Deserted downtown streets in DC During Lockdown 2020

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 For several months, during the Covid-19 pandemic, in 2020, the streets around the federal area in downtown Washington, D.C. were deserted.  But for the occasional bus or delivery vehicle there was no traffic at all.  In fact, many times I crossed the street anywhere, almost without looking, as there were no vehicles coming by at all.  I'd go on a walk about and the city areas of Penn Quarter and Federal Triangle were bereft of people and cars.  

11th and E Sts NW intersection

Usually it's very busy and you have to be very careful to follow the street crossing signs or you could get run over by a bike or car or van or bus. But not for the several months of the lock down. 

Shops and cafes and just about every office was closed and most had signs in the windows or doors about being closed indefinitely.  It was a very strange situation.  On the one hand, there was a certain enjoyment to the quietness of the city, but on the other hand, there was a certain uselessness in the air, as if these buildings and roadways were all for nothing.

Pennsylvania Ave NW

  If you did see a person, it was a security guard, with a mask on, or an occasional other person going on a walk.  Everyone was giving each other a suspicious look and wide berth.

 It was as quiet as an early Sunday morning downtown everywhere!

View on PA ave to Congress

Thrift shop find makes nice summer dress

This lovely blue dress I got for a few dollars in the local Goodwill Thrift shop last year.  And, inspired by the Refashionista , I fidgeted with it on the sewing machine and this is how it ended up!  Unfortunately, I forgot to take a photo of what it originally looked like!          But it had blousy elbow-length sleeves, hung down to around my ankles and was way too wide or basically hideously hanging on me.   It was probably a Medium size and needed a slash down from me.  But I loved the almost periwinkle blue color and its pattern, the V-neck, the shiny shell like buttons and how light and summery the fabric felt.  So I chopped the sleeves and made them into little cap sleeves, took in the side seams about an inch each and hacked about 6 inches off the hem.  That piece I turned into a belt that you can see tied around the waist.  I think it came out all right!   It's easy to wear in the summer heat and washes and dries quickly as the fabric is some sort of light weave. 

Summer Bed Cover From Old Embroidered Handkerchiefs

I'm not sure I wrote about this sewing project already but since it's summer and I've put this back on the bed it's worth explaining.  When we cleared out my mother's house when she died, I came across a stack of handkerchiefs that were very pretty and embroidered.  It turns out a lot of these handkerchiefs and small table mats that had been embroidered by my father's sister, my Aunt Margaret, so I decided to keep them with the idea of using them in a crafts project. Some of the handkerchiefs in the stash also had manufactured embroidery on them but also were very pretty, so I kept them too.  I googled some Pinterest projects involving old vintage handkerchiefs and decided to lay them all out on the ground to see if they suggested anything.  So I realized I had quite a few pieces and that I could use them as decoration on a bed coverlet. I had a fine linen sheet from my mother-in-law that was a one-of and so it was perfect for this project.
 It took me a long time to actually piece and lay out all the handkerchiefs.  I pinned them out and then steadily worked my way through stitching them down.  This took quite a while as it was hard to manage a big sheet on my sewing machine which is not one really designed for large projects like this.  But I finally finished it and felt quite proud of myself for recycling,  and reusing these items.  And it's a very practical and light summer bed cover as well!

Wall of Cactus

On one of my pandemic perambulations,  I came across this amazing wall of cacti.  Someone had set up a box like structure with a vertical arrangement of cactus plants in one of the Smithsonian gardens.   I think it is quite amazing. I hadn't noticed if they'd been up over the winter but it is April now and the little plants are looking very healthy and colorful.  I think these are varieties of a plant called hen-and-chicks and are quite easy to grow in sunlight or partial shade.  They are all very pretty and this arrangement is quite inspirational to see. It would be nice to grow some of these on a windowledge in our apartment but alas, there is insufficient light.

Sneak Peaks into Hirschhorn Sculpture Garden

They've chained off the pathways into the Hirschhorn Sculpture garden during the pandemic, but that doesn't stop me creeping up close and poking my camera over the fence or over the spaces between the hedges to see some of the sculptures there. I guess the Burghers of Calais by Rodin is the most famous or most recognizable one, the others being more abstract and the labels not particularly accessible.  I'll have to come back for another wander around once the Washington DC Stay-At-Home order is lifted or they start to release the locked gates and chains so we can get in and see it all again. Supposedly, May 15 is when the order will be lifted, but you know, there are many street vendors coming back on the corners and even on the national mall we've seen ice cream trucks and hot dog sellers.

Stay-At-Home Starting to End?

It almost seemed like a regular Saturday morning on the Washington National Mall today but if you looked closely you could see the masks and attempts to keep six foot away from the next person and a lot less people than one would see on sunny day. But it was good to see ice cream trucks, bicyclists, families, dogs, joggers and frisbee throwers out in the sunshine and trying not to think about going home and being cooped up some more. Also it was just generally quieter, as if we've gotten used to not making a lot of noise. I'd say there were far more cars, trucks and buses about than I've seen in this past week due to the pandemic stay-at-home order. There were at least two ice cream vendors in their brightly colored trucks doing a good business and there was even at least one National Park Service guard walking about.

Petrified Wood on the Washington Mall

I remember going to the Petrified Forest in Arizona when I took a trip out west once so I was delighted to see some pieces of petrified wood at the Smithsonian Natural History Museum on the Mall in Washington, D.C. recently.  I don't know if these pieces are from Arizona but they look very much like the ones I'd seen before.
To show how I had no idea about it, when I went to the petrified forest national park in Arizona, I really expected to see a standing forest of "frozen" wood. Feeling a bit silly, it was, of course, 'just' several acres of land that you can walk through on paths that weave among logs and trees and stumps that are lying on their sides and are fossils that were created when they got buried in sediment and minerals leached into them aeons ago.
 What is especially interesting are the tree rings and all the different colors that the minerals show in the "wood" pieces. You can touch the ones on the mall and they feel just like stone!  So interesting!

 

Dogwood Tree Blooming By Agriculture Department in DC

On my daily walk recently on the Washington Mall I wandered over to Independence Avenue near the Department of Agriculture and saw this lovely dogwood tree blazing away. Of course, I had to snap a few photos as I knew the rain was coming in soon and all the petals would soon get torn off.

The more you look at these dogwood tree flowers the prettier they get, from the little pink tips to their yellow green hearts.  Of course, I'm hoping that next time I walk over that way, it will still be there but probably not.  I've noticed flowers bloom and go quickly during spring. So doing the best I can to photo and get them blogged!

I also learned -- from the internet -- that as legend has it, the cross on which Jesus was crucified was made from a dogwood tree. God decreed that the dogwood tree would from that day forth never grow large enough to be used to make a cross. So maybe that's why this tree isn't very big! And why it flowers around Eastertide!

Easter Eggs And Hot Cross Buns

It was that lovely time of spring when it's Easter so I just had to make hot cross buns on Good Friday. To me the tradition is all about the cross being on the buns and making the day special using a food.  The real trick for me was to make them without wheat flour or sugar, so I scoured the internet and came up with a great recipe.  It was a keto/paleo type recipe which is just fine for me who doesn't eat sugar or wheat flour. And it turned out I had all the necessary ingredients at hand and they made up quickly.  I did make cream cheese icing too and put it in the crosses.  These actually came out really well and tasted great!

Another Eastertide tradition at my home is to make some dyed hardboiled eggs.  Now, this is something I usually do with my son as we have fun dipping them in the colored waters and decorating the egg shells. Apparently, eggs symbolize resurrection and the cracking of eggs something to do with Jesus coming out of the tomb but I'm a bit hazy on the origins of this tradition. But this year it was the time of the Covad19 pandemic and he was sheltering in place at his apartment so I made them by myself (sadly).

But I had some large white eggs and got out the food dye and dip stuff and made about half a dozen.  And so some of them ended up as part of our Easter decorations. I happened to have a couple of cute stuffed bunny rabbits so it seemed a good idea to put the eggs in front of the bunnies.  I have no idea where the idea of rabbits come from for Easter although I think it has something to do with rabbits being prolific and Easter signals new life. A catholic website asserts the tradition that rabbits are associated with the Virgin Mary, however, as the Greeks, apparently, believed that rabbits could reproduce asexually, so early Greco-Christians may have made that association.

So those eggs have been quietly demolished the past few days, showing up sliced on toast for breakfast and in egg salad sandwiches at lunch.  

Another Recycled Quilt from Shirts And Curtain Fabric

 This quilt was the inspiration for another one I wrote about recently as it was my first foray into using old shirt material to make the squares and triangles that make up the design for this quilt.  The old shirts were from my son and husband and had accumulated in my fabric stash and were just crying out to be used for something.  I also used some old curtain fabric -- the satiny brown fabric -- for the side striping that finishes off the design.  And I used a piece of old flannel sheeting for the backing. You can tell that I'm a bit of a hoarder when it comes to bits of fabric!

Again, I used the fast triangle sewing technique to make up the squares pretty quickly.  If you are working really fast, and a bit slapdash like me, you can skip using the ruler and pencil and just eyeball sew it.  When I cut the squares out, I use a 5" by 5" square piece of cardboard as a guide for the size of each square.  After making as many squares as you can generate from your fabrics, it's time to lay it out and see how you can arrange them in different ways.  This particular design (the blue and orange plaid squares) is called a windmill design and it's easy to do if you just lay them out ahead of time and turn the squares in the right way.  I take my time with designing these, and in this case it was a full week before I had it figured out!

 Once I put the larger squares together it was time to join them together with strips of grey plaid shirting and then finish it off with the bronze edging.  I also stitch-in-the-ditch in a few areas, to join the top piece to the bottom, once I've joined the flannel back to the designed portion. But I don't quilt all of the top to the bottom portion as I like my "quilts" looser.
Lest you think I sew this up in a day or so let me tell you that this type of project can take me several months to complete. I may just cut up the shirting fabric scraps one day. Another day cut them in the 5 inch squares.  Another day stitch the triangles, and yet another day to lay it all out. And yet another day or week to put the surrounding strips on.  The backing on this quilt project was some leftover flannel sheeting I had and that gave it a nice soft feel. I didn't use batting to fill it but I could have used some old blanketing or another layer of flannel sheeting had I wanted this to be fatter and warmer.  I just left it this way, essentially two layers of fabric.  It's just great to tuck around me when I'm reading in bed -- as it's about 4 foot by 4.5 feet wide, and I didn't want something too big.  This size makes for a great lap quilt for keeping you warm watching TV on the couch too and is a size that folds up neatly and can be easily stored nearby where you might use it. Everything was scrap fabric so again I felt virtuous upcycling, recycling and reusing all these bits of fabric that were piling up in my fabric stash.

Lovely Spring Flowers at Bartholdi Park, Washington DC

Whoever takes care of and gardens the various flower beds on the national Mall area in Washington, DC does a fabulous job.  This spring, during the time of the pandemic, we were able to take daily walks and see spectacular displays of hyacinths, tulips, daffodils and a myriad of other flowers whose names I don't know.

The flowers in this blog are from the Bartholdi Park garden  at the bottom of Capitol Hill on its southwest side.  It is located near the enclosed glass US Botanical Garden, which is now closed, but this park is open

and free to the public.  We have roamed through it a couple of times lately and just love the incredible displays of color, the aromas and watching the seedlings grow.  The park also has trees and a fountain, although that's not running now. 

We don't encounter too many other people on these walks due to the City of Washington DC Stay At Home order, but these walks are a valuable contribution to our health and well-being as staying at home all day every day for weeks on end is, strangely enough, quite exhausting.

Quilt Made During Pandemic: Recycled Shirts

Well, I pulled together a lap size quilt this past week from some old bits and bobs of fabric I'd been accumulating.  Most of the scraps were cut out pieces from old shirts from my husband and son. They are pretty hard on their shirts and once I can no longer sew the rips in the seams or shoulders or the tears that can't be patched, I cut up the shirts, open up the sleeves, etc.  Then I cut out 5 inch squares and start making a quilt.  I think this quilt is made from about five shirts, although I have scrap squares left over that I will turn into something else. Maybe a pillow....
One of the ways I have speeded up sewing quilt squares into triangle shapes was one I learned from a television show on sewing called "Sewing with Nancy" that I stumbled upon one day. Who says you can't learn from watching TV?
Anyway, to really make triangles fast the method is to get your two different squares sewn together fast by sewing two different squares together by putting the two right sides together and then stitching diagonally across from one corner to the other. Then you sew
a seam either side of that diagonal, about 1/8 inch away, so you end up with three seams running diagonally corner to corner.  Then you just snip through and across the middle seam, that is, the middle diagonal line of stitching, and hey presto, once you open it up, you have two squares made of two different triangles stitched together.  You just press them out then arrange them in rows, and then sew it up!  I try to make the whole thing as geometric as possible.  Usually, I bind the edge with strips of left over material sewn together to finish it.
I'm not the neatest sewciopath but over all, I'm usually pretty happy with how these come out.
And for the batting inside I used an old blanket piece, attached that to the patterned side of the quilt and then put on the backing (which was made up of discarded T-shirt material, so very soft and cottony) and then stitched it all together and turned it right side out (left about a foot unstitched so I could turn it right side out.  Then hand sewed that final foot and pressed the whole thing.  And eh voila, a lap quilt for keeping knees warm when curled up on the sofa watching tv or when reading in bed and when you don't or won't need a full size blankie. And it's all reuse and recycle or upcycle, and I feel virtuous that I didn't fill up the landfill!

Glorious Flowers on Capitol Hill This Spring

Since I'm in 'stay- at-home' mode now due to the coronavirus I actually have time to add things to my blog.  In fact, I sort of had forgotten about this blog until I went looking for a photo and remembered I'd posted it as a blog!  So here are the photos from our recent walk in Bartholdi Park gardens, which are at the base of Capital Hill in Washington, DC.  There was maybe one or two other people there, but mostly deserted.  We were able to walk about freely and enjoy the lovely plantings done by the U.S. Botanical Garden Conservatory.  Truly, the hyacinths smelt delicious!  Truly the colors of the tulips were gorgeous!  It was a great way to take our minds off the stress of these troubling times. I will probably be posting more on this blog now that I'm home so much, we've settled into a new home and I've cut back my work hours!

Jus

Saying Goodbye to My Lovely Old Victorian Townhouse

I'm saying goodbye to the lovely old late Victorian bayfront brown brick townhouse I've lived in the past 30 years.  I've moved to something smaller as we just can't do stairs and keep up a garden anymore due to the infirmities creeping in as we age.  So it's basically on the market now with a very friendly realtor, Jake Anderson.
We have had so much family life and good times in this house with my son and his friends and all our friends and family that visited us in the nation's capital city that I feel an era has passed. This was the house my son grew up in as he was 2 years old when we moved in and is now in his thirties.  Over the years we made many improvements, kept it clean and fixed up and all the time just loved the neighborhood, Bloomingdale, and our neighbors.  I'm already missing walks to Crispus Attucks Park and the quick access to Washington Hospital Medical Center clinics!

Had many parties in the dining room

It's a big house with a lot of functional living space like a covered front porch, eat-in kitchen and formal dining room, a back deck and a good deep lot where one can grow veggies in the back yard (or keep a goat, or so they say!). I especially cherished my eat-in kitchen as I finally got it to be totally modern with stainless steel appliances, a quartz counter top and a perfect shade of grey paint on the cabinets!
I hope the new owners will find out how grand it is to live with interesting features that you can't find in new houses such as original oak and pine hardwood floors, chestnut wood door frames and a stamped tin ceiling.

Living room woodwork is awesome!

I will surely miss the mirrored corner cabinetry, a cast iron and brass fireplace and high ceilings. The new owners will surely enjoy a few surprises in the spring when the bulbs (irises, lilies and daffodils) pop up and when the Queen Liz rosebush starts showing off in June, not to mention the glorious blue hydrangea blooms in late summer or the bright pink crepe myrtle that flowers through October.

A very airy modern eat-in kitchen

A super spacious master bedroom

Decorative china coffee or tea set made in Japan drips with gold and pink design

I've put this little tea or coffee pot set up on Ebay again to see if I can sell it.  It's a very decorative piece but basically it's a vintage reproduction Made in Japan as a copy of other vintage or antique tea or coffee services.  This has the little classic French medallion of rustic courtesans playing outside and the whole thing is painted in very bright rosy magenta tone and gold splashes of paint making it light up a lot in a cabinet case.

It has six cups and saucers, each cup about 3 inches high and saucer almost 4 inches across.  The tea pot or coffee server stands about 7 inches high and the creamer and sugar bowl are equally well proportioned and equally well gilded and painted. There's nothing wrong with this set except it says "For Decorative Use Only" stamped on the bottom in gold print, leading me to think that the paints have metallic or other elements in them that might leach into real coffee and tea.  So the set is for decoration only!

It's a shame really as it would be rather nice to have one's coffee served in this over-the-top antique copy coffee service!

At any rate I have partitioned it into two lots and put them up on Ebay for sale. One listing is for the six teacups with saucers and the other is the pot with creamer and sugar bowl.   I've written about them in social media before saying these may be useful for crafts purposes or for decorative uses.  I'm thinking of the people who make bird feeders out of coffee cups by glueing them to wooden posts or who make artful arrangements of coffee pots into water fountains and things.  I suppose I might do something like that myself if I don't sell them first!
Follow up Note:  No one wanted this after two years up on Ebay, so I donated it to a thrift shop, hoping someone would find it.