Christmas Wreath

I was suuuuper excited about Christmas this year, and was fantasizing about decorations weeks ahead of time. This is not a particularly unique thing for me, for those who have read last year's Christmas entry in my oil rig blog.

Over my Thanksgiving visit, I perused a book my stepmother had lying around, Christmas Decorations from Williamsburg's Folk Art Collection. In it was instructions for creating a wreath decorated with seashells, and I knew it was a perfect beginning to start the decorating bonanza!

I made it in honor of my grandmother, Louise Kelley Rochester who passed away this past January. This is our first Christmas without her, and it was especially meaningful to me to be able to use seashells from her collection for the wreath.

She had THOUSANDS of seashells.

I ended up only using the idea from the book, and basically making up the rest as I went along. I bought an overpriced styrofoam wreath base (with a coupon), and wrapped it in ribbon left over from my brother's wedding.

Then I used a hot glue gun and just went to town!

As I was just about finished, I started to panic. Absolutely panic. It looked like a crappy wall hanging you might see at a beachside drugstore for $4.99 or on the wall of a rented condo in Ocean City. All of a sudden I was filled with remorse for not predicting and preventing this.

Dejected, I took my mom's advice and just finished the darn thing and hung it up.

And then something magical happened...

It looked absolutely perfect hanging from our front door with a sprig of holly (natch) and a bow. It didn't look kitchy it all. Instead it looked absolutely at home and utterly lovely.

It didn't quite match the rest of the Duxbury wreaths of green pine branches and red velvet ribbons (I'm not kidding. EVERY house has them) but then our door doesn't face the street so I don't have to worry about offending the neighbors with my uniqueness, haha!

Forging

I luuurve crafts. I especially luuuurve historical crafts. So it was only natural that when I saw an advertisement for historic blacksmithing classes two days ago that I started freaking out and hyperventilating with excitement. So first thing yesterday morning, I logged onto the website of Prospect Hill Forge in Waltham, MA and spent the next hour perusing their pages.

What do you know, but they were offering a 3-hour introductory class THAT VERY EVENING!!! It was fate. I yelled across the kitchen table to my brother, who is currently visiting for the holidays, and we very quickly booked two places in the class. As it turns out, my brother has always wanted to try his hand at blacksmithing since he was a small boy being dragged to historic site after historic site by our parents.

There were a total of three of us in the class, and coincidentally we each had a degree in mechanical engineering (Although our classmate, David, was the only currently working in industry). The task was to make an "S" hook out of 3/8" square iron rod. The instructor gave us a demonstration, and as soon as that was complete we were each assigned a forge and an anvil and set to work. I was assigned to the one forge whose ventilation system was run by hand-crank instead of an electric fan. This actually turned out to be an advantage because I was less likely to overheat and oxidize my iron. Plus it was kinda fun to turn the hand crank.

We started by heating the center of the rod to twist it. We then made a taper on one end, chamfered the square corners, and and curled the point of the taper. The first half of the S-curve was completed by making the hook. After that, we cut the stock to a symmetrical size and repeated the process to complete the S-shape.

The results speak for themselves:

GUESS WHAT?!!?! I MADE THAT!!!!

A closer view can show the distinct improvement in my tapering technique between the first hook and the second. It was amazing to see the progress that I was able to make in the course of only a couple of hours! The dents were due to bad hammering, the blemishes were either from overheating or not brushing the oxidized iron off enough.

Here are Eric's and my hooks upon completion. Eric is going to use his to hang his bicycle in the garage when he gets home. I will be hanging mine somewhere as a decorative piece, likely without any function to it. We'll see where it ends up!

Eric and I returned home with filthy hands, smudged faces, sore muscles, and an amazing sense of accomplishing the same task that our ancestors have been doing for thousands of years.

The Art of Procrastination

I’m sure it’s a common thing for many people in the surge of creative motivation to pick up a long and daunting project only to lose steam after a the first few hundred stitches, cuts, knits, purls, etc. I personally make a perfect poster child for such a demographic. I get excited about new projects with great rapidity. An idea will strike my fancy and I will pursue it diligently … for the first few days or so.

Then something will happen: I’ll hit a frustrating obstacle, get distracted by work or social obligations, or simply get bored and whatever I happen to be doing will simply fall to the wayside. If I’m really inspired, I’ll pick it up again in a week or two when I have a chance. This rarely happens. Most of the time it will sit on my sewing table or my dresser or hanging off the ironing board until a monthly clean will see it folded and put it away in a drawer somewhere. Wherever I live, I usually keep a drawer whose unofficial name is “to-do when I get around to it-drawer”. Needless to say, it rarely gets opened.

Quitting my job in the oilfield this past April seemed to have a beneficial effect on my productivity, and while my two weeks’ notice were ticking by I dug through my then 3 accrued “to-do when I get around to it” drawers and pulled out the mother of all set-aside projects. There is a lot of background story that goes with this mother, so now might be a good time to make yourself comfortable.

Back in 2006 I was ill-advisedly talked into costume designing the MIT Musical Theatre Guild’s summer production of Sweeney Todd entirely in “steampunk” Victorian era, years before I even knew what “steampunk” meant. In addition to waistcoats, cravats, blouses and petticoats, I constructed six or seven full Victorian gowns complete with gi-normous bustles and big, poufy trains.

photo credit Jax Kirtley

This show involved more construction than nearly all the rest of my productions combined, and I recruited my assigned costume crew, talented friends, and random freshmen just arrived on campus to help me get it all done in time. Eventually, and after very little sleep the costumes were finished, the show looked beautiful, and my mind quickly turned to considering projects for myself.

I had enjoyed costuming Sweeney Todd for the practice it gave me in constructing period Victorian outfits. I kept the dress pattern I used, and with the “bustle pillow” the entire cast had signed and presented to me for my crew-member gift, I had the beginning pieces to make a full dress of my own. Hours of shopping later, I had a full set of fabrics, linings, lace and tasseled edgings, and all the notions necessary to make a beautiful costume.

It was almost a surprise it took me as long as it did to set this project aside. I worked on it continuously throughout the month of September, and finished the most difficult part that month: the bodice. It was roughly that time that the school semester got busy, so months passed before I made an attempt to pick up where I had left off. Most of the big pieces were partially assembled, like the bodice (minus the sleeves), but none were actually completed.

When I moved out of my apartment in Somerville and into the student housing in Boston, it came with me and wasn’t touched. When I moved down to Louisiana after graduation it came with me and wasn’t touched. I bought a whole new set of plastic storage drawers to contain it and the remainder of my forgotten projects and there it sat in my closet in Lafayette for years.

With my oodles of free time I had all the tools I needed to pull that mother back out of her drawer. Components had been lost, and pieces had been confused, but I managed to take stock of what I had and what I needed.

I began by fixing the confounding petticoat. A long-lost memory emerged from the ether, and I remembered that I had set the petticoat aside after realizing that I had (again) sewed a pair of the panels in upside-down. I ripped them out, realigned them, and proceeded to sew them in … upside-down … again. I ripped them out one more time, laid them on the floor and thought about them for a good, long while. I then went about checking and rechecking each piece, and then writing “top” and “bottom” on each petticoat panel and then checking the labels one more time for good measure. I sewed them in one last time, and what do you know it but I finally got it right!

I then sewed the sleeves on the bodice and got to have the fun job of embellishing it with all the frilly lacy scrumptiousness I had held on to for such a purpose. Extra fabric from the bustle and apron remnants provided the perfect contrast for the decorative buttons down the front.

I completed the skirt and embellished it similarly to the bodice. I put together the bustle and the apron draperies, and installed the hardware necessary to hold them in place. Bit by bit everything was coming together until before I knew it, one sunny day in April I was finished!

And of course, dressing up ensued and many photographs were taken.

My sister was scandalized by this last photo, since I was clearly a Victorian prostitute with my lack of stockings and bloomers. So I made sure to have those ready for my gown's unveiling at Halloween in Salem, Massachusetts.

Amongst the denizens of Salem, my huge bustle was a big hit!

Ahh, the glory of it all.

But it wouldn’t have been a real procrastination project if I hadn’t procrastinated many months more before posting this description of it, sigh.