Lovelihood

A million years ago, pregnant with The Boy and not really having had much association with kids since the time when I was one, I conferred with all the checklists and newborn preparedness lessons and movies featuring seemingly-happy babes and came to the conclusion that we would need onesies. Lots and lots of onesies.

And for the first two or three months, that's all he wore. Oneseis and the iconic footed jammies. Then, personality started kicking in, revealing him to be stubborn and proud and prone to maniacal fits of the giggles. And, excited at the little man he was becoming, we started dressing him like one, which, in our interpretation, looked (and still looks) a lot like a frat boy. We've given him over to the layered look, stocking his dresser with t-shirts from our favorite establishments and indie radio stations, to be worn over a small collection of thermal shirts and lightweight hoodies, even when this Texan spring might suggest that a plain old tank top might be more fitting. For bottoms, he sports denims generally way cooler than anything his dad or I have ever worn. With pockets in absurd arrays and numbers. In short, he's a cool little dude.

So, when compiling the wardrobe for the not-yet-born-Girlie, we played it cautious, wary not to give in to too many items that might contradict her personality later on. There were, of course, the hand-me-downs and some irresistible little shifts in pink concentric circles. And the sewing machine made its own contributions of booties and bloomers and a couple of entirely-too-cute-for-everyday-wear dresses. And sure enough, nine months into her baby-life, that stuff has mostly given way to miniature versions of the clothes our tween-aged neighbor girls wear.

So, with good reason, I had thought that the bloomer-making days were past. And yet that's what I've been spending the last week's worth of sewing time doing. Maybe it's that it just prolongs her babyness, a period that seems to be flying by entirely too quickly this time around. It seems to be a daily occurrence that The Girlie makes some face or pulls herself up in some new way or gurgles out some new consonant that compels me to remark to Mr. New Media that I can't believe how big she's getting. Yes. It appears I've reached THAT stage of parenthood. But bloomers. Bloomers will keep her a baby longer. 

And the best part about these bloomers (from this book), aside from their youth-preserving qualities? As with anything else you can sew for a baby, the amount of material necessary is small enough that it can be extracted from just about anything. Like beloved t-shirts, too ratty to function any longer as adult attire.

There are people out there, very talented sewists and purveyors of tutorials, who make the baseless assertion that jersey is deceptively easy to work with. Emphasis on the deception. I've used the elastic stitch function on my machine and varying iterations of the zig zag stitch, and combinations of the two, each time hoping something will click that will make that statement true. I'm not sure what it is, exactly, that the elastic stitch function does. So far as I can tell, its M.O. involves increasing the slowness and decibel level of the machine operation. But I've come to the conclusion that those jersey advocates out there are all either secretly working on sergers or are seriously delusional. Or perhaps both.

But, the draw of the t-shirt is strong. And, as I've come to learn, there is no sewing imperfection so heinous as to be un-concealable by judicious applications of elastic. Elastic being The Great Equalizer. Made from an old t-shirt that had seen heavy rotation through my high school years, and then banished to the sleepwear drawer once the holes started developing, these bloomers have become a favorite once again with a few short lengths of elastic. And they'll keep the prom dresses and dress slacks at bay for just a while longer.

Here's an embarrassing fact about Mr. New Media: In his dream home he will have carved out a sizable nook just for pillows. A pit, if you will. This space would be floofy and cushy and, I imagine, I Dream of Jeannie-like. He imagines possibly falling back into it, perhaps from a second floor landing. Maybe he lazes in it, sipping red wine. Maybe he browses the internet, enveloped in velvets and damasks and silk brocades. Maybe he takes in a football game on his appropriately man-sized flatscreen. I don't know. I do not share this dream. But nothing gratifies quite as instantly as a simple pillow project. And really, when your completed product is as soft and yielding as something to populate a pit of pillows, there's also very little that's as forgiving. 

For a good stretch there I followed the self-instigated tradition of crafting up a pillow as part of every gifting event for Mr. New Media. Birthdays, anniversaries, father's day, etc. Most were sewn, some with a simple envelope closure, others outfitted with zippers. At least one was knitted in an atrocious display of color theory. Some required new fabric, chosen off bolts or salvaged from the remnant bin, or worked from a napkin picked up on clearance. There's the one cut from a favorite t-shirt and fringed in bobbly orange. There's the one that sits as homage to Mondrian. One was made from velvety scraps left over from our re-creation of a favorite book. Two are giant felt carrots. One is just plain giant.

We have yet to find that dream home, the one with the pillow-lounging corner. Hell, we're not even in our dream-state. Home ownership and serious commitment to decorating will have to wait. Right now, it's really just a pillow hole, spilling out of the tent my mom made The Boy for his second birthday. Still, I'm about to stitch the first seems of a dress, a huge, daunting project, and am in serious need of some quick-return craftyness to build up my energy and self-steem. 

So, pillows. In starting the dress project, I had cut out pieces to construct a muslin, a most unthinkable act. My bright idea was to use the scraplets from to piece them together in a jagged, strippy fashion to make a pillow front, and then back it with flannel left over from the throw I made at Christmas. Easy enough, but the resulting panel evoked mummies and wrapped bandages. And, as Mr. New Media pointed out, we're a family prone to laying down stains wherever we sit, with sticky chocolate and ripe-strawberry remains grinding into everything. The fine art of napkin usage, despite constant gentle reminders, has not quite stuck with the three-year-old. And the muslin panel, as it was, was just too blank a canvas. A little embellishment was in order, so a second unthinkable act was initiated. I did some appliqué work. In the shape of Texas. Which really accounts for a third unthinkable act. But as they say… When in Rome, adorn your home goods with the likeness of your nation-state. I set a zipper in and called it good.

I've been in a state of mind the past few weeks where I've been very down on this state. There are, of course, many stereotypes about Texans. You know, the whole gun-totin', hickish, loud-mouthedly conservative bit. Lately, it feels like certain citizens of this state have gone out of their way to validate these stereotypes. But there was something rather therapeutic about making this pillow. Maybe it was all the pinning and needling the shape took, like a Texas voodoo doll exorcising its likeness' demons. Maybe it's just that it's fun and cuddly.

In the background, there, is the first piece we took in to commemorate our then-new Texas-ness. Our own deer bust in cardboard and decorative paper. I tasked Mr. New Media with this project once we were settled in this house. He predictably objected to the paper I had picked out. Too girly, of course. But what could be a better antithesis to your archetypical taxidermized trophy than patterns you might decorate a girl's baby shower with? Another Texas corner funned and cuddlied up.

Come every September, as the weight of summer heat, something I'm just not cut out for, makes way for that first chill, that slightest sliver of an inclination to slide my toes and children under a cozy blanket and settle in for the cooler months ahead, I start thinking quilts. I pull up images pilfered from websites and books and magazines, and sort through my stash, and browse all the pretty cottons online and wound in bolts at the store. And I plan and plan and plan. And then, nerve worked up to finally cut through some fabric, I realize that I need to put the whole thing aside to get to more pressing, seasonal matters.

And so it's gone the past few years. First it was The Boy's quilt. It was my first, a pattern from Denyse Schmidt's book, the one that allowed me to believe I could actually pull off such a thing. He was a baby, then. I'd been poring over the book for a few months, not ready to take the plunge into actual making, until I found him one December morning, foot leveraged against the rail to his crib, ready to launch himself out of bed. That night, we converted the crib, with a few turns of an allen wrench, to a toddler bed. And I decided that a toddler with a new (sort of) bed deserved new toddler bedding. I attended to the quilt in the evenings, after work and dinner and Boy putting-down. Worked in one-hour increments, that impossibly small crib quilt took three months. It, with Elvis Presleyan accents and blue-green floral notes, still accompanies his sleep, though it's entirely too small, now, for both his full-sized bed and his sleep-squirmy body.

The materials for quilt #2, a large one for our queen-sized bed, were freshly purchased when I found out I was pregnant. I, atingle with nervous excitement at this new development, stashed the bags of fabrics into a closet until such a time as my unstable nerves were steadied enough to wield something so sharp as a rotary cutter. In the meantime, I kneaded biscotti dough and hand-rolled truffles and brewed up liqueurs I wouldn't be able to drink (I may have taken a couple of sips here or there — you know, for testing purposes), and bundled them up for their holiday recipients. Once past all the gift-making, I took a moment to consider the direction of my next projects, whether they should be baby-related or not. I opted to spend the next few months working on a fairly simple quilt for us, because The Boy looked so content under his, and I wanted my own, dammit. I went without a pattern on this one, going with a simple staggered brick construction in solids of blues with columns of blue/green/brown prints thrown in for interest. I happened across the Democrat print next to a similarly spent bolt of Republican fabric at the store and knew it would have a happy home on my bed. If there had been a crazy-Liberal fabric, I would have stitched that in instead. The back, with its center stripe of orangey flowers dividing two cephalopodic panels, is an effective marker, like that tug-of-war flag, in our nightly battles for bedding supremacy.

The Girlie was born in July, with a full Houston summer's worth of bone-melting heat and humidity to survive before any kind of blanketing could even be considered. In a third-trimester scramble, I had made up a stack of light receiving cloths and even lighter provisions for the double-swaddling that would enable us all some sleep. These were no more complex than a layer of stretchy cloth edged with bias binding. A quilt would have to wait until such a time that being buried under a crib-sized hill of cloth and batting would not send me into sweat-gland overload. I emerged from a summertime spent cordoned in air-conditioned spaces in relative un-craftiness (there was a newborn to attend to, after all), consumed by two urges. The first, a strong desire to throw myself into a wordy, webby self-indulgence. The second, an absolute need to piece together this quilt. Mine (well, The Girlie's) is not so faithful to the whole polka dotty theme as its author's. But I knew we had something good going when The Girlie gave me her first chortles while eying the unfinished quilt-top hanging across the room.

This quilt is a product of flannels from The Boy's old receiving blankets and cotton prints from my stash, left over from the previous two quilts and other little projects for our little family. Things like baby booties and Easter baskets and blankets and little kimonos and pillows. The backing is a heart-y kaleidoscope, printed up at Spoonflower, swatched and color-corrected until it repeated and read just right. Hand quilting has a permanent residence on my ever-increasing list of things that I'm slow at, somewhere in the midst of running and writing and mentally reckoning for daylight savings. But after a happy month spent with legs cozied up under the quilt, thumb thimbled and rocking away, I was then faced with the task of binding. And, quite possibly, there is nothing I'm slower at than that, measuring my progress in tedious little inches. But it's finally done, all colorful and cheerful and full of bits and pieces of our family. And, yes, warm.