All posts tagged The Resource Exchange

Sewing Sunday

curtains-cropped
By On January 15, 2013 In Making Stuff, Sewing Sunday With No Comments Permanent Link to Sewing SundayPermalink

Although Fall is my favorite season, I do love Winter because it makes me feel okay about taking some much-needed time to relax at home and do projects for myself.  The cold weather somehow gives me permission to stay inside, sip tea, read and make stuff.  I don’t feel the pull of yardwork or gardening or frisbee or summer festivals, and I find myself looking inward and reflecting on how I want to start out my new year.  I’ve almost always counted on this time to accomplish a few projects that have been on the back-burner, such as launching this very website last January.  I know that the Spring thaw will pull me back into the realm of outdoor activities, so for now it’s nice to have some quiet time in the house.

This weekend, my plan was to make curtains for my back bedroom/Ben’s office.  Okay, really my plan was to make a curtain for that room since I didn’t have enough material for two.  (But that’s okay, I’ll get more.  Please, twist my arm…do I have to go to Fabric Row again?)  I had a spare curtain rod in the basement, so I set to work on Saturday sewing the curtain. I finished it up and went to hang it only to discover that I had somehow misplaced the mounting brackets that accompanied the curtain rod.  This wasn’t totally shocking in that the last time the curtain rod was actually mounted was two houses ago in 2005, and I feel like this is pretty much the story of my life.  I finally get fired up to start a project, get most of the way done, and then discover that I’m missing some critical component that will prevent me from finishing the project that day.  In my life, it’s inevitable…and it’s infuriating.

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The Burden of Making Stuff

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By On February 9, 2012 In Life, Making Stuff With No Comments Permanent Link to The Burden of Making StuffPermalink

Now that I’ve embarked on this new plan to make more stuff, I find myself at a crossroads that I’ve come to before.  As someone who’s not terribly into accumulating stuff (even cool, handmade stuff), I find myself asking the question, “Why am I making this?”  Last week, I got sucked into the vicious cycle of surfing around Etsy and alternating between feeling tremendously inspired by the things I find on there and feeling excruciatingly awful about myself because it seems as though everything I come up with has already been done.  The latter feeling is a slight variation on how I used to feel when I was painting growing up–as though every good concept for a painting had already been painted, so why even bother?

Of course, this kind of thinking is totally useless, especially if you’d prefer to spend your days doing something productive, instead of just balling yourself up in a corner and feeling like you’ve never had an original thought in your life.  But I think it does point to a larger question:  What’s my motivation for making stuff?

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Crafting a Wedding

Wedding Arbor - close up
By On January 31, 2012 In Design, Life, Making Stuff With No Comments Permanent Link to Crafting a WeddingPermalink

Last October, I got married.  Like a lot of stuff in our lives, my fiancé–now husband–and I didn’t want to do things like everyone else.  Specifically, we didn’t want to feed into the wedding-industrial complex that says you need to buy, buy, buy and spend, spend, spend for an event that represents only several hours–albeit several wonderfully amazing hours–of your life.  It’s a racket, really.  So we set to work crafting a wedding that was about us and not stuff.  As you might expect, this meant making a whole lot of things for the wedding, often from reclaimed/reused items.

While we were planning the wedding, a number of people commented that I should be blogging about all the stuff we were doing to make our wedding as sustainable as possible, so that other people could see how it can be done and be inspired to do the same.  The problem was that, while that sounded great in theory, I really didn’t have a whole lot of extra time to be doing something like that because, well, you know, I was planning a wedding.  So instead, I figured I’d save it all up until some later date to share with the world.  That day has come.  I invite you to take a little trip down recent-memory lane with me and see how we put together a handmade wedding that was about us–not stuff.  (Fair Warning: This post is a little long, so if weddings aren’t your thing, you might want to stop right here.  And if you don’t want the details but like wedding eye candy, you can just scroll through the pictures.)

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