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.

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.