Historical footwear!!

Footwear is always the hardest element of re-enactment costume, because shoes are made so much differently than they used to be, and often of materials that simply didn't exist in period.  Sure, there are some modern styles that can be adapted, but then there are companies like American Duchess that make accurate, beautiful shoes you can be proud to wear with the costumes you've worked so hard on!

Check these out:

http://www.american-duchess.com/renaissance-elizabethan-shoes/virginia-renaissance-shoes-brown

40 Bags in 40 Days: Days 22 and 23

I might have to change the title of my own personal take on this challenge to 40 Bags in...er...More Than 40 Days ;-) I lost steam on this project for about a week, but like I said, even if I don't do the 40 days consecutively, I still fully intend to do 40 of them!

Day 22 was YET MORE WORK ON THE DIGITAL PICTURES.  God, I have so many pictures.  My problem is, I take tons and tons and tons of pictures, but unlike Eamon, I don't edit them as I go (he's a smart guy).  And then I upload ALL. THE. PICTURES to my computer and they just SIT THERE languishing, the good with the bad, the wheat with the chaff, the blurry with the perfectly-in-focus, the best version of that gorgeous view with the 87 okay versions of that gorgeous view that I took just to be sure I really got the very best version I could get.  The thing is, you can't always tell from the back of a camera whether you got a good shot - it's easier and clearer on a computer screen.  Well, I can find a justification for everything.  It's a problem.  I guess you could call it digital image hoarding??  Is there a support group for people like me??

"Hi, my name is Sarah, and I keep every picture I've ever taken."

"Hi, Sarah."      

I really enjoy documenting important (and, okay, even not-so-important) stuff in my life.  That funny sign on the side of the road, the honeymoon Eamon and I finally took after 5 years of marriage, my baby's first teeth (side note: she is remarkably defiant about letting me get a good shot of them...and yet I soldier on).  I take these pictures because I want to remember things.  Of course, Eamon would say that you should try to live in the moment more, and that taking a picture manufactures a memory for you by superimposing a fixed image over the organic one your brain stores away (and also can't give you smells, sounds, ambience, etc).  This was the guy who was adamant that we not have a videographer at our wedding because he didn't want just their version of the experience to be what was captured and replayed over and over again.  I had to work to convince him to hire a photographer!    

Anyway...whew.  I had a lot to get off my chest about that!  Moving right along!

Day 23 I FINALLY tackled my desk and the file drawer/storage/printer, and now I can actually say that my desk area is tidy! I took the "before" picture of my cluttered desk...I don't even know how long ago - and I waited to post about this until I really, really had a good "after" I was happy with. But now the desk and the file drawer/printer surfaces are both visible!! I had so many things I wanted to scan for safekeeping just piling up, and not only did I put away/recycle/get rid of a bunch of stuff, the scanning projects are done too!! Now, what's *inside* the file drawer is going to be a whole other ballgame - I'm sure I will have bags and bags and BAGS of papers to shred/recycle, which will be very cleansing and cathartic in its own right. It's going to require quite a bit of time, and Bug's naps range anywhere from a half hour to an hour and a half lately, so I might get to one or two hanging files per nap. We shall see.

Desk and file drawer before

Desk and file drawer after

                        

Perhaps the best "side effect" of all this decluttering, which others who are participating in the Facebook group have mentioned but hadn't really sunk in for me, is that once I've decluttered an area, I actually find myself making the effort to keep it that way.  It's like, now I know how good these spaces can look, and I have an ideal to uphold and aspire to.  It's really changed how I see my living spaces.  Suddenly a pile of random crap on the dining room table is UNACCEPTABLE!!  That's kind of shocking for me, but I'm not going to fight it.    

40 Bags in 40 Days: Days 18, 19, 20 and 21

Yup.  You've probably noticed that I seem to be compressing more and more into each blog post.  I'll admit that I haven't been working on this project every single day, but I am still determined to do (at least!) 40 days total, and I'm already more than halfway there, so I really think I can see this through.

Days 18, 19 and 20 were all the same thing, which means that it actually makes sense to put them all in one blog post!  So there.  I have a VAST backlog of digital photographs on my computer that not only need extensive weeding (do I really need that blurry picture of my cats when there are four THOUSAND better ones??) but also need to be much better organized.  As I was going through them, I noticed that groups of pictures from various times in my life and places I've lived were all scattered throughout the big "My Pictures" file.  Even just creating meta-folders for "Life in Boston," "Life in Hawai'i" and "Life in Washington" made for a much more streamlined and less overwhelming collection.  There are some folders, obviously, that can stand alone, but that was a good place to start.  And because I only really have small windows of time when I can do any of this stuff (thank you, 6-month-old baby whose naps are a complete mystery right now) I just kept with it for a few days straight.  Momentum is a good thing.

Day 21, I undertook the small but satisfying job of decluttering the hall closet.  I tidied and came away with two bags to donate - scarves and hats I no longer wear, plus a nice suit jacket (doesn't fit anymore and the matching slacks are long gone), as well as three pairs of shoes.  I also hung up three baby carriers that had been living on the backs of chairs in the dining room.  Quick, but worth it!

Cluttered hall closet

         

Clean hall closet

                

Two bags to Goodwill!

40 Bags in 40 Days: Days 15, 16 and 17

Again, I find myself playing catch-up, at least in documenting this process.  But I haven't fallen off the wagon yet!  As you'll recall, this whole "program" ostensibly coincides with Lent, with Sundays being the "days off."  Well, my "day off" last week was Thursday, because that was the day my mom arrived and I knew there would just be a lot going on (so, it was totally not a "day off" in the sense of actual rest, just a "day off" from the 40 Bags challenge!).  I wanted to leave some of the biggest jobs for the weekend because I'd have her help, so Sunday would be a work day - and we got so much done!!

I love my sewing room SO MUCH.  Having a dedicated space for my machine, patterns, books and tools is seriously awesome.  Before renting this house, Eamon and I had only lived in one-bedroom or studio apartments, which meant that if I wanted to sew, I first had to find a surface big enough, flat enough, and stable enough for cutting and measuring as well as actually placing my machine on, then I would do whatever I was doing for that given project, and then it all had to be put away somewhere so we'd still have a functional living room.  I actually asked for a big folding table for my birthday one year, and that was a pretty good solution, but it wasn't perfect.  Now a sewing room is going to be a "must-have" for every new home because it's just so great to be able to leave everything "as is" in the midst of a project and come back to it later; it's really hard to get any momentum on something if you have to take the time to remember what you were doing and where you were on a project.  When I was pregnant I did a ton of sewing - mostly making maternity wear for myself and a few small baby projects here and there, but after Bug arrived, it was pretty much out of sight out of mind where the sewing room was concerned.  I completely neglected it and didn't even want to go back in because it was such a mess!!

Well, I don't even know how many bags/boxes of stuff we hauled out of there - maybe 10-15 all together??  Recycling, trash, giveaway/donate - plus we organized all the gift wrapping stuff, put away all the dresslengths and bits of fabric I had enough of to save, and put all of my historical costuming stuff in one box so it's easy to find.  What a transformation!!

Now that's a room I want to sew in!!

The sewing room was a particularly exhausting endeavor (toward the end of the day I got really snappish at my poor mother, who was only trying to help) so when she left on Monday I gave myself permission to take a breather.  Tuesday was another digital day - I pared down the backlog on my DVR to a much more manageable (and realistic) list of shows.  For example, I record The Daily Show and Colbert Report every day, and I love both of their takes on the news, but lately it's just been impossible to keep up, so I narrowed those down to ones where I was really interested in the guest interview.  

This Wednesday I tackled the bathroom.  The sink had become an eyesore, and the bathtub wasn't much better.  I have a bad habit of buying toiletries and what my mother calls "lotions and potions" and not using all of them, so I wind up with a million half-empty bottles lining the bathtub shelves.  I took out a bag of recycling/trash and neatened the surfaces.  I think it's a big improvement.    

Yes, there's still a lot of stuff out in view, but the difference is it's all stuff we use every day.  Both areas are more streamlined, too.
 
Onward and upward...

40 Bags in 40 Days: Days 12, 13 and 14

I've gotten quite a bit behind with blogging lately, but I have a good excuse: my mom is in town!  We haven't been crazy busy - mostly she just came to visit for a long weekend so she could snuggle her grandbaby (Mom still lives in Los Angeles, so pretty much jumps on any chance to come up here and spend some time with Bug).  But just the general upheaval of having a house guest, even one who is as welcome and helpful and wanted as one's Mama, can throw things off.  She has been immensely helpful with this purging project, though!  I had a few key areas I wanted to tackle while she was here and we made so much progress!!  I do come by my packratitude honestly - there were a few times she actually tried to talk me into keeping something I really just wanted to get rid of ;-)  But for the most part having a partner in grime is motivating and makes the work go faster.  So without further ado, here's the rundown of the past few days!

Wednesday: I finished up in the bedroom, organizing Bug's clothes and putting away my mound of clean laundry (although can you really call it clean when it's been sitting on the floor for weeks??)  I also did some more work on my desk, but not enough to take an "after" picture - as soon as I finish the surface of my desk, the drawer, and my files, then and only then will I feel like my desk is DONE.

Bug's clothes gone through for outgrown stuff, tidy and organized

\

No more laundry pile!

One box of baby clothes and a bag of her gDiaper system ready to donate/give away!

Thursday ended up being my "day off" this week because that was the day my mom arrived, and I knew we'd work both days this weekend, so although ordinarily I would give myself Sunday off, this week I switched things around.

Friday was the area *next* to my desk, which needed tons of attention.  It had just become the burial ground for all kinds of crap - things I was planning to put up on eBay, stuff I had intended to donate long ago and just never had, it was a mess.  Walking from my desk to the couch was an adventure.  But now it's all either on eBay, donated, or at least tidied - and the exercise ball, which has been rolling around between my and my husband's two desks aimlessly (often catching on the backs of our chairs or tripping one or both of us) finally has a home!!

Cluttered corner:

Clean corner: 

We had enough energy that the cleaning extended to the rest of the living room.  The couch and coffee table had kind of been my "home base" in Bug's early days and weeks for when she was nursing every fifteen minutes (or was it twenty?), and it had gotten to the point where it was really overflowing with her books and toys and pacifiers and various other accoutrements.  My mom made me see that I really needed my coffee table back - and did we ever reclaim it!!

Coffee table in disarray:

Coffee table clean - you can see the surface!!!

Actually *using the storage* under the side table, imagine that!

 One bag of recycling and two bags and a box to donate!!

Saturday was somewhat less exciting in the sense of having something physical to show for the work, but I did actually do some digital tidying.  My mom brought her laptop, which still had some *very* old files of mine on it (we're talking, writing I did in the 90's, at age 8 or so) as well as college application essays.  She asked me to go through it all and see what I wanted to keep and what could be deleted just to free up the space on her hard drive.  College is well behind me (my 10th reunion is this summer...yipes!) so I had no trouble deleting the college application stuff.  A lighter laptop, in the metaphorical sense, is a good thing!!

40 Bags in 40 Days - Days 10 and 11

Monday's job was to finish the task of uploading all of the pictures and videos from my cell phone to my computer so they can be added to our cloud storage.  I still need to pare them down and weed out the ones that are fuzzy or have poor lighting, but it's really hard to delete pictures of Bug!!  Also she's constantly in motion, so a lot of them are just fuzzy because of that.  I did some more organizing though, moving them into the appropriate folders (for example, I now have a whole file dedicated to just pictures of my husband with her because my mother-in-law requests them often).  This is an ongoing process, of course, because I take about fifty million new pictures of her a day, but knowing that everything up until a few days ago is now in multiple locations gives me peace of mind.

Tuesday I started in on my desk.  It had just become another of those catchalls for papers, CDs, stuff I intended to file or "do something with" (like scan into my computer) and just junk.  Also, the contents of my desk had begun migrating onto my printer and even the nearby couch, so that needed to be curtailed as well.  There's still a huge pile of random crap next to my desk that I need to go through.  Some of it I already tried to sell on eBay and failed, some of it is stuff I want to keep but it just ended up there because it didn't have another home, or again, I have plans for it but just haven't done it yet (like getting posters framed, that kind of thing).  I have a "before" picture of the desk but I haven't quite finished the job, so I will post an "after" when it is satisfactory.

Desk:

 Desk overflow:

40 Bags in 40 Days: Day 9

On Saturday I set aside some time to address the clutter in the bedroom (many thanks to Eamon for keeping Bug occupied during this particular effort!!).  Bug still shares the room with us, and it's where she naps, so I was hesitant to tackle the room while she was sleeping.  Before she was born, we set up an area for her clothes and diaper stuff, and divided everything into 0-3 months, 3-6 months, and 6+ months, the idea being that at around 6 months, she'd be moving into the nursery downstairs - that's where all of the rest of the clothes we have for her are being stored.  So we've been trying to keep up with the rotation of clothes, and had already started a box for things she had grown out of.  But her clothes weren't the only thing I needed to work on.  I have this really bad habit of doing my laundry and then just dumping the pile at the foot of the bed and grabbing what I want to wear from that pile.  It's really bad, but none of my clothes are nice enough for me to worry about them wrinkling, and most of the time I'm home with Bug in my PJs anyway - and if we're heading out of the house, it's still all about comfort and convenience for nursing, which is a small subset of my total wardrobe.  But I digress.  The pile has just been growing, and it all needed to be put away.  There's also the suitcase I brought with me when I took Bug down to LA to visit friends and family - in January!!  I just never unpacked.  Ugh.

So, I only have "before" pictures from this particular effort because there was more than an hour's worth of work, but I really did make progress.  The box of outgrown clothes got much fuller, and I folded and organized the clothes on Bug's shelf and made a dent in the laundry pile.  More to come!!

Bug's shelf:

 The upended bag of 3-6 month clothes:

 My laundry pile and suitcase.  

     

40 Bags in 40 Days: Days 7 and 8

I did not get a blog post up yesterday because...um...I don't actually know why.  But I did make progress!

Thursday's area was our entryway.  Like the dining room table, it had just become a catchall, the place for crap that didn't have a better "home,"as it were.  We kept meaning to get an actual piece of furniture for that area, something with hanging hooks for our keys, maybe a slot for outgoing mail, but never actually did, so we just kind of made do with the banister and floor.  All of that stuff is now either put away, recycled, or tossed.  It's really incredible how freeing it is to get rid of things.  I was holding onto a journal from *middle school* that I used for daily writing assignments, and yes, they were kind of fun to look through.  Apparently one of the assignments was "Do you think O.J. Simpson was guilty?" and another was "What are your thoughts on abortion?"  Definitely some sophisticated subject matter, but surprise surprise, my opinions haven't changed much.  So did I really need to keep those?  Nope!  Why were they on my banister?  No idea!

Entryway before:

Entryway after:

When Eamon got home he said the house was looking "noticeably cleaner."  Yay!!

Friday's task was to go through my cell phone and pare down the photographs.  You can imagine how many pictures I've taken since Bug was born, but really, some of them are fuzzy, or the lighting is bad, and I have to be judicious about which ones are worth keeping.  I didn't get through all of them, but I made some progress.  What I really need to do (maybe tomorrow) is hook up the phone to my computer and make sure to transfer over all of the really good ones, and upload them to our cloud storage that Eamon set up.  It would really be a shame to put that off and then drop the phone in the toilet or something.  Which is totally something I would do, because I'm the world's biggest klutz.

40 Bags in 40 Days: Day 6

I'm really proud of myself for staying with this for almost a week!!  I have a really bad habit of starting big projects and not seeing them through, and I'm determined to keep up the good work.

Yesterday I turned my attention to our junk drawer.  Everyone has one, right?  And it's not necessarily all junk, but if the junk and the useful stuff are so entangled and intermingled that you can't find the useful stuff when you need it, it might as well all be junk!  Aside from throwing away fistfuls of twist-ties and organizing batteries into "charged" and "not charged" (we only use rechargeable batteries in this house) and things like that, there was one task in particular that really needed to be done.  You see, my husband works on a submarine, and one night he came home with about 60 pens and markers - because "they were just going to throw them out and pens are always useful."  Well, yes, pens are useful if they have INK.  Last night  I tested each and every single one and threw away 31...count 'em...31 pens!  That was a very good feeling.  And we have no shortage of pens even after all that - you can see the ones that survived the purge in the "after" picture!

  Before:

After:

40 Bags in 40 Days: Day 5

Well, I finished up the "Fun Stuff" file!  It lived up to its name - there was definitely some fun stuff in there!   Also a bunch of junk.  I really have no idea why I felt the need to hang on to some of that stuff.

One file in particular really needed to go away.  I had a pretty toxic landlord situation in Hawai'i, and after a really bad dispute between us, I sat down and wrote him a nasty e-mail in the heat of the moment, and before hitting "send" I just saved it to my computer.  I guess I wanted to have it to read later so I could get my blood boiling all over again??  I even labeled it "Andy vitriol" because that's all it was - just a string of insults and spite without much purpose.  Was it satisfying to bang on the keyboard as I typed it?  Sure.  Was it helpful to my well-being to keep it after all this time?  My goodness, no.  So I deleted it.  I didn't even open it again to read it before sending it to the recycle bin.  Does it mean I've forgotten what happened, or that it won't make me angry if I think about it again later on?  Of course not.  But it's a symbolic throwing away of the digital "baggage" associated with the whole drama, and that really matters to me.

A bunch of other random crap also went the way of the dodo, and I added some new sub-folders to organize what I decided to keep, like some really hilarious attempts at poetry from college and high school - didn't we all think we were so profound back then??  

40 Bags in 40 Days: Day 4

Yesterday I dove into the "Fun Stuff" file on my computer - it's really kind of amazing how many random Word documents I had just been holding onto, with very little justification.  I didn't finish the job, but the file was certainly much leaner by the time I called it quits for the night.  It was so easy to get distracted - I'd open files because the file name didn't actually give me much information, and then get distracted reminiscing about trips taken many years ago, crazy college antics, my own perceived poetic abilities (or lack thereof)...you name it, it was in there.

The file needs at least another half-hour or so of concerted work, so I will probably just continue it tomorrow and then do two straight days of "real stuff" decluttering.  I'm eyeing my junk drawer, my car, and the piles of clean laundry that are all over the floor of the bedroom.  The problem with the bedroom is that my best shot at a long enough stretch of time to get anything real done is when the baby is asleep, but...you guessed it, she sleeps in the bedroom!  So I might just have to put her down for a nap, wait until she's *really* out cold, and then sneak back in and work all stealthy-like.  We'll see how that goes!

40 Bags in 40 Days: Day 3

Because this challenge is designed to coincide with Lent, Sundays are a day off (love that!)  So even though I started a day late, I'm still giving myself Sundays as a break from both decluttering and blogging about decluttering :-)

Here's the area I tackled on Saturday:  It's the corner of our kitchen right near the sink, and because both my husband and I hate doing dishes by hand as well as putting away dishes, you can imagine how easily and quickly the drying rack fills up.  There was also just a lot of stuff piled and smooshed into that corner, and the spice rack needed attention.

Before:

After:

I didn't have a "bag" per se of stuff when I was done, but I had consolidated some of the spices (there were two containers half-full of stick cinnamon, two of ground ginger, that sort of thing), emptied the drying rack, found homes in the cupboard below for a few large storage containers, and just generally tidied.  I'm finding a lot of motivation from folks who post to the Facebook group with their before and after pictures - but mine are really inspiring too!!

40 Bags in 40 Days: Day 2

This will be a fairly short post, but first of all, let me just say that I really want to stick with this.  It needs to happen really badly and I know that I will feel great when it's over.  I'm just putting that out there to the universe as a motivation.  I might have to come back and read this paragraph every now and then!

Yesterday's accomplishment was the weeding of my e-mail inbox.  I'm pretty good about archiving as I go, but there were some really old messages in there that I had been meaning to deal with and/or respond to, but for one reason or another never did.  I kept them in my inbox in the faint hope that SOMEDAY I would follow through, and someday finally came in the form of yesterday :-)  I can't in all honesty say that I took care of every piece of correspondence, but I did cut my inbox down from 50+ to about 20, which is a really good start, and going forward, I am hereby pledging to do a better job of staying on top of my e-mails.  By which I mean:

1) making e-mails from friends and family my highest priority, and responding to them more promptly.  Yes, I have a baby now, but I do check fairly regularly, and it's just courteous and the right thing to do
2) cutting down on the number of activism lists to which I am subscribed so that I'm not faced with a bazillion requests to sign petitions every day (let's face it, some causes are worth it, but come ON, you sign one and the next day you get thirty more)
3) unsubscribing from retail money suckers newsletters; not only do I really not need the temptation, this will simply whittle down the barrage of e-mails coming in to begin with

I have not yet done today's declutter; confession, I haven't yet decided what today's declutter will be.  But the Bug is down for the night (fingers crossed), so I'm going to eat some dinner and then get going on...a pile of stuff somewhere in the house!  Yay for non-specificity!

Er...um...hi

I like having a blog, I really do.  When I was living in Hawai'i on my own it was a great way to write down the things I wanted to be sure to remember from my time there and compile some of my photographs of the scenery, flora and fauna.  But as you can see, after I moved to the Washington and reunited with Eamon, the blog just kind of fell by the wayside.  It's kind of hard to believe that nearly two years have gone by since the last time I posted here.  I had a household to unpack, I was instantly caught up in rehearsals for "Fiddler" (which turned out to be just the thing, with Eamon gone on a really long deployment - a large cast is a terrific instant social circle!) and I was job-hunting to boot!  Also, I've managed to use Facebook for a lot of the everyday update type stuff that people tend to blog about, and I never felt the need to document my sewing projects step-by-step (the way lots of costumers keep online "dress diaries") on my blog.  I did post some "in-progress" pictures, but largely I just put the finished items on Facebook and/or my Pinterest page.  But I never just completely shut down the blog, mostly because it never occurred to me, and also because I figured maybe I would eventually want to use it for costuming stuff or whatever.

I won't worry about giving the rundown of the past two years here, because I generally direct people to this blog from Facebook, so anyone with whom I'm already friends there knows about all the big stuff like the birth of my daughter (referred to herein affectionately as "Bug").  Incidentally, she is yet another reason the blog has been silent - I know, I know, some people keep mommy blogs, but I am not one of those people!

HOWEVER!

I think I may have found something to blog, at least for a little while, and then maybe the blog will sink back into oblivion or I'll figure out another use for it.  There's this 40 Bags in 40 Days challenge that a friend posted about on Facebook, and goodness knows I need to declutter!  I guess it's designed to line up with Lent - which I don't observe, since I'm not religious in any way, but I do know Wednesday was the first day, so I'm already behind ;-)  It's okay though because there's a printable sheet for keeping track that doesn't have specific dates on it, so you can start whenever.

Here's a picture of the area I decluttered yesterday (Thursday).  I feel bad because my wonderful friend Diana came to visit in late November of last year so she could meet our little Bug, and one of the things she helped with while she was here was a declutter of this very table.  I had every intention of keeping it clear, and obviously that didn't happen.  But I must set aside guilt and simply dive in, and hope that this time I do a better job of maintaining a tidy surface.

So yeah, pretty messy.  Here's the "after"!

I did it!!  All right, so the things that were hanging off the chairs in the "before" shot are still hanging off the chairs.  Those are all the various baby-carrying contraptions we have collected and used, some more than others - there's a sling, an Ergo, a Moby wrap, and on a chair outside the frame there's even a Snugli (plus my purse and diaper bag, which is now also my purse).  I didn't even factor them into my declutter since it was really the surface of the table that needed clearing, but some of them could probably get stored away for now - most of the time these days when Bug isn't sleeping, we just carry her around or set her in one of her bouncy seats if we need both hands.

The bag on the table is my First Bag, and everything in it went to the recycling bin (yay!).  The other stuff mainly just needed to be given a home, and I think I did a pretty good job of finding places that all of it can live.  Not perfect, but at least we have a dining room table again!    

I haven't done today's declutter yet, and it's already getting on towards bedtime, but there's a suggestion on the challenge website that you can include non-physical spaces in this process, such as e-mail inboxes and computer files.  So, I will do a physical area on the odd days and a digital area on the even days, because I think that will help keep me motivated - changing it up is more appealing to me than looking forward to several days in a row of decluttering actual stuff.  Oh, and it's looking like I'll put up a blog post each day about the previous day's accomplishment ;-)

Stick with me and keep me honest!