On the road again

There are boxes piling up in the hallway. This means one of our neighbors is about to take her art on the road.

I should have featured her much sooner: Meg Hannan, owner and artist of Fabric Jewels. She creates beautiful jewelry from rolled-up fabric. That's a simplistic description -- the process is much more involved than that. And the results are varied and stunning:

Aside from an inspiring, inspired, and very hard-working artist, Meg is also the "good spirit" of the school. That's my unofficial assessment. Her living space and studio are in the center of the main hallway, and she frequently moves between the two (each a full-sized classroom) (check out her studio here!), so she's in touch with residents from the north and south of her. (You'd laugh, since the school is not that large, but we really rarely see the people on the south end. We wave from afar, but that's mostly it.) If I don't run into Meg every other day or so, something is just missing.

Well, I'm about to miss her a bunch, as she's taking her wares on the road for art shows in Houston and San Francisco. Bye, Meg!! Bring home lots of cash and empty bins!

Lights!

At the risk of making our living room look like a skating rink... those golden pipes just beg to have strings of lights wrapped around them.

The overhead lights are much too bright and make a buzzing sound. We mostly leave them off, unless we're cleaning and need a reality check on just how much cat hair is covering the couch and rugs.

We've had the colored lights up for a while, but recently added our new light covers from Bella Luz. Bella Luz (a.k.a. Joline El Hai) had her studio in the school for years, but recently moved out. We scored some of her artwork, including these light covers, at her going-away sale.

Each one has a different image on each side -- and there are far too many to show here.

You'll have to check out her artwork on Bellaluz.com yourself!

Office organization

I recently made a big push and organized our office. You know those cubby shelves that everyone has from Ikea? Yeah, it was getting out of hand with clutter. I finally straightened it out. Even emptied out my inbox. But you know how that goes... within minutes, the inbox was full again.
But that item on top is easy. It just wants some petting, and done.

The Principal's Office

Confession: I keep wanting to blog more about our space. But very little of it is in a state that I feel comfortable taking a picture of and sharing publicly.

Oh, it's not a pigsty. It's ok. But you know, it's not *neat.* Cat toys everywhere. Laundry piles, dirty and clean. Stuff. We have stuff. Our desk is shared by a laptop and a desktop, and all the accoutrements for each -- how attractive is that?

Well, one room passes muster, without too much prep: the bedroom. That's because we recently moved the dressers and a clothing rack into our dressing room, which is now too messy to take a picture of... ha! But the bedroom (formerly the actual principal's office) is *just* a bedroom, which is great.

I painted the room "sailor's eye" blue when we moved in. The heating pipes (on the left) had been painted gold by a previous resident, which works great with the blue. Striped curtains from Ikea, with gold chains from... Home Depot? Rusty rigged up a kitty-proof screen for one of the windows, which is held in place by some intensely strong magnets.

Perhaps someday we'll have lovely bedside cubbies made by Rusty, but now it's cheapo canvas bins. At least they match. :-)

Through the window you can see evidence of our light challenge: We face east, and trees and shrubs allow for minimal daylight to come in directly. (These pictures were taking in the early evening of a sunny day, and I had to use flash.) But it also gives us a lot of privacy, which we love.

We wrapped white string lights around the gold pipes, which looks lovely at night, and the paper lamp is so much better than the school-issue overheads.

And it seems like every bedroom has to have its requisite naked girl art, so this is the new home of my Maxfield Parrish print that I've had since college.

Overall, a very calm bedroom, until the ceiling tiles fall down at night (I think this happened to Rusty once). Just another reminder that this is no ordinary living space.

Summertime!

My, but summer is reluctant this year in Seattle!

But it's here nonetheless. Suddenly we have to think about watering our little garden. Hm, and the hose is where...? Too far away. The best solution would be to attach one to the kitchen sink and hoist it through the livingroom window... or walk with a bucket back and forth and back and forth. Hm. Well, there may or may not be vegetables this year!

Catching up on other news: We've done some rearranging. Remember my agony about not having a closet? I had a clothes rack in the bedroom, as well as two dressers, which made the bedroom kind of cramped and blocked the door into the hallway. I had two racks in the "back corner room" -- remember this room?
We'd never really fully organized or designated it for anything, but since it's adjoining the music studio, we made it the office, and moved the piano in there. Of course the office is still too messy to post a real photo, but here's a snapshot taken from the desk:
Hi, Gavin! Oh, what's that you're sitting on?


A filing cabinet made by Rusty. Wow!

The previous office (formerly the conference room) is now the "dressing room." Yay! Not only a closet, but a whole room just for clothes. We moved the dressers in there too, so now our bedroom is so much more spacious and relaxed -- no clutter. Just a bed. Nice.

We've been here just over a year now! We couldn't be happier. The music studio is being put to good use with rehearsals once or twice a week, our neighbors are all terrific (and wonderful cat sitters when we're out of town), and the courtyard is so great on warm summer evenings. Happy anniversary to us!

Spring

Spring is here, so the cellophane-panels that helped insulate our rooms are down and in storage.

So it's nothing but single-pane windows between us and nature. And it still gets cold sometimes. Thank goodness for fleece and purring lap warmers....

Fetching kitty

Forgive the sideways view... This is the best video yet of evidence that Gavin loves to play fetch. Even right-side up.

Gardening

Residents at the school have the option of gardening in the grounds that are near their classroom/studio. For Rusty and me this has been on the back burner -- there are so many other projects to do, and with school and work and performing, we can barely keep up with the laundry. But one sunny weekend afternoon recently had us strolling over to the tiered garden beds behind our kitchen. We just started yanking some weeds...
... and before you know it, we'd cleared the whole bed.
I went off to a baby shower, and when I returned, behold, there was a garden!
Rusty planted strawberries, various herbs, salad greens, and I think some lavender. So fun!

In the meantime, the cats are still cute as can be. When they're not being little monsters.

Bread!

Remember that stove we paid so dearly to have put in?

Brief recap: Stove left by previous tenants very small; we trade for larger stove with door that doesn't close; we pay for electrical 220V line.

Rusty figured out the door problem: magnets! So simple! And so much easier to deal with than wedging a chair under the door handle any time we're baking.

So baking has been picking up again, and Rusty continues to turn out amazing artisan bread loaves. It's this simple recipe where he has a starter in the fridge, takes it out whenever he wants to make something, doesn't knead it, just lets it rise for an hour or so, then bake, and yummmm!

Fabulous Neighbors

I've been meaning to highlight some of the other residents in our little school, and here's a good reason to get started: Lance and Trixie, whose home and business is in the former Kindergarten area of the school, just got featured as one of the top five coolest booths at the Seattle Wedding Show. What do they do? They run a pin-up photography studio. Lance is an accomplished photographer, and Trixie is a burlesque instructor, now acting as Lance's stylist. Their home doubles as the backdrop for their photos, which are all mid-century retro style. (Very appropriate, since the school was built in the 1950s.) It's an incredible place. And the wardrobe, the wardrobe...! Trixie has an amazingly fun closet. Check out their work at Old School Pinups.

Congrats on the good publicity, neighbors!