So the quilting’.
I believe last week, I was talking to my friend Mary, who also took the class, and said ‘What is the big deal. You’re sewing strips of material together, right? PSSST! No big wup!’
If my life were a movie, the audience would then immediately know those words would come back to haunt me. Usually at that point, the scene would cut to myself entering the quilting shop, with a cocksure step and sarcastic remarks’ to meet my quilting doom. In reality, there have been several weeks since I uttered that phrase, in between then I have taken hundreds of idiotic phone calls, ran a beta test of a major software release, took several showers, ignored my laundry and was forced to wear a thong, and cooked a turkey, so was not really paying attention to the impending irony that would be my quilting doom.
I think I know why you always see old ladies doing the quilting’. Because it takes seventy or so years to be able to do it well.
The first thing I had to do was find my sewing machine, which was stuffed into Computer Room #1 with the rest of my personal affects (which were booted from MY writing studio when Esteban needed a larger home office A YEAR AND A HALF AGO’ ahem). I found it and the cord, which was a pleasant bonus and would have sucked if I would have forgotten. Apparently, it is made out of lead or possibly whatever they make boat anchors from because it kicked my ass trying to carry it out to the car.
Then off to the quilting shop, where I lugged my boat anchor UP SEVERAL FLIGHTS OF STAIRS and into the class room. Our class consisted of three students, myself, my amiga Mary, and a lady named Lori with overly processed blonde hair. Our teacher was the proprietor of the quilt shop.
The first thing she taught us: the circle cutting thing is a weapon. You see, quilters have a special kind of scissors’ kind of a round razor blade on a wheel. I know. Quilters are some bad ass chicks, I’m telling you. I had no idea. She spent the next half an hour detailing us all the ways in which we could slice off various parts of our bodies with the radial scissors, which I like to refer to as the Circle of Death. Then she taught us how to use the Circle of Death correctly, detailing more possible ways we could possibly perform emergency surgery or face lifts and the like.
I have to brag a bit here. Apparently, I have a talent for rotary cutting that I never before appreciated. Maybe I’m destined to use it as a tool of destruction. Maybe I’m the rotary cutter Buffy the Vampire Slayer. For every generation, a Circle of Death Wielder is called.
THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE!!!
Whatever. Anyway, I was freaking awesome with the Circle of Death. It was no time at all before I had cut nine strips of 3 inch fabric. The quilting lady declared ‘Perfect!’ and I have to admit that I gloated just a little bit.
Ok, who am I kidding? I gloated A LOT! I snickered at Mary when the quilting lady reprimanded her for leaving her Circle of Death unshielded. I wore a sanctimonious look when Lori couldn’t fully cut her strips. After I sewed my first seam and the quilting lady declared ‘Beautiful’, I smiled. This was going to be a breeze.
Then my thread got all knotty. Then the quilting lady sat down at my machine and basically changed every single setting on the machine. She even tightened a screw on little silver metal things. By that time, Mary and Bottle Blonde were already ironing their seams. Then my bobbin ran out of thread. By the time I had wound my bobbin with more thread, she was showing the other two girls how to do the next step.
Finally, I finished my big long strips and she had to show me how to press the seams. Apparently, I have no idea how to use an iron correctly. This had to be shown to me no less than forty two times. I was wiggling the iron and that is a big no no as one might stretch the fabric. A bead of sweat formed upon my dainty brow. My deodorant stopped working. A spontaneous black hair popped out of my chin, along with a lovely fever blister on my lip. I suddenly began to talk in colloquialisms and used double negatives and the word ‘ain’t’. I slurped my soup and wore white after Labor Day. I belched and farted in church.
I suddenly became the problem student.
My seams weren’t straight. My seam allowances were imperceptibly too big or two small. She made me do three of them over. She made me go back and press things. My material suddenly didn’t look as cool as it had the day before, certainly not as attractive as Mary’s or even Bottle Blondes. The Quilt Nazi then developed a cough only when she was helping me, forcing her to leave the little classroom while I waited for her to return and criticize me, while Mary and Bottle Blonde worked happily further and further ahead of me.
Truthfully, I’m not used to being the problem student. I have a big ego. I fully understand this. Plus, in 8th grade, I got an A in Home Economics: Textiles (which was Republican for Sewing). I made my little brother a Lion King costume one Halloween and still had the tenacity to make myself a Sarabi costume to go with it. Sure, I might have been a poor student in high school, but it was because I was bored and not trying and was absent 45 days of my senior year, NOT because I was an inept tool!
Mary finished the first night’s work first. She clapped. She wanted to go back tonight to finish the rest. Everyone stood back from her tastefully coordinated table runner-in-progress and oohed and ahhed. Bottle Blonde finished next. Hers was similiarly lovely’ very straight and precise. I finalized my stuff five minutes after class ended, at 9:33 pm, long after everyone had packed up. No one ahhed. My seams looked like Lombard Street in San Francisco, or possibly a quilt designed by Dr. Suess.
And we get to do it again next week.
Oh. Boy.
Speaking of Dr. Suess, I had a meeting today and one of the women in it was apparently having a bad hair day. There was a chunk of her hair sticking straight up in the air, defying gravity. She looked like a freaking Who in Whoville with that thing. And I’m boggled, because I don’t know how you could unintentionally end up with hair that went against Newton’s laws of physics? I mean’. Usually there’s INTENT when your hair does that. You need some sort of chemical assistance. That doesn’t just happen on its own.
I’m just saying.
True love exists on Diaryland…. congratulations to Mr Bitterness and Ganache who recently became engaged. They have the most incredibly beautiful and warm fuzzy engagement pictures that you can visit here. They simply look like the embodiment of a couple in love, don’t they? Congratulations guys!
