Well two days late and a week behind, I’m finally back here this morning.
I had intended to write last week from the privacy of a three night retreat at the coast, but it turned out the wifi I was assured of was not, in fact, an amenity in my cabin. In the end I was relieved by the disconnect, but it did mean dropping out of this habit unintentionally and only a month in. I’m pleasantly surprised to say: I missed it. This week, it feels less like an obligation and more of a personal treat. There’s been a lot on my mind that I’d like to record here, this time around.
Last week was my thirty seventh birthday. As mentioned above, as a gift to myself I sent myself away. I booked a stay on the coast of southern WA, and drove out of town mid-week with a car packed with everything I thought I might want to reach for. Clothing that felt powerful, and comforting, and warm; foods that felt nourishing but also like a fanciful splurge; a quilt to quilt, yarn to knit; candles to burn, cards to pull; oils and lotions for winter skin; three kinds of tea, a loaf of homemade bread, honey and cream; a journal, a sketchbook, and books, books, books, and more books.
I’m neither an all-out, please-center-me-in-attention birthday celebrator nor someone who finds it a difficult “holiday,” as I recognize some do. Throughout the years I’ve used it as an excuse to have a dinner party, or do something pricier than normal, but I’ve also been comfortable mostly treating it like any other day, and politely thanking people for their well-wishes. While my own aging surprises me (as it seems it does each of us?) it does not bother nor upset me, and I feel no raging resistance to the closing chapters of my twenties, or thirties. For a long time now, the two-choice equation has seemed to me exceedingly simple: age or die. This prevents me from feeling the same disgust at aging that the world seems to insist that we feel.
However, this year, this week in mid-February also held some complicated emotional landmines, unrelated to my own birthday, and which I won’t go into. But I wanted to feel both held and removed, and focused on myself during this particular span of a few days; I wanted to pass through the dates on the calendar in a particular way, as gently and lovingly to myself as I could. And so I went away, alone, for the first time in my life. From 2/15/2023 to 2/18/2023, I chose not to share my time with anyone.
Each morning I got up before the sun, and made a cup of tea in the dark, eschewing electric light. I opened my curtains and got back into bed with my steaming mug, and I lit a candle, or three, and I watched the day ease in. I read poems. I journaled. I took sauna each day and I stood under the shower head afterward like an addict of the cold — breathing, breathing. I walked on the beach, and in the dunes. I laid down on the soft mossy loam beneath the coastal pines and I watched the trees in silence for long periods of time. I ate pink grapefruit, quartered and salted, in my steaming, sun-filled shower with the juice running down. I read and read and read. I slept. I ate. I thanked my objects out loud, by name, for their generous service: my teapot, my mug, my coat, my slippers, my hot water plumbing.
It was an experience meaningful in ways that can’t be put into words. But I will take a moment here to encourage you, if you have never taken time away from the obligations of your life alone — especially if you are a woman, a wife, a mother, a person upon whom the obligations of others’ care consistently rests — go. Go away. Even for one night. Turn your cellphone off. Ask no one what they would like to do, or what they need. And give yourself, even if only for 24 hours, anything you want, whenever you want it. Be a deeply considerate, kind, gentle, loving, attentive, devoted, and loyal best friend, caretaker, or romantic partner — to yourself.
From Maxine Kumin’s Always Beginning: “And I suppose a tribute to friendship is a good way to close out this month’s entries, a tribute to enduring relationships in general, to the loyalty that underlies them. Going on, is, after all, the ultimate pleasure of our lives.”
And with that, we now return to the portion of the record relevant to life’s fiber arts department. For on my way home that Saturday I stopped in a well-loved quirky Oregon coastal town and after failing to find a café within which to sit and read, I wandered into an antique mall. I had no real agenda but am always on the lookout for old quilts to ogle, or good Irish knitwear to inspect. Instead, I found an entire booth packed to the brim with vintage fabrics.
I spent a full ninety minutes in that booth.
I pulled out and assessed nearly every individual fabric you see in this photo. The pile of my considerations is there in the front, stacked haphazardly on a stool in a leaning tower. The cuts are all different lengths, and listed in atypical measurements; “7 feet!” boasted several, including that red gingham at the top of my stack. So then the mental tabulation: what is 7 feet in yards, and what does that make the price-per-yard? Another squirrelly thing about vintage or secondhand textiles is that you can’t be certain about the fiber content, and I am very particular. Luckily, I am also confident that I have a better-than-average hand for assessing this, as I imagine most textile people do; still, you can’t be entirely sure.
In the end I only took home six (only! six!) cuts, but I harbor regrets about some things I left behind. Prices were significantly cheaper than new fabric (by rough calculations, about half) but that doesn’t change the fact that prices in general are currently so high, and wages so low. In combination with this three night retreat I didn’t really have the money for (but so desperately needed), and the fact that I have, truly, an ungodly fabric stash already, getting out of there at $45 had a guilty little sting to it. That said, I am very satisfied with my choices.
The six things I couldn’t leave without boiled down to:
Two cuts in pale purple, for a quilt idea I’ve just started. One is a pale lilac brushed flannel, and perfect — the other is a brighter, more saturated hue, but a straightforward quilting cotton and if nothing else will be just right for the back of said piece. You can see them both at the very bottom of that stack on the stool, above.
Another straightforward quilting cotton in what a loved one of mine comically refers to as “hospital green”
A thin, relatively sheer pale blue lawn printed with large scale pink and white florals; not colors I gravitate towards at all, generally, but so nostalgic and sweet I couldn’t leave it behind
That red gingham, which was the real roll of the dice. The shade of vermillion is absolutely perfect; a hard color to find, and a color with which I am wholly infatuated. But it was the priciest of the bunch, at $14 for the cut, and I did not feel confident about the fiber content. It was absolutely stiff, and unpleasant to the touch. But I pulled a few fibers from the cut edge and snapped them (had I had a lighter in my pocket I would’ve done a burn test right in the store) and I felt confident the threads were not poly. I decided I had a lot of hope about how it would wash up; it had obviously never seen hot water, and likely been folded this way covered in its original sizing for decades, so I took the risk. I’m pleased to report I am still confident that it is entirely a natural fiber, and it has softened considerably, though what exactly it is I may never know. It passes the burn test quite pleasurably.
And finally, my absolute favorite find; a two+ yard cut of a sheer, drape-y, highlighter-yellow, large-scale floral print made up of peach and buttery roses and spring green leaves. This almost certainly has some poly content, or is maybe entirely so. But it’s so uglybeautiful and so loud and so just right in its weirdness, that I am madly in love with it anyway.
One less-than-pleasant reality of these last two weeks is that I have barely seen the inside of my studio. Between last week’s trip away and this week’s record-setting snowstorm, February is sliding out from under me without much access to my workspace. I feel itchy about it; my ideas overrun me and I have a real drive now for some long working hours. I need to get a commission finally sewn together and off the design wall so that the two current “burning desire” pieces can finally take over, and I have some decisions to make about processes. Hopefully next week, some photos of actual sewing.
If you’ve made it this far, I applaud your endurance. There is a final thing that for posterity/archive I wish to record for myself before the month changes over, and so I’ll sign off with this list of current interests and obsessions: topics I intend to mull over and work through in the coming season. Thanks for reading. I hope you are feeling the the approaching gateway into Spring in your bones, the way I am.
Colors
Vermillion (eternally); approaching 2 years of obsession with unwavering interest. Three current ideas featuring vermillion; the twins, plus the erasure piece. The combination of vermillion and pink (nearly all tones and varieties).
Acid yellow. Not warm, not natural feeling. Searing, in between yellow and green; neon, electric, aggressive and unforgiving. Not played with nicely. Ambiguous and difficult to describe.
Pale, dirty lilac. Not of the bright, candied variety but of a warm grey/pink undertone, muddy. Pale. (Though the bright stuff may have its hooks in me too; considering knitting a mohair sweater in this color.)
Soft, dirty blue green. Between pale teal and sage, a soft cold green, a lamb’s ear color.
Obviously the combinations of these. The acid yellow and lilac combination has been muscling other projects out of the way to get to the fore but the recent realization of the lilac and vermillion combination possibilities is also percolating; deep navy as the binding agent.
Recognition of the in-between-ness. The defiance of categorization. Visual confusion, or uncertainty. People see vermillion as orange, not red; acid yellow they call “green”. The blue/green, when at its best, defies either category. The color lilac I love most is often misclassified as pink.
Blocks / design interests
Continuation of log cabin variations (all pieces of the family of grief work)
One-patch and nine-patch variations
Needle-turn appliqué
An burgeoning interest in a medallion quilt
Ohio or sawtooth star variation (as a gift idea; bluegreen)