :)

So instead of posting those pictures, you get this:

Is that a curtain bracket  that has no mate and is too big for the type of curtain rods I like to hang?  No!  It's a BELT RACK!

I'll post "real" pictures of the closet once I figure out the basket-y business in there, whenever that happens.  At least I have the shelf in there - that stupid step shelf has been driving me NUTS.

 Ikea from a million years ago

See?  NUTS!  I mean, it's cool and everything, but it fits nowhere and holds nothing and goes with none of my stuff, ever.   I just can't let it go, though. What can I say, I like it. But it's in the garage now, where it can at least keep some things off the floor no matter how weird a shape it is.

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Regret and Woe

"I'll use this for something someday" gets me into a lot of pack-ratty trouble, as does "I bet I can make this into something cool" at garage sales and thrift stores.  I try to purge and make trips to Goodwill, SafePlace, and other charities on a regular basis (usually quarterly) to offset the damage, but sometimes, I'm a little too hasty.

Exhibit A:   my dad's old 2.5'-high wooden cabinet speakers from the 60s. WOW those are ugly!  They were broken, too - the heads were popped on both, and one had ratty, fuzzy wiring that needed to be replaced.  In the days before Craigslist, before I had a vehicle with which to cart them to the Goodwill, I gave these away for free to the first person I could find who would come pick them up and get them the hell out of my apartment.  (I found the picture above on Craigslist, actually... in San Fransciso. That's a bit far).


Oh, how I wish I hadn't.  End tables! Plant stands! Nightstands in the bedroom!  Remove the guts and the tops and use them as very large cachepots for enormous houseplants! Paint them!  Throw scarves over them! 

Oh, well. 

If I ever see these in person again, I'm getting a pair.


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♫ Toniiiight, Toniiiiight...♪♪

Plans! Yay!  This is me trying to get psyched about the next thing I need to do in my sewing room!  It's totally not working!

You know what is working? My bedroom closet...which is completely NOT working, which is why I'm excited about the sewing room.  Confused yet?  Me, too.  There are two bookshelves in my sewing room which are crammed full of crap, and there are two newly-updated/painted shelves in the garage that need to be moved into the sewing room, and there's a stair-step-shelf in my closet which doesn't remotely work for my storage needs in there and needs to go live in the garage where I can use all the storage I can get, no matter what it looks like.  (And we're up to four rooms now, if you're counting).

The next step in the sewing room - and if I can just get past this one (going on two weeks now!) I'll be OVER it and can move on to the fun part - is to unload all the crap from the shelves in there, and replace them with the newly painted shelves. 

And then I can move one of the old shelves from the sewing room into my bedroom closet, which is the part I'm excited about.  Because, at the moment, my bedroom closet looks like this:

wikimedia commons

When what I want is for it to look like this:

arhzine.com

Just kidding.  (That's cool, though, isn't it?  Just a little bit goth-y. I like it). 

My master bedroom, bath, and closet are all done in the same color scheme and style (more or less, I've been tweaking recently)...but the closet "organization" is just awful.

Here's a mini-before (top left), along with the basic floor plan (lower left) and planned "after."    The shelf with the baskets on it is the one from the sewing room (which I originally built to hold shoes in the entryway, and which has also served time in the dining room as a junk magnet buffet).

Which brings us back to the sewing room, because that's where this shelf is right now, holding up some dangerously unstable cardboard boxes full of crap.  Yay, crap!

I tell you, if there was EVER motivation to go home and clean up my junk, it's this blog right here (which I'm enjoying thoroughly, but, YEESH).  Tonight: shelves!  Tomorrow: the world.


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Un-Gardening

Lacking any home updates (I gave myself the weekend off...again), I'll show you instead what I did in my front yard yesterday morning:

Before:

The front bed wrapped around the porch and front walk; and around the side all the way to the back fence.







<-- ugly-ass electrical box FTL  :(

There were also pathways made of cement
"cobblestones"  (made with the Quikrete Walkmaker) so that...

(a) I don't have to jump over the garden to walk out into the yard, and

(b) visitors have somewhere to walk so that they're not tripping over plants (or trampling them)





But this was too much garden for the front.  I enjoyed it for a few years, but I found myself wanting

• less garden to manage
• more lawn space - my front yard is tiny, and every foot counts
• something more compact, to make more of a statement, rather than this huge sprawling thing that wraps around the entire world

After: 

I removed the garden beds that wrapped around the walkway and spread down into the yard, leaving only the bed in front of the porch (which still wraps around the side of the house).






<- that Rosemary on the corner is going away, too, as soon as I figure out where to move it to.

I moved the stones that had been in the walkways and made a border out of them - I have more in the backyard that I'm going to use to border the bed that runs down the side of the house, too. 

Some of the plants I removed from the bed that I un-did got moved to the bed by the porch;  some of them I planted around the ugly-ass electrical box so that hopefully, someday, the thing might be at least partially camouflaged.   xP 





 
So at some point this week or next weekend I get to move stones and a rosemary bush, and buy some grass seed to sprinkle onto the empty parts of the ex-bed so that the grass will grow in faster.

Future plans include:

• Removing the black porch railing and shortening it, and creating another section of railing for the side of the porch, so that the whole thing has a railing; and painting it to match the trim on the house
• Planting two small Crepe Myrtle trees - at the left/east corner of the bed in front of the porch, and one on the opposite side of the driveway (not pictured) to balance it out. 
• Buying a freaking weedeater so I can quit borrowing my neighbor's.
• Potted tropical plants and flowers to liven up the walkway, since it's no longer bordered by a garden; and something in those empty baskets hanging on the porch (whoops).

Hooray for Fall weather!


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FRIDAY!

Whee!  Weekend!  ...wheekend?  LOL.

On the Agenda...

1.  Sewing Room Shelves
Two to move in, one (possibly two) to move out - one's getting a fresh coat of paint and going into my bedroom closet - and two to hang in the sewing room closet.

"organization" 

2.  Artwork
I have a canvas I'm halfway through, one backgrounded, and several sketches I need to develop - and I think some sketches I want to make fantastic and maybe sell as just...framed sketches. New territory! 

what's this?

3.  Gardening
I'm also in the process (for about two months now) of cleaning up and removing various gardens around my place, to create a clean slate on which to work with new landscaping designs -the end result of which will be a lovely, shady outdoor space in the back to hang out in, and simplified-beautified front gardens that make a better statement than "the woman who lives here doesn't have time to work in the garden" like it does now, LOL. Wish me luck!

ah, if only it still looked like this...

Pics next week!

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Actual Artwork

Since (a) I'm not doing anything decorate-y or DIY-ish right now, and (b) I'm actually painting this week, I thought I'd share some of my "real" artwork (not that I don't consider decorating and building stuff an "art").  Here are a couple of my favorites:

i keep meaning to do one of these for myself

an experiment in moonlight & sheer fabric

Bad photo!!! But one of my very favorites. 

this one's got a surprise hidden in it

garden photography!

don't let the pretty flowers fool you - this plant ate my entire front garden

other photography, too

So, there's tons more.  Go take a look - it's all on my DeviantArt page.   (Possible NSFW warning:  I paint a looooot of naked women). 

This week I'm working on several things at once, like I always do -  a Sarasvati that's been patiently waiting to be painted for like six months, and several small, textural things which are mostly style and color experiments (one of which is not going all that well).  I'll post links and pics when I'm done.

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Hafta vs. Donwanna

What I Should Be Doing

• working on the sewing room
• finishing the freakin' couch cover, which STILL needs cushions!
• tending to my Bird of Paradise plant, which is infested with scale insects
• cleaning up the garage, which is in quite a state after all the business with the laundry room and sewing room

What I Want To Be Doing

• Pretty much everything else I can think of to avoid everything on the first list.

Sigh.


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Oh, My, Starry-Eyed Surprise

This is my bedroom:

This is my bedroom on drugs:

Just kidding.  That's the main hall at Hogwarts with its enchanted ceiling.  I have, however, always wanted a starry ceiling, and have recently been thinking about doing something along those lines in my bedroom.  (I realize how seriously girly that sounds, but it rates on the Boyfriend-O-Meter, so it's all good).  

Because, well, this:

Country Living

And this:

 (unknown)

And this:  

(dangly star)

I have all this paint sitting in my garage - greens and blues and blacks and purples - I could do this wonderful sponge-y cloudy thing like in the teal/peacock picture, then stencil little gold and silver stars - ooh, constellations?  Who knows!
Then again...painting ceilings...LOATHE.

I have way too much left to do in the craft room.  If/when I move on the bedroom ceiling* it'll be weeks and weeks from now.  I'm just thinking out loud, and dreaming a bit. :)






*And yes, the bedroom ceiling does need to be re-painted.  The blue color on it is from two years ago, and was never touched up after that paint job.  It's also the complete wrong blue, and always has been, but I let it go, because, hey, it's just the ceiling.  Also because I didn't have any ideas on what to do with it until recently. 


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Dogblog!

Meet my [canine] helpers: 

Raven

  Shelly

Daisy