Sometimes I have this strange desire for somebody (um, anybody?) to know what I’m thinking at any given moment, and possibly be able to empathize, commiserate, share or otherwise relate to whatever it is. Maybe it’s something frustrating, or maybe it’s something completely awesome that has me fired up and wanting to share it. I’m assuming, perhaps completely erroneously, that others have this strange need sometimes too. Am I totally off base here?

I used to think it was because my children were little, and the conversations in the house during the day weren’t exactly what one would call “stimulating” and it’s not like the children could have been said to care about any of the things that concern me or that I think are cool. I thought that as time went by and they got a bit older, that would change. Sadly, I was mistaken, and the conversations still aren’t exactly stimulating, just a different sort of mundane, and they still don’t care about the things that I do, and we definitely don’t have the same definitions of “cool.” “Mom, what’s for dinner?” “Mom, I made an appointment on Tuesday at the doctor. What do you mean you can’t take me on Tuesday?” “You’re excited about thread?” “Do I have to empty the dishwasher?” (Jeez, I wonder what reaction I’d get if I said they had to actually wash the dishes, by hand? They’d probably run screaming all the way to France!)

There are times when I want to call ITMan or a girlfriend or my mom, just to share whatever it is that is in my head at that moment with an adult, thank you very much, and ITMan is not at his desk or I know he’s too busy right then, the girlfriends are all unavailable for whatever reasons (they have lives or some distracting thing like that), and mom is, well, not always communicative when needed. And beside that, mom has heard all the stuff like this, my very first Twitter post,

There are days I’d happily trade my beautiful teenager for a mangy stray dog with fleas. Today was one of those days.

She’s heard it all before, in multiples, and lived it as well. She’s undoubtedly tired of hearing it by now, though to her credit, she does sympathize when I do bend her ears about it all.

There are also those moments where everything is just “short and sweet” (or maybe not so sweet, depending on whether a teenager and the center of the universe are involved), and not really something I want to get into in a long blog post (and I don’t seem to be able to write short ones which is probably due to a genetic defect dating back to my Grandmama’s day; she was notorious for including all the minutiae that no one really needed to know in every story she ever told and I seem to have inherited that trait), so a short one or two sentence thing is really all that it needs to be. I wonder if my Grandmama had the same penchant for parentheses? She probably got sidetracked just like I do…

To that end, I’ve added the Scraps section that you see to the right, courtesy of Twitter. Yes, I’ve been sucked in by that Twitter thing finally. Do you Twitter? If so, share your “Follow Me” link or whatever it is, and we’ll Twitter together. We can hook up, or whatever is is that people do when they Twitter. Tweet!

Share This

Pfft—where did that come from anyway?

I’m not a “scraps” kind of gal, preferring to work with big chunks of fabric when I make quilts, instead of the little oddly shaped leftover bits and pieces filling up the many assorted containers all over my house. When I start a new project, I first go big stash hunting, pulling out at many yardage sized bundles as I can find to create the perfect palette for the idea in my head. When the Big Stash has produced it’s last hopeful candidate, I go to the Little Stash of fat quarters stored in tubs and the process begins all over again. If the palette is still lacking in sufficient variety of color or pattern or amount, I head to the local quilt shop, dragging whatever I’ve already chosen hoping to add to it from the vast selection usually on display there.

Whoever wrote [that] may have intended it as a metaphor of life, but it’s not my metaphor.

Then come the Google searches, and the email and phone calls to friends near and far, in an ever widening and more desperate search for just the right fabrics to make the project successful, let alone make it sing. Way, way down on the list of possibilities are the boxes, bags, buckets, bins and baskets of scraps that bear silent testimony to the quilting projects of the last 18 plus years.

During (infrequent) moments of decluttering and purging unused “stuff” from the house and our lives, I consider taking these space hogging fabric bits straight to the local youth center or Girl Scout camp, secure in the knowledge that the leftovers would be put to good use. Perhaps it’s an unconscious, perverse desire to make a true scrap quilt someday, maybe it’s just a completely unreasonably fear that a fabric depression will soon envelop the entire quilting industry, or possibly when I open the containers to see what’s inside, I see the scattered bits of projects long past and just can’t bear to part with the last little bit of the perfect fabrics, but the bits and pieces of quilting fabrics always end up finding their way back to their secret locations in the house, there to remain forever crumpled. Read the rest of this entry »

Share This

Stars in My Hand was awarded Best Machine Quilting at the Albuquerque Fiber Arts Fiesta in May. The quilt has now gone into “retirement” to live with my Aunt and Uncle.

Share This