11.27.08
I feel like I should post something. Something thankful-esque.
I’ve actually got lots of drafts, but I never seem to have enough time to really wrap up everything I’d like to say re: the election and results, so that’s part of the radio silence. I can’t not say something, right?
But I think I’ll save it all for another day.
But I am thankful for the promise, the idea of a change in policies. The last eight years there have been things done in my name as an American that I am frankly ashamed of and have huge difficulty reconciling within our collective identity. I know that these things aren’t new (concentration camps, secret prisons, black ops, torture, war and fear profiteering) but it has been so baldfaced and shamelessly done, with so little apparent outrage when exposed, that it has been very dispiriting.
So I am thankful and hopeful for the new period in our history which will be here before we know it if the fleet footed passage of this past year is any gauge.
I am however, in the parlance of my people, “massively bummed” about the California election results, but not surprised.
These are pumpkins I carved for my my Grammy’s windowsill, my two favorite designs ripped straight from yeswecarve.com. I did the stencils for them myself, and it shows— Obama has kind of a tricky profile (well, that’s my excuse) and to capture it first in simple line on paper, and then transfer from flat paper to a convex shape…well, it looks more like my profile than his, but my Grammy still loved it.
She even wanted to have them up the night before Halloween and every night until the election, which made me very very happy that they were received so well and she was so excited about them. She’s in a lot of pain which none of us (including apparently, the pain specialists who sold her on a very expensive surgery [$82k] that if anything may have made things worse since it required her to be as still as possible for two months, a very debilitating “recuperation” for someone as active and unstoppable as my Grammy was and hopefully will be again) can do anything about, so it was thrilling to find something that made her smile.
I’d never used one of those special carving knife/saw kits before and I’ll never carve another pumpkin without them again. HUGE difference: so much easier.
I am thankful I had my Grammy’s help in sewing together some stuff for Amalia–I forgot to take pictures of the reversible outfit and hat, but they’re so big (baby sizes are all over the place!) that she’ll probably wear them for her fourth birthday and we’ll see them then. In the meantime, here’s a piccie of the matching hat and bloomers.
I picked the fabrics at a time when Amalia was drooling so much she had a perpetual rash–she was definitely what Heidi calls a “juicy baby.”
Ugh, I still need to put elastic in the bloomers. I’m not thankful for that, inserting elastic is a pain. A little chore, but easily put off…
And I was thankful to have my Grammy there while I tried to work from a pattern, reassuring me that it wasn’t just me who thought the pattern was perhaps too pithy and reliant on jargon as to be vague in what to actually specifically in this case do. Yo sewing pattern-writing peeps, I know if you’ve been sewing for ages it’s all obvious, but then I don’t get why a pattern is even needed then! It was totally like a form response from tech support.
I also did the Lorelei apron from A is for Apron (designer Joan Hand Stroh) while I was down in San Diego and I’m fairly happy with how it turned out. I think these two fabrics might have done better separately than together, but I couldn’t help myself, I couldn’t choose between them.
I funked up the very wide rickrack–it shreds like the dickens when cut and had to be placed just right. I did stitching lines on the cut ends to keep it from fraying.
I like topstitching; I love the way it looks, especially with contrasting thread, and for the most part, I think my control has grown by leaps and bounds–but every once in a while, there’s a hiccup that will remind the recipient that this is very human hand-made indeed.
This will be a thank you present (long overdue).
I’ve pieced together a quilt top for a baby my stepsister is having next month, her first and my father’s first grandchild, so pretty exciting and worthy of trying to expand the whole sewing skill set thingummy.
I’m not sure if I’m terribly happy with how it turned out, but I’d like to think that with the odd colors and pattern going on it will have to be good for stimulating the ol’ baby brain.
I’ll finish it with some white space surrounding the top for visual separation from the bias binding edging, and I don’t know what kind of patterning for the top stitching, we’ll see.
I made a rough draft on paper first for the shape pattern of the thing, then plotted out the numbers I’d need to fit the proportions to end up with the crib size, then filled it in color-wise.
There’s some difference; there’s a pattern and some movement obvious in the rough draft, but isn’t readily apparent in the final top. I vacillate between finding it hideous and being very proud. Maybe pink, orange and green aren’t the best color combos, but I loved the poppy fabric and picked out the coordinating pinks, oranges and greens from those. So yeah, like I said, let’s hope it’ll at least be good for growing baby brains on.
Maybe better with more white space between some of the shapes, or a lesson in there about proportions. Or maybe it’s gorgeous and awesome and I’m a complete freaking color and quilting genius. Probably not.
I am thankful for Straus organic ice cream, the best ice cream ever.
I am thankful that I made a big pot of lentil soup last night, because I completely spaced on doing the grocery shopping and that’s what we’ll be having for our Thanksgiving meal since the shop was shut today when I went, last minute as always…and I am thankful Nick loves lentil soup. (I’m making a cake too, so I am also thankful for a stocked up baking cupboard.)
I am thankful that after all this time, Nick and I still fit together like were made just new for each other.
While we miss our families, I am thankful we live here in Yreka, in the middle of gorgeousness and lovely weather. We are also thankful for the health of our families, even if we can no longer spend so much time with them as to make them thoroughly sick of us.
I am thankful for handspun yarn, there’s really no substitute for its squooshiness, even if it’s not your own.
Messy coffee table. I would have trimmed the photo, but I liked the light and the serendipity of all the color coincidences.
I’ve been working on the same project for the last month, how sad is that? I just don’t pick it up much.
Tomorrow is my mother’s birthday, and I will try to focus on being thankful that we had her with us as long as we did and that we able to know each other as adults and share books, and that if there is an afterlife, and if people are able to communicate at all, perhaps through dreams, the dreams that Grammy and I have been having with Mom in them indicate she is having a great time. So I am grateful and thankful for the happiness this idea gives us, and thankful for the dreams which seem so real that it’s like being given more time.
Really, truly, I am so thankful for so many things. Nick, the dogs, this beautiful place, our happy home full of silliness and dog hair and sweet monkey love. I wish everyone could have what we have and feel what we feel.
See this is why I don’t post very often. I’m a dork, a smug braggart, a slow and sporadic knitter, a spasmodic sewist, I stink at taking pictures of finished objects and I end up not posting for so long that there seems to be too much to catch up on, or, sometimes surprisingly little and not worth the bother, or completely lose focus and end with something random and kind of gross.
I am not thankful for the return of the box elder beetles.
These guys get everywhere. At the end of last winter, they were piled in the tracks of our windows in crunchy little drifts of dried exoskeletons. And they look like mini cockroaches at first glance.
Yuck.