The Barefoot Kitchen Witch

Quilting Blogs

When I recently fell back in love with quilting (not that I ever fell out of it…but we had kind of a parting of the ways and now we realize we are meant to be together forever), I figured there must be a gazillion quilting blogs out there, and I was curious to see what people were doing.  So I think I typed in a search like “quilting blogs” or something, and landed on this page. 

If you scroll down, there is a HUGE list of quilting blogs.  I’ve been clicking on one or two of them whenever I get some time to explore.  Some are defunct (the list went up in 2010), some have moved, but a lot of them are still there and it’s fun – and inspiring – to look at all the quilts people have made.

Go take a look.  So much talent and passion and artistry out there!

Random Stuff

So the other day at dinner Julia said, out of the blue, “I don’t like eating raisins because it’s like eating tiny old people.”

I have no explanation. 

~~~

The baby quilt I’ve been working on has conjured up memories of other baby quilts I’ve made, especially one of the first ones.  Not sure if I’ve told this story before, but here goes…

This was back when ALLLLLL my quilting was hand-sewn.  Piecing AND quilting.  Everything.  I loved it.  And I still do, though too much of it bothers my hands.  But this was a while ago.

Anyway, one of my sister’s friends, Betsy, was having a baby – I believe she was the first of their group to do so, and I was invited to the baby shower, and so I decided to make a quilt.  I kind of blended aspects of the styles of Monet and Seurat, with colors from Monet’s Water Lilies.  So I used soft greens and pinks and blues, and all the pieces were hexagons.  I can’t describe it better, and I don’t have pictures, but I remember loving the creation of it…the artists, their styles, the colors…and yay – a baby!

Anyway, because I was a card-carrying member of Procrastinators Anonymous (still am, but not as bad), soon it was the night before the shower and I still hadn’t finished the quilt.

But I DO finish things.  And the shower was at something like eleven o’clock the following morning (a Saturday, I assume), so, hey, I’d just stay up kind of late and get it done.

I was up all night.  All.  Night.  I had the tv on, I was in the living room with my quilt on a table, and I was stitching my fingers off.

And yes, dammit, I finished that quilt.

I don’t remember if I took any sort of nap that morning, before the shower.  I kind of don’t think I did.

Anyway, to make it even better, I had to drive, because my mom, who was also invited, had had surgery on the bottom of her foot and it was still in a cast or boot or something. 

The shower was half an hour or so from where we were both living (and my sister wasn’t even able to come to the shower for some reason…she was living up in Boston at the time, so maybe it was because of work or something?) (and, as yet another side note, I now live just minutes from the church basement where that baby shower took place) …where was I?  Oh yeah, half hour drive.  So here we go, my limping mother and me with most of my brain wrapped in fuzz.

We put our gifts with the others and found seats sort of near the back.  I propped my eyes open with paper clips.  And the shower was under way.

While other gifts are being opened in the story, I’ll take a moment to explain the weirdness going on in my head during the shower.

I was big.

I felt, as I willed myself to remain upright on that folding chair in that church basement, with all the many sweet church member ladies and family members and friends, like I was twice the size – at least – of my usual self.  Not fat.  Big.  A giant.  That’s how sleep deprivation was distorting my world.  I tried not to move so I wouldn’t frighten anyone with my big-ness.

And eventually Betsy got to the baby quilt.  She pulled it from the bag (or unwrapped it – I don’t remember) and held it up for all to see, (as I tried to shrink down so I was normal-sized) and said, loudly, “JAYNE W MADE THIS!”

And the word loudly doesn’t do it justice.  Her voice THUNDERED the words, and as she said them I seemed to grow bigger and all the little old ladies and moms and cousins and friends turned, as one, to look at me as I was contorting into something that might pass for normal-sized in my metal folding chair.

I hope I smiled politely.

No one ran away screaming, so I guess I looked harmless.

And the shower proceeded normally, with the rest of the gifts opened, lots of oohs and aaahs and smiles at all the adorable baby things…lots of thank-yous from Betsy, and then, of course, food.

That is my best baby quilt story.

I made baby quilts for my sister’s two kids, both of which were late.  Not sure how late my nephew’s quilt was, but my niece didn’t get hers til she turned two.  Hey, there were a lot of appliquéd flowers on that one.  That sort of detail takes TIME.

Anyway, so that’s the baby quilt stuff.

~~~

Like I said in my previous post, all this quilting has resulted in a resurgence of my love of designing and sewing.  So naturally I had to rearrange my sewing/jewelry-making/other stuff-making area.  (For some reason I can’t stand the term “crafting” or anything “craft-“ related.  I can’t use it.  Ick.)

So that’s what I did yesterday.  I’m still not completely done, but that’s today’s job. 

Both pictures were taken in bad light and with my phone, so please excuse the poor image quality….

Before:

After:

The biggest change I wanted to make was to have that tall work table sticking out from the wall so that I could walk around it and work on big projects.  It’s a bit of a tight fit back there, but I made it work and I’m SO happy about it.  There are still areas that need to be tidied up or reorganized, but that’s the easy part.

The hardest part was moving the rolltop desk.  Now, it does come apart, so that helps, and I remove all the drawers, of course, but still – it’s heavy, even broken down into sections.  But I did it.  I’ve done it so many times over the years, I’m actually pretty good at reassembling it, which is tricky because the center writing part has to slide in between the two drawer portions, so those things have to be just the right distance apart, and that middle writing section is HEA-VY because it’s got a huge piece of some sort of stone inlay as the writing surface.  And, of course, there’s maneuvering the whole roll-top section – which is one enormous unwieldy piece – and fitting it onto the pegs that hold it in place (the pegs jut up from the corners of the two main drawer-holding parts of the desk).  Anyway, putting that together successfully is always cause for high-fiving oneself.  Not that I did, of course, because that would be weird.

And that’s about all the writing I have time for.  I’ve got some laundry to hang outside, and some reorganizing to finish downstairs. 

And, of course, that baby quilt isn’t finished yet….

So what have you been up to lately? 

A Couple of Pictures

I worked on the baby quilt a bunch yesterday, made some cookies, got dinner ready, went with the kids to the book fair at their school, and did some more quilting before I went to bed.

I haven’t hand quilted in a while – my stitches are a clear illustration of that.  Don’t have pictures to show you, but I will at some point.

It took me a while to get going, trying to find a way that felt comfortable now, because my fingers start feeling needles-and-pins-y when I’m doing all sorts of hand work – peeling, chopping, sewing, pinning, writing, tying shoes, braiding my hair – stuff like that.  Sometimes it goes away after a while.  I think my little hand muscles loosen up or something.  I don’t know how it works.  But I know I can compensate, or change the way I’m holding something or doing something, and it’s manageable.

Anyway, I fiddled around a bit and finally got into a good rhythm with the sewing.  And it was so great to be doing that again.  Like harvesting coriander seed, it’s meditative.  Rhythmic.

It makes me happy.

And speaking of things that make me happy, here are the couple of pictures promised by the post title:

Julia, of course, mid-cartwheel.  We were at the ball field the other day.  Alex’s game was over and the coaches were talking to the team in the dugout.  Julia and I were waiting, and Julia, who does not do “patiently” or “sitting still” all that well, was turning endless cartwheels and practicing round-offs.  The sun was going down, and I was catching some great shadows of her against the back of the dugout wall.  No shadow of her in this picture, but it was the best of the cartwheel shots (taken on my phone), so I thought I’d share.

And this…

This is Alex running through his music before the elementary school band and orchestra concert last week.  The five local elementary schools come together for this concert – so five different groups of 4th grade violin, five groups of 5th grade violin, and 5 groups of band kids, all playing together.  It’s pretty remarkable, and I love their music teacher. 

You’ll notice that Alex isn’t playing his violin in that picture (though he is in the violin group and played that instrument as well).  He does fine on violin.  But he doesn’t love it.  He plays it because, as Bill has pointed out, it gives him an in, an opportunity to play his guitar.  So Alex was one of the kids who had a solo that night.  The others were all from the band.  Bill had arranged the second of movement of a Vivaldi concerto for Alex to play on guitar, and Alex’s violin teacher played the orchestra part on keyboard.

We went early so Alex and his teacher could run through the piece.  That’s when I took the above picture.  I like it – Alex with all the music stands and empty chairs behind him.

I only took one picture during the performance – first of all my hands had broken out in a cold sweat just before it was Alex’s turn to play, and because I didn’t want the click of the camera to be a distraction.  And it also occurred to me that I should just sit there and listen, and delight in the moment.

Which I did.

Today Off

I think I will be baking some cookies today.  Nothing new – I’m making these, I think, since I have a lot of limes and a bag of shredded coconut.  Not sure if there will be nuts in them or not. 

I was at Alex’s baseball game last night, sitting on the bleachers, when Julia came running up to tell me someone was here to see me.  (Julia spends Alex’s games playing with whichever younger sisters of other baseball players are around.  There’s a good supply of them.  Most are girls she knows either from school or from the season last year, and when she spots them and they see her, it’s like a tenth year reunion of best friends who haven’t seen each other since graduation.  Very cute.)

Anyway, the someone was the mom of one of Julia’s former classmates.  Her son is playing baseball, too, and he had a practice that night.

She asked me how my writing was going, and for a minute I had no idea what she meant.

Oh, yeah, this blog.  Um, I haven’t been doing much writing over the past year.

I’ve been thinking about that a lot, on and off.  I even thought, recently, that maybe this website had run its course.  Maybe I should just say thank you and goodnight.

But…nah. 

Still, I keep finding that I just don’t feel like writing about food.  I think, maybe, that I don’t need to write about food like I used to, because cooking is now “what I do for a living.”  I just don’t feel like photographing what I make for dinner and talking all about it.  Unless it’s something very different or really interesting.  I don’t know.  It’s weird, but that fire has burned out.

And I came to the conclusion (yesterday, after mulling things over), that that’s fine.  I’m not required to write about food.  I can write about whatever I want to.  Or not. 

I see my stats dip way down when it’s not pre-Easter (when those posts about coloring eggs are all over the place), and at first I felt this panic – Oh no!  I have to get those numbers up! – but…why?  I am not dependent on the ad revenue.  It’s nice, but not crucial.  So…I can relax about that.

I have today off.  My days off are so precious to me.  At first I’d use days off to catch up on all the household things – do tons of laundry, dishes, shopping, cooking, baking, etc.  But now, I don’t want to use up my time – MY time – doing all that.  So I try to get as much of that stuff done on work days, or have the kids do some of it, so that I can spend my days off doing what I WANT to do do.

Lately it’s been all about the fabric.  I’m working on a quilt but I can’t show you because it’s a baby quilt and a gift and no one gets to see it (out there in internet land) until after the baby arrives.  Which should be soon.  SO excited!!

I love fabric.  I love designing quilts or little wall hangings or pillows… and I haven’t really done a lot of that in a LONG time.  But now, I think now that I’m cooking for a living, it’s like THAT hobby or passion or whatever it is has been sated, and now I have room for other creative pursuits.

And isn’t that a great thing? 

I still need to get back to repairing other quilts we have – a project I started a while back and then dropped.  But it can wait til after this baby quilt.  And it’s Spring – we don’t need as many quilts.

I’ve also been sucked into the black hole of Pinterest, and that’s actually been a great motivator for me.  I see all these amazing creative projects (including quilts), and I just want to make them all.  Or not – but make my own things.  Because why not?

So that’s what I’m working on today.  Hoping to finish the baby quilt.  And then a couple other little projects…and then….? 

I have no idea!

And that’s sort of the best part.

Ghosts

When I first started working at my job (I wanted to write “my new job” but after over a year now, I suppose it’s not so new), I was, frankly, a nervous wreck.  I know I wrote about that, so I don’t think I’ll go into it again, but the short version is that I am way overly critical of myself about oh…everything I do…and so much of my time at the job (and before it every day) was spent in my head alternately criticizing myself, berating myself for not being better/faster/more efficient and for not already knowing how to do everything there, and imagining all sorts of disparaging things my new coworkers must be thinking of me.

I know. 

I know.

Anyway, as a result of that nervous wreckness, I could barely eat for six weeks and I lost some weight, which was nice, but not in a manner I would recommend to anyone.

So.

In addition to all the self-flagellation and not eating, I was also back in my home town, where many people from all my pre-college years still resided.

And post-college, because I moved back to that same town for a while some years ago when I returned from out of state.

Anyway.  In my overly emotional and jagged mental state during those first weeks, I didn’t want to see anyone I knew.  I was afraid I’d cry.  So many swirling emotions were that close to the surface, I didn’t think I could dam them in if the level got any higher.

So, naturally, I saw ghosts.

For one thing, every older man of a certain age – and dressed in a certain way – was my father. 

Oh, my father’s still alive.  And still living in town.  And I did see him (and still do) periodically when he’s shopping there.  But at first, I didn’t.  I just thought I did.

Every older gentleman in jeans and a lightweight jacket and some sort of baseball-style hat – my dad.  I can’t count the number of total strangers I almost spoke to before realizing that no, they only looked like my dad because they were rows of produce away with their backs to me and my father doesn’t even have a jacket that color.

Or a beard.

Sigh.

They weren’t him.  But for a moment, they were.

And then when he really came in, I had all sorts of other emotions swirling around that bubbled to the surface…but that’s another post, maybe, some day.

Anyway, besides my dad ghosts, there were others. 

People who looked familiar.  My brain – already overtaxed – would rush around (in my head, where it couldn’t scare anyone) looking through every classroom I’d ever been in, trying to bring a name to that face.  Was he…?  Was she…?

And along with the facial recognition thing came the quick back-in-time feeling.  If it was (or looked like) someone from elementary school, then BANG, besides being an incompetent fake cook at my new job, I was also EIGHT YEARS OLD.  Or, worse, ELEVEN.  Or, even worse, ANY AND ALL OF MY AGES IN HIGH SCHOOL.

Not only was I an incompetent fake cook, but I was also legally too young to be working there, plus awkward and shy, plus I had braces again!  And pimples!  And hair that wouldn’t hold a curl!

Agonizing.

AND, (yes, there’s more) – some of the people I saw were (or looked like) friends of my parents.  Couples or halves of couples who used to come to dinner parties, or belonged to the Rotary club, or the Garden club, or something.  They had more wrinkles, yes, but they were out and about, shopping, chatting with friends and neighbors “Oh, fancy seeing you here!”  Smiling.

My mom should have been there, too.

I’d see women of her age, vital and…doing.  Participating.  Living.

Mom was at home. 

Opting out.

It’s a long story. 

But anyway, many ghosts.

Ghosts of people. 

Ghosts of emotions.

Ghosts of what ifs.

Ghosts of whys.

Too much.

~~~

Those first six weeks were exhausting.  Most of that – okay, all of that – was my own doing.  My own letting go of the reins and letting every anxiety and insecurity I’ve ever had race wildly through the streets, past the strengths and mental defenses I’d built up over time (who were currently feebly trying to wave the out-of-control stampede into a corral).

What kept me going was, simply, that I really liked my job.  I was getting to do something I loved to do.

Wow.

So I survived.  And people I worked with were encouraging and critical but never mean (like the cartoon versions in my head), and I managed to battle my own WRONG thoughts and get to where I could eat a bit more often.

And here I am.

I’m happy to go to work.  I get to cook stuff!

I still have bad moments, but I learn from them and I can laugh them off. 

It’s good.

But I still see ghosts.

I suppose I always will.

Just Some Pictures

Crescent Moon and Branches