DIY: Rusted Tin Box Edition

When we purchased our house, which is larger than our apartment was, I spent a lot of time on Facebook Marketplace furnishing it, which is how I found this delightful enameled tin box, which I thought would be perfect for storing my cross-stitch supplies. However, it came with a lot of rust, so I looked up home rust-removal procedures, such as a soaped-up cut potato (?). I decided to try a coating of baking soda and water paste that I applied with an old sock and left to sit for an hour while crafting with a girlfriend by Zoom. Then I scrubbed everything with a toothbrush. It seemed to required more elbow grease to remove the gritty powder than the rust! I finished it off with a coat of linseed oil that a neighbor on our local Buy-Nothing Group dropped off. After sitting for several days, the box was shiny but slightly tacky, and I worried about storing thread unprotected. So while watching a presentation about caring for adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities, I applied some marble-patterned contact paper left over from a previous DIY project to freshen up an old Ikea shelf for the exercise room / conservatory. It's so much prettier on my shelf than the cardboard mailing box I had been hiding in a drawer!

Well-Dressed at The Frick Pittsburgh

A girlfriend and I made a date for the Saturday after Thanksgiving to try a new restaurant for lunch (Hemlock House: great mocktails, food almost too salty to eat) and then take ourselves to the Frick Museum. We were pleasantly surprised to discover that while their special exhibition on The Great Migration in the automobile section, and of course tours of the house itself, require tickets, the art pavilion is now free!

In front of the museum is Of Thee We Sing (2023), a new installation from vanessa german (1976- ) of Marian Anderson, in a blue-bottle gown, surrounded by flowers and hands reaching up from the mass of Black Americans who relocated from South to North to realize their dreams in the early 20th century.

My friend wanted to see The Red Dress, which is the product of 380 embroiders from 51 countries over 14 years. The brainchild of English artist Kirstie Macleod, who started it in 2009 by wearing the dress and sewing on it as performance art, it became a way to connect women as artists, immigrants, entrepreneurs, refugees, and survivors of many kinds of violence to showcase their hopes, dreams, and selves. Each was paid for her time and continues to receive a fraction of the exhibition fees.

There are all different styles of stitching in a rainbow of colors, women, animals, birds, flags, flowers and vines, stars, and creative abstract designs in thread.

As part of the exhibition, the Frick commissioned a local piece, The Calico Dress, which includes pieces from people of all ages and abilities who live here. Among the designs on it are one of the yellow Three Sisters bridges, the Frick building, a Steelers logo, flowers, a seahorse, a peacock, fancy fish, a rainbow, hearts, a cat, smiley faces, and big black buttons for contrast.

We also got to (re)visit Belgian artist Isabelle de Borchgrave's exquisite paper sculpture based on Peter Paul Ruben's Portrait of Charlotte-Marguerite de Montmorency, Princess of Conde, which hangs in the same gallery.

While there, we enjoyed some Chinese vases and a nice little exhibit on Shakespeare's Folios on the 400th anniversary of the printing of the first one, from the Carnegie Mellon University Library. I thought my maternal grandfather and -mother would have particularly liked this one, although probably they already knew that John Milton's first publication was the dedication in verse to Shakespeare in the Second Folio (1630).

Anatomical artwork

Of all the organs I have stitched so far, the lungs may be my favorite. Being asymmetrical, the pattern was tricky, and I got off on the wrong foot by incorrectly counting the stitches for the vasculature in the left lung. This meant that toward the end of the process, I had to make up some of the design, in order to make up for misplaced or excess stitches. Thankfully, the asymmetry means that it's not noticeable!

The uterus was an even more difficult pattern than the lungs, due to the fact that it called for about 2 dozen colors of floss, most of them variations on pink or red. I tried my best to match the required colors, but changing out my needle and thread for 5 stitches, and 1 stitch there proved to be very difficult. Sometimes I gave up, and I don't think you can notice the difference.

For fabric I used a piece of canvas that had once belonged to an elderly neighbor, now passed away. She had stitched a while flower with a yellow center and a purple butterfly. The flower is a little smudged, which might be why she abandoned the project. I decided its imperfections were part of its charm and added flowers, a heart, a ribbon, and confetti to enliven the design.

Both pieces have gone to live with friends or friends of friends in exchange for donations to the Birmingham Free Clinic. I have patterns for a brain and for various bacterial pathogens that should keep me busy over the next academic year.