wienerdog tricks.

Green Is The New Poor

Wait. I know: I'm not poor.

I'm not a bit poor. I've been reading about poverty for the last couple years and so I know I'm not. 

But I feel poor sometimes. And I talk to lots and lots and lots of people who say these words: I'm so tired of feeling poor.

I thought that while I share my thoughts with you about feeling poor and trying not to feel poor that I would show you the quilts I'm working with right now. I'm actually taking this one apart to use the blocks separately. My Granny seems to have made this and just tacked them together as they were finished. I want to use them and rearrange them into something else so I'm sitting with a seam ripper when I can and extracting the blocks from one another.

What I've been chewing on this last week or so is how many of you responded to the post I put up just a bit ago with such quick and honest stories of your own in-the-same-boatness and your smart choice to do life with one car. In fact, I told a friend just the other night that the most humbling thing about this decision so far has been how many people who've responded with, "Oh really? Yeah--we do that too. We have been for a while now . . ."

Right.

 I've got this one pinned and have started to quilt around the stars and around the corner boxes (those spots where each block's edge triangle meets another). I think I'm going to hang this one on my bedroom wall when I'm finished with it. It's got an old tablecloth as a back.

But I've been struck with how silly it is to call this "green." As it turns out, people without means have been getting by with one car since cars were made. Okay, so before that too. Many manage with no car at all. Many many many.

And so for me to jaw on and on about the Greeness of this One Car Decision seems silly to me. It's all very First World, of course. Because there's nothing inherently true about the maxim that we Need two cars in our family.

So, first I'm wanting to reflect here that I am humbled by the reality that there are those who go without all the time. And I don't want to be so busy talking about Green Living that I (or we) miss the gut check that many, many people go without.

But the other thing going on in my head has been this constant question--as we've continued to cut and cut and cut expenses to make our life make sense: How can I do all of this cutting and spend-thrifting and saving and not Feel Poor?

It's been a question that on many days I've not been able to answer for myself.

 This one has been begun too--but I didn't like the thread color and so I'm starting again. Sure. This picture is how I decided what fabrics to use for the back. Color choosing is not a theoretical process for me. It's all about hucking handfuls of fabric onto other handfuls of fabric.

And so the other thing I'm wanting to share here is that I can see that one way to fight that feeling is to tackle a decision like this one with a sense of Adventure-- rather than dragging toward it like a nine-year-old boy to a bathtub. And so in that way, I think calling it "Green" is actually helping. The fact that it IS Green is helping. 

So I'm just saying here that I'm feeling thankful for what we want, for what we're choosing. Thankful, too, that we are able to choose it. Thankful that doing something earth-loving somehow makes a limiting decision one that's feeling more and more expansive all the time.

It's taking lots of conversation and anticipation and planning and reflecting around here to do this new transpo life. We've only been One Car Only for four days and the amount of conversation it's taken to get Everybody Everywhere has been noteworthy. Comical even. Many people have had to breathe through their noses to remain calm as Details are Decided.

And still, I feel thankful. And somehow, I feel less poor.

Frankensteined Chenille

I sewed this for my newly attacked bedroom that I finished--well, sort of finished--painting last weekend. Am going all white and cream and black so that I can throw weird quilts onto my bed--and maybe even onto the wall--and my room won't look like a weird, overstocked thrift store owned by a color-blind lady with a penchant for prints.

 
So I really wanted a white bedspread. Looked online. Have searched thrift stores. Stared at my stash for ages. Then just this last week this arrived: a fat pile of handed-over chenille that I chopped up and re-attached and combined with the other weird chenille scraps I've been hoarding and then I turned them into the most chenilliest of bedspreads. I just took the widest swath of unstained fabric from each bedspread and put them together.

 
Not bad, Scrap Yoda (sometimes I call myself that when I'm calling myself something). Not bad.

The underbelly of this coverlet is, well, some seams. Here's how much that bothers me: -32%. I may go back and sew a second seam to keep the fray at a reasonable level, but that's all. (I did try topstitching the seam down, and let me just tell you: Step Away From The Machine when you feel like topstitching chenille.  Topstitching chenille is like putting lipstick on a dog. No it's not, but that's what came to me. Topstitching chenille makes weird bumps. That's what I was trying to tell you.

When I do supersized projects like this, I skip laying it all out on the floor and use the thing I'm aiming to cover (in this case, the bed) as the cutting mat. So I sewed the big scraps together with one good, end-matching side and one all-kinda-different-lengths side. This one:

Then once it's on the bed and I arrange it to be whatever size makes sense for my bed/thing I'm covering, then I trim the already-sewed-together pieces and add whatever last-step trim I'm going to add.

This keeps me from having to:

1. Take out a tape measure.

2. Search the interweb for "Queen Bedspread Measurements" (after which, I would need to go back to #1

3. Fuss

Once I have the thing right where I want it, I just cut right there on the bed. Volare:

I have a long strip of fringy-fringe that I will next attach. Um. If I ever do. Because I'm that way.

The real moral of the story here: If you let yourself become the sort of person who talks in loving terms about scraps of old fabric, people who know that you mean it will start leaving things like piles of chenille on your doorstep. 

* Thanks Grandma Suz & Meredith for the lovely piles from whence this bedspread cometh.

The Decision and Its Offspring: The Bike Warmer

I made the decision when I started sewing a few years back to work entirely with reclaimed fabrics--anything I could find in a thrift store or a yard sale or whatever anybody dumped on my front stoop. You've heard me jaw about it already. I finally wrote it all out recently to make it Real. (It lives up there on my nav under The Decision.)

Here's the thing, though--that Decision, in addition to ending up being Green--has slowly morphed into more decisions. The most recent one for our family has been to choose to reduce our expenses and use only one car. 

I know: you're shaking your head.

What are you going to do when it rains? What if you're tired and you don't want to ride? What if you're late where you're going? What if you fall off? What if those butt bruises you get when you first start sitting on a bike seat never go away?

Solid questions. And I've been relly thinking about them lately. And I've even trying to figure out what it is we--and I mean me and my tribe but also the bigger, culture We--really are so committed to pay for when we have two cars.

I think it might be Self-Reliance. I've been sitting with the obvious Convenience answer. And I don't underestimate the impact of that cost to us because I am, to my very bones, Decidedly Impatient in general. Excellent personal trait. Totally excellent.

Anyway, we're going for it. And so the first thing to do has been to get the whole fam suited up with bikes. Like better than I could have dreamt up, there's a guy nearby who does with bikes what I do with fabric: he scouts around and uses old bikes to build new, useable, made-for-transpo bikes. And then he sells them at a price that doesn't make a person cry when they're trying to outfit a hoard of us.

So I got this bike. It's mine:

  

And I hopped on it the other morning to bike the five or six blocks to the grocery store to get some coffee. And I was riding and smiling. 

My only beef with the bike is the color combo: turquoise and pink. I think I spent too many awake hours in the 80's because I am practially traumatized by these two colors next to each other. Something about them just feels like they are trying too hard.

And so I've invented the Bike Warmer. (I know that you are not in the least bit surprised that I did this.)

Here is my bike, newly claimed by Polyester-Loving Me:

I told my friend the Bike Yoda I was going to do this and he said, "Sounds about as useful as putting a sweater on a poodle." To which I said: Exactly.

Because if I'm going to do this, I gotta do it just like I would do it. So I am.

Before:

After:

I know: way. better.