BailiwickStudio

A Love of Letters

When I was little I fell in love with letters. The alphabet kind, that is. I remember in second grade there was a banner of cursive script above the chalk board, and I could hardly wait to learn how to write with those beautiful letters. Letter-love has stayed with me all my life. I learned calligraphy, I had a little business painting names onto boats at our local harbor, I made signs, I hand lettered cards and posters, and then I began a collection of vintage letterpress blocks, which I still look for at every flea market.

Then, a few months ago my husband started making our own letterpress blocks, inspired by my collection of vintage blocks. What a perfect new business for us to do together! His know-how of computer programming and CNC machining plus my love of typography. We opened an etsy shop in September, and I've had so much fun with it. My mind is brimming with ideas for collages and words and quotes, unfortunantly they can't be made as quickly as I can think of them!

Valentine's Day has been a perfect holiday to celebrate letter love, with lovely words, Xs and Os, and hearts. I invite you to visit our shop here, and to share some letter-love with you, I'm offering 20% off any purchase until the 14th of February (use the coupon code love20 at check-out). Happy Valentine's Day!

I'm joining with Little Red House for Mosaic Monday.

A Winter's Day

Today is cold and grey. I love days like this and wish we had more of them (during winter, of course). This has been such a mild winter that I'm a little disappointed in it, but it's not over yet, is it?

One thing I love to do on a day like today is hide away in my studio and make things. And since Valentine's Day is right around the corner, hearts - lots and lots of hearts - are on my agenda. I just received a shipment of  French lavender, and it has filled the air with the most wonderful fragrance. What a perfect way to spend a day!

In the Studio

My studio has needed a good cleaning and sorting for weeks now. I love how interesting it looks with all these cropped photos! The whole picture, though, is scary. It's time to roll up my sleeves and get busy!

Today I'm linking up with Faded Charm for White Wednesday and The Little Red House for Mosaic Monday.

A Clean Slate

Life is good, and even better when order prevails in your favorite spaces. My favorite place in the house is my studio. I love this room and feel so blessed to have it as my own. I spent much of Sunday cleaning up the huge mess it had become, which wasn't a job for sissies! Studios by nature are full of "stuff", and mine had become so overrun with stuff that something had to be done, and quick. Too many things didn't have a proper place and the result was a totally chaotic room. I'm sure this sounds familiar to a lot of you.

My incentive for this marathon cleaning spree was, of all things, a new ironing board. My friend Marcia and I spent a few happy hours at Ikea on Saturday and when I saw this ironing board I was all over it. The one I've been using for years is a monster of an ironing board - longer and wider than the standard size - so you can just imagine how much stuff was piled on it since it acted as a handy shelf. I usually had about a foot of space at the front end to do any actual ironing, so if I needed a little more room I'd push the pile down a bit further, then of course things would fall off the back end to the floor, where I'd usually just leave them in a heap. (wow, I sound like a complete slob, don't I?). So this new ironing board is very small - the usual height, but short and narrow - perfect! I'm making a vow (right hand raised) to not use it as a shelf.

Cleaning up the ironing board mess led right into cleaning up the worktable mess (which also acted as a holding place for countless little things). I hadn't seen the tabletop this empty since it was built. And the floor is clear too - I can actually walk around both sides of the table without having to step over or wade through piles of stuff. Obviously, I've been suffering from "stuffism", and the best cure for that is to just dive in and clean it up and if there's not a place for something perhaps think about getting rid of it. I ended up filling a large box with unneccesary clutter-makers.

After hours of sorting fabrics, threads, papers, and props, the room is neat! There's something about an orderly everything-in-its-place room that makes a person smile. How nice it is, when you need a certain needle, to know exactly where to find it! We all know what it's like looking for a needle in a haystack. That was my studio.

Now I'm so pleased with this room that all day Monday I kept looking at it from the doorway, and when I saw it neat and tidy I felt compelled to leave. I wasn't quite ready to mess it up. Maybe today...

I'm joining A Beach Cottage for Good Life Wednesday today. Pop over to see all the different ways life is good!

White Valentines

Old faded linens make me happy. For years I've collected them - lacy table runners, embroidered handkerchiefs, dresser scarves, french tickings and the like. I'd bring them home and they'd sit around my studio looking pretty, piled in baskets or on shelves. My intentions were to make new things from them but I always found it impossible to actually cut into them. So there they sat, in ever-growing piles, until one day I picked up my scissors and quartered an old hankie, then layered the corners over linen to create some sachets.

Now I can't stop digging through all my laces and fabrics for possibilities! It's still a wee bit hard to actually cut into these lovely old linens of yesteryear (I have to take a deep breath first), but when I can repurpose them into pretty things for today I feel better about it. Vintage linens + lavender equals the perfect pairing of two of my favorite things. Add bits of lace and vintage buttons or small keys or flowers, and the sachets make charming valentines, too - especially the hearts.

But now, since I've gone scissor-happy, it's nearly time to restock my supply. The piles are dwindling. I'm hardly complaining, though - there's nothing I love better these days than wandering the aisles of a flea market!

Some of these things you can find here.

I'm joining Faded Charm today for White Wednesday and A Beach Cottage for Good Life Wednesdays.

A New Word

I love choosing a special word for the year to keep myself focussed on my goals. Having a yearly word works better for me than new year's resolutions, which I never keep. Last year's word was serenity, and the year actually turned out to be quiet and peaceful. I think I'm ready for a little more action this year, though, so my word for 2011 is build & refine. oops, that's two words. Truthfully, I couldn't decide which should be the word, so I'm allowing a slight bend in the rules and choosing both. This year, a few of the things I intend to do are:

build my own website, and refine my business presence on the web.

continue building my garden with more roses, a picket fence, and a vegetable plot, while refining what I accomplished last year.

refine what we've done on our house, and also tear apart one of the bathrooms (which is the only room in the house we haven't touched) and build it again from the floor up.

and not least of all, refine my own self (eat better, exercise more) and build our savings. I have a feeling that last bit is rather important, given our economy's uncertain future.

So, I plan on being happily busy this year making progress and accomplishing much. Nothing seems impossible at the beginning of the year!

A New Vintage Shop

Something new for you today! After thinking about it for the longest time, I opened a second etsy shop called BailiwickVintage. I love going to flea markets and thrift shops, as many of you do, but I was becoming overwhelmed with things I didn't need. So, I finally made a concerted effort to declutter around here.

I gathered things up from all corners of the house and corralled them into a cabinet before they could find their way back to wherever I found them (a couple of those things really gave me a hard time, or was that me giving myself a hard time about letting go?). In any case, they're now listed in my new shop, with still more to come. I hope you'll visit! And I'll love having a clear conscience about doing more shopping - what better excuse is there to buy wonderful old things than having a shop to keep supplied?

 

WhiteWorks

Last weekend was sunny, warm, and calm - a perfect opportunity to do some painting and reworking of several things around the house. At one point my back patio looked like a factory for white painted furniture as I kept bringing out more and more things. There were six windsor chairs, a small table, a piano bench-turned-table, a couple of frames, and what I'll show you today - my new/old storage chest for the studio.

I bought it (click here to see the original) at the Rose Bowl Flea Market last month. It was exactly what I needed for my work table so I'd have a place to keep all the little odds and ends that are usually cluttering up my space.

It's quite old, and has all the problems that come with vintage furniture - such as drawers that are warped and therefore stick. But I still love it! I decoupaged the inside of the drawers with scrapbook paper - each drawer is different but has the same theme of vintage postcards, letters, or handwriting. I also bought new hardware since the old pulls were rather ugly, and two of them were missing, and I waxed the bottom edges with soap to make the drawers slide easier. But that only partially worked.

So now it's being filled up drawer by drawer, and I feel neater. And that's saying a lot for a studio that gets as cluttered as mine does!

I'm joing Faded Charm this week for White Wednesday and The Shabby Chic Cottage for Transformation Thursday.

On the Worktable

For the first time I'm joining kootoyoo for My Creative Space Thursday.

Today I've been cutting, sewing, filling, and trimming several sachets - one of my favorite projects. The fragrance of lavender fills the room and makes me very happy in what I do, and playing with fabric and buttons is always fun!

Mosaic Monday

When I started this blog about three years ago I thought it would be a great tool to use in promoting my etsy shop. But have I done much of that? No! I just blather on about all the other stuff going on in my life. Today, though, I thought I'd make a mosaic of some things in my shop because I'm having a sale over there, and a giveaway this week. For the details, just click over to this post and leave a comment to be entered into the drawing. I'd love to see my Mosaic Monday friends over there!

And then go on to Mary's for more Mosaic Monday.