Spring cleaning and still sewing daily....

Day 146

I am so happy to finally be enjoying the cool mornings and warm SLIGHTLY breezy days (not persistent 40mph sand storms) that make me love New Mexico this is the best time of year for me as everything is budding, its not too hot to go out, we can open the windows and throw off the cloak and dust of winter ONLY IF you are fully medicated against Cedar/Juniper allergies lol

FYI if you ever visit New Mexico no matter how hard we dust there is ALWAYS a fine layer of sand and dust on everything it is just impossible to keep up with....seriously its a desert around here LOTS of sand

So this Spring Break I laid out my plans to clean the house top to bottom, every nook and cranny and as of today I can say the upstairs is finished.....the loft where I fully expect my preteens to be bringing home friends in the Summer to hang out, watch movies, play games, sleepovers...it needs to be a fun place where they can just be themselves

Really hoping to get to the painting this Summer...one of these blues on the wall....I want this loft to be relaxed and reminiscent of my dream life growing up in Florida and my time spent on the beach like an old Florida cracker beach house of which I wish I had grown up in but while we had the Florida floor plan and windows of one of these houses it was a half hour drive to the beach.

This couch has been in our family since the oldest was born and has definitely seen better days but since it's bones are still good I am going to get some blue mattress ticking and recover it...for now I just recovered the many pillows in random fabric scraps I had laying around

I had one small piece of vintage red strip mattress ticking...

the girls insisted on this soft wool plaid piece....

both girls being born in Texas they loved finding this handkerchief so I threw it on a squishy pillow-not that Texans are squishy by any means lol-they just knew they would be using it a lot and wanted to put it on a comfy pillow

2 pillows that were already recovered, this wool felt 'Liberty and Freedom' and in the back a silky blue stripe

this vintage hand embroidered pillowcase written in German (if you speak German and know what it says can you let me know? ya know so I can impress people who come over lol)

UPDATE TRANSLATION: The early bird catches the worm <--thanks Mel, very cool

This one little scrap I had that actually had Florida and California on it-both places I have lived--one day I hope to find a real touristy handkerchief like this in my thrifting adventures

And that quilt in the back is from the girl's great (great?) grandmother and they use it all the time so it is perfect here...won't this room look great with the couch recovered and the walls painted and (fingers crossed) some faux wood floors eventually......like a room in my imaginary beach house that is my Summer home lol

Here is the cabinet under the TV which used to be open, exposed, ugly, jumbled....games, controllers, movies, wires every which way.....so I covered it with the only scrap of blue stripe mattress ticking I had (this is what will be used to cover the couch) and I hot glued vintage ric rac across the top over the staples (I totally luv my staple gun)

btw those are some of my huge collection of fossilized (over 1million years old) and modern shells collected in my years on the beach and in my pre-life as a budding paleontologist/geologist/archaeologist

Art on the stairs and beach on the stair rail-hub plans on building some more book shelves for the books along these walls this Summer-we love books in this house

random shell groupings

in an effort to decorate with what we have I dug these 2 aquariums out of the garage and filled them will most of my shell collection--the shelf on the left my hub built for some of our collection of favorite books

Today we plan on starting the downstairs Spring cleaning efforts...making homemade applesauce....the girls are creating their own Pokemon felt creatures (more on that tomorrow)...and I have 3 curtains to sew......what will you create today?