I hope you didn't come for the cake.

Chances are, if you are reading this, that you know me personally and have a better than passing acquaintance with my mercurial and capricious moods (and my propensity for tossing around $10 words like I bought them half off.) I have struggled all my life to master them, with varying degrees of success, and when they turn dark I struggle all the harder. The difficulty comes when the darkness intensifies and I can't master it; the ensuing waves of guilt and failure begin to force it all into a spiral that sometimes can be very hard to pull myself out of. Today is one of those days for me.

I'm tapped.

I don't know why there are days when my eyes fill with tears that have no purpose or even cause. I don't know why I can't enjoy the company of my friends and family when this strikes, why I can't eat a meal in a room filled with people or have a discussion about gemstones with my seven year old. I don't know why I feel like screaming at the love of life to just leave me alone for a few hours, to get the hell away from me so I can weep over nothing in peace. I don't know why I can't even stand to pet my sweet, sick cat who spent three days in the hospital this week. I don't know why I can't just decide to be happy. All I know is that I am a dry well today, a pitch black echoing hole in the ground and I can't even make a decision about what to eat for dinner. That pisses me off.  It exhausts me.

I'm going to show you the skirt I finished last week (back when I had the moxie to care about things like resolutions.) Eventually, that is, but not today. Today I'm going to lie on the couch and watch really shitty t.v. and cry about feeling guilty for laying this all at your feet, when all you came for was a picture of my latest doodad. I might muster the courage to order takeout, or maybe I'll drag myself to the store for frozen pizza, but then again maybe I'll just eat the rest of the ice cream and whatever cheese there is. Tomorrow, I'll try again.

Keep checking back, okay?

I am better at thinking them up than getting them done

I have been thinking about what the goal of this whole project really is. If it's finishing things, then I'm toast. If, however, it's STARTING things - well, then, I'm good to go. I've got a dress without a skirt and a skirt without a waistband both sitting next to my sewing machine, which is unfortunately on the table where we attempt to eat dinner every night. I've got a pattern cut and waiting that's been cut and waiting since LAST SUMMER. I had this noble idea that I was going to finish a whole outfit this week, which I have off because of spring break. I can barely get my dishes washed and the recycling out of the damn house.

In spite of all this, I have accomplished a few things that I am going to let stand towards my total. First and foremost, I don't have pictures of the cooking things because I don't have five hands. So you'll have to imagine the St. Paddy's dinner I made: braised lamb shanks with pan sauce, tatties and neeps (mashed potatoes and turnips with cream), whole wheat soda bread, and not-quite-Carbomb cupcakes. These last were not-quite because I don't keep Irish cream liqueur in the house (I will consume it like I eat popcorn - absentmindedly in a single sitting) so the frosting was just whiskey buttercream. But I think that's worth #'s 9 and 10, at least - for dinner and dessert, right? I had to try a couple new techniques - I've never braised anything bone-in before. And the cupcakes had a new ganache. To top it all off, even though it was Saturday and I was off all day, I am not terribly efficient while cooking, and I gave myself a goal of finishing it all before 5 p.m. because we had tickets to a show that started at 7. I was done by 5:30 and we made it to to our seats with time to spare.

I called finished on the postcard project even though I didn't finish it. The last week slid right past me, and then another week, and once we were solidly into March I figured it wasn't really worth it anymore. Still, since week 3 was all handpainted cards, I decided a pat on the back was still in order. Postcard project is officially number 11, and my apologies to the seven who never received their final card. By far the nicest payoff for this particular project was getting a postcard back from C., who lauded the idea while she visited at the beginning of February.

And now onto the things I DID do!
I have had this Western style dress for HRH for about a year and half, always with the intention of embroidering it. When I bought it, it was two and half sizes too big. Now it's verging on uh-oh, maybe you should wear that before we have to send it back from whence it came (the White E for anyone who's interested.)
I did the roses on the front first. I don't love the leaves on these ones, but at least I got them even.

I asked the girl what she wanted on the back, and told her more roses were already in the works. She requested a butterfly. I spent about a day looking around on the Internet for one that I liked, then I spent another two or three hours getting the layout of this just right. The metallic thread I used for the body of the butterfly is evil, and looks wonky, and you will notice that I managed to stitch the whole thing askew, but all in all, I like the way this came out.

everything in my house is covered in cat hair

I feel like I get a little bit better with every stitching project I do. For the embroidery nerds out there, I like stem stitch the best for outlining and I am less afraid of satin stitch than I was. I used a tiny bit of backstitch to outline the upper wing of the butterfly, but that's it. Amazing what you can accomplish with a limited repertoire. And that seals up 12.

Finally, it's boring, but I might be proudest of this:

Yes, those are Ziploc freezer bags. It took my two episodes of Downton Abbey to cut those to size, triple tape the ends, punch appropriate holes, and get them in this binder, which is also from the White E. I wish they didn't have the logo on the front, but I can still see the patterns ok:
Eventually I want to have a separate Ziploc for each of my transfers, but I just got a few new ones and they are currently doubled up until I get another Downton Abbey disc from Netflix and so have something to occupy my head while I do the utterly numbing cut, tape, punch, fill.
For the PDF patterns I got plastic sleeves. I don't think I'll even have to take them out to trace, which is a bonus.
Yesterday HRH and I went to buy a new hoop - I needed a huge one for a delusion of grandeur that I am sure will not see completion - and HRH wanted to buy some new floss. I pointed out that I always just end up buying the same ones, and she implied maybe I could do something about that, like writing down the ones I have so I can get new ones that I don't. Coincidentally, when I got my newest patterns, they sent a DMC order sheet with all the colors they make conveniently organized by color number. It was a simple matter this morning to sit down with the order sheet and my floss box and mark which ones I have. I slipped it, too, into a plastic sleeve, and now I can pop it out and bring it with me when I get the urge to buy new colors. Like, always.

This marvel of organization (shut up, it's not something that comes naturally to me!) is my lucky 13, folks. That's a quarter of the way there!

Not affliated, of course, because why would I be?, but I'mma drop big props to the awesome places I get my patterns: I'm sure you all know about Sublime Stitching, and probably also Colonial Patterns (Aunt Martha and the new Stitchers Revolution), but I'm also enamored of Sew Lovely Embroidery and Urban Threads. I wish I could remember where the butterfly came from so I could give credit there, too.

That's it for now, kiddies. Hopefully I'll have something else fab for you really soon!

I'm totally counting them.

So I finally figured out that weekly updates might be a bit beyond me. This is mostly due to my crippling laziness, I think. I HAVE been working on things - the very things referenced in the title of this post! - but the whole getting out the camera and shooting pictures and logging onto the Internet while avoiding the allure of adorable cats or beautiful vintage frocks or (Deity save us all) PINTEREST is waylaid by logging onto the Internet and NOT avoiding said seductions. Now you get a wrap-up post! Aren't you lucky.

I have decided to add a few rules to this self-challenge, mostly so that I spend more time creating and less time flagellating myself over how far along I'm NOT. At first I wasn't going to count baking or cooking projects, but the Valentine's Day extravaganza of four dozen sugar cookies flooded and sprinkled for the 2nd grade sugarpalooza made me change my mind. So the sugar cookies count. So does the heart shaped pizza we had for dinner, and the chocolate fondue we had for dessert. I don't have pictures of those. I was too busy trying to keep the 2nd grader in question from covering everything in the house - primarily the felines and me, her own mother - in red royal icing and/or warm ganache. But those count for my 3,4,&5 out of 52.

I also wasn't going to count finishing projects that were started before the first of the year. But I needed the embroidery hoop that was sitting on the last of this pillowcase to start a different project, and these have been 75% done since I took my children to California (ahem. in fall of 2010). It took the work of one evening to complete them. And then I decided to cut myself some slack. UFOs need love, too! 6/52.

the dude zombie is mine pillowcase, the lady is Z's

Then I thought that the cards I made for Valentine's Day for the kiddoes shouldn't count because... I don't know why really. Because I'm dumb, and this is exactly the sort of thing I am trying to stop doing. Of course they count. I only have a picture of the Cap'n's, because HRH is using hers as a bookmark. Hers is, of course, the more amusing of the two.

the other card featured a dinosaur and the poem:"roses are red, violets are blue, i'm really glad you're not a Tyrannosaurus Rex because it'd be super hard to hug you with those tiny arms." yes, i know i'm an epic poet.

Valentine's also brought a request for special headgear for the princess (An aside: I use this term derisively, because I really, really, REALLY want to not raise an awful entitled mess of a girl. She's not actually very princessy, though, to my everlasting gratitude, and as long as they stay requests instead of demands, I don't think giving in to a hair doodad now and then is a big deal.) I made her a quick headband with glitter craft foam and hot glue. I'll let the cards be one project, and that makes 7 &8.

this ffffffabulous picture is courtesy of my aforementioned crippling laziness.

The one place I'm failing MISERABLY is my February postcard project. A fatal combination of working on a day off, a holiday, and then a debilitating cold just knocked me right off track. I am planning to do last week's and this week's both today and hopefully hit the reset button.

Lastly, I have been obsessed with these pieces from Wicked Minky on Etsy. I wanted to make an homage piece out of shrink plastic, but I have been having a tough time with it. The plastic is... really shrinky. They are less chest piece sized than hidden-behind-the-ear sized. I am still going to string them up into a necklace after they finish drying because I spent a long time on them. Then I will probably just break down and buy one of the fabulous chest piece necklaces from her.

Not bad, huh? I'm better than caught up! I'm AHEAD! I can just slack off for the next two weeks!

No? Sigh. See you soon, then.

I'm better at crafting...

than I am at blogging, apparently. I really have been working on projects (although finishing them is, as always, the bane of my existence), but because they were all "in-process" rather than what I like to call "done" I figured I would wait until I actually had something to show for all my hard work.

I got lots of great Christmas presents this year. Seriously, my loved ones spoiled me rotten with the types of things they knew I would adore. My sweet son, told I needed new earbuds, bought me ones emblazoned with Kermit the Frog eyes. My manfriend (there has GOT to be a better term for this. No joke.) showered me with coelocanths and new bass string and embroidery patterns and an antique banjolele. And the delightful Ms. S. got me this. Gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous. It need a frame worthy of it, though. S. couldn't find one she thought was suitable, and told me she'd leave it up to me. She mentioned that she thought that a Mexican folkart style one would be perfect.

So I made this one.

I got the frame at the White Elephant on a half-price day, so I think I paid $0.50 for it. I also got Dolly Parton's greatest hits on vinyl that day, but that's neither here nor there. I took the time to sand the frame, which generally I am far to impatient to do. Good thing I had a new Dolly Parton record to get me through! It also took me two Wanda Jackson records, all of Willie Nelson's Red-Headed Stranger, The Stray Cat's Rant 'n' Rave, and the first half of the first side of Kenny Rogers' The Gambler. That is a TERRIBLE album.

It took me a few days to decide what color I wanted the frame itself to be, so in the meantime, I took out my stash of glitter craft foam - an obsession begun when I was turning HRH into a comic book character for Halloween - and began cutting out a sacred heart. Well, first, I spent about seventeen gazillion hours looking at Mexican folkart online and pinning the shit out of it. THEN I cut a sacred heart of glittery craft foam. And then I decided that it looked cheese-tastic and faintly commercial, so I painstakingly drew and cut a Shure-55 style mic head to paste over it.

Once that was done I decided to match the color of the Gocco print in the paint and did the whole damn thing twice over in what my son referred to as TARDIS blue. There are a startling number of items in my house that are precisely this shade of cobalt.

The next conundrum was what to use for embellishment. I had chosen the deep frame specifically because of the possibilities of gluing weird shit on and calling it art. What weird shit, though? I loved the idea of bottlecaps, so I charged Zed with the task of bringing me home some. I found the perfect 45 record clipart on Etsy (from here)but couldn't figure out how to make my ancient and cranky Macbook resize it. So I just used the label portions covered with these awesome epoxy stickers that were made just to fit inside a bottlecap. Then I used fine black glitter glue around the edge and into the ridges. I wish I had flattened the caps first, but I didn't realize I wanted to until they were already glued to the frame. Then I liberally interspersed the bottlecaps with star-shaped and regular tiny sequins. I went back on forth on the idea of adding the flowers, but ultimately decided it seemed more finished with them. Then I hung that bitch on the wall right next to my front door. I can't stop grinning when I look at it.

Bam! Two finished! It only took me five weeks! Oy...

I did a good job working on a great project I'm excited about, though. I decided to send 28 handmade postcards in the month of February - yes, I know this is a leap year, don't judge - but instead of sending them all to one person, I went with seven friend each receiving a postcard from me that I mail every Friday this month. I put the first batch in the mail yesterday. I was too excited to mail them to take pictures, because I'm super lame. I won't count this project finished until the last seven cards reach their destinations, and I hope that the friends I chose like being a part of my year-long adventure.

That's it til next time, mes petites choux. I have a question, though. Would you rather I updated no matter the status of my various projects, or do you prefer seeing the destination rather than the journey? Also, how on EARTH did that Smilodon drag that enormous coelocanth out of the ocean's depths?

Have I mentioned how dearly I adore the man who bought these for me?

A new leaf!

So I've become obsessed with reading all these sewing blogs lately. It's ridiculous - I've starting reading like twenty a week or something! I tell myself it's because I find it inspiring, but the fact is that I'm just super nosey and I love watching other people's creative processes.

The thing is, though, that right when I hit the depths of creation for Christmas this year, I realized that I have stopped documenting my own creative process, and that somehow in my mind I started valuing my own work less. I had few moments of panic in the week before the holiday when I was convinced that my gifts were somehow unworthy, that my effort in their creation devalued them. I ended up buying more presents in an attempt to offset the paltry nature of what I had made. Can you spot the problem with this, dear reader? Can you see where my reasoning went horribly awry? I spent dozens of hours stitching love into every inch of all these different project - a fez for the Cap'n, a sewing kit and new doll clothes for HRH, a bespoke amp cover for Z - and my heart was convinced that that meant less than a $25 videogame. I didn't even bother to take pictures of these things.

New Year's rolled around, and as you probably know, making resolutions is not really in my nature. This year, though, it feels like I need to give myself a chance to treat myself and my work with the respect it is due. In that spirit, I am going to start - and try to finish, though we all know the outcome of that already - a project every week for the whole year, for a total of 52 by December 31, 2012. AND - this is important - I am going to get a picture and write a little blog post so that I can't hide whatever feeble light I have under the proverbial bushel.

I have finished the first one, and I am impatient to post it, even though the person it's intended for hasn't seen it yet. Consider this a warning, La Fabulous: if you look now, you'll ruin one of your Christmas pressies. Also, this is why your package was so damn late going in the mail.

this did not photograph as well as i'd hoped

Project numero uno accomplished, friends. I used some gorgeous yarn I'd been hoarding for a long, long time. It's a Japanese silk and wool blend, originally quite expensive, but I picked it up at the White E for well, White E prices. I only had a single skein of this deep olive color, and so my choices were limited. Scarflette it is, then. I also managed to teach myself a new crochet stitch. So there's that.

I have started my second project already - another crochet scarf because it's freaking cold over here right now, and I can crochet while nestled under all the blankets on the couch while watching the Lord of the Rings trilogy again.

I have lots of things I want to make and do and sew and embroider and so on and so forth. I have a friend who is into lomography, and who wants me to pick up the Holga I've been neglecting for three years. I want to sew a Western shirt to match my sugar skull skirt. I have ideas, and I think I've made good inroads into the motivation. You guys can help by cheering me on.

Here's a not-birth story for you

I consider myself a birth professional, even though I don't work in that capacity very often. The one and only time I went to a convention for birth pros, I was given a test to see what kind of advocate I was: woman centric, baby centric, pair centric.

Guess which one I am?

I chose to pursue alternative woman-led birthing (as opposed to directed, medical birthing) while I was pregnant with my son, my first child. It was my first child but not my first pregnancy. I terminated my first pregnancy in the summer after my first year of college. I was 18 years old.

That summer was a crazy blur of bad choices. I had met my boyfriend, a stage actor from L.A. in the last few weeks of the spring semester. He had come up to fish and discovered he had miserable seasickness. At that point I was woefully inexperienced and painfully self-conscious, enough so that I didn't really believe that this very handsome boy could be interested in me or anything I had to offer. When summer rolled around, I moved into a house with Actor BF and some friends and tried to make ends meet with a (very short) string of ridiculous jobs I wasn't interested in, and whatever money got sent from home. I drank a lot and hung out with some amazing friends who kept me fed and mostly out of trouble. No one thought to remind inexperienced, self-conscious, loudly feminist me that I needed to Take Care Of Business instead of letting Actor BF do it. I never went on birth control, and at some drunken point, our poorly-realized plan of condom usage failed. By the end of summer, I had Urgent Business to Take Care Of.

We ferried to Bellingham, and he gave me $300 before dropping me off at Sea-Tac, where I used $99 of it for a MarkAir flight back to Denver. I was numb and disbelieving the whole time. Apparently we visited the Ketchikan mall and had dinner at a pizza joint. I know that only because of the sentence fragments I jotted in my poetry journal. I made it to Denver with only a borrowed backpack full of dirty clothes and a sense of shame. My sister picked me up and drove me to her house. The next day she helped me call the clinic, and two days later she took me to Glenwood Springs and gave me juice to wash the Valium down with. Then she brought me back again, held my hand while tears poured down my face, and bought me lunch that I couldn't eat. She never said a word that wasn't support or love. She told her husband I had a bad case of the stomach flu, probably from food poisoning. She told our mom I was better off on her couch, where she could bring me soup. She let me cry and cry, and two weeks later, got me back to Denver so I could catch a flight all the way back to Alaska where I could finish what I started. I wrote a few poems about it, cried a little bit more, told Actor BF to fuck off, as he really wasn't good enough for me. And then I moved on.

I mention this all now because I read a blog post this morning on, of all things, a sewing blog. A 60-something hippie type told the author of that blog about her repeat abortions, the first of which was in 1969. The blog author came home and wrote about the harrowing experience of hearing these stories, and expressed her disbelief that the woman who told them could truly be at peace with her decisions. The author spoke of her sadness for this woman's "aborted babies." She wondered how this woman's life would have been different if she'd chosen to birth those children. She honestly believed that woman's life would have been better.

I know how my life would have been different. I could enumerate the ways, but suffice it to say that it would NOT have been for the better. I do not regret not having a baby at the precious age of 18, when obviously I could barely care for MYSELF. I don't regret not having a child with an alcoholic that I didn't love. Not only do I not regret it, I applaud it as one of the few truly sensible decisions I have made in my life. On the rare occasion that I dwell on it for even a moment, I think, "Thank GOD."

I have tried to write this not-birth story before, because I know that the stigma about abortion won't go away if we don't talk about it. I have found again and again that I was embarrassed to write it. But embarrassed about WHAT? I'm not ashamed that I made the choice I did. I'm not ashamed that I chose to go on and birth other children. I'm not ashamed to say I would have more if I weren't worried that this world can't hold them. Choosing to end that pregnancy gave me the strength to make other choices, ones that were crucial for me and my children. I'm not ashamed of that. The shame I mentioned earlier wasn't because of the abortion. The shame was because I prided myself on being too smarter than that. And I'm not ashamed to say that, either.

no regrets here, either

Another letter to a filmmaker who is screwing stuff up

Dear Zack Snyder,

I really believe that you are a fanboy. You are camped out at 9:15 on Wednesday mornings outside your local shop to pick up the week's new issues. You bag and board anything and everything in case it might be of value some day. You know as much about obscure letterers and colorists from the '60's as baseball fanatics know about the Baltimore Orioles leftfieldsmen. I'm not doubting your geek pedigree. I know you too fucking well.

You're the sniveling little shit who disparagingly asks me upon my arrival at said comic book store if I'm "looking for something in particular - a gift for a boyfriend, maybe?" You're the one who points me firmly in the direction of the Buffy comics when I say I want horror pulp (not that there is anything wrong with the Buffy comics, but they're not exactly Hack 'n' Slash, are they?) You follow me not-terribly-covertly around convention floors making comments about the fit of my Star Trek t-shirt. You are the idiot who insists on trying to rolling to seduce my very powerful, not-at-all sexy mage in a one-off D&D adventure.

Here's the thing, Snyder. I don't much care for your movie-making. I think in your eagerness to make movies that are frame for frame reenactments of the comics they come from, you lose any desire to imbue your films with honesty or weight. It's frustrating when you do that to source material like Frank Miller's 300 and downright detrimental when it's something like Alan Moore's Watchmen. I don't know what graphic novel you were reading, but the Watchmen movie you made was NOT the Watchmen comic I read. The book was filled with fully-fleshed, complex characters with realistic motivations and emotional lives. Your movie? Not so much.

And now you bring us Sucker Punch. On the surface, there is nothing about this film that I shouldn't like. It is filled with dragons and mechas and sword-wielding lovelies and Jon Hamm. But why, for the love of Firefly, must you make the female characters look like they fell face-first into a vat of Porn Spackle(tm)? And why must the entire story be predicated on the assault - implied SEXUAL assault - of a teenager? And why do you take incredibly talented actors like Carla Gugino and Jena Malone and force them to emote with their fake eyelashes? You first remove all the power and agency from Queen Gorgo and Silk Spectres I and II, forcing them into roles where the ONLY art they wield is sexual - the sword-wielding and high kicks are merely frames for their ridiculous costumes. Now you are intent on selling us a whole two hours of this disenfranchising nonsense.

NEWSFLASH: We women live in a world that is fucking FULL of disenfranchising nonsense. We don't need it spoonfed to us in the guise of empowerment. Neither do our daughters, and just as importantly, neither do our sons. I want my budding geek son to not be the guy who chases girls out of the comic book shop, either directly with his nasty attitude or indirectly by insulting their intelligence and sensibilities with his complete ignorance of what makes a tough woman tough.

Honestly, Snyder. Your take on female power makes me feel bite-ier than the JJ Abrams Star Trek reboot. That is saying something.

Yours,
stella

P.S. In case you have forgotten what sexy AND capable looks like: