wienerdog tricks.

Post-Capitalism & Wonk

Mab said something this week that I have said many times to the sort of friends that I can fall into Making Revelry with (translate: the sort of people who will hear me wax on about The Way It Should Be Out There) and I absolutley think it's worth digging around about. It's this:

"Afraid your project won’t look like it came out of a catalog? It won’t. It’ll look like something you’ve created with your hands. If you want it to look like something from a catalog, then have it mass produced in a factory."  --Mab.

Highly Wonky-Highly Useful-Highly Happy Pillows from Old Quilts. Crazily unmatched corner meeting spots that some would deem Un-Okay.

I think we're at an interesting time in our country. Am I an Economist and do I have the credentials to say this? No. I think more people feel poor and disconnected from the life power of an actual dollar bill than any other time since I can remember. Am I a historian? No. I think we're all scrambling to get more dollars because we don't like to feel powerless. Am I a social psychologist? Nope. And because, of course, we need stuff.

The weird, imperfect back of my favorite summer skirt (made from old jeans) that turns out to be just the spot for my backside but looks super wonked on the hanger. Easy to judge, still wonderful.

And also we're diving in and trying to make the stuff we need. And we're doing this with gusto (at least some of the time--I was glad to hear in your comments that for many of you it's a LOT of the time. Woo hoo!). And so great mothership sites like Craft are guiding us and we're corralling the power of googling How To Do Whatever We Feel Like and we're all helping each other by putting up free tutorials. We're up to our necks in the really fun effort of providing for ourselves.

But then we finish what we made.

And it doesn't look like what we thought it was going to.

It looks, well, Wonky. Off just a bit. 

And we say: Guy. That doesn't look right. I must not be good at this.

And we set that one aside and go buy a (cheap) one that looks more like the one we had in our head.

I know all the flaws in this bag, and I also know that my daughter's teacher really liked it when I gave it to her.Wonk and all.

And we pay double--for the supplies we bought to make the one we wanted + the cheap one that we bought. But WAIT: we pay even more--we pay the cost of this message ping-ponging around in our heads looking for a place to land fester: I. Must. Not. Be. Good. At. This.

I think we have to shift our heads aroud a bit about all of this Making we're tackling to get what we need. And it's exactly what Mab said: "If [we] want it to look like something from a catalog, then have it mass produced in a factory."

We need to make friends with Wonk. Invite it to tea. Service it biscuits. Ask it about its childhood. Consider its finer points and stop judging its obvious irregularities. Because when Wonk is present, it's a sign that an actual human has constructed the thing we're looking at. Wonk indicates Humanity. I mean, sure, it might indicate some factory mishap where fire shot out of some gnarly big machine and smoke blew everywhere and all the little stitched-on animal logos landed on the bellybutton spot of all the shirts, but that's not the scenario I'm envisioning here.

In the things that we make ourselves to provide for what we need for ourselves and for our homes and our familites, Wonk just means that we didn't walk into a store to meet our own needs. And it probably means that we or whoever made the thing in front of us Experienced Something in the making--joy, relaxation, the frustration of trying something never-before-tried and straining toward pulling it off decently.

Wonk means a Something happened for a Somebody.

A highly Un-Factory-Like Zipper/Pocket treatment on a duffle bag for one of my boys. Still useful. Still charming. No need for perfection to be Just Right for camping.

Wonk is lovely. It's not an indicator of lack of expertise of failure or some sign that maybe you should try paper crafts instead. It just means that you made it.

And I'm so glad that you made it.

Time to Grow a Pair, Ladies Part II & Also a Winner

First: congratulations to Holly whose #3 comment was chosen by random to win her very own Go!Baby from the nice Quilt People at AccuQuilt. I'll email you soon, Holly, about how to get your nifty prize. Fun.

And also, I have more to say. 

I was recently sent a review copy of a book about sewing. It's a perfectly fine book. Probably terrific for a beginner because the pictures are clear and there are a lot of them. I would likely use it as a reference if I ever referenced anything myself. 

I'm tackling this ratty one now. Wasn't sure what I was going to do because it's so Completely Tattered.

And that last sentence makes it sound like I know all the stuff in the book. And, in fact, I don't. I regularly botch zippers (I mean, they work, but the ends of them are not Beauty Pageant Material), only recently heard that gray is a better thread color choice than white for quilting, and my eyes roll into the back of my head and the room swirls around a little when anybody talks about warp and weft. (Terms make me queasy.)

And the book I was asked to review could have fixed all of that for me.

But this is all I could think of while I was reading through the (very thorough) sewing book: we don't need any more information about sewing.

See? Way. Tattered.

We just need more guts and less nervousness and more surety that nothing bad will happen if we just tuck in and try.

I really don't think anybody out there is rightfully confused. And hold on, here's how I mean it: there are plenty of resources (many, many of them completely free now) that will help us figure out the snazzier tricks of sewing. And there are a few pretty friendly guides for getting started (this one's still my favorite). 

But we still just all need some more gallons of bravery.

Somehow, though, publishers believe we need more guides--that our big glitch is informational, some dearth of data--so they must be getting some word that we want them, which mean we must, in fact, be doing something to make them believe that we do (that was Capitalism as an Idea, Working Backwards, by the way).

And I'll allow for this VERY real possibility: maybe everybody does feel this way. Maybe I'm off my thrifted rocker here. It's always a possibility. I recognized that. Sometimes the bats in my belfry need more water and less caffeine.

So I just started cutting it up into panels. And then I put some good ones back together. And now I'm working on turning it into this.

But I'm still wondering what you all think about this.

Why do we feel like we need to know what we're doing in order to do it? What are we afraid of, ladies? What can go wrong? I'm not yelling this. I'm leaning in across a small table at a coffee shop, asking you. What can go wrong? Why do you need to have it all figured out before you dive in?  And I haven't been to some blogger conference that's told me to ask you questions to get you to leave more comments. I'd really like to know what you think about this. And that desire is probably mostly selfish--I mean, I don't want to be the girl at the party with her Creative Philosophy Skirt tucked into the Pantyhose of Her Ideals.

It's just what I kept hearing in my head as I read that perfectly lovely book: We don't need more information. We need more fearlessness, more unbridled willingness to Try.

Because when we do, we figure out all of the things that the lady in the book has tried and figured out and is showing us so that we won't have to try to figure it all out for ourselves.

My favorite part: because I could get panels out of either the front of the back of most of the whole thing, this is the entirety of my Thrown Away Scraps Pile. Excellent.

But having to figure it all out for ourselves is the best part. I'm sure of it.

One Strippy Quilt Back & Also You Are Now Popular Too

I finished the quilt back I started last week. Couldn't stop working on it. 

I think I tried roughly 37 different layouts for the strips, and ultimately opted for this chunk-o-lavender set up. I like it. I think it's going to talk with the top my Granny made nicely.

And I wanted to tell you the good news that one lovely by-product of my new-found semi-popularity: the Quilting People have one of those fancy cutters for you too.

AccuQuilt is giving me another Go!Baby Fabric Cutter to give away. (I know: they're nice. I agree.) So to enter, just leave your name and tell me this: do you work with old quilt tops?

I need to know if I'm alone in the world. I need to know if the lady at the local quilt store who looks at me with eyes that tell me she wishes I was not allowed to quilt (me with my refusal to measure, with my willingness to cut up old quilts, my unwavering commitment to thrifted fabric, my brash love of scraps) is truly the image of Quilter that I should be holding on to. Is there anybody else out there cutting up old stuff, dying to use these lovelies and not just shrine them away?

Do you work with old quilt tops? I'm only seeing people start quilts from scratch, and I have this funny feeling that there might be a corral full of you who have Hoards of Vintage Almost Perfection up on some shelf somewhere that you tell yourself you'll pay somebody else 39 kathousand dollars to Appropriately Quilt someday. 

Is it true? Do you have them and you're hiding them in your closets? I need to know.

About the contest (to be perfectly clear): to enter just leave your name and tell me about your experience with Old Quilt Tops (if you have any). Otherwise, I'll just need to know who your favorite Glee character is, because as an Intentionally Lagging Culture-an-ado, I am just now watching the series from the beginning. Most things in my day now happen with the sound of 12 voices singing behind me.

I'm leaving to go camping, so I'll pick the winner at random when I return next Friday, July 22nd.

Also: this top's up next. Can't wait.

How I Am Finally Popular

The first time this happened to me was in high school when I had kids. All of a sudden, everybody wanted to hang out with on to me. My phone head was ringing off the hook with the sound of voices calling yelling my name. And every time I turned around, I was leaving the house all dressed up barely dressed to go somewhere somebody wanted to take me me to take them. I was finally popular.

And it's happening again friends. Remember when I told you about how I was listed as a Top Quilt Blogger in Quilter's Home Magazine. (55 of us having been chosen from the roughly 19,556,732 Kazillion* currently writing about sewing on the interweb.) Well, now the Quilting People have found me. And even though when I typed that I imagined zombies, that's not how they are. These Quilting People are nice. They keep wanting to give me stuff. Not bad. Not bad.

And so one really nice thing that the Quilting People have given me is one of these:

 
The folks at AccuQuilt sent me one to try out. So I did.  I love free stuff. Plus, I was curious. I don't mind cutting a bit, but the cost of replacement blades for rotary cutters does drive me batty, so I wanted to see how this thing worked.

The Go Baby is a Fancy Cutting Device basically. It looks to me to be spot-on perfect for people who are in Betty Ford type programs for the Use of Applique, but I asked for basic shapes, knowing that I'd love to see if it had sort of workhorse potential for my more basic projects. So when they asked me, I opted for the 2 1/2" strip cutter and a couple of basic squares and triangles. 

And I decided to tackle this:

Remember these? I'm going to make a quilt back for this one--I know: can you believe it? I'm going to take an old quilt top and turn it into . . . wait for it: a Quilt. Crazy. (For other Old Quilt Top Escapades, click on over here).

And I could see a super strippy back that echoed these colors being nifty. This particular quilt top is such a wonderful, funky combo of colors and I didn't know where to start. So I did the smartest thing ever--I let the quilt tell me what to do. I just dug through my stash and started looking for a glob of fabric that agreed with one block at a time. Turned out to be real smart. It's a method I'd used again for color matching.

Then I tried out the Go Baby to cut them into strips. 

You stack fabric on what they call a "die" and then cover it with a cutting mat, then crank the whole thing through. 

And it worked pretty well. You can stack fabric (it says it cuts up to 6 layers at a time--I could swing about 4 or 5 un-ironed, mashed-in-there pieces without having to sweat when I turned the crank) and I ended up with a nice, fat stack. I don't doubt that somebody else who was a more fastidious quilter could have gotten 6 layers, it's just not how I work--as you already know--and I wanted to see what it would produce in the way that I work.

This stack is probably just about an hour's time of running scraps through the hand-cranked mechanism. Pretty impressive, really. The cutter made even cuts and only faltered when I overloaded it. (I couldn't help it--I wanted to see what it could do.)

My summary thoughts about working with the Go! Baby: helpful, inventive way to turn scraps into shapes you want with minimal waste. (I monitored my trash can as I went and I was pretty confident that I wasn't losing too much.) 

I think they may send me one to give away (!) More on that soon. In the meantime, I'll keep you posted on this Old Quilt Project. I've never actually quilted anything this big before. Yeehaw.

* All estimates calculated by hamsters who drank Dr. Pepper from abandoned cat dishes.