The Stuff Nightmares Are Made Of

Built by artist Theo Jansen.

Grow Old With Me, The Best Is Yet To Come

"Perhaps middle-age is, or should be, a period of shedding shells; the shell of ambition, the shell of material accumulation and possessions, the shell of the ego."
-Anne Marrow Lindbergh, age 49

 "We are brainwashed about what age you're supposed to marry, what age you're supposed to have a kid, what age you're supposed to do this or that. Oh my God! Who died and left those people in charge?"
-Cyndi Lauper, age 63

"Time and trouble will tame an advanced young woman, but an advanced old woman is uncontrollable by any earthly force.
-Dorothy L. Sayers, age 63

 "Aging is not lost youth but a new stage of opportunity and strength.It's a different stage of life, and if you are going to pretend it's youth, you are going to miss it. You are going to miss the surprises, the possibilities and the evolution that we are just beginning to know about because there are no role models and there are no guide posts and there are no signs."
-Betty Friedan, age 72

" ...old age is like a plane flying through a storm. Once you're aboard, there's nothing you can do. You can't stop the plane, you can't stop the storm, you can't stop time. So one might as well accept it calmly, wisely."
-Golda Meir, age 74

"Mark my words, the time goes fast. And those are the only things that matter. The things that you really had fun with."
-Lily Tomlin, age 76

And The Answer Is!

Stephen Bannon, who is Donald Trump’s campaign CEO, is a leader in the alt (alternative)- right movement. Hiring Bannon is Trump's answer to the question he has been asking African American and Hispanic voters for almost two week now, "What do you have to lose?"

Perhaps the most potent element of alt-right activism is the effort to build a sense of a specific white identity, and to claim that this identity is under attack.

“Anti-white animus in society at large is palpable,” says [alt-right leader Richard] Spencer. Demands for diversity in the workplace mean “less white males in particular”. More openly extreme alt-right accounts on Twitter talk about immigration in terms of “white genocide”.

This sense of injured white identity is what defines the alt-right, according to Dan Cassino, a Fairleigh Dickinson University political scientist and the author of a new book on Fox News and American politics. “The founding myth of the alt-right is that the disadvantaged groups in American politics are actually running things through a combination of fraud and intimidation. By doing this, they’re actually oppressing white men.”
- THEGUARDIAN.COM

Read complete article here.

I Am Learning To Sew- Project 33

I bought an old curtain which used to hang either in a boy's bedroom or in a man's den at a garage sale last week. I wasn't sure how I would use it but then I noticed these TV pillows in the family room and thought they could use a make over.

Throw pillows before.

Throw pillows after.

I think they turned out great and will not bore you with how frustrating making them turned out to be. I will tell you that zippers can be difficult.

You Will Find The Americans Much Like The Greeks Found The Romans

great, big, vulgar, bustling people more vigorous than we are and also more idle,
with more unspoiled virtues but also more corrupt.
-Harold Macmillan, Prime Minister of Britain (1957 to 1963)

Ryan Lochte is everything the world hates about Americans article here.

Welcome To htraE

(Also known as Bizarro World.)

WEST BEND, Wisconsin—Donald Trump asked African-Americans to vote for him in a room filled with about a thousand white people on Tuesday night.

"I’m asking for the vote of every African-American citizen struggling in our country today, who want a different and much better future,” the GOP presidential candidate said at a rally in Washington County, one of the whitest counties in the state.*
-Justin Glawe in his The Daily Beast article.

*Nearly 90 percent of Wisconsin's African American population lives in the following six counties, all of which are located in Southeastern or Southern Wisconsin:  Milwaukee, Dane, Racine, Kenosha, Rock, and Waukesha.
-Wisconsin Department of Health and Services.

I'm Sew Very Happy

My copy of More Fabric Savvy arrived a few days ago and I spend an hour this afternoon perusing it.  Each fabric discussed takes up two facing pages and gives you information about the fabric, what to make with it, sewing tips, which thread, needle, and presser foot to use, cutting layout directions, and other useful information.

Did you know silk and linens are washable but  many care labels on store bought garments say "Dry Clean Only?  Why?  Because neither the linen, the silk or the interfacing  used were prewashed before being made into the garment.

Did you know that  clothes made from Rayon should be machine-washed in cold water on gentle cycle because too much agitation distorts the fabric?

Did you know Rayon is made from wood pulp?

Did you know matte rayon jersey garments should be stored flat instead of on hangers because matte rayon jersey garments stretch when hung?

Did you know you shouldn't over-pack Linen in a washing machine because it absorbs twice its weight in water?

Did you know you should use liquid fabric softeners and not dryer sheets on garments made from microfibers?  Dryer sheets leave oil spots.

Did you know wool jersey wasn't used for women's wear until Coco Chanel started using it.  Before her wool jersey was only used to make men's underwear.

I did not know any of this before reading the book but I do now.

Book Room

If you want to call Deadwood a Western, you might as well call The House of Mirth chick lit.
-Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections

  I agree,  Deadwood is brutal, profane, violent and beautifully written.

The Neon Lights Were Bright

There is a facebook page called Save the Signs which posts old photos of neon signs in the United States.  Since it started out as Save The Signs On Colfax, a great number of the photos are about Denver.  The above photo was taken in 1974 and shows the signage for Hertz Rent A Car, the YMCA, and the old Centre Theater in downtown Denver.  The Hertz and the Centre Theater are now gone but the YMCA is still there.  When I first saw this photo it took my breath away because I found I wasn't just looking at the photo, I was in it.  I had walked down that street (East 16th Avenue.) in the winter of 1974 and could feel the freezing cold air on my face, hear the sound of snow and ice crunching under my feet, and smell of snow and automobile exhaust in my nose.  A flash to the past.

Lesson Unlearned

"If you look at the women’s national team, what do you want [people] to see? What do you want them to hear? And that’s where we do have a choice, as players, coaches, staff, the way we respond to certain things.”
-Former US Women's Soccer Team Head Coach Pia Sundhage to Hope Solo in 2012

“We played a bunch of cowards. The best team did not win today. I strongly, firmly believe that.”

"To call them cowards for playing a tactically smart game is ridiculous and classless, and it really doesn’t represent the house that we built with the U.S. team.”
-Former Gold Medal  US Women's Soccer Team member Julie Foudy

And the US fans calling for a boycott of IKEA are just as childish as Hope Solo.


Washington Post article.

Everything Old Is New Again

A whole bunch of these were inside a shipping box instead of Styrofoam peanuts.  There is hope for the world.

You're A Three Decker Saurkraut And Toadstool Sandwich With Arsenic Sauce, Mister Trump

"Hillary wants to abolish -- essentially abolish the Second Amendment. By the way, if she gets to pick, if she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don't know. But I tell you what, that will be a horrible day, if Hillary gets to put her judges in, right now we're tied."
-Donald Trump

 (Cartoon by David Horsey of the Los Angeles  Times.)

Granddad's Hands

I was getting out of the car this afternoon when I noticed this box on a bottom shelf of my husband's garage work bench and thought I would take a photo of it and do a blog post about it.

 The box was made by my husband's grandfather sometime in the 1920s. It is about 18 inches long, 5 1/2 inches wide and 2 1/2 inches tall. A half inch of the lid is made of some other darker wood and the bottom of the box seems to be made of the same material that is used for pegboards. Although the box shows age, the only damage to it is the gouge you can see on the right side of the lid. The box had been varnished and the varnish is now so old the box has a slightly rough surface. The label was handmade by my husband's grandfather and has the words WOOD CHISELS ASSORTED SIZES printed on it in pencil.  The printing also done by my husband's grandfather.


What does Bob use the box for now?

The same thing his grandfather did, as a box for chisels.

Is This The 2016 Or The 1952 Olympics?

If you read certain newspapers or listen to certain sports announcers, this year is the 1952 Olympics.

1. Chicago Tribune

2. NBC Sports

3. NBC, again

How Sunflowers Follow The Sun

"In a study published in the journal Science this week, researchers say they've found an answer: Sunflowers, like animals, have a circadian rhythm — an internal clock that can be set to the external world. During the day, this system sends messages to the eastern sides of their stems, telling those cells to grow slightly longer, which causes the sunflower to lean westward. At night, the message reverses, and the sunflowers tilt back toward the east."
-The Washington Post

Which is pretty cool if you, and by that I mean me, have ever wondered about it.

House Project

A while ago my husband and I found this bench in a thrift store and bought it. My belief that it had been made out of an old bed headboard and footboard was confirmed by a neighbor who is also a furniture maker. He believes the back of the bench was made from the headboard and the sides were made from the bed footboard. He also said he thought the bench seat was made from another piece of wood.

We bought the bench to replace the old bench we had in the entryway to our house. That one was functional but only allowed one and a half people sit on it at the same time  and was not really big enough to hold everything we needed it to hold.

So we bought some new hardware and came up with this.

A whole lot nicer and more usable.

Books To The Ceiling

Books to the sky,
My pile of books is a mile high.
How I love them! How I need them!
I'll have a long beard by the time I read them.
-Arnold Lobel (Children's book author and illustrator.)

My reading pile right now.

Artistic Licence

I entered an art show this weekend. The theme was Frida Kahlo inspired art. Creating my work took more work than I thought and this I found out when I downloaded 53 photos from my camera. I could feel I had it right when I took the fifty-third image.

Frida Kahlo, "Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair"

Colleen Shannon,  "Selfie with Green Hair"