Outside the Frame

I want to start a small but somewhat meaningful revolution.  I want us to stop being embarrassed by lived in space. We all do it, ya know, crop the mess out of our photos. And by mess, I mean the actual mess and clutter of living. And often by the vary nature of our hobbies, we sewcialists have more of it than many. Projects in progress and it looks like a tornado hit the place.

Yeah, right.

I personally have always been somewhat embarrassed by the not-pristine nature of my house. Its rather small and we have three adults, two kids, four cats, and various family and friends that stop by on a regular basis. I use my living room to sort clothes and my love seat to store the clean ones. Now that the kids are learning to fold and put away their own clothes that pile isn't nearly so bad. But this insecurity is something that is fed to us through culture and media.

That's what I'm talkin' about!

Someone I know who got divorced had a mother-in-law that told her "If you'd kept a better house, he wouldn't have cheated on you".  Which just totally flabbergasted me. If you have enough money to pay a house cleaning regularly, or have servants, or whatever, then I can see having a pristine house. Or maybe you are never home? Or never have any fun? I don't know. But the fact that we all do our best to put forth the best possible image of that  pristine house of, in this group of creatives, is probably much of an illusion. Much like the illusion that parenthood is all rainbows and kittens when that's total B.S. Most days is cleaning up bodily fluids, crisis intervention, and bananas getting stuck in the Kliptch speakers.

So all these thoughts running around in my head I though it would be fun to start a hashtag on twitter #sewdontclean and challenge other sewcialists to share their daily mess, the ones we don't normally show in our garment photos.  The following are all the ones that participated.  And I challenge everyone to not feel so bad about a little chaos.

spot the mallet

Please ignore the vacuum, I didn't mean it, honest!

See? We're all just human. What say you? Share your mess too! Just use the hashtag #sewdontclean

Why Cleaning Saves Money

So, as I said a little earlier I'm trying to get the house in better shape for the New Year. Its my goal to have things Ship Shape by January 6th. I stayed up late (for me, I work overnights, remember?) and made the trek down to Ikea for storage solutions (and got a reading chair for the bedroom), with the hubby's help.

In the process of "out with the old" I was cleaning out the closet under the stairs.  Its amazing how much junk accumulates there over the years. One of the things I found was an old film SLR that a friend of mine gave during one of her episodes of cleaning too.  Unfortunately, it needs work done and the lenses didn't work on my DSLR. However, I discovered it has a flash attachment that I can use on my DSLR. If you've been following me for a while you know I've been trying to improve my photography. Anyone serious about craft/sewing blogging knows this for a fact. Snug Bug went over that some time ago here.

So, I decided to compare it to the difference. I'm still working on my Sencha out of blue silk. I decided to do a bias binding on the neck instead of a facing. I'm doing a hand slip-stitch to finish off the back.  I took a photo using the standard one-directional flash and the newly re-discovered multi-directional flash.  See the difference, its kinda amazing. Of course, none of this will be very surprising to any of my hobby/professional photographers friends/acquaintances.

You can see where I have the binding pinned to death. That is the closest I've seen to what the blue looks like since I've tried to take photos of it. I'm stoked, really. This just saved me about $70 in equipment, which means I can go spend more on fabric. Right? Or shoes. Shoes are good too.

I was going to take photos of Simon in the Betsy Johnson pajama shirt but the poor thing is sick. He's pretty miserable at the moment. Aside from that, what does everyone else have "planned" for the New Year?