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...