The bathroom remodel

3 years ago, when we bought this house, we knew the master bath needed to be remodeled.  It was awful, 4 X 8 feet with a tiny shower, a child-sized toilet and a sink that was pushed into a corner where the door swung open.  The medicine cabinet was... scary, as was the space in the cabinet beneath the sink... which was just a façade for the fact that no one had ever built a real cabinet down there.  It was creepy and uncomfortable.  Luckily, the adjacent master bedroom had another 9 feet worth of space we could push into, making it an 8 by 13 ft bath when we could remodel.

It took us 3 years to save up for the remodel. 

But by the time we saved up, we lost steam in doing our own home improvements.  So we talked to contractors.  Sadly, the best price we could get for the full re-do was $37,000... WAY more than we wanted to pay (and more than we had saved up), and there would be nothing special about the bathroom.  The tile would be ceramic (we wanted glass, or marble, something DIFFERENT)... the tub would be ordinary, no jets.  The sinks and cabinets would be from stock, and the countertop would be ... some kind of solid surface, at least they weren't pricing out for formica! 

So we had no choice.  Take on the task of designing and sourcing the materials, and hire professionals to do the work that we didn't want to do.  We couldn't find a decent tiler who would do the glass tile shower surround that we wanted, so... I have a tile saw, so I thought we could do it.  And as long as we were at it, we might as well do the floor for ourselves. 

As time arrived to do it, the plumber and electricians were finished with their preliminary work, and the carpenter had finished out the walls and sub-flooring... I got cold feet.  Cutting GLASS requires a special wet saw blade.  The USUAL wet saw blade would cause chipping and shattering and shards of glass flying as I tried to cut... at least that was the story.  I ordered a medium-priced (about $25) glass wet saw blade and hoped for the best. 

We started with the floor and tub surround, which were to be marble.  Our neighbors thought we'd never finish.  I think we cut and placed maybe 4-5 tiles a night (I'm exaggerating, but it FELT that slow).  It took 4 weeks, considering that we were working evenings and weekends, working around weekends spent visiting my Dad and seeing my stepson's college graduation, and every other special event that we could use as an excuse to push the work aside. 

Eventually, we got around to doing the glass work.  We changed the sawblade and went at it.  It was a TON easier than I thought.  3 evenings and one weekend to finish up... And I have A FEW tips to help anyone stop the shattering/cracking that glass tile is so notorious for... besides getting the right sawblade... go slow!  So here it is, freshly grouted:  (more tips after the photo!

OK, now for a few more tips... when you're using a circular sawblade, the cut comes into your tile in a slanted fashion.  To make a clean edge that is at a right angle to the tile surface, CAREFULLY hold the tile in two hands, pull the sawblade up and lock it into the UP position.  Then turn it on, wait till the water starts running, and ease your slanted edge up to the blade at a right angle.  Keep your fingers away from the spot you're working and DON"T PUSH.  If you push, you're going too fast, it might crack/shatter, and worse, you might find yourself pushing your own hands in the direction of the whirling blade!  NOT GOOD.  So just gently ease the tile up next to the blade, as if you're using the edge of the blade to polish it.  The glass in that awkward angle will be shaved away. 

We were getting a glass shower surround.  The glass people said they will not drill through the glass, that we would have to remove the glass tiles and somehow replace them around the surround's anchors.  THAT wouldn't work for us.  So we decided to run a "frame" of marble from the floor & tub surround, up the walls to act as a stable anchor for the surround installers to drill through.  The issue was that ... same problem as always... glass tile shatters.  The surround installers have had enough experience with this that they know it's nearly impossible to properly drill a hole through a glass tile to install the surround.  They let you figure out the solution to the problem, whether it's to remove the tile and have them install without it, then replace the tile when they're finished, or to use an opaque ceramic tile in the location of their anchors rather than the glass tile in the rest of the surround, OR... get creative, like we did.  And here is the really important part... we hired a good subcontractor who knew what they were doing, to measure, manufacture and install the shower surround.  For the price we paid, we were smart to listen to their expertise.  We could beg and whine and convince them to install it through the glass tile (we'd have to sign a waiver of liability for damage to the tile before they'd do it), but we'd be missing the most important part of hiring someone who is good at their job... taking their advice.  Instead, we took their advice, got creative, and ended up with what I think is a nicer and more interesting look... a finished edge for our glass tile shower stall. 

The accent tile we chose ended up being a smart choice.  That was by accident.  We had several choices, some were a combination of different materials, and some were all glass.  I liked the combination, because it was more interesting, but the all glass choice had colors that were more exactly matching the rest of the tile... We made a choice and had it delivered, but because it had taken so long to finish the floor, as we approached the accent part of the shower stall, I had forgotten what we chose.  After working with the glass sawblade for a while, I realized I could not cut through the accent tile that was made of different materials... both glass and marble... with my special glass cutting blade.  For the low price, it came with a warning never to use it to cut anything other than glass or else you'd ruin the surface for the glass cutting task, a multi-use glass sawblade would have been 4 times the price!  When we got them out of the packaging, I was relieved, we had chosen the mosaic that was ALL glass tiles (less interesting, but a better match for the color).  By lucky accident, I could accomplish the task of cutting the tiny little edges of the mosaic pieces without switching saw blades back & forth for each edge.  GREAT!  It made the job a TON faster. 

As I type this, the surround guys are in the bathroom, drilling through my marble frame.  I HOPE our creative solution works.  I guess I'll find out later!  Wish us luck.

Single serving, oatmeal-free apple crisp

We are foster parents.  The house can go from 2 adults to 2 adults & 2 kids before you can say "boo", and with new children in the house, you don't know if they go bananas when they eat sweets or not, so this fruit-based dessert is perfect, and the recipe can be altered to suit how many people are coming to dinner.  The kids can help make it and they love that... plus they love how easy it is to make a fancy dessert.  And every ingredient is a staple in our house.   We've ALWAYS got apples in the fruit bowl, butter in the freezer, brown sugar & flour in the pantry, and cinnamon in the spice cabinet.  It's a no-brainer... a modification of my Grandma Lindquist's recipe. 


About one apple for 2 people (Granny Smith apples are GREAT for this).  For one apple, get 2 ramekins... About 2 tablespoons of unsalted butter.  About 1/4 cup of brown sugar and 1/4 cup of flour.  Cinnamon.  A pinch of salt.

Your choice, pecans, Walnuts, raisins, craisins. 

Peel, core & slice the apple.  Put the apples in individual ramekins.  sprinkle cinnamon on them & toss.  If you're using raising, walnuts, craisins or pecans, put about a tablespoonful in each ramekin.  Mash the rest of the ingredients together with a fork, add more cinnamon (we LOVE spice in this household), divide & crumble over each of the two ramekins.

Cook at 350 degrees for a half hour. 

 

Notice that the one on the right looks different from the one on the left.  I just made these for Wayne & myself.  This recipe allows you to personalize each one.  He likes more pecans and less topping, I like more topping.  YUM!

My first quilt

25+ years ago, I was tired of sewing dresses & skirts, jumpers & other things for myself, and I wanted to do a quilt.  The cluttery look of a home full of homemade calico & ruffles all over everything, table-skirts and cutesy home made pillows with lace & ruffles... it was my grandma's aesthetic, not mine.  I wanted something more sleek & modern for my home, but I couldn't afford to BUY the modern, sleek, contemporary look, or rather, what I could afford of it, would be hopelessly cheap and low quality.  I needed a way to do it for myself.

Surely there as a way to DIY something that would not look calico, ruffled, shabby/country chic and old-fashioned... I thought a bedspread would be a good start. 

Remember, this was before the internet.  FInding a pattern required a trip to the library or bookstore.  And I knew of no quilting groups for younger women (as I was at the time).  I just knew I wanted something different from the old-fashioned, Americana type quilt that would be at home in a country cozy house.  I wanted urban... or beachy... not farmhouse.  So I stumbled upon the tumbling blocks pattern and realized that it could be altered to give a little modern twist.  Use some brighter fabrics.  In this case, a range from cobalt, to teal to purple...

I honestly don't remember how I did the quilt top.  People I've met recently ask if I had trouble with all the Y seams... apparently, that's not something that quilters look forward to... I don't remember it being a big problem for me.  The problem was putting it together into a useful object.  So I put it aside.

And then, about 25 years later, my Mom died.  My Dad spent a few lonely years, and I really, really needed to do something special for him for his next birthday.  So last year in late August, I pulled the old quilt top out.  It did not have a border, just a bunch of diamond shapes sticking out... in some areas, it was so skee-jawed (mom's term, I think the modern quilting term would be "wonky"), that I didn't think it could be made into a square/rectangular quilt shape.  But I powered through it.  I pieced a few yards of dark blue, and spray-based it to a fluffy-lofted filling, and then spray basted the top to it.  It had (and still has) giant folds and wrinkles in it.  But that was the only way to get it semi-straight.  I rolled the diamond sides over to the back side, so if you look at the back, it's got a strange, rolled hem with a pattern to it... well, "pattern" would be a misnomer... variegated colors.  I didn't cut off any diamond tips, just folded them under.  Probably a mistake, but it made for a kind of undulating and VERY home-made-y finish to it.  Then I stitched in the ditch. 

With my home sewing machine, this was a challenge... a fluffy lofted quilt pushing through the normal sized arm... SOOOO... I chose to start in kind of a spiral, stitching all the ditches that were outside and easy to reach, turning as I found a corner...

That did pretty good.  It got me through about 1/3 of the quilt on each side, and a little from the top & bottom... the middle 1/3 of the quilt was the only part that was tough to quilt.  But Dad's October 6th, 85th birthday was looming and I had a deadline.  On October 3, 2012, I finished the quilt! 

more than 25 years in the making.  I started it just after graduate school, between 1983 and 1985... and now it was done.

My Dad, who was has become my idea of the best type of "cool", now has it.  He's slowed down, so he needs the extra warmth.  But the modern style fits his style.  Although he grew up in a very rural community and had not a lot of family money, he worked hard and got himself through medical school.  He went to Korea at about the time period referenced in M*A*S*H, and worked in an Evac unit.  He returned to Ft. Meade and met my mother, who was working as head of the secretarial pool in the Department of the Navy at the Pentagon (the part of the pentagon that was victim of the 9-11 attacks 40+ years after she left it).  They married and moved to live in New York.  Mom worked for the CIA and Dad was a resident in pathology at the hospital across the street.  They lived in a very urban way, living in a building that everyone who was there knew was condemned, and as soon as all the residents could be ousted, it would be demolished.  They were the picture of the first "yuppies"... hosting martini parties and living the best young-adult life available to a dual income professional couple.  When they had me, they chose the most modern way of child-birth, the natural method... Dad, the newly minted pathologist working in a research hospital, was aware of all the newest research, and he decided that all the epidurals and such were probably not a good idea. 

After I arrived, they moved to "the country", a gated community in Rockaway beach.  We lived on the beach across from our church.  I probably made sandcastles with some of the boys who, 40 years later, were victim of the 9-11 attacks on the WTC.  That very Catholic, very Irish neighborhood was hard hit, considering the number of them who had chosen careers in law enforcement and firefighting.  But 50 years ago, before our country lost it's innocence, my Daddy was still a smoker.  Mom, with her black hair and bright blue eyes looked like a young Liz Taylor... and Dad looked like... well, there's one photo of him leaning against his car at the beach.  I'm playing in the sand at his feet, and he has a cigarette pack rolled up in his t-shirt.  He looked like the picture of James Dean, a Rebel without a cause.... the ultimate of "cool".  Given that they maintained their own moral compasses and did not do the heavy drinking, drugging, and cheating that the hipster generation might have done, they really were "cool".  Doing the part of the hip stuff that we look at old movies and long for... the super-cool martini parties, the fondue parties, etc... but missing the part of that generation's behavior that caused many of them to get old before their times.

These days, he feels cold more often than he exudes cool... so the quilt is a good fit. 

I held it in the back of my mind that this quilt was not good enough for him, but better to give it than to hold it back and wait.  We don't have time to wait, these days.  But I still worried.  And then the miracle of modern technology came to my rescue.  I was browsing and found a quilter's guild.  Actually, I found LOTS of quilters' guilds.  So I found one that fit my schedule and went, and then joined.  And I talked to people, heard their stories, saw how perfect their quilts were, and asked some questions... And I explained how intensely IMPERFECT this first quilt was.  And they helped me let go of it.  THe imperfections...

I guess the quilters who finish their projects are the ones who don't get mired in worry about the imperfections.  Maybe I'll tell that to my artistic niece, who seems to have a hard time finishing her projects... that finishing it is more important than perfecting it.  What a great lesson to learn.... 

... lesson learned... 25+ years later

my first art quilt: The secret heart of my niece

OK, it's time to start posting about my projects.  The most recently finished was one for my niece.  She's a recent immigrant from Thailand.  And at age 16, having been taken from her friends and brought to this country where she's not so comfortable with the language, she's not too happy.  She's homesick, and she wants her freedom. 

She is also an artist, which at age 16, means to her that she feels deep, artistic thoughts.  She feels very dark, and feels like she has to keep her feelings inside.  She goes to school and smiles, but there are things she's not too happy about.  Sometimes, she just wants to hide, or have everything go back to the way it was.  But it can't be, so she just feels... sad.

And she's also got everything else about being a mid-year teen going on.  So it's tough. 

I wanted to do something for her to help her understand how to open herself up to this experience, how it could end up being a great thing for her if she lets it be... so I thought of this quilt I once saw... it was an artistic quilt, where flaps had been sliced into the quilt so that it flapped outside of the frame.  It was pretty cool, and it would work for what I wanted.

I asked her for her favorite colors... the answer:  Grey, blue, orange... those colors work REALLY well for what I wanted to do. 

I asked my brother to please spell some words for me in Thai characters:  Niece, Pretty, Smart, Artistic, and Loving.  He sent them to me in a word document, so I was able to enlarge them to see them pretty well.

I essentially made 6 quilts.  Five of them have progressively smaller windows/flaps.  The top quilt, when all the windows are closed, is dark gray.  The bottom quilt, when all the windows are open, is bright orange.  In the middle, are various shades of blue.  darker as they get closer to the orange, so it would pop out. 

The orange window opened to a heart quilted into the fabric.  I followed the line around and allowed it to get progressively less heart-like, until by the time it hit the uppermost quilt, it was just an oval over the top of it. 

Each window... when closed, at the bottom of the window, has a word... the top quilt's word is "niece".  The more important words come as you start opening up the layers.  You can barely read it, because it's my nieces "SECRET" heart, not her OPEN heart, you know?  It's our secret, that we know it's there (shhhh, only those who are in the know, know).  On the inside of the window, only legible when you open it up, is the quilted word, the English translation of the Thai word on the outside of that same window.  These are printed at the bottom of the window so that when all the flaps are open, you can see all of the English words, one on top of the other.  And when you finally open all of the windows for my niece, you see her beautiful, bright heart.

It's made to hang, and it's made to generally keep the windows open all the time...

Two days before I was scheduled to drive to see her and I was going to bring this to her, she was frustrated about something and posted on her facebook page, "I never SAID I was PERFECT!!!"  Perfect, 16 year old frustration, right?  Well, this was perfect for me, because this little quilt was my first on this style, and it's WAY not perfect.  The words were tough to write, my first attempt at that, and the laywers were each made with a single piece of cloth as the topper... with the window made as a buttonhole stitch through that quilt, and then opened up just the way a buttonhole would open.  I didn't want to bind those edges, I wanted them to fall easily rather than stiffly, and I did not want a contrast in the closed window.  I wanted the most minimal line to indicate it opening, and a buttonhole stitch seemed the best way.  But buttonholes have little threads that you don't see when it's on the button.  the edging doesn't necessarily make a clean cut.  And my measurements were WAY from perfect... I made some adjustments to the size of the windows as I went along, so that the lowest window, the heart, would be big enough.  And adjusting the holes as I went meant the slivers of fabric you'd see of each later (other than the window) would be not as uniform as they could have been.  This whole quilt is a little wonky. 

It's not perfect.  But, as I answered to my niece on the night that she posted that frustrated cry... "sometimes the most beautiful things are not perfect.  it's the imperfections that make them beautiful."

Thank God for that, right?