Trim

House Painting 072112

John - painting the trim over the upstairs window.  We're back to working on the east side of the house, up until today he's been working on the soffit and the trims way up there where you see the pale blue.  This afternoon we took the storm windows out and now the task of repairing the wood, priming it, and the painting it and all of the window trim colors and then onto fixing the storm windows themselves. 

Porch Redux Update 091111

Detail of the column trim. The larger beaded band closest to the ruby red will be painted the medium green color you see on the soffit next to the column. The little bit of trim under the larger beaded band will be light blue. The smaller beaded trim, beneath the copper band will be a light sage green with a light blue band just underneath it. Should be done by next weekend.  The blue I mentioned will be the same blue as the porch ceiling.


All five columns have paint on them now, the trims need to be finished.

Now to scrape the porch ceiling and get it painted!  The color I have is called Sorjourn Blue, it's kind of a robins egg blue.

Porch Update - 091011

Closer and yet so far away, the new section of soffit is painted, the first coats have been applied to it and three of the porch columns.
The porch rail is my next project, well after I finish painting the south wall of the porch and the window trims.


I have the trims to paint on the tops and the bottoms of the columns, and then it'll be time for paint coat number two.  The roundish trims are a pain to paint around, two shades of the sagey greens and a copperpot stripe in between the rounded trims.

Red Hearts

Base heart is started using silk dupioni, dyed with cochineal, wool quilt batting and cochineal dyed cotton backing fabric.  I machine stitched the edging and am now set to start embellishing the heart with natural dyed vintage trims, lace, yoyo's etc.  I enjoy the hand stitching portion of heart making it's a very nice respite between projects.

Madder Root Dyed Vintage Lace and Trims










Vintage lace and trims I picked up at a yard sale this summer, some are antiques. Everything has been scoured by washing twice in hot water - to get rid of the smell, then boiled with soda ash for two hours. The items were then mordanted with alum and soaked for two days in the alum vat, I then dyed everything with Madder Root Extract I left them to soak in the madder root vat for two days. The brighter yellow items are made of nylon hence the color.

Today's Yard Sale Score


There were gobs of bits of vintage lace, doilies, linen fabrics etc., all carefully folded INSIDE of tacky polyester fabrics.

This is just a hint of what I picked up, all at one sale, for fifteen dollars. The only downside is I'm going to have to put this stuff in a closet with my ozone machine - it smells like dryer sheets to which I'm very allergic. Most of the items like the millenary pieces are very fragile, still very usable for collage, and would probably not survive being washed.


This woman was an ace garage sale preparer!!! Very sly if you ask me, as I was taking items out of the bags all sorts of treasures started to appear. It's like she knew that these would be chosen ONLY by the right person. As I was looking around for more goodies, I had just grabbed a bag of millenary supplies, she asked me if I had looked at the other bags of fabric on the far table simply stating that everyone had passed them by. I took one peek and grinned from ear to ear and each bag was a mere 50 cents! Mother Lode!!!

Vintage Bling

A peak of some goodies to come!

An overwhelming knot of trims!

Somewhat sortred!

Vintage type writer ribbon tin that held sewing pins.

Life is strange sometimes. I picked up a box of vintage bling yesterday at one of the shops I frequent. Typically I do not use gold anything in my work because I simply do not purchase anything gold, so I don't have enough to complete any one project - well until now that is.
As I went through the box I discovered that the box of trims once belonged to woman that once lived in my house! Just like the piano that keeps coming back to live here, after being sold multiple times, so has this box of trims! In the box I also found crystals from my chandelier that is missing and has been since dh moved here in 1991.
Yes life is strange sometimes.