a wee sewing project

Yesterday my daughter handed me a little blue stuffed animal with one arm off. It belongs to her American history teacher, who uses this stuffed animal instead of the usual card or key as a "get out of the classroom free" token.

The teacher knows I sew, which is why she sent the stuffed animal home with my daughter for repair.

Sewing the arm back on was the work of a moment. I couldn't help adding a little shirt to keep the wee beastie warm.

And I couldn't help injecting a wee bit of political commentary. I do hope the teacher takes it in the gentle spirit in which it was given.

crafty bits

These were some of the Christmas gifts I made last year. The patterns were gathered from a month-long feature of quick and clever craft tutorials on the fabulous Sew, Mama, Sew! blog.

In the top picture are a tote bag, journal cover, lavender-and-rice heat pillow, zippered pouch, and placemats. They were so much fun to make, and working with fabrics I love made the process a pleasure, even through multiple gift sets under a wee bit of time pressure.

The pins are made with shrinky-dink plastic. I love this stuff, and can't even begin to think of all the things one could do with it. I mean, who would have thought of decorative heads for pins? Not me, that's for sure.

Are Clotheslines Retro?

photo by tobyleah on flickr under a Creative Commons license

I hope not. I think they're the Next Big Thing.

My mom used to hang out the sheets when I was little. I remember the fresh, clean scent of the fabric and its crisp hand. Why has it taken me so long to put up my own clothesline?

Years ago I took my laundry to the local and extremely crowded laundromat. One had to keep a hawk eye out for machines about to be emptied or for a folding table with an efficient folder. There were lots of dirty looks and pointy elbows at that laundromat.

This was before laundromats began having amenities like a television (although watching Jerry Springer would have made the experience worse), and wi-fi access was probably just a gleam in some engineer's eye. For that matter, so was the internet. I didn't own a Walkman. I didn't know how to sew or knit. Reading a book meant missing out on newly empty machines, which wasn't worth the time lost. I believe I graded papers to pass the time, which made the experience even more dismal.

Those details came back to me only at this writing. What I have always remembered about that laundromat is the sign on the wall extolling the virtues of electric dryers. Dryers are more hygienic -- no more dust, dirt, or (horrors) bird droppings on your clothes. No more clothing faded from the sun. And the heat of the dryer magically eliminates wrinkles, so there is no more ironing. A happy housewife in dress and heels smiled at the shiny appliance. Didn't I want to be like her?

Lord, no. Even though I smirked at the sign and lamented the lost clothesline, it sadly never occurred to me to use one. I want to go back in time and beat myself about the head and shoulders. (And hand myself a sewing needle, thread, and a bit of cloth.)

There is an art to clotheslines. A bit of experimentation, and sneaky looks at other people's clotheslines, taught me to hang shirts from the bottom and pants from the top, unzipped and with pockets pulled out to allow air to circulate inside. Towels and sheets need extra clothespins or you will find them in the perennial garden. (It took me a week to find one of my son's shirts behind the daylilies.) On sunny, breezy days I can put out two loads, but when it's still or humid, there will be damp towels and wet waistbands at the end of the day.

And how on earth does one manage the clothespins? Take a shirt. I pin one side, which twists under the weight of the rest of the shirt, and try to get a clothespin out of my mouth and onto the other edge of the shirt. Then I have to re-pin the first side, which has wrinkled under the pin. Then back to the laundry basket for more pins before wrestling with a towel. The kids have a good laugh when they see me trying to hold the towel to the line with my head while reaching for a clothespin.

Thank heaven for free patterns on the internet. Life is now a bit easier, with a retro-styled clothespin apron:
Tied in with bow:

In keeping with the ideals of conserving time and energy, I tried to make the apron entirely from materials I already had. In the end I did have to buy two dollars' worth of brown fabric at Wal-Mart (I know, I know) for the binding.

The pattern is from Lucy at My Byrd House and I love it. The only changes I made were to simplify the waistband and change fabrics at the bow-end of the ties.

Top 10 Lost Items

(click to view larger)

10. ruler
9. stitch markers
8. the right size needle
7. crochet hook
6. pattern
5. how-to book
4. pen
3. pencil
2. scissors
1. glasses!

Perhaps most important, on the other side of the chair, a clean table top waiting for my cup of tea.

Thrifty

My mother-in-law passed on last year. She was a woman of remarkable generosity and talent. As the wife of a Navy officer, she moved her family across the country -- and an ocean -- many times with efficiency and grace. And she was thrifty: she could squeeze a dime till it screamed, let alone squeaked.

One of her talents was sewing, from cushions to tailored suits. And by going through her sewing supplies, I'm awed once again by her thriftiness. Several spools had different threads on them, just dabs of each. I'm guessing that she wound leftover bobbin thread onto empty spools to save for the next time she needed that color.

She saved every snap and fastener, even if its mate were gone. Perhaps she saved them for mending, or just from habit.
And there were jars upon boxes of buttons, sorted by color and sometimes type: I wonder what she used the purple buttons for. Clearly most of the buttons were used, cut from old clothing. Somebody must have worn a lot of shirts with little white buttons!

I'm sorting through the threads, buttons, notions, needles, and fabrics, choosing some to keep and some to pass on to others. (If anyone needs grey buttons, I think I have several pounds of them.) While I don't keep my thread ends, I am going to put one of the multi-colored spools on my sewing table to remind me of my mother-in-law, her talents, and her thrift.

perfect summer day

But first, a joke:

Guns don't kill people. People kill BANG oops.

(You kind of have to say it out loud.) It's from one of my favorite TV shows, This Hour Has 22 Minutes on Canadian television.

Today was gorgeous: sunny and hot, but with a nice occasional breeze. I planned to spend a good bit of time power washing the deck, but machines don't like me and it quit. (Bad switch. We've already replaced it once. You have to mail order a replacement. Don't get me started.)

So the kids and I swam in the pool, and played with the dogs, and I put new syrup in the hummingbird feeders, and it was just just a bit too hot to work in the gardens, and I really wanted to sew. So I took the sewing machine and ironing board outside.

It was wonderful. The birds weren't at all discomfited and kept up a steady presence at the feeders. I was surprised that even a very gentle breeze made surprisingly loud background music for my sewing. It was peaceful and simply wonderful.

The kids saw me having so much fun that they came out of the air-conditioning to join me. They made their own dinners (peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, canned ravioli, and hummus on crackers) and brought them out. We sat and ate and again I wondered why we don't do this more often.

Tomorrow is supposed to be thunderstormy, so we'll probably be inside. I'm so glad we had today.

creativity

(note: photo edited 25 January 2008 to remove copyrighted material used without permission)

It is such a joy to work in a clean space. After a massive de-cluttering and de-stashing, my craft room lets me breathe. Sometimes it takes drastic action to re-invigorate one's creativity: I packaged up three quarters of my fabric stash to give away. That process was agonizing. Each piece reminded me of its original purpose, whether for a particular quilt or because it cried out to me with its color and design. But it was too much wealth, requiring endless organizing, and became a burden. I couldn't face the bins and boxes of fabrics calling out to me, rooting me in the past when my tastes have changed. With the stash and the mess gone, this room's quiet is somehow quieter than the rest of the house.

The drawers and magazine bins are from Ikea, which has finally opened a store only two hours' drive away. Following the dictum that life is too short to hoard one's treasures, I cut into some of my remaining favorite fabrics to cover the drawers and bins. The chocolate and pink ones on the left are by Denyse Schmidt, who puts colors and simple shapes together in a way that is completely refreshing. The animals on the right are by Beebe Moss, Ami Simms' mother, who has inspired a whole movement to raise money from quilts to research Alzheimer's disease. And the bins in the middle have the coolest paint-by-number birds and flowers, half finished. (My husband had to study them to see if the numbers on the unpainted portion were consistent; he thinks they are.)

The glass vase is for those little thread clippings and fabric scraps that would otherwise inevitably end up on the floor. I found it at a garage sale, I think. I love its curving flower petal shape and gently weathered surface.

The quilt is a top I put together in a fit of inspiration a summer or two ago at my parents' lake house. My mom very generously took me to her lovely local quilt shop and let me pick fabrics to make a quilt. I loved the old-fashioned florals in the shop that day and added regimented squares of navy blue to smarten them up. I was reminded of the garden design advice of the English gardener Penelope Hobhouse: Structure! Flower gardens need structure! Put in some statues and shaped shrubs so that the soft billows of flowers have something to organize them.

That summer I only completed the top, and it has languished amid other unfinished quilts until now. It was the first project I chose to work on in my fresh new start of crafting. So far it has close spirally quilting across the center, and leaves and straight lines in the white borders. Next, the navy half squares at the edges need their second halves appliqued on (I decided not to machine-piece them into the border fabric), then the binding applied. It's very exciting to me to see the different facets of quiltmaking come together to make an object greater than the sum of its parts (or so I hope).

There seems to be a lesson here: from strict structure comes creativity. And I'd wrap up this post with that bit of wisdom, only I'm not sure it's true. For everything, eventually, ends in chaos (the rest of my house is a huge reminder of this principle), whether it's a craft room or a house or endless paperwork at the office, and I don't want my life's purpose to be fighting chaos, battling the inevitable. That sounds like drudgery. The fight isn't, after all, with knights in armor and bright slashing swords (no blood in my fantasy, please). In my reality, it's more likely scrub brushes and dishes and laundry that never end, like the pails of water in Mickey Mouse's Sorcerer's Apprentice. And when the battle invades my crafting space, inspiration withers.

I had intended the floral quilt with its regimented squares to be the destination of my musing: the free form of creativity bounded by a structured form. But I think, instead, it's the paint-by-number fabric design. Here is the promise of an orderly progression of art: begin with the outlines, then label the colors and fill them in. When all the blank spaces have their prescribed color, the artwork is done. No mess. No wandering, or wondering. It's structured from beginning to end.

But what makes this particular design so wonderful is that it is forever unfinished. The blank spaces, marked only with their obscure numbers (is 17 orange? maybe -- but maybe not) are what draw the eye, jarring against the colorful completed portions. The promise of a destination is there, the direction is given -- or is it? Maybe it's not the process, nor the completion. Maybe it's that moment when we think we can see both, when we're almost, but not quite, sure we have the path.