Jenyfer Matthews

I saw a link to one of these videos on The Rejectionist and subsequently found a couple more. I like Curious George the best.

This is what I’m really thinking when I’m reading these stories – but I believed I was the only one who thought this way!

Happy Mother’s Day

I am finally turning my attention to the commission quilt I accepted back in November. It’s a queen sized quilt and I wasn’t super enthusiastic about taking on such a big project at the time – I even tried to put them off by saying I had other projects I was working on and that it would take me at least six months to finish. They didn’t mind. How was I supposed to know that I was going to move to a new house and take a medical trip to the US in the meantime? It really is creeping up on six months now and I’m not finished.

I did set a personal record and got the entire quilt pieced, pressed, and the layers basted in two days last week – just before my weekend in bus hell away.

I switched the quilt on my own bed this week and it happened to be another quilt that I made at a time of many life disruptions back in 2006. I took an online class and my plan was to finish this quilt before summer vacation. Little did I know that my husband was going to get a new job and that I’d be organizing an international move before that summer too. I ended up finishing the quilt top and packing it up in my suitcase along with the very colorful pieced backing I’d constructed to go with it. My plan was to lay it out in my mother’s living room and get it basted and ready to quilt when we got to our new home in Egypt.

While I was in the US, I started to worry about the colorful backing – the front was fairly light colored and I didn’t want the colors from the backing to bleed. So I decided to wash the backing with a color fixer called Retayne. Mistake! The colors might have been permanent after the wash, but the seams frayed so badly I would have had to cut it the pieces apart and reconstruct the backing. I decided to just buy some other fabric for the back instead.

If that wasn’t bad enough, I took the quilt top out of my suitcase to start basting the layers together and discovered that the sewing machine oil that I’d tossed in my suitcase (in a baggie) at the last minute had leaked onto the quilt top!! Having learned my lesson about washing things from the having ruined the original backing, I treated the oil spots with dish soap and spot cleaned it the best I could – and kept my fingers crossed the rest would come out when I could eventually wash it.

Once we finally made it to Egypt, it was quite a while before I had the time or the energy to do any hand quilting in the evenings, though the quilt was finally more or less ready to go. I hadn’t been working on it for very long when I stood up after a couple hours of quilting and ruptured a disk. After all the heavy lifting and hard work I’d been doing all summer long, it was sitting on the couch in one position too long that did me in.

I was in bed for about six months with my back injury but I did eventually get back to the quilt. I stitched in the ditch around every single piece with variegated rainbow colored thread. I made my own template to fill in the “blank” areas. I scribbled all over it as I tried one pattern and changed my mind in favor of another motif before I sent an SOS to another quilt friend for advice. She gave me a great idea and I was finally able put the last stitches in it. I can usually finish a large quilt in a couple of months, hand quilting. What with delays and injuries, this quilt took me closer to two years!

It was the singular most troublesome quilt I ever made for myself, but it’s so pretty I think it’s almost worth all that trouble.

(click image to enlarge)

I change my quilts for the seasons and this one is early summer.

I actually like the plain backing a lot – really shows off the rainbow stitching!

I’m hoping that the commission quilt won’t be quite so much trouble as this one was to finish. At least I’ve learned my lesson about sitting for too long at a stretch!

Or maybe that should read “Orchid Obit”.

The last of the orchid babies died this week. I prefer to attribute their demise to the poor quality of the Cairo tap water than to any sort of negligence on my part. Yeah, that’s it. It was the water… It’s certainly been known to make me sick!

I know I complained an awful lot about my weekend away. In fact, though it was a long ride, the trip would have been nice if I could have contented myself with either the mountain climb (sans migraine) OR the beach. The main source of my dissatisfaction is that I wanted to do both and only really had time for one. Oh well.

There was a bright spot though – I had a lot of time to read while sitting on the bus. I brought along my e-reader so I could finish up a book I was in the middle of, and also so I could read in bed without disturbing my son. But I also brought along a paperback: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith.

(Just an aside: if she had written that book with today’s attitude toward flashy pen names, do you think she’d have stuck with Betty Smith? Or gone for something like Beatrice Smythe-Whitmore?)

I got this book out of a pile of freebies a neighbor in my old building left in the stairwell – it was a familiar title and the blurb looked interesting. It’s been sitting on my nightstand for ages though. I normally only have time to read at night, and by then I only have so much mental energy left for reading books that require a bit more attention. So I’ve looked at this one every time I’m between books and have then chosen another one.

I decided that with so much time to read on the bus, it was the perfect time to turn my attention to A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Though it starts out slowly enough, it didn’t take long to hook me. A good character will always suck me in, and this book is nothing if not full of good, rich characters.

It’s the story of Francie and her family, and her life growing up in terrible poverty in Brooklyn before World War I. Her father was charming and a talented singer but an alcoholic, her mother worked as a maid to hold their family together. Francie and her brother Neely started working when they were little children, collecting scraps and selling it for pennies to contribute to the family’s income. Often they subsist on coffee and the variety of meals their mother created from stale bread and little else. Ultimately, it’s the story of survival and persistence and growing up and bettering yourself, in spite of the many obstacles put before you.

There’s a tree that grows in Brooklyn. Some people call it the Tree of Heaven. No matter where its seed falls, it makes a tree which struggles to reach the sky. It grows in boarded-up lots and out of neglected rubbish heaps. It grows up out of cellar gratings. It is the only tree that grows out of cement. It grows lushly . . .survives without sun, water, and seemingly without earth. It would be considered beautiful except that there are too many of it.

This quote from the book is a metaphor for Francie – and for all the poor people in the city.

Apparently, the book is nearly autobiographical as Betty Smith grew up in the area of Brooklyn she wrote about and many of the characters are based on people she knew growing up. Perhaps that’s why it felt so alive – a best seller in its time and written in clear, no-nonsense prose, it reads as well today as it did when it was published in 1943. Almost makes me long for another long bus trip so I can take in another classic.

Or maybe I’ll just skip the bus and make time to read in the daytime instead!