Say It Isn't Sew

I was out in my studio the other day, waiting for my next massage client to arrive, as I so often do, and looking around at all the art supplies I've accumulated over the past couple of years and not done anything with.  Cool how-to art books, empty journals,

  a craft pasta machine, acrylic paints in little bottles,

little pointy and rounded tools for sculpting polymer clay into food and dolls heads and recognizable characters from real life,

watercolors, brushes, a new sewing machine I HAD to have after seeing it at Penny's in 2003 and on which I've never sewn anything save one straight line 7 years ago just to make sure it worked and that I still remembered how. 

 

As usual, I felt little jabs of remorse and failuredom for having had so many plans over the past 10 years and accomplishing so little.  And it's not really even about failure or accomplishment, it's about not doing the things I love to do and doing, instead, stuff I care less about than this stuff.  It is so hard to push through the resistance to change the way I spend my time.  Not able, somehow, to connect the dots between what I do and what I get.  Wanting one thing and doing stuff that will never get me there.  

A week ago, I went to the store and picked out fabric and batting and matching thread for a baby quilt for a girl I work with whose shower is TODAY.  (I told you I bought the stuff ONE week ago, right?)  I thought, while taking these pictures on Thursday, that I must be out of my fucking mind to have thought I was going to start and complete a baby quilt in, what was then, 4 days.  And not even whole days, either.  And one of those days I was scheduled to work 12 hours in the ER.  (To give you a little point of reference on my timing, I started a quilt for my first grandson when his mother was pregnant with him.  I finally finished it and gave it to him when he was 6 years-old).  

And not only that, but I already had all of this that I bought to make a quilt for the 4th of July.....1997.

And this that I cut a skirt pattern out of like 20 years ago and never sewed together and now, who would wear this?  I'm not opposed to the color or print but it's all cut out in the pattern of a skirt that's completely out of style, now.  Arghhhh! 

 And this fabric that I bought and never did ANYTHING with.  I totally love it, still, and probably should have made the baby quilt out of it, now that I see it again.

This one really hurts.  It's a pile of partially assembled quilt blocks that I started to replace a quilt made for my sister by her close friend that I destroyed when I lived with her in 1981.  NINETEEN. EIGHTY. ONE.  That's 30 years ago.  Right?  Yeah, 30 years. (Math's not my forte, okay?).

 

So Thursday, after my client's massage was completed and the place was cleared out, I locked the door and started working on that baby quilt.  The one for the shower today.  (I thought it would be best to start from the present and work backward). 

I didn't think it could be done.  I really didn't.  But I worked all the rest of Thursday and 10 hours on Friday and when I got off work last night at 7, I started working on it and finished it at fifteen minutes after midnight.  I tossed it in the washer on the delicate cycle and went to bed.  This morning, I dried it, (then rewashed it and dried it again because there were two little dark spots on the hem that, oddly, appeared darker when the quilt was wet than they did when it was dry and that turned out, after all that, to be two little pieces of something brown stuck inside to the batting where they are entirely irretrievable).  Then I ironed it.  And this is what I ended up with.

I even dug the gift bag and tissue paper out of a stash I've been rat-holing for years.  Ironed the tissue paper and that's that.
It feels really good to be sewing again.