The Cuckoo Bee

1.  Suburban New Jersey does not look like suburban Maryland.  The houses are different, the trees are different, the towns are different, the quality of the sunlight is different, the smell of the air is different, everything is different.

2.  My cousin makes a delicious vodka tonic.  She offered me a shot as soon as I got in the door, but when I was halfway through my drink and talking to my aunt on the couch I was like ‘thank God I have half a drink left’ so I think that was a good decision.

3.  My Cousin and Uncle have big puffy red hearts floating around them all the time.

4.  We were sitting at the table and my aunt said something about how funny it was how time goes on and on and repeats itself.  As I sat there looking at her I had the feeling that I was seeing myself through her, like each generation was a sheet of tracing paper and we were all stacked up and mashed together so we became indistinguishable, all the generations forever, whatever that means, and stacks of my aunt and myself and everyone else were blended together like when you make paper out of scraps of tissue.  That sure was a good vodka tonic!

I am taking a break from design issues related to the Thanksgiving gifting and thinking about soft cube-shaped bags.  This is my first rough draft.

I guess I accidentally ordered this fabric from superbuzzy.  It is very diaper- looking to me or maybe that’s just baby-looking–anyway it’s very soft.  I was thinking of this same kind of design with a brown wool inside and an orange multicolor outside.

The design of this is a T-shape, with free motion embroidery on all the faces.  I am planning on putting a button closure on the next one.  I may do another rough draft with another methodology, ie cutting and reversing six individual squares, then quilting them and sewing together.

I am also experimenting with shaping.  Here is a leaf-segment.  I made six of these and put them together with masking tape to form a tiny version of what I am thinking about as a larger bag.

It’s quite tiny as you see.  I am using unbleached muslin to make these and I am liking unbleached muslin more and more every moment.  Soft cube is calling my name.  Goodbye, reader.

Well, it’s time to make things for Thanksgiving.  Here is the pattern for the lunchbag I am going to make my Aunt Whitey.

I have been wanting to make a slice of bread for a long time, and was thinking that I might make one for Uncle Joe, since what the heck do you make your uncle anyway that he will want? He might want a little amigurumi cat doll wearing a calico dress, but I doubt it.  Not that a felt stuffed slice of Texas Toast makes more sense.  As he is quite religious I made a stencil to put on the bread.

Then I received two packages, one from Sew Mama Sew and one from Cia’s Palette.  Cia’s Palette I have ordered from twice, and they seem so nice there with their little hand-written thank you note, and they always include a sample of some random exciting fabric, and they are not a giant megalopoly.  They do always seem to have a selection of things that I can’t find anywhere else.  Here is the package from Cia:

Close-up of these fabrics:

Then of course Sew Mama Sew, which has everything else in the world.  Here is their packaging:

Really, there is little more delightful than receiving this kind of thing in the mail, especially as it arrives inside your mailbox in an envelope so is always surprising.

Here are the concupiscentia oculorum-creating fabrics from this package:

I am going to be making Aunt Whitey’s lunch bag out of these.  And appliqueing an ultrasuede dachshund and a felt heart, and on the handle, tiny bows.  Is that precious enough?

concupiscentia oculorum:  lust of the eyes.  I just learned that.

Readers, tell me what you think.  Should I write to Mr. Gilbert at his house and ask him to read and comment on my new short story? Do you want to read and comment on my new short story?  I am only interested in real comments, readers, not general well-wishing (I am not principally opposed to well-wishing).  Let me know.

Did you know that I love the United States of America?  I love Native Americans.  I love Pilgrims.  I love diversity.  I love cowboys.  I love the American people.  I love the spirit that can come from urban decay and the culture that comes from never seeing a city.  I love American English and I love this beautiful, beautiful land.

Back to me, there are two sides of my ancestral family.  One side are farmers in the midwest.  Oh, how odd and foreign it is, the niceness and manners and the ironic jolliness, and how I love to visit them all and pretend I live there.  One thing they always have a lot of at any festive occasion is jello “salad.”  Sometimes it will have some grated carrots or raisins in it.  I am told it occasionally has cottage cheese, but I loathe cottage cheese.  So when I make jello salad I make it like this:

7-Up Lemon Jello Salad with Cool Whip, Pineapples, Marshmallows, and Mandarin Oranges

Mix 1 cup hot or boiling water with 1 package lemon jello.  Stir until dissolved.  Add 3/4 cup cold 7 Up.  Add 1 small tub of Cool Whip.  Refrigerate for 45 minutes.  Add drained cans of pineapple and mandarin oranges, and mini marshmallows.  Refrigerate for 3 hours or until set.

The other side of my family is in Northern New Jersey.  My grandfather used to say there was a big difference between Northern and Southern New Jersey–I think he was talking about the weather.  If you have Polish relatives in New Jersey, they are probably very much like my relatives there.  I have had a lot more contact with this group although I am definitely not a member and cannot anticipate what they will think about anything.  At my father’s memorial service my Uncle Marty told me a story about what they used to do in the old days.  It went like this:

My Uncle Mickey and Uncle Frank and Lou [said Uncle Marty] and all of the rest of them would go out, and every time they ordered a drink–they drank Seven and Sevens back then–they would order two, and put one under the table.  Then when the bar closed they would have their own bar under the table and they could keep drinking all night.

Of course that is only one of many, many wonderful tales like that, all of which end in someone driving the car into the New Jersey swamps or accidentally smashing a piano.

SO, in honor of this tradition, once you have finished the lemon jello and have the remainder of the 7-up handy, you make the following recipe:

Seagram’s Seven and Seven

Put one shot of Seagrams in old-fashioned glass.  Add enough 7 Up to make it palatable.  Fill with ice cubes.  Drink while waiting for jello to set.

There you have it.  Early Thanksgiving Dinner.  Yes, you can call me Martha.

Sometimes I remind myself of Martha Stewart with all the home cooking.

Cream Cheese Frosting

Beat  3 Tbspn softened butter

Add 6 Tbspn cream cheese, keep beating with wooden spoon

Add confectionery sugar until it is extremely sweet

Eat.

Are you ready? Because I’m going to tell it like it is.  Usually I put up some crafty things here to make you feel good, and that’s all it’s about.  In my former blog, however, it was all about booze and drugs and whores, because that’s the imaginary life I lead.  Somehow I have gotten away from all that (in my blogging life, I mean) what with all the stuffed animals and cuteness.  It is now time, dear friends, to go back to our gross roots and talk some trash about how much I despise everything and how drunk I wish I were right now!

Things I secretly will judge you for, and give you bad marks, if you do:

1.  Mispronounce the word “err”

2.  Tell me what college you went to if it is in the Ivy League, unless I ask you

3.  Tell me the designer of your diaper bag

4.  Disparage yourself unnecessarily

5.  Not admit, either explicitly or in an implied way, the superiority of the female gender

6.  Not appease me in one of my frequent pissy moods

I’m not proud of all this.  I think it is terrible to judge people, especially for something as snotty as mispronouncing the word “err.”  It does give me great pleasure to discuss my evil personality issues, partly because like everyone else I am very vain and love to talk about myself, which is totally fine, and partly because I am under the illusion that if I admit I have these flaws they disappear or are mitigated somehow.  Are they mitigated?  I think they are.  Blah, blah, blah.

On to my favorite things in life:  booze, drugs, whores.

1.  I like to drink, but not in moderation.  My favorite thing is to spend eight or ten hours drinking so that one is thoroughly soused but not actually dying (yet) of alcohol poisoning; also to stay up until seven o’clock in the morning so you get that crazy feeling of liftoff which aids the alcohol.   Then it’s nice to have a taco.

2.  Oh, I love marijuana.  Yes, how I love it!  If only I lived in Jamaica and I could ride around in the back of a cab all day and the driver and I would share a joint the size of an ice-cream cone.  That’s what happened when I went there.  Remember, law enforcement officials, this is fiction.

3.  Whores, whores, whores.  Porn, porn, porn.  This is probably what I would do if I had several lives to live.

I think that’s all for now.  I’m feeling better.  More real.  The knobby old witch who directs traffic around here is going to yell at me, but I don’t care! Actually, I do care.  It’s very annoying to be yelled at constantly.  What I meant is that it won’t deter me.  I’m suffering here for the benefit of truth.  Sigh.  Good job, me.

This is a very, very simple wallet.  It will probably insult your intelligence.  On the other hand it turns out puffy and cute and is good for kids, so let’s go ahead and insult ourselves a little.

1

Take six squares.  Mine are 4 1/2 inches on each side.

2

Figure out which pieces you want for the outside, the inside of the top flap, and the pocket.  There’s just one pocket in this wallet, for which I am using the green owl fabric. The pieces on top are the top flap of the wallet and the middle piece is the bottom half (and the back of the pocket).

For interfacing, I used a very thin cotton batting for the shell of the wallet and for the pocket I used a piece of thin, stiff interfacing.  [My husband just informed me that donkeys kill more people each year than die in plane crashes.  Hm.]  The pocket interfacing I made half an inch smaller than the square on one edge because, as you will see below, we will be folding over the top edge of the pocket and topstitching it down, and you don’t need interfacing there.

3

This is the pocket.  I’m making a tiny quilt sandwich, right sides of the fabric facing out both ways.

4

Now I’m folding over and pinning the top of the pocket and just sewing along that edge.  The pink-and-brown fabric will be the inside of the pocket.

5

This will be the part of the pocket that you see when you open the wallet.  Also called the front of the pocket.  I feel like I am not describing this clearly–perhaps I should not have drunk that liter of Coke and eaten a whole box of Spongebob candies right before I started writing this.

6

Now for the rest of it.  The piece on the left will be the outside shell.  The piece on the right will be the inside.  Figure out the orientation you want  and then put the right sides together for each twosome and sew along one edge– like making a quilt top with only two pieces.  Then iron open (or forget that, if you want).

7

Now it’s sandwich time.  Lay down the outside piece face down, then the two pieces of batting on top, then the inside piece face up.  The batting is going to be too big, so cut as needed.  Depending on the kind, if any, of closure you want, you might put it in here before you sew the sandwich closed.  I didn’t end up using a closure and because the batting is not joined, it stays closed nicely all by itself, but I am now thinking Velcro (not that you will see that in this tutorial).

8

Now, just like making a quilt, go ahead and quilt it.  Being totally creative here I put an X on the top half and left the bottom completely blank.  Let’s say it’s minimalistic.  Great work, me!  You too, reader.

9

Cut a two-inch, or less, or more, strip for the binding.  I made this one 28 inches long and it was just barely long enough.  Then in the regular binding manner, fold it in half the long way and iron the wrong sides together.

10

Start in the middle of a side and pin the binding to the outside of the wallet, raw edges facing out, and do your mitered edges which I really hope you are better at doing than I am.

11

Here we are, all the way around.  Do that thing where you tuck the one end of the binding into the other, making a little cuff first, and sew that sucker down.

12

Now we neatly, for us, fold the binding over to the inside side.  Put the pocket in so that when you sew the binding on it will sew the pocket on too.

This is the last step.  You have two options: hand-sew it on this side, which is fun, or if you just want to crank through this process, topstitch it down.  I did the second option, as you can see above.  It would definitely look better the other way but I was about to be late picking my son up from school so I was rushing.  I’m a great parent, right?

13

Fold it over and we’re done! Here’s the front side.

14

And here’s the back side.  I like it! Do you?

Discussion 1:  Parts of the creative process I like/don’t like.

Don’t like:

1. The discomfort of constantly thinking

2.  The amorphous state of something getting ready to be made when I don’t know what it is yet

3.  Certain decisions that I don’t like to make, e.g., pink vs. red

4.  Not knowing how to internalize the finished product/what to do with it

5.  Not having a job where I wear a suit

Like:

1.  Forgetting and then remembering, and then forgetting.  Then remembering.

2.  Resolving amorphous state when object materializes gradually or suddenly

3.  Thinking about idea of material thing and shopping for its component parts

4.  Starting

5.  Finishing

6.  Discussing with other people what they make.

Second Discussion:  Should we move to the suburbs?  The answer is already yes, but here are some good and bad things about Maplewood vs. Hoboken.

Maplewood

Good things:

-Fresh air

-abundance of nature

-space

-lack of traffic

-easy to drive to Taco Bell or the mall

Bad things:

-ticks

-boredom of suburbia

-how do you get trashed there? Will have to try.

-takes longer to go to New York

-can’t walk to all those places in Hoboken no more.

Hoboken, Good Things:

-everything is here or across the river in that other place

-nice view of sky from our apartment

-lots of friends nearby

-easy to get totally trashed and still arrive home

-plethora of food delivered

-I feel the love of Hoboken coming out of the sidewalk

-get plenty of exercise walking and climbing stairs, although this is also a bad thing

Bad Things:

-general feeling of road rage permeating town, even while walking

-broken glass and pollution

-constantly running into people (occasionally this is a good thing, usually causes pain)

I do love Hoboken but I can’t wait to move to Maplewood, and then move back here.

Oh, my.  Sometimes things come to life that make me fall in love with them as if for the first time ever.  Like this…Sigh…the super chunky knit wallet clutch! I may have to introduce it to my mother.

The little bow…Swoon.  Yes, I made it myself, but it kind of made itself so I feel free to swoon repeatedly.  Whenever I walk into a room with this purse in it, my eyes go directly to it–just like at the dance where you’re wondering if what’s-his-name is going to be there, and then you see him across the room.  Just like that.

This yarn is SO fat and soft.  It reminds me of huge udon noodles.  It is actually a little chubby for the giant needles I used, but to make it even puffier I used DOUBLE STRANDS SO NOW IT WILL DESTROY YOUR MIND IF YOU TOUCH IT!!!

Don’t even get me started on how plush and luxurious it feels to stuff something inside it.  Ahem.  I think I had better go for a walk outside and get some air.  That way I can rush back home and cradle my beloved in my arms.  Tah!