Lamp Shades and Spiders and Plastic Beads, Oh My

On the theory that you can find instructions for anything online, I researched how to make a lamp shade. Too many instructions start with "Take any old lamp shade and recover it with fancy paper." Or paint it.

There's a sexy pendant lamp made from rings of plywood and cardboard. (Thank you, Instructables)  You need a jigsaw. This would be dandy, except for my fear of jigsaws. I can order one  -- a lamp, that is-- on Etsy for about $50, including postage. This is more than my budget for 4 lamp shades.

Papier mache is a favorite in the crafty crowd. There are pages of Google entries that I will spare you.

Another set of instructions advises me to deconstruct 10 to 15 wire hangers, form 2 rings, and cut 10 vertical struts to be hotglued in place and wound with fabric strips.  Only when that is done do you begin to construct the shade covering, which, based on the precision of the prior instructions, is undoubtedly lined and silk. I'm not using hot glue with anything that I hope will last, such as silk.

I can start with a bare frame from the Lamp Shade Company, which has more listings for youtube videos than for a website. I'm sure this is a mere oversight. The bare frames cost more than I want to spend. And then there are the coverings. The result is a lamp shade that could be sold for $75. But I want lamp shades to disguise my compact fluorescents. That's all.

Perhaps I should take out my handy dandy soldering iron and solder some hanger wire to a metal washer, creating what is known as a spider. The metal washer could fit on to the shade harp, the wire spokes will reach to a ring which can be made of cardboard. And then find parchment paper and glue it to...over budget again.

Perhaps I've been too literal in my definition of lampshade. Perhaps what I really want is a lampshade made of plastic beads heated in an oven until they fuse into a multicolor form.

  Or a screening and wire basket. Or kitchen utensils.
 

 

Or I can go back to the 2nd hand stores and keep looking.

Poor Choices

Lowe's clearance shade

Once upon a time one could buy basic lampshades without hocking one's children. I consider $29.95 for a plain medium sized drum shade -- no fancy shapes, no pleating, ruching, piping  or ruffles -- extortionate for what I want,  essentially a piece of heavy paper on a wire ring.

Lowe's has a shade for under $10. It fits a lamp with a harp, and I was willing to try it until I saw that it is lined with red. I'm sorry, I do not want a red cast on everything. It has a similar sized cousin in a nauseating mustard yellow. No sale.

Target has a whole lot of chandelier shades, and a whole lot of large shades. Nothing medium sized, except for small lamps with medium sized shades at $15.97. I briefly considered plastic cubes meant as locker storage. I toyed with the idea of using ice cream containers, or even plastic planters. 

Reluctantly I perused the WalMart website. While there are oodles of choices in the $15-$40 range, there are a few plain shades under $10 in small and large sizes. Hobby Lobby, too, has shades that will do.

Hobby Lobby self adhesive shade

What do you do when what you need is only offered by stores you'd rather avoid? I weigh the amount of my revulsion. WalMart is a store that is good for no one but the Walton heirs. I object to subsidizing a family that is wealthy enough to buy a third world country. Hobby Lobby sanctimoniously closes on Sundays so its workers can spend the day with their families, but wants to opt out of health care programs because they can't control how the money they pay in will be used.  Specifically, Hobby Lobby wants assurances that no money it pays into a health care system will ever be used for abortion, even when abortion is needed to save the woman's life. This  sort of moral superiority may be even more revolting than soulless money grubbing.  

I suppose I could order metal rings from a lamp supply house and make my own shades. Martha Stewart would. But there's no way she'd stop at 4. 

Will I stand on principle or cave to expedience?  

Patchwork Explorations

I have a love/hate relationship with quilting. I love the way it looks. I love the way stitching patterns transform a plain fabric sandwich. I hate the prep work required to keep the sandwich layers in place, and I'm not all that fond of planning things out to the inch. My rules for patchwork are that I should already have 90 percent of the fabrics I need, and that the pattern be no more complex than a 9-patch. There are LOTS of 9-patch variations. I avoid embarking on large quilting projects. I quilt pockets, cuffs, bodice inserts, pillows, and doll clothes. Random is nice. Bits from an assortment of projects made these strips. They were destined for a tote bag.

My favorite quilted jacket was pieced directly onto the corpse of a too-large plain jacket. I used 2-inch wide stripes of fabrics that pleased me, and added curved bits for yokes and cuffs. It allowed me to use fabrics left over from clothes I had made for myself. I was out of step with the quilting community, which had discovered stripes and paper pieced work.

True patchwork, for me, is random fabric combinations. In college I made draperies of 2 and 4-inch blocks, with poor joins that didn't bother me as much as they should have. Today's lovely pieced quilts of fabrics from the same company, bought at the same time? They are a little too perfect, a little too confining for me. I can appreciate the work. I just can't make myself do it again. I bought all the fabrics for a clever vest pattern in Threads, sewed it up, admired it, and promptly gave it away.

 

In 1971 a roommate introduced me to the joys of Grandma's Flower Garden, a hexagon arrangement that took hours to cut and more hours to hand sew, making it appropriate for a college student. I learned a lot about grain and fiber with that pattern. Polyester/cotton blends were tricky. Some hexes came out well; some were elongated. I've thrown out most of the results. I suppose I could do a pillow or two with the leftovers, but the blocks stay in the UFO box to keep me humble.

In 1973, when my grandmother gave me bow tie quilt pieces cut from fabrics she found at our house, I HATED the way colors from different decades worked together. No, I don't like greyed colors paired with brights. There are some colors and patterns I never ever want to see used together, such as a navy/kelly green plaid with a pink/blue seersucker. I unpicked a good many of the blocks she sewed, redoing them in combinations I found less objectionable. I tried random block placement and hated it. Some 40 combinations later, I gave up, and the pieces languish in a box of fabrics somewhere. Years later, an aunt told me she forcibly prevented my grandmother from giving other brides boxes of pieces because she knew the bride would eventually hate it. And I stopped feeling quite so guilty.

Quilting books pushed eyepopping combinations when my preference was for subtle gradations. I admit that the results work. I just can't wear it and won't use it. The hobo bag was fun to make and looks better than the photographs, but it is unused. Even the Ultrasuede pocket does not save this bag. Still, it is preferable to the one with the bright ice cream cone middle. I've never finished this, and all it needs is a snap and a strap.

In the 60s and 70s applique tended to be rounded and cartoony and sweet. I avoided it until a friend had a bleach accident with a lightly appliqued sweatshirt jacket. I took the jacket  to the fabric store, found a  bright print that worked, and added  bits from my stash. I was hooked. Cartoon flowers of randomly chosen fabrics joined stripes from my enormous collection of bias bindings  to adorn many a sweatshirt jacket. The Koos van den Akker technique of large organic shapes framed in bias worked fine in miniature, for Barbie sized dolls. I haven't tried it in a human scale.

 

 Recently I've graduated to stealing shapes from nature.  I photocopied leaves, making  favorites  in original, medium and enormous. Enormous lost, but medium adorns the sleeves and front of a jacket.

The Forty Box Trick

Today is one of those days when getting started seems doomed. Between the sinus pressure and the allergy medication fuzz, my get-up-and-go is impeded by inability to make decisions and being easily flummoxed by missing packing tape. When you are packing forty-leven boxes that will be stored, it behooves you to carefully mark them and keep a list of what's in them. 

When the markers, boxes, packing tape and labels are in the same place, that place is not where I am. Go up into the attic and go down into the cellar, and while you're at it, clear the garage loft, Cinderella. 

Most of the time I have the all-important notebook indicating box and contents. Packing tape and markers wander. Adhesive labels disappear, only to surface when I have no need of them. I've inherited boxes of photos and fabrics from other family members. As I sort through them, I mark the year on the box or label in the forlorn hope that I will not have to reopen the box again this year. 

Because I've inherited a lot of sewing stashes, I devised the 40-Box Trick. At any time, the floor is covered with as many open boxes as will fit in a room. Things get moved from Aunt Kawhatsis' sewing box to the box for zippers,  snaps, or fabric. There are two boxes for each: Keep and Give Away. Throw Away is one enormous black sack that gets taken to the recycling bin when all I can do is drag it. 

I have a 14 x 14 inch box full of zippers because you just never know when you might need a vintage metal toothed zipper. That's right, I inherited zippers carefully unpicked by folks who lived a day's carriage ride for the nearest town. They had habits of recycling which seemed sensible, and the saved zippers might have been useful had this bonanza arrived when I was young and impoverished and making clothes to attract attention. Now I make clothes to cover the bare and they don't tend to be dresses.

 I have card after card partially filled with snaps of varying sizes because I sew doll clothing and  used to buy the smallest size by the gross. Now it is more politically correct to use Velcro for doll clothes for kids than to teach them to operate snaps and buttons, and that snaps and buttons are not food. It doesn't matter than the doll clothes are clearly for children older than 4, at which age they no longer put everything in their mouths. It doesn't matter that after 4 years of use, the thing might need to be resewn. Nope. Better safe than sorry. Use lumpy Velcro for doll clothing for kids and toss those partial cards of snaps because heaven forfend, a child might locate your hobby cupboard, rummage through and bite the snaps off the cards.    

I could do a history of snaps storyboard, and a history of buttons from pottery and pearl to cardboard, pot metal, plastic and polyform clay. The folks whose stashes I inherited didn't have time to use all their supplies, and hope springs eternal. I mean, I MIGHT make a fabric belt to match a shirtwaist, right? Or need to replace the pockets of pants? And this is AFTER I sent 10 or 15 cartons of stuff off to a church bazaar. 

I have boxes of ditsy prints, scaled for small dolls, sorted by color. There is a box for table linens never used but often taken out and stroked while tales are told about what happened when they were in constant use. I plan to turn some into clothing. You will hear screaming from my relatives. There are boxes of draperies, and I'm keeping them, all of them, even if there are too many for the average room or the color is not what I'm using this year. It is hard enough to find draperies in colors and prints I can enjoy. Whether I sewed them or bought them, I want them because I am NOT going through that horror again, and besides, mine are natural fiber. When one is allergic to the 20th century, natural fibers matter. 

At this point, so much of the clutter is precious that making decisions is impossible. Stop. Just box it. I know this would be sane. But if I box it, it means I want to take it, and I don't want to be in hock to moving companies for the next 30 years.

Sorting the stash

No one needs 30 little old ladies' worth of vintage seam binding in red and green. Other colors are harder to find and often are just the ones I need. But wait, you say! Aren't you the person who owns little metal things that make bias tape. And didn't you find and buy entire rolls of bias fabric at Goodwill? Well, yes I did, but they are red, navy and gingham pink. I've been using them for years, haven't made a dent in the amount, and ...Yes, I know I am unreasonable. No one needs as much as I have. And it is possible to make more. BUT I know these bias bindings and the way they handle, and that makes them worth keeping. I keep the whole thing because winding off yardage is a time consuming nuisance.

What about the tiny doll scale embroidered appliques that I don't need at the moment? When I needed them, I had little access to fabric stores and no one seemed to stock them in any color I might use. I toss ribbons that are easy to replace and keep the ones that tug at my heart.

I am down to the dregs of sorting. Do I put all seam rippers and measuring tapes together so I can lose them all at once, or do I follow my grandmother's habit of making up a small sewing kit for every room? Her habit is part of the reason so much of this stuff  had been stashed helter skelter, why there are so many multiples. I had my portable sewing kit, my portable jewelry-making kit, and thread sorted by which sewing machine found it acceptable. Most of my belongings will be in storage for months, and if I put them all together, chances are I'll have to buy more or live without them. Living without sewing is not living.

I've done the easy stuff. What is left has sentimental value, or spurs my imagination, and that's good, except that en masse  it tends to be, well, MASSIVE. These are all things that technically one can live without. I don't bead every day, but over the years I've acquired a collection of findings. Even if new findings are better, I didn't enjoy shopping for them and I'll keep the leftovers for my next project.

              

Let's move on to the vintage patterns. I love the graphics. When you can buy old patterns at 10 cents each, you acquire a whole lot of patterns for the same $20 patterns cost today.  And the instructions are much better, except for Vogue patterns. Vogue has made an art form of offering finicky instructions for things that are obvious and only a line for the impossible. I've got patterns from the 40's on. To sell them, I'd have to remove them from their envelopes, check to make sure they are complete, and put them back into the envelopes. I'm packing up those boxes and using the sealing tape. No time for this, no inclination for this. Besides, I WANT them all. Perhaps some day I will photograph all the pattern fronts and sell off the extras. Another project, another year.

When I left the NY area for the Midwest, I discovered that some stores regularly sold patterns at less than the suggested price, and some at $2 per pattern. This makes it possible to own patterns for things you would never make in your right mind. It makes it possible to give away entire boxes of unused patterns. And I did, three cartons of them. Most were purchased 2nd hand and some were just plain dumped on me.

Let's not get into the patterns for doll clothes. I've got patterns for dolls I owned as a child, patterns for dolls owned by children of neighbors and friends. I've been given multiples of vintage Barbie patterns as people left the Barbie hobby. I accepted because I was certain that I would put them in the hands of people who needed them. And then  Mattel changed the size of the doll. I've got patterns from the big four, from indies, patterns I refined through 6 or 7 drafts, patterns I revised to fit nonstandard dolls. I used to throw away my altered patterns, certain that the doll would never cross my path again, but such is not the case.

I refurbish small dolls and give them to charities because I think it is important for kids to have toys, especially after they've been burned out of their homes. I now recognize that if I've devised clothing for a doll once, that type of doll will turn up nude in the next 3 years. So really, 3 cartons of patterns just for dolls is reasonable. 

It is easier to rant about the indecision and futility of my chore than it is to just do it. I've been at this for long enough that I've had to open some boxes because what I need has been sealed away for months.