Stitching With Dropped Threads

Poppy picked up several thick books at the library on our last visit, so I helped myself to one of her choices the other day. It's called Dropped Threads, and it's a compilation of short essays and excerpts by Canadian women, professional writers and otherwise.

I didn't expect to like it. But I did. Not all of it, not every single piece, but as a whole it was a pleasant surprise. Lots of feminism from lots of perspectives, bits and pieces of women's lives, small truths and revelations that I needed to hear.

It's me, it's my age, it's the circumstances of my life, and I'm finding more and more as I creep up in years that I need to hear the voices of other women. Older women. Older women who aren't trying to feed me religious propaganda. I've heard so much of that, and seen so much of it, and continue to see it in a lot of my clients, hush-mouthed women speaking what they've been taught all their lives, and suffering for it. Not all of them, obviously, but enough that it's a worry to me from a health point of view as well as a frustration as a person who's messing her way through life and needs to hear what's real. Needs to speak what's real, not a superimposed "should".

And I found that. I read women talking about aging, and loneliness, and second-guessing. Talking about their bodies, relationships, ambivalence, regret, lack of regret. And spirituality too. Most of it seemed pretty real, their own stuff after peeling back the layers to find themselves underneath.

Getting older is something on my mind a lot these days. Because I am, I guess. But how do you do it? I don't expect a set of directions, but I want to hear other women's walks, and how they came to peace. I want to hear what it is to settle into your own wisdom, and stop chasing youth, how to sink into maturity of years and maturity of vision, and bless that settled-ness that isn't the hyperactive, performance-driven frenzy of the earlier decades.

Dignity. I think that's what I'm struggling for. Not apathy or resignation, but dignity in the fact that I'm a woman almost forty, and then almost eighty. Or ninety, if such things come to pass. Not to compare my greying hair or wrinkles to other folks my age and think how much older/younger I look than them, or how busy/not-busy, smart/not-smart, creative/dull, ambitious or staid or ... or any of those other things that I've measured myself against all my life.

I'm trying to come to terms with myself. A big part of that is being female, and not trying to win male approval by being willing and able to run with the boys. I don't want that. I know I've done it in the past, and I'm not happy about it anymore.

I want to be a person, a woman-person, an aging-woman-person who looks both directions and knows herself.

It's not really about gender, except that this is the gender that I am.

I want to be wise.

Yeah, I know. Don't ask much, do she?

How I Spent My Summer Vacation

Basket Case

Another

rainy

day.

So I undertook something I've been thinking of undertaking for a while now, a little fabric "basket" made according to a generous tutorial. However, her dimensions were all given in centimeters, and because all my sewing equipment is marked only in imperial, I did some translation. And a little fudging. Along the way I took some pictures - and considering the gore of my last post, and how I cringed every time I clicked on my own site, I hope this is a little easier on the eyes.

Oh, and her seam allowance was 1 cm, more like 3/8", but I used my standard 1/4" quilting seam.

So, the orange stripe is my Fabric A, and the blue-green print is Fabric B.

I cut two strips, 3"X9", of Fabric A, and a 9"X8" Fabric B.

Pin the A's to the B, right sides together (my A was same both ways), and stitch.

Open seams and press. The completed panel was then 9"X13"

I cut a lining of Fabric C, the same size (9"X13"). I applied a medium/heavy-weight fusible interfacing (don't know which it was, sorry), and then trimmed it all around.

I then folded both pieces in half with their 9" sides matching, and stitched along both edges on both pieces.

(N.B. Purely for your convenience and edification I purposely left my machine threaded with navy cotton, just so you could easily see the seams I'm describing. It was NOT because I was too damned lazy to change threads for something more closely matching. Absolutely not. Far be it from me to take such an easy way out when I could easily have walked across the room to my sewing cupboard, opened the canister, and found something else.)

Now, this is a little trickier to describe than do. Take your lining, fold the corners out, measure up 1.5", and draw a 3" line across. Pin and stitch along the line.

Trim it off to about 1/4". This is what you get. Do it to the outer fabric "pocket" too.

Turn the outer shell right side out, and slip the lining into it. Then fold the edges in towards each other and pin all the way around. Top stitch close to the edge.

(Note the matching topstitch thread. Can you see the navy inside? No, neither can I.)


This is what you get!

I think next time I'll cut a 2-7/8" X 5" piece of stiff cardboard and set it in the bottom between the shell and lining layers before stitching them together at the top, to give it a sturdy base that you could load up with bits and pieces without having it sag. And next time I'll make a handle too.

I think I'll make several for Christmas.

Yes, I said that. Christmas. Ouch.

When I announced that we were getting chickens this year, a lot of people asked me if I thought I'd be able to do the butchering myself.

Apparently I can.

But I don't like it.

This poor bird was so sick, laying there with its head in the dirt... Yesterday at least it looked around every now and then. Today it was nearly comatose, and was having so much trouble breathing. It's been a very cold, and recently wet, spring. I think it was pneumonia.

So I got the axe. And after apologizing profusely, I dispatched it.

I don't want to talk about that part anymore.

You know, there I was apologizing to this animal, and I think it bothered me more that I'd called it into being on my farm and its life went for nothing, than the killing itself. It died because I'm inept at raising chickens, not because it was ready for the next stage, sustaining my life.

But I felt worse just watching it die slowly. When I killed it, I suffered a bit, but it didn't. And I think that's the important thing. I think. It's all got me a bit flustered.

Then a couple hours later I heard this horrible little skreeing from the area of the back porch. I opened the door, and there was the kitten with a mouthful of struggling baby chickadee. Mercy. I shut the door again.

Wherever I look, there's the Janus-face of life and death.

Discard

There are several excellent reasons why baby quilts are the best quilts. Let me tell you about it:

1. They're small. That means they're a lot easier to quilt on the machine, and a lot easier on my back.

2. They're small. That means that I can used up bits and pieces of fabric, things I don't have enough of to piece a larger quilt with.

3. They're small. If they're an eyesore, they're not a huge eyesore, and when the baby gets a little bigger, people have a very valid excuse for passing them along.


Poppy's been attending a youth group at one of the local churches, and the couple that runs it is expecting a second child. I very much appreciate that they're willing to undertake that project (the youth group, I mean - baby-making is their own look-out), so I'm making a quilt.

These are fabrics that I've had way too much of for way too long. Poppy swore blind that she loved them and I got enough to make her a bed-size quilt, but after the purchase she informed me she loved them, but not in that way.

(Yeah, heard that one before. Oh, my heart...)

So there I was left with her expired passion, and I've since made two laps quilts and several baby quilts with the heap. This is it. I'm done. All the niggly leftovers are going in the second hand bag.

But all the same, it's kinda pretty, and I've satisfied my stash-busting instincts. I guess even unwanted leftovers have their consolations.

Chateau Chicken

Thistledilly

It's dandelion season. I live in the midst of a dandelion forest. In fact, there are places in the "lawn" that look like they were deliberately sown to dandelion, because there's nary a blade of grass. Not even quack grass. That's quite an accomplishment. Maybe later in the year I'll go out and dig roots and make a batch of wine. At the very least I know it's "organic".

This place has been so neglected for such a long time, and often when I'm gazing, stupefied, at some clump of desolation, I think about the word "organic" and wonder what its applications are. My dandelions are organic, but that kind of organic doesn't look very fruitful by human terms.

Organic Thistle. I've been punching through the thistle patch with my shovel, breaking off the tops so they don't go to flower. I gave up on trying to dig them up by the root. Hah! They go on forevah.

Chickens, doing chickenly things. Pooping, eating, flapping, shrieking. Growing. Astonishingly. We were planning on putting them out on grass this weekend, but the forecast is for rain and thunderstorms, so perhaps we'll bide our time a bit longer.

One-Eyed Jack, the preening one. I thought he died a few days ago, but it must have been another runt, because here he is in Cyclopean glory. When everyone else in the coop had pneumonia, Jack's eyelids on the one side swelled up and stuck together, and that along with his runtiness made him easy to spot. The sickness has passed, but his eye is still mostly shut. And he's still a runt. Or she. Maybe it's One-Eyed Jill.

I'm astonished every day when I go to check in the morning, and this bird is still wandering around tipsily under the legs of its giant siblings. If it makes it through to the bitter end, it won't be so much a chicken dinner as a chicken nugget.

When I'm working on our farm, I'm hard. Hard like weathered, not hard like brittle. Like a "bottle in the smoke", a drinking skin.

I do what needs to be done, but that's not what I think needs to be done from inside the house. I haul big food-sacks, and behead thistles, and carry five-gallon pails of water. The place looks bad. There are days when I'm out there, and I look around at the ugliness, and the loneliness, and there are tears running down my face because I can't see the beauty, and my heart is cracking with all kinds of grief, and all I want is to get the hell out. But I do it anyway. The chickens get fed, the garden has a chance to breathe because it isn't choked by weeds. When it's time to butcher, I'll do that too, and maybe the tears will splash on the meat. And I'll do it, and carry on with it, because I'm tough. Something inside me is hard, and hardening.

I need this. I need the other things too, the study and the companionship and the therapy work, but I need this too, to keep me on the right side of real.

I was thinking this afternoon, about real, about really real. There was a time in my life when I used to worry about whether it was right or wrong to wear jeans to church. In a world where food comes from the ground, that's not a real question. It has nothing to do with morality. All the lists of do's and don't's from church that I used to fret about, or the lists that accrued inside my head, the ones of my own making, they're so far away now. Now it's about whether or not the chicks and the garden have water, and that's about it.

That's who I am today. Could be different tomorrow.