Day 26 of 61 Days of Martie

The last flowers of the season! 

I spent most of the day at the Other House--I'm trying to get out of the habit of calling it Ann's house, as it's now mine. I was going to say "We are painting the doll room," but actually Kevin is spackling and prepping, and I'm playing with the dolls and getting things together for Goodwill, eBay, and the trash. Ann had 70 years' of stuff in there (she lived there for 26 years), and her tastes and mine didn't intersect often, so a lot of it has me going "Oh, blech, WTF was she thinking?!"

Her color and fabric senses, for example, were 180 degrees from mine, for the most part. I've been going through a lot of fabric yardage she'd bought for various projects, and I can't really use any of it. Ann liked oranges, yellowish greens, screaming royal blues, and sparkly taffeta and knit synthetics. I prefer purples and blues, more muted subtle earthy colors, am generally not a big fan of sparkly (although lately that's changing), and utterly love cotton fabrics. Her tastes were from the shiny structured modernist part of the 1950s and 1960s, and she had boxes of Vogue patterns in those styles. I love denim and loose flowing things in colors you can find in a field of wildflowers, and wouldn't stitch those Vogue things unless there was serious money involved.

Basically, I now own tens of pounds of fabrics and patterns I can't stand. She also cut out at least a dozen garments that I've found so far, but didn't even start stitching any of them. If I could stand to work with some of those fabrics, I'd be in clover for doll clothes from those pieces. But a structured dress, cut out of burnt-orange-with-lime-green-dots double-knit polyester, that wasn't sewn? Not one chance I'm ever going to use any part of that.

Don't get me started on what's still in her closets.

I wish she was still here so I could tease her about all this. Then she could tell me I have the taste of a middle-class overeducated hippie (true enough) and we could keeping going until we laughed ourselves out of breath. Miss her something fierce.