I don't know if it's the season for me to take on large projects or what, but the last 48 hours have been a whirlwind of finger cramps and eye strain...because I've been making a perler bead portrait.
Perler beads, in case the name isn't ringing a bell, are the little plastic beads that you arranged on a shaped pinboard and fused together with an iron in elementary school.
I never made anything interesting with them, until now. For some reason I decided that my sister needed a perler portrait for her birthday. Not of her, though:
This is a portrait of Zachary Taylor, a US president I know nothing about. Honestly. I mean, I know he existed and junk, but I couldn't tell you a single thing he did for this country. For some unknown reason, though, he is my sister's favorite president. I honestly have no idea.
My setup, about 2 hours into construction...
The portrait was constructed using 12,177 beads. I used an iphone app to convert my selected image into a perler dot format. You could do the same thing in photoshop, by changing the color palette to approximations of perler colors--but that's a lot of work, I don't have photoshop, and the app was $3.99. (you can get the app here.
Since my portrait was going to be large, I had to get the buildable board segments. They snapped together like puzzle pieces. I needed 20 tiles for this project.
Here's a progress shot at the end of day one (yesterday.) you can see my board here, and how the colored and clear segments are puzzled together.
Another progress shot this afternoon. I had to stop here and make sure I was placing everything correctly, because I thought it was starting to look like Jeff Daniels...
The completed portrait. Before ironing. I gotta be honest, I'm only about half done fusing this guy. It's big. And I needed to take a break and use my teeth whitening strips. I'm still seeing a lot of Jeff Daniels in this thing, but Marie said that's cool. If it looks like Zachary Taylor she'll tell people it's Zachary Taylor. If it looks like Jeff Daniels, she'll tell people it's Jeff Daniels.
After the ironing, I'm going to get it framed. My sister's birthday isn't until the end of November, so it might be gracing my wall in the meantime...
Now that I've made my mom a quilt and my sister a perler portrait, I have to figure out something for my dad. I can't leave him out of all the crafty love. His birthday isn't until January, though, so I've got a little time... Suggestions?
My mom says I was always an anxious baby, and she blames the bulk of my lifelong issues with anxiety and depression on the Challenger shuttle disaster. In January 1986 my mother saw footage of the disaster on tv, and was deeply emotionally affected. She blames herself for passing that sadness into her womb. I don't know how much Challenger impacted me in utero, but she seems convinced that it's the cause of my fucked brain chemestry.
I have anxiety. Unrealistic, unpredictable anxiety. I also have depression, which is always somewhat present, but equally unrealistic and prone to drastic changes in severity. There are days when I can go to the grocery store and smile at strangers and feel okay, and there are days when it takes all my willpower to get out of bed long enough to pee.
I know I'm far from alone in this. What's the newest crazy estimate on anxiety disorders? 40 million cases in this country alone? And at least 20 million are estimated to have a depressive episode this year?
This isn't some point-making piece. I don't have deep thoughts here. I have no idea if/how Challenger affected the wiring of my brain. I'm just saying...
...they put a lot of disasters on tv.
If I ever get pregnant, I'm not going to watch any CNN.
I asked the Zebra,
Are you black with white stripes?
Or white with black stripes?
And the zebra asked me,
Are you good with bad habits?
Or are you bad with good habits?
Are you noisy with some quiet times?
Or are you quiet with some noisy times?
Are you happy with some sad days?
Or are you sad with some happy days?
Are you neat with some sloppy ways?
Or are you sloppy with some neat ways?
And on and on and on and on
And on and on he went.
I'll never ask a zebra
About stripes
Again.
--Zebra Question by Shel Silverstein.
I know I'm a straight-up adult with a BA in Creative Writing, but I've had the same two favorite poems since I was eight years old. 'Jabberwocky'--which I memorized in the fourth grade, won a talent show with in fifth grade, and can still recite now, and 'Zebra Question,' which I had on a Shel Silverstein cassette, and listened to almost every day until my stereo ate the tape. A few years ago I found the album on cd, and even now I'll listen to Shel perform 'Zebra Question' when I'm feeling a little off..
I don't know if I'm happy with some sad days or sad with some happy days, and it's not a question I'm going to have sorted out anytime soon. It's been cold here lately, and rainy, and the days are shortening. It's not a smile-making combo.
I had to work today before the sun was up, and was finished and home before most people had their coffee, so I walked in the door, put on sweatpants and went back to bed. When I woke up I had this in my head. That hasn't happened to me in a while. Here it is, exactly as it was in my head when I woke up. The linebreaks were there, too.
these cold, wet weeks have reminded me
of the leaks in my heart. I'm chilled through,
trying to bail out the cellar where I keep my hope
dark rainwater a trickle down grey mortar
soaking through the boxes.
I'm under fifty blankets with cold, stiff toes.
the afternoon as dark as the middle of the night.
when I drink my tea I mistake lit streetlights for the sun
I dreamed, but I just remember one. I was walking on a frozen lake with someone I knew in the dream, but don't know in life, and the ice cracked. We dropped to our bellies and were crawling for shore, but the ice fragmented and I was pulled under the water. Then my pov shifted to someone walking by the pond, who saw my scarf, the shattered ice, and a shoe in the water. Then I woke up.
I work for a bridal clothing chain. No, I'm not going to say the name of the company, but they do have commercials on tv nationwide, in Canada and Puerto Rico. There's a very good chance that you've been to one. Some studies suggest that 80% of people with ovaries will visit it at some point.
When I started working there, I was often shocked at the things I saw happen in the store, and the stories I heard about nightmare brides, nightmare attendants, nightmare moms...
And more than a year and a half later, I'm still shocked by the crazyass behavior I witness almost daily.
Like people who don't realize that a bridal salon isn't the most appropriate place to take a small child.
My first day on the job, a kid took a dump in a corner.
Three months in, I caught an unattended toddler right before he toppled off a bridal platform ledge. His mom was in a fitting room, and when she came out, she screamed at me for touching her child. (After I caught him, I sat him down and gave him paper and a crayon. When she finally came out of the fitting room, I was sitting a few feet away, just keeping an eye on him.)
And yesterday a bride came in with her four children. They had just come from dairy queen and every one of them was holding a half-eaten chocolate dip cone. Every one of them had a chocolatey face and sticky, chocolatey hands. And before I could catch them, they all followed mom into the bridal racks where they proceeded to touch everything.
When I caught up to them and got mom's attention, showed her a fresh chocolate stain on a $1000 gown and asked that the kids finish their ice cream in the reception area before looking at the dresses, she stared at me and said 'well, I can tell you that mark isn't from my kids.' I was speechless, but one of her girls piped up and said 'yes it was, mommy, it was David!' And then David looked at me and said 'I'm sorry, my hands are sticky.' The customer herded the kids out of the store pretty quickly, but after they left you could hear her yelling at the kids in the parking lot about touching things. I was disappointed. I mean, they didn't have to leave. We weren't going to make her pay anything for the damaged dress. I just wanted her to look at her kids, see the ice cream, and say, 'Hey, guys. Let's finish our ice cream before we look at dresses.'
I'm not hating on kids. Or parents that take their kids on errands. Your job as a parent is to teach your kids how to act in the world, and that means you have to expose them to it. And kids, well, they have shorter attention spans, shorter tempers, and need supervision. You can't blame them for that. And for every incident with a child in the store, there are 10 kids you don't even notice because they are being parented. But I will never understand taking your kids somewhere and then treating them like an annoyance or pretending they don't exist. That shit is bananas.
I mentioned a new sewing machine in an earlier post. I had been sewing machine-less for a while, so having one back in my life called for a very special project to break it in. After seeing a youtube video demonstrating 'the 1600' quilt project, I foolishly decided to do that.
Watching the video is dangerous. It will delude you into thinking that you can make a quilt face in 35 minutes. It made me think that I could just go ahead make a damn quilt with no experience or previous real desire to quilt. Full disclosure: I made some 9 square faces when I was a kid, but the basting, tying and edging was done by an adult. And when I watched the video I was under the influence of nyquil. For a cold I had. Seriously.
The project calls for a 'jelly roll'--which is simply a pre-made bundle of 2.5" wide fabric strips. I am not a fan of traditional quilt fabrics, or expensive 'time savers', so I made my own strips. My fabric was a pile of batik fat quarters that I got on sale, and I just took out my cutting mat and sliced up a pile of strips. I ended up using 12 fat quarters for this project.
I mixed up the colors so it was more or less random, then sewed all the strips end to end on a diagonal.
After the seam was sewn, I cut off most of the extra fabric.
What a mitered seam looks like opened.
I was left with a long strip. Seriously long. I didn't measure, but I expect it was slightly less than the 1600" long it was supposed to be. I dug around in a massive pile for the ends, tried to make sure the fabric wasn't twisted (it was...like a lot...) and put right sides together and sewed a looooong seam. When I got to the middle, I cut the fold, releasing the twisted edge and finishing the seam. I opened it, pressed it, folded it in half again and sewed another seam. I don't know if I sewed four long seams of five, but it ended up looking like this:
It was pretty square at this point, though it looks rectangular...optical illusion, people. It's a lot smaller than the original 1600" quilts, because I didn't change my sewing machine foot. That means I sewed a thicker seam than 1/4", which narrowed my strips and small-ened the finished face. Right here it's 50" x 53", which is somewhere between craft size and twin size. I am calling it 'watching television' size. The strips randomized pretty well, and since they were shorter, I ended up with a really nice piecework effect. Here's a closeup.
I decided that I wanted to play this bitch fancy, and pulled out five matching fat quarters for a border. I cut it into strips 4.5" wide, mitered the ends like the strips for the face, and sewed them to the edges of the quilt face.
I also got a half yard of this beautiful stuff, and cut 2.5" strips for the binding.
Above: The finished face with the border fabric. I mitered the corners, because it turns out it's easier to do it that way. Who knew?
Below: The face, after free-motion quilting the edge.
That's right, folks. I free-motioned the borders. It turned out kind of laughably bad, but I'm cool with that. This quilt was an effing journey, and there's no way in hell I'm ripping that shit and redoing it, you know what I mean? No. Way. In. Hell. I realized there was no way I was free-motioning the inside, so I stitched the ditch every other line of fabric. It should be fine.
My batting was 80% cotton, 20% polyester, no scrim, low-loft 'heirloom' thickness batting. I got it for $12 on sale at Hancock fabrics, and it worked awesome. I wanted the quilt to lie fairly flat, so the detail in the batik wouldn't get lost. The backing is a wide-width quilter's flannel in a sort of rotten tomato color that matches my couch.
I spray basted the quilt, because I'm impatient and lazy, and I like things that come in spray cans. It worked awesome. I put in Popeye and started basting and was done before Sweet pea even came into the picture. Like really. The basting spray was half price on Joann's website, so I picked it up at a steal.
My 2.5" binding strips were folded in half and pressed, pinned to the trimmed edges of the quilt, and sewed down with the folded edge facing the center of the quilt.
Like this.
Then I wrapped the folded edge around to the back and hand stitched it to the back.
Here's the finished quilt, measuring 60something by 60something. It is shown here on a full size bed, because that's where it could lay flat for photo taking. It is destined for my mom's couch, where it will keep her toesies warm while she works on her own projects.
From start to finish, it took 1 week, and the materials came in under $50 total, excluding the free motion quilting foot, which was $7 with shipping on amazon.com. So fine, it was $57 all told.
I have a little sister. She's pretty awesome. Sometimes we text, and then I put our conversations on the internet.
She's ferocious.
Today's textual exchange: Bridge Mix.
Birdie: Why would anyone cover a nasty ass brazil nut in chocolate? Bridge mix is all kinds of fucked up.
Me: It's true. I live in fear of that hard jelly one.
Birdie: I just tried bridge mix for the first time. Never again.
Me: Yeah, not good.
Birdie: Based on shape I thought the jelly ones would be malt balls and the rest were nuts.
Me: Never assume anything with bridge mix. I swear some of them are just rocks and twigs. What flavor are the jelly ones supposed to be?
Birdie: the flavor is disappointment.
Me: Aah, that's it.
She and I didn't discuss it further, but my own theory is that bridge mix is like fruitcake. No one has made a fruitcake since 1887: It's just the same fruitcakes being passed around every year. Once and a while somebody slices into one, gags, then throws it out. This explains the waning popularity of fruitcakes as gifts over time. I think the same theory can be applied to bridge mix. Brachs made waaaay too much of it in 1957 and the last four decades have been spent trying to empty their old bridge mix silo. It really is the simplest explanation. The theory that there are people out there who enjoy bridge mix and consume it with such regularity that it warrants an actual company devoting space and employees to making it is much more ludicrous.
Yesterday I shared some highly personal details, and today I'm going to do it again.
My sister recently texted me asking for Halloween costume ideas.
My cool sister.
Here's part 2 of our textual escapades.
Me: Be a sexy firelady.
Birdie: Sexy Firelady? Veto. I don't think I am he sexy costume type.
Me: Well that eliminates about 87% of available costumes. An additional 10% are my crazy ideas and you have vetoed them as well. Out of the remaining 3% of costume ideas, I'm sure you will find not less than 2.8889% generally displeasing. You are difficult.
Birdie: I'm sorry! Some guy at work told me I should be the little mermaid, probably because my hair was down today.
Me: No. Not unless you're going to wear a bikini top. And may I remind you it is October.
Birdie: It was vetoed for the reason that I do not want to wear just a bra on Halloween.
Me: I support that decision.
Birdie: Beekeeper: good costume for Zack? He says no.
Me: Would you be his sexy bee?
Birdie: Why would I be his sexy bee?
Me: Because you have a vagina. If you have lady parts your costume has to be sexy. Unless you're a minor or as spending Halloween in the company of minors, in which case it is inappropriate.
Birdie: Fine. I could get yellow booty shorts and a low cut tank top and make stripes on them. Bee costumes are lame but beekeeper costumes are funny.
Me: Or you could be the beekeeper and Zack could be your sexy bee. You can dodge the vagina rule if the dude in the couple dresses sexy. It really is the truth. I did not just make these things up while sitting on my couch in my underpants watching batman.
I have this little sister Birdie. She is smart, and very funny. Sometimes we text funny things. We did today. And I thought I'd share them on the internet.
My sister, with her kitten, George Washington Carver Lucas Orwell Clooney Foreman Gershwin Michael etc. He is a very impressive kitty.
Photographic evidence that she has always been cool.
Here's our textual exchange of the day:
Birdie: What should I be for Halloween?
Me: Sleepwalker Texas Ranger. Or Christopher Robin Hood.
Birdie: What?
Me: Walker Texas Ranger in a nightgown--with belt buckle and cowboy boots. Or some hybrid of Christopher Robin and Robin Hood. That one is less thought through.
Birdie: I feel like you have been sitting on these hybrid costume ideas for a while.
Me: Well the Sleepwalker Texas Ranger one I've had for a month or two. But I promise you I came up with Christopher Robin Hood today at work.
Birdie: I veto both ideas for myself, thereby leaving them for you.
Me: Why did you even ask for my help if you're going to pass on my brilliant ideas!?
Birdie: Wacky ideas. I am looking for something a little more obvious.
Me: You are boring.
Birdie: Am not.
Me: Yes you are. But that is okay. We need boring people to invent new sandwiches. Sandwiches are very important.
Birdie: I love sandwiches.
Me: I know you love sandwiches. We all love sandwiches. They are an integral part of our culture and economy. You could dress up as a sandwich engineer. Your pockets would be full of rulers and test tubes and slices of bologna.
Birdie: Anna. Anna. You are very creative but not very helpful.
(It's true. I'm not very helpful.)
Tune in tomorrow for episode 2 of SisterToSister where we still fail to come up with a solid plan for Birdie's Halloween costume.
I'm not much of a sewer. I do have some rudimentary sewing knowledge. I even enjoy it. But it's never been a main activity for me. There's always been jewelry to make, resin to cast and things to spray paint before I've made it over to the dusty corner where I keep the sewing machine. And the sewing machine in question? A 3/4 size purple number.
This is the exact machine I have.
Well, now that I've given you some background...
About six months ago the laundry basket that I have designated for broken clothing was overflowing. There were ripped seams and loose hems, jeans that needed patching and straps that needed reattaching. It was a big 'ol mess. So I got out the purple thing, loaded a bobbin, threaded the machine and sat down to fix the hem on a pair of slacks. And then it happened.
THE THREAD BUNCHES OF DOOM!
Any sewer will know what I mean by this, and it usually just means that you threaded the machine wrong, or the bobbin didn't thread right, or that your tension is wrong, or something along those lines. All of those problems are fixable. But after lots of googling, manual consulting and phone calls with sewing friends, my thread bunching was worse, not better. I held off taking the machine to a repair shop, and just did the work I needed to do by hand. Have you ever hemmed/seamed/darned/patched an overflowing laundry basket of clothes by hand just to spite your sewing machine? I have. I gave it the stink eye the whole time, and made sure it could see me from it's dark, dusty corner of shame.
That's pretty much what my stink eye looks like. Fang and all.
Fast-forward to two weeks ago. My sewing machine is still in time out, but I've just gotten back from seeing Megan. And we've basically spent four days talking about her sewing projects, and going to fabric stores and talking about sewing projects, and buying patterns and fabric and adorable sewing boxes. I got home and looked at my machine, and realized that even if I did get it fixed, that it's probably time for a full-size machine to enter my life.
I looked online. I looked in stores. I read blog posts and reviews. I watched youtube videos. I got confused and gave up. But last Friday night, I got drunk, went to bed, woke up in the middle of the night, drank some gatorade and couldn't get back to sleep. I found myself online, shopping for sewing machines and coffee makers. (The coffee maker will need it's own blog post.)
Then I saw this:
If you've ever read consumer's digest (and what 25 year old hasn't been reading it regularly since age ten!) then you know what this symbol means. It means this is the winner, and please just give these people your credit card number so they can mail you the best thing you've ever seen. And it was slapped up on overstock.com. (sorry, looks like it's sold out.)
Here it is. Oh, you might be asking yourself, does that say Project Runway on it?
Why yes. Yes, it does.
It came in the mail today, and it's currently sitting in my living room, looking as effing awesome and badass as a sewing machine has ever looked. Tomorrow will be spent reading the manual and figuring out how to use it. And the next two weeks will be spent trying out all the fancy schmancy stitches it has.
I'm so excited. I don't even know what to make first.
