Sucker!

On Sunday morning, I announced to my family that I was heading out to the Annapolis Quilt Show, the annual show put on by the Annapolis Quilt Guild, of which I am not a member due to my anti-social tendencies. But I like to check out the show and especially the vendors. It's always the exact same vendors, but sometimes, in amongst the batiks and civil war repros there will be one fabric that I like. I made the offer to the kids to come with me, knowing that, as always, they would refuse, but then Harper pulled one out of left field and asked if she could take pictures there. I said sure, and then Devon had to come too and so off we went, me with my debit card and two girls with my old Canon point-and-shoot.

So, normally, I would have several photos from the show for you but A) all the pictures they took look like they were taken from a moving vehicle, and B) I cannot now find the camera.

The show was lovely, as usual, and again, as usual, it made me wonder if I would ever see one of my own quilts in a show someday. More on that later.

One of the first vendors we came to was Material Girls quilt shop. they're in LaPlata, MD, which is about an hour or more from here and so I have yet to drive down there, but each time I see them at the show, I realize I really, really need to go. Plus, they sell GenQ, which makes them automatically cool. Harper went nuts when she saw ninja fabric and then the  salesperson pointed out that they had a kit for a ninja quilt. I am a sucker for a kid who wants a quilt, and I am, apparently, also a sucker for fabric that is already put together for me in a nice package.

Well, I couldn't just buy a quilt kit for one kid and not the other, now could I? And it just so happened they had a solar system quilt kit. For my little science nerd. Whose eyes lit up when she saw it. Dammit.

And I also got suckered into a pattern for some stuffed kitties. Because everybody loves stuffed kitties.

And I got myself some hexie papers. Just so I could bring home something for me.

And I've been working on three other projects that I can't show you. The first one I have probably mentioned. It is for a friend who is publishing a book and needs quilts made with her patterns for a gallery. She asked me to make one, and I did, and Lisa quilted it for me, and now I'm binding it. Or, actually, I am wrestling with thread and pliers, because it is so densely quilted in places, that is the only way to get the needle through. I'm having a lot of anxiety about it. Not about the binding, though that is making my one arthritic knuckle swell up rather cartoonishly. Just anxiety that what I made isn't good enough. I see so many problems with it, so many things I should have done differently, and things I had hoped would be less apparent after quilting are maybe even more apparent. I will be glad when it is doen and mailed off because then it will be out of my hands and I won't even know if it makes the cut for a long time, so I'll have no choice but to forget about it.

In the meantime, I  designed a quilt. An actual design, too, not just another goddamn chevron quilt made from half-square triangles. (Seriously. If I see another chevron quilt presented like its the most amazing thing anyone has ever seen, I'm going to throw my Eleanor Burns HST ruler at my computer screen.) And when the whole top was put together, I realized it was like 96 x 96 - just freaking huge, and I cannot quilt something that big on my domestic. I mean, I can, but the thought of it makes me cry. So, Lisa to the rescue again, but she can't work on it until, like, January, because the ENTIRE WORLD has fallen at her feet and is currently sucking her toes. Metaphorically.

So, in the meantime, I shot a pic of it and sent it to Jake and Melissa to see what they thought. I was hoping they'd be comfortable enough to be honest with me and tell me where they think the design may have gone wrong, but clearly they were not that comfortable because they asked if they could publish it. And I tried to be all cool about it, like, "Um, yeah, sure, I guess," and I told them it probably wouldn't be ready until next year, figuring that might give them their out, and they were all, "NO, that's cool. This is worth waiting for." So, I figure they're trying to get on my good side about something.

So I can't show you that either. Then I have a third project going, and it's almost done. I probably will show you that, because I think it's going to suck. See I have this idea for a book, but I can't put together a proposal, until I have at least a couple finished projects, and both this and the one that will be in GenQ unless certain people come to their senses have been designed with that potential book in mind. But I cannot give everything to Lisa to quilt for me because of all the metaphorical toe sucking and because I can't pay her for all of that and because I need to be able to do more myself. So this one I have quilted on my own, and it's just a wall hanging, so it's certainly manageable, yet I still think it looks like I was blindfolded and high when I did it.

I can't help it - I do have high standards for myself. I want to be good enough at this that someone might want to learn from me someday. I want my work to be good enough to be in a magazine, or in a book. I realize not everybody wants those things for themselves, and that's fine, but I do. And so I have to keep making shit until it isn't shit anymore.

And keep bitching about it here. :-)



OH! And I almost forgot, because I put this on Facebook. New t-shirt!!