Getting There

The most fun part of crafting is … CRAFTING. I reserved 75% of this past weekend for making stuff – curtains, pillows, mitts, benches. Good times!! Stuff is really coming together. And it looks AWESOME.

Jeff has said on more than one occasion lately that he thinks I might not be satisfied until 75% of the stuff we have is made by me. I said no, 75% must be handmade, not necessarily made by me. Ha! Not really. I don’t think I have enough time to amass that kind of collection! Not that I won’t try.

However, I can manage only a short post tonight that does not include my recent attendance at an Etsy craft night or the knife skills class, for I must return to typing up my self-review for my job. Next Sunday is my six-month review that ENDS my probationary period. YAY. Well, yay if I’m not fired first, I guess!  Hard to believe I’ve been here in the Bay Area for six months as of Thursday.

TTFN.

Huge project progress

Suddenly, it’s the last day of February. Did this month just whiz by or what? Maybe that’s because the kitchen has been quite a project. Just finding the materials and designing the patterns was enough for one month! We decided to get as many of the raw materials as possible from local stores, which was interesting. It’s definitely kept me busy on weekends, and I’ll be busy for a couple more weekends finishing. I’ll post about the non-kitchen goals separately.

By the way, our kitchen projects were inspired by this blue and yellow distressed shelf and letters that Jeff got me for Christmas from OldNewAgain. I love the sunny feel of it, and that there’s a little jam jar for flowers. I’m also trying to work within our kitchen’s lingering fifties feel and the simple, quirky aesthetic of my sixties-era dish collection. There are elements from the kitchen shown in the cutout below (I can’t remember what magazine it’s from), but the benches and table seemed right for our little space. I don’t like the chairs though. I’ve actually read horror stories about children and animals getting stuck in hairpin legs like that and getting hurt.

1. Kitchen table: Yes! We got it Saturday and had dinner at it last night. Jeff and I got super picky about the table. We decided the optimal table was a 40″ round table – not easy to find – and similar to a Saarinen tulip table. Those are expensive and hard to find second-hand, but there are a variety of knock-offs. We settled on the CB2 Odyssey based on sturdiness and build quality.

2. Benches for the kitchen: Almost! Progress is slow owing to my lack of expertise. After I designed them we went to a local lumber store for materials, where Jeff and I faced the fact that we were woefully out of place. We are giant nerds, and though we were willing it was a good thing my brother was there and knew what to do. Much sanding, fiddly math and drilling later, we nearly have some pretty and sturdy custom benches. They’ll also double as bookshelf-storage underneath. I named them Woodhenge, haha … see?

3. Cushions, pillows, curtains, appliance cover, oven mitt: Almost! I am awaiting special accent fabrics  – I had to wait to order them until after I knew the bench sizes, the style of the table, and what sort of coordinating linen I’d find. I was going to use Central Park, but we decided we liked Kate Spain’s Fandango collection more. I picked these fabrics: Portico in celadon for the bench cushions and Sarabande for the curtains, plus coordinating fabric. I ordered enough for future projects like napkins, a round table mat, and placemats.

The other fabrics I’m using are a white cotton I already had and a heavyweight linen. I got the linen and other supplies at local store Discount Fabrics. I thought I’d died and gone to heaven in there. Also, in case my inventiveness fails me, I got this pattern to get me through making box cushions with cording. So now everything’s washed, measured, ironed, cut out and partially sewn. Just awaiting the other fabric.

The challenge in making everything yourself is mostly about pulling together a thousand tiny details. I really like how things are turning out so far, so hopefully that will give me the inspiration to spend a bunch more hours working on it!

The Truth About Memory

My last two completed January projects were started when I lived in south Austin, and since I moved out of there in October 2009, these finishes are a long time coming. This is my third finished small quilt, one of a set of four quilts in progress about thoughts I had while I lived in Austin about the fragility of life. Due to various circumstances, I spent a lot of time living with that thought, and eventually decided that I wanted to try to make things that expressed aspects of that theme, to give some sort of voice to how I thought about it all.

This quilt is called The Truth About Memory. For me the fragility of memory is wrapped up in the idea of the fragility of life. When you lose someone, there are pictures and belongings, but what you really have is your memories. It’s the same with our own pasts – as we move through the linear progression of life we lose pieces of who we used to be and create new pieces, and our memories are the layers that create the present.

technically, this is looking back through time …

The trouble is that memory is fragile, just notoriously faulty neural pathways. As a long-term journal keeper, I know how unreliable memory can be. I can’t tell you how often I’ve realized my version of a memory is wrong, or the details are glossed over, the years were switched, I forgot names and places. Some events disappear. Illness, age and stress all contribute to this ongoing distortion and loss. Sometimes that’s good, sometimes not so much.

these little lines represent confusion …

This quilt is meant to represent pseudo-linear memory. The silk is primary experience/event memory, and shows how recall is sometimes good and sometimes twisted or incomplete. The embroidery is little memory threads, a glimpse, a noise or smell, small anecdotes, fuzzy scraps of information, or simply pathways linking one stream of memory to another. Lines twist, appear and disappear at random.

This visualization is a combination of what I think when I hear about “neural pathways” plus my personal experience of unreliable memory. Also shown is that I realize my clearest memories are those with emotional ties. For example, my first memory is from age 14 months when my brother came home from the hospital. I remember being out in front of our house looking down at his little face. It’s just one simple picture in my mind, but 34 years later it’s still with me.

hand-stitching on the back of the binding

So what’s here is real memories that are essentially indecipherable to anyone but me, because I doubt anyone else thinks of it quite like this.

Details: The backing is oatmeal linen with appliqued strips of pieced kimono silks. The embroidery is DMC variegated pearl cotton in one of the peach/brown colors (4124 maybe? I lost the tags) and ivory. It’s machine appliqued, hand embroidered. The binding is machine sewn on the front but the back and corners are hand-tacked.

The cat is now sleeping on top of it, so I guess she approves.