Spikey bits

We joke, sometimes, about cats lying on their backs “with all the pointy bits [pointing] up.  These cacti hardly have any section that is not being pointy in multiple directions!

And for good measure, here’s a spikey thing by Chihully:

 

 

 

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Sacrament of the Scrubbing Bubbles

Unsurprisingly, this never caught on….

To be honest, other than the text and the mustaches, there was very little I had to do here; we can compliment/blame Alice Cordelia Morse for her lovely watercolor and gouache work.  It’s archived at the Smithsonian, as an image from the Cooper Hewitt Design Museum. I’m reasonably sure that the skull-like blotches around the cross were really meant as shorthand for cherub faces.  But scrubbing bubbles [wha-hoo!] are much more entertaining.

We’ve had a houseguest that did not arrive [or leave] on four feet.  So perhaps that’s why cleaning has been on my mind?

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Subsequent arrangements

I know some people have these bronzed, which, even at the time when I’d been in the stores that offered the service, seemed strange…

Maybe it was the little white “first shoes” that got bronzed more often.  Still an odd keepsake.  Maybe it made more sense in days when polio or other childhood illnesses meant that some children didn’t make it to any larger shoes, or walking was a bittersweet milestone to look back on after that became impossible.

Or maybe it was “the thing you did” because the nice people at the store offered a service, and everyone else in the neighborhood had these things on their shelves, so….?

I remember buckling these on and off, running to the edge of the beach in them [and needing to shake out sand], going to school…little white cotton socks…discussions of why toes should be “piggies” and why on earth they would want roast beef…

But for the last few years, now that these shoes live with me, rather than my parents, I have been trying to figure out WHAT THE HELL to do with them.

The current [literally] solution is to use them to hold charging cables up off the floor and out of the immediate visual field of the current baby in the household, that kitten I keep photographing.

What things have you got that have found odd new purposes?

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Red currants

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Ephemera old and new(ish)

I assume you can sort this out.  If it was a rebus, I guess my message would be “Spring Cleaning is for the Birds”?  Maybe?  It’s a lovely day.  [Well, outside children are screaming, but that’s just the nursery school at recess]

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Small Strawberry Dress (or, Dress with Small Strawberries)

Either title will do; you can see from the weave that the pattern is small.  Appropriate for a child’s dress that wouldn’t even cover me from neck to navel at this point.

I suppose I should have a “Fabric” category for the blog — I keep finding items that might need memorializing.

(Siri ‘helpfully’ suggests I wanted to write “memory ozone” there. Really?!!)

There’s a chance I’m misremembering, but I think this dress is from my days of little red shoes with multiple buckles and insisting that all my stuffed animals be brought to the living room mid-afternoon, so ‘birthday parties” could happen.

The flannel fabric is still soft and the colors bright and I am not sure what to do with it now that it’s here. I’m better with furniture, really. I can work out what to do with furniture.

Kinda hard to convince either of the cats to wear this, even if Malkin would look adorable with his grey ruff puffing out from beneath a tiny Peter Pan collar…

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Use of Space

Actually, I don’t recommend parking on the jellyfish: the traction is terrible getting back onto the street.

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