Porch view with looming clouds. We had a massive thunderstorm right after our walk last night --- much sheet lightning and preliminary thunder as we were taking our walk in the dark. Right after we got home, and I had settled Dora with her last supper in her crate, the sky opened up. I had to get Dora out again and put her thundershirt on, and then I had to sit with her in the dark hall until finally she settled down enough to sleep.
But the sun is shining this morning, and it's looking like a lovely Saturday. High again of about 88F, which while not exactly hot --- 90F and over is hot --- will certainly feel warm enough to be going on with. After today temperatures will drop a little, though not below 80F. Still lots of rain and thunderstorms in the forecast, for which I must be thankful now, because I will miss them in July, August, and September.
The husband has indicated that he wishes that I would get busy with my restoration of the front-porch glider that came from my aunt and uncle's house, after having spent years on the patio of my own childhood home. So I guess this morning I will tackle that, and I have put on my sturdiest, most impervious dress for the job.
Wearing:
*Secondhand Wool& Sierra dress (S) in Washed Navy, bought last fall, last worn May 26. Wears in 2025: 12
*Secondhand Xero Z-Trail sandals, year 1 of wear
Sweet and simple, that's today's outfit. This dress, as I've said before, has hiked the Camino and sustained various injuries before coming into my keeping, so while I do just wear her as I would wear any other dress, I figure she'll stand up to dirty jobs. This dress, again, is a size Small, whereas my Iris Blue Sierra is an Extra Small. I really can't decide which fit I prefer, were I to buy another one. In a lot of ways, these just feel like two different dresses, as in two different dress designs (obviously they are not literally the same exact dress). I've been noticing how my pockets stick out just a little in the Iris Blue, and was thinking that this was a function of its being too small, but these pockets still out a little, too, and this dress, despite being a Small, is not too small at all. I sure do wear that Iris Blue dress a lot, which I suppose does tell me something.
Not, mind you, that I'm in the market for a dress. I have enough dresses. In the fall I might reassess, but for now: enough. My current June Wear Everything Once Challenge drives that reality home to me every day.
I did notice, when I took my Fiona off last night, how pilled she has become on the backside, probably as a result of, say, sitting on the back steps, which I do fairly often and am not going to stop doing. I've been wearing that dress regularly since late 2022, which on the one hand does not seem that long --- not yet three years --- but on the other hand, she is one of my two oldest dresses still in normal rotation. Both my 2021 dresses have been relegated to nightgown status (and again, maybe you can see why I have my reservations about sizing in the Sierra dress . . . ). Pilling . . . is an oh well kind of thing, not really a deal-breaker for wearing a dress I love. But I do note it.
So, this looks like pinprick holes, but it's not --- it's little tiny wool bobbles. It's really not a big patch, and it's weirdly on the left side, so that I don't know what could have caused it. Not that it matters. Nobody but me is really going to register the presence of this phenomenon (and if they do, why are they looking at my left buttock cheek is what I really want to know).
My main point in noting it is to remind myself and anyone else who might need to hear it that ACTUALLY flaws are fine. Normalizing imperfections is healthy. We don't need to try to live in some kind of Instagram-filter world where everything is uniformly smooth and untouched by any kind of real-life friction or gravity. I think this about the human face, but I think it about clothing, too. It's fine for an article of clothing to show some signs of wear. Just as you live in your skin, you do, in fact, wear your clothes. It's okay for them to reflect the fact that you wear them, and that you're not afraid to do things because your dress might get hurt. (I mean, yes, we have nice dresses in which we don't go mountain-climbing or restore iron porch gliders, but even then --- if I want to sit on the back steps in my church dress, I am going to sit on the back steps in my church dress).
ANYWAY. I need to let the dog out. It's a sunny Saturday, and the whole world is going to be out on the streets with their dogs, so I think we'll hang out in the backyard. I need to do some laundry, and Dora, being the helpful girl that she is, can accompany me in this task. I also need to change the sheets on our bed at some point or other during the day. But once I get this load of washing in, it's putty knives out, to see what headway I can make on this glider, so that the husband will not be unhappy with its presence on the porch.
AFTERNOON UPDATE
I have
*managed a nice short no-other-dogs walk with Dora
*changed the sheets on the bed
*washed and hung two loads of laundry
*read some Miss Mapp
*worked on the porch glider
Alas, I didn't take a "before" shot, but then where we are right now is still pretty "before."
Here, as you see, my lovely spokesmodel (actually she's a barksmodel, but we won't split hairs here) poses with the glider. As you might also see, along the bottom of the glider is a strip of indoor-outdoor fabric.
This is all that remains of a layer of upholstery, obviously the work of my aunt, or rather, of the person she hired for this purpose, that covered the glider's seat and springs. Beneath this fabric was a layer of polyfill batting that swathed the front and back of the metal frame and was held in place to the springs by metal staples, much rusted, which I have now removed.
I loved my aunt very much, but her taste was not my taste, and in any case, this particular glider model was meant to have exposed springs. Some vintage iron gliders have a sort of metal skirt across the front, but this type apparently did not. I don't remember its having anything but cushions in my childhood, and my roamings about the internet turn up images, admittedly also in rough shape, that seem to indicate that my memory is correct. People were simply not all that fussy. They painted their glider, springs and all, and then slapped some cushions on and sat on it. I'm sure my aunt thought that she was giving the glider a more refined appearance, but at this late stage in the game, it wasn't looking very refined.
Here's a similar style, with cushions on. This is the kind of thing I remember from childhood.
Now, at least, the batting on the seat is gone. The next step, which I guess will happen next weekend, is to turn the glider over on its back and figure out how to remove the remnants of that fabric. I'm not quite sure whether it's stapled or screwed or what, but as it was applied to the glider frame, so it may also be de-applied.
The back frame received the same treatment:
But my hope is that once I've figured out what happened on the seat frame, then the undoing process on the back will be faster. I bought some cheap waterproof covers for the cushions --- I think these are actually for boat seats, and they're not fabulous, but they do cover the rather aged cushions until I have the wherewithal to take their covers off (they do come off) and wash them. I don't love this fabric, BUT I think that when the glider is sanded, primed, and repainted a dark vintage green (there are remnants of paint on the springs that suggest that it was originally green), then the cushions, once cleaned up, will look okay. Figuring out cushions/cushion covers for old outdoor furniture is a pain, especially as I don't sew and don't off the top of my head know someone who does this kind of custom upholstery, which is bound to be expensive.
So I can keep these cushions for the time being. They will look a lot less dorky when the rest of the glider is restored. The waterproof covers, meanwhile, are not un-useful. They are very soft and protective, and I might keep them on through the winter in any case.
But just getting that stupid polyfill batting off the seat frame feels like a massive triumph. I'd cut a bunch of it off when I was removing most of the seat cover, but some of it was very stubborn --- I realized only today that it was attached by these metal staples. Once I did realize that, the removal went a lot faster, and I began to feel a lot more hopeful about my prospects of restoring this piece of outdoor furniture as I had envisioned.
I am so happy to have my glider. It's one of two that I remember from my childhood. One lived on my grandparents' front porch in the country outside Jackson, Tennessee; the other was on the patio of the house I grew up in. I'm not sure which one this is. I had been assuming it was my grandparents', because it came most recently from the porch of my aunt and uncle's house down the road from my grandparents' house. They wound up with a number of iconic things from the farm --- the old dinner bell, a grindstone, an anvil, etc. So I had assumed that this glider was part of that lot of items. But my mother seems to think that it's the one we had at home. Maybe my parents gave it to my aunt and uncle when they moved house in 1984? The glider we had did not make that move, and I had always kind of wondered what had happened to it.
Either way, again, it's great to have. I love having a swing at one end of my porch and a glider --- as satisfying in its way as a swing --- at the other. It's comfortable and easy to sit on, or nap on. An elephant could sit on it and not crush it. We are talking cast iron here. I'm really looking forward to getting those fabric remnants off, then attacking the back (which again I hope will go more easily, because I'll know everything I'm dealing with). Then it will get a good and needed cleanup, a sanding, a priming, and a fresh coat of green paint.
And then it will be adorable. I wish I could wave a wand and make it so this instant, but what I need to do instead is persist.