Projects

Making quilting

In Projects on 15 April 2010 with 1 comment

I’m an ideas per­son, not a doer. I get antsy halfway through and start look­ing for ways to impro­vise. I’m going to hold my Granny entirely respons­ible for this, a woman who once got part­way through a crochet pat­tern I’d sent her before decid­ing she could “make it bet­ter”; a woman who filled my child­hood with cakes covered in blue icing, and recently decided to put  the top­ping dec­or­a­tions into the cake mix, just to see what will hap­pen. It’s just a little bit unfor­tu­nate that some other kind genetic rel­at­ive kindly endowed the curse of deaf­en­ing per­fec­tion­ism on me, mean­ing my brain thinks that if it can’t be per­fect, it shouldn’t be done. These two traits are in no way even remotely compatible.

Quilt­ing is some­thing I’ve alwayswanted to do, but some­thing that seemed way out of my league of crafts. Everything I’ve ever read about quilt­ing makes it seem like the most pre­cise art known to human­kind — some­thing that can only be achieved with a set square, a laser meas­ur­ing device and the most ded­ic­ated devo­tion to detail. I have none of these things. Well, I could prob­ably rustle up a set square from some­where, but I have prob­lems with meas­ur­ing, prob­lems with cut­ting, prob­lems with pre­ci­sions — he per­fec­tion­ist part takes over to the point that when Al tried to talk me through draw­ing a line in a calm and rational way I have to ask him to stop before I have an anxi­ety attack. It’s far, far easier for the internal impro­viser to take over and say “hey! Draw a wig­gly line and call it art!”

This is why I just went for it, and star­ted without either a plan or a clue. Squares were cut at ran­dom, then sewed together at ran­dom. Even the fab­rics were chosen ran­domly from a selec­tion I already had, although there was a minor brain­wave in the fab­ric shop when I remembered that they all shared browns, yel­lows and greens in com­mon, so I got another couple of fab­rics to tie in some other col­ours (a smat­ter­ing of light blue, a humung­ous chunk of Very Bright Yel­low) without hav­ing to buy too much more. Throw­ing the cake top­pers into the mix, if you will. Who knows what might happen?

Now I’ve put the top together, and actu­ally read a bit about quilt­ing, I can see where a plan would have been use­ful, par­tic­u­larly in address­ing some of the imbal­ances in the over­all item — there’s a little too much yel­low here, and that green is per­haps a little too green in nor­mal light (what is it with fab­ric shops and bad light­ing?). But if I’d had to plan, Per­fec­tion­ist Sarah would have kicked in and I’d have been too put off by the daunt­ing task of plan­ning to actu­ally get round to mak­ing any­thing: I’d have the Best Plan Ever, but never any­thing to show for it. Next time, I’ll have some sort of plan before­hand, but try to keep in mind that, actu­ally, the ran­dom­ising and thinking-as-i-go aspect was quite fun to play with.

The next part is the most ter­ri­fy­ing for me: the actual quilt­ing. I gave in and bought a walk­ing foot and guide for my machine, because I’m fairly sure that any machine that seems to be aller­gic to its own bob­bins might throw a little bit of a tan­trum try­ing to go through three lay­ers using a nor­mal foot. I have wad­ding, picked at ran­dom in the fab­ric shop because I didn’t know what I was buy­ing, and now seems to be ridicu­lously thin. I made a trip to the lib­rary which, though small, is pretty heav­ily stocked with tex­tile craft books thanks to the, ah, more gen­teel demo­graphic of the area I live in, and now have a couple of books that I look at in hor­ror, try­ing to digest terms like “layer sand­wich”. I’m still no fur­ther for­ward on how bind­ing magic­ally appears. Do I just cut it? If so, how, and does it mat­ter if my straight line looks like a worm free­styl­ing at a disco or should I hire someone who isn’t aller­gic to accur­acy to do it for me?

At the moment, with the top pieced and hanging over the sofa and the wad­ding still safely wrapped in its bag, I feel really quite scared about mov­ing on, but also excited. Yes, it’s com­pletely squint in places, and I only learnt some tech­nical ideas and time-savers from books when I was already well into the con­struc­tion, but it has been forever since I’ve had a pro­ject I’ve enjoyed so much. Bizar­rely, it has had a pos­it­ive effect on my work­ing day — I’m self-employed, I work from home, so work ten­ded to creep into even­ings when it was easier to work without inter­rup­tion, but now I aim to be all wrapped up by even­ing so that I can work on my quilt (don’t worry, the work’s still get­ting done, just dur­ing the day!). Most nights I’m squirreled away at the kit­chen table by 8pm, sewing.

I’m just scared I’m going to ruin it.

Just hot air

In Projects on 2 December 2009 with Comments Off

Some days it’s best to just give up and spend the after­noon sit­ting in the kit­chen listen­ing to the radio and cov­er­ing bal­loons in tis­sue paper.

Morningside by night

In NaBloPoMo, Photos and Videos, Projects on 3 November 2009 with 2 comments

Can we cla­rify: post­ing a photo before giv­ing up and just going to bed counts as fully-fledged blog­ging, yes?

I capture the tenement

In NaBloPoMo, Photos and Videos, Projects on 1 November 2009 with 2 comments

Sit­ting in front of a blank file titled “NaNoWriMo2009.docx” won­der­ing where all the words that flooded my head for the past month have gone, it sud­denly seems like a bril­liant plan to take part in NaBlo­PoMo as well. This reminds me a lot of being in Uni, when it sud­denly seemed like a good idea to scrub the flat from top to bot­tom the day before an exam, but if it gets me doing two things I want to do more of (writ­ing and blog­ging), and see­ing as no-one’s going to mark the res­ults — although they may taunt me for the rest of my nat­ural life if I fail at either — I’ll run with it. I’m temp­ted to make myself take a photo a day through­out Novem­ber as well, and blog that, too. Hell, why not go the whole hog and run a mara­thon every day in Novem­ber, Sarah?

Novem­ber is my planned month of end­less health. Tech­nic­ally you can’t plan these things, but it’s surely due, after spend­ing the whole of Octo­ber with vari­ous vir­uses. Virus begets virus, it turns out. Over the course of the month I’ve done pos­sible ‘flu, stink­ing cold, ton­sil­itis, laryngitis, to the point that the doc­tor has now given me anti­bi­ot­ics just in case there’s some­thing kil­lable in there. If I was well enough to leave the house for even half of the days in the month, I’d be sur­prised, and when I did go out I man­aged to get myself attacked in Waitrose (Waitrose! Maybe you expect to get kicked by ran­dom strangers while stand­ing in the bakery aisle of Lidl, but Waitrose?!), mean­ing the whole of the month of Octo­ber can safely be filed under A for “Atrocious”.

But Novem­ber? Novem­ber, you’re going to be won­der­ful. Together we’ll write a book, a blog, take pho­to­graphs, catch up and get ahead with work pro­jects, leave the house on a daily basis (okay, we can work on get­ting to the top of the street without dying again before we start on the daily mara­thons), catch no germs and be okay.

C’mon Novem­ber: let’s get started.

Detail

In Photos and Videos, Projects on 1 October 2009 with Comments Off

I set myself a little pro­ject this morn­ing, and the res­ult is this series of little still lives fea­tur­ing the details of my day and my home (there are more pho­tos on Flickr). Some of the images are stranger than oth­ers — who takes a photo of a bottle of bal­samic vin­egar or a doorhandle? — but the answers give bizarre little insights into who I am and how I live: I add bal­samic to everything (except maybe por­ridge) and I think the old doorhandles are the favour­ite part of my new flat, other than the bath­room and kit­chen win­dows (light!) and shower cur­tain. You prob­ably have to have lived without a shower rail for three months to truly appre­ci­ate the power of a square of clear plastic.

Later, I headed out­side and grabbed a few of the little details from my walk and the area of Edin­burgh that I live in, much to the bemuse­ment of every school-age per­son in the city. I can tell I’m get­ting old because the orange num­ber 8 below? It was stuck to a com­munal bin. And I took a photo of it just to hor­rify the school­girl who had been star­ing at me and my cam­era for the pre­vi­ous few minutes. She’ll prob­ably need coun­selling to get over the sheer hor­ror of it all.

1000 new things

In 1000 new things, Projects on 6 May 2009 tagged 100 new things, lists, photo, Projects with 2 comments

You’d be sur­prised about what’s new to me. I spent my teens hid­den away, sleep­ing, and my time at uni­ver­sity was spent almost exclus­ively switch­ing between uni work, paid work and a state of cog­nit­ive sus­pen­sion that meant all I could do was press the F5 key over and over and over and over…

So when I was look­ing for some­thing to fill a bit of time now that the degree is done – pause here for the small party that hap­pens in my brain every time I real­ise that – it made sense to con­cen­trate on the new. To both identify the things I want to do that I’ve never done, and to grab those things that I’d never even con­sidered but that would be fun, inter­est­ing or will one day make an inter­est­ing story to tell when I’m tucked into my rock­ing chair.

And because no pro­ject is complete(d) without a goal, and as I am the Queen of Ordered Lists and unat­tain­able tar­gets, I figured I’d start small – so 1000 new things it is! There is no time limit, but I accept that it’s in my best interests to do some of them now rather than wait­ing until I’m 80, not least because I need the impetus to add vari­ety and struc­ture to my life over the next few post-uni months

Some basic rules. I like rules.

1. For the pur­poses of the list, the defin­i­tion of new is new to me. I’m not out to make his­tory here. You’ll prob­ably have done at least some of these things already (per­haps all, in which case I ask you: do you ever sleep?) but if I haven’t then it totally counts as new.
2. I can’t include any­thing that I can’t men­tally define as “a thing”. The sort of activ­ity that you might men­tion to a good friend on the phone or when you bump into them in the street. For example, five minutes ago I sent an email that I’ve never sent before while eat­ing a cer­eal I’ve never had before! That’s two new things at once! But neither of these count, not least because they don’t meet the friend-mentioning cri­teria — not even I’d start a con­ver­sa­tion with “yes­ter­day I sent an email about image res­iz­ing for print­ing”. I hope.
3. I won’t include things that are new but that make me crumple a little inside. On Monday my purse was stolen, some­thing that had never happened to me before, but because I don’t want to add it to the list and I don’t want to ref­er­ence it repeatedly, it won’t be included in the list. Is this blur­ring the truth some­what? Most likely. But I choose not to make it a big­ger part of my life than it already is.
4. If I’m not sure if some­thing is list-worthy or not, I’ll ask someone I can trust to be adju­dic­ator. Their decision is final, unless by ask­ing I real­ise I vehe­mently dis­agree with them, and then my decision is final.
5. Part of the pro­ject is to blog as much as I can, but I very likely won’t blog everything, and there may be some things I just can’t blog about (state secrets, crim­inal escapades, work stuff, etc.). In which case I’ll post hor­ribly mod­i­fied entries that make the story sound way more inter­est­ing that it actu­ally is, like it’s a Face­book status update.

I’ve already star­ted with some items I’ll blog about later (four or five so far — one needs to go into adju­dic­a­tion), but I’m very open to any ideas for things to do, no mat­ter how small or big. I’ll try any­thing, so have a think — what do you do that I’ve prob­ably never done?