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.

Cyn, cynical--cyn, cynical--cynical is me....(sing like Dick Van Dyke)

(This is a picture of Astrid peeking into the kitchen. My sewing machine and one of Elliot's old handdrawn maps are behind her. I put this picture in because I feel very childish tonight....read on, if you dare.)

I'm in the final stages of drafting my Bad Craft Blogs paper for the Popular Culture Conference in Boston--my husband and I are reading our papers on April 4. I've been aiming for nine pages, and I have about six right now--with one more day of spring break in which to finish the draft. I feel pretty confident that I can do it (unless I don't sleep tonight and feel bad in the morning), and I think it's going to be a pretty good paper. But. I'm sick to death of thinking about blogs. I've been looking at other people's blogs much more than I actually want to (I just found out, for instance, that there are 1048 blogs in the Knitting Blog ring), and I'm feeling like I did before I ever started my own blog---that they're good mostly for navel gazing egomaniacs with time on their hands.

And yet....this navel gazing egomaniac with no time on her hands has *really* enjoyed writing a blog, and I feel like a twelve-year-old wallflower when I google Seis Manos and can't find it, or when I go to Blogflux (where I tried to list myself) and I can't find it. I figure I'm doing something (or lots of somethings) wrong, but there's part of me that feels like I'm being left out by the popular kids. I've been feeling high on my tech savvy (not easy to do in a house where my husband can basically build a computer from scratch, and knows more acronyms than actual words)....

To top things off, I just about fainted tonight when I found that someone from U Washington had published a refereed article about knitting blogs in an online rhetoric journal. I was ready to call up the Popular Culture Association and let them know that I wouldn't have a paper to read, because someone had already written and published what I was going to say. Then I had the presence of mind (ha ha) to read the paper and I saw that it wasn't at all what I was trying to do.

This entry is way more "academic" than "creative," though a main reason for starting Seis Manos in the first place was to explore how artificial the divide between those two kinds of thinking is. I've been thinking how competition goes underground in women's craft blogs---women seem afraid to openly show how competitive they probably feel---and my immersion in writing this paper (and, I hope, a journal article built on it) has made the academic machisma I'm so used to feeling bleed way, way into an area that I've tried to keep it out of. Oh well. No one's reading this anyway! (Maybe if I start making lists of people I hate and envy--and who have no connection to sewing or crafting--this blog will suddenly become very popular and influential.)

The long, long braid

Astrid went back to school today (finally), and I didn't get a call from the secretary telling me she needed to come home. This feels like a great victory (I'll take them wherever I can get them these days). As we promised her, she got to bring her long, long polarfleece braid (about 8 feet now) to school for show and tell. I'm going to pick her and her brother up from school in a few minutes. It will be very interesting to hear Astrid's account of the reception her braid got: because she's in a Spanish-language Montessori class, and because I forgot to look up the words she might need in order to describe her work, I have no idea how her teachers or classmates will interpret what she definitely sees as a *big* achievement.

I've started lacing together my braid into an oval rug, and even though I've only got about 14 x 3 inches put together, it looks lovely. I'm already thinking about new projects to braid.

Rug-braiding

Okay, the bad cold turned into pneumonia, and I haven't felt like doing much but sleep. Elliot and Astrid, however, have been at home with ear infections, so sleeping hasn't happened as much as I have needed it to. There have been moments when I've actually gotten more peace if I was busy--I guess the kids are so used to me working on stuff that they are less likely to express neediness if I'm up and about than they are if I'm lying down. The second I lie down they have parched throats, grumbling tummies, ouches galore, and disputes that require immediate mediation.

I started braiding a rug out of cheap polarfleece last week, before I was so sick. Cutting the strips was the most fun, all things considered, mostly because I bought a 60 mm rotary cutter (I've wanted a bigger one for a long time--my little one just can't do thick piles of fabric). The braiding has been fun, too, but it's a drag to get up every few minutes to sew new strips onto the ends of the current ones. The braiding goes *really* fast. I wasn't able to find linen carpet thread in the stores (and I was too impatient to order some online--had I known that I was going to get pneumonia, gee, I would have ordered it last week), so I bought cotton crochet yarn. I was able to find the recommended kind of needle--it looks a bit like a ski. Of course, I don't at all feel like trying to put the rug together right now.

Perhaps the most gratifying part of this braiding adventure has been Astrid's big achievement: she asked me to teach her how to braid, and she learned very quickly. She needs help keeping it tight, but she definitely understands how braiding works. I told her that, once she's feeling better, she can bring her long (about seven feet) braid for show and tell.

Hats and mittens for cold, cold girls

In spite of a pretty bad cold, I spent a few happy hours this weekend working on hats and mittens for Astrid. Until last week, she had what had turned out to be her "signature" hat (if it's possible for a three-year-old to be that fashion-forward): a roll-brim cap made from cappuccino-colored Polartec fleece, with a flower crafted out of deep red Polartec and a coral colored vintage glass button. No matter how bedraggled she was at the end of her long school day, Astrid always looked fresh when she was wearing that hat. As eventually happens with all good winter hats, she lost it--and actually went for a couple of days with a huge knit beret I found at the bottom of our woolly bin.

I went through my fleece scraps on Saturday and found enough of the good stuff (real Malden Mills Polarfleece in a sunshine yellow) to make one hat--plus plenty, plenty, plenty of the junky stuff to make a spare. (I bought a ton of fabric-store fleece last week because I want to try to make a braided rug out of it....more about this as it develops.) I also found a very easy pattern for good mittens (http://www.barlowscientific.com/technotes/home/mittens.htm). They turned out a bit narrow (though they still fit), but they have nice long cuffs so Astrid's wrists stay warm. I made three pairs out of the good stuff and one out of junky stuff; I trimmed all four pairs around the wrist with nylon/lycra swimsuit fabric.

We've had a lot of snow over the past week, so I feel good knowing that I won't be getting "that look" from Astrid's teachers when she arrives without the right outdoor gear. She's a skinny, fast-moving thing who gets cold fast. The new hats, in particular, will take a while to work their way into my heart the way her cappuccino cap did, but I have faith that it's the kid, and not the gear, that makes fashion history.

Bad Haiku

Not exactly a news flash, I know, but....gee....there's a lot of terrible haiku on the web. I was trying to find some poems that I could put in the block-printed cards we've been making--I want to use them as Valentine's Day cards. I did find a very few that I like a lot, but I had to wade through stuff that seemed to miss the spirit of haiku--the fleeting observation of a moment, especially one involving the natural world or the body in space.

Here's my favorite, by a writer named Jane Reichhold:

Winter weaves
a pile of pillows
on a hard chair

For me, it captures something comforting about Valentine's day, but without losing the feeling of really, really strong cold that we're dealing with here in Chicago.

I also like this one, by Philip D. Noble:

black flight of starlings
dive and soar in winter dusk
changing in shape and size

In my long drives home from the northwest suburbs to my neighborhood in Oak Park, I often watch the clouds of starlings shift from power lines on one side of a big intersection to the lines on the other side--and then back again, before they've even had a chance to rest. I don't get it, but I like to watch it.

Today I circulated flyers for the crafting group we're starting at work. I have no idea how this will go, but it feels good to try it.

Printer's Block

No pictures today....instead, an afternoon of disappointing printing. Over the past week, Elliot and I made several printing blocks out of white Sculpey. I had a feeling that Elliot's wouldn't make great prints because they were pretty bumpy, but I had high hopes for mine---I was planning to take the best of the bunch and use them on some little t-shirts for my niece, Imogen. As it turned out, neither Elliot's nor my blocks worked much at all; even though I had rolled lightly over the surface of mine before baking them, they were apparently still too uneven to make all the detail show up when I test-printed them on paper. Even worse, when we mixed the fabric paint we were going to use on the t-shirts, it was way gunkier than the Speedball block printing ink had been, and we couldn't get the brayer to load properly. Inexplicably, I decided to go ahead and print on the t-shirts, and they came out pretty bad.

After Elliot (cheerfully) gave up, Astrid joined me and asked if she could paint on the remaining t-shirt. I couldn't think of a reason to say no, so I gave her the bottles of paint, a mixing surface, and a plastic knife. She ended up mixing an almost fluorescent orange and applying it every way she could think of to the lime green shirt. She started with a chunky brush and made hearts, x-es, a ladder, and a mountain. Then she switched to rubber stamps (seashell, three different fish, a crab, Saturn....probably something else, too). Finally, she put handprints in several places. It's actually a very cool shirt. She concentrated so hard while she was working, and when she was done (right when I was ready to start cooking dinner), she was wiped out and wanted me to hold her (her usual response to exhaustion, even now that she's almost four).

When I'm working with the kids, I usually have to help at least one of them work through disappointment when his or her work doesn't come out the way the child had envisioned. Today I was the one who had to deal with that kind of disappointment. Elliot had so amiably walked away from an obviously lost cause, and Astrid was oblivious to my own dissatisfaction--her work went great.

I'm going to see if some embellishment can make the t-shirts look a little better. I also thought of trying to wash out the paint, but I'm pretty sure I've waited too long now.