Soon

I will eventually write the posts I had planned to tell you all about Market and how I almost didn't go and then I did, but I find myself unable to write anything right now that isn't just kind of morose and dull. My brother called me Monday night and told me that his latest MRI shows tumor growth, the first since his initial surgery two years ago. We will all find out tomorrow what his treatment options are now, and so, until I get past that, I simply can't even pretend to be lighthearted. Thank you all for your understanding and patience with me. I'm sure I'll be back in a few days.

An experiment

Several months ago, I discovered this website. Now, it may not be to everybody's taste, but I immediately fell in love and then into a deep despair because I knew I would probably never be that funny. (I got over it.) From there, I started reading the author's personal website and got to see a little more about him, and he turned out to be rather fascinating. He had a girlfriend in Scotland and he wanted to marry her. He worked in a coffee bar and made very little money but he had a few thousand readers and he decided to put up a donation button. And now, every month, I try to budget some money to give to him (I try to budget $20, but I often have to do less. He asked his readers to give one dollar a month, and I believe only about one percent have given anything.) He doesn't know me. I've never written to him directly or communicated in any way, but I read every word he puts online and for that I think he deserves something from me for that. There aren't many sites out there that inspire me to daily visits, so I try to support the ones that do. (He married his girlfriend, by the way, but is still saving to move to Scotland to be with her.)

So now I am about to head out to Kansas City, for a business that has no money and can't actually pay me. I have eschewed paid work in order to focus entirely on this project and so, as I suspected, I am going to KC completely fucking broke. (I had money saved up, but then David broke a tooth and that took up what I had saved and more.) If I need a cab, I'll have to pay for it. If I need to eat, I'll have to pay for it. I'm going to stuff Power Bars in my purse and hope that I can live on those, but I doubt it. When Devon starts school in the fall, we will have some relief, because then I won't be paying for her daycare anymore (and yes, I could pull her out of daycare now, but I'd never get any work done and she LOVES it there.) I need to consider shutting off the cable TV for a while.

There is no way for me to know when or if GenQ could become profitable, but if it does it is likely to be a while. Before I knew GenQ was even happening, I had plans for some projects that I hoped would make up for some of the loss from losing my Quilter's Home work (and no other mags out there are interested in what I write or pay as well). However, the time necessary for work on GenQ has made pursuit of those projects next to impossible. If things ease up this summer with the second issue, then that may change.

When I return from KC, I am going to start organizing a fabric sale here on the blog. It pains me to do it, but I have to. I have also decided to put up my own donation button, which you can see at the top of the right hand column. Several people have suggested this in the past, but I have always resisted it. I hate asking for money, and so I'm not going to. I'm just going to leave that button there and whatever happens, happens. (And for those brave souls who do click the button - Sundara Silver is me. I had a home-based silver jewelry business when I started my PayPal account and I can't seem to change it to just my real name.)

BUT. Because I love you, and I realize I haven't been very entertaining these last few days, I will leave you with a very special present. I give you the first submission to the 2013 Quilter's Shirtless Man and Spicy Burrito Calendar:

Is that not the most awesome thing ever? These guys are all brothers and they and their sisters made a calendar of their mom's quilts for her for Christmas last year. But for the last month, the boys all shed their shirts and grabbed burritos! She sent me this on Christmas Day, so it was like a gift for me too, and when the boys all said they'd be happy to have the picture in the calendar, I just about died.

The three on the right are performers—the Platt Brothers—and I believe it's the hottie on the far right who is named Cheetah (a name, his mother assures me, he gave himself. Apparently, she tried to name him Ben, but he informed her at age six that she got it wrong and he made it legal when he was 16). The rest are Flynn, Cy, and Boone—and if those don't sound like the names of four brothers from a Nora Roberts quartet, I don't know what does. Hopefully, this will assuage all the weirdos who saw the 2012 calendar and were all, "Why aren't they all buff? I only want buff guys with quilts and burritos on my wall." So, here ya go, ya whiners. Four of 'em. Now leave the rest of us to our cuddle bears.

So this is just the beginning of the awesomeness that will be the QSMASBC for 2013. Also on track and hopefully to be completed this summer: a book. Specifically, all my Quilter's Home humor pieces plus a few new ones that will only be found in the book. I'm doing design and layout myself on this one and will self-publish as well. (I could just imagine trying to pitch that to C&T or Martingale: "Yeah, it's all previously published stuff, but in all the places where it originally said 'poop' I'm going to change it to 'shit'.") It's even going to have a special introductory section called How To Quilt! Rest assured, you will come away with WAY more knowledge about quilting than you ever thought possible. I won't guarantee that it will be useful information or that it won't get you arrested in certain states, but it will be edifying.

Now I need to go estimate how many tampons are reasonable to pack just in case and try to get my favorite smelly soap into a travel bottle without also pouring it down my pants. If don't manage to check in before Thursday, wish me luck with my attempts to be personable without a full meal or access to Dr. Pepper. I just got my 16GB SD card for my camera so I hope to be back with lots of pictures of people trying to grab David Butler's ass when Amy's not looking.

It's never finished

Last night, at 10:15 pm, I made the final approvals for the PDF proofs of the magazine at the printer. Oddly, just like every other time I sat back and yelled, "DONE!" no balloons fell from the ceiling and no one cracked open a bottle of champagne. David wants to celebrate, but I just don't feel like it yet. I had said that we would celebrate when the hard copy proof arrived via FedEx this week, but it turns out that there will be no hard copy proof and that I won't get to look at it until I arrive in Kansas City next Thursday (and if they don't have a copy ready to hand over to me the second I see them, there will be hell to pay).

I'm feeling kind of burnt out and a bit numb. I just cleaned my kitchen,  because that's one of the things that has been ignored these last few weeks - housecleaning. My family might actually get to eat a decent meal this week and there may even be clean clothes for everyone to wear. If I also manage to take a shower and shave my legs, well then it will be just like a party around here.

Now I will be thinking about Market, or trying not to think about Market. I've always wanted to go, but not so much as a vendor, but as an observer. I keep telling everyone that the last thing they want is to put me out in front of the public, but that is also the last thing I want. Nearly everything about this trip is high up on my master list of Stuff I Avoid Whenever Possible:

1. Flying.
2. Sleeping with other people (there will be at least 4 people in one hotel room, god help us all.)
3. Being in any situation where I do not have immediate access to a bathroom.
4. Crowds.

Number three has me particularly worried, since I spent my entire weekend in pain, running to the can, and none of my meds seemed to help. I never know when it's going to get bad like that, but it has on the last couple trips I've taken. And I'm such a freak that I can't bring myself to talk to any of them about it, but apparently I've got no problem broadcasting it on the internet.

We have recently had some issues on the mag with people being upset that we sometime use the terms "slut" or "ho" (always used jokingly, never meanly, by the way). It has been enough of an issue to make me realize that it would probably be wise for them to not publish the link to my blog in the magazine or to even have the link online. They wanted me to put my blog address in my column, as well as on my business cards, and I ultimately decided not to. It was a strange time when I first started getting published in Quilter's Home and my blog address was in there and I got a pretty sizeable increase in readers - as well as a sizeable increase in people who didn't care for what I write and told me so. And that was fine. I don't expect the entire quilting world to love me, and I wouldn't want it to. Part of why I write the way I do here is in order to remain on the margins, where I can continue to do what pleases me and not what I have to consider might please a large audience.

But now, as Creative Director of Generation Q Magazine (that still sounds so cool!), I represent an entity beyond myself and one which we hope will be our livelihoods. I have to consider that lots of very conservative people are going to be picking our mag up to see what's what, and the last thing we need is for somebody to become inclined to reject us because they decide to check out my blog and discover that I worship Beelzebub and all his minions. See, when you are audacious enough to try to put together a magazine with national and international (that means Canada - sorry, Meg) distribution with only four people and a lot of nerve, people are inclined to either fully support you or totally reject you because you make a neat scapegoat. Lots of people in the world aren't truly happy unless they've got something to hate, and there's not much in the quilting world to hate. Turns out, I make an excellent object for that.

Again, I don't care if people don't like me or what I write, but I do care about it in relation to Generation Q. I am starting to think that it might be time to split off again, to have one blog where all of you who know me and like coming here can continue to read my insane rantings and another, more "public" blog that would be the face of my professional self. Which basically just means that I wouldn't curse or mention weenies. I'd probably still be a smart-ass half the time. I can't help myself.

So, I need a name for my "sanitized" quilting blog. Any ideas?

Finished. Sort of.

Guess what I did, bitches? I finished the motherfuckin' magazine. Uploaded all 100 pages last night, and I totally wish I was a young dude right now, because this feels like the kind of thing I need to celebrate with cigars, scotch, and hookers.

But I am not a young dude, I am a middle-aged woman with kids to pick up from school later and take to a baseball game tonight. So, instead of celebrating with bad life choices, I decided to design a new t-shirt.

Available on t-shirts, mugs and tote bags in my Cafe Press shop. And possibly also a tattoo on my ass.

A Rant About Copyright Rants

Unless you've been bound and gagged and locked in a "naughty box" by your significant other for the past couple of months (I don't know what you people get up to in your spare time, but I'm not judging), then you are surely aware of all the hullabaloo and folderol surrounding the issue of copyright in the world of quilting. Everybody who's anybody (and probably a lot of people who aren't) has weighed in on the topic. I thought that the tidal wave of umbrage and pseudo-legal opinions had passed, but, no. I just read two more this morning. A dead horse will keep on twitching as long as there are bloggers out there to get indignant about it.

There are a lot of things that bother me about some of these rants that keep ending up in my email inbox, but the main one is how, after soapboxing grandiloquently about laws that, as far as I know, may not even exist, people are now starting to call for civility. "Let's all remember that, when all is said and done, we are all sisters. And brothers. Well, some gay brothers—not that there's anything wrong with that—and a few heterosexual brothers who are totally welcome too. So let's stop calling each other names like 'stupid meanie-pants' and 'booger-butt.' "

Please. For the love of all that is good and holy in this world, do NOT stop calling each other "stupid meanie-pants" and "booger-butt." Because if quilters stop saying stupid stuff on the internet, what will I have to write about? I'm not just a humorist, I'm a satirist, for god's sake, and if people don't act like asshats, I won't have any ridiculous attitudes to lampoon. And besides, you know me. I think people are entirely too tame. I'm willing to bet that you cannot find one comment on any blog anywhere on this topic where somebody has called someone else a "fucking copyright whore." Nope, not there. I checked.  (They must have deleted my comment.)

I can't help it. I love controversy in the world of quilting, and though it has made me some enemies, I'm still going to point it out and laugh at it when it happens. I think that we have to laugh at ourselves and our  little quilter squabbles in order to move on from them and to ultimately learn from them. And because, if we don't, we're all just a bunch of cocksucking booger-butts.

Still alive, with significantly flatter ass

I am beginning to understand why they say sitting at a desk all day, every day, shortens one's lifespan. I'm pretty sure that as a result of my efforts to design the first issue of Generation Q Magazine, I will die a good ten years earlier than I would have otherwise. My back hurts. My neck hurts. My right wrist is a mess. My eyes are always burning. It's fucking awesome.

I'm dead serious. Even though I feel like a big blob of pain, I am having the time of my life. I probably won't say that next weekend, as we approach deadline, but in general, I'm truly enjoying the work. And it has gone the way so many things I do has. At first, I approach the project thinking, "There's no way. There is no way in hell that I can do this. Why the fuck are they making me do this? Idiots. I told them I couldn't do it, and now I have to go through the process of failing and then telling them I'm failing and then go crawl in a hole because I let everybody down even though I TOLD them I couldn't do it."

And then I do it.

The mag is well over halfway done, and every time I take a moment to scroll through the pages and look at it, I think, "That there looks like a real magazine." I honestly don't think it looks like people are gonna pick it up and go, "This was obviously made by a middle-aged woman in between obsessing about her weight and telling children that boogers belong on tissues, not on fingers." That falls somewhere between projectile vomiting in horror and disgust and having spontaneous, multiple orgasms on the scale of How People Will React To Seeing The First Publication I Ever Designed All By Myself.

I even managed to write my column for it, and I was pretty sure that wasn't gonna happen either. Then the good old internet came to the rescue with all kinds of inspiration. I think it turned out pretty good and there's even a little eye candy to go with it. Ah, it's good to be a magazine designer!

I even ended up doing photography. All the quilts for our projects need flat shots as well as "lifestyle" shots, so that you get a pretty picture of the quilt "in use" as well as a view of the entire quilt. Unfortunately, some of our shots didn't work out in the original photo shoot and they couldn't be shot again, and I start to get twitchy when I can't be there to control everything. "Are you using enough light? Don't rely on ISO to make up for low light—it'll just end up grainy. Can you do it outside? You have to make sure it's perfectly flat and you have to make sure your camera is parallel. Hey! Where are you going?" Turns out, Jake was going to the FedEx office, because she sent me all the quilts. So then I had to suddenly come up with a way to get flat shots.

Often, people with put quilts on the floor and then find a way to get above them and shoot down, but that is fraught with problems unless you have a very specific set-up. I decided the quilts needed to go on the wall, but then, well, I needed a wall. Naturally, the only wall in my house that is suitable is in my sewing room/office, where George hangs:

So, David and I broke down all my sewing tables on the other side of the room and moved the sofa over to where they used to be, then George got re-hung in between the two windows on the west wall (and when the kids first saw what we had done, their first question was "Where's George?" followed quickly by "When are you going to put it all back exactly the way it was because we liked that better?"). After we moved George, Devon felt a need to show her support for the project:

Then I had to figure out how to get something on the walls that I could pin entire finished quilts to. After a couple false starts, I finally got a phone consultation with a wonderful woman known far and wide as Shortbread Sam. Shortbread Sam is a friend of Jake's and now she's a friend of mine AND THAT IS JUST THE COOLEST THING. Honestly, the idea that I have all these people whom I've never even met in person just kills me. I love it. Anyway, Sam suggested good old posterboard and these 3M Command strips that are used for hanging pictures. Nine panels of posterboard and nine packages of 3M strips later, I had a wall. I got some cheap reflector lamps from Amazon as well as some very bright, daylight balanced light bulbs, and set up my tripod.

The background gets completely Photoshopped out, so the seams in between the boards don't matter. It's not perfect, and doesn't really work well for very large quilts, but it did acceptably well for the smaller ones.

A few days after getting my boards set up, I got a package in the mail from Sam. She has made these super cute buttons and she sent me a whole set:

"Sewinatrix" immediately found a home on my purse. Sam will be selling these on Etsy soon, so keep checking her blog to find out when they go up. Sam is also letting me test her paper piecing patterns for letters. I want to make a big, inspirational message quilt for my sewing room. You know, something with a quote or saying that will keep me going when my ass hurts and my carpal tunnel is acting up and I just think I can't take any more goddamn quilts. So, it's going to say: RIDE IT LIKE YOU STOLE IT. Cheers me right up every time I think about it.

Anyway, thanks for being patient with me while I am "on leave," as it were, to work on this project.

Alive. Thank god.

I am still alive, y'all, but barely. I've been putting in long hours on the magazine, which, combined with the time I can't work on it because my parenting duties take precedence and thus are also work hours, means I have been working 15–18-hour days and only managing about 5 hours sleep a night somehow. It caught up with me on Friday and I was so tired I could barely stand up, so I've tried to catch up on sleep and get a little R&R this weekend (swimming, watching The Descendants and eating). I'm feeling better today so I'm hard at work, but then I get a Facebook message from a high school friend who wanted to let me know that my high school boyfriend was ill. The little bit of research I could do suggests that he has cancer and that things may not be going to well for him right now. A student of his, on one of those "rate my professor"-type sites, said that he told his class he was dying shortly before he left permanently.

It was such a typical teenage story, and someday, when I have time, I will write it all out, but suffice to say he was my first everything and I thought I loved him, and he thought he loved me, until he didn't anymore. But while he did, he was my adventure. Like me, he wasn't blessed with grace or good looks, but was smart and creative. I think of him every once in a while, and when I do it is always with that sweet and boundless affection that is as much for the kid I was then as for the kid he was. The kind that sort of floats out into the world with no place to land because he and I have no connection anymore. I haven't spoken to him since high school. I never friended him on Facebook, and now I am glad I didn't, because I would feel compelled to, like so many people have done in the last few days, post some weak message on his wall that he may never be able to read and that doesn't even remotely say what I really feel, which is this:

Tim, thank you for noticing me, for flirting with me, for sticking notes in my locker and and asking me to prom. Thank you for all the furtive things we did in ridiculous places. Thank you for giving me your poetry, all bound in your dad's shop. Thank you for breaking my heart, and helping me grow up just a little. I did love you, the way only a 15-year-old girl can, and I still love you now, the memory of you, the way a 42-year-old woman happy in herself and her life can. I wish you peace.