I’m not one to worry about medical issues unless I know with absolute diagnostic certainty that I do have something to worry about. I probably don’t fret much because I was a sickly child, or because I now have enough chronic but minor “let’s keep an eye on that” issues that I expect I’ll spend many more years partially broken down and mildly miserable until something really big comes around to finish things off.
And then the other day I felt something strange on my ear. I picked at it for a bit and it didn’t come off. My heart started to race a little and I began counting the times my ears got pustulous sunburns, and wondering if I’d get an extra elfin-looking prosthesis just for shits and giggles. I got up to examine it in the mirror and then got entirely distracted* and forgot about it for a day or two. Then I remembered and finally got up in there with a flashlight and extra hand mirrors.
It was lumpy and hard and a strange skin tone that wasn’t quite my own.
I figured it was more likely to be some sort of ageing barnacle, so I flicked a little harder at the thing with disgust.
It came off…
I’m pretty sure it was a glob of Liquid Nails.
(My home improvement crust usually looks more like this).
But I do sometimes worry about the day when I can’t do much with my hands. I’m already unable to knit, sew, or type for more than an hour or two at a time, and I have to take frequent breaks due to various wrist and finger and hand barks and whines. So I need do as much fiddly-fingered work as I can now.
I’m plotting some hex quilts I’ve been thinking about for some time now. Some may be “art” pieces that I probably won’t share, while some of the fabric sketches (quilt-a-doodle-dos?) might end up for sale. We’ll see if my fingers can do the talking as well as the walking…
I ordered some dye-cut hexes to take the easy route.
I didn’t quite expect them to be this small.
I hate rulers and their confounding fractions – give me metric!
I hate most fabric marketed to babies, or rather their keepers, since perhaps babies would really just like giant boob prints, but most of it is just pathetic and timid, too cartoonish, sometimes oddly and vaguely religious, too pale and sickly pastel, and just plain ugly (however I do like some vintage baby prints).
But this one caught my eye a bit ago, and I knew about an upcoming wee one that needed a sewn item.
I don’t make many things for babies now – at first I made many things because I only knew one. Then more people started having them, and then the first one got a sibling, and I couldn’t keep up, or the charm wore off, or they started to blur together in a drooling blob and I couldn’t remember what I’d made and for whom.
(My apologies to all of those second children out there.)
So I whipped up a little quilt for the wall, but it could still be used as a quilt. I had a grand idea of massive three dimensional applique with crazy depth and perspective, but in the end I kept it simple – a bit of applique birds and leaves and machine quilting.
I had to buy thread again too – you’d think I would have learned from the last time I moved and couldn’t find it…
But the paint is drying in my new studio room at the moment, and next will be a freshly sealed floor (and then it has to become the bedroom for a while while I work on that room) and then I’ll be able to unpack allllllll of my sewing things! So I see that day not so far off in the distance now.
And their rat-tat-tat drilling (as long as it isn’t the house).
And though I don’t like that they damaged our lovely Magnolia, I’m fascinated by the pattern that they made – almost as if the tree had ripped out stitches…
…or machine gun fire.
Maybe the yard is run by Woodi Peccaroni, the ancient don of the fermented tree sap bootlegging era…
Many years ago, I found this old narrow reversible quilt at my old favorite thrift store. I loved that it was made from scraps, improvisational, hand and machine-sewn, and the fact that it was just plain old, and I like old sh*t.
I sewed a sleeve on the opposite of what I considered the more public side and hung it in my bedroom to ward off the cold seeping through the walls in my old apartment – I loved that place too because it was old – but damn, it was also cold.
It’s tufted with knots of white, blue, and reddish-pink (perhaps formerly red?) wool yarn. The interior might be filled with wool as well as it’s just a mass of somewhat disgusting clumpy lumps now, but I’d need to perform a little surgery to find out.
(And I don’t think I really want to see what’s in it in case it’s nasty).
The reverse has a pinwheel and some nice fabrics not seen on the front. This pinwheel got into my deep brain and caused me to make many half-demented pinwheels last summer, or maybe the summer before… I think I probably have enough to make something from them… I should find them.
I like this squiggly block.
The back has a few stained blocks, but were stained in their former life perhaps as clothing, as the stains were sewn over.
A few faint splotches look suspiciously like blood, or a really robust coffee mixed with a hearty and delicious red wine.
(That is also part of the reason I chose the other side to display).
And there are some lovely hand stitches too.
I also love that delicate blue pattern on the left side.
I can’t date it – there are definitely some old fabrics in it, perhaps from the 1910s, and the red, white, and blue color scheme could place it in WWII times, but some of the other fabrics have a 1950s and ’60s vibe? Though the shape is also older – long and narrow – somewhat too big for a crib and too small for a twin bed. It would probably best fit one of those narrow cot-like beds (don’t they have a name???).
But it seems that it could have been made from old clothes from a number of members of a family perhaps for a notable baby or a soldier – as a memento, or a comfort for someone leaving home.
But things are rarely as they seem, right?
When I was trying to pare down my things after I moved to N’s house, I gave it to him to give to one of his family members who was having babies at the time – I thought it would be nice for a wall in a kid’s room. But he wanted to keep it, though we didn’t get around to hanging it up then.
Or in that apartment of late of which I’d rather not speak or remember.
And we still haven’t put it up in the new house (or anything else yet until the painting is done…
rather, all of the repairs that need to be done to the walls before I can even begin to paint them).
But I rescued it from storage a few months ago, and I’m really glad I still have it.
And I lovehatelovehatelovehate love that he enables me in the keeping of old sh*t.
Though I thankfully received some helpful suggestions on how to finish it in my limited workspace, I still didn’t want to deal with it. But then I had a head-smacking moment when I realized it didn’t have to be a quilt. I wanted it to be a functional bed covering to fully realize its concept, but it made no difference whether it was a quilt, or a coverlet, or a comforter, or a duvet cover. I am loudly sighing with relief. Though I also went to 13 stores (even thrifts) trying to find a cheap comforter that I could use as filler instead of spending an ungodly amount on 4 or 5 layers of high-loft batting and failed to find one in my budget. So duvet cover it became out of thrift, necessity, and for the sake of my sanity.
Most of the other things I’ve been working on are finally coming together as well – it will be a welcome relief to stop thinking about the things I’ve been thinking about for the last few months. So now I’m allowing myself to fall backwards into a bottomless [happy] pit of multiple projects.
My vacation knitting socks are further along, and might even conclude by the end of the year.
I’ve gathered some acorns to use as dye (still no luck finding a tree infested with galls).
While I was in the woods, I saw several really cool vine yarns.
And I’ve started a couple of gifts for upcoming birthdays and holidays.
But thankfully I do not fully participate in most holidays apart from cooking and eating (mostly just the eating) so I have none of the pressure that others do to complete x projects in x time for people who might not want/like that hat, pair of socks, scarf, pillow, toy anyway.
As some may say, woot!
Or yippee!
Or hell yeah!
Or yee hah!
Or the excitement is so short-lived it will be over by the time I finish shouting.
I tend to get a little obsessive/fanatical about certain colors, textures, and shapes. For a few years, I loved the diamond. Not hard-assed sparkly rocks that people die for literally and figuratively, but the shape in a flattened geometric form. I had some awesome diamond-shaped eyeglasses back in the late 1990s that I wore to dust; I have some argyle clothing, jewelry with diamond shapes, some great vintage diamond-shaped buttons I’ve yet to use, and I’ve sewn and knitted many diamonds.
Little did I know I had a thing for hexagons too.
I knew I liked antique hex tile floors. I had an original one in my first roach-infested apartment (it wasn’t the first of several infested, it was the first and happened to be infested). And I fantasize often about having one again (a tiled floor, not an apartment full of cockroaches).
I photograph tiled floors when I see them, including this one in the late 1990s, which also served as evidence in case I was brutally murdered or came down with an incurable STD or sudden Bukowski-like alcoholism from the seediest hotel I’ve ever patronized in Niagra Falls (I mean seediest ever, not one of many in Niagra Falls).
And check out this awesome antique floor in a non-hipster cafe in Brooklyn I saw last year:
(And yes, I have a cheap-ass pre-paid phone and can’t figure out how to email the picture to myself, so yeah…)
When we first started fixing up our former house, I was completely and entirely ecstatic when I found this in the bathroom:
However, my joy was short lived when I found other things:
And the absence of the tile throughout and/or layers of cement and other impenetrables that prevented us from salvaging the original floor.
I wanted to put down a new authentic porcelain hex floor, but the high price sent me to the big box for the cheap alternative:
Still porcelain hexagons, but not quite the real thing – the real deal is more flat and matte with thinner grout lines. I loved that bathroom though, and I yearn for that giant cast-iron tub again…
But I’m still always on the look-out for hex floors and sometimes find them in surprising places:
Look how small the hexagons are! The tiny little hexes are just a little bit bigger than a hex floor tile.
I wonder if the maker was sick of it after one motif, this was a leftover from a finished quilt, it was made to be a chair pad or other small item, or yeah, maybe she (maybe he but not likely) died. I love the inconsistent greens as well – I wonder if it was made from old-time scrubs or nurse’s uniforms, or if the fabric was home-dyed.
For those of you in the knitting world, you’re probably expecting me to say I’m hip-deep in hexipuffs for the Beekeeper’s Quilt and that’s what this is all about. Nope, though I like it a lot, and considered it for a little while, I’m going to pass for now (even though I may have purchased a few mega-sale skeins of sock yarn with this in mind).
I occasionally find myself designing floors for bathrooms, kitchens, and foyers of homes we don’t have. In fact, one of the houses we purchased over the last year had a half-bath (I hate the name “powder room”) small enough that I could justify the price of the real thing and to my own custom design. But alas, I must settle on non-floor hexagons for now.
But look at this!
(Picture yanked from internet – no idea of its original publication)
Ok, so a floor again, but even though whatever house we’ll eventually get will eventually need to be re-sold, I’m really tempted to do something along these lines. I don’t know if it is paper or fabric, but it would be fairly economical and a more interesting alternative to the paper bag floor (which I also sort of like, but can’t get past that leather crazy quilt jacket look of it).
But back to what I can do now, which really isn’t something I can do since I must finish other things first, but what I’m fantasizing about doing is a traditional hexagon quilt. After a summer’s worth of basting letters for an appliqued quilt, and though at the time they often annoyed the hell of of me, I had the brilliant epiphany that a quilt can actually be as portable of a project as sock knitting. Though that is probably obvious to all already, I’d never thought of making quilts outside of hours-long blocks of time at home. And though my earlier thoughts of sewing a quilt by hand were along the lines of you’ve got to be f*cking joking, I now want to piece that bitch up one by one by one in airports, while visiting other people’s houses, in waiting rooms, and sprawled on the sofa while binge watching some mildly awful but addictive television series.
I haven’t decided whether or not to use my current stash and scraps or come up with something a little more uniform and floor-like, but I’ve sure as hell had fun playing with the possibilities – at least in my head, of course, since I really can’t be spending any real time on it. (And I haven’ t yet printed off a bunch of blank hex sheets I found on this site).
I’d be remiss in not mentioning the hexing possibilities with crochet in the form of hexy granny afghans – see this Flickr group for pics – but alas, I don’t crochet. I don’t like the looks of it sometimes, but that’s usually the maker’s fault for choosing crap acrylic yarn, or poor colors, or having no general aesthetic sense.
But I’d like to learn one of these days…
Oh yeah, and my inner jukebox plays this every time I think of the word hex:
The 1990s infected me with a whole wiggling writhing wad of ear worms…
1. Ignore the fact that your diet is consisting of more and more mutant produce and get to work.
2. Plan a queen-sized quilt when you don’t have a queen-sized area in which to work. Alternately, plan a queen-sized quilt when you bought a house with a big studio, but the sale wasn’t final. Alternately, continue with said queen-sized quilt when you could have easily scaled back.
3. [Sidestep] While struggling with the space issue, contemplate the boxes and boxes of books hidden beneath Indian bedspreads (that once adorned dorm walls), pictures without walls, and the weak light from the single window in your sh*tty apartment living room.
4. Focus your attention back to the quilt top. Realize that though you usually have a fairly high tolerance for wonkiness, one square looks too sloppy, so carefully rip it out to fix it without thinking about the possibility of how your “fix” might not make it better, only worse. Feel sad that it could have just been a little extra wonky instead of a lot extra wonky now since there’s no way you’re going back in there to fix/mess it up even more.
5. When ironing the top (hopefully for the last time) discover that one of the fabrics can actually shrink and warp once it’s already been ironed many many times. No time for flailing about and shrieking WTFs, just rip the bitches, replace them, and re-iron the whole thing c-a-r-e-f-u-l-l-y.
6. [Sidestep] In anticipation of quilting, play with a few samples of top+batting+backing. Discover that your machine is entirely rejecting this action and refuses to obey proper tension. Feel immediately panicked, then feel immediately in denial and move on.
7. Discover that it will be impossible to lay and smooth out the layers flat. Even if you hop from chair to sofa, you will never be able to perform the long jump necessary from end to end and will fall several times trying.
8. Consider crying.
9. Investigate paying someone else to do this part.
I’ve been having a run of good bad luck lately. Not luck that is at first bad, but then allows for something awesome to come in,* but good in terms of a good dose of it. Don’t get me wrong, it could be much, much worse, but it is annoying as all get out.
I’ve barely spent any money lately, but my last two online orders involved a bottle of shampoo ending up all over a book, and an item of clothing needed in a timely manner arriving with a giant slash – and I did not cause it myself by opening the box with an evil box cutter or anything so keen.
I’ve been trying to set up a new doctor here and ended up with a $558.00 bill for a physical that should have been free. For the last month, I have been calmly and persistently contacting the doctor/billing office/lab/main office/insurance company to resolve it. All say they can’t but the other guy can. One kind soul read back to me the transcript of the call log at the doctor’s office – I sound like a f*cking obnoxious demanding crazy bitch. In this instance though, I am not – I have been perfectly professional with them, and only cry with rage and shake a little about the potential of having to part with the money that I don’t actually owe when I’m off the phone.
But with bad, sometimes good shows up a tiny bit.
I dropped one of my current favorite sewing needles into a big box of scraps. Bad, but not too bad, but then I sometimes use my scraps to stuff things and what if someone bought something made with them and then gave it to a toddler (though I specifically say my things aren’t meant for kids) and then the toddler sucks it down his slobbery germ-hole and requires a dramatic surgery and then my precious needle ends up accessioned with the other surgically removed swallowed things at the Mutter Museum. Bad (although I like that museum). But after shaking and scrounging and hoping to find it when it penetrated my own digits, I finally located it without bloodshed. Good.
I stitched up a little piece with my own white hairs. Bad? Well, I’ll give you kinda gross, but it is what it is. The bad part was the haircut I got a few weeks ago that was supposed to be an inch and ended up three and more in various hideous feathery layers. And the annoying routine I go through with every hair cutter when she/he tries to convince me to color my hair. I rarely get a haircut, you think I can keep up with roots? And hello, money? And hello again, chemicals? And ciao bitch, I’m aging, that’s what happens! But the biggest bad is that my greys are coming in at an alarming rate and falling out at the same pace. I figure they’re my newest strands so they should be sticking around longer… Needless to say I had more than enough to finish the piece and now I don’t know what to do with the leftovers – I don’t think I want to use hair-thread again though. (And not to worry, I’m not saving boogers, ear wax, and toenail clippings… well, maybe a few fingernails, but they’re for art purposes too.) Sounds scarier than it is.
And the last is a bad me for not finishing the epic summer-long quilt yet. I’m terrified to do the quilting part (and my machines are getting tensiony), so I’m considering my options of finishing the top off and calling it a coverlet. I don’t intend to use it anyway.
* And speaking of rotary cutters and needles, if one more person/media outlet/memoir tells me that loosing their job was the best thing that ever happened to them, well I just might get slicey and pokey.
On a trip to visit my folks (I won’t say home because they tragically (for me) sold it some years ago) earlier this summer, I finally found this little fabric picture that used to hang in my bedroom.
The scene is one I drew, and drew quite often as a slightly obsessive little sh*t, and at the dumbsh*t age when I didn’t comprehend that the sky wasn’t just up there and therefore depicted it as a stripe. So let’s say I was four, or should four-year-olds understand how the sky works? So maybe I’ll say three… Regardless, my mother deemed my “Bird In Flight to Nest” precious and decided to turn it into a sewing lesson. I’ll say that it was my first, but I really don’t know. She cut out the pieces, sewed the margins on the machine, and gave it to me to applique. I do clearly remember getting somewhat bored or frustrated with it, and it is also quite clear that she finished it for me and then added a few embroidered embellishments. I don’t know if this took place in the span of a day or I abandoned it for some time and she got tired of having it only partially completed for weeks or months. I also don’t remember if it was during the one truly massive blizzard of my youth (though I think I was down with the chicken pox then) or in the leisurely long days before I had to go to school. Either way, it was something I did as a child wherein my hands and mind were engaged (and it wasn’t so traumatic that I didn’t want to do it again).
This was before the recent cringe-worthy days of fashionable “upcycling.” Smack in the 1970s when fuel crises, a renewal of the back to the earth movement, thoughts of Silent Spring, and the birth of Earth Day were kicking around. My parents left their urban home to escape air pollution, overcrowding, and to grow wholesome organic food on a few idyllic acres. We were also broke-ass poor, so recycling old clothes into craft projects was both a necessity and entirely practical – how many thousands of years have we just used what we have and then used it some more? Why should this now be a trendy buzzword to help sell our crafty stuff? Convince the buyer that her materialism is ok because it’s upcycled and therefore she is a conscientious fabulous person?
Fabric is fabric is fabric… and is infinitely re-usable. Sometimes the perfect print is on a bolt, sometimes it’s a pair of pants… you’re not special for using or buying either one.
But back to the picture.
The components are:
Sun: I assumed the terrycloth sun was salvaged from a much abused towel, but my mom said it was leftover fabric from some shorts she made for my brothers as small children in the 1960s… I’m not sure I’d like terrycloth shorts… they seem so, absorbent?
Tree trunk: Yep, that’s my dad’s old tie – gotta love plaid neck wear…
Sky: Leftovers from a quilt my mother made for me of yellow, green, and blue gingham to match my wallpaper of the same colors (only the wallpaper also had puke tones in it too).
Flowers, eggs, bird parts: Felt scraps – who didn’t have random felt scraps lying around?
Nest: Burlap feed sack – we lived on a little farm with little animals and a pony. Food for them came in burlap bags.
Bird: This is an odd denim/oxford cloth hybrid that was probably clothing in its former life.
Grass, leaves: We can’t remember what these scraps are from, but I wore various homemade calico skirts, shorts, halter tops (remember, 1970s over here) and dresses.
Background: This could have been leftover paining canvas or material for rustic curtains.
And even though this turned into a rage against the preciousness of upcycling, it was originally meant to be a rage against not teaching children how to sew or make bread or brush animals or do anything constructive with their hands. Yeah, there are a few schools that teach such things, but as a whole we’re becoming such boring dumb-asses with our iSh*t.
It was the last of the summer hiking trips for us.
Our cottage was decorated in “Wal-Mart for cabin.”
I actually miss the tacky painted saw blades, crude whittlings, and sh*t made out of driftwood and antlers of mountain/country crafts of yesteryear (or just a few years ago really).
Now it is plastic sh*t from China (often copied from domestic crafters).
But I managed to finally finish basting all of those damn letters.
The pile looks smaller than it really is.
I will never be so wordy on a quilt again.
Our CSA has been offering loads of lovely flowers.
It is a nice thing to have fresh flowers, but not in place of food – they really need to step it up in the veg department. And as vinyl village apartment dwellers, we can’t compost, so I don’t like to have too many fresh flowers.
The letters are ready to mingle with the as yet unmade quilt blocks.
I’m also getting wordy with a fair isle scarf.
I don’t love stranded knitting.
I don’t hate it though.
My Tour de Fleece spinning goals fell short.
But I finished plying my Pigeonroof Studios “lettuce” and have one braid left to finish spinning for a particular project.
I spun this one a little too thin and it came out lighter and softer in color, so it might have to become a different project.
Or the original project will be scrapped altogether.
We were in the Adirondacks last weekend for a couple of days of soggy hiking and down time away from our frustrating and increasingly desperate home (and my job) search.
I know that I said earlier that I needed another bout of cabin time to finish designing that shawl but I have to focus on other projects at the moment now. I took all of the letters I need to cut out and baste for my newest quilt (I think there are 26 total) but I only managed to finish a whopping four. Pretty lousy progress. And I’m not entirely sure I’m doing them right or how to handle some of the narrow slices that I really can’t fold down.
So I easily got distracted since basting is tiresome to me and doesn’t seem to amount to much since I still have to sew the damn things on. In my current overwhelmed and distracted state I forgot to pack socks for the weekend. It was a good excuse to buy a new woolen pair, though I could only justify the one and had to wash them after every hike and hoped they’d dry enough for the next time. Our cabin was infested with carpenter ants and chasing after one to photograph it was a perfect basting procrastination activity. Do you realize how hard it is to get a clear shot of a very busy (and harassed) little ant?
Bugs were definitely showing off their strengths over the weekend. Inexplicably, black flies were suddenly crazy about my eyebrows and one little f*cker bit me so successfully that blood was shed on my favorite wool t-shirt.
But the weekend also held one of those magical and rare summer afternoons when all that mattered was swimming in a mountain pond and feeling the sun.
(Thanks to N’s family for their hospitality and the afternoon at their awesome lakeside cottage on Sunday!)
And since we were away, I had a late start in the Tour de Fleece, and promptly suffered a wipe out when I sliced open my thumb on a yogurt container of all things.
I need my thumb to spin dammit! I should probably lower my yardage expectations now but I’m willing myself to heal quickly.
ASTITCHMATISM 