2021 Wish List

Well. I usually put out my wish list by November 1. But November was pretty overwhelming. So was October.
In fact, most of this year has been overwhelming;
I haven't really thought much about my Christmas wish list. 

Also, there's the weirdness of almost never writing on my blog anymore (you can also attribute that to Overwhelm), and then suddenly, out of nowhere, posting a wish list. Hmmm...

But here's what I've finally come up with:

I'd like a Tap-Dance Floor. Here are the instructions to build one. (And I already have the mats for it...)

Character Tap Shoes. Although you'd probably have to take me to try them on. (I do have flat tap-shoes that could go with the new floor for a while...)

Drawers for my living room shelves. I really want these to be done. It is about time for that project to be all finished—I mean, I need a tidy place for all my Christmas wrapping paper!

I had some drawers built, but they don't fit right.
So I need new ones. With nice drawer-glides installed.

A Custom Dress Form. Or at least the stuff to make one—and then some time with Bruce to start building it. I've found lots of different instructions for making them, and I've finally decided that this five-part "how-to" looks pretty good.

(Although I'd use pour and mix insulation foam instead of the spray stuff, so there wouldn't be any air pockets inside the form.)

Well, I'm pretty sure I think of new little things almost daily, but I don't even remember them.

Mostly I want us all to have a Happy Christmas.

My baby is eighteen!

 I know this post is a week and a half late...

Aww! What a cute, smiley baby she was!

But Jessica turned eighteen years old! (Now I can officially kick all of my kids out of the house. ;-) )

We had a really fun day for her birthday! First of all, Jessica had been wanting to get a haircut, so we took her to do that. I was a little skeptical of her getting a pixie cut, but...

Before...
Look at how long her hair has gotten!
(That's her stylist, Hailey, in the background.)

Jessica had saved some pictures of styles
that she liked  to show Hailey.

And the first cuts have been made!
(Hailey swept away all that pretty blond hair
from the floor before I thought to get a picture.)

A bit of a blow-dry to determine if it's just right. This time you can see a bunch of blond hair on the floor.

Trimming off just a little bit more...
And it's looking oh, so cute!

Here's the finished cut!

Jessica was really happy with her haircut. Next on the list was clothes-shopping. Yay!

I didn't get pics of her trying on clothes (my bad), but we had a lot of fun, and she got a couple of really cute things. Maybe one day we will have a picture of her in her favorites.

Then out to lunch with Dad and Lindsey, and then home for a rest—and maybe a movie.

That night we had chicken & broccoli casserole for dinner (as per Jessica's request). Then we all went and played Jackbox games for a while. She got a lot of birthday presents (the benefits of being the youngest and having lots of siblings with jobs). 

And then it was time for dessert: Pumpkin Cheescake (yum!). When it was time for the birthday singing, we decided we had to recreate the photo from Jessica's first birthday.

It took a few tries, but they did a pretty good job of it. Jessica got the look about right. (By the way, she's wearing one of her new shirts.)

Bruce promised her he wouldn't blow out all her candles, but in the end he laughed so hard that he did blow them out...all but one.

I don't think Jessica minded, though.

Cake and more games. It was a fun, fun day.

Happy Birthday, Jessica—you adult, you! Love you!!

It's time for an update!

 Well, it's almost time for an update... of my kitchen!

First I have to do all my canning. But it's kind of fun to think about anyway, so I've been thinking about it.

Bruce helped to stimulate the economy (??) by getting new appliances as they went on clearance at Lowes. The appliances are now in my garage, waiting for us to get our act together. I would love to have this all done before Thanksgiving. So we're not rearranging everything—although I did come up with one design that included moving the kitchen sink. I discarded that idea.

I thought I had a drawing of the kitchen as it currently is, but I can't find it. So here's the remodel idea:
 At the top of the pic, you can see a closet on the left; this is currently the weird, unused kitchen bathroom. We are removing everything that has to do with water, then making it about 18-inches smaller (as shown);
this will become a coat closet. With the closet a bit smaller, the ovens can move to the left about 18 inches, which will allow us to move the cooktop to the left so that it's not smack against the corner. Yay!
The refrigerator currently sits directly across from
the bathroom/closet. We will move the fridge diagonally down and to the right, as in the picture.
The plant shelf will go live next to the fridge.
Now we can put a floor-to-ceiling pantry on most
of that left wall. At the end of the pantry, on the bottom-left, you see a closet that will hold my
vacuum, broom, mop, etc. (right now they
live in the weird, unused kitchen bathroom).
And, in the center, we'll add an island.
This will give me 1. an open work-space and,
2. a lighted work-space. How would that be?

I'd like to replace all of the main-floor flooring: the living room, the entry hall, and the kitchen/dining area. If the price is right, I will do this; we'll see. Eventually I will replace the countertops, but for now I will most likely paint them (just like I did in our old house ten or so years ago). And, of course, I will paint the cabinets, too.

Because our kitchen gets so little natural light, I want to paint at least the upper cabinets white (or an off-white that makes you think "white".) I've been toying with making the lower cabinets a super dark—almost black—blue. Or making upper and lower cabinets white and the pantry dark blue...  I don't know yet. The only thing, color-wise, that I'm completely determined on is my blue wall in the dining room, which I love, and light-colored upper cabinets.

So here are some color ideas I've been tossing around, and I would love your opinions! Keep in mind that the kitchen flooring will also extend to the living room. 

Of the flooring choices I've seen, I like these two best.
I do lean toward the Eucalyptus... I think.
It might stay cleaner looking.

1.  Here you see the Hickory flooring, Chocolate countertop, white cabinets, and super dark blue as the maybe-maybe color. (Really undecided on that.)
I scanned the paint-chip for the dining room wall; that is the color.

2. Hickory floor, black countertops—
all the rest remains the same.

3. Hickory floor, Sand countertops.

4. Eucalyptus floor, Chocolate countertops.

5. Eucalyptus floor, Black countertops.

6. Eucalyptus Floor, Sand countertops.

So, these are my current thoughts. Mostly. I've also toyed with adding a little brown to the Sand counters to make an in-between kind of color. Or making the pantry some kind of complementary color to the blue—or the cabinets under the island. Or... I don't know what!

What do you think?

Shelved

I like to study my scriptures in our great room. It's just a nice, pretty, quiet place for that. But, unfortunately, it didn't have a place for me to store my scriptures between times. So I just stacked them up neatly under the coffee table. And that was fine until everyone else decided to do the same. You can only fit so many sets of scriptures underneath a forty-inch round table. Pretty soon they were overflowing all over the room. This would never do. I needed a small bookshelf.

Well, lucky me! (I guess. Is it lucky that I got a shelf from Mom's house because she died? Let's not handle that sword...)

I brought home a little bookshelf that's been in our house forever. In fact, I'm told it's a shelf that Dad made, which makes it even better. When I said that I needed a shelf to put our scriptures on, Heidi felt that a shelf made by Dad would be perfect. And she's right, I think.

Anyway, it had a lot of scratches and dings in it, so of course I decided to refinish it. And, of course, I forgot the "before" pictures. But here's the whole progression of work:

At this point I realized I hadn't taken a "before" picture.
So I've already sanded quite a bit of it down to the
bare pine. But you can still see what color it was.

I removed the back before I started sanding it down. Then I spent a lot of time sanding, to get rid of as many scratches as I could. When I started, I was thinking the shelf had been stained, and even as I got down to obviously bare pine it didn't occur to me that it had actually been painted. But for it to come that clean, it had to have been paint.

Sanding the underside. Dad did a lot of tricky piecing to make the rounded base of this shelf.

Sanded to bare wood. It has a very defined grain.

Once it was all sanded, it was ready to be stained! I wanted to do it the color of my kitchen table, but I grabbed the wrong can of stain. It was walnut. Hm.

I was instantly unhappy.
Bruce and my boys liked it, but I had wanted it
to be more like it was originally—not this zebra/tiger-stripey thing. Some parts of the wood grain absorb stain better than others; I should have realized it
would turn out like this.

So then it sat out in my patio while I brooded over what to do. Finally I went and bought a stain that has better coverage. Another light sanding, another brushing of stain, and here's what I got:

Ahhh. Much Better!
(This color is close, but the camera
didn't get it exactly right.)

Now for the back. I knew I wanted to do something fancy, so I decided to cover it with lace or some kind of fabric.

Here's the inside-back.

Here it is again, and the fabric I chose.

And here it is with the fabric glued to it.

Fortunately, when I was nailing the back in place again I was able to use the very same nail-holes that Dad had made long, long ago. (This is fortunate because I am terrible at driving a nail straight into where I want it.)

Even pounding the nails into the exact same places, there was still one that I couldn't get in straight.
I figure the shelf will be able to live with that.

Here it is, all put together:

Awww. It's so pretty!

And here it is in its new home, in the corner of the great room:

Scriptures and gospel-study books in place.
The "Flight into Egypt" figure that Melanie and I bought for Mom (and that Melanie graciously let me keep) stands on top. 

I'm very happy with it!

Tammy

When I was a very little girl, sometime before Christmas, I saw my mom sewing something. Normally I wouldn't have given this much thought, but Mom was having a hard time with her project, and Dad was helping her. They were making hair out of yarn! I asked Mom what she was making, and she said it was a doll. 

"Who's it for?"

She said it was a present for Kelma, a friend of mine. When I told her I wanted a new doll too, she told me something like I should be thinking about other people, and not just myself. Which I didn't quite get at the time.

I just took this picture of her cute face this morning. You can see that she has a little stain above her nose. Tammy was well-loved!

Then Christmas came around and that doll was all wrapped up in a package for me! A beautiful little-girl, rag-doll, with hand-painted face, brick-red yarn hair, and a bright red dress. (That dress was often the bane of our cat, who looked hilarious walking down the hallway in it—
I wish I had pictures.) Denise got the matching boy doll; they were named Tammy and Tommy; Mom named them. In fact, I think I asked for her help naming most of my dolls.

Tammy and Tommy were Raggedy Ann-type dolls, and Denise and I played with them all.  the.  time. Tammy survived playing outside and inside, and several trips through the washing machine, clear up until I had little girls of my own.

And then one of them cut her bangs off! (No pics, unfortunately.)

And her panties disappeared. So I put Tammy away, intending to fix her up one day.

I finally started working on her last January. 

Tammy's original yarn hair had been stitched to strips of fabric, and then the fabric strips were then attached to her head—I had already removed all of it a few years ago. Now (in January) I finally embroidered her new hair directly onto her head. 

Originally, Tammy had straight hair. But I thought it looked so cute curly, that I left it looped. 

Then she sat in my room for a few months.

Well, this week I decided it was time to remake her clothes. I was lucky that I had a little piece of the original fabric Mom had made her clothes with. Yay! But when I compared that fabric to Tammy's clothes this is what I saw:

On the left is the sleeve of Tammy's original blouse. On the right is the fabric scrap that (thankfully) I must have swiped from my Mom's fabric stash years ago.

Well. I couldn't make bright, practically neon-colored panties and still keep Tammy in her faded blouse, so I took the blouse apart to use as a pattern for a new one. I had just enough fabric to cut out a new blouse and panties for her.

I wanted to make the outfit as similar as I could to the one Mom made, so even I sewed it together with green thread, like she did. (Hers was more of an apple-green, but I used the yellow-green color I already had at home.)
I went to the store to get new ric-rac to put on the edges of the neck, sleeves, and the legs of the panties. I don't remember if the panties had ric-rac trim on them or not, but I think they probably must have matched. In the end it didn't matter. The new ric-rac was so big (the only size they had at the store) and so heavy that I didn't like it on the clothes at all. So I reused the old ric-rac on the blouse, and trimmed the panties' legs with lace.

I finished the blouse and panties this morning.
I do think I would have preferred to have the
matching ric-rac on the panty-legs, but there's not much I could do about that. They will be hidden
under her skirt anyway.

I was a little worried that I'd lost the original buttons, but they were in my button box. You can see that the buttonholes are made with the green thread. :-)

And now Tammy is all dressed, she has pretty hair, and she's ready for...

...ready for what?

I guess she's ready to join the other toys in my "grandma stash." And hopefully some day somebody else will love her until she's falling apart.

Ten more reasons I like my husband

 He got up early yesterday (when I woke him from a peaceful sleep) so he could work on the garden that I've been nagging about. And then he worked far longer into the heat of the day than I would have recommended—even when I asked him to stop because it was too hot. ♥

He lets me snuggle up to him and fall asleep while we're "watching a movie." He even stays for the whole movie, with me asleep on his shoulder or lap. ♥

He likes getting a hair cut from me. He even thinks it's fun. ♥

Also, except on very, very few occasions, he remains clean-shaven in deference to my preference.

He takes me out on dates so we can escape the house and the kids. (Yes, even when they're 17 and older, we want to escape them sometimes.) ♥

He lets me know that he thinks I am amazing. ♥

He laughs at my jokes. A lot. ♥

He thinks I am gorgeous, even though I can see that I'm looking older, and even when I've had my hair in the same ponytail for three days. (Although he really likes it when I take care of myself—I guess I clean up nice.) ♥

He works on house projects with me. ♥

He cries over the food I make for him.
Hmm.
He says it's because I'm such a great cook. ;-) ♥

He is an awesome dad to our kids, and an awesome friend to me. ♥

I love you, Bruce! ♥♥♥