Hey: Do you really want to know?
Man, I finally said it: "Only Ask a Question If You Want to Hear the Answer."
It's Tip #2 for writing a better blog--posted today over at my new Write a Better Blog column at Lollipops. (This was Tip #1 if you're dying of curiosity and you missed it and you won't be able to sleep tonight wondering what Tip #1 is since now you know what Tip #2 is.)
I can say this because I've been looking for an attractive shower curtain--nay, a Non-Ugly one--for some time now. Years, actually.
Seems like yesterday that my little sister and I were standing in front of the U-shaped shower curtain display at a nearby store whose initials are all the same letter and shaking our heads at the vast array of u-g-l-y options.
I know I sound snotty. Please don't hate me.
I'm annoyed because a non-ugly shower curtain (NUSC) seems like something that ought to be widely available, doesn't it? I mean, there are NU tablecloths for sale in the world, NU napkins, NU bath mats, NU toaster covers (oh: wait).
So I took matters into my own polyester-filled hands and made one.
I did this both because I need a shower curtain and refused to spend 39 bucks on something super ugly. And also because I'm really wanting to get into the Sewing Book of World Records under the category entitled, "Most Made Things With Abandoned Fortrel."
And the upside of using this fortrelesque polyester is that it is not only dirt cheap and comes in all sorts of relaly pleasing textures, it also DOESN'T RAVEL, so I didn't even have to bust out the button hole foot on my machine. I just snipped little holes for the shower curtain hanger things.
And now when I take a shower I nod my head a lot. Because I'm right: it's just the thing: fetching, even..
I didn't invite her, ya'll.
There I was: after having cleaned my house like the Queen of Somewhere was visiting, I was shooting pics. (We're renting our house out on an occasional weekend to vacation renters these days, so I was taking pics to show all the potential visitors how Truly Clean & Lovely our house has become #fiinally #ittookstrangerscoming #airbnb #betterlinensthanweuse).
And I was clicking away at the kitchen, when she appeared. . .
She galloped up, begging to be included in the shots.
And I was all, "Um, Barbie. #1 you're Doll Naked, which is not acceptable on a vacation rental website and #2 you know you'll come with us when we go, so including you would be False Advertising.
She was all, "Whateve. Just shoot me."
So I did.
Who dares me to include this photo in my rental listing?
I had another of my Granny's hand-stitched quilt tops come my way--and I'm going to set about reclaiming it.
It needs some work. . .
I've stared at this one for a bit. Honestly, I've wondered if my own Granny pulled it off. This level of steady patterning doesn't really show up in most of her other quilts. But these hand stitches--in whatever color thread she had around . . .
. . . and the itty bitty seam allowances (she was a fan of the Barely 1/4" seam allowance...looks like 1/8 in spots) make it clearly hers.
So I'm going to guerrila hand patch it from the backside. With orange. And that will turn it into Our Quilt--hers and mine.
That's the Plan, Stan.
P.S. Thanks for all your great responses of interest in my current writing project. I'm typing my fingers off over here--will share more as it comes to life. :)
Is there a Doctor in the house? A Rug Doctor?
*SNORT*
I can't stop making rugs, Everybody. I feel like I already mentioned this. But seriously, don't pull back the covers on your bed or anything when I'm around right now because I will whip the sheet off your bed, slash it into torn strips and convert it into a tiny rug before you can say Hey--That's My Sheet, Dude.
One for Baby Pumpkinhead. Colors: pink. Materials: All kinda stuff--sheets, old polyester, cotton scraps. This was the rug I experimented with mixing fabrics. Take Away: the scrap crochet rug is an unbelievably agreeable creature. It doesn't care what you mix together to make it. It just keeps turning into a rug no matter what.
One For My Friend Susan Who Graduated From Nursing School Like a Year Ago. Because nothing says "Congratulations" like a scrap crochet rug. Colors: blue and yellowy golds. Materials: just sheets. Take Away: I tried mixing lots of different shades of yellow. The blue sheet helped anchor the look of the thing so that it didn't look like a crocheted scrap heap.
One For My Friend Shelley Who Just Hosted Me At Her House. Shelley really likes going to Africa, so this one's special because it's bordered in hand-dyed fabric from Tanzania. Colors: the ones that were in the single flannel sheet I used--cream and green and dark red and some browny gold. Plus a bunch of good deep orange and brown and gold around the edges. Materials: one flannel sheet with pictures of people doing things in thes snow; strips of hand-dyed cotton from Africa. Take Away: One sheet yields a little foot rug. Also flannel makes a sturdy rug (soft but not mushy). And mixing fabric is sometimes downright meaningful. Colorado Snow Scene + Vibrant Africa Cotton = Two Things Shelley Loves and mixes up beautifully in her life.
One For My Living Room That Will Be Quite Large. Colors: dirty whites. Materials: Sheets so far. Take Away: As it turns out, mixing ugly colored sheets into a rug produces . . . wait for it . . . an ugly rug. I added sheets with colors I didn't like thinking that somehow the peaches and sage greens would disappear. This just in: they didn't. So I yanked them off this rug that will someday be ginormous and decided to wait for the right colored sheets. Additional Take Away: Craft Patience.
Start ripping and hooking, people. But I warned you--scrap crochet is totally Crafter's Crack.
Not this time, baby. [Update: Baby Fiona. Baby Fiona. That's why there's that f. F for Fiona, see?]
I had started making Unnecessarily Complex squares out of triangles that I had a hair-brained idea I was going to do some sort of chevron pattern with (click here for the quilt that my friend Emily made that was so stinking cute she made me want to make one).
Then I sort of found myself walking a wide circle around the pile where I'd left the weird stack of hand-sewn triangle-y squares. Like it smelled bad or had a virus I didn't want to catch or something. I did this for roughly 4 days. And it was getting down to the wire, People. I was going to meet my niece-lette Empty Handed if I didn't get the sewing hitch out of my sewing getalong and start Making.
So I was upstairs staring at it like it was a dead animal that I was afraid might come back to life when all of sudden, I just picked up this other weird mod sheet that was lying nearby and started cutting wildly and I'd sewn an entirely new Top for the thing and deemed the complex triangles as Back Material.So, this quilt took very little time to make, unless you count all the time when I was trying to get my head to figure it out and my head was refusing.Oh--and also if you don't count how I decided to HAND QUILT it like some weird Quilting Aunt Overachiever.
(I may or may not have been hand-quilting it all the way through my niece-lette's baby shower. This can't be confirmed. It's just a rumor.)
I finished the hand quilting (bloody thumbs and all, Everyone) and then I brought it home to finish. Because I needed to add this (I know: and she has a jungle room, Everybody. Come. On.)
And also to add this. . . .
Because it's what I saw stamped in my head the entire time I was making it for her. And it was true.
This is my whole point, Everyone.
I’m writing about it a lot right now in my free time.*
* I have free time because I’m not teaching anymore **
** I ‘m not teaching anymore because I got that bad kind of tired*** instead of the good kind of tired****
*** You know—the kind where your spleen wants to nap all of the time, even if you’re standing up and your child is saying something cute to you.
****You know—the kind where you sit down to Make something and you look at the clock 15 minutes later and it’s, well, 2 hours later. That kind of tired.
P.S.S. If you are interested in talking to me about the Big
Writing Project***** I’m tackling right now, email me****** glahendrix@gmail.com *******:
*****It’s more than a blog post in length, more than a poem in length. That makes it a Big Writing Project.
******What should you email me? I’m thinking just like a question, like “Hey—what are you writing about? I want to talk to you about it because maybe I will have some ideas that will help you since it’s probably about Making and I’m totally interested in that topic. Also will you send me that picture of your Polyester Letters That Spell MAKE?”********
*******I mean it. I’d love to hear from you. And by asking you to email rather than comment, nobody will know if no one else actually responds to this offer and thereby my own Writerly Underwear will not be placed Gingerly on the outside of my Writerly Pants. And I will not be walking around on the interwebs looking like a Girl In Need of Friend To Tell Her How It Really Is.
********If you ask me this, I will email you back and answer your questions and the question about the picture and whether you can have a copy for your laptop screensaver will be YES.
* Don't worry: this is me, Ginger, of Wienerdog Tricks, that blog you read about making and sewing and all those other things she rants about ... my blog went to the mall and got a makeover. Hence its newly-achieved attractiveness. It is ready to go to the Blog Prom now.
While I've been hand-quilting (not a typo) a quilt for my new niece Fiona, I also had to get some sewing done. Sometimes when one project just won't finish, I start up another one.
I don't consider this Crafty ADD, I call it Valuing Project Completion: VPC.
My quick & dirty projects this last week included. . .
A carrying case for all my sewing weapons.
This was a 9-minute project. I swear it.
And, actually, it's my current Favorite Thing.
Also--this laptop case which I literally sewed in 15 minutes--and I know this because I was on the phone with my friend who was about to pick me up for a road trip, and she was all, "I'll pick you up in 15 minutes," and I hung up, took the stairs two at a time to get to my machine, and started hacking pices of polyester to make the cover.I realized I didn't care a bit if my (unravel-able, by the way) polyester seams were exposed on the inside of my laptop cover.
I just wanted the thing to have a cute little safety case.
And because the polyester that your grandma had her pants made out of is so nice and thick, a double layer of the stuff kind of makes a cushiony cover.
The only thing I did later was hand stitch up the spot where the inside fabric slipped when I sewed it up inside out. I deemed this a Purposed Color Corner, and now it looks all Avant Garde Polyester (which is maybe the first time anyone used that phrase to describe something made out of polyester.) And I also hand-stitched the velcro flap thing. I used most of my 15 minutes trying to hack a piece of velcro off an old laptop cover that I have recently fallen out of love with.
Also, I made these for my niece-lette: appliqued burp rags (which Baby Pumpkinhead--who is no longer a baby, by the way, Everyone--lovingly referred to as I was sewing them as "barf rags.") I bought some nice, hefty cloth diapers and then did some free-hand-cut and speed-appliqued little niceties on them.
One of them is the World's First Polyester-Enhanced Burp Rag, a feat that I have been meant to accomplish for years, As You Know.
We have to have balance, ya'll. A little Complicated Work is nicely offset with some screaming fast projects. That's all I'm saying. No need to tell yourself you never finish anything: try thinking in terms of being really good at Starting.
Is finished.
It was given its former name during the moments when I considered hand quilting this almost-king-sized beast of a thing. I got ahead of myself. It happens. I could envision a huge game of tic tac toe with a winning line of O's shooting down diagonally.
But then I quilted one O sitting on the floor at my friend's house watching the super bowl. It took me the whole game practically. (Hand sewing seemed like the only legitimate response to Beyonce's Intensely Uncomfortable To Witness Air Humping.) And when I came home I decided that I wanted to use the quilt within the century, so I popped it under Lettie and started sewing straight lines wildly.
And now it's terrific. And finished. And has already made its first run. And is now living with its Former Former name, "Trailer Quilt."
At the moment I had to figure out how to bind the thing, I had Not Enough of anything. So, I pulled off an old trick, and used a different scrap for each edge. And it makes the quilt even happier.
But the thing I liked best about USING this quilt was how BLASTED WARM it was. Wool batting, people. I had no idea it existed. Then I went into our sewing shop in town and met the new owner and had a Quilt Batting Conversation with her and she was all "have you ever tried wool batting?" and I was all, "no." and then I was all, "three yards, please." And then I camped with this quilt and the ManSpouse and I decided that it was easily the toastiest we have ever been in our trailer. Or in any of our tents before that.
QUILT SPECS
Name: "Trailer Quilt" and also, "The Quilt Formerly Known As Tic Tac Toe In Church"
Pattern: None, except for a sort of cross pattern to the big, fat 9-squares.
Size: King-ish. Roughly 90" X 90"
Materials: thrifted sheets (four patterns), my great grandmother's vintage upholstery scraps, flannel given to me, a flannel sheet I once used as a painting drop cloth.
Batting: wool/cotton blend.
Stitching: top and back hand-pieced with Gutterson thread and a tiny needle because that's what I had. Machine-quilted with my 1929 Singer, Lettie.
This Happened to Me. But You Weren't Here, So You Didn't Know Until Now.
I found Baby Pumpkinhead's monkey languishing on the sofa. Apparently he/she (not sure--haven't asked) was asking reflective questions like, "What will I do after college?" or possibly "Should I grow out my hair?"
The space seemed so private and sacred for monkey, that I quickly snapped the shot and left quietly. He/she may still be there thinking deep thoughts. I'm not sure.
Making This.
That huge street-sized rug that I discovered yesterdady is 1) not the size of my street, and actually not even the size of my current rug and therefore, a little too tiny-ish and 2) includes an old sheet with flecks of green, which means that I will hate it when it's done. What can I say? I got excited and didn't pay attention to the fact that I don't really like the color green. So when I said to myself, "It will just like blend in," I was, in fact, lying to myself.
I'm going to do this to it.
True story. Also I handstitched the back for my trailer quilt last night. It's flannel.
Those sheets stripes are there because I didn't have enough flannel. Even after I used all the white flannel my friend gave me, even after I ripped up the white flannel sheet I used for a paint cloth and kept mostly only the pieces with no not very much paint on them.
Postal Regurgitation: Pep Talks.
No, I'm not going to barf mail. This is the part where I tell you to go read a post I wrote a long time ago because I think it will hELP you and because Tricia asked me to give more making pep talks, which I will, but also which I have done so BEAUTIFULLY in the past (*ahem* *serious nod*) that I want you to read every last word I've said on the matter of Making as the Meat of your life and not the Mashed Potatoes.
GO here for a Making Pep Talk: Time to Grow a Pair, Ladies (a classic from 2011).
We Just Don't Know Yet. But Maybe.
I might write a tutorial about how to make those bike warmers. But only if anybody else has a secret desire to have a bike as cute as mine. It's entirely possible that everyone is satisfied with having an ugly, un-adorned-by-polyester bike and is merely satisfied seeing my bike be better than theirs. Let me know if you wanna know how to do that.
*Dog Chats 1 - 36 were written only in my mind. Please don't try to search for them on the interweb because that might involve having my head www-ed and I feel sure it's a painful process even though other people have probably survived it.
This will be the title of my first e-book, I'm sure of it. Or maybe it will be How To Crochet a Rug As Big As Your Street. I'm frankly undecided.
I have decided that the tediousness of measuring every piece of fabric for a quilt makes me want to hurl or fall sleep (maybe at the same time). But I've also decided that the color baking of quilt making makes me weirdly happy.
I will need to embrace being a lifelong Mediocre Quilter.
I will not be able to embrace the perfect corner, the crisp edge, the quilt that folds up non-weirdly. I will never receive eye contact in a quilt shop from ladies whose color wheels are made of cardboard and whose coffee mugs have flying geese patterns embossed in mauve and slate blue tones. I will never be invited to explain to anyone how to decode a pattern or organize a Bee. I don't think the Quilting World would even likely trust my whipstitch. [mental note: look up what a "whipstitch" is on wikipedia later].
And, even though I knew this about myself the minute that I began quilting, I still might need to write these sad realities down on a piece of paper and concoct an elaborate grief ceremony that would involve koolaid and sand and banners. And pie. And pictures of cherubs. And burnt sticks.
In the meantime, I will continue to produce mediocre quilts. I will continue to handstitch them on occasion (as I did with this one...while camping...while sitting at the beach...while talking to friends...while eating chips). I will rip quilt squares out of old sheets while sort of eyeballing them for same-ishness to each other.
And I will continue to use old fabric that other people thought should be sent off to the glue factory.
Also I will continue to purport that yellowy gold is the color of God when he's happy and content.
And also, even though I will not in the foreseeable future be invited to lecture on quilt making, I will continue to wag my lips here to you about it.
And that's just how it all is.
Oh--and this i's the quilt I'm making out of three old sheets and some scraps that I took apart from a quilt top of upholstery samples that my great grandmother handstitched together and that I will use inside my NewOld Trailer and that will likely be backed in flannel and edged with an orange and yellow sheet my friend just found for me at a thrift store.
I sort of can't stop making them. This is a re-up from last summer when I tried crocheting rugs (well, *ahem*, one rug) from t-shirt yarn for the first time. But this time I was all, hooowwww aabboouutttt BBBIIIGGEEERRRRR.
So I made this:
But it did this:
So I did this:
So it could do this:
Which was good. What did it take? This:
Next I'm finishing this:
And then I'm on to masterminding the BIGGEST CROCHETED RAG RUG THE WORLD HAS EVER SEEN (Bwwwaa Hhaaaaa Haaaa Haaaaaaa). I will RRUUUULLLEEEEEE THE RRAAGGGG RRUUUGGG WWOOORRRLD.
It will be the size of the mondo living room rug I bought in the outdoor department of Target which I love but whose edges CONTSTANTLY curl up in a way that make me, well, pissy. So I will conquer my living room world by crocheting the STOOTKA out of 30 gazillion old sheets. Just wait and see.
Always good to have a goal.
Just in case you want to do any of this: T-shirt yarn tutorial; Super helpful basic crochet video from some lady like me who just turned on her camera and started explaining; The basics of blocking--I did this minus the pins + 70 gajillion books. Also--I used old tshirts for the first one, but am using a strange combo of stuff for the pink one. And yes, there's polyester in it. Obviously.
RAMBLY OPENER
Sometimes I dream Little. (For instance.)
Other times I dream Big. But only sometimes. I have a tendency to reach for things that I know I can touch and skip the psychic muscle ache of the other stuff completely.
TRANSITION TO MAIN IDEA THAT LINKS BRAS TO BIGGER THINGS (NOT BIGGER BRAS, BIGGER DREAMS)
So when we started talking a few years back about wanting a tent trailer for the family, I surprised myself. It's more than a fifty dollar item. It would take saving for. We'd have to want it for a while before we'd get it. The gymnasium called "Loud, Echoey Disappointment" yawned before me. I might have to bounce around in there quite a while before the thing manifested itself.
If it ever did.
And if it didn't, then I'd end up being one of those people who talk about "someday we're gonna . . ." and blah blah. And I just really, really have tried not to be one of those people.
CONNECTION TO CURRENT HOLIDAY SEASON AND ALSO TO BIG DREAMS
This year I declared it Christmas of the Unexpected at our house. Everybody in the family's got a day of the week (and some of us are paired up on those extra days)--and we're in charge of doing something unexpected for somebody else.
I have been thinking this season about the nativity story and the way that it is a story of unexpectedness if it's a story of anything. There are all those faithful people watching the skies for somebody to save them, and while they're squinting for a king or a bruiser of a ruler to overthrow the bad guys oppressing the daylights out of them, out of the clouds drops a baby.
And I have to say that if I had been a faithful jewish person at the time, I woulda been shaking my head and praying, "Really?"
But as I've been mulling and chewing my own head to shreds about the ways in which Christmas bugs me, it struck me that what we need--what I need, my family needs--is a refresher on what it means to be really surprised. On being ready for the Unexpected.
THE PART ABOUT WHAT REALLY BUGS ME ABOUT CHRISTMAS
It drives me batty that my primary concern at Christmas is how to materilize whatever my kids have said they want. It feels like Potential Disappointment Management rather than the giving of real joy. And I'd really like Christmas to be about real joy.
So I declared it the Christmas of the Unexpected as a means of our reaching toward practicing being surprised--and also as a means of practicing surprising other people. We delivered root beer floats to some friends and once I cleaned the house by myself so the rest of the fam could play instead of pitching in, and mostly the kids have said "For our unexpected tonight, let's watch a movie on a school night!" And mostly we've said, "Great idea!"
THE PART ABOUT THE TENT TRAILER BEING BETTER THAN THE BRA
And then when I wasn't looking, right smack in the center of Christmas of the Unexpected, this happened: after a year of searching more or less every day [oopss--accidental confession of weird personal hobby] for tent trailers and trying to talk myself into the idea that an early 90's pop up with a Dusty Mauve interior was something I would grow to love, this 1969 Apache Ramada Pop Up appeared. The fact that it was only 600 bucks meant we could pay cash. I sent Pete 120 bucks short and got a surprise check for 123 while he was on the road there (thankfully . . .since it was going to come out of the grocery envelope).
THE CLOSING WHERE A VISION OF YELLOWY GOLD TELLS THE STORY OF THE WAY IN WHICH THIS TRAILER IS BETTER THAN WHAT I'VE EVEN TRIED TO WISH FOR AND HOW IT'S A SIGN TO ME ABOUT HOW I RARELY DREAM BIG ENOUGH AND THAT I PROBABLY MISS THE BABIES DROPPING OUT OF THE SKY WITH ALL MY SURETY THAT WHAT I NEED IS A BRUISER OF A KING
And the reason I write all of this here--and not just a "Hey--looka whatwe got" is that everything about this falls under the category of the Unexpected.
There are the things I want, the Little dreams.
And then there are the things I rarely believe can come true.
And then . . .
They do.
My work top is actually clean these days. Tidy. I've even reconfigured my space. Gotten rid of fabric that doesn't make me nod when I look at it. I even swept.
I've finally found a way for both machines to live next to each other, both ready to roll. I've got a couple of notes about what I may make later--stacks here and there of scrap groups and jotted dimensions of covers and such I want to pull off.
But I'm not sewing. I'm not really cutting much. I walk up the stairs, look around, find a way to make my scissors look more purposefully placed, throw a few more things on the mending pile, stay for a bit, and then walk back downstairs.
It's winter.
At least in this maker's heart, it is. Slow-moving, steady, quiet, hide-at-home winter.
It's a strange things--a true maker's inconveniece, a botch in the design of a maker's year--that christmastime comes in these months. Right when I want to shower my loves with scrappy goodness, I find I just sit.
Christmas would be better placed in the spring, really--or maybe in the months just after the hard-working production months of spring. But it's not.
I think often these days of Tillie Olsen, short-story writer, who over a lifetime of writing published just one slim volume of fiction and a sweet little set of shorts (Tell Me a Riddle) that I've read and re-read. And then there is the big non-fiction piece called Silences, a chronicling of the woman writer's struggle to find the spaces to Say. My friend Al gave it to me when my boys were small and I was stumbling into our writing group barely having read what the rest of the group had written (and in no way bringing a single poem myself). In it, Olsen tells the story of her writerly life with the courage of a person who sees that her shortcomings as a published writer and mother may, in fact, be shared by others--and in that way not shortcomings at all, but realities.
She transforms her not-doing into a message of freedom. She sees the winter of her writing life and, by speaking of it, makes a sort of spring for the rest of us.
And I'm wondering today if that's how I'll do christmastime winter this time around. A note, maybe--no packages or ribbons or paper yet, a Christmas Note, for all those that I love. Something that lets winter be winter and looks out ahead to spring.
This one wins for texture.
Somehow I managed to unearth hankie-like big scraps of super soft cotton for the back, a worn-in pillowcase for the blue stripes, and even the binding is that slippery-ish feel that vintage tablecloths give.
The whole thing is a score, in my make-it-out-of-trash world. It's 9 attached blocks of 9-squares, just about big enough to be plopped-onto or maybe hold when it's time for that.
Favorite part: one made-from-smaller-bits square that I hand-stitched onto the back after I quilted the long strands of line.
I'd initially tacked it on to be quilted, but then I didn't like how it looked crossed out by the quilting, so I stitched it on after.
And now, the quilt doesn't really have a "back"--at least in the sense that there's sort of quilt news on one side and then blankness on the other. Both sides count.
The printed scrap is cut from an old tea towel. Baby's due in Feb. God help me if the baby is late. [*Artist's Misunderstood Sigh That Friend's Uterus Might Not Agree To Timetable-Specific Quilt Vision.]
You already know that I do these projects to stay sane myself. But this one was even niftier to take on, because I also really like this baby. Ahead of time. He's not here yet. He promises to be funny, insightful, and have really, really tall hair (if my seared-forever memory of his father across the preschool snack table is any indication of his hairdo genes).
So this little blankety wonder was easy to want to make--and a real push in editing for me. I'm forever over-making things. Can't help myself. There was one more thing I wanted to add, but I didn't because this quilt looks finished to me. And I didn't want it to turn into a big scrap jumble.But I can see it in my mind--and I'll hold the thought as I hang out with this baby in the years ahead. It's just a little word I wanted to embroider about the score this baby made to land with his particular mom and his particular dad:
"lucky"
Because he really is.
And yes, I've now made myself cry. Happy tears, actually.
I haven't yet chosen my tatoo. But I have tagged my sewing machine.
I've never tagged anything before [internal pause to check to see if I'm actually telling the truth. Yep. It's the truth--not even a bathroom wall, I don't think. Yeesh. I'm not sure I've even lived until now.]
It had to be done. I couldn't sit by and let the world use my sewing maching itself to tell me about the way that I sit down to greet my sewing machine itself.
There it is--there's Ro right there on the right. Sitting and waiting for me. It's not her fault.
Although I've already told you that I've decided not to set out to make money from sitting down to my sewing machine, I still sit with an intentionality that reeks of big important reasons for me. When I sew, it's a big deal.
It's the meat, not the potatoes or the weird bowl of re-heated corn on the dinner table that is my life. The main dish. The real deal. I don't chug over to do it; I do it so I can chug.
I don't sew as a a "treat" or a "reward" for actually having done the important things in my life. I mean--sure, I do a lot of other important things in my life [try to remember to look my children in the eye every day. Check. Etc. Etc.]--but my Making Life is all wrapped up in that middle of that stuff. It doesn't arrive somewhere after.
It's not a hobby.
And I just couldn't take it anymore, my own machine telling me that the group of people who manufactured it thought that, in fact, it is. A hobby.
It is so more than a hobby.
For you too, I know.
P.S. Who knows--this may have initiated an entire series of Life Appliance Tagging that I have not up until now deeemd necessary.
I may next add verbage to the car:
[Even though this car is really big, my husband rides his bike because we swear we care about things like chopping down too many] SEQUOIA [s].
I really didn't set out to make Quilters mad. It wasn't my intention. Though I'd be lying if I didn't admit that the day that I walked into the retail fabric store and saw that Quilting Worker eyeing me like she could tell I sometimes cut paper with my sewing scissors, I sort of wanted to make her mad. But just her. Not all Quilters.
But that's not why I (sometimes) take old quilts apart.
I think I do that because I want to be doing what my Granny was doing when she made her quilt tops in the first place. She was surrounded by things that everybody else would have thrown away--worn out clothes, upholstery samples from her husband's upholstery shop, ripped pajamas, dresses that didn't fit right, stuff with stains on it--and she wanted to make something with all of it rather than chuck it.
She was a scrapper.
The story her daughter tells of the time that a relative threw away Granny's bag of scraps is the saddest story I've ever heard somebody tell about her--and she lived a life with lots of pieces to her story that were quite sad (or could've been if she wasn't the woman she was). The one about the scraps being thrown away is always told in a tone of voice that indicates that the Thrower Away of the scraps Knew. Knew that Granny love to make things with old fabric scraps. That it was dear to her very being. And that throwing her scraps away would have been like throwing away a 7 year old's bike. Mean, really.
Now I have her quilt tops. I'm on my last one. Down to the bottom of the stack. I have a handful of sqaures with stains left. And one whole top. Amd I'm working with it to figure out whether I'm going to take it apart before I put it back together. I've been thinking I would leave it alone and build a denim back, turn it into some sort of picnic quilt.
Please pretend that this photo is focussed. That I wasn't jogging by when I took it. That my man son wasn't flinging his body in front of the camera to thwart my efforts. That I had cleared my dishes.That all that pink isn't yelling at all that yellow.
But the other day--while flopping different vintage sheets on top of the thing to see what I wanted to cocktail it with--I realized that I don't like it yet. That I see treasure in it, and I see things to unmix from it.There's some poly in there that needs to be expunged . . . and probably put back together to make something else.
So I'm going to take it apart.
But it's not because I'm trying to make the Quilters mad. It's because I'm a scrapper too.
Now I know why all Quilters smoke like 3 packs a day*
It's because of all these quilts that they feel like they really should make for everybody because they can. I've started to twitch, myself, every time somebody says they're pregnant. Thank the good lord hisself that only one dear friend and one relative is at this time currently about to pop. Because if anybody else I knows gets knocked up, I'm going to be SERIOUSLY BEHIND, people.
Only one corner left. Almost finished.
And what about christmas? Oh my Heavenly Day, what about Christmas? Now that I can hand quilt, how in the name of Carol Brady's underpaid hairstylist am I going to pull off hand-sewn quilts for everybody? So many things to quilt. Maybe I'll make table runners for everybody instead of full quilts. Or napkins. Or little covers for everybody's USB drive. Yeah yeah, that's what I'll do. Yeah.
Plus, what about my kids--they each need a hand-sewn quilt from me. I need to make each of them quilts. I mean, I did, but I need to HAND-QUILT something for them now--something that they can have forEVER. That's totally what I need to do, man. It's totally what I need to do.
I'm so wound up, I just need a project to calm me down. I'll quilt something--yeah, that's what I need to do, I need to quilt something so that I can calm down from all this Quilting Pressure.
Mom, what's for dinner?
What honey--oh. Yes. Right. Uhhhhh--Be there in a second, honey! Just working out some inner tension up here. Just working on some quilllltttsssss.
I hate letting my kids down. So stressful. Uhhhh. Gotta do something to relax--I'll quilt.
[Insert photo of bloodied finger from too much interaction with tiny hand-stitch needle here.]
*Quilters don't smoke 3 packs a day. But if you see a Quilter madly lighting up with the tip of a just-burned cigarette, don't judge. That person has a lot going on inside and maybe needs the nicotine just to deal with the real pressure of being able to quilt.
I know--but seriously, it's really fun.
Big pillow for Baby Pumpkinhead's bed.
These are quilt squares that I scored in a Vintage sheet Sewing Bee. It was Deb's idea [my favorite thing she's ever made]--both to do it and to include me (one really good idea + one really big risk). This was the quilting bee wherein I sewed my first quilt squares the wrong size and make it
virtually impossible for anyone to use what I made and in turn received
11 GORGEOUS quilt squares from other lovely quilters. Excellent.
But these are--hello--totally nifty and begging to be hand quilted--little stitches all around the edges of the everything. So I did.
And then I turned it into a body pillow cover, since that's what I do. I framed the squares with bits of old white sheet and backed the pillow cover with some creamy-potato-soup colored polyester.
Also I'm doing this--more from the stash of Granny quilt squares that I'm coming to the bottom-of-the-pile of.
I hand quilted the edges of the squares then decided I didn't feel like stopping, so I'm trying a sort of Thread Scribbling kind of a thing in the big blank place.
I imagine that you could draw this sort of thing onto fabric and then sew over it, but I'm just sort of drawing with the thread in weird curvy patterns.
I think I should be finished with this one (what is it? Oh--no idea yet. It's three blocks sewn in a row) some time in the spring of 2051.
As if it's not enough that I can now crochet (well, sort of), enjoy hours at a sewing machine, prefer chamomille tea to green, will admit to loving Barbra Streisand music and wear only comfortable shoes (even on dates): I now enjoy hand-sewing.
It's sealing the deal: I'm an old lady. Prematurely, maybe, but still: totally old.
I might try to figure out how to convert my sofa into a monstrous rocking chair.
Here's what happened: we left for a camping trip (a wonderfully dirty, adventurous, eat-out-of-a-dutch-oven-over-the-fire one), and I wanted to take a project with me. And--because my husband has not yet built me a bicycle-powered generator so that I can take my sewing machine camping, I decided to try hand sewing.
It was a very, very good idea.
I made this:
It's another table runner from that fat, happy pile of old quilt tops--all four tied together with the best ever big red polka dot cotton that makes it seem like thouse four squares were meant to live together.
It's backed with an all kind of yellow daisy vintage sheet that I've been trying to find the right spot for.
And you know how whenver you go to somebody's house and they have some lovely, old quilt there and you notice it, they call you over and say the same thing every time: Look At The Size Of These Stitches. They're Tiny!
Well, let's just say that my ancestors will not be making that sort of comment to visiting starngers about my hand work. It will be more like . . .
Ancestor #1: Look at the size of these stitches.
Ancestor #2: Jeez. They're huge.
Ancestor #1: Maybe our relative was the Yeti.
Ancestor #2: They sort of wobble everywhere also.
Ancestor #1: Maybe she was a drunk Yeti.
Me: Whatever, Judgemental Ancestors.
This hand sewing project stayed with me everywhere I went: fireside, river side, lake side--and once in a pizza restaurant where my 11 year-old Man Boy requested that I put it away because it was so embarassing.
Me: How embarassing.
Him: Very.
Me: Like on a scale of 1 to 10 how embarassing is it to go out in public and realize your fly is down.
Him: 6.
Me: How embarassing is it to have your mom hand sewing in a pizza restaurant.
Him: 10.
Me: Oh.
And then I put it away.
Until we got in the car.
I'm working on my next one--a series of four vintage sheet squares that I landed in a lovely Bee that my friend Deb pulled together gobs of months ago.
I promise to show you when I finish.
I can't stop crochet-ing everything. That's what happened. I visited My Grandma and she showed me how and now I can't stop. Please don't stand still wearing a t-shirt because it will be awkward when I slip it off you and deftly swip the bottom into a block that I can transform into a honking long piece of t-shirt yarn super lickity split and then frantically begin to make a rug from your clothing. (In case you missed it, go here to learn how to do that. It's a Ninja-like skill we all should have in these uncertain times.)
First, I made this rug.
Okay, so it's the only crochet-ed thing I've finished, but I'm working on another one now.
Plus, I braided one. (Because when you walk into your Grandma's house and she has a gorgeously hand-braided rug that she and your grandfather made when they lived in German in 1950 and it looks like it arrived the day before yesterday, you start wildly braiding. It just seems like the right thing to do.)
And yes, it's a rombus, but I'd rather not focus on that at this time.
Also, while I was visiting her, I finished a quilt. I finished quilting a quilt, I mean--it's one of that stack of my great grandmother's quilts I've been staring at for more than a year almost two years now.
I finally figured out (while in proximity to my creatively-smart Grandma) that I ought to just do a straight forward quilting stitch on the thing and not torture myself that I have a short-throated machine. I decided to embrace my inner Tiny Pfaff and just make the thing happen.
And it did. And I used this nifty navy blue for the back and then--again my Grandma's idea--just folded the extras at the edge over to bind it.
Preeettttyyyy sneaky, sis.
And I finished another quilt (that one I posted about last time.)
And I got inspired and came home and am about 14 inches of hand-sewn-binding away from finishing finished another that's been staring at me since I had darker hair. (I'll show you that one later, I swear.)
I think she slipped me a mickey or something. I've hit kind of slump these past months, and I spent a week with my grandma and came back my same, Make Crazed self.
It feels lovely to be myself again.
Is there a better moment than the one where you are running around an empty parking lot wearing a quilt like a cape and flapping your arms up and down and your friend is in the car pulling up and he doesn't know that you finally finished the quilt you made for him out of all his old Young Life-thirts and then he sees you and doesn't know why you're running around a parking lot and then he gets out of the minivan and sees that the weird cape is actually a quilt and he says, "No way--is that my quilt?" and you say, "Yes!" and then you give it to him and he's really happy and also you can tell by the look on his wife's face that it is WAY CUTER than she ever imagined a t-shirt quilt could be?
Answer: nope.
And who doesn't want to do something terrific and loving for this guy?
Answer: nobody. He's one of the bravest, most willing-hearted souls I know. I was a giddy freak working on this quilt.
I had my dream Quilt Hand Off Scenario just the day before yesterday, so I'm still sort of beaming on the inside. And now I need to talk about making quilts out of t-shirts, since I've done it . . . once.
I saw a picture of a postcard quilt and liked the idea of using little samples of the (garbage bag + mother lode of a suitcase full of) t-shirts Scott gave me to pull together a quilt for him. There were so many shirts, that it made sense to get a little peek of each one. I didn't worry about the snapshot even really including all of the words some of the time. I just cut a piece out of each shirt around 6" X 10".
I cut 30 zillion white 2" X 6" strips of white cotton and joined the t-shirt blocks up with a little white cotton strip between. Then I cut (fewer than 30 zillion) looooooong white strips (the width of the quilt) to hold together each of the long rows.
When I went to the the quilting I just quilted around the edges of each t-shirt. And it sort of helped to pop each block. Plus it was easy, which I'm into. And then I made binding out of some brown polka dot cotton I walked by at the thirft store that yelled to me, "Come buy me to bind Scott's quilt with"--so I did, since I do everything that thrifted cotton tells me to.
And as it turned out, it was all Just The Thing because you know how weird and floppy t-shirt quilts are and how they look like a big piece of old clothes? Well, this Didn't. It Didn't Look Like Old Clothes. That might need to be the goal of all quilt making out of t-shirts.
So I highly recommend it. Go make one. You know every time I make something, I want you to go make one. That's how I am.
First t-shirt yarn. (I used this SUPER-perfectly clear tutorial).
And yes, I'm going to braid a rug with it. It's the right thing to do. I'm also going to be listing Ability to Turn Old T-shirts Into Yarn as a crucial skill set on my resume because I think that being able to make that onesuperlong strip out of the bottom of a t-shirt seems like magic, which means that I am now highly magical. I may, in fact, just list Highly Magical on my resume, actually. That would cover this skill and others.
First peek at the t-shirt quilt I am making for my friend (and hence the source of all the t-shirt bottoms I used to make all that yarn)
First polyester-covered dining room chair cushion covers:
I recently noticed that my seat cushions were Deeply Pathetic looking.
Hence the makeover. Goodbye sad, tired black and white checks. Hello, Polyester Kaboom.
First time the Upper Room's been passable in forty kabillion days. But why show you After, when Before is so much more satisfying to see in somebody else's house?
Like I keep telling you, I'm just here to make you feel better about yourself.
Drop Pin from little sister: "At Shwanky Hotel" [accompanied by instagram pic of mai tai with tiny umbrella that a worker has written her first name on in glitter paint made from organic monkeys]
Drop Pin from me: "Home, Morro Bay"
This does not say enough, people. It just. doesn't. say. enough.
I need a drop pin functionality that can say:
Kitchen, Morro Bay. Still Standing Up.
Garage, Morro Bay. Trying to Find Pathway Through Garage to Washing Machine.
Garage, Morro Bay. Waiting on Washing Machine Repairman.
Bathroom, Morro Bay. Looking for Clorox Wipes.
Bathroom, Morro Bay. Wiping Toilet.
Kitchen, Morro Bay. Heating Something.
I think that there is a possibility that the only way that facebook could actually offer me this funcitonality is if I were willing to have a chip implanted in my head that a satellite could track. So I am considering it. I might have to sign a waver, of course.
In response to my recent other declaration of the insufficiencies of technology, I have recently created these Pinterest Boards:
Things Other People Are Obviously Doing To Make Me Feel Bad About Myself
Other People My Children Wish They Lived With
Happy Truth Telling. Implants optional.
