Finished!

The front:
The back:

A little close-up:

The binding:

The dedication:

The way it looked when I sent it off:

I will tell you all about how this was both a success and a failure eventually, I think. Or this will be the last you ever hear of this particular quilt. I am a little sick of the way it looks, I think. I hope J. and the baby like it. I hope they don't hate the way it looks. Please cross your fingers for me.

Cat Escapes Bag

I mean, there are way more than two kinds of people in the world. I really loathe when people try to be pithy by "boiling it down" to a two-types-of-people-in-this-world scenario. It just never works--I know because before I was someone who hates this tendency I was someone who tried to apply it to everything from restaurant customers to sexual partners. And every once in a while, I find myself doing it again: having an experience or conversation that really seems to crystallize some aspect of the human condition and reflexively thinking that I've found it! I found my very own original axiom.
Then my mind is flooded with exceptions to my bright new rule and I'm back where I started (see above--like, where I started).
This just happened to me, not thirty minutes ago. My friend W. called, stricken.
But wait: let's backtrack...I finally finished the baby quilt for our friend J's new daughter, and this morning W. requested that I send her some photos. Knowing that of all my friends and family members, W. would be the most understanding of this little confessional endeavor, and caving into the pressure she applied upon hearing about my blog, I blurted out the address. Then I went to the post office and the grocery store and the gym and the fabric store. I hadn't been home very long when she called to express her sheer flabbergastedness over the extent of my no-longer-secret, considerably-less-anonymous public journal.
She was careful to point out that it's not this guy's existence that has her rattled, but rather how very much it reveals about my heretofore-unknown-to-W. doings here on the borders of Appalachia. I've been coming here for like nine months now (W. exaggerated a little when she gasped "nearly a year!"), and still the only person who knows both my true identity and of the blog's existence was, until this morning, my husband. And he doesn't even know the address!
Geez, when I put it like that it does sound a little bat-shit crazy. Especially because I am not secretive. Well, that's not wholly true. I am extremely forthcoming about almost everything relating to my tumultuous inner life, but I do keep guilty secrets like I forgot to pay a bill, or I was supposed to send a thank-you card two months ago. But this doesn't fall into that category. I'm not doing anything shameful on here.
OR AM I???
Which brings me to the two-types-of-people thing. It almost brings me there, anyway. W. and I discussed the fact that this is weird but she can accept it because she likes to read blogs. And she used a phrase which I loved and will here repeat with joy at its sheer perspicacity*: We are both readers, and are therefore both "desperate for content." I love that! I'm totally desperate for content. I want so badly to have something new to read every time I turn to my computer! Or really, every time I turn to anything. And blogs are so tailor-made for whatever we want at any given moment, or over any given period of time. And some of them provide us with something new every single day!**
Anyway, W. is a blog-reader, so while she was disconcerted by my revelation, it wasn't the internettiness of it that threw her, it was its secretness, its thoroughness. This isn't one of those ghost ship blogs you sometimes come across, you know? The ones that were obviously for a school project or were born from some swiftly forgotten impulse to share.*** Although I am no pioneer woman, my output is hefty when one considers the fact that if you had asked yesterday, W. would have called it non-existent. And while I often go tangential on your ass, the central precept of the blog is sewing. And W. had no idea that I've been doing so much sewing.
(W. lives in the Northeast. We hardly ever see each other but frequently, almost daily, we have hour-long phone conversations. It's amazing what you do and do not share with someone in that kind of relationship. You know?)
The blog reveals a secret life that took her by surprise. That's an understatement, but I can't go further into that now because this post is obnoxiously long as it is.
We discussed telling J. about the blog. Two of us have never, ever, not-even-once managed to keep a secret from the third. There is no question that the new mama will be clued in very soon. She, however, does not read blogs. At least, to the best of our knowledge she doesn't. We've got evidence to back that up, too. 1) She is not a voracious reader. 2) She is not desperate for content. 3) She is also not really one for sharing, as a general rule. We all share everything with each other, but where W. or I might tell a grocery store cashier that we're going off the Pill, J. would not. She would do no such thing. She would, in fact, be speechless to hear that it had happened. At all. Ever. To anyone.
She, in other words, is the second type of person. For one thing, the urge to share, which drives the blog in its myriad incarnations, is not so strong in our J.
For another thing, blogs are an acquired taste. At least, they are to people our age and older (let's say over 30? Even 25?). They're such a new phenomenon that we have no reasonable expectation of understanding them in any inherent way. They compare to absolutely nothing that came before them. At least at first glance, keeping a blog seems more like an exhibitionist's compulsion than a new way to communicate and connect. And isn't it egocentric to assume that anyone would be interested in reading your blog, anyway?
Once a person starts reading them, though, they cease to appear quite so alien or presumptuous. I couldn't say exactly what prompted me to start writing here, but the desire to do so certainly struck only after I had been inculcated by several months of reading blogs.
Forster's famous inscription is knocking around in my head, so I'll put it down even though I know it's the most overstated: "Only connect..."**** By invoking that epigraph and waxing philosophical on the nature of blogs, I'm also venturing into the uncomfortably outdated territory of, like, all the cultural commentators of 2002.
But if blogs are such an old-hat phenomenon, then why did I treat mine like a shameful secret?

OK, look: I think I have an answer for that, but I'm pretty sure it would take us in a gigantic, word-filled circle. And NO ONE READS THIS BLOG! Even W. said she didn't save the address so as to honor my wishes for anonymity. So I'm going to leave this here because I've gotten carried away. And I'm really cold and I want to go take a shower.

I will post pictures of the finished (!!) baby quilt on the morrow. Or the next time I post, whenever that is.


*Thank you, thesaurus.com. I knew the word was out there, but had to go through "appropriate," "perfect," and "precise" to get there.
**I recently had a dream that I showed up at the Pioneer Woman's house totally unannounced and we were both really uncomfortable and shocked that it had come to that. I check her site a lot less anymore--totally do not want to become a fangirl, especially not of that brand of...well, that brand of Kool-Aid. There. I said it. I still totally enter the giveaways for mixers, though.
***I once stumbled onto a childhood neighbor's three-post blog about finding out her husband was having an affair and leaving her and their infant daughter. It was devastating and weird, but a form of catharsis we could all learn from, probably.
****I mean! It's TWO WORDS! This is an amazing achievement, a seriously mind-boggling thing that happened in literature. It is stirring and so often quoted as to be a most terrible cliche, but whoa. Who cares? It is an exhortation and a blessing and a sad, sorrowful sigh. And it's only two fucking words. Plus that ellipses--that perfect, winsome line of dots...

Sheesh!

My friend went and had her baby two days early! The nerve, I tell you. She called last week to tell me she was breech and would be going in for a C-section on Tuesday (tomorrow), and that threw me into high gear on the quilting front. But then she moved it up some more! Now I am officially late with the quilt, and that is bad. I'm more industrious when the deadline is looming than I am when the deadline is past. I'm going to fight that, though, because I spent the morning making a rather ambitious Christmas list, and thanks to Sew, Mama, Sew's gift ideas, at least half the things on this morning's list are hand-made items. We'll see if I make it happen.
Anyway, here is a little peek at the hand-quilting:
It's hard to see, but if you look closely, there are those stitches (which good quilters would make MUCH smaller) I've been slaving over for the last week and a half. Yikes, I say. Plus, when I really look at it I'm sort of horrified: it is quite big for a baby. Newborns are notoriously small, and this quilt is very large in comparison. She will grow into it. Yeah, that's it.

Now, to find my thimble and get cracking.

Progress!

It's a little less fun to post this since the picture isn't very good...
But look! I finished the quilt top. Of course, it ended up being a LOT easier than I anticipated. Those strips were just so long--I guess I put it off because I was afraid it was going to be an ordeal. Or I put it off for the sheer, perverse pleasure I always derive from putting things off. That's a problem.*
Anyhoo, it's based on a tutorial for "pocket change" or something. (I went to link to the tutorial and it's gone! I bookmarked it but it's been taken down--I forget what site I found it on, but if I come across it again I will link it up). The top looks really pretty and I'm proud of it. Right now I'm working on the back--I had a few leftover squares, so I thought I'd incorporate them into the backing, like I've seen some people do. The squares are verticle on the front; they'll be horizontal and more scattered and in shorter, more varied lengths of strips on the back.
The middle panel is 5" while the four others are 3". I cut an obnoxious number of 5" squares, so that's what I'm using for the binding. I'm going to sew a bunch together and cut it in half so I have a really long 2 1/2" strip. I don't know how well it will work, but we shall see.
Our drive on Thanksgiving is just unbearably long, and I will need something to keep my hands from strangling the state of Ohio for its vastness, so I'm either going to be turning the binding or quilting this baby by hand over the holiday.**
It measures about 48" by 55"--I looked up other baby quilts and I think they tend to be about this big. Yay for me! It really got me out of my rut, too--it was so satisfying to have it put-together and pretty that I just holed up in that sewing room all day yesterday. I was very productive, which is, of course, out of character for me. I hope I can do the same today!

*I have a friend who went on antidepressants for a while and she said the most incredible thing about them was that they made her pay her bills on time. Crazy. She said she just got a bill in the mail, wrote a check and sent it off with a stamp on it (this was in the nineties, before click-to-pay stuff). That's not exactly revelatory for organized people, but for the scatterbrained among us, it is nothing short of miraculous. My friend told me because she knew I'd understand the extremity of such a change in behavior. It's certainly tempting, but she also said it severely inhibited her ability (even her desire!) to have an orgasm. A sex drive! My credit rating for a sex drive! Puh-leez. I think it really says something about our capitalist, Puritanical society, that we would even put something like that on the market--and know it will sell! Aaargh! Wait. Where was I? Oh, yes. Quilts...
Wait, though: before I quit this footnote, I have to say I understand that antidepressants do more than make you pay your bills on time. I get that doing that is more a symptom of improvement. But still, I am baffled by the public's willingness to give up sex for happiness. It is so counterintuitive, isn't it?? I just wish the pharmaceutical industry would have worked a little harder to keep their Prozac from affecting our lust. Listen, I'm still on my first cup of coffee. And I think I'm back to tree-in-a-forest-not-making-a-sound status, so I'ma leave to their own devices whatever logic flaws I've accumulated here.
**Listen, I know hand-quilting is just like dumb in this modern, machine walking-presser-foot age, but when I told my mother I'd gotten a presser foot for quilting, she told me that my Grandma Peg always said that a machine-quilted quilt was not really a quilt. I am certainly not such a purist, but there's just something about hand-quilting my first quilt that appeals to me. Grandma Peg died last year and it feels a little bit like honoring her dear memory to at least partially finish this little guy by hand. Plus I can do it while I watch TV--Ohio State plays Michigan on Saturday, and that's like the biggest rivalry in sports (even when Michigan is a terrible football team). I love my Buckeyes, and it behooves me to have something to do with my hands during stressful spectator-sport situations.

Dear Blog,

Today I have to make up for some recent setbacks. Some of my setbacks have been good (like getting lots of subbing jobs) and some have been bad (like "go ahead, order that second pitcher of margaritas!"). But they have all contributed to a stall-out in my productivity. I am so close to finishing the toaster cover, even though it's going to have some surrrious wrinkles on the lining. And that baby quilt is all happening, lined up and ready to be assembled as soon as I assemble the necessary motivation to put it the eff together.
Anyway, I'm writing to make it official that my productivity is back on track. I thought if I told somebody about it, it might make me less likely to watch "Battlestar Gallactica" and more likely to get up there to the sewing room and sew like the wind!
That's really all I've got to say. The coffee I'm drinking hasn't done its job of sweeping out my cobwebs, but it's doing its best.
Love, S

Eeeeeeeeeyooooore

We didn't go to happy hour. Husband had a late meeting, so we just had a cocktail at home. It's for the best, of course. I made chicken with 40 cloves of garlic, a recipe I've read about like four hundred times and every time the writer says it's absolutely incredible. I found a crock pot version in one of my slow cooker cookbooks, and tried it. It was really really good. I will post pictures and stuff once I get the camera back from Husband, who has it to take pictures for work.
Yesterday wasn't exactly the mid-week holiday I wanted it to be--H. had to work for most of the afternoon after all, and we did laundry and cleaned for the rest of the day. It turns out that one day-holidays are a little bit disappointing. With long weekends, you get to say "it's Sunday but it's really like Saturday" when you get a Monday off--it turns on its head that dreaded "I thought it was Friday but it's really Thursday" phenomenon. Mid-week days off don't give you that thrill--we were so looking forward to yesterday, and then *poof* it was 7:00 last night and H. has a long day today...
Oh, and I'm shedding an egg, which makes me tired and irritable and relentlessly negative. The worst thing about it is my obliviousness--thankfully H. knows it's happening and points it out to me. That sounds like he's a terrible dude who chalks everything up to "monthly bills," but he's really not. I went off the Pill a while ago, and now I really get down and pouty; since I almost always fail to make the connection to hormones, my inexplicable jerkiness is that much more disturbing to me. So H. is actually doing a favor when he points it out. Not that I'm always fawningly grateful for it. But yesterday when he suggested that my quiet, doleful digs about him having to go to work might be attributable to my period, it really was a relief. I don't want to be this person, and if I don't realize why it's happening, I start to think maybe I'm just essentially unhappy, and this is how it's going to be from now on unless I can find some way to make a major change. The drama of that sentiment is 100% me, but the truth of it comes purely from the onslaught of hormones.
I'm coming to the end of it, though. And today is beautiful--the house is flooded with sunshiney light and the few leaves left on the trees are rustling like maracas in the lively wind. I will take Dog for a walk up the hill and I will finish that baby quilt top. It's going to be a weird size, I think...I have just a little bit of proportion to work out. But I have all day to do that! Yay coffee!

Happy Hour: A Censure

Today is Tuesday, but it's a little bit like Friday. Tomorrow's Veteran's Day, one of those crazy holidays we never, ever relegate to a Friday or Monday. Thank you, veterans*. I get to have Husband home all day, and we have nothing scheduled or compelling. It's just a free little surprise (being only marginally employed, I do not track holidays so much--the Christmases and Thanksgivings don't sneak up on me, but one-offs like this one certainly do, in a wholly welcome manner).
*I mean thanks for everything, like making tremendous sacrifices to protect your fellow citizens and being brave and fighting wars even if...well, even though wars are exceedingly bad, the spirit of Veteran's Day is good: veteran's deserve our gratitude.
I think we're going to see "Where the Wild Things Are." And tonight we're going to Happy Hour! This is something we don't do so often, because by the end of the week (when the proximity to the weekend makes a night out more prudent), Husband's tuckered out and heading straight to a bar after work doesn't appeal to him so much. Also, we sometimes get carried away by the happiness of Happy Hour. And by "we," I mean "I." And by "sometimes," I mean "once," which was very much enough. Allow me to explain.
When we first moved to this little college town as adults (we both lived here in college, but didn't know each other), I turned to my friend S., who lived here while her now-husband finished his Master's, for advice. (Boy, how's that for excessive explanation? The coffee is strowng this morning). S. told me the best way to make a place for ourselves would be to go to Happy Hour frequently for a little while. In no time, she said, we would make friends and lots of people would know us. Never mind that Husband is not a grad student, but rather a decidedly visible member of the city administration--we didn't make that distinction. And you know what I mean when I say "we."
Anyway, the two of us headed out for Happy Hour and I learned a valuable lesson about the local microbrew's wallup. I got sloshed, and then I got friendly. I began talking up another friendly couple who actually knew, through friends of theirs, my friend S! Small town, indeed. And the guy grew up in the same small, effed-up town my mom is from. I characteristically spazzed out and gushed about how nice our new friends were and doesn't S. give the best advice and etcetera.
Later we found out that our new friendly couple friends are actually swingers. And I don't mean they like to don zoot suits and go dancing. I told S. we'd met them, and that I'd embarrassed myself thoroughly, and she said "NEVER go to their house. Ever." That sentiment has been echoed, verbatim, by lots of other people since then.
That was a year ago, and we haven't been back to Happy Hour since. Tonight we're giving it another try. I recount the first experience here as a reminder to myself: sip, Sadie. For Christ's sake. Also I'm going to cook something in the crock pot so we don't come home with greasy paper bags full of sloppy pizza and smelly gyros. We are, after all, grown-ups. And by "we," I mean "Husband." I have yet to earn that distinction.

P.S. I have no photographs that illustrate this point. Or rather, I have no photographs I'm willing to share with the world wide web that illustrate this point. Here is a photograph of a drunk stranger I took at a bar after our friends' wedding in February. (In a way, it does illustrate my point.)
P.P.S. I have no idea whether this woman is a swinger. If I had to guess, I would say she's not. However, I have been wrong before.
Finally, I promise I will get back to the subject of sewing in the near, near future.

omg

Holy moley! I just performed what had become the most fruitless task of my day: checked over old blog posts to see if anyone had commented. Guess what? People have been here.
I freaked. I ran around in a couple of poorly defined circles and shrieked down to Husband "Two people read my BUH-LOG!!!" You guys (if you came back and if you didn't I totally understand), I read your blogs all the time! I really admire the stuff you do and love reading the stuff you write. I feel like I'm at camp in third grade and my awesome counselor just told me I make really good bubble letters. It is a really great, childlike kind of happiness. Or maybe a doglike happiness:
So thank you for being so nice!
On my camera (but not yet in my computer), I have some new pictures of my little sewing space, which is newly and fantastically tidy. I idiotically forgot to take Before pictures. I always forget the Before pictures! You think I'd have learned after being the agent of so many dramatic disaster-to-acceptably-organized changes. And dear God, I love before and after pictures. Anyway, I took a photo of some of the scraps I picked up off the floor, but that doesn't really give the sense of chaos I managed to tame in only six hours last week... Right, so eventually I will put up those pictures.
Thank you. Bye, actual blog readers!

great giveaway

Look! Hawthorne Threads (a newly launched online shop) is having a giveaway!

http://www.hawthornethreads.com/giveaway

http://www.hawthornethreads.com/fabric/designer/patricia_bravo

And I will have something to show you soon, after a triumphant flash of genius garnered me some very inexpensive fabric...

Sick, But Sewing

It's a little bit gross over here lately. Husband was sick last week, and still hasn't entirely recovered. I picked it up on Tuesday, and have been alternating good and bad days since then. I take it for granted when I'm healthy, a fact which isn't exactly a revelation, I know...but still! I want to be taking it for granted again.
Yesterday, a healthy-compared-to-the-day-before-day, I managed to do some sewing: I started a few projects...
...and made lots of progress on another.
I am making a toaster cover for a friend whose cats love to jump onto her kitchen counters.* She's been trolling for a toaster cover for a long time, but they are apparently quite out of vogue and she hasn't been able to find one. I mean, people just don't have toaster covers anymore. Of course they don't! They're kind of twee, really--it's not like toasters are unsightly, or like a proud homemaker needs to pretend s/he is above using such a modern convenience...But for people like my friend, toaster covers aren't about aesthetics or kitchen cred, they're about not wanting to find cat hair on your toast.
I am not using a pattern. I am using rough measurements, so the cover is not going to be a very good fit. It might make the toaster look fat. But it will cover said toaster, so it will serve its purpose. My friend picked the fabric, and she even paid for it.
It doesn't have batting or anything--I considered putting in some of that pot-holder insulation stuff, but had a hard enough time getting the lining to line up with the outside, so I scrapped that idea. As a result, it is going to be pretty disappointing for my friend. I'm quilting it by hand, though, even though there's no "sandwich." I think it will look cool on the inside even though it won't quite look good enough to be reversible. Quilting by hand is kind of insane, and it's both more and less difficult than I expected it to be: it turns out the stitches look neat-o even when they aren't perfect (and mine sure as shit are not perfect), but that's really only when they're in a pattern. The few straight lines I've tried look downright wack. I bet it takes a really long time to get your stitches to look perfect. I was afraid of that, but I'm pleasantly surprised to see that there seem to be only two steps on this ladder of hand quilting: imperfect but passable and perfect. I mean, until my stitches are even and precise all the time, they will look like this:
and this is good enough.
Also, quilting by hand is really really time-consuming. But when a person is kind of sick she likes to watch a lot of movies and TV shows, and that's a great time to be quilting. She gets into a rhythm and watches her project come together and feels quite satisfied and less like a sad, lazy germ-ridden lump. How a woman ever finished full-sized quilts when she had to also wash clothes by hand and keep fires burning and have cholera and make soap...that remains a mind-exploding mystery to me.
P.S. Listen, I know these photos are shit. The toaster cover is a rumpled mess because we are a toaster-oven household, so I have nothing to cover with my toaster burka and therefore it is a shapeless heap. The in-progress pictures are meant to be enticing and mysterious, but it is a gray, gray day here and I'm a pretty bad photographer. They just look like scraps, but I spent a lot of time with scissors yesterday, so the small amount of sewing I accomplished was, well, an accomplishment. Perhaps not one worth photographing and posting on the internet, but so what? Who cares?
________________________________________________________________
*Rereading that sentence, I realize it's nearly impossible to refer to a "toaster-cover-trolling friend whose cats walk all over her counters" without making one's friend sound like a possibly dotty cat lady. Well, we are in our early thirties and this particular friend is married and her house is really clean. Plus she's hot-looking. It's weird to feel like I have to defend an anonymous friend on a blog no one reads, but lately I have been commenting on other Blogger blogs and my name's been a hyperlink, so odds that someone other than that one Russian gangster might stumble over here are sort of increased. So there you have it. Also, I am not a cat person at all, so maybe I'm prone to thinking that anyone with multiple cats is loony. Maybe no one else would read that without feeling reflexive cat-hater distaste for my friend's dilemma. But I ask you, what is a blog if not a haven where a girl can project her own prejudices onto her readers?

In Which I Attempt to Address the Secret Blog Conundrum, and Do So Rather Half-Heartedly

Sometimes I visit and make little persnickety changes to the layout of my little blog. Everyone else's blogs always look a lot cooler than mine does, and this is good for them because they have people who read their blog. So they really deserve to have better-looking blogs. It works out. But sometimes I think I can make mine look cool like another person's, so I waste like 30 minutes to an hour clicking different templates and color options and wishing I could just click and drag certain page elements so they would be exactly where I want them...
And then I realize I haven't actually posted anything on my blog and I think maybe I should do that...So here I am, posting something on my blog.
How do people do this? How is anyone confident enough (I think "confident" is the word I'm looking for, but it isn't exactly right--bear with me) to ask people to read their blogs? I think that ultimately, the reason I don't tell anyone about my little blog is that it seems dangerously akin to inviting people over to look at your slides from a cruise you took. The pictures are simply never as interesting to the people you invited as they are to you. Your guests look at them and remark upon them, but they are only photographs depicting an experience they did not have.
I don't really know anyone who has a blog. Not personally. My dad keeps a few in fits and starts as it serves his purpose-of-the-moment (a motorcycle trip or a class he's teaching), and although I think my dad is a really interesting guy, and a brilliant writer, I hardly ever read his posts.
However, I have like fifteen or twenty blogs bookmarked. They are the blogs of strangers, whom I have never met. These women (they're all women) live in different parts of the country than I do. And I check their blogs (ugh--wish there was a synonym for blog that didn't sound vague or pretentious!) every day, sometimes more than once.
They aren't doing anything particularly fascinating. Lots of them are crafting stuff and cooking stuff and taking attractive pictures of the things they make. But often they just write supershort posts about the weather or their children or like a random encounter at the grocery store. And I'm addicted to reading these things! That's crazy.
So I don't want to tell people I know about this here blog because I don't want to subject them to my cruise-photos (and I can't tell my dad because now he'll know I don't read his stuff...).
But sometimes I comment in the comment sections of the ones I do read, but I don't include a link to my little blog. Why not? Wouldn't I like to be a member of this internet community? Don't I want people to see that I make stuff on a sewing machine too? Well, yeah. I do want that. I would like it if someone commented on one of my pictures, and said "oh I like that." It would feel absurdly, outrageously gratifying.
But what if I start including my little link on every comment I post and no one says anything? Or...here's the thing: there are a million little doubts like that one which keep me from linking. And when they're all in my head at any given moment, they transform me from a relatively well-adjusted woman into a brace-faced 13-year-old, sitting at a cafeteria table and trying to find something to say that won't reveal me for the spazz I am.
The big craft blogs--and by "big" I just mean the ones that lots of people read, that present beautiful and simple, expertly crafted objects (not to mention lifestyles)--are like the popular girls in the lunch room. I want so badly to be able to be like them, serene and bubbling over with creativity and positivity and resourcefulness! I want to have lots of people complimenting me every day, too.
But I am a spazz, you see. I will go long stretches without posting anything or sewing anything. I will shift the focus of my life from fabric to needing-to-lose-weight-really-badly(!) and consider maybe inventing a new blog to chronicle that experience. God, I'll hatch some crazy plan to sell stuff on Etsy and get discouraged that no one bought one of the four things I posted...I did that. Already.
Those women are amazing. They're artists, professionals. They work so hard all the time, but I am lazy and not particularly skilled. I hate myself when I find I've taken on the jaunt, breezy tone of one of their posts, because I do not talk that way and I don't have the experience and skill to deserve it. When I sew, I swear and cheat and improvise weird solutions to problems no skilled seamstress would ever actually encounter. And I give stuff up and I stop right in the middle of a project to check to see if anyone has posted something on their cool blogs in the last 37 minutes.
I feel like a loser, and I think maybe if I just changed the layout of my little blog I wouldn't feel like such a wannabe. Then I realize I should write something and turn out this insanely neurotic piece of trash, when I would be much happier walking Dog or just messing around on my sewing machine.
It's a vicious cycle, is what I'm saying. Amateur/spazz/procrastinator/sloth/brace-face/aspirant...Repeat. Not necessarily in that order every time, but those are the components.

Friday

Husband's at a conference and has been since Wednesday night. I am sitting on the couch with a cup of coffee (made from the expensive espresso beans I promised myself I'd only use in small quantities to make...well, to make espresso.) I just ran downstairs to take the laundry out, yelling in the empty house "wait! Wait! No, stop!" I thought I had left the extra rinse knob turned on--a waste of water and a tremendous waste of time. Whenever I accidentally do that, all my laundry momentum just dissipates in the most pathetic way. I hate doing laundry. I hate that you have to do it and then walk away and wait and then do it some more right when you were in the middle of something else. And then you have to wait again. And then do more laundry! I don't really go in for housework of any kind, but I can stay on top of dishes and even vacuuming. Those are tasks that get started and finished in the same burst of energy. You start them, you do them, you finish them. No intermissions. For that matter, there's no folding and putting-away of clothes involved.
Our closet/dresser space is negligible. And we rent, with no intention to stay here for more than eleven months from today. We are not rich people, and neither of us have lost that ascetic peculiarity of youth: spending large sums of money on things that are not fun feels like getting punched in the face. The prospect of doing so paralyzes us, and if there is any way we can rationalize doing without said un-fun object (usually a piece of furniture, sometimes items of work-appropriate clothing), rationalize we will.
In a lot of ways, I'm kind of proud of us for this frugal streak. It certainly helps to keep expenses down. And the truth is, our little house is crammed with furniture as it is. Except for our bedroom, which is really lacking storage space for my clothes. Husband uses the two closets in the guest room, plus half of our bedroom closet, to hang his enormous tall-person clothes. He has a serviceable dresser and manages to fit all his socks and underwear, plus a few sweaters, into it. That leaves me with the following: one tiny dresser, two of whose four drawers are crammed with lingerie (we are not stingy with that stuff!), one drawer for socks and one for bras and everyday underwear; one shelf for all my folding clothes; the other half of our bedroom closet and its floor for my shoes.
The fact is that this is enough space. I don't have a lot of clothes, and I only wear half of what I own. BUT the setup does not take into consideration my extreme laziness and hatred for maintenance. I loathe putting clothes away in the first place, but when doing so means carefully placing tiny shirts atop a teetering pile of other tiny shirts, I will turn my back on the precarious stack and simply live out of a laundry basket in the basement. This, of course, causes problems because eventually I am living out of every laundry basket we own and Husband at some point, in loving exasperation, has carried all those baskets into our bedroom and nothing I own is folded and only I know the secret of which basket contains clean clothing and which dirty and which has the designation of holding the elusive I-could-wear-this-again-one-more-time-if-all-else-fails jeans and bra and cute shirt.
This is why our bedroom door is always closed to outsiders, even if I have managed to scour the entire rest of the house from top to bottom. Even if our living room, kitchen, attic, guest room, bathroom and dining room are absolutely gleaming, there is a fair chance that our bedroom looks like someone ransacked it. And there is a good chance our bedroom looks ransacked because I have spent the last several weeks, well, ransacking our bedroom. It's hard to find clothes when you're me.
So every once in a while I try to convince Husband we should invest in a dresser. He wisely tells me 1) we don't want to do that because we might not need it in our next, more permanent residence 2) he won't buy another cheap dresser because they are crap and a waste of money. And being cheapskates, we are also terrible shoppers both. Therefore, our chances of happening upon the perfect, high-quality, deeply-discounted, beautiful, antique, appealing-to-our-vastly-different-design-sensibilities, dresser one day while we're out antiquing with the rest of the white people our age and demographic--well, the chances of that happening are rather slim.
So we go through this cycle, wherein I purge everything one day in an ambitious fit of determination to keep the laundry-basket-ransacked-bedroom thing at bay. I spend about three weeks staying true to the organized piles on the shelf, putting away clean clothes within mere days of their removal from the dryer. Then I slip up a little and stop matching my socks to each other. I keep them in a laundry basket or on top of the dryer. When I need them, I sort frantically through said mismatched pile, often ending up with mismatched socks on my sad feet. Thus begins the slipping-down period, wherein I stop putting clothes away. This is a vague phase--our room isn't clean, but the clutter could easily have been caused by something other than an attempted kidnapping or successful burglary. But unless I am blessed by another fit of ambition (and these are like bi-yearly at best), the ransacked phase is inevitable.
But let's not think of that now. We are currently living in a blissful state of afterglow from a happy purge I made last weekend. I even invested in a big plastic bin for sheets (bedding used to have four designated places: the bed; the floor of the laundry room; the dryer; atop the dryer). So I'm nailing it. The slipping-down was only apparent in the huge pile of laundry on our bedroom floor (baskets and hampers are never there when you need them), but I took care of that first thing this morning.
Truly, these are the halcyon days of my new, clean regime. If only I could stop yammering to the middle distance of nobody and stand up and start cleaning the rest of the house. My friend is coming to stay with me tonight. We are going to watch the first season of Buffy and maybe play that drinking game where you take a sip each time you see Buffy's bra strap. My friend's house is always immaculate, so that will be the standard to which I aspire. I will probably fall short, but at least the couch will be vacuumed.
Am working on a birthday gift for my nephew. It involves fabric, so maybe next time there will be a blog post from me that has something to do with the title of my blog. The gift might be a train wreck, but we shall see!

oh, by the way...

Even without the scary bald fat guy for motivation, I have managed to make a few things and list them! Here they are:

Eeek! A fabric sale!

Oh boy. An end-of-bolts sale really feels like the best possible thing. How can one resist when the fabric is discounted once for being almost-gone and then discounted again for being oddly-sized? Let me answer that: one cannot resist. At least not when the one in question is me.
I justified my purchase (we are broke! I am selling shit online in hopes of financing my heroinesque fabric habit! Why can't I lay the &$#% off?) by getting some stuff that I'll use for some kids'upcoming birthday presents. Our 7-year-old niece asked for a yoga mat and I can make her a bag for her yoga mat. Plus there was some really cute stuff with construction equipment, and my nephew does love his diggers.
An aside: the niece belongs to Husband's sister. The nephew is my brother's kid. I call the niece "ours" and the nephew "mine." At first, out of a strange and very noticeable sense of fairness to all the kids on Husband's side of the family, I called my nephew "ours" but that felt funny--didn't thoroughly communicate my L-O-V-E for that little guy--so I changed it. How long until the niece feels like mine and not ours? She's really great and I love her a bunch, so I'm not just fronting when I call her ours, but saying "mine" isn't right yet, either. We will see. If you are reading this for reasons other than mistaken identity, maybe you could chime in? Maybe you appreciate that link to a great fabric sale (even if I did my best to deplete the supplies)?
Maybe there are about 18 billion websites out there and the chances that you stumbled onto this one are astronomical so you aren't reading this? Of course. Please, forgive me.
One of these days I will actually explain in detail why I have a blog if I don't ever tell anyone about it, not even electronically and/or anonymously (like I never post this address when I, however rarely, comment on other sites...)
But I am puffy-eyed and riddled with buyer's remorse this morning, so I'm not going to go into it. I'm going to pour another cup of coffee and take it to my sewing lair and sew like the wind! Or, like I've got a huge bald fat guy with lots of self-inflicted piercings, dressed in leather and a spiked collar, standing over me looking menacing and holding a whip and screaming stuff like "sew or you will get the lash!" and "sew, minion, or we will feed antifreeze to your little dog!"

Three Things

OK. I grant you, it was a small goal. But a goal it was, and I accomplished it! I grabbed that stack of squares, and I rifled through it and I realized that the pile largely consisted of plain squares of fabric--probably two-thirds were just carefully cut pieces of fabric. One-third was log cabins and checkerboards and weird patchworky stuff. It was a bi-ig stack, i tell you! I stared at those squares and I bit my lip and I knitted my brow and I shook my head and I settled on a pillow!
(OMFG SHE MADE A PILLOW! I CAN'T BELIEVE SHE MADE A FRACKING PILLOW OMFG.)

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaannnnnnnnnnnnnddddddddddddd that's kind of it. The rest of the squares are still scattered around the sewing room, looking forlorn and, quite honestly, like they don't exactly go together. I think a quilt requires either far more or a bit less forethought than I put into this possible project. I bought some fabric with a particular magenta-loving little girl in mind, but I didn't consider how much fabric I would need to actually complete that quilt...

So I cut squares out of lots of fabric and I wish now that I had larger swaths of that fabric. This is the kind of experience from which I actually learn. It is concrete: I cut fabric before I was sure the final project would actually happen. I regretted doing so because 6" by 6.5" squares of fabric have limited potential. I see lots of ...well, so far I see lots of pillows and maybe some cobbled-together pot holders in my immediate future. I considered place mats, but 18"x12" is too small and 24"x18" isn't quite right...And I'm not sure I have quite enough squares for four place mats...You get the picture. I feel stymied.

But that's only a neurotic report on one aspect of things that have happened over the last two days. The other thing is that I finished a really beautiful table runner:
(Pictures don't do it justice...) And the other other thing is that I am trying to sell it! And the PILLOW. Holy Moses. I have a store on Etsy. Like, whoa.
I've never been a very industrious person, certainly not in the pursuit of money. But I love making things with fabric and I hate being unemployed. I want to contribute and pay for the sewing supplies I buy. So here it goes.
I know I still don't tell anyone that I have a blog, so it seems completely crazy to be "announcing" my Etsy store on this secret blog. But just because it's a secret, unknown-to-the-world blog doesn't mean I can't treat it like something people actually read. And you never know when someone will just accidentally surf onto this web address, or onto this one: SadieSewedonEtsy.

If you are reading this, will you look? And consider buying one of the two whopping things I've managed to list? No? You're a Hungarian mobster whose seamstress ex-girlfriend shares a nickname with me? Sorry. But seriously, dude. If you need a table runner, I am your girl.

Back again

If I hadn't learned my lesson about making resolutions (the lesson being that I rarely manage to keep the ones I make), I would resolve here to write more often. But I know how these things go, so I am not going to make any new-leaf declarations.
The college students have returned to our little-big town. I'm wearing a sweatshirt as I write this. The football season, new though it is, has already claimed a few victims. If anyone wants to make weekend plans with us, we are quoting them mid-October dates, as our September dance card is all full. Which is to say, summer is gone. I can't say we made the most of it, but neither would I say we squandered the season. Autumn, really, is my very favorite season. In February and March, spring edges it out for favorite status, but that is purely situational. Fall's got it all over the rest of the year--the sky is its bluest, the air is its most fragrant, sweaters are still new and welcome. I know we have a few more weeks of late-summer heat, a while before leaves really change colors and sweaters are necessary all day, but right now it feels like fall. And after a hiatus from sewing, I am back at it.
This stack...

has been on my mind for a couple months, haunting me from the sewing room, calling out "There aren't enough of us to make a quilt! There are too many of us for anything else! Enter at your own risk!"
They began as a quilt for a little girl, but if that little girl got a quilt, there are about a dozen other little girls who would be owed a quilt from me, and I am about as good at owning up to obligations like that as I am at sticking to resolutions. Until I am more comfortable with this quilting thing, smaller projects are more prudent.
So I am going to go think about what those smaller projects are going to be. I bought a bunch of white and off-white fabric this weekend, which I love to have because I am not stingy with it (solid white being less likely to evoke that "what-if-I-use-this-beautiful-pattern-and-tomorrow-realize-I-need-it-for-the-masterpiece-I-didn't-know-I-had-in-me?" anxiety)--I can play fast and loose today. Fast and loose means productive, if I can just publish this post instead of going on and on because I am still scared of that stack of squares...

Smoothies & a Poem

Every morning this week has been a Smoothie morning for me and Husband. Well, this morning it was a Smoothie for me and a rush-out-the-door-in-a-big-hurry for Husband. His smoothie's in the freezer; I will have it for elevenses. Or maybe tenses.
It's fun to wake up with Husband and make him a smoothie. He's been taking a thermos of coffee to work, so he makes coffee and when that's been done I get up and make the smoothie while he dresses. Then we drink our smoothies together.
'Sfun.
Today's smoothie was exceptional because I got these insanely ripe strawberries at the farmer's market yesterday. When I got them home I understood the air of desperation that pervaded the site--everyone had strawberries to sell and everyone had to sell them yesterday if they hoped to sell them at all. I had to carve them up to put them in the smoothie this morning--they were verrrrry soft--but so red they were nearly bloody, and sweet and delicious.
I planned to skewer them along with pineapple chunks for the party we're having tomorrow. Husband's family is coming down for a graduation--his uncle is receiving his PhD!--and I planned the menu very carefully. I wanted the skewers out before lunch so people would have something healthy to snack on (besides the chips and veggie dip), and these skewers are an example of something that is greater than the sum of its parts--even if you include the actual skewers in the equation. They are elegant without being pretentious, they are portable, and they are awesome-tasting! But you need to have whole strawberries, or they at least need to look like someone didn't peel them with a hacksaw. So I guess it will be a bowl of strawberries and pineapple. The best laid plans, as they say.
Incidentally, what they say is "The best laid plans of mice and men/ often go awry." I looked up the original Robert Burns poem and will include the wacky-sounding last two stanzas, because I think they're nice. He's writing to a mouse whose nest he overturned with his plow one winter's morning. He's sorry for the mouse, but not too sorry.

But Mousie, thou are no thy-lane,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes o' Mice an' Men,
Gang aft agley,
An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,
For promis'd joy!

Still, thou art blest, compar'd wi' me!
The present only toucheth thee:
But Och! I backward cast my e'e,
On prospects drear!
An' forward, tho' I canna see,
I guess an' fear!

(this is from http://www.electricscotland.com/burns/mouse.html)

In which our Heroine Speaks of her Defeat at the Hands of a Child's Blanket

I will call it a clash of ambition and ability.
I want to finish a project so that I can say "Look, I finished a project." This is something I need to hear myself say. I need to feel like sewing projects don't have to take like indefinite amounts of time to complete.
But something always gets in my way.
With this little-girl quilt for one of my god daughters, what's getting in the way is my total inability to plan anything. That, and this sick tendency I'm discovering in myself to nitpick.
Aargh. I'll explain.
At first I thought it would be great to have all these bright, intense colors. I picked up a few solids during my last binge of fabric-buying, and was so happy to have a kelly green and a really intense turquoise. I tried to incorporate them into this quilt, and they looked tacky. They clashed a little and it was a bad move.
Around the same time, I was also discovering that I can't seem to leave well enough alone. The idea for the quilt was simple: my god daughter's name, with each letter appliqued on a different quilt square. I couldn't leave that alone, so I put a log-cabin border around each of the letter squares. I was pleased with the way that turned out. The rest of the plan was to use squares of the solid-colored fabric interspersed with the occasional print-fabric square, with the print squares matching the fabric from the appliqued letters.
But that wasn't good enough for my god daughter. Even though I still can't make a proper square out of a piece of fabric, and even though my log cabins are inevitably and maddeningly crooked, I decided to experiment with different kinds of log cabin squares, and after spending all day yesterday cutting out squares of the wrong color fabric and then painstakingly piecing the overly-ambitious (and ultimately crappy-looking) log cabin squares, I am really nowhere.
So I wish I could just pick a project, start it today, and stick with it until it is finished. I wish I could just say "I want some orange napkins" and make the orange napkins and be pleased with the way they turn out and come downstairs when Husband gets home without feeling like I'm retreating in a cowardly fashion from a big fight with bad guys.

Roast chicken

I've become rather enamored of roasting chickens. It's so economical: the two of us reap at least three meals from one roasted chicken, and that doesn't even count the beautiful golden stock I make and freeze when all the meat's been devoured.
I've tried a few different recipes and a few different roasting vessles. I started with the real live Calphalon nonstick roasting pan with the professional-looking rack and ergonomical handles. It produced a beautiful bird. But our kitchen is very small, and that roasting pan is very big--too big, if we're being completely honest, for one 3- or 4-pound chicken (which, incidentally, can cost as little as $5. I know I should be getting my chicken from a farm but the reasons I don't are myriad and will have to be reserved for another time. For the moment, let's just say it's because I'm cheap.). And counter space is at a major premium in my kitchen, so the second time I roasted a chicken, I left the big beautiful roasting pan (which was a wedding gift, of course) in the basement and turned to the big (but slightly smaller than the roasting pan) beautiful enameled cast iron dutch oven which was also a wedding gift. I have two of them. Nah nah nah nah nah nah. I love them both. One is about 5 quarts and one is 8. The 8-quarter is oval and it almost fits over two burners on the stove. I used the big one for my second chicken and it turned out great. But it's also a little unwieldy and I was getting pretty cocky with the chicken roasting. So I turned to my big cast iron skillet--sans enamel. I believe I wrote a tipsy post about that experiment. It turned out great. The cast iron skillet is now my go-to roasting pan. It's a manageable size and cleanup is pretty easy as long as I have an abrasive scrubbing sponge on hand.
As far as recipes go: after trying a few different ones, including Julia Childs' master Frahnch recipe, I have to say the best one is Marcella Hazan's Roast Chicken with Lemons. It is ridiculously simple, and in comments sections on like every Roast Chicken discussion on the world wide web, you will find that someone has posted a rave review of this recipe. You poke about twenty holes in two lemons, with a fork or a toothpick. You stick said lemons up a raw, rinsed (do I need to say plucked?) chicken's butt. You rub the chicken's skin with salt and pepper. You place the chicken in a cast iron skillet (this is my variation, you understand). You roast it at like 350 or 400 degrees for about an hour. You turn it from its back to its front, and then vice versa, every 15 to 30 minutes. You do not baste it. When the juices run clear and the leg wiggles freely in its socket*, you remove the bird from the oven and let it rest for about 10 minutes. Then you carve it and serve it and it is delicious and juicy.That's the recipe. Marcella has you truss it and I ruined a perfectly good embroidery needle (because who has chicken-trussing needles lying around?) the first time I made this, trying to sew the chicken's butt closed. I have not since trussed a chicken.
I also made a variation of this recipe for quesadillas recently: I stuck two limes up the chicken's butt and used salt, pepper and cayenne to rub the chicken. It turned out great, too. The lemon doesn't really flavor the chicken too much, and neither did the lime. Marcella says this is a "self-basting" bird, and I suppose that's really the function of the citrus fruits--to baste more than to flavor.
*I am a tiny bit paranoid about my ability to determine the wiggling of a leg and the clarity of chicken juices. The breast should be at 160 or 170 degrees. The leg and thigh should be at 180 degrees. These are the FDA guidelines. Julia says that in France people like their chicken less well-done than we do in these United States. That makes me want to puke a little. The trouble is that a juicy chicken and an undercooked chicken are a little too similar. My chickens fluctuate a little as concerns their done-ness. I would say err on the side of dry, not because of salmonilla but more because, even though everyone thinks they want a juicy piece of chicken, it can be a little gross if the chicken's so juicy it's almost wet. But that's my personal taste, my personal advice. You really have to feel your way to being comfortable with chicken-roasting.
P.S. Sorry--the only photos I have are these, which I forgot to snap until the chicken had been carved a little bit.
P.P.S. The lemon chicken stuck once. I think it was in the enameled cast iron. There was no rhyme or reason. I scraped it off and flipped it and it still tasted great. I chalked it up to a fluke. That's what you should do, too. If you try this. If you read this, which you won't because...you know. I might be a tiny bit crazy.

Resolution Update.

It's not that I'm slipping. Today was just kind of a fluke. We had a very busy weekend, with lots of manual labor on Saturday, fixing up some buildings on my family's land out in the hills. And we had a last-minute, very welcome visit from my best friend and her two radiantly beautiful children yesterday.
AND we're out of coffee, so I had no motivation to get up with Husband this morning. Plus I was very tired from the weekend. But so was Husband, and he got up and went off to work lickety split. I, on the other hand, did not. It's a testament to my exhaustion that I had no seven o'clock dreams. I did have some eight o'clock dreams, but I actually woke up before those could get out of control and turn into nine o'clock dreams.
Anyway, not the best way to start a new week, but it is what it is.
On the other hand, I have not spent much time on the computer this weekend. We were too busy, for one thing. Yesterday I restricted myself to the reading the NY Times website, which is chock full on Sundays. And my Facebook farm has been managed--I won't have to go there ever again if I so decide. Pathetic, I know, but I think it's important to be honest.
My parents are bringing down some furniture they're donating to our cause (our cause being "we have a rickety dining room table and the chairs keep breaking"), but besides that I have nothing to do but sew, sew, sew. Finished an apron for my mom last week (and forgot to take pictures), and it turned out really nicely. On the front of it I sort of appliqued one of those off-kilter log cabin squares, and it looked so cool I can't wait to make some more. Without coffee, however, I'm having a hard time deciding what those squares will become part of.
P.S. I put the picture of the purple flowers here so it would stop being such a text-heavy page. They have nothing to do with me sleeping in like a big fat sloth; they have nothing to do with me intending to make log cabin quilt squares today; they have nothing to do with me being out of coffee. But they're pretty and they're growing wild in the wooded hill across the street from our little house.

Which one of us is Lazarus in this scenario?

My computer died last night. I mean, doornail dead. I use a MacBook--it was not turning on; the battery was not dead; it was making this strange weary-robot noise and then just going quiet. I've used Macs my whole life (my dad was an Apple guy from the early '80's) and have seen--and learned ways around--a lot of computer glitches for someone with an only moderate interest in technology. And this was new and Husband's calm but thorough internet searches (performed on his own functioning laptop) turned up suggestions that did nothing to revive my little machine.
I despaired.
I had a bad feeling about it. I thought about all the cookies my computer remembers so I don't have to. I thought about all the recipes and blogs and fabric stores I have bookmarked. I thought about the schoolwork from last year that I never backed up. Then husband mentioned photographs and I had a near-meltdown.
Then I went a little catatonic.
Then I had a glass of wine and Husband went to great lengths to cheer me up and it worked--lost data flew from my head completely for a good, good portion of the evening.
Then we watched two episodes of the Wire and during that time I managed to completely forget about the busted laptop a couple times.
Then while I was brushing my teeth I tried one last time to turn the computer on and guess what? It worked. Like the tragic-heroine operatics I performed earlier in the night had never taken place. And I am writing this on my trusty guy right now.
I learned something about myself last night: I am too attached to my computer. I was also reminded of something that I never seem to remember during those moments when it would most come in handy: I have an all-too frequent tendency to lose perspective.
I must say, I did not cry. But I did grieve, on some level. And that's worse than throwing a hissy fit, I think. Because I wasn't grieving the lost photos (Husband has our honeymoon and there is really nothing priceless in my album: mostly meals we've eaten and nights we've drunk--har har), I was grieving the lost convenience. I know it's a tired cliche, and I'm sorry that I don't have a photo to make it wink, but this thing is totally a crutch for me. I have no job! I spend hours looking at the internet every day! The loss of the laptop would create a vaccuum and I was terrified to think that I had no idea what could possibly fill it. I am terrified that a malfunctioning computer could shake me so.
Writing this, I realize also that the computer makes me feel connected to the world, of which I'm not really a part at the moment. I mean, of course I'm a part of it, but I sometimes go whole days without seeing anyone besides Husband. I thought this recent sewing jag, productive as it's been, was solving the problem of my unemployment. I thought what I hated about not having a job was the feeling that I don't contribute, financially, to our lives. I thought I would make our house look pretty without spending (much) money, and that I might even sell something I made. And I still might. That's not really the point, though.
The point is that I spend too much time looking at the computer. I felt resurrected when it came back on--it's surpassingly pathetic, but I felt a little bit like I died when the computer did. I won't be able to look myself in the eye for like a week after writing that sentence. Which only proves the point: I must step away from the laptop for a while.
I will allow myself to write these posts, because I've loved writing them, loved writing at all in the last week. But Facebook has got to be stopped lest I succomb completely to stalking people I barely knew in high school and playing Farm Town until I become a virtual millionaire farmer, the lamest accomplishment I can imagine for a thirty-two-year-old married woman of above average intelligence who boasts both sparkling conversation skills and big boobs.
I want to join the world the old fashioned way. I want to sew lots of cool-looking things and give them away to the people I know well and love now. I want to live in such a way that a dead computer bums me out but ruins nothing.
Part of that will mean less internet, part will mean an external hard drive.

Too much tell for a little show

I think one of the things that most appeals to me about sewing is the relative mystery inherent in the process. Because it contains so many variables, a sewist (I've heard people use that word; not sure how I feel about it. I will try it out here and see if I can stomach it--seamstress sounds so doddering) really doesn't know how a project will turn out until it's quite finished. I think this must be true for people who sew clothes as well; that's a frontier that still has me paralyzed with fear. It is especially true of the projects I've been making, though--while a top or skirt has maybe two fabrics, these table runners and quilt squares and pillows include five, six, sometimes nine or ten different fabrics. What if they don't go together?My confidence as a sewist (no. Can't do it--you won't see that word from me again.) is obviously quite low, and my anxiety level in unfamiliar situations is generally off the charts. But that only contributes to the pleasure I find in a finished project. The suspense nearly kills me, but when it's finished and all the threads are tucked away and the corners (mostly) squared, I feel a flush of sheer pleasure: I did this. It is finished and attractive and I can't take my eyes off of it.
It isn't only the variable of fabric choice that makes sewing suspenseful. It's also the fact that, until it's completely finished, a sewing project is utterly unfinished. It's tattered and shaggy and messy. Like a house that's undergoing a deep and thorough cleaning (I have heard of such things) or renovation, a sewing project gets messier the closer it is to being finished--at least my sewing projects do.It is an act of faith to go through with it. It takes a kind of tenacity that doesn't come naturally to me--a quality that I would do well to nurture and develop in myself. Tenacity, that is. And dedication and follow-through.
This project was my first attempt at cording on a pillow. I embroidered the flowers for a project I abandoned, and I embroidered the name when I decided this piece of patchwork was going to this particular baby pillow.
__________________________________________________________________

**Disclaimer (into which I heartily put the "lame")**

I probably could have done a better job illustrating this point--with better, more tattered pictures of a work in progress. But that would have required me to take pictures of a tattered work in progress, which would have required me to make progress on another piece of work. I was thinking about this aspect of sewing and I am trying to post something every day this week, and I am trying to keep it relatively simple and get rid of some of the backlog of projects I've accumulated in my photo album.
Gosh, that sounds terribly churlish for a Friday morning, or for any morning. Maybe I'm taking too many resolutions at a time here, with blog posts and getting up early...The fact is I really love the way the embroidery came out on this pillow and I wanted to show it off.
In short, I am fronting. Isn't my pillow neat-looking?

Goodbye To All That

I don't have a job. I substitute teach sometimes, but it is rare. We moved here because Husband got a great job and we loved the idea of coming back to the small town where we both went to college (before we knew each other), and agreed that unemploying me was worth it.
And it was worth it. Husband's doing a great job, and while I've had some rocky times when I felt like a lazy bum who doesn't contribute, I've also started learning to sew and I've vastly improved my housekeeping skills. Though laundry still eludes me.
The main sticking point has been that our primary breadwinner wakes up at 6:45 every morning and his wife does no such thing. I love sleeping in. I am not suited to waking up anytime, if I'm being completely and embarrassingly honest, before 10 in the morning. I cannot tell you how lazy that makes me feel, coming as I do from a family with a rigid German work ethic on one side and a kind of fraught compulsiveness (she's Welsh, but I don't know if that has anything to do with it) on the other. My unemployment is not easy for them to understand, but coming as it does during these economic times (which are by all accounts quite bad), the joblessness is at least explicable.
I have grappled with guilt over my sleeping habits ever since I became a full-fledged adult, or more accurately, since I was old enough to be considered a real adult by everyone else. But I still slept in most days when I could, sprawling delightedly in our big bed after husband had left for work or (on weekends) heeded his internal alarm clock and retired to the living room to read the paper with Dog faithfully by his side. I snoozed, waking two or sometimes three hours after he left our bed, feeling groggy and lazy and guilty! guilty! of sloth. Actually, when he's home on weekends I don't feel so bad sleeping in. He makes me feel like a pampered princess--he says he loves letting me sleep because he knows how much I love it. So when he's home, I am content to sleep in. When he goes to work and I wake up hours later, realizing that his day is like one third over and I've been unconscious for all that time, it's a different feeling entirely. "Pampered" turns to "spoiled" and the decay in decadent really starts to show. I feel sheepish and guilty and lazy and spoiled--spoiled like rancid milk, like that brat in Willie Wonka.
But still I would sleep in. Not every day, but while we're on this embarrassingly honest train I might as well admit that most days, I slept until at least 9:00. I would wake, make some coffee and hopefully clean up last night's dishes. I would peruse the Internet aimlessly, and then frustratingly realize I'd wiled away like an hour or two and it would be late, late morning and I would shake myself and scold myself and feel like a bum.
BUT STILL, I would sleep in! What is wrong with me? Jesus.
Anyway, on Tuesday (which was like Monday this week), I think I drew the last straw. I think, I hope, that I've turned over a new leaf.
For some time now I've known that my dreams get weirder the longer I sleep. Eight a.m. dreams are a little less pleasant than middle-of-the-night-with-Husband-beside me dreams. Nine a.m. dreams are weirder still. This phenomenon has been getting more intense of late. It would seem that the rigidity and compulsiveness that are my birthright have infiltrated the deep recesses of my subconsciousness. Because Tuesday morning I had some truly fucked up dreams*--dreams I fervently hope I'll never dream again. My subconscious, it seems, is waging a full-scale war on my youthful, care-free laziness. If I want to wake up in anything other than a state of drooling, haunted, skeeved-out confusion, I will continue following this virtuous routine:
Wednesday I got up as Husband was putting on his shoes. The coffee was brewing by the time Dog and I walked him and the trash cans to the end of the driveway at 7:45. This morning I was standing at the coffee maker at 7:37, bemoaning the fact that he won't be home until 8:00 tonight, but accepting it like the total grownup I am, and kissing him goodbye as I set out to start the laundry.**

This is my new leaf:

I have turned it over.***

*The content of the dreams doesn't really matter, you know? Besides, if I tried to recount them, I would probably lose the one reader my little blog can claim: namely, me. Then there wouldn't even be a tree to fall in the forest, let alone someone around to hear it.
**That's bullshit. I did no laundry. I sat down with my coffee and read the internet. Then I wrote on it.
***I actually went outside to take this photograph. I was an English major. I know that metaphors do not need to be illustrated. Is this an unintended consequence of the internet, of the blogosphere, that everyone will think it's OK to use a cliche as long as they have some twee digital photographic essay to cleverize it? Ugh. Any sense of self-congratulatory smugness (over waking up during the virtuous seven o'clock hour) went straight out the window when I posted these photos. I leave them here as a reminder to myself: Never forget. You are sort of a douche.
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Acknowledgments

Joan Didion, whose title for a far, far superior essay I filched for the title of this dumb little act of procrastination.