Long story short, we've had a new oven sitting on a pallet in the middle of our kitchen for about two and a half years. The oven it was meant to replace was dying and then it died fully and completely about 2 years ago. So we've been living without an oven for 2 years because I couldn't find anyone to install it, and we kept hitting road blocks every time we attempted to move forward with DIYing it. (The huddle that we ran into a year ago was the need to move a gas line for the cooktop above - something I was not going to DIY!)
Anyway, we unexpectedly were able to get the oven installed by someone about a week before Christmas! I finally have the ability to bake things again - this time without a computer brain and with a convection option (which turns out is just the old-fashioned term for "air-fry" ).
Now that the oven on a pallet is out of the way, I've been going through the cabinets and trying to reorganize and "lazy-proof" everything. If I can just find a home for everything, we might actually keep the kitchen from becoming a nightmare.
I don't have an actual pantry, so we bought a metal shelf unit for storing all the big things like water, paper towels, etc that don't fit inside the tiny cabinet openings with fixed shelves and put it in front of the pointless door we never use (see photos 3 & 4). Someday, I might wall off the door and put in an actual pantry in the corner, but that is a long term dream for later.
Lazy-proofing involved setting up an organized coffee station for my husband (the coffee drinker) and pulling all the tea options out of the cabinet for easier access since he now enjoys hot tea with me as well. (It used to be an avalanche of boxes and too many things got buried and forgotten in the mess.) Now we can easily see what we have with the tea caddie shelves on the counter (pic 5).
So my kitchen is still a mess because I have to make a bigger mess before things actually get better, but it's almost there. I got a breadbox and a coffee maker slider with a drawer for pods that I haven't taken photos of yet. I refuse to tackle the spice cabinet until after I get everything off the island. Fingers crossed I can get it all put away nicely this week and be basically finished with it - I'm sick of spending time in the kitchen!
I spent the day priming things for paint and then I remembered to shoot a quick video. #SewingStudioBuild
I started cutting all the edges while Janet was away yesterday morning. When she got back after lunch, she pulled out a roller and started filling in. I'll put a pic below in the comments. #SewingStudioBuild
We broke for lunch and then came back with a portal ac unit plugged in to an extention cord from the house. Can't wait until they finished hooking up all the electrical and we have the mini split cooling the room for us - it was stupid humid today! #SewingStudioBuild
I made some decent progress on basting while listening to podcasts this weekend. I started with some purple ombre fabric I didn't show in previous post. I cut out as many fabric triangles as I could fit on the half yard I had and made it through a little over half that pile.
I'm going to mix in some outerspace/stars that coordinate with all my other ombre fabrics, so I cut a pile of those this morning. I'm waiting until I have all the purple and the stars basted to determine how much I need to cut up of the original ombre fabric I posted because I know I won't need to use it all.
Swipe to see progress and star fabric.
#epp
Experimental dirndl...
I wanted to try wearing a dirndl as a support garment. So this is very plain.
Notes:
1) First set of hand-sewn eyelets - okay, that was pretty straightforward and these seem nice. Are they cute? Not cute. But they're solid and didn't stretch or twist first run out at all. Grommets suck, so if they continue to perform, I might switch. They took a while, obvs.
2) I should not have made this many lacing holes. It's secure, but yeeek I need a lot of ribbon. Also to get it over my head I need a lot of room initially between the lacing ... yeah. There is sooooo much ribbon. DH said I should use clips instead. Maybe a zipper? I've seen that on modern dirndl, although that doesn't allow for adjustments. Look, this explains busks on corsets, okay?
3) Comfy. Very, very comfy. It's cotton denim, nonstretch theoretically but it's not coutil by any means. So a little stretchy, but not much. The ribbons are the least comfy part, lacing distance could ...
The husband said that he wanted to upgrade his look and go more corporate. He hasn't been wearing buttondowns regularly for some time, but I used to make him shirts regularly.
I redid his shirt pattern (improving/refining/refitting) with current fit trends in mind (we're loosening things up a la 90s) and this is the first shirt off the presses.
I had this piece of linen in stash (for him). It's lovely - blue threads one direction, aqua the other. But goodness it's stretchy, and it wrinkles just from humidity - it wrinkled sitting quietly in a pile for sewing. I decided pretty quickly that this was going to be a casual-dressy shirt (you know, the ones that say, "I am expensive", not the ones that say, "I am here to do your taxes" ), so I slightly increased the button distance and used some nice mussel-shell buttons from Wawak.
I have some fabric incoming, and I'm going to do some colorblocking and work creatively - really try to make things he couldn't buy off-the-rack, at ...
