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?
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*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.