Vintage appliances

 

My mother would be hard pressed to locate an instruction manual of something she purchased last month.  A., shall we say, is a bit different.  He keeps all of the manuals to everything he's every purchased, neatly of course, and all in one place.

In fact, he keeps manuals to things that he didn't even buy.  Yes, that's right!  When we recently cleaned out all of the kitchen drawers prior to the renovation, we unearthed manuals and installation instructions for the major appliances—manuals that are so old and so wonderful I just have to share them here.

A. thinks his kitchen was last renovated in the early 1980s, well before he bought it.  That may be true, but the appliances seem to have been even older than that.  The stove certainly looked dated...

 

But check out the instruction manual:

Look at the food styling!  Look at the font!  That can't be from the early '80s.  Maybe the '60s?  I love the fake daisies stuck into the meat.  Centerpiece, main dish...why choose?

And here's the Magic Chef dishwasher:

What era was this?  Look at her hairdo!

There isn't a single date on any of these manuals, but they seem much older than 1980 to me.  The amazing thing is that they mostly worked: the dishwasher cranked away when, on occasion, we asked it too; the fridge hummed reliably (if inefficiently) day in and day out; and the stove offered three working burners, provided you had a pair of pliers to get around a broken knob.  Which is pretty good, I think—will the current crop of appliances last thirty or fifty years?  Somehow I doubt it.

Ana Sortun's Potato Risotto

So far I've tried only a handful of recipes from Ana Sortun's Spice, but I've loved every one of them—each has been unusually delicious.  This is a creamy, indulgent "risotto" made with finely diced potatoes instead of rice.  How nice!

We've been trying to decide how we should get our fruits and vegetables this summer, the two viable options being delivery (by Urban Organic) and weekly trips to the greenmarket and grocery store.  It's nice to pick things out, and I love farmers' markets, but delivery is really convenient when you live in a big city.  Plus I wondered whether Urban Organic would be a better deal: can you really get 11-13 kinds of produce from the greenmarket for $25?

You can get close, as it turns out.  Here is our $25 haul from Friday:

Lettuce, sugar snap peas, strawberries, potatoes, tomatoes, green and yellow zucchini, asparagus, beets, and radishes.  So many colors!

The tiny, fresh potatoes—the size of ping-pong balls—reminded me of a recipe I had seen in Spice.  Or, rather, it reminded me of a story I had seen in the book, in which she gushes about her first experience with and abiding love for just-dug potatoes.  It's a little over the top: could there really be a noticeable difference between just-dug tubers and those that are a week old?  But here I was faced with some of the little things, and I decided to give her recipe a try.

Laptop studio

 
When I make or photograph jewelry, I tend to spread out.  Like ice cream on a warm afternoon.  Like pancake batter.  Like food trucks in midtown.  Like drug dealers in West Baltimore, at least according to the Wire.  You get the picture.

Here I am spread out on the table, on two different occasions:

Part of it is that there are simply a lot of little parts and tools I need access to, but part of it is also that I like to see what I'm working with, especially if I'm making something new.  I like to see and touch the array of materials.  It's fun.

A. hates this.  He can stand it for short stretches, but he really, really doesn't like clutter.  (I kind of like a bit of clutter, at least in my work space.  Contained chaos, I call it.  I find it hard to get the creative juices flowing on a completely empty desk.)

Since I don't have a dedicated space for the jewelry operation in this cozy little apartment, I've been periodically spreading out on the dining table, the coffee table, the bed, the kitchen (for soldering and oxidizing), or the windowsill (which also serves as the photography studio).  Often these spreads would last a few days, in some shape or form.  So A. proposed a compromise: I could be messy, as long as I kept it on a tray.  The tray could be stored easily, out of sight in seconds.  I accepted.

We found a nice tray at a thrift shop for $8, in great condition.  I covered the bottom with a piece of an old flannel sheet (actually, the sheet I put down when I saw and file silver in the apartment), because I like the slightly fuzzy surface (things don't roll around) and because it gives the tray a clean, fresh feeling.  Rubber cement and scissors...very easy to do.

(Yes, things are *very* messy here...I was in the midde of cleaning and organizing.)

So far the tray has worked well.  It's on the small side, but that means it's quite easy to set it on my lap.  It doesn't accommodate working with metal, but I do that less frequently than I work with beads and stones and all that.  It is handy to be able to pick everything up, leave it the way it is, and put it away.  And it improves domestic harmony—always a good thing!

Custom necklace

Recently, A.'s mother asked me to make a necklace for her sister's birthday.  Eight strands of stones and pearls in an array of soft hues, inspired directly by a very pretty necklace of hers.  Here it is, almost finished:

Working with sixteen threads was a bit of a challenge, but I like learning new techniques.  Fun!

Doing the Etsy thing

I joined Etsy!  I did!  As a seller, I mean—I've bought several things over the years.

I put the Pudding items up a couple of weeks ago, and there were a few views and a few hearts here and there.  The hearts were nice to see, but all in all it was pretty quiet.  When I logged in, there would be one or two updates in my activity feed.

Then, yesterday, things picked up: I logged in mid-afternoon and there were twenty-seven updates waiting for me.  Hooray!  By the end of the evening, one of my necklaces had been viewed over 1,300 times (how did that happen?!), 34 people had favorited my shop, I was in several circles and treasuries, and two pieces had sold.*  Drumroll, please—this is my first sale to someone who is not a friend or a friend-of-a-friend or indeed known to me in any way.  Momentous!  Not bad for week #2.

To celebrate, I made a treasury myself, using one of my favorite color combinations (pale grey and yellow) as inspiration.  It ties in nicely to the recent weather, which has alternated between rain and shine.  Love the terrarium and the rug.

 

*Update: I was in the Etsy Finds email.  Mystery solved!