Happy New Year!!

In case you haven’t noticed, for the last 6 months we’ve been “absent” from this site, not because we weren’t going to update anything ever again but rather because I was a Sew Weekly contributor. What that means is for the last 12 months I have been sewing along to each weekly theme,  taking photos of ME in MY stuff and then blogging about the process.

Both Sue and I have plans to keep buying and sharing “stuff” : ) My mother, on our monthly trips to the Alameda Flea market, routinely says “Why are you looking at tablecloths? You must own close to 300 AND you’re not doing the blog any more!”

Yes, it’s true, we did our year but that doesn’t mean we just stopped looking and buying. We’re just pickier : )

So now that I’m not sewing a new piece/outift every week we’re going to showcase some of our latest acquisitions.  It won’t be a new one each day, we’re going to try for once a week. We’ll also be highlighting collections of old and new friends. If you have something you’d like to submit for a post please let us know!

Today’s post is a re-post of the final Sew Weekly challenge. The theme was “holiday” and I wanted to use a purse from the collection of a friend and fellow costumer who died earlier this year:

That much gold just screams “Holiday!” doesn’t it? I made a dress in a gold and ivory brocade as well as a gold satin coat to complete the ensemble.  You can read the entire post here.

My original idea was to do this photoshoot using a friends 1966 gold convertible Cadillac but with the holiday season nuttiness we weren’t able to connect by the deadline. Don’t worry, we have plans to do the shoot soon but for the moment I had to think of some way to show off the dress in an appropriate setting.

I pulled out the scraps of the dress fabric and used the biggest piece for a runner down the center of the table. The candlesticks were found at World Market (formerly Cost Plus) on sale after some holiday last year, and the chargers under the plates were originally seen during Mardi Gras.

The dinner plates are my basic white with the gold band and the salad plates are the monogrammed set we found at the thrift store in Rockridge for the Miss Havisham tablesetting at Halloween.

Silverware is Chantilly by Gorham, wine glasses are IKEA and the gold striped glasses were a thrift store find for the Fifth day of Christmas (5 Golden Rings) almost a year ago : ) I stripped the Christmas tree of all gold and silver ornaments to fill basic vases for all that sparkle! For a last minute save I think this worked out pretty well : )

Here’s the whole ensemble – dress, coat and bag with pretty table : ) If you check out the full post you can see the photo that was chicken-bombed…

Monday night at 11:25 Ariel Rose finished her journey here on earth. She is no longer in pain, no longer struggling to breath and finally cancer free.

In 14 years this amazing girl had a larger influence on this planet than most of us can hope to have if we live to be 94. She was smart, loved her twin sister and brother and wanted to work with lions and tigers. She loved her San Francisco Giants, especially Sergio Romo. When he threw the last pitch over the plate to win the World Series this year I was at the family home. There was cheering, and then we packed the family into the car so they could race Ari to the hospital due to seizure activity. She would watch games from her hospital bed and yell at the screen while procedures were done to and around her.

She fought until her last hours, her mom snuggled up against her in bed at the hospital. When Crystal saw how hard her daughter was hanging on she held her close and told her it was ok to go now, that she’d fought long enough and they understood how tired she was. Shocked, stunned, grief stricken. We should not be burying a 14 year old girl but we will.

A month ago Crystal and I stood in the parking garage at Children’s and she said to me “Did you know they sell coffins at Costco?” That was the beginning of one of the strangest conversations I hope to ever have. She asked me to make a special shroud for Ari, a gold lion on a deep red background, the colors of Gryffindor house. Ari was HUGE Harry Potter fan! She wants the word “Brave” (after Ari’s favorite movie and indomitable spirit)  and Ari’s name. Of all the projects I’ve done in my life this will be by far the most challenging.

In Ari’s spirit you can go to either Ariel is Brave or Team Ariel on facebook and leave a comment or load a picture of you holding the “Brave” sign like she’s doing in the top photo.  Sergio Romo tweeted a couple pics of Ari that you can see here.

You can read about her journey on her caringbridge page.

Ari and her sister were featured in this blog on July 31, the Harry Potter Birthday post. You can see photos of them during better days here.

Brittany and Elora

This VERY grainy photo is of my daughter, Brittany, with her photo she entered into the Marin County Fair. You can *just* see the blue ribbon behind her head : ) Yes, she took FIRST PLACE!!! I nearly, but didn’t, cry when we came around the corner and saw that ribbon. She has been my photographer for most of my Sew Weekly challenges this year as well so its nice to get some validation that the work you do IS good. Other than that which a mother gives : )

When she entered the photo she had to drop it off and wait to see if it would be accepted into the contest, that wasn’t a guarantee. Then it was but she wasn’t allowed to write any back story to the picture so she titled it “For my twin”.

Here is the back story – A few years ago my friend Crystal found herself in a nightmare that no one can ever imagine. Right around Halloween her daughter Ariel had a swollen eye and thinking it was pink eye they trotted off to the ER. Within a few days Ari was diagnosed with a very rare, very aggressive form of cancer called Rhadomyosarcoma. 350 cases are diagnosed a year in this county and on that day it was Ariel.

She started a treatment regime that included surgeries, 30 rounds of radiation, multiple scans and tests, 21 rounds of chemo and a rollercoaster of a year that she and her family emerged from exhausted but at least NED (no evidence of disease). Five months after she started her journey my husband was diagnosed with cancer so instead of bonding over make-up and cocktails we would talk about chemos and diets and late night crying sessions. There came a point in my husbands journey where the toll of taking care of him 24/7 AND working became too much and one night Brittany almost lost her mom. She called Heidi, a mutual friend of ours, who stepped in and made life tolerable again as she did so many times for Crystal. Between Crystal and Heidi, who is also Ari’s god mother, we ALL made it through.

Three years ago Crystal became the Chief Organizer and Bottle Washer for the St. Baldrick’s event that Oakland Children’s Hospital holds each year. St. Baldrick’s raises money and awareness for Pediatric Cancer Research by holding shaving parties where shavees are sponsored, each one trying to outdo the others in fundraising. The first year we helped out we looked out over the lobby at Children’s where the event was held to see a sea of blue – Oakland Police and Firefighters came out in droves, there were representatives from a dozen other police departments as well as the Coast Guard, family groups, friends….it was AMAZING. I think that year the event raised $100,000. Tow years ago we were going for $125,000 and made it a little over $150,000. For a short period of time we were the top event in the state, until the “46 Mommas” moved their event to L.A. to coincide with the “Stand up to Cancer” live broadcast. If you’re going to be outdone then having the “46 Mommas” sweep you is an honor : )

Last year, on Valentine’s Day, Ari was diagnosed with a relapse, just as plans were coming together for St. Baldrick’s. How Crystal and Heidi pulled it off it a testament to the strength you find inside you when you need it. This year we did over $170,000 but again, how they pulled it together just amazes me. Every year, Crystal’s husband and teenage son along with Ari’s TWIN sister have shaved their heads in solidarity. Elora, the girl in the photo, is Ari’s twin. This year Brittany took her camera and one really big lens and took hundreds of spontaneous portraits. She chose this one for a school project and most of the time when you say “Elora is shaving her head in honor of her twin sister who is fighting cancer for the THIRD time” you get tears.

So this is our tribute to a family that has been through so much, to a battle that literally changes every day. Ari is currently battling, she was able to come home from the hospital a couple days ago after getting her sinus’s cleaned out (the site of the original tumor) since she’s contracted a nasty infection called MRSA for short (it’s a super bug, the kind of thing you can only get if you are severely immunocompromised). She also had a bone biopsy of a suspicious large “tumor” in her femur that we had all thought was a progression of her disease. Turns out, in a VERY happy turn of events, that it was “only” a bone marrow die-off, with a possible secondary infection but NO CANCER CELLS. While it seems perverse to celebrate a marrow die-off and infection this is the world of cancer. This doesn’t mean she doesn’t still have cancer, she does. It just means that today it’s not in her bones. She has tumors in her brain and spinal cord and is not considered “curable”. They are trying to give her the best quality of life for as long as possible. When you hear a 13 year old girl say she’s not ready to give up, she’s still going to fight…it puts your own struggles into perspective. My mantra has become “Hey, if it’s not cancer, it’s fixable and everything will be fine.”

Crystal was instrumental in helping out with one of the most popular posts here, the Harry Potter/JK Rowling birthday post (July 31). Ariel and Elora are wearing the robes I made for them : ) Ari was still recovering from major brain surgery but had a smile that glowed and Elora was being her goofy wonderful self. I vowed that if anything happened with Ari then we would suspend the blog for a bit. We never had to do that but there were a couple of times we came close. We have no idea how much further this journey will go but whatever is needed from us, we’ll be there.

If you want to find out more about St. Baldrick’s you can go here.

If you want to follow Ari’s journey you can go here.

A few weeks ago the San Francisco Giant’s honored Ariel’s bravery and she threw out the first pitch. She was weak from chemo, scared and Sergio Romo walked and talked her through it. He has become a friend and fan of theirs, even re-tweeting “Ari-isms”. You can get updates on the Team Ariel facebook page as well as Crystal-isms : ) Ashton, who we featured March 28, was a friend of Ari’s and her mom Judy is a friend of Crystal’s. Such a small world.

A couple months ago I decided to order 2, and only 2, side plates to commemorate the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth. Took them a while to get here but they arrived in FINE style! Each plate was wrapped in layers of bubble wrap and in their own box with the above gold embossing.

This is what we found when we opened the boxes : ) There is a little informational card and the plate itself is wrapped with lion-and-crown gold imprinted tissue paper!

I almost stopped there…

But I didn’t : )

For our final post of the year we’re featuring these stunning plates. They are sitting on Royal Worchester Howard china from my sister’s collection. They are so stunning that nothing else was needed. My Gorham Chantilly sterling silver seemed to be the appropriate silverware for so fine an event. The water glasses have a gold rim and floral design around the top that mimics the tea cups, the wine glasses are crystal as is the candelabra in the middle of the table that my grandmother received as a wedding present in 1940. The small rectangular dish is called a “pin dish” that commemorates the coronation and believe it or not I use it as just that in my sewing room!

The tea cups and saucers as well as the tea pot, sugar and creamer are the set I found just before the Gatsby picnic last year at the Alameda Flea market. While the patterns don’t match the gold rims do. And let’s put this into some perspective – the two plates commemorating the Jubilee cost about $140 while the entire tea set (all 28 pieces) was around $30!

My justification for buying these was how often are we going to witness an event like a 60th anniversary of ANYTHING? I love the two postcards and the bowl my grandfather brought back from England in 1953 so this is the next generation of that sort of thing. I’ll re-wrap the plates in their fancy tissue and carefully tuck them into their embossed blue boxes and store them in a box under my bed. I’ll leave a note for my daughter telling her why I bought them and hope she and her future family will appreciate them.

I’ve printed out each of the last 365 posts and keep them in binders to show people like my grandmother who doesn’t use the internet. It will all be part of my legacy one day. “Remember when grandma/great grandma did that crazy tablesetting a day for a year thing? What ever possessed her to do something like that?!”

Because we started this journey a year ago with a table with candelight in the dark we end it that way too.

We picked up the tea party and went outside!

So we end our year here. Out by the pond at dusk surrounded by elegance. In the past year we’ve taken well over 20,000 pictures, edited several thousand and learned the basics of photoshop. I only wiped out a camera lens once and there were cats involved : )

We decided to postpone the Final Interactive Challenge when Sue ran into some serious health issues. We’re still going to do it, and if you’d like to make a tablesetting you are still more than welcome to participate! We are still going to have parties using our dish sets and blog about it, it just became tough to do the daily setting, work full times jobs AND take care of our lives, houses and gardens. I am infinitely pleased that we managed to get every single post up for the last year! There were moments when I thought we might have to just say “oh well” but those were worked through.

I also want to say “THANK YOU!!” to everyone who stopped by, left a comment, shared our pics on their blogs and invited their friends to stop by. When you do something like this you have no idea if you’re reaching people but I do know from looking at the map that we’ve been seen all over the world. The power of the comments is HUGE so thank you to everyone who dropped us a line : )

I’ll be taking a short break from dishes and tablecloths and setting up a sewing blog. For those of you who have followed me on Sew Weekly I’ll be blogging over there for the rest of the year so I won’t be gone! I’m also not going to stop going to flea markets or stop buying dishes and linens, I’ll just be pickier. The interesting thing I saw when looking at what others shared on their blogs is that almost anything with red in it is quite popular. Since I’m the red fan this will be an easy thing to continue. I’m also going to start selling some of the things I’ve acquired, don’t need any friends or family members thinking I could do a shot on “Hoarders”, so if there is something that you would love to own drop me a note.

So Thank You again, I’ve had a blast! I hope you did too.

See you soon : )

And that’s it…

We are done.

]]> http://retrodecosettings.com/2012/06/20/day-366-a-jubilee-tea/feed/ 5 http://retrodecosettings.com/2012/06/19/day-365-bamboo/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=day-365-bamboo http://retrodecosettings.com/2012/06/19/day-365-bamboo/#comments Tue, 19 Jun 2012 11:00:18 +0000 Loran http://retrodecosettings.com/?p=7103

Another stunner from Nadine, my mom decided she couldn’t live without it and I wholeheartedly agree! It is beautiful linen, in fabulous shape and is huge. My mom has an octagonal dining room table that almost nothing fits on well. This one not only fits but you can see more

Continue reading Day 365 – Bamboo!

Another stunner from Nadine, my mom decided she couldn’t live without it and I wholeheartedly agree! It is beautiful linen, in fabulous shape and is huge. My mom has an octagonal dining room table that almost nothing fits on well. This one not only fits but you can see more of the pattern than you can on my table : )

There are TWO “borders” on this cloth! The inner border just fits on my table top, the outer one flows over the edge. Shamrock green Fiesta is perfect for the starter, followed by modern yellow and chartreuse. Paprika berrybowls and salt & pepper shakers pick up the brown of the bamboo. Linen napkins (from Nadine!) and french ivory silverware frame the plates.

The casserole dish is from the Magnolia line, it actually photographed a lot more to the yellow tones than in looked in the real world. I don’t mind the magnolias, the green leaves play pretty well along with the cloth.

The glassware is Bamboo by Noritake. I have about 120 pieces that I found at Salvation Army in one trip. They had probably been someone’s grandmother’s collection, kept somewhere where they picked up a good film of grease and dust. It took us an hour just to wrap and pack them at the store, another 4 hours to unwrap and clean and a week to figure out what cabinet to empty! I have at least 8 of the pilsners, wine glasses, tom collins, martini, brandy snifters, dessert cups, seafood servers WITH liners, and on and on. Now that we’ve used them a few times I’m going to put a good part of the collection on ebay.

When I bought the gladiola’s I really wanted those green ones, but Trader Joe’s had bundled some red in that I just set aside. As I photographed the table I realized the paprika dishes were pretty close to the scarlet, and how would scarlet look?

As SOON as the red hit the table the cats were RIGHT THERE. Chunk and Stuart both came RUNNING. Granted, the table looks pretty good but I’m trying to figure out what they were after!

The brown is subtle, the red is in your face, you decide. Personally, I like the red : )

Tomorrow is our “last” day…but we aren’t going away!

We will be taking a little break, cleaning up the rotating piles of dishes and organizing a years worth of accumulations. There are plans to keep going but doing a posting or two a week and doing “larger” settings. We haven’t had the luxury of time or budget to do things like parties and floral arrangements like we’d like. We have been offered two cars to do picnic’s with that really MUST be used. And in the last year we’ve seen collections of “stuff” that people should really see and appreciate.

This is still a fabulous learning experience and we intend to keep learnin’! We’ll be featuring what’s going on in our gardens (maybe more of Sue’s garden since she’s got the serious farm girl thing going!) and do more lifestyle posts. If there’s something you want to see, just drop us a line : )

Tomorrow – A Jubilee tea!

One, one, ONE day to go!!!!

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