It's raining today, so: house tour time! At least, it's Tour de Dining-Room time. I spent some minutes yesterday clearing off the dining-room table, which had been strewn with the religious goods my husband had bought from his friend who came to visit last week, trying to find places for as many of them as possible.
Obviously there's still some overflow, but at least it fits on a single chair now:
Here's a long shot of the dining room, which, to be honest, may be my favorite room in the house:
We don't use it for dining that routinely, and in a lot of ways I understand why "formal dining room" isn't a priority for a lot of people when they're looking for a house, but it is nice to have one. Sometimes you just do need to seat a number of people, and you don't want the pots and pans you used to cook the dinner staring at you the whole time you're eating it. My mother bought me this table in a junk shop in Memphis, and we both agree that it's one of our best acquisitions ever. It seats eight comfortably, as you see here, but we've gotten as many as fifteen people around it, using more or less every chair in the house. The chairs down the sides are from the breakfast table in my mother's house --- she now has chairs made by my brother, so didn't need these. The end chairs are from my dad's law office. The little youth chair in the corner by the cabinet was made by my brother. A Catholic priest gave us that mahogany settee thing next to the youth chair. The cabinet came out of my ex-sister-in-law's house --- when we moved here, she wasn't an ex, and she was going through a major furniture purge to turn her downstairs into art and gallery space, so we scored that extremely handy piece, which holds lots of Christmas stuff, mostly.
The real appeal of this formal dining room, actually, is that it's a place to put many things for which I otherwise would not have had a place, but am happy to own. It's a good room for a party, with plenty of table space to spread out food, and places to sit down with your little party plate: both the aforementioned settee and, under the window, a refinished church pew which was my husband's Christmas gift to me one year (Exhibit A in the "where am I going to put THIS thing?" category). Both benches can be drawn up to the table for more seating if necessary. That rug is one of the few things in the room that we bought ourselves: it came from Overstock.com and is a polyurethene indoor-outdoor rug, which seemed a good idea when we had little kids and a big dog.
Anyway. I put the big Holy-Family shadowbox thing on top of the cabinet, mostly to get it out of the way safely.
Here it keeps company with my grandmother's punch bowl, plus some vases that I really don't have that much room to store, unless I want to climb up and put them in the top cabinets in the butler's pantry, which is kind of a pain. Vases are another thing I have a lot of, not that I buy them for myself, so here are some. Welcome to the Minimalism-Free Zone.
I moved a few things around on the wall by the door into the kitchen to make room for the wooden crucifix. My husband was going to take it to his office, mostly because I'd suggested it, but fortunately he wasn't all that set on the idea.
So part of me wants to move before we accumulate any more things, and another part of me has a panic attack just thinking about it. We really do need to tackle our upstairs closets, where lots of things we don't need have gotten stashed. The other thing that gives me a panic attack is thinking about leaving all this for my children to have to clean out one day . . .
Anyway. But these things are pretty, and I'm glad I have them, and I figure I'll be giving those porcelain icons (still in boxes, stacked on the ladderback chair my mother found on the side of the road, wove a seat for under my brother's direction, and gave to me because she didn't have room for it) to people for Christmas. I do like the idea of my house as a "Cabinet of Curiosities," which I've decided is a good name for my aesthetic.
Meanwhile, in clothing news:
It's actually cool enough to do the knotted-tee-over-a-dress thing again. Here's my Wool& Sierra with my thrifted Icebreaker merino tee, plus EVA Birks, because they can stand getting wet when I go outside. Hair in a turban because I washed it.
I tried knotting my chambray big shirt over, because I really wanted that kind of look, but the shirt is just too voluminous. I find that I try it, then sideline it, a lot, so provisionally, anyway, I've outboxed it. I'd like a chambray, or some similar washed light-blue, button shirt to tie over things . . . just one that fits a little better. That one was thrifted, and it's wearing really thin anyway, so I think I can say I've gotten my money's worth out of it.
Still feeling a little under the weather. The ick continues not to identify as Covid, but whatever it is, it's lingering. Resting and trying to kick it before Monday's reading.
AND . . .
Who doesn't need a Mason jar of eggplant chips? Well, really . . . not that they're not pretty good as chips, but we have more eggplant than we can eat right now, so I dehydrated several eggplants' worth of slices to use for things like eggplant lasagna or baba ganoush later. Waiting for more of them to get bigger so that I can add to this stash, then rip out the plants to make way for additional winter greens.
I'm drying another round of red hot peppers right now to add to that stash. The jalapeños are still producing, so I'm not ready to tear them out yet, but the end is in sight. More, more, more room for winter lettuce. I need to think about how to cover my containers on the coldest days, but we should have a good span of growing season left before that really becomes a concern.
Time to kick back and read. Margery Allingham is kind of growing on me. Although Campion still can't touch Alleyn as a hero, he does have his weird little brand of charm.
UPDATE: Got my $15 gift card for doing the 7x7 challenge. This was a pretty ridiculously easy challenge, but it's kind of interesting to contemplate doing a series of 7x7 self-challenges, just to prod me to wear more of my clothes. This should become easier to accomplish as the weather begins to cool down a little --- I could almost wear leggings today, in fact! It would have been nice to have had that possibility for variations last week. Layers really help make outfit variations more interesting.
ALSO: I'm not going to spend that $15 anytime soon. Still almost two months till my birthday, when I will have a window in my no-buy year. But lemme tell you, especially as I repose in my recliner of sickness, I AM THINKING ABOUT DRESSES.
For one thing, I'm pondering how much I love the wool dresses I have, and how easy it was just to wear them in rotation for a week in Team Basic mode --- but also how much I look forward to layering with them as the season changes. I'm not really looking forward to . . . entirely other clothes. This is what I really want to wear.
I'm also thinking about how, every fall, I get caught out by the downturn in temperatures. It's hot for so long, and I don't want to wear many clothes, and then suddenly it's cold, and I don't have enough, or warm enough clothes. At least, that was my pattern for many years. Cue panic-stricken dash to Goodwill to load up on . . . stuff . . . even if I didn't really want it . . . because it looked warmer than what was in my closet at the end of the summer.
Last year that didn't really happen so much. This year I think it will happen even less, mostly because I have these wool dresses that are warm and cozy underneath anything else. And I have three of them, so that gives me lots of options for being warm. I also have more pairs of merino tights, which I hope to get a lot of wear out of. The quality is undoubtedly inferior to that of Wool& and other wool brands' leggings, but I found my tights last year to be warm and comfortable, and they held up okay for what I'd paid for them. This year I have more pairs in more colors, bought right at the end of the cold season, so I can rotate them more. They make a pretty decent bottom base layer, certainly for 95% of our not-hot weather.
I'm still thinning out my wardrobe by tiny degrees (witness the chambray shirt I just outboxed), which, paradoxically, actually seems to expand my outfit possibilities --- or at least give me more reliably GOOD outfit possibilities instead of weird experiments. That's the thing. I don't want to wear weird experiments. I just want to look and feel good.
Anyhow, still thinking about these upcoming dress purchases. Aside from the mauve Sierra, the teal Fiona keeps catching my eye as one possible choice. I like the color a lot. I don't have a dress in that shade of blue, but it would go with virtually everything else I have. I like the neckline. I also think about how much I like my Maggie dress with a belt, and wonder whether I would really like at least one dress with a defined waist. If so, I think this is the one dress with a defined waist, of all the Wool& line, that I would consider. Of course the swing dresses are versatile, in that you can belt them or not, but I do HAVE a number of swing dresses already, especially when you count the bamboo ones. Something different might be nice.
The other option that's suddenly on my radar is the Audrey. I hadn't really considered her before: the colors previously available all seemed too pastel, and in the original model photos, she looked more like a long nightgown than a dress. I also didn't really want a long maxi dress.
BUT. I keep seeing pictures of real people wearing her, and I like the look. It seems that the length isn't quite so maxi, more like lower-calf than like dragging the floor. And the new colors are intriguing. I like the vintage-blue heather, which is the same as the tencel Camellia dress, but I'm also weirdly drawn to that new black heather. People are reporting that it's more a dark charcoal than a black, which makes it seem more possible than actual black, which I don't want to wear. It would be a bit of a risk, but I wonder if it would work?
I'm attracted to this dress because she does seem like a really versatile all-season dress, especially in a darker color. I could see boots and a sweater with this dress, or a long-sleeved merino tee tied over. A longer line would really, in many ways, be a lot more workable with pullover sweaters, in terms of the Rule of Thirds, because a pullover hitting at the waist wouldn't cut you right in half --- you'd still have a pretty long line as your bottom element. And one thing I have sort of missed sometimes, in wearing all these swing dresses, is that whole "dress you don't have to shave your legs for" vibe.
Something else to (over)think about, at any rate.