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.

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...

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!