Hide My Heart Ⅰ

I finished three purses for Valentine's day.  The theme is "Hidden Heart". This purse is one of them. Well, in this one the hearts are not really well hidden (;p), though. The long chain handle allows you to use this as a shoulder bag or a cross-body purse. I combined felt applique, beads and wool stitches together on a wool fabric which has some gold sparkles in it.

This bag is available to purchase this month at the local vintage boutique Junk Evolution in East Bank, South Bend.
Thank you for visiting. Please have a nice weekend. Happy bag making!!

I think, we are crazy. / School corp auction

Saturday, there was a huge auction in the town which is for selling public schools' old furniture and equipments. My husband and I were pretty much excited when we got to the warehouse where the auction took place. It was HUGE. There are so many cool stuff that would be called "Vintage" on the market. If you are not interested in admiring old and used things, it would look like tons of refuses to you. To some people, including us, it looks like a mountain of treasures. There were so many junk lovers at the auction as you can see in the photo below.

Many things are nostalgic to us since we spent school days in early 70's through 80's. Some of items in the auction are not familiar to me (I graduated all schools in Japan) but my husband knows almost everything. Those goods reminded us lots of good and bad memories in our schooldays.

Colorful steel lockers. I love to have some. If I had a space to place them!

We wanted a piano for Nina. But we were too slow to bid it off. You need some skills to get what you want at auctions. My goodness, pianos were bid off at $20 each!

Since it was a school auction, there were lots of sewing machines. I guess I saw at least 40 machines in the section. My eyes got caught by these JANOME machines. They looked relatively new. Pretty sure they are newer than my old Singer machine. I hoped there were some dress forms but there were none of them. A dress form is on top of my wish list for many years. Well, I'll wait for a dress makers' auction being held in the town someday ;-p)

A couple hundreds of class room chairs. Some of them look so mid-century. Love the colors and style.

Look at this incredible printers table! Quality!

I really wanted some old stools. But I had to give it up because they were sold in bulk. I wanted a couple. So I didn't get any.

Doors. Heavy solid doors.

The poster on a steel locker. This one must have been in a workshop.

You must been wondering about the title of this post "I think, we are crazy." Why do I think we are crazy? The answer is in this photo. I mentioned it before that I didn't get any stools because of they were sold in bulk. And later.......maybe about one hour later......

We purchased 22 wooden (with vinyl back) old school chairs! Yes TWENTY TWO of them! We just couldn't resist getting them. I love the colors of the vinyl backs. The vinyl covers are stuck in the back with metal studs. They are all in pretty good condition. If we give some good maintenance to them, they would shine as stylish vintage accessories.

We both have lived in Tokyo for many years. There were cool vintage furniture stores along the avenue close to our apartment. These chairs would attract customers of those stores' so much. I can't wait to have some of them in my house. (We already have so many chairs in the house, though....) We carried all of them to our truck in drizzling rain. We don't have room to store them in our garage right now. So we took the chairs to the garage of a house we are renting.

Do you agree that we are a crazy couple? No? OK, there is a continuance.

We got these EIGHT SEWING MACHINES (and one steel cart), too! This time, I can see many of your jaws are dropped in my mind. OK, I have been wanting a spare machine which I can attach a low shank darning foot (and some other presser feet). Then we found these quality Janome machines in bulk. And they were SO INEXPENSIVE! It comes with the cart which I think it will be nice to have for storing my products in my workroom (I just finished re-organizing my studio). Is that a good reason for my purchase? Well, after we bad off the machines, there came a lady who wanted three of them so we sold three to her. And a while later she was still wavering if she wants a couple more so I gave her two for free. Because they looked imperfect and the maker was not what I wanted. (Of course in assent. ) Finally I got three machines and a cart, (watch your jaw, Ladies!) It was $25 TOTAL.

This is one of the machines I got. Unfortunately One of them has a problem feeding fabric correctly. But it seems simple to repair if you had a good repair shop. I am glad we got three. We hope another one to be a gift to someone after some maintenance.

My husband just came home from work five minutes ago. And he went to the garage where we store the 22 old chairs to get some of them. He said he is going to start refinishing them from today! He seemed happy when he said that to me. I think refinishing furniture is one of  his few hobbies. I will update about refinishing chairs and my "new" old sewing machines.

Thank you so much for reading such a long post! I am glad that you made it to the end. I hope you enjoyed the story. If not, look forward to the next post. I promise I will write about sewing :-D

A Mid-Century modern dinning set reborn

I have been desperate for a new dining table which is larger than one we have. Well, it doesn't have to be literally "new". We wanted something fits well in our Mid-Century built house. There is nothing in our favorite style in furniture stores in town. Vintage tables are too expensive for our budget. So I have waited patiently for months and months. Then, finally! I found it. It was waiting for me at a yard sale on the way to my doctors office.

At a glance, I found that this dinning set is ideal for our dining room. The style is very Mid-Century, and it even looked like some kinds of Danish modern design (Actually it wasn't Danish, but was surely a Mid-Century product). When I sew that the price at the yard sale was $50. I promptly called my husband Tim and asked him to stop by the sale on the way home from work. When we were back at the sale, Tim asked discount (of course!) and it went down to a half price!!

We found out that the dinning set is a product of Kroehler. Kroehler was a furniture maker in Chicago from early 20th century to 70's. They were the second largest furniture seller in the US. I don't know about them so much, but it seems they produced a lot of cool furniture.

Anyway, the surface of the table was so ugly. It has gotten lots of paint spots and sticky stains from a old vinyl table cloth. But we were sure that it will be beautiful after elaborate sanding.

We worked very hard together sanding the surface for a couple hours. The stain from a table cloth was pretty tough to get lid of.

Finished sanding! Hope you can see the beautiful wood grain!

After that we put an organic oil stain. One coat a day. We repeated that five times. Which means it took five days to finish. Then it looks like this! Shiny, haah? I am so so happy with the result of our patience.

This is the finished product. The table has three leaves.  So when it gets expanded ten people easily can fit in. How wonderful it is! The one we used to have could barely hold six people. Now I can invite friends over to tea or dinner without worrying about the seating arrangement.

We are using the table like this with six seating. It feels much more spacious on the table than before. For me, our dinning table is not only for having meals. On the table, I do embroidery, knit, crochet, draw designs and so on. Nina does her homework there, Tim and I sometimes work on PC on the dinning table as well. So this place is pretty much important for me and I am so happy that now I have an ideal table and it is beautifully finished by US!

Oooops! There are five chairs left still needing help! Well, they are still on work in progress. I detached seats and cleaned wood. I have been looking for a good fabric to re-upholster these. But there's no luck so far.

When this project is finished, I will share it with you here. Stay tuned, and I hope you all have a great weekend! Thank you for reading.

Update

We have been so busy these weeks. That made me slow to update my blog. We had a very big event last weekend. The event meant a lot for us and was pretty much emotional too. I will write it down here about that event when I am ready to handle it. So I am going to update about general life around myself today. I cannot believe it is October already. But it is October. The busy holiday season is just starting.

We went to another apple orchard for our second apple picking. My kitchen is filled with a lot of apples again. We got several different kinds of apples. This time we had Johnathan, Mutsu, Empire, Red and Golden Delicious.

 

Last time I baked an Irish apple cake from my favorite recipe book I brought from Japan. This time I baked  two apple pies from the same book. The book is featuring the English sweets' recipes written by a Japanese woman who has lived in England for long time. In Japan, all purpose flour is not common at all. I don't know what people use in England, though the recipe instructs using cake flours for everything. for the first pie I used cake flour and it tasted just right. Then the second one I ran out of cake flour so I used all purpose. It didn't turn right. The crust was too hard (my husband liked it though). I still have plenty of apples. There are many enough for making four more apple pies. Well, I think this is a good opportunity for me to learn baking apple pies and build up my own family recipe.

I started crocheting. It is going to be a large market tote or something. The cool weather always makes me feel like crocheting and knitting. I wish I had more time to play with yarns. If I had two more free hours everyday, I would make scarves or hats for all the family members for Christmas gifts.

In this country, I don't see the custom that people admire the taste of seasons from wild plants growing in the corner of your back yard or on the shoulder of the streets. (I am sure there are many people love wild flowers in the nature in America :)) Many Japanese like to enjoy looking at some plants in the nature which are regarded as weeds. In Ikebana (Japanese flower arrangement ) and Sadou ( Tea ceremony ), those kinds of plants are cherished very much.

 I got this weed from my backyard. This is called "Yama-gobou" in Japanese. And I just found it is "Pokeweed Inkberry" in English. In this season the berries get dark purple.Its beautiful. I love this plant. Sadly my husband thinks of them as weeds. So most of them were cleaned out in the Summer. But they are obstinate! That is the ground of they are regarded as weeds! I am glad that I still am able to see the berries in my yard.

And I show you my recent finds from antique mall.

A crockery of the dairy company in Wisconsin. I often see this company's pottery around here.

And a children's book about the life of 1960's.

We like Mid-century style homes. Our home is build in 60's and we are collecting furniture and knickknacks from that age. The reason I bought this book is not only it was our taste. The stamp on the first page says 1964. That is our (my and my husband's) birth year!

The pictures in the book are so pretty and it is fun to imagine  how my husband and my In-lows lived in those days in this country. I am sure that Japanese people in that age were eager for living like these American people in the book.

 

I hope you enjoy the cooler weather in your place too!