In Which I Come Out and Then Rely on Quilting Minutiae to Go Immediately Back In

...Come out of the blog closet, that is! Yucka yucka.
My brother started a blog. It's really good and I want to comment on his blog post but then he'll see that I have a blog and then he might have spare time and he might read all the dumb old posts. Plus my parents read my brother's blog and they might see my comment and they might come to visit my blog and then THEY might have (no, definitely have--they're retired!) spare time and come see my blog... To prevent deep reading, I am going to write a detailed, quilt-heavy post so they can see it's not worth diving in here.

Here is a picture of a quilt I made:

(This is the quilt made to look like the house where I grew up, where my parents still live)

(This is the actual house)

It took a year. Lots of that year was spent avoiding the sewing room altogether because some aspects of this quilt were geometrically confusing to my head. For instance, the diagonal sky. It was like, "WHAT?" And the house was hard, too. Really, any time you get diagonal, I turn into a frustrated monkey who can't figure out how to the square piece into the round hole. Seam allowances, squaring off...Not to mention I was learning to use my rotary cutter as I made this quilt. (This is the part of my blog where I reveal to non-sewing readers that they really have no interest in reading my blog!) See all the strips? I bled over those strips. I learned that rotary cutters don't solve all the world's problems over those strips. I learned that you really must find a way to keep your ruler still or else the strips get that dumb arched imprecision.
I started the house quilt in like November of 2009 and finally gave it to my parents in mid-December of 2010. It was supposed to be a Christmas 2009 present. But they've known me for like almost 34 years now, so if they aren't used to disappointment over the timeliness of promised "creative" gifts by now, then it's their own damn fault. (I don't really think that! That's just tough talk. In reality I was embarrassed and guilty.)
Here are some final thoughts on this quilt, along with some detail shots:

• I wish I had waited until I was more skilled at making quilts before I tackled this one.

• I say that because I think I could have made a more beautiful and less-childish-looking quilt if I had just had a little more experience with that uniquely-quilty experience of not-having-the-faintest-idea-of-what-the-finished-product-will-look-like-until-you-have-a-finished-product. This turns out to be one of my favorite aspects of making quilts, as it turns the whole endeavor into a kind of surprise party (not that anyone's ever thrown me one, but a girl can hope). However, with a little more experience, I've learned some things that would have made the process of the house quilt into a slightly less painstaking process. For instance, I might have done a little more cracking-out on Flickr house quilt groups. I could have learned some things about depth and perspective (I really hate that I didn't have the flowers in the front of the house wrap around a little bit to create an illusion of...I dunno, dimension?)

• Most importantly (and this is going to be the last point I make because I'm even boring myselfby hand* is so disproportionately large compared to the time it takes to piece the motherfucker, that if you don't do your level best to make the best possible design, you are going to have a veritable eternity to second-guess your choices. This point applies more to another quilt (a pink and horrible-looking one) a little more, but still: when you're hand-quilting, you are looking at the design in minute detail for like thousands of minutes. And if you took any shortcuts because you were sick of trying to figure out diagonal sky (for instance), you are doomed to regret it--because you are going to be sewing hundreds of teensy tiny stitches all over that screwed-up-looking diagonal sky! You can't escape!

That's it, I think. I'm just waiting for the other quilt photos to load. That means this post might never be finished because it's been loading now for like five whole minutes...
here), the amount of time a body spends quilting a quilt *On hand-quilting:
*I shall write another post someday on this subject. I love to do it because it keeps my hands busy while I'm participating in fun lazy things like TV-watching. And there is really nothing so special than a hand-quilted quilt that somebody slaved over for you. The machine-quilted quilt is nice, but it's less of a labor of love. There's less poetry in it, yo.

It's a Wonderful...

wonderful,

wonderful,
wonderful,
wonderful,
wonderful life.
May your days be merry and bright.

In Which an Ancient Computer Causes Me to Wax Nostalgic...

December is riding in on fluffy, lazy snowflakes. I'm lying on a couch with my best friend's baby asleep in my arms. I'm gazing out the attic window at treetops and slow-motion winter weather. The music up here comes from my old iMac and it's like a time capsule no matter how often I play it. Nothing has been added to it in four years, maybe five. And the thing wasn't even plugged in for at least two of the intervening years. It doesn't have a built-in CD burner, either--every song in there might as well be preserved in amber, accessible only from this dinosaur of a machine (the first color-screen computer I ever had!).
This is also the first computer I used for music. I bought it in 2000 or 2001 and all the songs I put into it are mine, you know? I was so single during the time I used this thing, at least until the last year of its waning days, anyway. P is a music junkie--he owns thousands of albums and has broadened my musical taste more than I ever thought possible. He is the dj in our house and I wouldn't have it any other way (except sometimes, like when he's in a Skeletonwitch mood or on a Pavement binge, or a Fugazi bender--I can take some of that stuff but he knows it's best to play it when I'm not around). So the music up here represents the last music that was purely mine. (I'm trying to write this in a way that doesn't make it seem like my delicate sensibilities have careened helplessly into the gaping maw of my husband's voracious musical appetite, but it isn't working. So can you just take my word that P taking over at house dj a good thing? It means we do not listen to a finite number of relentlessly sorrowful songs on a continuous loop--New Me finds Old Me's taste to be quaint and pretty, and it does bring back the memories, but you absolutely cannot dance to it.)
That said, I love being the dj of my sewing room (the attic). Lots of the playlists I listen to were composed in the early days of 2001 or 2002, when I lived in another attic--that of an old house that was converted to apartments. It was mere blocks from the hippest part of downtown Columbus; I was single and skinny and waiting tables for a living. I had painted the walls of my tiny garret various shades of purple and turned it into a kind of bohemian-looking hovel. My mattress was on the floor (on top of box springs, but still). I dyed cheap curtains and hung them on a makeshift bamboo rod (suspended from the slanting ceiling by raffia! Ah, to be young once more...) which separated the "bedroom" from the spot where I kept the computer and a bookshelf and some pillows to sit on.
I listened to Dar Williams and Bob Dylan and Lucinda Williams up there. I listened to Gomez, Willie Nelson, Tom T. Hall, Van Morrison, "Greetings from Asbury Park," Stevie Wonder. I listened to "The Captain" by KC Chambers. I listened to songs, not albums--that's one of the main differences between me and P, actually. I know it's not a purist's way to do things, but the sewing room catalog is riddled with single tracks from many artists and bands. I had only recently discovered iTunes and was enamored of the way you could just get a song you heard at out one night or on the radio.
Bless the hearts of my friends back then, people I worked with at the restaurant who didn't owe me anything--they would come up to my little attic and sit at my computer (at my drunken bidding) and agree that it was very cool to just get any song you wanted, and make playlists with me and give me ideas for songs to buy. The sheer dorkiness of that practice is stunning me this morning as I remember it for the first time in a while, but it's also something sort of sweet and innocent from a time I don't often associate with those qualities.
I remember that I listened to music alphabetically. I didn't really utilize the playlist option that much, and one night I was listening to the Rolling Stones to impress a guy and when it came to the end of that, a Rod Stewart song came on. Oh, the horror! In my defense, I acquired the Rod Stewart in a Rushmore-induced fit--it was "Ooh La La." And now that I'm thinking about it, it does not defend me at all--it only reveals how thoroughly uncool I really am. See, a quick Google search reveals that the song at the end of Rushmore is not performed by Rod Stewart. Duh, if you're cool. If you're me, you download the Rod Stewart version and think you're cool until something like this happens and you remember that you are actually the kind of dork who invites people to after hours and then makes them sit in front of your computer with you. I still do that. I'm kind of doing it right now, aren't I?
Some things never change.

Here is a Picture I Took with Our New Camera

We still have an absolute boatload to learn about how to take really great pictures, but we went on a walk through our deserted (for winter vacation) college town on Sunday and took a bunch of naturally-lit photographs and then at the end of the walk, Ella the Dog sang to us. Actually, she yawned while I was snapping away, but how cute is that??

Budget Girl to the Rescue

Starting this month (November), I am the one in charge of our budget and bills. This is not something that comes remotely naturally to me, so I had to make some adjustments in our life. I will talk about those some other time, because they are a little bit ingenious and comical at the same time--good qualities in a blog post, you know. But the reason I'm thinking about it right now is that I must (must must must!) get our grocery budget under control--it was already dicey with our recent extended house guest situation, but then Thanksgiving weekend blew it all to hell. It's our biggest expense (besides, you know, housing) and one of the only ones we actually have any control over, so I'm going to put all my problem-solving skills to work on it.
Starting right now! What with leftovers and a few other options in the freezer/fridge, I think we can keep the grocery bill very low this week. But I have to plan.* Thoroughly and boring-ly. Sorry.

Monday

Breakfast: Peanut Butter/Banana smoothies
Lunch: Soup; peanut butter sandwiches
Dinner: Out (my brother's coming to town and there's nothing we can do about that; this kind of unexpected--and totally welcome--expense is exactly why I need to be smart about our bills!)

Tuesday

B: Cereal
L: Leftover sloppy joes
D: Broccoli spaghetti squash (intriguing? Possibly disgusting? It's gonna be an experiment). Leftover turkey/stuffing/sweet potatoes are my insurance policy in case the squash is awful.

Wednesday

B: Oatmeal
L: Soup; peanut butter sandwiches
D: Breakfast for dinner: sausage & egg bagels; hash browns.

Thursday

B: Smoothies
L: P can go out; I'll scrounge something--can of soup, toast + egg, whatevs.
D: Tuna noodle casserole (from a box! I know, but this is also part of the budget plan: we have the box for reasons I won't go into; it's much cheaper to use what we have than to go out and buy all the various individual ingredients--they do add up).

Friday**

B: Oatmeal
L: P can go out again; I will maybe have leftovers or toast or something.
D: Roast chicken; rice; cabbage of some sort (there's a head of it in the fridge right now) spinach salad (with goat cheese! And glazed pecans! And red onions!)

Saturday

B: Pancakes, maybe? We have nowhere to go this weekend, which is nearly unprecedented. Whatever we do, it will be very relaxed and lovey and yay for weekends!
L: Chicken salad? Maybe we'll do last night's spinach salad with chicken, or maybe sandwiches on toast. Celery.
D: Maybe we'll go out. Or have chicken tacos with refried beans made from the cooked cranberry beans I've got in the freezer. Salsa ingredients; lettuce; tortilla shells; cheese.

Sunday

B: Oatmeal or bagels or eggs and bacon
L: Soup--we'll have chicken stock for sure, and I have a boatload of frozen corn from Thanksgiving: corn chowder it is! Onions; milk or cream; potatoes.
D: Spaghetti and meatballs (from the freezer--P's favorite, for sweet nostalgic reasons, Sunday-night dinner); salad; bread (made while I was making the soup).

*We eat breakfast together every single day, plus P's lunch expenses snuck up on us last month (when I was tracking these things for the first time); I have to plan for those meals too or else what's the point?
**This will be the grocery store day, I think...

OK--see how I did that? The orange words constitute a shopping list! This is, or would probably be, really dull if you were a person who existed in the world, but it's totally working for me! And the list is pretty minimal, so it gets December off to a cheap start. Hooray!

I'll tell you all about our awesome camera later. For now, please know it's awesome and that's all.

(Mostly) Drug-Free Pie-Making

This morning I stuck with ibuprofen while I made pies. I made some dough for the crust on Monday, thinking that wold make it easier today. But I didn't put enough fat into that batch, so after tons of rolling and crumbling and trying my best, I had to give up and start the crust from the beginning. Should have done that to begin with: mixing the dough isn't what takes time and concentration; rolling it is. Anyway, I always make pie crust with shortening but today I added about a tablespoon or two of butter and look:
Pretty, huh? I'm trying to refrain from saying "wait 'til we get our new camera," but I obviously wasn't trying too hard! This pie deserves a very nice camera.

Anyway, I used this recipe, which calls for the juice and zest of one whole lemon. I added more than a dash of cloves and some extra cinnamon and nutmeg. And I ate a tiny piece of one of the apples once they were all mixed up with the seasonings and zowee! It tasted great! I'm scared of under-seasoning apple pies because of a disastrous experience in high school: my friend and I made lasagna and an apple pie for our Christmas Dance dates and the apples were old and tasted like absolutely nothing. Plus, the lasagna was cold. So that was the other lesson. The apples, though, were an unforgettable disappointment--the pie looked lovely but tasted like sawdust. Anyway, that lemon juice and zest really added a zing!

And this pie! It's so pretty! Like, magazine pretty! I hope everyone's impressed tomorrow at P's family's house. They aren't really pie people, though. Usually there's not even a pumpkin pie at their table, which is why I'm making one right now. They are a pumpkin-roll-up-with-cream-cheese-icing people. They are cake people. But I'm a pie person! I come from pie people! It's tragic, because this crust is the kind of crust that can only be truly appreciated by people who really, really loooooooove pie.
P.S. When I finished the dough-chilling and pre-baking and rolling and shaping and filling and blah blah blah, I did take a Vicoden. I figure I can handle removing pies from an oven and determining whether they're done, even under the influence of prescription painkillers. I felt I should tell you about the Vicoden so you'd forgive me if this post is error-riddled and/or incoherent in any way.
P.P.S. Damn! I just looked at the recipe again and realized I forgot to dot the apples with butter before I put the top crust on. I repeat: Damn! I hope it doesn't totally ruin it. I mean, I know it won't totally ruin it, but I hope...I just hope it's good!

Oral Surgery, In Brief

I had a wisdom tooth removed. It hurts and I'm on drugs. This is my post for the day.

I did it!

P.S. I made really good pureed vegetables soup and I'm gobbling up Bob Evans pre-made refrigerated mashed potatoes. And P is being so nice to me! He's making me excited for when we have kids and they get sick and Daddy takes care of them. He has a chart for my drugs and a gauze clock (I get the gauze in my mouth for one hour at a time). I love him.

Caesar Salad, a Recipe

Have I told you about my amazing recipe for Caesar salad? I am going to do so right now. It is extremely garlicky and lemony and potent. I believe that the end product tastes better than the recipe might look, but if you like a mild, creamy or dominantly cheesy Caesar, this one probably is not for you. But it's SO GOOD. Try it.

(All the ingredients are a rough estimate--you should mos' def adjust to your taste buds)
Juice of 1 lemon
1 garlic clove
Anchovy paste (I buy it in those toothpaste-looking tubes and squeeze out a 1-3 inch section)
Olive oil
Parmesan, freshly grated
Salt and freshly ground pepper
Romaine lettuce for as many people as you are serving (P and I can eat an entire medium-sized head for an entree-sized salad), washed and dried and chopped to be salad-sized

1. Slam down and peel the garlic. Sprinkle some salt, preferable a course kind like Kosher, over the crushed clove. Use the flat side of your knife to smoosh the salt into the garlic. You can also chop the garlic, but the smooshing action is most important. Press down and away until you have a salty, pulpy garlic paste. It will be potent (duh)--if you are making this salad for guests whose taste buds are unfamiliar to you, I would suggest using a fraction (1/4 to 1/3) of your total yield of garlic smoosh. If it's for you and you like to smack your lips on some garlicky salad, go ahead and add it all!
2. Add the garlic to a big salad bowl. Then squeeze in the lemon and the anchovy paste and lots of pepper and some of the cheese.
3. Whisk it so everything is combined. It will not be pretty! The anchovy paste turns the whole mess quite gray.
4. Keep whisking. This time, add the olive oil while you continue to mix it. Stir like crazy until everything is emulsified.
5. Take a piece of lettuce, swirl it around in the dressing and eat it. How does it taste? Too lemony? Add more oil. Too oily? Add more lemon juice. Too...you can't quite tell but it needs something? Try more cheese or pepper. I rarely add anchovy paste--it's definitely a background flavor, you know? Also, consider using more salt.
6. Anyway, once it tastes good to you, it's time to dress the salad. You have two choices: you can either add the lettuce straight to the salad bowl where the dressing is, or you can pour the dressing into a smaller bowl and pour it over the lettuce. That's how I do it anymore--it's easier to mix completely, and it often turns out I have more dressing than I need. That way I can save it and use it for other things.*

*Like marinating whatever meat I'm using to top our salad! Shrimp

is just so good on this. Maybe that sounds gross? I don't know. Nor do I care. It's positively delectable, so bright and lemony and crunchy/pillowy/tender. This is what it looks like in close-up:

(Oh, this is also a catch-up post! We make this salad all the damn time, but I took these photos in June)

Here is a Picture of a Turtle

REALLY trying to post daily for a little while, at least in order to get into some kind of groove. Not going to go crazy and write a ton because that wears me out and then I'm like, blogging takes forever!

So, in the interest of continuing the catching-up-on-the-long-sabbatical, here is a picture, from May, of a turtle we found in our back yard:
(Just think of how awesome this would have been if we had our awesome camera when the turtle showed up!)

Consumerismmmmmm!!

We're getting a new camera! We're getting a DSLR Canon with so many buttons and switches it's going to take me ten years to figure it all out!

We're trading in credit card points for Best Buy gift cards and we might go buy the camera on Black Friday (Eek! Never been! Hate shopping!) because it will be on sale that day. We have to get our gift cards in time, though, so my fingers are very much crossed.

We visited a very nice camera store this morning in Columbus, and the guy was very helpful and he convinced P that I was right about the Canon Rebel T2i (which I'm not linking to because it's gobsmackingly, you-could-feed-a-developing-nation-for-that-amount-of-money expensive). I did a lot of research but: a) I had a hard time communicating the results of that research when it came time to relay the information to P; and, b) I have a husband who is maddeningly distrustful of my ability to do consumer research. He had to hear for himself, from an incredibly helpful and knowledgeable and nice camera expert, that the camera I want to buy will be the right camera for our needs.

Anyway, we actually held the camera in our hot little (or in P's case, hot gigantic) hands and touched and twisted and clicked and marveled at the coolness of the thing. Then we looked at lenses and then at bags and then we left and while P was amenable to the fancy camera plan before, he is now 100% on board and looking at photography stuff on the internet and getting as excited as I've been all along. It's going to be so fun!

Ironically, if I want to show you a photograph of the actual camera, I will have to take that photo with our old point-and-shoot. So it will be kind of a crappy photo compared to the other, new pictures we take. I love thinking about our new camera. I can't wait to get it.

P.S. I have this military jacket I've been wearing all autumn and I love it but feel like it makes me look considerably more intrepid than I actually am. The camera is going to increase my intrepidness quotient considerably, so I will be as intrepid as I look--just in time for the weather to be too cold for the jacket. More trivial irony...

Catching Up and Then Some

I was going to cut and paste the whole ketchup joke from Pulp Fiction as the title for this post--you know, baby tomato isn't walking fast enough so papa tomato stomps on him and says "ketchup". . .

But after a very brief search, I couldn't find it word-for-word (except I did--please see below*).

Also, I was going to post a photo from each of the intervening eight or nine months and that way, it would be easy for me to get into blogging on the regular. But when I went to look for a photo from, like, March. . .

There weren't none! The cupboard, as it were, was bare.

It appears that we did nothing worth photographing between Christmas and July. . .

Well, that's not exactly true, either. I found a few pictures, but I can't exactly say why I thought some were worth photographing at the time. Like this one from May:

What the--?

I don't remember taking it and I can't imagine why I chose to take it, if the photographer in question was, indeed, I (it could have been my man; it could have been a creepy stranger who wasn't very good at being creepy after all--photos of me and the ol' husband sleeping would be way more menacing than an inexplicable snapshot of one of our many junk drawers that is also our liquor cabinet).**

Plus, the drawer is open! And there is a lottery ticket (Winner? Loser? Expired? Still in the drawer as I write this, some six months later? Stay tuned to find out!) perched atop that never-watched PBS documentary about something so boring I haven't bothered to read the back...the DVD is resting on a used-but-not-discarded puffy shipping envelope. And those three things are actually, come to think of it, piled on top of an ancient iPod speaker which we blew out before we got married and moved into this house! So, the speaker has been worthless for at least two years and yet we went to the trouble of moving it into this house; we keep it in our liquor cabinet in a corner of our postage-stamp-sized dining room where space is already at something of a premium.

*Sigh*

Here I thought this post was going to be about how this photo is and always will be evocative of our little rented house, because that wine rack and that lamp and that painting and the little cabinet are probably never going to share the same space in any of our subsequent homes. I was going to go all breezy and zen and let's be honest--it would totally come across as smug when I went prematurely nostalgic on your asses about how I have no idea how this photograph came to be taken but it's just so reminiscent of our moments in this little house blah blah blah/ha ha ha/my-life-is-so-accidentally-perfect-and-worthy-of-photographing-and-publishing-to-the-internet-at-any-given-moment. . .Except, jeez, this isn't a pretty picture at all. It's junky and boozy and weird. And crooked, for the love of God. Not actually evocative of our lives--ummm. I'm going to ruminate on that one. . .

I think it is telling to note that instead of following through on my intentions of getting nostalgic and waxing poetic about how my dad painted that (admittedly awesome) painting in 1968 and then gave us that lamp (after he bought it on sale at his favorite warehouse store) forty years later, I got all (justifiably) butt-twitchy about the contents of that drawer. I need to tell you I didn't have to check the contents before I cataloged them. I am, in fact, not at our tiny rented house right now. I have memorized the contents of that damned drawer after looking in it for batteries or stamps or matches or a flashlight or my college transcripts or our passports like thirty-thousand times. Yet I have never cleaned it out and turned it into a place to store useful, needed items. Do I need to restate the definition of insanity right now? I didn't think so (*but even after the rest of 2010 has moved past it, I'm a little enamored of that thing where you link to something a tiny bit unexpected but punch-liney--it's like David Foster Wallace and his compulsive footnotes only, you know, far less intellectual and literary and brilliant and may-he-rest-in-peace).

Where was I? I mean, besides on my fourth cup of coffee (goes without saying, you say?). . .

The intentionally-snapped photograph of this particular junk drawer raises many questions. One of them is: did I actually intend for my subject to be that bottle of scotch? Boy, that's one for the ages. But the other questions...the other questions are making me tired. I just want to draw some really obvious conclusions now, please.

For a long time, I've been very understanding of the way people can live in really messy or badly- or under-decorated homes: when you see it every day, it becomes more familiar than it is unsightly. Spending the last hour geeking out over this junk drawer thing has refreshed that feeling for me--I've blocked out this black hole of space in our house. I've totally failed to see it as anything other than a drawer which never, ever, no matter how many times I optimistically (insanely) pull it open, contains an item for which I'm actually searching. I understand how these things happen, but when I'm forced to look at it for what it is, I still agonize over how it could have happened to me. After all, that drawer could be so many things! It could be the place where we keep napkins!

"And if it were," says my internal, skeptical, kick-ass/feminist/sensible psychoanalyst, "would you be a happier person than you are right now?"

And I give her that look that Dr. Phil's studio audience members are wearing at predictable intervals of his show. That "it just dawned on me, slowly and reverentially like the most beautiful glowing angelic light" look. Only my look is real, not the result of crazy bald-man brainwashing. Because the answer to the question is "no." In fact, it's "hell, no"--as in "hell, no, I won't go." You know? (Aagh! The rhyming! Stop the rhyming!) I mean, I'm protesting right now.

I have to snap out of it, out of the assumption that my messy house is an indicator of one or all of the following things:

1. I am unhappy, miserable, depressed and said condition is, like, leaking out and manifesting itself in the messy spots of my home.
   
2. I am inferior in every way to people whose lives are in a constant state of peaceful, ravishing, seemingly-effortless photographability
3. I am rough, gruff, unpleasant and slovenly.
4. I am unprepared to be someone's Mom, Mommy, Mum or (most of all) Mama.

Yeah, this is internalized anxiety in a lot of ways. But I didn't invent it out of thin air, y'all (or more accurately, y'none--don't worry, I haven't lost sight of your nonexistence). We still, like, deify the women who exemplify domesticity. We still slobber all over their graceful, sun-dappled kitchens and children and perfectly-imperfect "corners." We fall all over ourselves trying to recreate the paint colors and the flea market finds and the food photographs.

(And I think I do mean "we," by the way. I'm afraid I sound manifesto-ey, or at least a little presumptuous by going plural, but I don't think I'm alone. However, I'm going to switch it over anyway because it's making me feel a little neurotic.)

I have really gotten in to sewing. I like it; it's an awesome way for me to feel both creative and productive. I make a huge mess and I do it in fits and starts and sometimes I go months without touching a sewing needle. Some of the things I've made are really beautiful to me, and some of them are quite ugly. I started this blog because I wanted to be part of the community of people who "craft," but after almost two years, I still haven't had the nerve to share this stuff. Ick.

It is totally natural to want to show our best face to the world. I know I'm not the only person with multiple junk drawers and latent teenage inferiority anxieties. We take pictures from the best angles and we crop out unsightly stuff or stand with the pile of trash bags behind us when we do the photo-snapping. I mean that literally and figuratively.

But I don't want to do it anymore. It's exhausting. I want you to know that my junk drawers often stay open to reveal the expired, losing lottery tickets inside. I want you to know that my sewing room goes from this:

to this:
almost the second I pick up the rotary cutter. While we're on the subject, I want you to know that I once mauled the hell out of my finger with my rotary cutter.

I want to be able to tell you I feel kind of pathetic and amateurish, but I don't want you to assure me--patronizingly or otherwise (although I'm convinced there's really no "otherwise")--that I'm "really awesome :)".

That's it. I can't shut up!

**P.S. That was one of the most grammatically confounding paragraphs I've ever written, or recently written, anyway. Why was it so hard to get it right? Not that I got it right... Jeez. The sheer illiteracy of it has followed me down to the postscript! I mean, "if the photographer in question was, indeed, I"?! I (indeed) ask you! What goes on here? What is the meaning of this?! Also, puh-leez. And that's leaving aside the length of time it took me to decide how exactly I wanted to describe the following: "one of our many junk drawers that is also our liquor cabinet." I mean, huh? The problem was, I felt dishonest calling it "our junk drawer" because that implies we have only one junk drawer (scoff! One junk drawer is for organized people who consider a junk drawer to be a place that contains useful items such as batteries and flashlights and, well, see above). So, sorry, nonexistent reader. Just working out some kinks before I go around telling the internet my blog exists. I guess I'm gonna have to build up one hell of an archive so I can be sure this guy gets buried deep.

In which the Inexcusable Blogging Sabbatical is Excused by Tremendous Before and After Photos

Here's why I've been gone so long (she writes to the nonexistent readers, who've--what?--been checking in loyally for the past nine months, just wishing this day would come...):

(Before)

Yeah, that's my sewing room, basically for the last six or seven months. I've probably cleaned it once since the last time I posted here, but it quickly deteriorated to the condition pictured above. May I just say, Egads. I was frightened to go anywhere near it until circumstances dictated that I simply had to deal with it.

I was ready to grab the dog, torch the house and use the photos (Yes, there are more! Each grislier and more shocking than the last!) as my defense when the arson case came to trial. I bet the right jury would have let me off with probation and a suspended sentence or something. Not bad when you look closely at this photograph.

But I didn't gamble on the vagaries of our loophole-ridden legal system! I behaved like the grown woman I am, like the Better Homes and Gardens subscriber I am, like the wife and wannabe mom and gracious host I am. Not like the scatterbrained, sloppy, lazy, drunk and oblivious lunatic I used to be. See, the Sarah I used to be entertained notions of arson-as-a-viable-solution much more seriously than the Sarah I am. Plus, that other Sarah didn't have a Dyson. Or a husband who has probably never entertained the notion of arson-as-viable-solution, seriously or otherwise. (There is still enough of the old Sarah in me to admit that the Dyson was more of a motivator in this instance than was the level-headed husband.)

When I finally tackled the wretched project (with elbow grease, and not the kind that doubles as a fire accelerant), I'm ashamed to say it was finished in a matter of hours--I could have done it a lot sooner. Fabric and old files are so thoroughly pile-able, you know? Once the piling (and folding and cramming-into-trash-bags and stacking boxes and sorting and vacuuming picking-needles-and-straightpins-out-of-the-carpet...) had been done, it was kind of like...

****poof!****

(After)

OH MY GOD I COULD LOOK AT THESE PICTURES ALL DAY!

Then I came here to blog about it and I realized the last thing I posted was a little crazy (if you're there or ever were, sorry). Maybe somewhere there's a place for that stuff, but I think I'm going to say this isn't that place. So it will be a return to the domicile around here--food, sewing, maybe some before and after pictures of our bedroom once our long-term (and very welcome) houseguests move into their new digs sometime in the next few weeks. Also, I have a very big (for still-a-slowpoke-beginner me) project I've been working on since last year, which I'm very slowly finishing by hand these days. I think I'm ready to post pictures sometime soon.

But let's not get ahead of ourselves, girl. Let's allow this image to soothe the savage, sloppy beast for a little while longer:

Repackaging, without a new name

Here's the thing: I like having a blog, but 2010 is like 35 days old and I have turned my sewing machine on only once. I've just been putting it off. Husband and I went on an insane diet kick and my days are filled with working out and thinking about not being fat anymore.
And I would love to have documented some of that on this blog, but (and by the way, WTF? since no one reads it...) bitching about my diet has nothing to do with sewing. And the blog is supposed to be about sewing.
I could have started another blog, and don't kid yourself: I considered it, but that would have been insane! What, when I want to write a blog post about my diet, I go to "sadiestarves.blogspot.com" and I tap-tap-tap away about how I put a teaspoon of sugar in my oatmeal and now I have to spend twenty more minutes on the elliptical? And when I want to write about sewing I come back here and tap-tap-tap about the house quilt I'm (not) working on for my parents?
And what happens if I develop another interest? For instance, once I lose twenty more pounds (God have mercy), we're going to start trying for a baby. Sadiepeesonastick.blogspot.com? Then when it works...
The ins and outs of this one are a little too dicy for me. It's only 8 am. The fact is, I want to share sewing stuff with other people on the internet, but I also want to share stuff about my personal life--not so much with other people on the internet, but I feel better once I've put things in the right words. And something about publishing it all, and the possibility that someone might stumble upon it...that is a balm.
The only place I ever share this site address, though, is in comments on sewing blogs. And so I started to feel kind of...beholden to those people. Like they'll go "oh! This person looks forward to trying my technique for ironing seams open. I wonder what project sadie is sewing right now?" And then they'll visit here, only to discover some half-starved fat girl pounding away on her keyboard about her latest neurotic obsession. And *gasp!* swearing like a sailor.
I feel like the title of the blog misrepresents me, but I also feel like I want to have it all in one place: the photos of quilting projects; the rants about how blogging is a weird thing to do; the half-drunk, profanity-laden tirades; the raging fury directed at that goddamn animated Wii Fit balance board who's all like, "That's overweight!" every fucking time I step onto the scale. And politics! I want this to be a place where I can be a lunatic when confronted with the lunatics on Facebook who post things like :

"Thoughts Perez? RT @PerezHilton: Fox News had the top 13 programs on cable news in total viewers for 5th month in a row"

I really don't know exactly what this means, but I think this guy is calling out Perez Hilton (whom he almost certainly doesn't know personally) regarding the "dominance" of Fox News programming?

Aaaaand, with that, I have staked my claim. This blog is no longer just about sewing! I will no longer feel furtive when I post something that doesn't involve a photograph of fabric! (Or food, which I felt comfortable writing about because it is somehow akin to sewing in its apolitical hominess)...
Right. Clearly what might have passed for my eloquence is deserting me. This has all been a ploy to keep me off that damnable Wii Fit scale anyway.
But quickly: if you secretly read this and do not want to be discovered for some reason, and right now you're in the grip of some kind of panic that I'm about to turn into one of those chirpy "Fitness-and-nutrition-changed-my-life!-I-lost-one-tenth-of-a-pound-and-I'm-so-proud-of-my-progress!!" people, fear not. I promise not to write about the diet every day, and I promise not to be falsely positive about every fucking ounce I take off. I have too much weight to lose, and too much longing for huge forks full of fresh fluttery, buttery pasta to toe the party line of those other weight-loss blogs, to which I misguidedly turned in the early days of this diet. I believe that being positive is important. But nothing grates more than the vapid positivity pressed upon fat girls by skinny, patronizing diet gurus. "Oh, [furrowed brow, lower lip jutting out in this-is-what-Barbie-looks-like-when-she's-being-sympathetic fashion] I know it seems hard right, when you've been working out like crazy and eating like 1400 calories every day and STILL haven't lost a pount, but keep your chin up! It just takes some time!!"
No. I am pissed. I have lost weight, but I have a lot more to lose and that just fucking sucks. Admitting that doesn't make me fatter and it doesn't mean I'm less motivated. Those chirpy, perky celebrate-every-ounce people have got to be carrying around some of the same discouragement--and "well, I'm disappointed but I know it's a marathon and not a sprint" just isn't a totally natural way to express yourself. It's good to keep that in mind, but being pissed that you're fat is a valid feeling, dammit! And when you're spending every waking moment controlling the stuff you put in your body, giving free rein to your frustrations and anger is a good feeling.
So I will write more about the diet as I (hopefully) continue to lose weight at a fat sluggish snail's pace. I will tell you a little more about the skinny girl I truly am. I will even include some rational descriptions of my approach and the history of Fat Sadie. But there will be no false cheer. I love food and I love excess, so dieting is pretty damned grim for me.
That's all. Time to go add a disclaimer to the banner of this blog, whose title will from this moment on be a little misleading.

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.