Bits & Bags 1: Elastic Wrist Straps and A Fear of Zippers
Working my way through Organizational Items A-F (actually it’s now A-H), but here are five of my completed items.
First up: Button Pincushions! These are not fancy pincushions–not cute animals or stuck into teacups or some such–but they are functional. My intent was to just make the wrist pincushions, but I had extra fabric, so I whipped up a third fat little guy.
I’ve loved wrist pincushions since I first discovered my mom’s when I was a kid – I thought it was genius and stole it regularly. I now have one of the standard Dritz wrist pincushions ones too, but these days the shine is off. I think it’s ugly, too thin, and I don’t like the plastic wrist band. My wrist pincushions are a take-off of a Keyka Lou free pattern. I sewed mine with 2 fabric layers and iron-on fleece, while hers are made of 3 layers of fabric. Also, mine have a comfy elastic wrist strap which I came up with all by my lonesome.
Not sure what happened, but the green one is a tad malformed … I must have stuffed it funny. These little guys will save me from sticking my pins and needles into random cushions on the couch or into my clothing while embroidering … a practice which I’m sure will one day become tragic if I continue.
Second: FEAR OF ZIPPER. These two items mean that I’ve now sewn a zipper into three items in my entire sewing life. I decided my irrational fear of sewing in zippers must end. It’s not that hard. At some point I became petrified of zippers to the point of avoiding them like they are months-old moldy cheese. So here I am facing sewing fears–I’m sure some past therapist is very proud. I’m not going to pretend my zippers are at a professional level, but they’re definitely functional and not bad-looking, I think.
Plus it never hurts to distract everyone by adding cute cat charms
I messed about with quilting for these bags … each side of the bags is quilted using thin fleece. One bag has straight line patterns, the other curvy free-form sewing. Quilting makes for thick sturdy bags, which is useful because I intend to keep sharp pointy objects in bags like these – an awl and scissors to start – and thick sides mean the sharp pointy things have less of a chance of poking me when I reach for the bags.
I’m plowing through these now at a great rate of speed, should be ready to post a couple more items soon!!
Rainbow Thread
About a week and a half ago I decided I really needed, somehow or other, to get back in the crafting groove. My energy has been elsewhere for almost two months, which is understandable. I wanted to find some way to get back to it, even if it wasn’t much, even if it didn’t make so much. So …
Yes indeed. I organized. That’s standard 6-strand embroidery floss. Wound neatly onto little plastic bobbins with all the kinks worked out and the really stubborn knots cut off. Stored in rainbow order in a nice little clear box like a box of sunshine and flowers. Guaranteed to make me happy just looking at it. I love rainbows and color, and I’m somewhat OCD, so lots of things get arranged by color in my house: my sewing thread, the clothing in my closet, Sharpie pens, notebooks, fabric stash, yarn stash. If there’s color and I’m nearby, it’s probably in rainbow shades.
Did I actually buy all of that floss? Nope. I’m not that crazy, I don’t embroider enough to use several miles of thread, and there wouldn’t be any pink there if it were up to me. The majority came from my inheritance of Jeff’s grandmother’s crafting supplies and is marked with an asterisk. I would describe her style of floss organization as “Giant Ball of Stringy Chaos.” There were a very few faded and “crunchy” specimens over thirty years old that weren’t salvageable, but most were fine. I rewound those and Jeff was patient enough to unknot the really nasty ones.
Oh, and any of you who embroider, you might be happy to know that your humble standard DMC embroidery floss will probably still be in good shape in 2040. Only the pink faded a bit.
I took pictures of it all because of how GLOWY and nice and shiny and ORDERLY and pretty these were. Where’s my next project? ‘CAUSE I HAVE THREAD.
On Finishing, and Creative Road Blocks
Well, it’s done. I finally put the border on. Don’t know what you’ll think of what I chose – heck, I’m not sure about what I chose – but at the end of the day, it’s done. It even has hanging loops. And as a matter of fact, it’s hanging right now, in my office, above my computer screen. It’s hard for me, now, to just look at it without seeing every tiny or not-so-tiny stitch in it. I’m not sure I’ve been done with it long enough to see it as a whole. One thing, though – in my office, the gold in it positively glows like sunshine when I look up at it, even in fluorescent light. It’s a pleasing unexpected result.
So, details. The finished size is roughtly 24.5″ wide by 14.5″ tall. Base fabric and binding: upholstery-weight woven fabric remnants, cotton (mostly). Trees, flowers & hills: repurposed cotton/polyester blend pieces from a 1970s quilt kit, 4 prints and 2 solids. Embroidery: DMC cotton. Stitching: mostly machine stitched with cotton/poly blend.
My machine refused to stitch through the corners since there were 9 layers of upholstery weight material to chomp through. I hate mitering, so this is not that.
So if you’ve made it this far into the post, allow me to go off on a tangent for a bit and talk about Merlin Mann. He writes at 43folders.com, among other things, and is well-known for writing and speaking about how to be more productive. He’s written about the Getting Things Done system of staying on task, focused and organized. That’s not really much my particular worry, but lately Merlin has veered off into something more interesting to me. These days he’s talking about how to be more creative - because his productivity work led him to realize that that many people clutter up their lives and minds with endless distractions and excuses to avoid the act of being creative (a type of productivity). People can’t even start that thing they’ve been wanting to do/make for so long for reasons that seem to make sense, but instead are excuses to avoid the possibility of failure and fear. Internal voices that tell you you’re not good enough, what you want to do will inevitably suck, that pursuing it is ridiculous or childish, or that you don’t have enough time or space or … whatever.
Anyway, Merlin says it better than I, and he’s funnier than I am, so you can read his blog post about it or listen to the embedded recording of a talk he recently gave on the subject. I read it/listened and a lot of what he said resonated with me as I completed this little quilt. For me, making something like this is intimidating: it incorporates techniques I am unsure about, features subject matter that is personal, has no pattern, was begun with only a general picture of how it would turn out, and when I started I didn’t even have all the fabric I needed. I did the first small picture quilt for someone else, which made it easier, somehow. I had a deadline, too. So it took some of the stress away. This time, it was harder to begin, hard to finish, and hard not to stop halfway through and think, “This project stinks. What were you thinking? What are those color combinations, anyway? It’s all lumpy. Your stitching is awful. You’re never going to finish, it’s taking too long. No one cares anyway,” and finally “Your border looks terrible.”
But it’s like Merlin says, if you want to do something that’s important to you, and foster that creative urge, you have to start somewhere, and put one foot in front of the other, and not care about suckage and pitfalls and insecurities and your relative ability to do whatever it is you’re doing. Your first attempt might be horrid. Then you do it again, and again, and again, until finally you’re doing what you wanted to do, and the act of doing and making has become more important than the fear.
I say this rarely, but when I was very small I wanted, desperately, to be two things: an architect and an artist. Today I am neither one because when I was young people told me I wasn’t very good at math, geometry and drawing and I should really concentrate on things that weren’t analytical or creative. At 34, I still want to be an architect and an artist, and I know now that the people who told me I wasn’t very good were not very nice or correct, and that one day I will prove them wrong by doing a little of both.
And now it’s done. And hanging. And I can start on the next thing with less of the fear than I had when I began this one.
P.S. That’s my office, the top of my screen, the most boring wall color ever, and to the left my note to myself about the reality of the world: absurdum ad infinitum.
