come to the table ...

i realized the other day that i had sort of forgotten about this blog. a lot has transpired since the last time i wrote -- too much to even begin to tell you. but i'll start with my latest "project". now you have to understand that i love old things. i have a lot of antique furniture pieces in my tiny little apartment. some my parents refinished, some i refinished. my grandmother's red ruby is mostly packed away but is about to make an appearance -- as is my great grandmother's blue willow. and mostly this need to unpack these treasures came from an item i brought back from PA in december.

my daughter and i made a trip after christmas to see my dad and while i was there we visited a couple of antique stores. i fell in love with a cute little enamel hoosier table (which is a marriage and if you're not familiar with what a marriage is ... ask and i'll explain), but since i have no room for a hoosier cabinet and very little counter space to roll out dough, a hoosier table is the perfect happy medium for my little place.

so i bought the table (a steal at less than $65 after a discount and with sales tax added in). we brought it home (it fit perfectly in my tiny little honda fit with all our luggage packed around it).

at this point, i got it into my head that i wanted hoosier chairs (which we had had in my house growing up -- why didn't they hold on to them???) to go with the table. i would refinish and paint them white and my daughter the artist could reproduce the design from the table on the chairs. thus, began the quest to find the chairs.

now what you have to know is that if i weren't looking for these specific chairs -- i would have found them in a heartbeat. but because i was looking for them i either couldn't find them or would stumble upon some antique place that had "just sold a couple of those chairs a few days ago". it was painful. but i finally found four chairs that were similar but not identical enough to just give me that quirky look i wanted.

two of the chairs were easily sanded and painted (i say easily, but really, it was a tedious and back breaking job) because they were in natural finish. i actually hated painting the second one because when i had sanded it i discovered that the spindles were tiger maple. but i charged on because i had already painted one of them white.

unfortunately, the last two chairs (one painted an awful yellow -- and that was probably the 5th or 6th coat of paint) and one that was partially stripped and ugly as sin -- have proved to be my undoing. the yellow one has a structural issue that will render it unusable -- so it's probably going in the trash, unless i can figure out a way to fix it without paying a ton of money ... (and since none of these chairs cost me more than about $10-$15 each it wouldn't be worth it to spend a lot to fix one). and the partially stripped one, well, let's just say that the stripper that was recommended to me (spray) didn't work very well and it's still partially stripped. it may be that it never gets completed.

however, in the meantime, i have two beautiful white chairs awaiting my daughter's return from art college in order to paint the design on them. i'm excited to unpack my grandmother's red ruby and great grandmother's blue willow, set my table and have my children together for dinner at my "new to me" hoosier table and chairs.

spools of thread ....

i have this antique coats and clarks spool cabinet that had been my mom's. its made from oak, consisting of two drawers, and has coats o.n.t. and spool cotton painted in black over what appears to be gold leafing on the two drawers -- sort of like the one in the photo. one of the drawers has a little square wooden tray and the other drawer has wooden dividers so that the spools of thread can be organized neatly. its really a neat little cabinet and i've used it for years, especially when i had my sewing business.

the problem with this cabinet is that the drawer with the dividers is really too small for today's spools of thread, unless u buy the guttermann thread -- of which i only have a few. you see, in the days when this cabinet was made, thread came on small wooden spools. i have a few of them from an old sewing box my grandma had -- and they fit quite nicely in the drawer. but the ones of today are huge and don't fit at all. so i ended up putting many of my spools into one of those plastic shoe box containers -- which, if u know anything about sewing and thread and fabric, is not good for them -- but that's where they are. and while cleaning out the kitchen to have them rip apart my wall -- i found that box of thread under the cedar hope chest of my mom's. i guess i had forgotten where i put it.

a couple of weeks ago i was looking for a particular color of thread to fix something and i couldn't find what i was looking for and yet, i knew that i had at one time owned that color of thread. it was frustrating. but this is what happens when u live in a tiny apartment and come to it complete with all ur belongings, and some belongings of those who have come and gone before u. its just the nature of the beast. u don't have room for everything, yet u have a hard time parting with things and so u find whatever nook or cranny where it will fit that u think u might remember where it is when u need it. which, of course, doesn't happen. and thus it was with the thread when i needed it.

but back to the thread cabinet. i got to thinking about the fact that if the spools of thread of today were the same size as the ones of yesterday that i wouldn't have had an issue finding the color i wanted because i would have known exactly where it was in the first place. so i'm blaming the thread companies. i mean truly -- who needs that much of one color of thread. 250 or 300 yards of it. even if ur sewing a complete garment u probably won't use all of it. then ur stuck with this huge spool with a little thread on it and u don't want to throw it out because what if u get a rip in the thing u just created and need to fix it?

so now u have this dilemma about where to store this huge spool of thread and granted, not everybody has a spool cabinet like i do, and they will resort to putting the spool somewhere where they hope they will be able to find it (like i did), when they need it.

so when did the need for larger spools of thread come into play. i mean truly, think about the size of the garments that ladies used to wear -- yards and yards and yards of fabric and intricately sewn bodices and sleeves with delicate lace or elaborate beads attached to them -- all needing to be sewn on by hand. surely they must have gone through a lot of spools of thread for one garment when u consider the size of the spools. as dresses got shorter and less intricate handwork was involved, surely the size of the spool of thread should have gotten smaller -- not larger.

i don't have an answer for this. i haven't researched it enough to know the answer. i just find it frustrating that my lovely antique oak spool cabinet is practically going to waste because the drawer that is meant to house my spools, doesn't accommodate the size of today's spools...