Finish It Friday ~ Birds & Blooms Quilt Top

This quilt top began with the leftovers of a set of fabric in the Alegria lin from Cloud 9 by designer Geninne Zlatkis that I bought about eight years ago and used to made a little spring/summer bunting. I had planned to make the rest into a table runner, but when I sat down to make a list of things to finish this year (this year being my year of finishing all the things), the idea just didn't excite me. Did I really need another table runner? And wouldn't it just get all stained and dirty from the sloppy people I live with? 

Instead I would make a quilt--a quilt for my own bed, which I've never made before. It would be both pretty and practical. C and I use a down comforter most of the year, but there are a few weeks in the summer where it's too warm for goose feathers. But even on those hot nights, when I lie down beneath a sheet and thin blanket an C sprawl on top of the blanket with a fan blasting him (which I turn off, because I can't stand to sleep with a fan blowing), he ends up getting up in the night and rummaging in the closet to find additional blankets, which inevitably don't fit my aesthetic--scratchy red wool things. I've been meaning to make a summer quilt to solve this problem for a long while.

I was able to find a couple of pieces from the Alegria line online, enough to make borders (albeit in two different colorways), but I had to find other fabrics to fill out a whole quilt. I went with another Cloud 9 line, Birds & Branches, as well as fabrics from Cotton & Steel and Rifle & Paper, all selected from tiny pictures on the internet, with great hopes that they would all work together, since the quilt stores around me are still closed. I added in some fabric from my stash, including a couple of Kaffe Fasset prints (there always has to be Kaffe Fasset) and then arranged them in 4-patch blocks, because I was afraid just random arrangement of all this disparate fabrics would be too much, even for me.

 

Since I chose a pattern of 4 and 8-inch squares, it came together quickly, and I'm pretty pleased with the way it turned out, even though it's more pastel than bright, which is my general go-to color zone. 

Pandemicvision

Before the pandemic, I wasn't a huge TV watcher. I'd tune in every Sunday night for Masterpiece and watch a movie on Friday and Saturday, and maybe take in a show that everyone in the family enjoyed once or twice a week, but otherwise usually spent my evenings reading, writing, or projecting. I think. In reality I find it hard to remember how I used to spend any of my time pre-pandemic, and I find it hard to imagine having the energy to do anything other than zone out in front of the boob tube. All that changed with the apocalypse. The need to escape into the normalcy...if somewhat zany normalcy...of other, imaginary, people's lives overpowered any desire for productivity or self-improvement. In looking back over the first thirteen months of the pandemic year, I've had a hard time remembering all of what we watched, so I thought I'd attempt to take an inventory here.

Comfort TV

Familiar characters. Known plot points. Memorized lines and jokes. This is what I craved most of all, so early last April I instituted Friends Night every Monday, when we would watch one episode of Season 1 of Friends. I figured the 20 episodes of the first season, which would take us into September, would get us to the end of the pandemic. While this was way more realistic than all of the "shop for two weeks of lockdown" and "we just need to flatten the curve" prognostications, it wasn't even anywhere close. When M went to college, we kept him in the loop by FaceTiming with him every Monday night and setting the phone up in front of the TV. E bought me the discs for Season 2 for my Birthday in August and then Season 3 for Christmas. We're going to need Season 4 pretty soon. I just hope the pandemic ends before we get through all ten seasons.

When one of requires the television equivalent of macaroni and cheese in between Friends Nights, we watch a couple episodes of the BBC/Masterpiece production Jeeves & Wooster, with the madcap duo of Hugh Laurie and Stephen Frye, or (also BBC) Death in Paradise.

Family TV

When your kids reach a certain age, they want to spend less and less time with you, and one of the only ways of spending time together that doesn't lead to some kind of confrontation (except over who gets what seat on the couches) is to sit down in front of a show everyone can enjoy. Soon after he came home from college last spring, M and I were casting about for something to watch when we came upon Scrubs. C and I used to watch it when it was on network TV (a concept totally foreign to my kids), and I forgot how funny it was (that is until the totally unnecessary and off-the-rails last season). 

Before we had kids, C and I used to come home from work, cook dinner, and sit down to eat in front of the nightly Friends and King of the Hill reruns. We kept up this ritual after M was born, until the night when his little diaper butt bounced up and down tin time with the theme song of King of the Hill. After that, we moved dinner to the kitchen table and relegated television to after the kid was in bed time. We reintroduced M to the show, and he loved it still, but instead of his diaper butt bouncing up and down, he took to talking like Boomhauer. Another show we remembered from out network days and that did not disappoint in the humor department (until yet another excessive final season) was My Name is Earl.

We've made Friday night another regular TV night with E and Z, watching The Mandalorian, which I admit I didn't love, then Wanda Vision, which I thought was such a great, original story and a fantastic departure from the predictable plots of most superhero movies. Now C and the boys are watching Winter Soldier and The Falcon, but while I sit with them, I usually read or do a craft project and don't pay much attention, because I don't really like the Winter Soldier as a character and I really don't like the gun violence (as opposed to super hero power violence).

Girly TV

It seems that being trapped at home with four large male people, sometimes going weeks without seeing another woman in person, caused me to gravitate toward shows with women as the primary characters: New Girl and The Mindy Project got me through the rough period of last spring, and often I stayed up way too late at night bingeing on them, avoiding going to bed where I'd have to think about...stuff. I've also been slowly working my way through The Gilmore Girls, but I can only watch that when C's not around because he hates it. He claims the acting is poor, but I tease him that he can't stand watching a show that is entirely focused around women and their concerns, only some of which involve men. (I think I'm at least partly right.)

Drama

Life is dramatic enough these days that we've mostly stuck to comedies, though we have continued our Sunday night Masterpiece tradition. I've forgotten about most of these at this point, except a WWII show set mostly in Warsaw after the invasion, which was an extremely traumatic thing to watch during apocalyptic times, and All Creatures Great and Small, which I found lovely and sweet and soothing. Perfectly pastoral.

The Best for Last

It took a couple of years of many people recommending Schitt's Creek to me before we finally dove in and watched. It's true that the premise sounds pretty dumb. And it's true that the first few episodes will have you thinking that it's a show about a bunch of vain, selfish people being not very nice to each other. But it turns out to be very funny, very smart, and also very, very sweet. The characters change and grow over the progression of the seasons, when usually sitcoms work because the characters don't change. They're very loving to each other, in their vain, selfish way, and they love each other in spite of each other's quirks. 

Book Stack ~ March 2021

A monthly post about my progress toward finishing a very large stack of books. Past months' posts:

January 2021

February 2021

Last month's stack is another mini one. I'm getting cranky about how much work is interfering with my reading time (I've decided to stop blaming television and point toward the real culprit instead--capitalism).

Nonfiction: Erosion by Terry Tempest Williams. I've been a huge fan of TTW ever since I was assigned to read Refuge in college. Her writing is just so beautiful and searingly truthful. This one so much so that it hurt a little to read--about the realities of climate change and the abuses to wild lands by the fossil fuel industry and the previous administration. There's none of the cheery optimism so many nature writers feel compelled to tack onto the hard realities of we're basically f*cked. So yeah, a hard read, but a necessary one.

Fiction: A Deadly Inside Scoop by Abby Collette. This book, by contrast, was just pure fun--an ice cream shop, a murder (okay, maybe that wasn't fun for the murder victim), and a number of suspects, including the narrator's father...all tied up in a nice bow after a mildly suspenseful scene, in the best cozy style.

What are you reading this month?

Ordinary Days

Last month I was scrolling through my online bank records for 2020 while preparing our tax info for the accountant. I started in December and worked backward, and when I reached the early part of the year, before the pandemic and the lockdown, I became unexpectedly, unbelievably sad. Not because I had booked tickets for the vacation of a lifetime that would have to be cancelled or put a deposit on a venue for a major event that would never happen, but quite the opposite. The utter ordinariness of the transactions--a trip to Goodwill or the bookstore, haircuts for the boys, a pair of shoes--seemed so foreign to the way the world is now that I felt a deep, deep grief.

The pandemic did not change my life materially. My nearest and dearest have stayed safe and healthy so far. I would have been off of work for the entire summer and fall anyway. I might say I even thrived on the opportunity to be in the company of my family and to have the time that I would otherwise have spent socializing, ferrying my kids around, or running errands to focus on writing and spending time in nature around my home instead.

Many people are expressing optimism that now that vaccines are making their way into arms at a thrilling pace, we'll soon be able to go about our ordinary business. But this last year has driven home the reality that "ordinary" is relative. That what's ordinary to me is not an experience that is available to many: Black men and women who are brutalized and murdered by police and vigilantes while going about their ordinary business of buying a sandwich, going for a jog, sleeping. Elderly Asians who are attacked in the street by white supremacists. Asian women shot in their places of work, again by angry white supremacists. Women of all races beaten and murdered in their own homes by those closest to them.

The weather this year has also been anything but ordinary: wildfires going into December; tornados in February; blizzards in the Deep South; a town flattened by a derecho. Thirty years of denying and ignoring the science on climate change are coming home to roost. It seems unlikely we'll ever see an ordinary season again.

Early last year, I was working on a short story called "Soccer Moms at the End of the World." It was to be a somewhat comic, near-apocalyptic tale (quite possibly a genre I invented) about people going about their normal business as if a quite obvious catastrophe was not looming. As the coronavirus epidemic swelled toward pandemic, I felt the urgency of writing it and was making progress. Then, after my kids' school shut down, I lost my daily writing time, the half hour between 7:30 a.m. (when I arrived at work after having dropped them at their bus stop at 7:00) and 8:00 (when I had to actually go into the office and work). Then my work closed too, and what could have been a full-time writing schedule instead became a full-time doom-scrolling schedule. And the apocalypse had become all too real--bizarrely slow-moving but incredibly palpable--which made writing about a fictional apocalypse a little weird. Also, I didn't know where that story was going. I didn't know what to do with those moms, blissfully ignoring the burgeoning crisis as they bought snacks, drove their kids to soccer games, and sat on the sidelines chatting about everything but what was most important. I still don't know what to do with them. They have to get up every morning and take care of their families. As do we all.

Finish it Friday ~ Little Bird Embroidery

This isn't much, but I'm all for celebrating small wins this week. Several years ago C gave me an embroidery kit for Christmas (because I asked for it) by Cozy Blue Handmade. It has four patterns--all of the same image of plants and birds but in a different color scheme for each season. They're totally adorable, but the thing is, I don't really like following patterns or instructions (except while knitting). Also, it's harder to embroider while watching TV and the lighting in our house wasn't that great. Which is to say I hadn't gotten very far over three or four or five years since I got them.

This winter, I bought new lamps to make working and reading in the evening easier and more comfortable. And I found that if I'm watching something sort of mindless, embroidery and TV aren't totally incompatible. And so I finished the first of the four seasons: winter cardinals (which, truth be told, was the one I'd made the most progress on in the past, so it really is a small win, but still a win).

While I had my embroidery box out, I tidied it up, winding all of the floss onto little cards. (I don't have a "before" photo, but picture a packrat's nest.) This was a useful activity for keeping the hands busy during interminable conference calls when knitting might be a little too obvious.

Also in the embroidery box was this little scene I stitched up a few years ago on a weekend trip to the pond. This is more my kind of embroidery. It might not be as professional-looking as the kit, but it was more fun and personal. I have to think of what to do with it, though.

I also found these embroideries from drawings M made when he was very little: a smiling, happy elephant and turtle and a very long, winding snake (which, apparently, was my Waterloo on this project). 

I don't remember what I planned to do with these and I don't know what I should do with them now, if anything. I could dig out my kids' old drawings and do a whole series, put them together in a wall quilt or something. But I'm not sure I could handle it. They are so far from the cute little kids who drew cute little animals (and, if I recall correctly, I had to really dig to find these little animals--M mostly drew robots and space and war scenes).

Book (Mini) Stack ~ February 2021

A monthly post about my progress toward finishing a very large stack of books. Past months' posts:

January 2021

I only managed to finish two books in February, but they're both from my Book Stack and they're both on my list of twelve particular books I want to finish in 2021, so I'll call it a win.

First, for fiction, I read Far From the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy. I'd read Tess of the d'Urbervilles way back when (in 2009! How is it possible that 12 years have gone by?) and absolutely loved it. I don't know why, but I never got around to reading any more Thomas Hardy since then. My sister had given me Far from the Madding Crowd sometime between then and now, but I never picked it up--a book that long is just such a commitment, you know?--until last month when I finally compelled myself to dive in. And you know what? I was reminded of what I loved so much about Tess. Hardy's lush descriptions of landscape and people and weather (there's a thunderstorm that goes on for three chapters). He does have a tendency to make unflattering sweeping generalizations about women, though I suspect these are tongue-in-cheek, since they're usually used as counterpoint to what the women characters (usually Bathsheba, heroine of this book) actually are like or what they actually do. I will admit that it got a little bit slow in the middle, and I didn't love it quite as much as I loved Tess, but I was happy that it didn't end tragically (for Bathsheba and the hero, Gabriel Oak, anyway; other characters did come to unhappy ends). Perhaps I'll read Jude the Obscure or The Mayor of Casterbridge before another dozen years go by.

In contrast to that nearly 150-year-old novel, my nonfiction for the month was nearly brand new: World of Wonders by Aimee Nezhukumatathil, subtitled In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments. "Praise" is a fitting description; it's like a series of praise poems written in prose, which is apt, since Nezhukumatathil is poet. I won't write too much about this book here and now, because I'll be reviewing it in Literary Mama in a couple of months, and I'm already excited to read it a second time for the review. Stay tuned!

Finish it Friday ~ Wavy Charms Quilt

This quilt began as a package of vaguely S-shaped charms my mom sent me several years ago as part of a de-stashing effort. I never got around to finishing it because: a) I didn't have enough charms for a whole quilt; b) I didn't have the original pattern piece to make new ones out of (nor nearly enough stash); and c) I had no idea how to sew wavy lines and get the resulting fabric to lie flat.

I decided to just let all that go and dive in. I made a pattern from one of the pieces my mom sent--this is a good way to introduce error, and indeed the new pieces I cut ended up longer than the others, but like the guys of the buildings and grounds crew where I worked the summer after I graduated from college used to say whenever someone started to get uptight about the imperfection of a small project, "It's not a f-ing piano." I'm not sure if I sewed the curved edges "properly," but I just kind of stretched and molded one piece to fit another and, when the two pieces were being recalcitrant, by using the occasional pin.

For the backing, I went with a romantic rose print, which I thought fit with the calicos on the front. I didn't like it at first and wished I'd gone with something more simple and monochromatic, since the front is so busy, but it's growing on me. Like the 70s quilt, I used fluffy batting and tied the corners, old-school style.

Even though almost no two of these prints would go together in any rational way, they kind of work as a big kaleidoscope of color.