OK, y’all, I have made it five whole days posting every day. I know I used to post 6 days a week before COVID hit (you’d think I’d have more time with being at home all the time, but no, I don’t. Don’t ask me why, well, except for that pesky day job that continues into the early morning hours and often wakes my tired ass up at 2 AM to poke at my to-do list and stress me out).
Today’s challenge topic is my first project. Well, I started sewing at age 8 (or was it 7) and no way in hell does that project still exist anywhere, because I am old and I occasionally get rid of stuff I don’t want any more. So then I thought about my quilt start…which was at age 23…and I THINK this is the first project I did? I had walked into this quilt/country stuff store and saw they offered classes (this is back in the day before websites, so I literally would have had to WALK into the place to even know this existed), and I signed up for a quilt class with this crazy woman named Susan, who is to blame for my deep dive into a fabric stash that has taken over the world. Now I don’t actually remember which was the first project I did with her, because I did MANY, but it was early on, and I think it was a pieced quilt…before I knew I don’t like to piece things because that involves straight lines and making a lot of the same block and ugh boring. (No offense to those of you who enjoy it. I’m just not one of you.)
That said, I think this was my first official quilt.
OK, wait. It’s a quilt top. I never quilted it. It was big and that was a million years ago (OK, thirty or so), and I didn’t have quilting skills then. Even now, I’m not sure it would fit under my machine.
Yeah, even then, I was into weird color combos and strange patterns.
I mean, the whole idea was that you learned a 9-patch and whatever the other two blocks are called and you made a quilt. I figured that shit out.
I’ve pieced a few more quilts over the years, mostly baby quilts all using the same easy peasy pattern that makes like four different blocks, using really bright colors. I pieced another quilt, also supposed to be for my bed, that has the same issue of not being quilted, because I don’t have a machine big enough to quilt it. It has a lot of alien fabric. It might even be the same pattern I used for the baby quilts. I don’t piece.
From there, I pieced I think one landscape quilt, and then went full on into hand applique, which eventually led me to what I do now. CAN I piece? Sure. Do I want to? Not really. I did one earlier this year with my quilt guild as part of the pandemic shutdown, and it is also still a top, albeit a much smaller top. Not quilted.
Meanwhile, my day job continued last night until 10 PM or so…I did game during that, but honestly was off my game, mostly trying to figure out how to teach tsunami alert warning systems and Google Drawing for 6th graders. Exhausting stuff. But I managed an hour of ironing for the newest quilt, which felt really nice (it’s like I forget that every time…get your ass off the couch and go iron and you will feel SO MUCH BETTER).
Some vining ivy there…
Still lots of green. How many pieces have I ironed? I think I mostly finished the 400s and the 500s, just a butterfly here and a bug there. And then moving up into the sky. Actually, I think I have a lot of the 500s to do. Never mind. I think it’s all bugs though. Not even halfway. Getting there.
Have you see the thing on the NY Times where you can predict your place in the vaccine line? Check it out. I don’t know how I feel about it.
At first, I was like, oh man, only 210,000 before me? That’s not bad. Although I have to admit to being terrified of vaccines, having had some really bad reactions to them. I can’t even have the tetanus vaccine any more. It’s been 20 years (?) since I had the last one. I’m still good, still protected. So there’s me.
But this made me pause. I want those 868K other elderly to go before me. And the homeless. And the other essential workers. And the teachers who are actually teaching in a school with kids, I want them to go first, and I want the prisoners to go before me too, because they can’t control their environment and COVID is raging through the prison system.
I may hate teaching online, really, I do, I so miss being in the classroom and at school and it is so fucking isolating and trying to talk to parents and help kids is so fucking hard, but I don’t NEED the vaccine yet…maybe by next summer, when I want to go back to school in August (are we going back in August? Who the fuck knows). Then you can give me the vaccine. Until then, I’m like the crazy bitch in the grocery line letting everyone go before me. You go, you go, no you go.
OK, lots to do this weekend, hopefully some of it art (the left eyelid is twitching like a bitch, so I need to do something relaxing).
Kathy Nida 