Lori Finding Joy

Right before Christmas my sewing machine made a horrific clunking sound and then quit on me.  Now, I like to knit but I need to sew; there’s something about my psyche that needs a regular visit with my fabric.  I live in my head, and cutting and sewing patchwork is one of the few things that gets me out of my thinking mode, which is something I really need.  I learned this during the time I was living in NYC without my sewing machine, and I vowed to never be without it again.  Having it crash and burn was kind of traumatic, truth be told, especially during vacation time that I had hoped to spend finishing up some projects.

Happily the machine was fixable, and finally this weekend I had time to get reacquainted.  I’ve had this machine for at least 10 years and never had it cleaned, and the lightbulb had been burned out for so long that I’d forgotten there was one on the machine.  Surprise!  It was none too soon for sewing, either — not only do I have numerous projects in various states of completion, I needed to start another one.  My quilt guild runs a program called “Friendship Squares”, where each participant writes their name and the type of block they want on a piece of paper.  They can specify an actual block (I requested log cabin blocks last year), a color, or a theme.  You draw names, and you make six blocks (two per month for three months) for your friend.  In turn, someone makes six blocks for you.  At the end, you’re supposed to make at least two additional blocks and sew the top up.

Last year, I wound up with someone who wanted Asian-inspired blocks.  I don’t normally buy this type of quilt fabric, so I marched off to the quilt store and bought several fat quarters of fabrics.  I sewed up “T” block squares which, with the Asian fabric, looked like little kimonos.  The recipient made a really lovely quilt and I considered the whole experience a success.   (I continue to kick myself for not getting a picture of the finished quilt, especially since the woman is no longer in the guild.)

This year, I drew “1930s” – yet another aisle of the quilt store I never visit.  These are prints that are based on fabric designs from the 1930s, many with cutesy animals on them.  Not my thing, really, so Saturday morning I took advantage of the ridiculously unseasonable warm weather and walked into town to the quilt store to find some fabric.  It was really hard to choose a plan for these blocks; the store had a lot of really great red fabrics that I liked but what if the person I am making them for hates red?  I decided I really should go for a variety, and came home with this:

The next challenge was to find a block.  Years ago I got smart about managing my growing stash of quilt magazines, all of which had one pattern I wanted to try someday.  I ripped the one pattern I wanted out of each magazine and stuck it in a red three ring binder, recycling the rest of the magazine.  Hardly a genius move, but I’m telling you this simple thing has become my own personal quilting bible.  After much browsing, I found this block – which unfortunately I can’t credit because I have no idea which magazine it came from (I’m guessing from the style it was probably Quilter’s Newsletter).  It’s not terribly difficult, but it does require some precise piecing of the triangles.  I made two blocks today, the red one below and a blue one.  I worry that maybe the style isn’t quite right for the fabrics, and maybe there’s too much white.  I have to decide whether to scrap this altogether, continue on, or use these two blocks but find other patterns for the remaining fabrics.  Thoughts?

Just a quick note to say that I’ve begun posting some of my family essays here on this site.  They are posted as pages, rather than blog entries, because they are a bit long.  You can find them under the “Family Essays” tag, right under the blog header.

To fully appreciate 2011, I have to step back and think about how truly awful years 2009 and 2010 were.  For one thing, in 2009 I was working for a perfectly good organization that was simply and sadly a terrible fit for me.  I was just miserable.  On top of that, I found out someone I loved dearly had betrayed me in some completely unbelievable and totally unnecessary ways.  By the time 2010 rolled around I was just coming out of my shell-shock, enough so to start a job search and stop thinking about voodoo dolls.

Thankfully, the job search landed me at a place that I feel really good about, both because of what we do AND how we do it.  And while 2011 could have been better, I helped raise enough money that we surplussed, which means that in 2012 we can take on at least one long-standing project for the organization.  THAT feels good.  There were definitely some major disappointments, mostly proposals I thought were really good that were turned down flat, and I have to rethink some things for 2012.  But by and large, 2011 was the first year in a very long time that work was satisfying and meaningful.

I can’t lie though; the best thing about 2011 was hands-down going to Ireland, even though it was a short trip and I was sick the entire time.  Frankly, between the cold medicine and the beer and  Irish coffees people kept pouring down my throat (to stop me from coughing on them), it’s a wonder I survived.  Also, though I came home with some great photos I wish I’d taken more (actually, the header photo of this blog is a flower from Saint Stephen’s Green in Dublin).  So, I’m not at all done with Ireland – I want to spend more time in Dublin, and I didn’t get to Galway or several other places I’d like to see.  But it was a start.  There was a lot about Ireland that reminded me of Maine, and I spent a lot of time thinking about the O’Neill’s, my Irish ancestors…the farmers in County Kerry that, I’m told, left at the height of the potato famine for Canada, where I still have relatives that operate a dairy farm in New Brunswick.  Things would have to be really terrible to leave a landscape like this:

I wish I had a Harry Potter-esque Pensieve so you could step into my memory of standing on the side of the narrow, winding road to take this picture…the road was so high up I got a bit of vertigo…the wind strong enough to almost knock me over, the smell of salt air and green carried with it.  Alas, the photo will have to do.

(Incidentally, I also learned that one of my O’Neill ancestors married into a family of French Huegenot descent, and some of my umpteenth-cousins own this major chocolate empire.  Which, y’know, explains a lot about my own personal chocolate consumption.  It’s genetic, hee hee!)

I also turned 40 in 2011.  I don’t really know what to say about that.  I still feel like I’m 14 in my head, and still have to think about it when someone asks my age.  It wasn’t awful, in large part because the day I turned 40 I was sitting on an Aer Lingus plane bound for Dublin.  And also because I’ve discovered that life just tends to march on regardless, so there’s just no point in fussing about age too much.  It is sort of weird to be this age and not be married, and to not have kids.  I will admit there are times when my nieces are watching “Say Yes to the Dress” and I get a little sad that I never got to be that perky, excited, naive little 20-something bride dropping ridiculous amounts of money for a big pouffy dress…but oh well.  I don’t know what my word is yet, but I’m certain “perky” isn’t it.  And I’m okay with that.

I’m also glad that I was able to catch up with a few old friends this year – something I must be better about in 2012, but it was a start.  And I made a few new friends as well, some knitters and quilters, as well as my friend K. from India.  In fact, the latter half of 2011 felt like India was stalking me; everywhere I went there were people from India, or pictures of India, or Indian music, or a TV show about India. This includes a huge banner promoting tourism in India that went up at South Station, which I saw every morning I went to work.  K. says this stuff was always there and that I’m just noticing it now, like how you buy a car and then you start seeing your particular model of car everywhere.  All I can say is, I bought a new car this year and I never see anyone else driving one like it.    But lately I keep tripping over Edinburgh, and it’s making me want to explore my Scottish roots.  It probably won’t happen in 2012, because I have to move at the end of May and moving is always expensive…but I’m thinking I will spend 2012 planning for a 2013 trip.  My mom keeps talking about going to Canada, so maybe that will happen in 2012.

There was much more knitting than quilting this year, in part because I wound up being the treasurer for my quilt guild, and somehow all my quilting time is getting eaten up by bank statement reconciliations.  There is a lesson there, my friends.  Also, there was very little writing outside work – I basically stopped all recreational writing in June, and I have no idea why.  I just haven’t been that driven or passionate about my writing as I have been in years past.  I had been writing these essays about my family, which (thankfully…) amused my relatives, but I kind of ran out of steam.  Mostly the blog got reinstated as a way of answering everyone telling me to write more, though I’m still not entirely sure I have enough to say to sustain it.  (Hence the knitting and cat pictures.)  Time will tell, I suppose.

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Speaking of the cat…let me end 2011 by cementing my crazy cat lady status and saying that I still have absolutely no regrets about adopting that 8-year old cat from the shelter in 2010.  Pets are good for what ails you…even if they claim as theirs the blanket you bought on your Ireland trip, and occasionally get mad and pee in your laundry basket.  Here’s to a happy close of 2011, and a better 2012!

My employer shuts down the week between Christmas and New Years, so I am a little over halfway through my 11-day break.  I am so grateful for this time off it isn’t even funny – I really  needed some rest.  Christmas is still exhausting in our family since we still have one Santa-believing child, which means we’re up until midnight helping my sister and brother-in-law stage the living room, and then up at 6 am when the kids can’t stand waiting one.  second.  longer.

It was a great holiday, though, not the least of which because my sister and brother-in-law are wildly generous in both food and gifts.  After the festivities, I spent Monday and Tuesday practically immobile, knitting and watching (via Netflix) a British show called Kingdom, with Stephen Fry and, oddly enough, Hermione Norris from MI-5.   I loved this show, which of course means it was cancelled fairly early on.  I was very sad when it ended.  On the other hand, if it hadn’t ended I might not have left the apartment all week, proving there’s a bright side to most everything.

Another bright side is that I woke up this morning with actual ENERGY.  This happens so very rarely that I am trying to savor it before it runs out.  This afternoon I plan on putting a good dent in my gift card stash before testing out my sewing machine, which I am happy to report was raised from the dead by a local repairman late last week.  Talk about Christmas miracles…he even replaced the light bulb in the machine, which had been burned out so long I’d forgotten there was supposed to be one in the first place.

In the knitting department…in my last post I noted that I’d once again veered wildly off-course in the “get things done” department and started yet another baby sweater.  It’s the Sweet Bunting Cardigan by Laura Chau (pattern available here, though I purchased it at my local yarn store).  And then I finally broke my streak and finished it:

Once again, I used Rowan Purelife organic yarn, which is fast becoming one of my favorites, with some random leftover white yarn for the bunting colorwork.   This yarn was a little thicker than what the pattern recommended so my gauge was off, but I’m not too fussed about it.  To paraphrase the great Elizabeth Zimmerman,  babies grow.

The pattern is pretty simple and straightforward; there were only a couple of places where I had to stop and ponder what I was doing.  I also like that it’s a baby sweater with no buttons that can be chewed off and swallowed.  There are some short-rows in the back for shaping that seem sort of unnecessary in a baby sweater, but they aren’t hard to knit.  And while I find colorwork difficult, there isn’t a whole lot of it here and by the time you get really sick of it, it’s over.  And you could certainly knit the sweater without the colorwork for a plain and simple cardigan.  The only modification I would make to this is that the pattern has you knit the front bands (button bands) at the end.  I would just add 5 stitches to each end of the body and work the bands along with the rest of the sweater; I find it much easier than picking up stitches.  My favorite part is the tie – my first attempt at i-cord, which I wish I had made just a smidge longer:

Alas, the finished sweater bears a passing resemblance to a certain Muppet.  Beloved though he may be, this was not my intent.

I’m a big believer in using the last few weeks of the calendar year to review my accomplishments and set new goals for the coming year.  While I don’t believe in resolutions per se, I do know myself well enough by now to know that without some goal or higher purpose in sight I will waste inordinate amounts of time doing…well, nothing.  I am a ruminator by nature, and I can stare into space and brood for hours if I don’t keep myself in check.  Oh, the novels I’ve written in my head!

The one thing I’ve learned is to make my  goals more process oriented than results-oriented; for example, “send out X pieces of writing”, rather than “get published”, because while I can control the quality and quantity of my writing, I can’t control the whims of magazine editors.  While I try to make sure there are few “stretch” goals on my list, I also try to make sure that there a few things that are totally do-able if I just put some time in.  Some years are better than others in the accomplishment front.  Some years have had really major things on the list, like “move to NYC” or “find a new job”, and some years have less dramatic things like “submit one essay somewhere, anywhere” and “donate clothes somewhere, anywhere”.  Some years I do pretty well, and then some years December  appears out of nowhere and becomes one mad dash of trying to get things checked off my list.

Then 2011 came along.  It may go down in my personal history as one of the strangest ever, and I’ve had some pretty strange times these past few years.  I did go to Ireland, and I did manage to sell a quilt (via a charity auction, but it still counts in my book).  Those items were on my 2o11 goal list – but that’s all I managed to get done.  Instead of checking off other things, like writing, I mysteriously found myself having to buy a new car (oh the horrors…the salesmen had me in tears for a week), serving as the treasurer of my quilt guild, and spending a ridiculous amount of time at the dentist’s office, in a position not conducive to anything but having one’s teeth cleaned and/or drilled.  (Not to mention the money spent, despite having what is purported to be very good dental insurance.)

So December came, and I reviewed my list, and for once in my life I just gave up.  My apartment still looked like a bomb went off, there were half-completed knitting and quilting projects everywhere, books not read, essays not written (let alone submitted….), plus I still had a cold, and I just decided not to care.  There was really no way I was going to get anything else done between family and work stuff.  I decided to find one project to finish, and I swore I would finish it before even THINKING about buying any more fabric or yarn.  Then my sewing machine died, which meant I had to find a knitting project.

I fished through my knitting baskets and unearthed a blanket I started 4 years ago, when my niece was in kindergarten.  School exhausted her – she came home every day, sat on the couch with a snack, and promptly fell over asleep.  The only other time I’d ever seen anyone fall asleep so hard, so without warning, was in college when I had a roommate with narcolepsy.  At any rate, I decided to knit her a blanket to sleep on the couch with, and found this pink, purple and white Malabrigo yarn that was perfect for a 5-year old girl.

I don’t know what happened, but I knit up two skeins of  yarn and let it disappear into the nether regions of my basket.  I had one skein of yarn left, and I have no idea what I was thinking because 3 skeins of yarn is not enough for a 5-year old sized blanket.  It’s certainly not enough for a 9-year old sized blanket, which is how old she is now.  And the yarn is discontinued, of course.  But I figured I’d have enough to at least wind up with some sort of baby blanket, and decided that since it’s thick yarn on size 10 needles it would be a quick finish.  I knit, and knit, and knit some more….

Now what you have to understand is, this yarn is really soft and when knit in a double moss stitch (knit 2/purl 2) it becomes this lovely mass of squishiness that is kind of hard to resist.  It’s like bubble wrap – you just can’t NOT touch it.  Or, if you are a cat, you just can’t help  kneading it with your paws whilst your person is trying to knit it….or dragging it off the table onto the floor and sleeping on it.  *sigh*

And then I got sick of it.  Sick of knitting it, and sick of fighting the cat for it.  Right now it’s on the couch, still on the needles with 1/2 a skein left to knit, and the cat’s using it as a pillow.  But really, it’s okay.  It was exactly the excuse I needed for this: