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Tag Archives: domesticity

quilting: moomin hanging finished!

10 Saturday Oct 2015

Posted by Anna Clutterbuck-Cook in handwork

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domesticity, photos, quilting

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Today, I put the finishing touches on my quilted moomintroll hanging, started in August under the tutelage of Kate Herron Gendreau in a slow sewing class at JP Knit & Stitch. The pattern is a modified version of Carolyn Friedlander’s circles.

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I really like the way the quilting stitches, with their combination of straight seam lines and free-hand curves came out, as well as the buttons that I purchased at Gather Here. I bought them on a whim longer after starting the project, but they turned out to be a great compliment to the colors and textures in the overall piece.

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I added the moomintrolls and, at Hanna’s request, a wee bumblebee.

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And in the lower left-hand corner, below the moomin-inspired flowers, a tongue-in-cheek “handmade by…” label.

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It’s been lots of fun to have a non-textual project to work on during evenings and weekends — on to the next one! Stay tuned for more #GratuitousQuiltingUpdates.

our lovely mechanical box, and other updates

14 Friday Nov 2014

Posted by Anna Clutterbuck-Cook in our family

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cat blogging, domesticity, history, professional gigs, work-life balance

Graphic by @K8_Bowers.

Graphic by @K8_Bowers.

Last night, I rhapsodized on Twitter about how glorious it is to have the dishwasher in our new apartment wash dishes while Hanna and I snuggled down in bed to read. This morning, I woke up to this glorious meme, courtesy of our librarian friend Kate Bowers! Life is, indeed, good.

As the history of photo posts since mid-September attests, it has also been busy. In no particular order…

  • Geraldine, age six(ish), was at the dentist on Halloween and had to have two molars removed. Doing well, she — and by association Teazle — have been on vet-prescribed soft food diets for two weeks, plus liquid painkiller and mouthwash (just Gerry, not Teazle). We’ve been having adventures in oral syringes! She seems to be a bit less tetchy and cuddlier since the operation, so we hope she’s feeling better.
  • Teazle, age two, is experiencing her first autumn with access to “the out” (in the form of our back porch); she spends much of her time going out and returning with fallen leaves for us to admire. Or complaining that we have closed the window due to cold and cruelly blocked her way.
  • Hanna’s been crocheting lots, thanks to JP Knit ‘n Stitch‘s selection of Cascade Yarns. Her latest project is star scarves, which she makes out of handfuls of these guys.
  • Hanna and I met with our friend Natalie in mid-October for a marathon Boston Summer Seminar planning session, and are well on our way to planning an exciting program for the June 2015 attendees.
  • I’ve been blogging less here, but wrote two blog posts for the MHS on teen sexuality in the 1930s and trans-continental travel in the 1910s. Both were enjoyable little projects; my self-challenge is to focus on our 20th century collections, so often overlooked, and the results of that limitation can be quite gratifying.
  • Plus the Amiable Archivists project burbles on, mostly with a links list every Wednesday highlighting issues of workplace, power, and identity.
  • While illness prevented us from traveling to the NECBS conference at Bates College (Lewiston, Me.) on Patriot’s Day weekend, Hanna posted her presentation online anyway and continues to explore historical memes in Irish nationalist autobiography in her “spare” time.
  • Hanna has also been enjoying her “ultimate power” of meal planning and preparation (while I run errands and load the mechanical box) which I ceded to her over the summer — a decision that has worked well for both of us! Most recently, she successfully test-drove the slow cooker we inherited from the previous tenant with mac and cheese.
  • As co-chairs of New England Archivists’ LGBTQ Issues Roundtable Hanna and I launched the new Queer!NEA WordPress site this fall and I have had the pleasure of working with our volunteer “Q5” series editor, Brendan Kieran, to develop a series posts profiling New England scholars and archivists working in the field of history of gender and sexuality. We will be cycling out of roundtable leadership in January and are currently looking for a candidate to take over the position of Chair for 2015-2016.
  • One reason I won’t be returning as Chair for LGBTQ Issues is that I have volunteered to serve as NEA’s first-ever Inclusion and Diversity Coordinator. I’m gonna do my best to effect small-scale yet concrete change, particularly when it comes to keeping diversity coupled to issues of structural inequality and social justice. I expect to screw up, and am already practicing in my head how to respond constructively and non-defensively.

Also, I have my own freakin’ meme. So there’s that.

Hope y’ll are staying warm, cuddling cats, and looking forward to a rejuvenating weekend.

wedding anniversary the second

14 Sunday Sep 2014

Posted by Anna Clutterbuck-Cook in our family

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art, domesticity, family, holidays, move2014, wedding

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As this post goes live, Hanna and I are on our way to Northampton, Mass. to enjoy lunch at the Lhasa Cafe and a wander with friends in celebration of our second wedding anniversary.

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I spent some of yesterday hanging art on our walls (finally!) including the framed tattoo concept drawings my father did for our wedding tattoos, and my sister-in-law Renee’s two landscapes — one painted in honor of her marriage to my brother (9/9) and one in honor of our marriage (9/14). We’ve hung them in a triptych on the bedroom wall (pictured above); they face this housewarming gift from my parents, who obviously know their daughter and daughter-in-law well: Continue reading →

forward intentions: an introduction

04 Thursday Sep 2014

Posted by Anna Clutterbuck-Cook in life writing

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art, boston, domesticity, forward intentions, hanna, michigan, oregon, west coast

Reflections on local intentions in this eighth year of my Boston residency, and a long melancholy weekend at the end of summer, has pushed me to think about what my forward intentions actually are. Now that I’m done with grad school (*weeps with relief*), doing the whole “emerging professional” thing at a job a genuinely like, married with two cats, I’m like … so what’s next, life?

View from the Sylvia Beach Hotel (Newport, Ore.), 24 Sept 2013.

I never really had a plan, per se. I mean, I almost didn’t go to college? I was emotionally allergic to school and considered some sort of roguish apprenticeship instead. I wanted to run a writer’s colony in the U.P. (“upper peninsula” for you non-Michiganders), feed people and fix septic systems, maybe have a lot of time for hiking around with a compass in the back woods. Or maybe open a bookshop by the sea, with the writers tucked away upstairs in garret rooms overlooking the surf. Again: Tea, biscuits, quiet, thoughts, maybe a puppy and obviously cats.

Continue reading →

local intentions: year eight

01 Monday Sep 2014

Posted by Anna Clutterbuck-Cook in a sense of place

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Tags

boston, boston summer seminar, domesticity, family, hanna, librarians, professional gigs

Photograph of the hallway in our new Jamaica Plain apartment (May 2014)It’s become a tradition here at the feminist librarian for me to pause and take stock every year around Labor Day. It was on Labor Day weekend in 2007 that I first arrived in Boston, trunk packed with dorm room necessities, to begin a new chapter of my life as an East Coast urbanite.

read year one | year two | year three
year four | year five | year six | year seven

2014 has been a tough year for us, so far. As Hanna said back at the beginning of August, “I’ve decided to break up with 2014. We’re through.” Things started last fall with a positive but tiring whirlwind trip to the West Coast, out of which Hanna barely had time to recover before coming down with a pernicious case of pneumonia which required multiple courses of antibiotics and several weeks of bed rest. Then we began the new year with a Midwest polar vortex, then returned to Michigan in March to sit with my family during my grandmother’s deathtime. Hanna sprained her ankle the day after we got back to Boston, and while she was still on crutches we got the call to view what is now our apartment. We moved in May, then got the call that my grandfather had cancer. I’ve just come through the busiest summer on record at the MHS library and at this point we’re both looking forward to what we hope will be the most peaceful, boring autumn Jamaica Plain has ever seen.

At the same time, it feels good — more than good — to be looking forward to fall (my favorite season!) in Jamaica Plain, which in turn is here in Boston. We’re so pleased to be living here, in fact, that when we take our vacation in September we decided to stay put.

We’ve done a hell of a lot of traveling this year and it’s good to be home.

Which brings me to the point of this year’s post: local intentions. Continue reading →

holiday weekend post about curtains [some photos & well-wishes]

03 Thursday Jul 2014

Posted by Anna Clutterbuck-Cook in a sense of place

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boston, domesticity, holidays

As the weather gets steamy here in Boston (who was the bright spark who said, “Let’s build on a tidal swamp!”) I’m taking comfort in our airy bedroom with its new IKEA curtains — Hanna and I picked them out because they reminded us of Anne of Green Gables.

I’m also rather fond of my new IKEA lamp…

… as is Hanna of hers.

May your weekend, whatever the temperatures, be as spacious and lazy as ours.

one month later … [#move2014]

12 Thursday Jun 2014

Posted by Anna Clutterbuck-Cook in a sense of place

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Tags

boston, domesticity, family, move2014

It’s been a month you guys!

We can still see the rug on our bedroom floor, and the only thing under the bed are dust bunnies and the occasional cat.

I don’t have anything super-noteworthy to say, I just wanted to mark the day. It really is hard to believe we’ve been living a month in our new place. Some eclectic observations:

  • I don’t miss our old neighborhood as much as I thought I would. Is that disloyal? I’m not sure yet. Part of the reason is that we still live in the same city and maybe 80% of our time is spent in the same spaces as before the move. Hanna and I both miss walking passed the brookline booksmith more days than not, and being near Trader Joe’s, and 4A Coffee on Harvard Ave. but other than that … I’m so actively happy to be where we are in so many ways, I don’t have room to miss the old. I wonder if I ever will? Maybe I’m done with that chapter and ready to move on.
  • Maple trees have a distinctive presence and sound to them; I grew up in a house surrounded by old maples and hadn’t realized until moving to JP that I missed them. Now when its windy or rains and I hear the trees outside I can relax. Sleeping has been a wonderful thing because the sounds are right again.
  • Having a porch expands the size of our apartment beyond its already wonderfully expansive 860 square feet.
  • A ceiling fan (in our living room) is amazing as a tool for cooling the space on hot days.
  • Kitchen counters! Kitchen counters! Kitchen counters!
  • For some reason, Hanna and I decided to start using the dishwasher when we moved here, despite the fact we never used the “adult box” that was in our old apartment. I am really surprised at how much it lowers the stress level of our evenings and makes cooking together a pleasurable activity. Sometimes, labor-saving devices are worth the hype.
  • We now live in a neighborhood with a much higher Latino/a population than Allston, and that’s something else that feels like home (Michigan) to me in a way I hadn’t noticed missing until we were passing neighbors on our way home with a much broader range of ethnic diversity than on our previous commute. Even the music from the car stereos that pass our front windows feels more familiar. (And yum! the Cuban restaurant up the road makes the best horchata!).
  • Gentrification. It’s a thing, and I’ve been thinking about it. I have days where I’m like, “What’s so elitist and destructive about wanting to live within walking distance of where you work?” That is, after all, the way most workers have gotten to work for centuries. But I’m also aware that as early-career professionals, Hanna and I fit a profile — one of people who are actively courted and catered to. While our neighbors here are often invisible at best and actively erased at worst. According to the Boston Globe, only about 15% of market-rate housing in JP is “affordable” … for families making $80k per year. There’s a lot of upward pressure on this already impossible market. We’re working to do what we can not to contribute to that, while embracing JP as a (hopefully long-term) home for us as well.
  • Did I mention how wonderful a back porch is to enjoy? 
  • And neighbors that invite you to their barbecues instead of engaging in intimate partner violence on a near-nightly basis?
In other news, how did it get to be June 12th already? I hope all of you are having a fruitful beginning to whatever the nature of your summer season will be.

cats + porch [#move2014]

04 Wednesday Jun 2014

Posted by Anna Clutterbuck-Cook in a sense of place

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boston, cat blogging, domesticity, family, move2014, outdoors, photos

We continue to feel so lucky in finding this apartment, particularly on sunny Sundays in June, when our back balcony is a breezy, cozy sanctuary; a liminality between in and out, private home and neighborhood society.

We enjoyed brunch together last weekend, along with a little light reading.

Repotted some happy plants…

… and got creative drying the week’s laundry in the fine weather.

The porch is a new experience for the cats, who are practicing giving their mother attacks of the nerves by exploring the top of the (second floor! far from the ground!) railing without a net. We feel they should could equipped with safety tethers.

Geraldine seems largely content to chill in the shade or sun and survey her surroundings.

The clean laundry is obviously the best place for a black cat to settle in for a nap.

Meanwhile, our next door neighbors M and J have gotten a head start over us in the gardening department, with lots of promising seedlings that spent the weekend drinking up the sun and water they were afforded.

Hope y’all are finding ways of being in this early-summer moment. Happy June.

ownership and choice [#move2014]

02 Monday Jun 2014

Posted by Anna Clutterbuck-Cook in a sense of place

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big ideas, boston, domesticity, family, move2014

Annotated street map, Hyde Square, Jamaica Plain (Boston, Mass.)
Photo by author.

I started this blog post last week and somehow it failed to save automatically, erasing several full paragraphs of text. Damn you Google, the way you lull us into complacency with your automatic back-ups! Still, I’ve continued to think about the themes of this post in the intervening week and will write a different post now than I would have last Sunday. And I think I’m mostly okay with that.

Ownership, and choice.

Last weekend, Hanna and I had a conversation about buying furniture. Our household is currently composed of some odds and ends, a few really awesome, we’ve picked up through the street-side equivalent of dumpster diving and IKEA purchases, again some quite excellent. Hanna moved here following an escape from an abusive relationship and a string of insecure housing situations, neither of which lent themselves to long-lasting furniture investment; I moved here from the Midwest with everything I needed for grad school packed into the back of an “economy” car rented from Enterprise. We’ve been constructing our household from the ground up.

The discussion we had was about buying some non-IKEA furniture, specifically a coffee table and a couple of bedside tables (perhaps matching!) for lamps and the inevitable stack of books-to-be-read we both accumulate. It would be nice, we feel, to have bedside tables with little drawers so Teazle won’t spend the hour between 2-3am every night trying to wake us up by swiping our spectacles onto the floor.

We’ve been thinking about L.L. Bean this time around, specifically their “Mission” or “Rustic” lines, which for us means maybe a piece or two per year depending on the size of the vet bills and how much we care about traveling to England in the next decade.

Then last weekend I got thinking, if we’re going to spend $500 on a coffee table or $250/piece on a pair of end tables, maybe we could do better than give that money to Bean’s. They’ve a good reputation as an employer, and are regional, sure. Their pieces are made here in the U.S. But what if we went a step further down this path and actually hired a local woodcrafter to do the job?

“I dunno, I guess I’m just not used to having the money to make that kind of choice,” Hanna observed. “It makes me anxious. I mean, it’s always the way I wanted to spend money, but Evil Ex always fought me on it. And then when I moved down to Boston I was worried about feeding myself and paying rent.”

See, despite the fact that we’re still renting (and yes, as we prepared to move everyone kept asking us if we were buying; there’s a whole separate post in me about the unexpected pressure I feel as a married person in my thirties to buy into the real estate market — it’s seriously more pressure than we’re feeling about the babies thing, maybe because we’ve made that decision in the negative already) this feels like our first home as a married couple. Our first purpose-“bought” space. We made our grad student digs work for eight years — eight years? the management company rep kept repeating when I handed him the keys, eight years? whoa. that’s gotta be a record. — and while we made the move because we needed a bigger space, it was also a move that consolidated our commitment to Boston. Despite the fact we’re tenants, not owners, of this lovely new home, we already have a sense of ownership.

Because we’ve chosen to live here — this city, this neighborhood, this building, this space. So even though we’re still writing that check every month to the landlord, not the bank, we’re putting down roots. Hanna bought a sage plant. We’ve introduced ourselves to our next-door neighbors. We do our part wheeling the trash to the curb on Monday mornings.

We talk about hiring a local artisan to build our furniture, even if it means we’ll have to wait for a year to get those matching end tables with the drawers where we can keep our eyeglasses safe from questing paws.

Jamaica Pond, May 2014
Photo by author.

Because we can afford to wait a year. We’re thinking in those terms, now, more than we used to.

And it’s definitely a good place to be.

new perspectives on boston [#move2014]

20 Tuesday May 2014

Posted by Anna Clutterbuck-Cook in a sense of place

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

boston, domesticity, move2014, photos

We almost have enough bookshelves…

We’re still unpacking here in J.P. but the living room is taking approximate shape. And I think my biggest observation from this first week in a new location in the same city is how much one’s understanding of a big city like Boston is filtered through the situational perspective of daily activity. I mean, “duh.” But we’ve shifted three miles south of our old home in Allston and suddenly our daily routine moves from one set of neighborhoods and local businesses to another.

Eventually, the living room will have an office space!

My initial impression is, weirdly enough, that Boston feels a lot more like a big city living in J.P. than it did living in Allston, on the edge of Brookline. Living in Allston, most of our daily routine happened in The Fenway/Longwood/Brookline neighborhoods, and Brookline definitely feels like a self-contained village enveloped by the greater metropolitan area of Boston. Jamaica Plain, too, feels like a very distinct neighborhood — but within the city of Boston. It feels very conscious of its status as part of Boston, and I feel woven into the fabric of big city life in new ways. No longer does my evening commute cut passed Fenway Park and up Beacon Street through Coolidge Corner … now I cycle by Symphony Hall through Roxbury to Jackson Square along the reclaimed Southwest Corridor Park.

“Kitty TV” has a new view…

Here are some of our discoveries from week one:

  • Ghazal makes (and delivers!) tasty Indian fare
  • The Southwest Corridor Park offers me a safer, more peaceful bicycle commute
  • Koo Koo Cafe is not a new discovery, but is now on our walk to work!
  • As is Green T Coffee, on those days when our path through
  • Olmstead Park is too meandering a route to Countway
  • The local fabric and yarn shop, JP Knit ‘n Stitch, where we picked up fabric to recover our ageing IKEA chairs
My selection…

… and Hanna’s

In the coming weeks, we’re looking forward to checking out:

  • The Thacher Milk Delivery service we saw drive by this morning
  • Jamaica Plain Historical Society’s historic walking tours on summer Saturdays
  • The Boston Building Resources organization, even though we’re renters not owners
  • The Allendale Farm garden center and more local Agricultural Hall for some herb & vegetable starts for our sunny balcony

Hope all of you are well! Those of you whom I owe emails, I haven’t forgotten! The moving exacerbated my tendinitis and exhausted us generally … last night I was mostly asleep by 7 o’clock. Little old lady hours. But I haven’t forgotten you!

❤

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