Millinery: Brown Felt from Paris

Paris France brown felt hat body, millinery design by Frances Walter Nelkin, modeled on a Thursday afternoon in Salt Lake City Utah.

Kellie rocks the full face veil.
Jill experiments with artistic photo editing...

The felt hat is trimmed in brown grosgrain belting with coppery multi-faceted scattered bead work, and a line trim of picot beading.

The veil is removable. It is held in place via two pins at the back of the hat.
Like who wouldn't want to wear the veil on the hat when it looks that great?

Answer: People who are afraid other people would look at them. They think blending in better.

I say: Blending in is BORE-ING!
Especially when looking confident in a retro style is so much more interesting!

Yes, Kellie did just happened to be wearing a vintage black silk skirt on Thursday when I asked her if she'd model again.

Just another day at the office.

(I think she could blow away the crowd at Fashion Week, don't you?)

(((help))))

The mood swings around here are pretty dramatic these days.
Being civil takes extra effort, and every ordinary function like making coffee or getting dressed takes some determined effort.
(Not a window in the house currently has a shred of drapery for privacy...)

The kitchen cabinets are in...but not the floor, or doors or counter tops or sink.

Every light switch and outlet is without a plate cover.
(And how did they decide to use EVERY possible switch color and style in one row?)

The kitchen appliances still grace the living room, with lawn chair, bar stool and $5 teak chair find at the thrift store.

Oddly, guests are still welcomed when they drop by. And they do...we are meeting the neighbors one by one.

(You can still see the kitchen's original color in this shot in the book case in the background.)

The office is painted...baseboards still to go.

And the floor will be sanded and refinished too.

Master bedroom color has been decided via sample flat coat painting of a peachy coral.
Now a "real" layer in eggshell finish will be done.
And of course the floors and baseboard work, outlet covers,closet clothes pole etc...need to be done too

It took some doing to find the pink I wanted that would still be acceptable by my hubbie.

Lots of tries...and a swing through blue as well.

Upstairs bath: Needs the floor tile, doors, sink, toilet, tiles, light fixture, and of course, baseboard paint.

Guestroom: Atmospheric blue is a winner here. It feels like being in a tree house in there.
Sand/finish floor, baseboard, plates, light diffuser...still to go.

Stairs to the basement. Recap the treads and center carpet? Money/time is all we need.

Bob at least is still laughing. He is a good sport, the cat litter box and cat food stink in the unventilated room is no fun.

He will stay until after the 220 moving boxes arrive and get unloaded into this room.

Meanwhile I will need to find closet space for the boxes already here.

Too bad the closets are all being worked on right now..

Not even going to try to make the only completed living space look good.
The table under the window is our coffee pot area. The cereal and cups/spoons are in the cold storage area at the other end of the room, the milk and OJ are upstairs and out in the refrigerator in the garage.
Just getting coffee, juice and cereal pulled together each morning is quite a journey.

My eventual sewing room. Outside they (former owners) merrily piled up dirt against the unsealed wall. Naturally damp seeped in, and the paint blistered off the wall. It will take a special fix..not just a once over easy with Spackle affair.

The bathroom has a frosted window...good to change in. Right now the shower drips, and the cats like to drink water from in there. The drips also splash on the tile floor. Grrr...

The laundry room which is now simple a large sink that B. put in so we could wash paint brushes and cups and spoons and so forth. A folding clothes drying rack holds anything that needs to dry.

Some day...it will be a cute room.

Some day.

Our 220 boxes arrive in 12 days.

(...help....)

I sure hope the contractor can pull all this stuff together before then and I can finish all the painting.

Boy do I ever sympathize with those folks who live in disaster areas long term.

And boy oh boy do I ever hope no one murders us in our sleep.

I would just die if the newspaper showed pictures of our house looking like this!

People would think we were crazy slobs or something.

Well, at least they would have the crazy part right.

Remodeling...renovation.

Crazy.

Just plain old crazy all the time.

Cocktails Anyone???

I have a dream...that once the 50's house is all pulled together, I can host a cocktail party there one evening.
You know the kind of cocktail party that I am talking about: one where the women all wear kicka** cocktail hats and everyone makes witty conversation over drinks.
(Non-alcoholic drinks would be made available for those who abstain from liquor, extra wittiness will be required from them however.)

For this event I see myself providing a nice selection of my cocktail hats to be worn by those who have never thought to acquire such a delightful item for themselves before.

In an effort to add a little reality to this vision, I recently added *yet another* such hat to my collection.

My usual model "Joan" is in storage right now, but real human person Kellie, our campus receptionist was game to model the hat for me.

Kellie is a treat to work with: she wears vintage designer fashions with such grace and confidence that most people just think that she has found fabulous modern items. She couldn't fool me though. You can't get that kind of style except in clothing from the past.
She's in her junior year at the University of Utah, and will become a commercial airline pilot.
Answer phones and taking messages is just a temporary gig...

The dark navy hat with the well known millinery label "Amy" has navy bead work that glow with rainbow irridescence and similar colored sequins that are wrapped with a bias silk strip is held on with two velvet covered side V shaped clips.

The veil is in perfect condition, and can be untied for full face coverage or just pushed back. Kellie found full face to be a bit claustrophobic. It is an option that takes some gutty determination to wear for long.

The Hat Diva sent me a link to see a vast collection of vintage hats...if this one hat leaves you wanting to see more, click here and here!

If it leaves you wanting to own one yourself, get moving to your local antique shop or ebay website.

They are out there, and I got this one for only $20!

(PS: I wore the hat just for fun at work for a moment. Put it on with a ski vest and slacks and turtleneck and headed down the hall to a full to the brim break room with probably 50 students roaming around. NO ONE even blinked an eye. And to think that people say they would feel self conscious in a hat!)

Ohhh too cute!

Another adorable ceiling light diffuser:

Bidding...crossing my fingers....

Baby Central

It seemed to me that years had gone by since anyone I knew had become pregnant.

Then suddenly, every time I turned around, someone else was talking morning sickness and due dates.
Right now wife of the guy in the next office is carrying, the co-worker two offices over is expecting, two women in our church fellowship group are pregnant, plus two of my friends are expecting fresh supplies of grand kids, one blogging friend is expecting grandkid #1, and three bloggers that I don't know personally but read daily are also preggers.
Count 'em...that's ten babies on the way.

(This just in within the hour: make it 11...another friend just called with good news!)

Babies on the way in despite the trying times we live in.

(No surprise there, when the economy tanks, it is easier to just stay home and go to bed early, if you get my drift...)

I'm excited for all of them. Only two (make that three) of these kids in the making are going to be first borns. One is a third, one is a fourth.
The mom of the fourth born is so cool about it.

When I was talking about all the fuss and bother that was generated over first babies (with blog postings along the lines of: I felt the baby move 9 times today. I just praise the Lord for this little one, and ponder how he or she will be used to further His kingdom. I read Scripture aloud to my tummy so he can hear it daily! He is already one and a quarter inches long according to my pregnancy book, and I can't believe I only have 252 more days to go! This is just happening so fast! I also have decided to use Winnie the Pooh classic wall trim instead of the new WTP design, and to show a picture of my bare pregnant tummy each and every week on my blog...) while later, Baby #2 only gets mentioned in passing between further reports of Baby #1 becoming "a little man" (at age 18 months and shaving already presumably) and that he is now able to sit on a trike ALL BY HIMSELF (with five pictures following to document...)

Mom expecting #4 comment: Yeah, that was SOOO three babies ago....

Each baby is miraculous; especially if they are a first born. Subsequent babies, while quite miraculous also, are also rather boring after awhile. They sleep, they eat, they get runny noses, they poo... while that earlier edition baby in the house is tearing up the tracks with all kinds of new tricks.

I don't think I have ever read a blog post about baby #2 that managed to record the wonder of a filled diaper that had nearly the same zeal as the prior blog post about baby #1 grunts and digestive outcome.
It is hard to understand how such amazing events just don't continue to fire up one's interest after awhile.

The kid I grew up with had his first kid a few years back, and being several states away from his mom at the time, he video taped "Baby Margaret" for hours and hours and hours at a time.
Serious...HOURS.

His mom, (who had became a first time mom herself at 40) admitted to me that watching her ONLY child's first born baby sleeping on video just didn't hold her attention for more than a few minutes.

Ditto just about everything else that the 10 day old grandchild did...especially since it was the same stuff Margaret did as a 9 day old grand child, and an 8 day old grandchild etc etc..

Two years later Baby #2 "Thomas" apparently was not quite as interesting...his naps went completely unrecorded. Hopefully Thomas will never find out about the large UStoreIt unit that was rented to hold all the "Baby Margaret" tapes...

Naomi Wolf had an interesting experience with being pregnant the first time.
(You remember her don't you? No? She is a third wave feminist writer with a stunning inability to do decent documentation. I trust, dear reader, that you have managed to keep up with the defining differences between first, second and third wave feminism. If not...perhaps you should. It will make for far more interesting conversation at the next baby shower you attend than sharing exactly where you were when your water broke.)

Yale graduate and Oxford University Rhode scholar Naomi wrote a book called "Misconceptions."

In brief:

Misconceptions examines the modern problems surrounding pregnancy and childbirth. Most of the book is told through the prism of Wolf's personal experience of her first pregnancy. She describes the "vacuous impassivity" of the ultrasound technician who gives her the first glimpse of her new baby. Wolf both laments and rages against the doctor who performed her C-section, (I'm with you there Naomi...) and advocates a return to more personally attached practices akin to midwifery.

Ah yes...when you are a first time mom, naturally every single detail of your pregnancy is so awe inspiring that it is just unfathomable that a person who does something like 16 ultrasounds a day just couldn't work up a giddy over seeing *yet another* jelly bean with a heart beat.

How callous. How sad! How unfair!!!

Following the birth of her children, Naomi made a stunning connection: Abortions kill children.

More stunningly, she also connected the second wave feminism of "women have the right to abort" with the concept that abortion kills a woman's child. She managed a third wave spin on this dilemma: Women must, sadly, sometime make the decision to kill their unborn children, and because that is a sad decision, abortion clinics should be surrounded by women and medical personnel who will grieve and mourn those children while being supportative of the moms.

Naomi lost me there.

Now if she wanted to talk about the fact that sometimes a woman feels she must make the decision to kill her surly teenage, I could probably get on board with that. There's a reason why God included the passage about stoning rebellious children in the Old Testament. God knew parent of teens usually don't have the energy to go collect enough stones to get the job done, but it does give them something to dream about.

I made an interesting discovery over my three decades of parenting:

Everyone blab blab blabs the baby years. Pictures abound!

Everyone brags brags brags the school years. A few pictures are taken!

Everyone drops names of where first born is going to college. A zillion senior pictures get taken!

Everyone get really quiet after that...even if the kid graduates and gets a job.

Everyone is totally silent if the kid drops out of college and doesn't get a job.

Everyone starts talking again once a wedding is in the works. Thousand of wedding pictures!

And then it is back to step one all over again.

My mom has been in a prayer group since I was about ten years old. The ladies have prayed their way through their kids, and have just about finished up praying their grandkids to adulthood.

Those grandbabies were just so precious!

And ultimately they were just as messy as teens as their parents had been, if not more.

(Shaking head...prayer meetings are confidential you know.)

The great grand kids?

Oy vey. Maybe the less said the better!

Wonder what Naomi would feel about all that?
Can't wait until she becomes a grandmother!

Constant Cooker Takes a Day off...

I've got another gift for her, but if the mail would allow me to, I would be sending her this for her Golden birthday.

Because I don't think anyone else would think of it.

Shouldn't every birthday have some gifts that are a total surprise?

It is golden colored after all...

Have a BLAST today, my friend!