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Operation Quilt: Day 2
I know you are all sitting on the edges of your seats waiting to hear how it’s going on the quilting front. It’s an exciting raging battle between me and the threads, let me tell you. Today I pretty much just cut. Cutting cutting cutting… It was hard though!
I hate cutting this fabric up. I feel so much pressure to use it wisely. The patterns are so old. Each piece seems like it holds a story, if only I knew what it was. I bought them in a stack at an estate sale years ago for something like 25 cents a piece. I know they are old flour sacks but I don’t know how old they are. I hope I am doing them right putting them into a quilt. It seems like a better thing to do than keep them away in some dark corner of my closet.
So cut away I did, as carefully as I could. I admit I had to take several breaks because some of the flour sacks were wonkey and not square. It’s stressful (for me) to figure out the best way to cut an odd shape to use every scrap possible. Way too much math for my lopsided brain. I even called my mom in a moment of weakness.
Somehow my mom magically figured out a way to get untangled from whatever she was doing and she came to my rescue! I love my mom. Or maybe she just couldn’t resist all the fun I’m having with this silly quilt. She and my nieces drove down to visit me. Which is great because Bug is bored out of her skull rattling around in this great big house full of toys to play with.
What kind of kid gets bored in a house full of somebody eles’s toys? She is so weird that way. She’s never played with toys much. She has a room full of them and she’d rather bug me. She’s always been that way.
It’s nice because I never have to pick up much after her but it’s a pain in the butt because sometimes I’d like to do my own thing, like you know, make a quilt or something. So I’m very happy my nieces are here to entertain my favorite little monster. Not that I don’t like Bug’s company or anything. I just need some space once in a while.
Once they were here I finished cutting pretty quickly. I did sew a few pieces together just to see how’d they’d look. I wasn’t sure about the strip width but I think I’m settled on it now. It’s actually turning out to be a lot easier than I thought. I don’t want to jinx myself but I think I can totally do this, especially now that my mom is here. She’s not doing it for me, that would be cheating, but she is helping me out of those crazy second-guessing circles I seem to spin myself into.
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hot gritty sweaty
Summer is upon us and the heat has been oppressive. I know I can’t complain since we live at the beach and it’s probably a zillion times hotter in other parts of the country. It’s just that we don’t have air conditioning in our old broken down apartment and sometimes I find myself wondering if winter ever existed. And if it did, why did I complain so much about being cold?!!! I would take that cold any day right about now.
Do you like my makeshift curtains? I knew that crocheted blanket would come in handy when I swiped it from my mom last year. I swear it drops the temperature on the couch about five degrees which is really wonderful when the weather feels like hot dog’s breath.
I’ve been daydreaming about Paris again, as I’m wont to do when the sweat is rolling down my back. It’s my happy place I go to when I’m hot and hating my ugly stained carpet. I like to think about the old broken down apartments I saw when I was there. Window ledges were crumbling, paint was peeling, walls were cracked. Life wasn’t all clean and modern and air conditioned but it was still beautiful in that gritty, these-walls-have-been-here-for-hundreds-of-years sort of way.
My apartment might not be a hundred years old but it feels like it sometimes. So I’ve been trying to see the beauty in it. Not just in my hot sweaty apartment but in life all around me. You know, just ordinary life. Just like that famous photographer said, if you look hard enough you’ll find a picture.
Actually I’m quoting that all wrong. It was Stieglitz who said, “Wherever there is light, one can photograph,” But in my mind I paraphrased it to be something like, “There is a picture everywhere, you just have to find it.” I love thinking that. I love trying to find that picture. Sometimes I have to bend over backwards to find that weird odd angle but it’s there.
Today I tried to find that picture at the laundromat. It made laundry day a lot more fun. Maybe they are mundane photos but life is mundane. Personally, I don’t have a lot of pictures from my own childhood. I’d pay a lot of money to see photos of myself helping my mom do laundry back in the 70’s and 80’s. (Did I even help my mom do laundry? I don’t think I did.) We’ve got lots of pictures of my brother and I at Sea World and camping in Yosemite but not a single one doing something ordinary. I’d love to go back in time and see what that ordinary looked like.
I wonder how much different it is from how we do things now… I find these mundane details way more interesting than say photos of a mountain or a pretty lake. Of course I love photos of beautiful scenery. But it’s the people who change, the fashions, the moments, the little things… that’s what I want to capture. I wonder what Bug will think of all these photos when I’m old and gone. Will there be so many of them that she’ll find it all exhausting? Or will she treasure them?
As you can see, laundry time ran into nap time but I chose to stay at the laundromat and fold my clean clothes there. Why? Because the swamp cooler was blasting out a nice humid breeze and the oldies were playing. I might even say it was pleasant. Which is a first for me and laundry day.
