Terrible/Perfect

The Angels Have the Phone Box

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What to Get Your Needleworker

"If you want a golden rule that will fit everybody, this is it: 

Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful."

-William Morris

Stephanie over at Yarn Harlot has a really useful list going (I think she makes one every year) of what to get your knitter for Christmas. You may or may not personally have a knitter, but chances are you know one, and may at some point wish to give them something. Her list is great.

Reading it brought to mind that during my mother's last visit with us, she said that I'm difficult to buy for. At the time I thought it was an odd perception. I mean, like anyone else, I want tons of things. Obviously! Things can be so nice! 

What I think my mother meant to express is that my tastes and habits of acquisition are a bit outside the mainstream. I tend to like things that are somewhat hard to come by; for example, I rarely, if ever, see something that I want in a shopping mall. No insult meant to malls or what may be purchased in them, but in the main, those goods don't reflect my taste. 

I love vintage. I love books. I love exquisitely made useful things. 

I love craft.

In the same impishly helpful spirit of Stephanie's post, I thought I'd list a few objects of desire that, in my opinion, any crafting person who agrees with the words of Mr. Morris up there would appreciate.

1. Just about anything from Maison Sajou

I'm a bit of a Francophile*, but I can objectively say that Sajou makes beautiful, useful things, including scissors (handmade in a small family-owned workshop in France), that make my heart skip. Exceptional embroidery thread, wooden vintage-style tubes of needles, patterns, fabric books, you name it, it's all special. The little kit above would be an incredibly thoughtful gift to present to a very young sewist.

2. American-grown and milled yarns from Brooklyn Tweed.

I am super excited by the revival of small-scale production, and I am super excited to try this yarn. I feel discomforted by the dubious origins of the vast majority of the goods that are out there to buy, so a gorgeous, high-quality yarn like this, entirely produced in the U.S.A., and made by passionate knitters for passionate knitters, is thrilling to me. If you want to give your knitter a very thoughtful gift indeed, buy one of Brooklyn Tweed's patterns along with the yardage of wool needed to make it, in a color your knitter would love.

3. Gera! cross stitch patterns

I adore, adore, adore these. I have one of the Alice in Wonderland patterns, but I so wish the baby sampler had been around when I was having babies. I have no love whatsoever for the cross stitch patterns sold at large craft supply stores, so I'm grateful to know that there are some fantastic designers, particularly out of Japan, doing modern, interesting work. Gera! is by far my favorite.

4. Lantern Moon knitting supplies

In particular, Lantern Moon's knitting cases seem to be more elegantly designed than others I've seen. My top pick is the Knit Aid Case, designed to hold the knitting-specific tools all of us knitters have in our work bags. I have their cable needles, which are little treasures, and intend to replace my lost repair hook with one from them.

5. Fancy stitch markers

Your knitter will never have enough stitch markers, especially if he or she knits a lot of lace. The ones above (and their photograph!) come from Etsy seller The Raveler's Roost. Do a search on Etsy for these, and you can buy your knitter stitch markers that are beautiful, uniquely useful, or that relate to their other passions or interests, whether cheese, avocados, matryoshka dolls, or sock monkeys.

6. Books

Does your crafter have a wishlist through some kind of bookstore? Ask. Or, do a search for books about your crafter's niche, then have someone intimate with him sneak around his bookshelf to make sure you're not getting him something he already has. There are a ton of incredibly interesting and useful books about crafts out there right now, besides pattern books. Ones that have caught my eye in recent years are The Knitter's Book of Wool, 200 Fair Isle Motifs, and The Farmer's Wife Sampler Quilt. Books on the history or some particular fine point of your crafter's favorite pastime are probably welcome; most of us are a bit obsessive.

That's it for now!

*I reeeeeeally want to learn to speak French, but it seems less useful than, say, Spanish. Maybe I'll do it anyway.

Pot o' gold

I don't know about you, but I was getting tired of looking at that busted up yellow tabletop. It needed refreshing all along, and today was its lucky day. Benjamin Moore 2022-20 "sun kissed yellow", which is brilliant and delightful. Exactly what a bright yellow ought to be.

It looks like we're moving house pretty soon, within town. I'm pretty excited. We're good friends with the homeowners, and we've (I've) been given the go-ahead to paint the walls. I have never owned my own home, so at 31 years old I've never painted the walls where I live. I have no idea why but it's been hugely motivating for me. I've been spending FAR too much time at the Benjamin Moore site searching for the color that best approximates these beautiful tiles, and the right grey, and the best color for a little powder room with no window. 

I watched my friends' children this week while their mum is out of town, and it was such an odd feeling: puttering around, washing dishes, doing laundry, scooping dog poop, in a house I'm going to be living in in just about a month.

There's going to be a sewing room. I kind of can't believe it. The only way to justify that kind of space for that kind of activity is to turn my thoughts towards building a business, which I have always wanted to do anyway. Having a dedicated space, where I can fence out little wandering hands and fuzzy dogs and stack packing boxes or whatever in the closet may finally make that possible.

But first: yellow table.

I had no idea refinishing furniture was so immensely satisfying. I'm kind of scaring my husband, for real. I was going on and on about this amazing paint scheme I have in mind for the painted wood panels in the dining/great room area and what I'm going to do to a couple of chairs that I bought at Goodwill and all of a sudden I realized that I could see the whites of his eyes and foam at his lips and he was straining at the bridle, ready to bolt. It's not the expense or time involved, but I guess altering things is a concept deeply alien to him. He doesn't care about design at all. I take that back: he is drawn to certain aesthetic qualities, but he doesn't think about objects and color in the same way that I do. Or maybe he doesn't think about old, crappy objects and pale, apothecarian green in the same way that I do.

Oh well. If I ever get to the point of reupholstering something he might pass out.

On the make

Right now I'm feeling deeply sad, and at the same time deeply fulfilled. It's a weird tension.

So, color! Who knew? I kept dropping out of visual art studies, so color theory is all new to me. Any great books on the subject I should know about? I was an art major at both of the schools I went to, for about three weeks apiece, and I couldn't get past the part of art school where some intensely cold woman whose paintings were chiefly of strained-looking, pale nuns made you draw pottery stacked on the rungs of an open ladder. Blech. Anyway, I'm trying not to regret having found fiber arts so late and looking forward to coming to it as an older person with a much firmer identity and vision and voice. I have an unbelievable amount of catching up to do technically, but I'll take a silver lining anywhere I find one.

I'm fascinated by the ways that color and pattern come together in a quilt. The balance of print scales, the need for solids or semi-solids to rest the eye, the importance of line weight and sharpness in the prints themselves, the subtle difference one element makes in a composition...

I could do this all day.

A little separation

I caught a vivid glimpse of my own ridiculousness tonight. The younger one, who is at the time of this writing 27 months old, is going through a bout of separation anxiety, which has been hellish, for all of us. I had no idea that children her age could have separation anxiety, but apparently it's not unheard of. Anyway, she wants me to carry her around all day long, and cries when I put her down, and cries when I leave the room, etc. Not all the time, but, you know, at every point in the day when it is critical that I be doing something that is not carrying her around. Like when I need to use the bathroom.

I've been really, really stressed out because of it. So today I basically checked out on my kids. I stepped in for the usual and necessary intervals: breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks, unclogging the toilet, dealing with various poop situations, but otherwise I decided we would stay home all day and I would do some sewing. The girls were told to entertain themselves. It felt radical, delicious and, yet, neglectful, even though I was there, responsive, and taking care of their physical and emotional needs. Even so, tonight I kept on sewing. The little one had a very late nap, and it was shaping up to be a late, late night with her, but I kept at it anyway. Eventually Mr. T took her into the bedroom to try to get her down, and I just let them go do their thing while I kept at the machine. 

I felt so guilty.

And then I realized that I feel guilty for...letting my husband, my partner, my children's father, be the active parent so I can take a break? For real. Ridiculous.

I am insanely available to my children. It is extremely rare for me to be without at least one of them. Last weekend Mr. T took them both out to the park and left me at home, and I realized that it was the first time that had ever happened; each week, I simply escape out of the house here and there to run errands by myself. I finally realized what a dumb arrangement that was, and how much easier it would be for Mr. T to take the kids out someplace they like to be, and so I got this huge expanse (four, five hours?) of time to myself, in my house. That I used the time to clean and organize instead of take a nap and sew like I intended is another matter, but geez. Absurdly overdue.

I wake up with my children fighting over who gets to be closest to my body. I am their sole caregiver from 6:30 a.m. until 6:00 p.m. I am still their primary caregiver the remainder of the time. I need breaks. I mean good, solid, regular breaks.

I'M NOT GOING TO FEEL BAD ABOUT THAT.

Yes I am.

I believe, though, that this neverending Mommy shift is 99.9% of the cause behind my being a crankier Mommy than I'd like to be. Being unendlingly available is not good for me, it's not good for the kids, and it's not good for Mr. T, who needs some regular, long stretches of being the active duty parent. So if it's between feeling guilty for drawing a line in the sand about getting breaks and feeling guilty about being a bitch to my kids, well. 

Guilt or no guilt, I got some sewing done today.

The big kid listened to Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH while Baby bumbled around doing destructive things and I added three, nearly four more quilt blocks to the pile (their centers had already been sewn, I'm not that fast).

Maybe Saturday I'll do a few more.

Octopuses

We had a crazy Easter weekend. I feel like there was something I did on Friday but I can't remember it. Saturday was the animal parade, which is, if you are not a curmudgeon, as I know some of you are, charming. I'll let Wikipedia do the 'splainin, if the drum major dressed up as an octopus frightens, confuses, and/or arouses you. In that photograph it kind of looks like he's wearing tap shoes. I can only dream. Sunday was Easter, and my children became crackheads. They ate chocolate for breakfast and it was downhill from there...just all day madness and then so. much. screaming. at bedtime. I feel bad for being a fascist about sweets and then we have a day like this, when they're eating the same amount as other kids and they get jacked up, can't sleep and then don't fully come back to normalcy for a few days. No more damn chocolate!

CAFFEINE IS THE DEVIL.

But all that is over now. Let's move on.

I feel self conscious posting about bought objects as much as I do, but I really shouldn't. I don't read a ton of blogs but the ones that I do read are about stuff, when it comes right down to it, specifically about crafting and the supplies related to crafting: fabric, yarn, notions, etc. I should just get over it and own the whole thing.

I LIKE FABRIC. A LOT. To a lesser extent I like mid-century pottery.

To be fair the "stash" is fundamental to fiber arts. It's like having the full spectrum of paints. For realz, I'm not making that up.

I stashed it up a bit last week; my JoAnn got the Denyse Schmidt line and I went all the way. Or 1/3 of the way, if we're talking in fractions of yards.

There are two colorways in the full collection, "Picnic" (reds and blues) and "Fairgrounds" (greens and blues), and I love the Picnic fabrics like crazycakes.

The Fairgrounds are less inspiring, but I have an issue with getting so hung up on loving a fabric that I can't decide what to do with it, and it sits unused. So I got the Fairgrounds prints to relax with and actually get quilting.

The bottom fabric is actually "Picnic", and there is a yellow print that is "Fairgrounds" not shown here. Obviously some of the elements are mix and match.

I have a serious log cabin quilting problem. Every time I start pulling fabrics out and plotting for a quilt, I start thinking log cabin. Whenever I say or think "log cabin" I think of Log Cabin Republicans. Anyway, I want Modern Log Cabin Quilting really badly. I think I'd make every one of the projects in that book. And Susan Beal, World of Geekcraft? Say what? We are friends now. I just decided that. I have this dream of a periodic table quilt, and I think she would fully understand that vision. 

So I'm log cabining the DS Quilts fabrics:

Why are you puckering in the middle? I don't care. I'm going to wash you so hard.

I'm going to mix up the blocks between the ten fabrics so they're all a little different (I also have six solids to try and make things pop a bit) and then I think I'm going to do a bento box. A large throw size. I'm stoked. 

I also picked up a bit of this amazing floral, from a line called Botanical Pop:

The baby crunched it all up, but dang! Pow.

I think I've used up all of my creative time this evening writing this groundbreaking piece of prose but I'm fired up for some sewing. I realized I hadn't worked on my Mendocino quilt for many months, and when I pulled it down I was all ahguhguhguhguhguh.

Why did I abandon this project? It had something to do with thread, and a bobbin. I remember that much. How stupid.

DS Quilts Fairgrounds bento box, it has been...satisfactory. But I'm in love with someone else, and I'm leaving you to be with her. I hope you'll understand. She's a freaking mermaid.

Ook.

Baby's Christmas gift is taking me forever. Forever and ever and ever and ever, amen.

Today, new experiments in the placement of safety eyes and embroidery under extreme conditions (At the top of K2! While skydiving! During a space walk! Inside of a volcano!)* produced the finished head of one crooked little dude. But a cute crooked little dude (I hope).

And you know, we're all kind of crooked, right? And cute.

*In real life, I was trying to embroider the mouth on after I'd stitched the head mostly closed. To be completely frank the process seemed like potentially helpful practice should I ever need to deliver a calf.

Homemade

I have a quiet house for once, so I can hang here for a moment or two. Not too many moments, though, because I have a rather full plate. I'm hoping to make some miracles happen this next week, and with my dude home from work on vacation for pre-Christmas chillaxing and to celebrate our Solstice wedding anniversary I might be able to actually make some of the things I bought supplies for.

This is the project for tonight and tomorrow:

All cut up and already being stitched, huzzah huzzah.

Less pressing on my agenda were cupcakes, but I made those, too, and they are Red Velvet, except they're not red, because I refuse to put red #40 in food that I give to my children. So they're vanilla cupcakes that happen to be brown. And tasty.

These will get the cream cheese frosting treatment in a little bit NOM NOM NOM.

While I haven't been anything resembling productive recently (Molars. All we have left are those two year molars. And then the teething is over.), Big Kid has been busily working away at her little table. It's inspiring, actually. She just goes for it with scissors and paper and tape and markers and now needle and thread and felt and buttons and turns out all manner of funny little objects.

I showed her how to piece for a quilt today, using felt that she cut into squares (more or less) and a little running stitch. She's doing great.

She also rolled some beeswax candles this week all on her own to give to her ballet teacher. She drew a bow on paper, wrapped it around the candles and tucked a little note in. I don't know that her ballet teacher has all that much affection for her (they're only in there 30 minutes a week), but she could not wait to go to ballet so she could give it to her teacher. It was incredibly sweet.

Lately she's been making things to put in Baby's stocking. We have a book (it's like this, only the first volume) that collects some of the Christmas stories from the Laura Ingalls Wilder Little House series, and in one of the stories Laura and Mary make a "button string" for Baby Carrie. Big Kid decided that Baby needs a button string of her own, and despite the fact that Baby will be allowed to have the button string for all of two minutes before it gets tucked safely away, I think it's lovely that she thought to make one and took the time to do it.

She also made her a ball. Out of a sheet of felt.

These little treasures are now down in the toe of Baby's stocking.

There are SEVEN. DAYS. LEFT. until the big day, so I'm sure she'll be putting together all sorts of other silly/sublime gifts for people. 

Creativity and generosity are pretty great.

Give a shout out in the comments if you're making something (food? drink? toys? clothes? soap? hot buttered rum?), I'd love to hear what other folks are up to.

Happy week, all!

Six weeks

Part of aging is time compression. At Big Kid's age, the month between Thanksgiving and Christmas felt like an eon. At 30 I'm panicking that there are ONLY SIX WEEKS (and change) until Christmas, and so much that needs to be done, and so much that I would like to do. 

A good friend of mine is on the same page and posted a link to Simple Mom's Christmas budget advice, which was oddly soothing. She makes two suggestions that make sense to me: focusing on the little things, and making lists.

I like lists.

So I'm making my lists, and Big Kid is doing some holiday prep work of her own. She is seriously in the swing of it already, which is kind of frightening.

Gifts already made for Mama and Daddy...

A dog-eared copy of the Magic Cabin catalog...

And her wish list (which at 10 items totals over $1,000. Damn.)...

(For anyone struggling to read her writing: Noelle (a doll), the Juliet dress, the mushroom doll, the flower fairy and home, Waldorf doll, stacking rainbow, Nicki babies, barn, and then her hand was tired and she wanted me to finish it for her. Hopefully my handwriting is legible).

Next year I need to be more careful about letting her get ahold of catalogs. She knows that she will be getting a stocking and one wrapped gift, and I've been very clear that we can't afford (and wouldn't want her to be inundated with) more than one toy that's similar to what she's put on her list (and by "similar" I mean I will probably be making it myself). She knows that she won't be waking up to a small mountain under the tree, but having a magazine of TOYS! just creates desire where there was none before. In this case, desires for very beautiful, very expensive natural toys.

So for her, and for us, Christmas planning is all about prioritizing.

I try to keep asking myself: how do I want my family to experience this season?  And I want it to be peaceful and joyful, and a kind of time-out, like stepping into the warm doorway of a friendly neighborhood shop during a cold rain.

My first priority this year is to make a comprehensive list of our family's traditions around this season. Not just for me, to make my planning easier, but for my girls. The more concrete our funny little family traditions are for me, the easier (and less hectic) it will be to make sure they happen every year, and the more they will come to rely on the familiarity of favorite events and a mood of calmness, delight, levity and wonder. This is really where the "little things" come in: the Christmas movies, the evening family walk through the neighborhood to look at Christmas lights, the pot of Mexican hot chocolate drunk while decorating the tree. 

My second priority is getting all of the shopping that needs to be done, done now (and I'm not going to feel bad about giving my parents wine, again. Nice bottles of wine never come amiss).

Then there are the "tasks" like sending out cards, having Santa pictures taken and sitting for the girls' annual portraits. I hope to schedule those in as quickly as possible so we're done.

Then, there are a couple of big craft projects that take precedence.

After that, it's funtime.

I like this last list. The "we'd like to do that, but no worries if we don't" list. The "let's light some candles and put on Johnny Mathis and get our hands messy" list:

Salt dough ornaments

Peppermint bark

Spritz!

Paper snowflakes

Beeswax candles

And something or other with wool.

I like wool.

The Slayer

I haven't abandoned you, dear internets!

I'm just busy right now.

A couple agenda items to hit before we break for lunch:

-Watching the first season of Buffy again makes me feel old. The Scooby Gang was all one fictional year behind me in high school, so everything looks all familiar and dated at the same time. I'm still not completely used to TV shows and movies looking "really 90s".

-Is it just me, or does ironing and cutting for projects take foreeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeveeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeer? I do wash everything, because I want the option of drying the shit out of it later on, so the ironing is maybe more epic than it needs to be, but seriously it's the biggest time commitment for most projects. Hence the Netflix Instant Watch.

-Dear Netflix, Please figure out how to add subtitles to your Instant Watch selections, or fix your audio levels. I can't hear anyone talking and then suddenly it's all KABLAMMMMO! POW! CRASH! SOMEBODY SCREAMING! It makes me want to mail y'all a movie of the look that comes over my face when I have a pair of fabric shears halfway around a tight curve and a floor covered in selvage strips and I hear the baby crying. Thanks! -Me

-When does Spike show up? Wikipedia says season two. Excellent.