Party like it's 1899 Forever

I made the beginnings of a rag rug for an upcoming event at the museum.  The point is to highlight examples of bygone home handicrafts as well as to show kids that there are many ways to recycle.  Scrap fabric from worn out textiles or clothes is braided and then stitched together.  It is, as they say in California, hella easy.  Examples on flickr.

Rag rugs seem to have been the dominion of rural women just trying to make do until the Arts & Crafts movement (1860 - 1910) popularized them as an art form. Old ones are fairly pricey (and awesome) on Ebay. 

I totally love them, but this is going to have to go to the back of my "free time shit to do" pile because I don't have scrap fabric, and I need to embroider pictures of Ray Smuckles saying rude shit first.  Stay tuned for an Anita+Brittany clothing line consisting of silk-screened and embroidered hoodies and shirts with pictures of Ray saying WE DOIN THIS! and Roast Beef saying "I am the guy who sucks. Plus I got depression." 

Questions, see Achewood.  Start in 2005 or prior.

Stay a while

I found myself trapped alone in here for a while today. It's a lovely 1901 bungalow with apparent Amityville tendencies. Right now it contains an exhibit about the restoration of a nearby Victorian and is full of strange and random items found in and under the house, like books and letters and bottles under the porch and 100 year old broken kitchen implements from under the ground floor.

The very average key lock turns smoothly from the outside, but once you are in, you are in. I spent about five long minutes jiggling, turning, and struggling before moving to the back door which was even more immobile than the front. So I just stood in the hall for a while, wondering what to do, my fingers sore from the repetition of trying to turn a key in a lock that had somehow been re-keyed in the last 20 minutes. After trying the front door again, getting nothing, and stamping and screaming REALLY?!?!?, the lock clicked over.