My Crib

So over the weekend, just before the 600-pound rock of death settled on my head, I put two quilts that I have finished recently up on my sewing room walls and took a picture. I put the picture on Facebook, because I was feeling quite proud that I finally have a sewing room that looks like a quilter's room:

And everybody on Facebook was all, "That can't be a QUILTER'S room! It's too neat! Where's the dog hair? Where's the piles of scraps? Where's the mound of empty ketchup packets from McDonald's that you open and suck all the ketchup out of without even any french fries because you are hungry and it's midnight and you are too lazy to go down to the kitchen and get a snack like a normal person? Huh? Where's that?" So, in order to maintain my reputation as a Quilting Slattern, I had to promise that I would reveal the REST of my sewing room, not just the part that I keep neat and tidy so that when I am exhausted from writing yet another AWESOME COLUMN for GenQ (I have no shame. None.), I have a place where I can fall down in a swoon without getting ketchup on my pants.

So, here is my desk. WHERE THE AWESOME HAPPENS:

Please note the ice pack for my head, the dirty socks on the floor, and the paper with the tattoo design I am working on next to the computer.

This is the area next to my desk, where the printer resided along with half of the crap my kids leave in my room:

That pile on top of the printer is where I keep all of my important papers. It's crucial to have a good filing system. Also, that little kitty on the chair in the bottom right corner is wearing a white felt dress that I made. It looks like something a prisoner of war would wear AND it took me several tries to figure out how to sew it so that it had armholes and a neck hole and wasn't just an oddly shaped sack.

This is the cutting table:

This is also another area where the kids' stuff has taken over the available space, because where else are you gonna keep a princess castle, a makeup kit, a bag of plastic Easter eggs, and a homemade checkerboard? Please note that the stuffed animal on the ironing board is mine. It is an octopus, because I have some weird thing for invertebrates. Devon labors under the impression that his name is Octie, but I like to think of him as D'Artagnan.

A close-up of the cutting table:

You can see I purchased a set of plastic containers at Ikea, that I hoped would control some of the clutter, but now they seem to be as much a part of the clutter as the shit they contain. This is also a shot of the table in an unusually pristine condition, as there are usually half-drunk Dr. Pepper cans and bowls of potato chip crumbs or unpopped popcorn kernels littering the table as well.

And I have decided to save the best for last:

My crumb collection. Because it is too fucking hard to drag the vacuum all the way up the stairs, and besides, I have to take off the hose thing and jam on one of the attachments and I am usually WAY too tired from writing humor columns to do all that work. You know, I always say that I don't want to get a dog or a cat because now that Devon is FINALLY potty trained, I think I deserve a break from dealing with another creature's poop, but the crumb-cleaning capacity of such a creature might make the poop-handling easier to take.

So hopefully I have now restored my credibility, but I'm pretty sure we are now about to engage in a rousing game of "Oh, Yeah? You Think THAT'S Messy? Well, One Time, I Lost My Youngest Child In The Scrap Bin And We Still Haven't Found Her." So just remember, I spared you all by not showing you pictures of my bathroom. BUT I WILL IF MY HAND IS FORCED, SO HELP ME.

Oh, and, P.S. The migraine is gone today. I feel like dancing. So I think I will.