What I'd like to be doing

Sometimes I feel like I've walked into a restaurant that looks really great from the street, but when I sit down and see the menu, I think....gee, do you have one with better choices? I know I walked in here under my own power, but now that I'm here, nothing looks too appetizing.
Here's what's on my menu:

1. revising an article that's due on 8/15, when I feel pretty sure that the revisions "suggested" by the editor will turn my essay into something much less interesting (to me)
   
2. grading more papers
3. cleaning the house
4. cleaning the house
5. cleaning the house
6. mowing the lawn and weeding

Here's the menu I wish I had:

1. sewing the six pairs of "around the house" shorts I cut out on Monday night
2. finishing the two sets of pillow tops I'm embroidering (a pair of pigs and a pair of camels; I've done the first of each set)
3. sewing a comfortable, belly-positive swimsuit with the Kwik-Sew swimsuits and activewear master pattern book I bought two weeks ago
4. finally finishing my big healthcare collage
5. taking a nap
6. putting together the Broken Dishes and Four-Patch quilt blocks I've finished
7. taking a nap
   
8. going to the pool by myself in the very attractive, belly-positive swimsuit I just finished (see #3)

Tonight when we were at a picnic with the other families from Elliot's baseball team, we heard the cicadas for the first time this summer. Every year I promise myself that I won't get melancholy when I hear them, but it never works, and this time was no exception. Unlike other years, though, I was with a bunch of other women who had the same looks on their faces as I must have. It was nice to know that I'm not the only one who mourns the passing of summer when it's really not quite half over.

Elliot Irons

We got back at 7:45 from a very chilly, sort of disappointing baseball game last night, and though I have a yucky cold and wanted to go to bed, I decided to help Elliot with the quilt block he's sewing. I wouldn't let him use the rotary cutter over the weekend because I couldn't supervise him (and I really value each and every one of his fingers), so he traced triangles onto the back of his fabric scraps and cut each one out with scissors. He was a little disgruntled about the labor; he thinks that everything goes very quickly for me just because I have the right tools at my disposal....

The big development is that Elliot got to use my heavy iron for the first time. *Everything* about the experience was new for him, so I couldn't take anything for granted---for example, he didn't realize that the iron couldn't rest face down on the ironing board. He was also frustrated because he sewed about half of his triangles together on the wrong side (i.e., along the long bias edge, rather than the shorter leg), so he'll have to cut more triangles to get the block he wants. (He, too, has been reading Davina Thomas's 200 Quilt Blocks.)

Summer Weekend (for real)

We're closing out one of those "now it's really summer" weekends--too much to do, in a way, but most of it was fun, and now we're very tired. Elliot had an early baseball game on Saturday, then the kids had their school picnic, and today Astrid had a completely exhausting birthday party to attend. (In the car on the way home, she requested that I not talk at all, because she was too sleepy to listen.)

Yesterday I finished a small quilt for one of Astrid's English teachers; she's having a baby in August (I think), and Astrid requested that I make a quilt for her. It includes one of my old dresses, from the days when I lived in straight jumpers with deep pockets. (Eventually I decided that, as comfortable as they were, they weren't all that flattering to my multiparous belly, so I've moved on to other, equally utilitarian fashion statements.)

Now that I'm done with Miss Kate's quilt, I'm working in earnest on another pieced quilt. I'm getting lots of inspiration from Davina Thomas's 200 Quilt Blocks to Mix and Match. Her fabric choices are too ice-creamy for me, and the blocks she makes aren't scrappy at all, but the book seems pretty exhaustive, and Astrid and I enjoy looking at it together, especially at bedtime.

I'm also continuing to work (mostly during baseball games) on embroidered flour sack towels, with designs from Floresita's vintage collection. At this weekend's game, I didn't have Astrid with me, so I could embroider to my heart's content, or until my fingers cramped up (this time around, it was the latter).

Elliot at the helm

Elliot's been telling me that he wanted to start working with the sewing machine again, so today he did it. I showed him how to stitch triangles together to make quilting blocks, and he quickly figured out how to chain the pieces together so that he didn't have to cut his thread after each one. He made about twenty of them before dinner during the time it took our pizza to bake!

Right before dinner, when her behavior is usually at its most challenging, Astrid rolled my work chair right into my ironing board, which, as you can probably see, is embarrassingly overloaded with stuff (sewing related and otherwise....), and it capsized. It's kind of surprising that this has never happened before, as I insist on using the ironing board as a catchall surface, and Astrid insists on zooming across the hardwood floor on the rolling chair. We were quite glad to hear the oven buzzer go off, so that we could put aside all our disagreements and eat homemade pizza together.

After dinner, the four of us watched Singin' in the Rain, one of our favorite musicals (it was Astrid's first time seeing it--she liked everything but the "smooching,") and we ate apricot nectar cake that Astrid and I made this afternoon. It was sweet and tangy, just like the movie.

Are *you* ready for the Creed?

I'm working on an artquilt for the American Literary Naturalism course I'm teaching this semester. The students are required to produce a creative project (visual, literary, dramatic, musical, etc....), and I hinted to them that I hoped to do the same (you know, talking the talk/walking the walk....we have no hands-on arts courses where I do most of my teaching, so I try to create opportunities for students to work with their hands....).

In the process of gathering images for my quilt, I came across a very cool website for an exhibit called What Was Home Economics? From Domesticity to Modernity. The whole site is interesting, but I was strangely attracted to "The Home Bureau Creed" (in the "Educational Techniques" area of the exhibit. It's visually beautiful, and feels surprisingly contemporary (to me, anyway).

My favorite part of the creed is where it urges people "to lose self in generous enthusiasms." There are lots of ways to interpret this idea, but I think it's a nice way to think about the relationship building that happens when people share/teach other people handwork and useful arts. I confess that lately I've been getting tired of "project-ing" (though there are lots of sensible reasons why....); at the same time, this description of what I spend so much time doing and thinking about makes me feel pretty sunny, even on a gloomy gray Chicago day.

Pieced or strip-pieced....doesn't make a big difference!

We're back from the Popular Culture Association convention in Boston--we had a very good time with our kids and with my sister Lora's two sweeties, Sam and Lilly--and now I'm semi-overwhelmed with all the work I have to do this week. Being Easter Sunday, however, I'm trying to honor the spirit of the day by not doing a ton of work. I also made a point of sewing for a while (and I hope to sew some more tonight). I'm almost through with the fourth block in the crib quilt I'm making. The design I chose alternates 16-patch blocks and pinwheel-shaped blocks; I've started with the 16-patch ones. They seem to be going pretty fast (ask me again next week, and the week after that, and.....). As careful as I've been to make keep my seam allowances identical, though, there are still places where the corners don't line up. This makes me mad. And, given the way I work (as fast as possible, mistakes be damned), it's not like I'm likely to get a lot more precise as I go along. I suppose I can say that these quilts are an honest reflection of my true personality.....

Before we left for Boston, I ordered a *lot* of black bamboo jersey from Wazoodle, and it hasn't arrived yet. I've never ordered from Wazoodle before; I expected them to be as fast as Fabric.com. At least this time, they're definitely not. (I was a bit worried that the package had disappeared from our porch, but their website says my order is "in process.") I want to make myself a bunch of cool summer shirts, and possibly some pajama shorts for Elliot. It's not like I am ready to sew any of this stuff, but the space between the impulse purchase and the gratification of holding the cloth in my hands is a bit wide for me. (Actually, this wasn't an impulse purchase, as I've been web-shopping for bamboo jersey for a couple of months--I just didn't plan to buy as much as I ended up buying--but I got a considerably lower price for buying ten yards at once.)

Why do scrap quilts cost so much to make?

I'm suddenly interested in making a pieced scrap quilt--instead of my usual can't-be-bothered strip piecing. I'm reading a book by Roberta Horton about the theory and aesthetics of "real" scrap quilts....it's got me all excited. I looked forward all day to shopping on line for batting, templates, and a *little* bit of fabric. Yet I just got off fabric.com, where I spent $50....the fabric wasn't all that expensive--but the templates were $18 (I hope they're worth it) and the batting was $8 (not bad, really---it's the good cotton stuff). I guess I didn't absolutely have to buy five half-yards of fabric. On the other hand, given the kind of week I've had, maybe it's exactly what I needed to do.