Why can’t we all be ectoplasm with hands?
Seriously, this whole having a body business. It’s for the birds. You know? You gotta feed it and let it sleep and dress it and stuff. What a pain in the ass.
I feel like one of those neglected Tamagotchi pets. Beep! Beep! God.
Last night I was reading this book, The New Crewel by Katherine Shaughnessy, and I was so fucking inspired.
The shapes! The colors! They make me happy, instead of making my eyes bug out like Kaffe Fassett’s stuff does (no offense meant to Kaffe fans; I just can’t handle all those prints and colors at once).
I have some ideas for applique quilts using some of Shaughnessy’s patterns. And I am so psyched to try them out, you know? Also am I psyched to try machine-stippling, which I’d never heard about before this week (it’s a freeform quilting method). But between Owen’s sleep regression and my own stupid body’s need to sleep (not to mention its need for fresh coffee in the mornings and clean clothes to cover it up), there has been no time. No time! Ah the cruelty!
(Or should I make that crewelty? Nah. Nobody likes a bad pun.)
Target code red
In front of me in a line twenty-seven people long: One trashy couple, early twenties. Girl wearing black jeans and scrunchie; guy with buzz cut and sleeveless t-shirt.
Their purchases: 1 pair mesh see-through panties; one tube KY personal lubricant; 1 copy of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Volume 5.
I don’t even want to know what these people get up to in the evenings.
Quilting in public and other anomalies
Day care wants Owen at “school” at 9 a.m. this year, so in he goes. It leaves me a little time before work, even if I go in early, so I brought my quilt and hoop and quilted on a little park bench in front of the county courthouse.
It was fucking weird.
It felt like performance art, doing this archaic technique as city buses rumbled by and secretaries made their morning constitutionals in suits and sneakers. But it was a calming 45 minutes, and I really needed that, because Owen has gotten a jump on the terrible twos.
He sleeps for shit, if you’ll pardon my French, and wakes as often as when he was a newborn. It takes upwards of two hours just to get him to go to bed now, whereas before he would drop off to sleep as easily as walking into a lake.
An unfortunate side effect of this refusal to go to bed means a dramatic decrease of free time. He whittled it down to maybe half an hour last night, which was really only long enough to brush my teeth and read a chapter of Bill Bryson before turning in. My e-mail inbox has reached embarrassing proportions, and I have a stack of web design work making sad puppy eyes at me.
I’m sure you’ve noticed a sad lack of updates on this ol’ blog. (Ha! “I’m sure you’ve noticed”. Because y’all are waiting BREATHLESSLY by your Bloglines waiting for me to update. Pfft.) Well, I have noticed it, anyway, and it’s partly due to being besieged by toddlerhood and partly due to just not fucking feeling like sharing my intimate thoughts with strangers and partly due to the fact that I am obsessed with finishing my quilt. Seriously, obsessed to the point where I will quilt in public.
Which, as you see, brings us full circle and really says nothing at all, which is pretty much the story of this blog.
You are, however, more than welcome to peruse the archives; they are quite pretty and AJAX-y, and you can while away a tender hour reading about my big butt and how I dislike this one lady at the auto mechanic’s. VERY IMPORTANT STUFF.
You can take the girl out of Ohio …
But you can’t take the Ohio out of the girl.
Things I enjoy non-ironically:
- Country music, including but not limited to Dolly Parton, Kenny Rogers, maybe a little Garth Brooks if I’m feeling populist, Merle Haggard and, you know, Willie, Waylon, Kris, Johnny and the rest
- Quilts, making of
- Quilts, snuggling under
- Town fairs, pumpkin patches, and festivals involving produce or Amish activity
- Gingham
- Beer in cans
- Buying beer, in cans, at a gas station
- Bonfires
- Farmland, pastoral beauty of
- Wicker
- Sun tea
- gently criticizing Michigan drivers for sucking so hard
- Monopoly
- Getting stuck in traffic behind a tractor
It’s almost September, and I can tell because my bones feel kind of achey and small-towny.
Return of the dead &$%!-ing iPod
To make an awful Monday even worse, my iPod bit the dust. Again.
It had been working terrifically since February, when it died for the first time and I resurrected it by beating the everloving hell out of it (a documented repair theory for this product).
Then, last week, in the parking lot of the local KFC, it froze on a Dolly Parton song. (The fact that I can put “KFC” and “Dolly Parton song” in the same sentence — and have it be true — gives me the shivers, but facts is facts, and I must report it.)
So anyway, parking lot, frozen ‘pod. I gave it a slam and reset it before Iain even got back with our Original Recipe.
But yesterday it cried the Click Of Death, whirring and clicking like a cicada dying of tuberculosis. It was sad. So I slapped it around as much as I could in my quiet office, feeling the tough love coursing through me, knowing I was going to be the digital Florence Nightingale this little piece of machinery required.
But guess what? NO FUCKING DICE. It’s still dead. And I’m afraid it’s dead for good.
Tonight, after Owen goes to sleep, I’m going to go all Josh Highland on it and do a little iPod surgery, see if that doesn’t do the trick.
If it doesn’t … then I suppose I’ll be selling it on eBay for parts. And maybe I’ll buy a new one. Like, a Nano? I heard those solid-state little buggers are hardier; do suppose that’s true?
I mean, yeah, maybe my son will have to go without shoes again but goddamn, Mama needs her country music during the long, depressing weeks of late summer.
Urban Baby Runway - Babylegs contest winners
We won two pairs of Babylegs from Cara’s contest on Urban Baby Runway. Owen loves them, but I think I love them even more. If it weren’t 90 degrees out he’d be wearing them all the time.
Feeling lucky? The new contest is up at UBR, featuring things from Tale of a Baby Human. Or if you’d rather shop, the UBR store is always open.
Bedroom redecorating
decorating on a serious budget
Will it embarrass you if I tell you the whole thing cost $175? Because I’m kind of proud of that.
Though you really need to see the before pictures to understand how impressive that is.
The room is intended to be a neutral palette to display the bed quilts I make (once they’re finished, of course). Right now it’s got an old Ikea duvet cover and a thrift-store blanket, giving the whole room a rather primary-color focus that I’m not completely happy with. But I guess the onus is on me to finish the quilt, then, isn’t it?
Ikea Bookcase Headboard Mod:
Materials:
- Two FLARKE bookcases handed down from Malnurtured Snay
- 7 feet of crown molding
- miter box
- hand saw
- patience and spatial reasoning
- tape measure
- primer
- paint of your choice
Instructions:
- Enlist your favorite handiman to figure out angles for crown molding; saw pieces, swear; re-saw pieces.
- Prime and paint everything, including your pants, because that just happens
- Put baby down for a nap
- Nail bookcases to each other
- Nail to wall for safety (I think they call this “anchoring”)
- Nail two of the shelves vertically, flush with front edge of bookcase, to block bed-level shelf from becoming a resting area for your head
- Nail crown molding around top.
Got the idea from this book. All credit goes to Iain for the fine carpentry.
So long, summer
Here we are, in the last few hours of the last day of summer vacation. Tomorrow, Iain goes back to work and Owen goes back to day care. I’m kind of having a hard time with this.
Mostly, I’m trying not to freak out about Owen going to the toddler room. He’ll be one of the youngest kids in there, first of all. And yeah, he’s smart, but he’s a little small for his age — 25th percentile — and he’ll be the new kid all over again. And the teachers he’s known for a year and a half are staying behind in the infant room. And if I remember correctly the toddler-room teacher is, ah, less than impressive in the IQ department. And he’s going to be there all day, and I’m not, and he’s going to be hurt that I just up and left him with those manic two-foot-tall people who bite.
I could really get used to Iain being a stay-at-home dad. I really could. And I know it’s going to be good for us to have that second paycheck coming in again, and I know it’s going to be good for Owen to have those children to play with and learn from again …
But honestly, I just don’t wanna. Don’t want to bring him back to school, don’t want to deal.
I suppose, judging by my alarming appetite for chocolate-covered pretzels today, that this is merely the PMS talking. But even if you scrape off the hormonal-crazy layer, there’s that pervasive mother-guilt layer, and that one’s pretty thick and unscrape-offable.
Sigh. Guilt-ridden PMS mama coming through, watch out, guard your blogs and lock up your Tostitos.
Also — I’m kind of coming to terms with the fact that it might be months before I write that linktastic Blogher post I promised. Let’s all agree it might take awhile, OK? Then the pressure will be off and I’ll feel OK to post regularly again.
Also p.s. — The bedroom redecoration project is done, thank fucking Christ. I ran out of creative steam yesterday, just in time to fluff the last pillow. The downside is that I no longer feel like taking pictures. Or even talking, really. I’m spent. And don’t forget pissy and premenstrual.
p.p.s. Owen said his first sentence Friday: “Bye-bye, bird.” Did you check that shit? A comma! Clauses and everything. Told you he was smart.
Paint in my hair and joy in my heart
We’re redecorating our bedroom this week — a long and tedious process when you have a job and a toddler.
The walls were the same putty-poop color they were when we moved in, with the added attraction of a giant bare spot where Iain started picking at loose paint. Plus no art on the walls and a hulking piece of furniture that sucked up all the atmosphere from the room. I decided it was time to lighten up.
So Saturday I drew up a plan and bought some primer; Sunday we painted the room, Monday we started priming and painting the wood veneer furniture which was handed down to us from my mother’s neighbor. The goal is to redo this room for less than a hundred dollars, and once I return the impulse-buy featherbed, we’ll be on track.
Last night we painted the drawers before House came on (my new favorite TV show. Anyone else think House is kind of hot?) and today after work I hope to vacuum and arrange furniture and spray-paint the drawer-pulls a glossy black.
I have high hopes that the finished product will be nice-looking; I’m going to go all apartment therapy on that room and majorly weed out the crap, keeping things nice and orderly and streamlined and happy. It’s funny; I’m twenty-six years old, and this is the first place I’ve ever lived where I could do what I liked as far as decorating. When we moved in, I was six months pregnant and we were house-poor (it is Baltimore, after all, such a housing market) and only now, two years later, am I actually getting to decorate. It is only “design on a dime” decorating, and not totally what I wanted, but still.
It feels really good to turn the place I live in into somewhere I actually enjoy living in.
And this is the best before picture I can find, and it only shows a part of this room. Even when I took this, I cropped out the bad patch and the rest of the room because they bothered me so much. Actually, the paint doesn’t look so bad in this light, but trust me on the excretory associations it musters.
Anyway. That’s what we’ve been doing this week. That, and sleeping on separate couches to avoid the paint fumes. I’ll be so glad when it’s all done!
What to do with a pile of scraps?
recent flickr
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my sewing tutorials
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