express yourself

I haven't kept up on my blog this week, mostly due to complete insanity this week - my whole routine was thrown off and apparently I don't do well with that because I'm being sort of a nutcase. Where do I begin? I attended a class and exam this week and thus wasn't at work, I received my incredible purchases from ebay that just about made me fall on the floor, my Claudine Hellmuth class and Artfest is only a week away, and the biggest thing was (drum roll, please) we found a house to rent! Words cannot describe how wonderful this place is, I'm still waiting for the bubble to burst, to pinch myself and wake up, for the punch line, etc. How do I describe this place?

Ok, so it is a historic home (I think built in 1900) located about a block from main street Snohomish, a beautiful little mill town north of Seattle. I am a stone's throw away from antique shops, country stores, tea parlors, a bakery, a homemade candy store, the Snohomish Arts Center, the mill, the Snohomish river, and gorgeous farmland. It's the kind of place where it is seems like there is a legal requirement to display carved pumpkins on your porch during Halloween, to go caroling from house to house during Christmas, that sort of thing.

The house has all the original woodwork, light fixtures, and wallpaper - much of which we wouldn't select ourselves if we were building the house, but the history of it has a charm of its own. It has four bedrooms, two bathrooms (one with a clawfoot tub - GASP!), full basement and attic, hardwood floors, tons of cupboards and drawers (including those vintage flour and sugar drawers in the kitchen which I have only ever seen in the house I grew up in). It has updated wiring and new double-paned windows for efficiency, an extra mudroom & sun room off of the kitchen, and the garden area surrounding the house is chock full of iris, daffodils, wisteria, huge camellia and rhododendron bushes, and a plum tree. Our bedroom window looks out over the mill, and my art studio has a big sink and tons of cupboards in it, including a huge closet. It's like I'm in a movie, not reality.

Assuming the previous tenants (owners of the local artist's gallery/store in town) are out in time and the landlords (which turned out to be the landlord of our store in Country Village!) can do the things they need to do before we can move in, we'll officially be living there on April 15th. I will have a full kitchen, art studio, washer/dryer, garden, porch, a place to grow herbs, and a bedroom that fits more than just our bed. Considering I thought the world ended when our previous house find fell through, I see now that God knows a lot better than I do. I should listen to him more often, it would save me a lot of time and trouble.

Anyway, I'm starting to go crazy again with all the goodness and excitement going on, so I am going to close for now and write more later. Today I have to shop for my last few Artfest needs, get busy finishing up my trades, and start putting some inventory up on my website. So far I have some awesome vintage/antique buttons from an old button factory, old skeleton keys, printer's blocks of all sizes, antique glass buttons that I'm REALLY having a hard time parting with, and a couple pieces of original artwork. I bought some gorgeous paper at Daniel Smith on Friday to make some journals for sale, and the paper is so lovely I'm afraid to work with it. Once I get over that, I'll have some various handmade books up for sale. Then, as soon as I get my back-end business stuff sorted out, I’ll have all kinds of artsy mess-making supplies up for sale - inks, paints, pens, ribbons, glass glitter, and more! Oh dear, I'm starting to get way too excited again...