This is the Year!

This is the year: the year you are finally going to clean up your quilting space. That’s what you said last year, too, but you didn’t quite hit the mark. You said you’d reward yourself with making that new quilt – once you cleaned up your space. Now it’s the end of January and you still haven’t cleaned up but you really want to start that new quilt. What should you do?

You should start that new quilt anyway. I know, that sounds like giving in, but it’s not really. You can start your new quilt, but you don’t have to literally clean up your entire sewing space beforehand. Start small. Start by cleaning off your cutting table so that you can cut. That is a start. Don’t just move the stuff aside… actually fold up fabrics and put them away. Re-stow escaped notions. Hang up your rulers.

Now, your sewing machine table. How about just putting away past projects, either complete or not, that are sitting right on the sewing machine table? Not next to it. Not under it. Just right on top of it. I bet there are at least 3 or 4 (or more?) of those. You are making good progress now!

Now let’s move on to pressing. Again, you don’t have to organize your entre stash first, but how about putting away everything that is laying on the ironing board. I know you – that’s a lot of stuff!  That will make another huge dent.

Finally, how about you fold up all of the leftover fabrics from just this project and put them neatly on a shelf or in your stash? Now there is less mess for next time!

So, we didn’t clean your entire space, but we made it better than it was. Before you embark on your next project, tackle one small area. Wash, rinse, repeat. If you can follow this process, your sewing space will get clean before the end of the year and there will be no need for any grand declarations come the New Year!

Old Sewing Machines are Best

My everyday sewing machine is Singer 301A. It’s a vintage machine built in 1957, that is 11 years before I was even born. This is my workhorse machine that I use for everything… projects ranging from clothing repair to beautiful quilts for my family. There have obviously been a lot of advances in sewing machine technology since then. We are living in the age of the fancy embroidery machines that can do all kinds of stitches and even embroider full images. Modern machines can cut the thread for you, thread the needle, make sure the needle is in the up position when you stop and probably 100 other things that I don’t even know about because I use a sewing machine older than myself.

From time to time, I think about modernizing. I wonder what I’m missing out on, and could my sewing be faster, more efficient or fancier if I upgraded? I recall one time I was at a sewing expo and I decided to try out some new machines with a good mind to buy one. The first thing the salesperson did was hand me a small scrap of fabric. It was about a 2” square. I said, “What’s this for?” He said it was a “leader”. Again, I asked, “What is it for?”. He explained it was a small scrap of fabric used to start out a seam, it was supposed to eliminate thread nests, keep the fabric from being drawn into the needle hole, prevent the machine needle from becoming unthreaded when a new seam is started, etc. I looked at him with incredulity. “None of those things have ever happened to me.”, I explained. He scowled back at me in disbelief.

I tried the new machine anyway. I was put off by the fact that I needed this little scrap of fabric to help the machine behave itself when starting a new seam. It worked just fine, so I decide to try it without the little scrap of fabric “leader”. The fabric was immediately sucked into the needle hole; a giant snarl ensued. The machine could not move forward. It was awful. I cringed and ceded the $2000+ machine to the now annoyed salesperson.

My vintage machine never did any of these things. What good is a machine that will cut the thread for you and always leave the needle in the up position if you can’t just start out a new seam on the very edge of the fabric? I thanked him for his time and went back to browsing for fabric.

When I got home, I was more grateful than ever to have my old machine that had its own process. It simply worked in its own way. Sure, it doesn’t thread itself. It only has “forward” and “reverse”. It can’t make even a simple zigzag let alone any fancy edges. The foot pedal overheats if you use it too long. It doent cut the thread and the manual thread cutter on the back is so dull it doesn’t work anymore. Despite all of these perceived inadequacies, it makes a perfect seam: totally straight, perfectly even stitches, every single time and has been doing so for more than fifty years. For me, you can’t ask for anything more than that.

Fall Into Craft Fairs

September is here and every year at about this time I am stricken with an urge that I must fight: the urge to gear up for craft fairs. I live in New England so around here they are particularly abundant. It all started back in college. My school had this very, very long hallway through the main building, affectionally known as “The Infinite Corridor”. For some modest fee, I think it was 10 bucks, they’d let the students set up a table to sell crafts. Every year, my broke friend and I would scheme about what we could sell to make some much needed holiday cash.

The first year, our efforts were modest but rewarded. We bought mini Christmas ball ornaments from an actual Five and Dime and made them into earnings. This is something anyone can buy at Target® now, but at the time it was relatively innovative. Unfortunately for us, these were super cheap to make and sold relatively well. It was the beginning of our downfall. Due to their relative success, we decided next year we’d do something even more grand. We decided to make fancy Christmas stockings, the kind that looked like old Victorian boots and were made from cool upholstery style fabrics decorated with beaded trim and lace. As much as it was against our nature, we started early and made lots of stockings.

The week of the highly anticipated craft fair came, and our hopes were dashed. No one wanted to buy cool Christmas stockings. We surmised that maybe college students were “too grown up” care about stockings anymore. We started planning for next year. This time, we’d make cute little stuffed animal ornaments, like puppies and kitties (even pigs!) with little holiday hats. These proved to be incredibly time consuming, but as college students we figured our labor being “free” was acceptable. Again, our hopes were squashed. That year, we discovered a disturbing turn of events at the craft fair: some enterprising graduate student was simply buying trays of samosas from a local Indian restaurant right across the street, marking them up to $1 each and selling out before lunch. Outrageous! These were not even “crafts”! We were furious but determined. Before that year’s fair was even over, we hatched a new plan.

The next morning, we arrived still with our cute puppy ornaments but also armed with pans and pans of baked goods. We made my friend’s famous Apple Sauce Cake and Carrot Cake in abundance and sold them for $1 per slice. We figured we were better than the Samosa Lady (she predictably came back the next day) because we at least provided napkins which we’d of course commandeered from the cafeteria. We sold out. We ended up making 80 bucks each that year, a veritable fortune at the time.

I still have one of the stockings my friend made all those years ago: a super cute faux fur dalmatian print stocking with ruffles and fake pearls. I still put it up every year. It serves not only as a reminder to never participate in a holiday craft fair again, but also as a token of our dear friendship which is still going strong after 35 years!

I’m Not Procrastinating

A wise man once said, “Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone”. Specifically, these words were immortalized by Spanish painter, sculptor, and ceramicist Pablo Picasso who was one of the most influential artists of the 20th century. Pablo knew what was important: your art, not the dishes. Sure, it’s important to be productive and useful and maybe even a little bit tidy, but there are only so many hours in the day. If you prioritized keeping your house clean, it would probably look very nice and make your mom happy, but you’d never have time for creating art whether that be paintings, beautiful knitted scarves or handmade quilts.

I never wake up and think, “what am I going to clean today?” I wake up thinking about my art, what comics do I need to draw today, maybe today is a writing day, or maybe it’s a more practical “coloring stuff in” day, but no matter what, creating comes first. Maybe I’m not even going to draw today. Maybe today I’m going to work on a quilt. I save the dishes and the laundry for when I’m tired and my creativity is at a lull. If you are a night person, maybe you do the chores first, while you are still sleepy, the coffee hasn’t kicked in yet and your mind is ramping up. Either way, you should always utilize the time of day when you feel the most enthusiasm and energy to focus on your art.

Many times, creative people will get distracted by cleaning, household tasks or other minutia claiming they “need” to get these things done before they can settle down and focus on creating. This is really just a delay tactic because creating is hard and takes real effort. It’s easy to fold socks. It’s hard to look at that blank canvas or page, or that neatly folded stack of fat quarters wondering what form they are going to take. No matter how hard it is or how stuck you feel at the time, just get started. Start anywhere. Once you just get started, the creativity will flow. Remember, if you were going to die tomorrow, better to leave the dishes undone than to leave this earth with your art still inside you.

I Never Drank the Coffee

When I first started out my career, I was a software developer at a company that made video games. We used to quip that software was “made out of potato chips and coffee”, the staple diet of any good engineer. Despite this fact, I’d never drank a cup of coffee. Somehow, I made it through four years of undergraduate work at one of the most notoriously grueling technical institutes in the world yet never touched the brown stuff. How could this be?

The answer is simple, my friends. Sugar. Lots and lots of sugar. When I was a freshman at the aforementioned institute, I launched into each day with the breakfast of champions: a jelly donut, a can of Coke and an 8:30 am physics lecture. With this kind of start each morning, I was bound for greatness! Coke got me my first degree, well, also my second degree for that matter, and pretty much all of my work years were bathed in the stuff.

People used to tease me about getting diabetes, which I eventually did. As an aside, sugar does not cause diabetes, but as it turns out age and a late-in-life pregnancy did, at least for me. I no longer drink Coke, but I still do love it. I know it’s incredibly bad for you and I don’t buy it for my kids, but nevertheless, my office is adorned with lots of Coke-related merch – lots of cute metal tins and even the official Coca-Cola Barbie.

Today, I’m all about the green tea for clearing out the brain fog to focus on designing quilts, blogging or writing comics about quilting & knitting, although I do fondly remember the good ol’ days that Coke and I used to have!