thebitchystitcher.bloodspot.com

Buoyed by my successful completion of a quilt last week, I bought some more batting and set about finishing the shark quilt top I had made for Harper over a year ago.

As I was pin basting it, I stabbed my thumb with one of the safety pins, not realizing that I had drawn blood until I saw a spot of red on one of the white strips of the quilt. Naturally, I said something unrepeatable and Harper wanted to know what had happened. I showed her my thumb and pointed to the blood spot on the quilt, and in typical Harper fashion, she raised her arms as if in victory and said, "You got BLOOD? On my SHARK QUILT? That is SO AWESOME!"

So I've decided to let the blood smear that I got on it when I let the sewing machine needle gouge another finger while I was quilting it be a surprise. 'Cause you know me. I'm a giver.

Red light! Green light!

Merry Two Days After Christmas!

As I mentioned on Facebook, a few weeks ago, just a couple days after I broke my toe, I woke up with a shoulder muscle completely seized up. It was clenched so tight, I couldn't lower it to a normal position and it hurt like a motherfucker so I had to keep my left arm curled up against my chest to keep the weight of it from pulling on the injured muscle. Thus, for several days, I was a limping hunchback, gallumping around the house muttering, "Yes, master...."

I lived with it for almost two weeks and then finally broke down and went to see my doctor about it. She put me on steroids and muscle relaxers and said if I wasn't seeing improvement in 3 or 4 days then we would talk about physical therapy or chiropractic.

I'm sure many of you have been or are currently under the care of a chiropractor and think they are wonderful, and I am honestly glad that you have found relief in their care, but I have yet to meet one that did me any good. On the advice of real, seemingly competent medical professionals, I have sought the help of chiropractors three times and all three times I ended up no better than when I started and in one case probably worse.

My favorite of the three was Dr. Wagner, a youngish, Jon Denver-y looking man, who was very earnest and enthusiastic about all the money he was about to get out of me, and he tried hard to be the kind of practitioner who would educate his patients as well as treat them. Except he didn't take into account that one of those patients might be an over-educated skeptic who requires peer-reviewed articles from major medical journals and years-long, double-blind studies before she might be convinced of anything.

So on my second visit—the one where he showed me the results of my x-rays—he wanted to explain all about "subluxation" and had a small model of a spinal column as a visual aid. The model had not only the vertebrae but also the spinal cord within it and nerves branching out from that. The nerves ended in tiny LEDs. So as he spoke about "displacement" and "dysfunctional segments," he surreptitiously pressed a button to make all the little LEDs flash red, indicating, I assumed, pain and general Bad Feelings. Then, as he extolled the wonders of cracking my neck repeatedly, he secretly pushed another button, which made all the little lights glow green. Green for Go! Green for Yay, Spine! He then sat back, looking rather satisfied with himself, and awaited my response to his elegant proof. Which was essentially, "You're shitting me, right?"

Despite this, I let him crack my neck and other parts of my spine many times over the next several months, and while I kind of liked how my back felt immediately afterwards, it did nothing to improve my chronic back pain or my migraines and I eventually stopped going, indicating to him, I suppose, that the Red Lights of Evil had won. Several years later I went to another quack - I mean chiropractor (I know they prefer Doctor of Chiropractic, but they can bite me) - when I was pregnant with Devon. My hip joints were so loose that they would often collapse as I walked, which was extremely painful. It was bad enough that I left my job a few months before I intended to, because the office was up a long flight of steps and we had no parking nearby. I even bought a cane. The doctors I consulted all insisted that a chiropractor was my only option, so I went and this one was a lovely young woman who happened to be pregnant and was due around the same time as me. She proceeded to take some medeval looking device and hammer my hip with it, then some electrical doohickey, and by the time she was done, I was in a hell of a lot more pain than when I started. And I went back! More than once. Not because I believed she could do anything for me, but because I wanted to at least be able to say that I had tried it when I decided to make someone listen to my complaints about how goddamn much my hips hurt.

So, suffice to say I wasn't keen on pursuing that option. I have become even more blunt from years of self-employment and the consequent lack of socializing, and I'd probably get myself kicked out. AREA WOMAN ARRESTED IN CHIROPRACTIC MELEE. "She kept screaming something about green and red lights," said terrified onlookers.

So, after 3 or 4 days, it wasn't much better, but I decided to wait until after Christmas to do anything about it. The things that hurt most were working at the computer, driving, and pushing a shopping cart. Naturally, I spend most of my time typing and driving, with occasional pauses to pick up stuff at the grocery store. Thus, my lack of posting and the sorry state of the snack shelf in our pantry.

Then - a Christmas miracle! Saturday morning was the first time I awoke without having to immediately take a megadose of Advil and apply alternate rounds of heat and cold. As suddenly as it had come, it went away. There's still a bit of stiffness, and a twinge now and then, but otherwise it's all better. Chiropractors across the Maryland capital area can all breathe easier now.

Strangely, the one thing that didn't hurt was quilting. Which I suppose I should take as some sign that I should just be sewing instead of writing, but no one's gonna pay me to make crappy quilts (at least no one's offered to - yet). I finished the table runner and got that mailed off, so I got the crazy idea that I might try to complete one of the quilt tops stacked up in my closet. Back in 2009, I made this for my youngest child:

Sometime after I finished it, I added a dark purple border and made my first attempt at free motion quilting an entire quilt. I bought the gloves and the silicone thingy and made a good effort, but only got about a quarter of the way done before I gave up.

What I was missing was a table to the left of my sewing table to hold up the weight of the quilt. I got my husband to help with a wee bit of furniture rearranging last week, and I dragged out the quarter-done quilt and gave it a go.

It took me several days to complete the work I had done on it back in 2009. I finished the rest of it in one afternoon.

I used a lavender thread and stippled the living crap out of it. Found a slightly different purple fabric for the binding, and by Christmas Eve, my youngest daughter had a new quilt, one that her mother made entirely herself, without having to resort to paying someone else to quilt it. I'm not sure what to make of the fact that I was able to do that, when so many other tasks were incredibly painful, but I'm sure someone could make a model with red and green lights to help explain it.

The Monogram Project

One evening last week, the new neighbors' kids were over at our house and the eldest, a girl who is turning 9 soon, eventually decided to hang out with me rather than the other kids. At some point, the answer to one of her many, many questions contained the words "sewing room" and she wanted to know what kinds of things I sew. So I showed her a couple quilts, and she was duly impressed. That's why I love making quilts for kids - they think its so awesome that you can do something like that and haven't quite yet developed the "so you didn't have enough money to buy one at the store" mentality that older kids and many grown-ups have. I also showed her a purse I had made and that's when her face really lit up. "Wow! I could sure use something like that,"she said. "I have a wallet but I don't have a purse and my mom always has to carry it in hers." Knowing that her birthday was coming up in just over a week, I asked what her favorite colors were, and she said blue, green, and orange. And was very emphatic about the orange.

I scoured the internet and tapped into the Facebook hive mind, and finally ended up buying this pattern. I used fusible fleece instead of interfacing and used solid fabric instead of jelly roll strips. I actually had an orange fabric with green and blue stripes in my stash and paired it with an old Erin McMorris fabric I bought a couple years ago.

But now that I've made it, I'm wondering if she's allowed to have a purse. She's always telling me what her mom won't allow her to do, and of course they are all things I totally let my kids do. I will leave it to your imagination as to what those things actually are.

So, I might get in trouble, but I've decided I don't care. That seems to be my general attitude these days. I might get in trouble, but I don't care.

I've been thinking about the new year coming up, and I will be glad when this one is over. There have been some good things about it, certainly, but 2010 will forever be the year my brother got brain cancer. And, as I say, good things have come even from that, but even so, I am anxious to leave 2010 behind me.

I started thinking about all the quilting projects I would like to do in the next year, and many of those will be given away. I've also been thinking about wall hangings and about pushing my nascent applique skills further in 2011. I've been focussing on hand applique but I also want to learn to do it by machine, and while I was thinking about this, I just decided - out of nowhere, really - to take a couple of the fabrics from my Christmas quilt and make a big M. Like a monogram. Then it occurred to me that this would be a neat ongoing project throughout the year, or maybe even longer.

So I have decided that for every project I complete, I will take some of the leftover fabric and create an M applique, each with a different font. I may quilt and bind each piece separately, or I may even frame them. Or perhaps they will end up in one quilted piece to be hung on the wall. Whatever the final product, I think it will be a neat way to commemorate all my projects and keep a piece of them with me.

Now I just have to figure out what the hell I'm doing.

Or should I say, "TOE-rture"? No, probably not.

Um, have you noticed that Christmas is looming? Every year I have panic attacks starting December 1, because every year I find myself in a situation where there will be no Christmas unless certain parties who owe me money cough it up in a timely fashion. This situation was aggravated four years ago, when my chosen method of birth control failed around tax time and our second daughter was born 6 days before Christmas. Even though we had David neutered a couple years ago, I still won't let him near me in April. Or May, just to be safe.

So, once again, I am biting my nails and hoping for the best.

In between working on the next articles, I have been staring at the dresden plate table runner and wondering how the hell to quilt it. I have done nothing beyond stippling yet, and I really wanted something different, so I went back to my Virtual Quilting Mentor, Leah Day, and let her words of wisdom convince me to try a paisley design in the area surrounding the dresden plates.

Here is what I did, on a practice panel:

Not great. But not so bad that I'd have to wad it up and use it to scrub toilets. So I was all ready to start in on the real thing when WHAM. I smashed my right foot against the leg of a chaise in our (to quote Git Down Kitty) "fo-yay."

This was not an unusual occurrence. I smash my toes on furniture legs all the time, and so when I hobbled into the kitchen and announced what I had just done, pretty much everyone just rolled their eyes and went, "Again?" But I knew something was different about this time because usually I'm in blinding pain for about a minute and I say lots of bad words and then it goes away. This time it was oddly numb, but I still felt panicky and I wanted to say lots of bad words, but I didn't need to. Harper helpfully reminded me, after noting my unprecedented restraint, that I could say the word Ramona came up with in "Ramona and Beezus": guts. So I sat in the kitchen with ice on my foot shouting, "GUTS, GUTS, GUTS!"

Then the pain set in. And the swelling. And the colors! Such pretty colors. 

I suppose I could have gone to a clinic or the emergency room, but since the toe wasn't pointing in an unnatural direction and the pain wasn't more than I could bear (as long as I didn't actually, you know, move it or walk on it), I elected to just buddy tape it and stay off of it for a day or two. This of course meant that I got to read all day yesterday, and that meant I plowed through the last book in the Outlander series in record time. And of course she leaves you with the most tantalizing cliff-hangers in this one, when I have to wait for her to FINISH WRITING BOOK EIGHT. I suppose I should be glad I have something to look forward to, but WHAT IS JAMIE GOING TO DO TO LORD JOHN? Or Claire, for that matter? And God only knows what will happen to Roger. He'll probably end up blinded and castrated. 

Or forced to wait years for book eight, because that, my friends, is torture.

You can dress her up, but you can't take her out

Ah, home.

Last Sunday, we piled the kids in the car and drove south to my ancestral state of Tennessee where we stayed at my parents' home for just under a week. Nearly every time we have done this in the past, someone has been ill, either succumbing just prior to departure or shortly thereafter. Last year, David was recovering from pneumonia and Devon had an ear infection. Devon was also sick the year before that, as was David. In fact, it's almost always a small child or David or both, but never me. This time, miraculously, no one had even a sniffle and Devon, bless her heart, was sunny, sweet, and pleasant almost the entire time.

But it was still incredibly stressful, as family visits always are.

Arrangements had been made for us to drive on Thursday to Franklin, where my brother lives, to meet up at his house for a couple hours with my sister and her family and then go to a restaurant that they recommended for Thanksgiving dinner. Sparta, where my parents live, is about 2 hours away from Franklin, and there is nothing in between the two. NOTHING. Miles and miles and miles of NOTHING. And while getting there was long and boring, coming back was worse because you know what's out your window when you drive through nothing at night? INFINITE, IMPENETRABLE BLACKNESS. Driving down windy, two-lane highways in a thick, dense shroud of negative nothing is not exactly boring. IT'S TERRIFYING. I was absolutely sure that either a huge, 20-point deer was going to leap out of the void and impale us all or some crazy redneck, blurry-eyed from a case of Bud Light and too much family togetherness, would cross the median and we'd all be obliterated in a greasy smear on the pavement in the middle of NOWHERE. As it was, we nearly hit a dog and an albino skunk. Seriously. It probably plays banjo and owns a still.

As I have done all my life, and will probably continue to do even after I am dead, I overdressed myself and my family for the occasion. For me, that is still not saying much, since I don't own any decent clothes, but I did wear real shoes with heels (stacked heels, but still) and the girls had on dresses. David was going to wear a tie, but I actually managed to think clearly just long enough to tell him to just bring it and put it on if he felt he needed it. Naturally, everyone else was in jeans and t-shirts. I do this all the time. I always assume that if I go casual, no one else will, and I'll look like the idiot who has no respect for others and can't dress properly. But instead, I always look like the idiot who dresses like a grandma: pearls and pumps just to buy a can of tuna.

Dinner itself was pretty sad, at least for me. I have a...ahem...condition, resulting from having my gall bladder removed about 10 years ago. Most people live without a gall bladder just fine, but others - five percent, maybe - can't tolerate the bile just being dumped into their intestines constantly. I won't go into all the details, but I will say that it is rather painful. How painful? People wonder why I was willing to give birth twice without pain medication, and it is because, even though labor lasts longer and is certainly more exhausting, it doesn't actually hurt as much as the cramps this condition produces.

Naturally, it happened on the way to Franklin, and though it eased up a bit throughout the visit and dinner, I knew it wasn't over (and hoo, boy it wasn't - at certain points on the ride home I was hoping that deer would show up and put me out of my misery). So I wasn't too willing to stuff my face at dinner. Not that I would have anyway, probably, since it was all buffet style and I have a deep-seated dislike of buffets. Besides the fact that you just have no clue what some of the dishes actually are (Oh, that's undercooked possum with jellied phlegm and mule hoof gravy! Specialty of the house!) there's also the bacteria-loving semi-warm temperature and the blatant lack of even a sneeze guard (at least there wasn't one at this joint, and I don't believe they help anyway). You just know people are picking up every roll and individual pecan pie and setting it back down, even though they pulled something long and green out of their nose only moments before. Gaaack.

But even if it had been made by my own hands and served on bone china, I couldn't have eaten it. The trip back was bad enough, and if I had stuffed myself on top of it, we would have had to pull over somewhere in the pitch black and I would have taken my chances in the dark with the albino vermin.

I did not sew a stitch while I was there, mainly because it was time to upgrade my phone and I got a good deal on a refurbished Droid X, so I spent a lot of time just playing with that. I do love a new gadget. When I wasn't doing that, I was reading. I'm on the fifth book of the Outlander series, and oh, poor Roger! I honestly don't know what I'm going to do when I am through with the last book. Probably start all over and read them again. Or die. That seems not unlikely, considering the depth of my addiction and the potential withdrawal symptoms an end to the series will no doubt cause.

So I have nothing stitchy to show you, but I will show you a few photos I managed to take while we were there. Sadly, there were no albinos willing to pause long enough to be photographed.

My parents' house.

The view from the back.

Happy to be out of the car.

Hint: it involves haggis

Sigh. This morning I got one of those "Are you alive?" emails from a concerned reader who feared I might have keeled over in the last couple of weeks and was up in my sewing room slowly decomposing. But, no. I am alive and well and just...distracted? We are heading to Tennessee for Thanksgiving on Sunday so I have that to prepare for. I was dealing with a minor dispute with a corporate conglom-co legal department who thinks its okay to screw writers up the ass. I'm still trying to get my BP meds settled and I am either feeling like death from the side effects of one drug or I'm headachy and unfocussed from not taking any.

And I've been reading.

There. I said it.

Okay, well. There's more to it than that. See, I am what you might call an enthusiastic reader. I used to read several books a week, but that number was greatly reduced when the kids came along, and for a while there, I was lucky to get in one every couple of months. Now that the girls are bigger and more independent, and I have may own sanctuary, and I have my handy dandy Kindle which allows me to carry around several books at once, I've been making up for lost time. The one BP medication I've taken so far that doesn't make me incredibly tired gives me insomnia, so I am up til 1 or 2 or later every night reading.

And because I have been reading so much, or perhaps due to the brain damage that affects the parents of difficult toddlers, I have been reading a lot of things that I normally wouldn't look twice at, and enjoying them thoroughly. I don't think I am a literature snob, but my personal taste tends to run toward the clever and quirky, satirical novels and comic novels and non-fiction about such things as how prostitutes and drug dealers created modern democracy. But then I found some mysteries I actually liked, ones that came in a series. Mysteries! I hate mysteries, usually, especially the ones with titles like  "Death On A Stick: A Sicky McSickerson Mystery." But then I started reading Charlaine Harris, and I plowed through the Southern Vampire series (on which True Blood is based) and then the Shakespeare series and then the Harper Connelly series (of which there are only four, dammit).

After those were all gone, I tried to find others, but with no luck. I went back to downloading endless samples of books, trying to find anything that would keep me company in the wee hours.

And then I found it.

I'm not even going to admit out loud what it is, just that the first book in the series was free, so I figured what the hell. Then I started reading, and now I pretty much don't give a shit about anything else. These are not mysteries but rather...hmmm...historical fiction? Well, frankly, I think a reasonable person would classify them as Utterly Absurd. An educated person with a modicum of taste would just clout me on the noggin with one of them. But, oh God they are so good. There's fighting and romance and torture and adventure and anguish and swooning. And all I want to do is find out what happens next and lose myself in the ridiculous plot. Fuck Twilight. Edward's got nothin' on this guy. (Update: read the comments to find out what it is!)

So when I sit in front of the computer and try to write something semi-amusing about quilting, I'm really thinking about the next chapter and wondering what unbelievable imbroglio the characters are going to get into next. It's very distracting.

But I swore I would manage a post today and that I wouldn't stop writing to go indulge my literary sweet tooth until I had written something - anything - about stitchy things. And so because I care about you all so very, very much, I am absolutely not moving from this spot until I tell you all about my exciting new project which invol

But I aspire to be an above average moron.

Ah, the vicissitudes of the freelance writing life. Getting paid is often the hardest part, after the carpal tunnel from excessive typing and the vitamin D deficiency from never leaving the house. And for me, there's also the part where I get to tell people what I do for a "living," and they're impressed until I tell them I write about quilting. And it gets even better when I tell them I write humor about quilting. They cannot back away fast enough. 

So when the new neighbors across the street moved in this past weekend, I was hoping to put off the "humor writing is TOO a legitimate career" talk as long as possible, but my fool husband is too proud of me to let that happen. As we were chatting with the mom of the family, she asked if I happened to have a needle and thread she could borrow to repair a Halloween costume, and as I went to retrieve it, not mentioning that I have thread and needles coming out my ass, I heard my husband say, "So did Megan tell you all about her quilting?" By the time I returned, she had been primed by his blabbing to ask me the usual polite questions, but she didn't have that same "oh, so you make a little money but you don't do anything important" attitude that most people around here seem to have. Maybe it's because they're from Florida. And later, as we were going trick-or-treating with our kids, we actually had a real conversation about it, and when I told her that my first article for QH was called the Zen of Crappy Quilting, she laughed out loud and said, "Now that sounds like my kind of quilting!"

AND - they have a son my daughter's age and a little girl my younger daughter's age, plus a bonus nine-year-old daughter. That almost makes up for not being paid and not being able to feel my fingertips.

Over the past week, I managed to finish the top for the table runner. I suppose I should know this by now, but I really should beware of patterns that I get free off the internet. They are not always written with the average moron in mind, though they are often written by an average moron. If I were a more experienced sewist (and I love that new word I keep seeing: sewist;  it sounds so prissy)  I would have remembered that applique can cause some shrinkage of the background fabric. As it was, I did not remember that, and as a result, my sashing was all way too big. In most instances, I was able to make it work, but one panel was just too small, so it had to be left out, making this a four-panel table runner instead of a five-panel. 

Now I am attempting to quilt it, which basically means I am teetering on the edge of ruining it completely. I'm starting by stitching in the ditch around all the squares, and it already looks like someone kept bumping into me while I was sewing. I'm not sure what else I can do beyond that which won't look messy and stupid. I truly hope that someday I can approach the quilting of even a small project like this without so much nail biting.

ONE HOUR LATER

Harper just wanted to use the computer, so I took the opportunity to finish the last few in-the-ditch lines I had to do. I managed to fuck up all four lines in exactly the same way, without ever noticing what was happening. 

This is why I have to write humor instead of "important" stuff.