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.