Turns out I'm a bitch

It's strange, my new quilting habit. For one thing, it keeps pulling me away from my more pressing and urgent habits.  I have a niece coming in October and I'm still a skein away from finishing her baby afghan, and I haven't even started her Xmas stocking yet!  But also, while it is the one thing I really just don't care if I get right, I totally judge other people's quilts!  I google pictures of quilts and it turns out I have really specific taste in quilts.
I don't like borders. People piece together a crib quilt, add a ton of borders to it, and then say they made a double bed quilt.  No you didn't!  It's all filler!
Same with sashing.  In the right quilt it can look good.  If you make it too wide you just look like you stuck postage stamps to a sheet of printer paper.  More filler. It's practically cheating.
I also don't really care for it when a quilt top is all pieced and then the person quilts it with really dark thread that overpowers the fabrics, but that's more of a preference than an actual dislike.

Labor day is coming up, you know.

If I believes in an immortal soul, I would sell mine for a 3 day weekend alone in a hotel with good lighting and room service.  I would stitch my quilt, crochet the baby blanket I'm making for my brother and his pregnant wife, and let other people cook for and serve me whatever I feel like eating.  I would sleep in, poop with the door open, and never have to utter the words, "Why is the baby crying?" or, "Thomas, stop it!"  It is my dream.

8th grade

It's the first day of school.  She's in 8th grade.  I remember 8th grade.  I remember what I was doing in 8th grade.  It makes me want to home school her, remove her from society completely.  But then I remember that she is not me, she is smarter than me, and she has far less of that desperate need for approval no matter the cost that I had, and I feel better.  But still, I remember 8th grade and it scares me as a parent.

Same old Same old

This week is the local county agricultural fair.  Cow judging, carnival games and rides, fried and/or sugar coated foods, you know the drill.  Ryan has a season (5 day) pass for admission courtesy of my mother and new this year is a carnival Megapass which allows you, for the low price of $45, to ride all of the rides as much as you want. She got that by babysitting her brothers.  She's been at the fair pretty much every day, drinking lemonades, eating cheese fries, and meeting the President of The United States.  Standard small-town kid things.

The Secret Service wouldn't let me in, because there were already too many people in line to be scanned before Obama was leaving anyway.  Probably a good thing, too, since I had forgotten that my seam ripper was in my bra (that's where I keep it, okay?) and having the Secret Service bust me trying to get in to see the president with a tiny jabby pokey thin crammed in my bra probably would get me put on a list somewhere.  So I lived vicariously through Ryan, who got an autograph and photos, but no photo of her with POTUS himself.  But still, awfully cool day around here.

Right back where I started.

Today I learned that if I keep the presser foot up, I can quilt all sorts of loopy swirly patterns with my sewing machine.
Today I also learned that if you keep the presser foot up it completely fucks your tension and you end up with cluster fuck knots of plastic invisible quilting thread all over the bottom of your quilt.
Today I learned that the ratio of putting stitches in to taking them out is about half an hour with the machine vs 3 hours with the seam ripper.
Tomorrow I learn to start all over. Perhaps I was meant to hand quilt.

The difference between you and a good mother

The difference between you and a good mother is not the search but the motivation.  A good mother searches for a diagnosis for her child because she wants to know what the problem is and what can be done to cure, treat, or work around it.  You want to be assigned a diagnosis so that you can tell people what's wrong with your kid and get the sympathetic look and "A ......... child?  You're a better mom than I; I could never handle that."  And despite all of the evidence against it, you're really hoping someone will tell you it's autism, because that's the most fashionable disorder for parents, er, I mean kids, to have. Autistic kids are the new adopted black kids after all.

Winter yet?

The heat index today was 100`, and I am thinking of cardigans and quilts and Xmas stockings.  I'm so sick of this heat and swamp-like humidity.  I'm ready for 3 foot snowdrifts and ice in the windows.  Who's with me?

Psychodyke

Once, a thousand years ago, when I had neither children nor commitments, I had an admirer.  And she was a freaking psycho!  Not in a "call the cops cuz I'm scared" sort of way, but in a "Jesus shitting Christ she's put $1 of gas in her car 6 times today waiting for me to come on shift" sort of way.  And I affectionately named her Psychodyke.  Which was cool back then because they didn't completely revoke my gay card until I married Tom, and gay people can say dyke. 
I found her again.  On facebook.  And to prove that I am never too old to make completely predictable mistakes I will always regret, I clicked the "send a friend request" button.  Because before she became a psychopath with a lot of time to waste at a gas station, she actually was my friend.  And for a new kid in the 12th grade at a school 4 times the size of her old one, a friend was pretty cool.  Until the KD Lang music and visible underwear part turned friendly into creepy.  Then I just ran!  Update undoubtedly to come!

Curtains

My sons' birthdays are coming up, so we are planning a party.  I have only just reached the phase where I obsess about my house being ready for company (it's not) now that we've ordered and received the gifts.  I realized on Friday, 8 days before the party, that my kitchen curtains were a bedsheet, and had been a bedsheet for about a year now.  It started out innocently enough; I couldn't find fabric I liked for curtains.  I wanted tan fabric with coffee cups all over it.  And all the stuff I found was either too light or too dark or the coffee cups were really teeny for quilting and would just look like oddly shaped polka dots to anyone who wasn't standing with their nose pressed into my curtains.  But now I had a party to throw and I could not let people come over and see my house with a bedsheet in my kitchen window.  Luckily I had recently ripped off Douchenozzle, so I was prepared!

Okay, a backstory.  I was looking through classified ads online and found one for a yard sale with sewing fabric, so I of course wanted to go. But then I noticed who posted the ad and it was DN. So I called my friend, who hasn't given me permission to use her name here so I will call her Pam Dawber, even though she is decidedly not Pam Dawber.  So I called the non-Pam Dawber and she said she'd go with me, because she likes yard sales and my discomfort would amuse her.  But it turned out that DN wasn't even there.  I bought a ton of fabrics, some in very large quantities, and the teenage kids who sold it to me was all "Two dollars for all of it" even though I was really hoping it wasn't much more than $20. Clearly, the kid had no clue what 15 yards or more of fabric is worth, but who am I to correct DN's kids at their own house?  So I gave them the $2 and hauled ass out of there before they realized they had been robbed. 

So, now I needed curtains, and had enough of a very high quality drapery fabric of questionable beauty, so I whipped up a set of curtains and padded valance for my kitchen.  I'm still not sure if I love them or hate them, but I'm stuck with them now since the valance is bolted into the wall and it would look really strange with another set of curtains hanging from it*.  So, here is what I did this weekend.

Today I tackle cleaning while Tom tries to make some way for me to get the frogs and crickets out of my kitchen, and the bearded dragon off my TV.


*Also, I stapled the fabric to the valance upside down. Is it as noticeable as I think it is?