This picture of me was taken at Market a couple years ago in one of the hundreds of gorgeous booths at the show. Those pom-poms were edible! Just kidding.
International Fall Quilt Market is next week!
Fall Quilt Market is the biggest trade show of the year for the 4 billion-dollar-a-year quilt industry I accidentally started working in five-and-a-half years ago. It’s a Quilts, Inc. production and it is intense. Here’s what people do at Quilt Market:
– Wear their Sunday best
– Write business
– Take meetings
– Schmooze
– Booze (Not at the level of a pharmaceutical sales rep convention, but there’s a little drankin’ and aren’t you surprised? Mm? Quilters drink liquor? Scandal?)
– Go to dinner
– Make deals
– Take names
– Chew bubblegum
– Break hearts
So really it’s just another day in the life of a quilter who took her/his hobby to the Next Level. Hey, speaking of Next Level, this Quilt Market is a big one for me. Maybe the biggest one yet. For years — years! — I’ve been circling a dream project and for months — months! — I’ve known that the dream project would launch next week but I’ve been sworn to secrecy. At this point, the pain of withholding the thing is almost physical.
Do you want to know what the big project is? Do you? Are you ready to freak out? Are you ready for totally amazing, fully incredible, head-slappingly gorgeous images to flood your cerebral cortex? It will all happen so soon! I’m the world’s worst secret-keeper; if I wasn’t in fear of mucking up the whole thing for me and the brilliant company I’m working with, I’d just out with it.
But maybe I could tell you something else. Maybe I could let a different cat out of the bag. Maybe I could finally tell you the other secret I’ve got. Yeah, that’s what I’ll do. Here goes: I’m pregnant. No, no, no. That’s not it. I’m not pregnant. Let’s see, what was it… Oh, right:
Chilean students return to school, 2011. Photo: Wikipedia
You can wear white clothes to work tomorrow. You can wear them this weekend. White pants, white jacket. White shoes. White shoes are hard to pull off, but bless your heart if you can and if you can, go for it. The idea that a person can’t wear white after Labor Day is a myth. It must be squished.
Labor Day was several weeks ago, but this comes up because I overheard a woman at the airport talking to her husband about the no-white rule. “I couldn’t believe it,” the woman said, selecting a french fry from a McDonald’s bag and popping it in her mouth. “Barb was wearing white after Labor Day.” The lady was dressed in a sweatsuit with be-pom-pommed Uggs on her feet.
The notion that it’s gauche to white after Labor Day is about 100 years old and was kind of a trick played on people by a bunch of mean girls who didn’t have to work for a living like the rest of us for heaven’s sake. Rich folk in American cities around the turn of the 20th century had things like sideboards and china; their children were given dolls and Turkish delight for Christmas; they also decided to turn “summer” into a verb. Summering meant leaving the city for the country for the hottest months of the year. August was dismal enough without having to direct the carriage through all those sweaty proletariats, after all — and those stinky factories! Best to go to Lake Geneva or the Hamptons and wait till the steaming, teeming masses cooled off.
White clothes made from lightweight material do feel cooler than clothes made from other colors. The lady in a white linen dress seems quite at home at a picnic table in June; the lady in brown crepe is clearly trying to ruin everyone’s fun. But the choice of white clothing in the time period I’ve just described was not just for the purposes of body temperature; it was a status symbol. Could you afford to summer? Could you afford an entire new wardrobe for three months out of the year every year? No? Gosh, that’s too bad, Julia. I’m sure I have a dress from last year you could — oh, actually, no: I dropped a lamb chop with mint jelly on it during the Sumnter’s garden party last July and Hilde had to throw it out. How is your mother?
Labor Day became a national holiday in 1894 and it made sense to the mean girls to use the day as the cut off date for white. Anyone who wore white after Labor Day clearly wasn’t cool enough to know the rules, so they could snicker and stuff because there are rules, dummy. In the 1950s, the whole Jackie O., Dior silhouette, let’s be ladies thing perpetuated this old rule and so all of us still think it’s a thing. But it’s really not. I get upset about it because it doesn’t make sense and I love wearing white. The colors I look best in are white and black (but never together.) To cut white out of my wardrobe for the majority of the year is silly. So this is personal, you see, this archaic notion.
Tomorrow’s challenge: white pants to the office. Do it. Come on! I will if you will. Have I mentioned I work at home?
I’ve been traveling so much lately — home in DC this evening after a full week in Chicago — chances are good there are new readers to PaperGirl. I encourage people I meet at events or classes to visit and read this blog, but I still see fear in their hearts when I tell them PaperGirl isn’t about one thing but “just sort of about my life.” A gluten-free baking tutorial blog is an easier sell but what can I do? Surely some people were curious enough to visit and it seems like a good opportunity to take a moment and explain the monkey. I haven’t posted a picture of or given an update on Pendennis in some time; let’s get everyone caught up.
Some adults have an ironic connection to a childhood toy or a juvenile object and it can be cute or it can be weird. Either way, these peoples’ friends are actually happy when there’s a “thing” because it makes that person really easy to shop for. “I have no idea what to get Nancy for Christmas” is not a sentence Nancy’s friends will ever have to say because Nancy likes deer.
I don’t have a “thing” for sock monkeys; I have a thing for my sock monkey. His name is Pendennis and no, I do not sleep with him or cry hot, hot tears into his soft body. He does not come on trips with me. I haven’t had him since I was three and I do not suck on his tail. My high school art teacher made him for me when I was her teacher’s aide and Pendennis has simply been with me ever since, not because I need a stuffed animal to cope with life* but because I love him. My love is akin to the love I have for a special painting or a treasured photograph, except that I can cry hot, hot tears into his soft body. I love the monkey like I love my favorite sweater or my favorite snack. He is a comfort and we all need more of that. He went to New York. He came to DC. He’s my little guy.
But fondness springs eternal for Pendennis not just because he’s familiar: Pendennis is hilarious. I laugh out loud when I see him poking out from under a chair or twisted up like a pretzel under a pillow (see above.) I’ve been Pendennis’s personal photographer for years because I have to try and capture the joy he brings to me when I discover him in his natural habitat. This way, when I’m old and Pendennis has been chewed up by a cat, I can look at the pictures on my hologram phone and feel happy again. What’s crucial for readers to know is that I never, ever pose Pendennis. When I take a picture of him, you can be sure I am shooting what I discovered, not anything I created. The monkey needs no stylist, no art director; I simply point and shoot.
That’s the scoop on the PaperGirl mascot. And I’m glad you’re here.
Blizzard in a cup, not to be confused for “gizzard in a cup,” only in participating stores.
On the way to give my lecture to the stately and gifted women of the Northern Lake Co. Quilt Guild on Wednesday night, my dear friend Heather and I stopped for a dinner of sorts at the Something Oasis on I-94. There were strangely no French bistros at the Oasis or one-star Michelin restaurants, so I ate a McDonald’s hamburger for the first time in lots of years — pretty good! — and Heather got a slice of Sbarro’s pizza. We were walking out when Heather gasped. I jumped a foot. I thought she had seen a spider on me.
“Cotton Candy Blizzard?!” she said, looking at a banner next to the DQ on our right. Indeed, Dairy Queen was advertising a Cotton Candy Blizzard. Heather was a sitting duck. “I’m getting that,” she said, and promptly ordered a mini. The guy handed her a cup of ballet slipper-colored ice cream with multi-colored sprinkles. I had a bite and couldn’t believe how much it tasted like actual cotton candy. A remarkable achievement, Dairy Queen. I could see how it would be easy to eat a large quantity of this food.
When I got home I researched the Cotton Candy Blizzard so I could write about it from an expert’s point of view. It turns out the DQ Cotton Candy Blizzard is a Thing. A Major Thing. The flavor debuted years ago but was only an experiment, a limited-time offering. The public went nuts for it and, in a brilliant marketing move (I imagine) DQ snatched the thing away and made people visit their restaurants again and again in hopes of seeing the flavor on the menu again. Well, this year they did a “Fanniversary” celebration and asked their customers what favorite flavor they’d like to bring back. Cotton Candy won by a landslide.
The flavor is available for a limited time, so get out there and get’cher self one. Note that the medium-sized Cotton Candy Blizzard contains 890 calories. Enjoy!
1. Never enough candy punkins
2. People hang enormous fuzzy spiders all over their front porches
3. People hang enormous rubber zombies all over their front porches
4. People hang enormous gauzy ghosts all over their front porches
5. People hang out in enormously inappropriate costumes on their front porches
6. Pumpkin spice liquor (See No. 5)
7. Orange and black are gross colors together
8. Plastic Things
9. Fake blood, real blood, blood mix
10. Not all children who trick o’ treat come prepared with a joke or trick
11. If you dress up to go to a party, you have to try to drink a cocktail without the use of your hands or mouth or both, as they are covered, wrapped up, hidden deep in a plastic lobster claw (see image), or coated with oil-based paint, usually green.
12. Everlasting Gobstoppers
13. Itchy
14. Snow possible
15. Deep brooding on entropy and decay as the faces of jack-o-lanterns begin to rot and cave in on themselves
All the pumpkins go first. Then the regular candy corn. Then the chocolate-topped ones. Photo: Wikipedia
Sometimes I sit down to clack out the ol’ PG and the post writes itself. Other times it takes forever to put things together in a non-awful way and I fail at that all the time. I enjoy writing every time, but on nights like tonight, when I’m sleepy but still committed, I hope for a post that is simple to put together, one that doesn’t demand much research or intricate weaving of information.
It’s not going to happen tonight because I have hit a goldmine of information about my all-time favorite candy: the mellowcreme pumpkin.
Yes, the mellowcreme pumpkin; that Agent Orange mellowcreme pumpkin with the Wicked Witch stem. Woe betide the man or woman with a cavity, for that chubby candy will cause you to wince and realize you really need to get that looked at before you reach for another and just chew on the other side.
I didn’t need any other information about candy punkins to enjoy them but now that I read the Wikipedia entry on them, I love them more than ever. Apparently, the pumpkins are considered “candy corn’s first cousin,” which is adorable. Then, I learn that the pumpkins are made of “corn syrup, food coloring, honey, and sugar…beaten and heated in large kettles to produce an ultra-sweet syrup. This syrupy mix generically is called “mellowcreme” by confectioners, since the resulting candy has a mellow, creamy texture” and I thought the “mellow” was a play on “mallow,” like “marshmallow!” No. Then one of my favorite words in the English language was engaged in the description of the next step: “the mellowcreme slurry then was divided into two uneven amounts, with the large amount receiving orange food coloring and the smaller receiving green food coloring.”
Slurry!
I realize that was the work of the author of the post, but it adds to the charm of pumpkins, as well as this sentence: “Once dry, the candy is shaken violently to remove excess cornstarch and a final glaze is added to give the candy pumpkin a sheen.”
Violently!
So now I love mellowcreme pumpkins more. In high school, I’d keep a big bag in my locker and distribute them to my friends between class. Anyone could’ve just bought their own bag, but mellowcreme pumpkins taste better when they’re contraband and given as a gift. You could call them “hot punkins.”
This summer’s road trip taught me two things about myself:
1. I can wash my hair in a bucket
2. I should probably slow down
The first is straightforward. The second thing is something that I’ve been told for years and for years I have not known what it’s supposed to mean, nor how one does it or why a person would want to do it. How do you “slow down” life? Do you go to the beach more? I don’t like going to the beach. Is it choosing to sleep in until 11am on the weekends? Sleeping that late gives me a headache and half the day is over. I like the day! You sleep! These people want me to be less scrappy, cunning alley cat and more laze-on-the-sun-porch farm kitten.
Here in my thirty-sixth year, I’ve inched just a bit closer to understanding what this concept means. For me to be a farm kitten, it would mean taking fewer gigs, traveling less. It would be doing less TV. It would be sleeping in (or at least not getting up at 5:30am most every day.) No more flying back and forth from DC to Chicago. There are certain things that I have incorporated into my life since the trip that are smoothing me out a bit, if you will: heading to bed earlier, more yogurt, allowing myself to watch documentaries on Netflix and just watch them and not feel like I’m wasting my life if I’m not drawing, sewing, etc. at the same time.
Outside those things, though, I’m not slowing for a second. I mean, you gotta be nuts. There is so much cool stuff coming up. There always is! There’s so much to see and do and make. I’ll lie down later and when I do, just think how sweetly I’ll sleep.
One of my favorite writers told a story about how a friend of his said, “Stop working so hard; you’re burning the candle at both ends.” My favorite writer said, “Yes, but it gives a lovely light.”
This photo is public domain, but let’s all hold ABC responsible for the time it held the copyright.
I am wishing so hard that I could offer all the alternate names I’ve come up with for the gameshow pictured above. Sadly, that sort of content is best saved for PaperGirl: After Dark. So far, that blog does not exist, though it absolutely should. I’ll let you know.
As I mentioned recently, I’ve had a galaxy of question marks spinning ’round my head. With a ginormous project about to launch (just a few more weeks and I can spill the beans) and a Very Big Decision I’ve made (you’re gonna flip when I tell you), I’ve been asking myself many questions. Here are twenty of them.
1. What time is it?
2. Was that my phone or yours?
3. Did I seriously forget to buy yogurt?
4. What day in November should I move back to Chicago?
5. I’m so comfy in bed but I kind of need to pee before I turn out the light. Should I just try to sleep it off or get up and go now so I don’t have to get up at two in the morning?
6. Are PaperGirl readers passing it along to other people because that would be so wonderful?
7. Am I correct in thinking that a forty-year-old woman in good shape is hotter than a twenty-year-old girl in good shape?
8. Did you hear that?
9. Did my tenants in Chicago take good care of my home?
10. Did I come to Washington and stay a year longer than planned because I was running away from something and if so, what was it?
11. If I’m such a hardcore existentialist, how come I hated Crime and Punishment so much?
12. Are you kidding me?
13. Do I still enjoy eggs or do they gross me out?
14. Will the person I went on the road trip with this summer be in my life in a significant way in the future or was that whole thing just a brilliant, brightly shining, but ultimately isolated moment in time? (There were less-shining and isolated moments, like this one.)
15. Do my friends in Chicago miss me?
16. Is it wise to have a box of chocolates in the fridge right now?
17. Is Yuri reading this?
18. Will I ever have enough money to have someone do my hair every day?
19. When’s the next time I’ll be in a hospital bed?
20. Seriously?
Oh, this is fun. I could more. I could do really, really good ones on PaperGirl: After Dark. You’ll be the first to know.
Chicago! Quilters! And friends! And friends of quilters! And their pets:
Did you know there’s a new quilt shop in Chicagoland? You didn’t? Well, now you do. Katie and Lisa, both handsome and imminently capable women, have opened up The Quilter’s Trunk and I’m to be the first big, juicy event they hold. (That is a terrible sentence for several reasons but mostly because it makes me sound like I’m a pig they’re going to roast in a barbeque pit.)
The event is next Saturday, October 10th, starting at 10am at the shop. I’ll be giving two lectures — one in the morning, one in the afternoon — signing books, doing mini-demos, takin’ pics, and enjoying the company of fellow quilters. If you live in the area, you should come because you can:
1. support a new quilt shop in your area
2. shop for things to help you make perfect objects (quilts)
3. hang out with me
4. probably eat snacks
Go to the Quilter’s Trunk website for more info and contact information for the shop. The lectures will have limited seating, so I wouldn’t wait long to call.
All the tips and info I’m sharing regarding the extinguishing of Hot Fire That Can Ruin Your Life is meant to be food for thought (burning, fiery food) and to inspire you to brush up on your emergency skills.
Yesterday, I had a pan of hamburgers in the oven that were surprisingly greasy and got so incredibly hot, I believe I was minutes away from a grease fire. I can’t be sure and don’t want to be; if I was sure, there would have been a grease fire and grease fires are bad.
The burgers were from Whole Foods. “Steakhouse” it said on the label when I pulled them from the freezer. When I got home yesterday there was no energy to go to the store, so this would be dinner. I put the four thawed burgers onto a cooky pan — one with a lip around all sides — and put it in at 400-degrees then went about my business. Maybe I got busy doing other things and forgot to check on the burgers halfway through. Maybe when it was time to take them out I let them cook 15 minutes longer and only did that because I was not paying attention. Maybe.
Regardless, when I opened the oven door, I gasped. The grease in the pan was a scalding pool that seemed like it was beginning to smoke. (I guess “steakhouse” means “80% fat and frightening to prepare.”) I turned off the oven immediately and got my biggest oven mitts to move the pan carefully, cautiously, I’m-not-breathing-till-this-is-ten-feet-away-from-me, to the counter. I spent several long minutes spooked. Grave. Wincing. That was almost on fire, I thought, and it made me wonder if I know how to put out a grease fire. Do you?
Here’s what you do NOT do:
– Do NOT throw water on a grease fire! This is the worst thing you could do! Do not do it!
– Do NOT try to carry the pot or the pan out of the kitchen! Leave it alone!
– Do NOT put a glass lid on the top of a grease fire in a pan! It will break!
Here’s what you CAN do:
– Call 911. If it’s really bad — and I think mine would’ve been — there’s very little you can do and it could get dangerous, fast. Grease fires are extremely hot and spread quickly; they’re also fueled by a liquid, so splashing a la napalm is highly possible. Get help.
– Turn off the flame and put the lid on the pot. Obviously, this works if your fire is on a pan or pot on the stovetop. A lid on the pot will stop the fire from getting oxygen and may extinguish it.
– Baking soda can work. But you need a lot of it and most people don’t have a vat of baking soda three inches from their hand when they’re at the stove.
– Apparently there are better-than-ever fire extinguishers on the market that we should probably all have, including me. Get one.
– Even if you think you don’t need to, set a timer for heaven’s sake, and be somewhere within earshot of it. The fire safety info I looked at this evening said basically all kitchen fires happen because people leave the kitchen and forget they’re making things with fire and gas.
This post isn’t as fun as this one and it may not sell books — by the way, thank you for all the orders: I’m gratefully deluged! — but it’s one I hope you’ll share around online or talk about at lunch tomorrow. It’s easy to forget kitchen safety stuff.
If you start a Christmas quilt now, you will totally get it done.
This weekend I met hundreds of sweet, talented quilters at Meissner’s sew/quilt haven in Sacramento. Generous stacks of my book, Make + Love Quilts: Scrap Quilts for the 21st Century, went quickly, especially when you consider everyone in the shop was drooling over the newest BabyLock machines and waiting for my mom to come out of the bathroom so she could sign their first issue of Love of Quilting.
The good news is that there are books left! I’d love to sign a copy of Make + Love for you and send it to your house/apartment/yurt. The bookstore price is $22.95, but I’ll give you for $20, plus $5 shipping and handling. Yeah, it turns out to be about the same amount of money, but it’s signed. Can’t get that on eBay! (I hope.)
The book is my first and includes 12 original scrap quilt patterns for bed-sized quilts and a lot of sparkling content. You get full instructions, tips, and various extras in the book, including this quote from Marilyn Monroe: “It’s not true I had nothing on. I had the radio on.” I’m serious, that is in my quilt book. You’ll see.
Click on the Make + Love Book tab on my website. Scroll down and you’ll find a PayPal button. You don’t need a PayPal account to buy the book. Click the button! PayPal will give me your shipping address. Please let me know who to make the book out to if the name is different from the person paying. I will get books out as soon as I can; my goal is within three (3) days of ordering, but with my travel schedule, be kind. I’ll let you know if it will be much longer than that. Books will be sent media mail.
Isn’t it nice to buy something not through Amazon? If you haven’t done that lately, give ‘er a shot.
*If you live in a country that is not the USA, I’ll happily send a book, but we have to get together on shipping. So put a note in your order when you click it to me.
She didn’t (weirdly) buy some Cinemark movie theater: she bought the movie theater, the movie theater up on the Winterset town square, the shuttered, empty and badly-in-need-of-repair Iowa Theater. Everyone I grew up with saw movies there (e.g., Little Mermaid, Titanic.) Our parents saw movies and newsreels there (e.g., Klute, How To Live Through The A-Bomb.) Their grandparents went there to see movies (e.g., Steamboat Willie) and to show off their funny hats. The Iowa Theater was built in the 1920s and has been the site of tens of thousands of movie showings, thousands of live performances (back when the stage was in use), and countless adolescent gropings in the balcony. Who knows? The Iowa Theater may be responsible for the existence of a number of human beings. It’s definitely responsible for some cavities: just think of the Mike & Ike’s.
Here’s the scoop.
Earlier this year, the theater closed and went up for sale for the same reasons anything closes and goes up for sale: life changed, people moved, interest waned, money did things, etc. When my mother learned that the theater was looking for a new owner, she inquired. My mother is a mover, shaker, connector, entrepreneur, and a do-er; she is also creative, possesses a designer’s eye, she greatly values education and the arts, and she believes strongly in mixing Junior Mints into your buttered popcorn during the previews so they get nice and melty by the time the feature starts. Mom is only semi-retired and she is heavily involved in Quilts of Valor, the creation of an Iowa Quilt Museum, and she’s working on a novel. But the movie theater inquiries began to turn into real questions and the real questions turned into offers and offers into contracts and before long, Marianne had a new project and my family got 10,000 times cooler than we ever were when my sisters and I lived there. If any of us ever move back to raise a family in Winterset, our kids might actually be popular. Not that we have baggage about any of that.
The plan is to restore the Iowa. It will be beautiful — but it’s going to take awhile. The property is a wreck; the amount of work is overwhelming. Basically none of the equipment is worth a penny. There’s mold on the floor. We’ve only found one dead mouse, so that’s great. There are rooms upon rooms in the building; no one who ever saw a movie at the Iowa could ever guess what’s in there. There’s a third balcony and dressing rooms in the back; there’s a full pulley system for the stage curtain, sockets for footlights, old film canister storage cabinets — the wonders go on and on.
PaperGirl will be following this story as it unfolds. My rules state that I will only ever include one picture per post, but all the pictures I take of the Iowa Theater restoration process will be posted on my Instagram page; many are posted already and this is the page for that. The theater will show movies, it will be a place for cultural events — plans for the space will follow in another post and those plans will make you clap your hands in delight.
One day you get up and you have the same thing for lunch. One day you get up and your mom tells you your family now owns a 100-year-old movie theater. So get up!
California State Flag. I arrived in Sacramento last night and this is as good an image for this post as any.
Over the past month or so, I have been able to see the possibility that exists all around me. By “possibility” I essentially mean “choices I could make.”
There is always possibility; it is always all around every one of us; it is always perched on the tips of our respective noses. But there also exists The Lull, and The Lull is a veil that gets dropped slowly, silently down over our faces until we can’t see those possibilities. The Lull isn’t a malevolent spirit, it’s just made of stuff that makes a strong piece of gauze: time, habit, inertia and fear. It’s the veil that weighs 6,000lbs.
But every once in awhile the veil lifts. Sometimes it lifts because something good happens (e.g., you win a baking contest and think, “Wait a minute… Do I want to be a professional baker???”) Sometimes it lifts because something terrible happens (e.g., your significant other breaks up with you and though you’re sad, you’re now a free agent and you no longer have to deal with his World of Warcraft obsession or anyone’s, ever, ever again.) Possibilities flood in when The Lull is disrupted. You suddenly see the world beyond the veil and wow, is it ever big and boy, were you ever thinking small.
You don’t have to wait for something to happen to you to lift the veil. That sounds like something a life coach would say, but I know from recent experience that it’s true. I recently asked myself, “Mary Fons, what do you want?” I wasn’t talking about handbags. I wasn’t talking about lunch. I just stopped what I was doing (eating lunch, alone) and faced myself. I run all over the place, I go 90-miles an hour, I’ve got this thing, I’ve got that thing… But what do I want? What is my heart’s delight? If money was no object, if nothing bad would happen, if no puppies would lose their lives, what possibilities that are consistently pushed away would I grab and make my Real Life?
And now, I’m super raw. The veil is up and it’s funto see all this stuff. It’s also a mite overwhelming: the veil hides a lotof possibilities. I don’t have more possibilities than some because I don’t have a family or a spouse; I just have different ones. I don’t have fewer possibilities because I don’t have buckets of money like some people; I just have different ones.
Watch out for The Lull. Flap your hands over your face and see if you can move that veil out your eyes. I can’t be held responsible for what you see, but I don’t think you’ll regret it. And you can’t un-see things.
I was in the ER recently. It happens. An amusing thing happened this time around.
The triage nurses put EKG nodes all over my chest and arms to get my ee-kay-gee-zies. A male and a female nurse worked together to stick the suction cups all over my torso — unceremoniously, I’ll have you know — and then they punched EKG buttons on a machine atop a rickety cart. They looked at the reading that came out and I saw their eyes get very wide. They looked at each other, subtly panicked.
“Wait, wait…”
“Okay, so…”
I was understandably concerned. I asked if everything was okay. I got no answer right away, but then the male nurse sighed a huge sigh of relief and turned to his colleague.
“We’ve got the left and right arm nodes on the wrong side,” he said. He turned to me. “The machine thinks your arms are on the wrong side of your body.”
When you feel bad enough to be in an ER but have no flesh wounds and have been given sufficient pain medication, you are able to cackle with delight. Arms in the wrong place?! What a hoot! I managed to slap my knee before they came to switch the nodes.
“Can I have the EKG?” I asked. “I love the idea of a machine thinking my left arm was on the right side of my body and the right arm was on the left side of my body. I mean, how often does that happen? Can I have it?”
“Uh, sure,” the nurse said, and handed it over.
EKG paper is awesome; it’s onion skin-like, and it’s nice and pink. And hey, it’s your body in pen ink. I told him I wanted to blog about this. And I did.
I have just a few days left in Iowa. On Tuesday, I fly to California where I will be for almost a full week. Mom and I will be lecturing at the irresistible Meissner’s Sewing in Sacramento and that’s fun, but even funner is that my favorite aunt lives in Sacramento and I’ll be staying with her. We will drink pots of coffee and talk about bloodlines and Ferragamo footwear.
Before I leave, I have a lot of cooking to do. Mom and Mark have a kitchen far bigger than the one-bedroom apartment kitchens I’m used to, so whenever I’m home, I get to set up a mini-culinary school for myself. Within the past week, I’ve practiced marinating and grilling, I baked coconut-macadamia crisps, I’ve made succulent fruit salads with unexpected herbs (basil n’ sage!) and worked with some sauces. But what I made today may be the finest food I have ever produced in the test kitchen: I made a perfect chocolate cake. Would you like the recipe?
Note: I made enough changes to both the cake and the icing recipe I found that I’m calling it my own, but like a yoga pose or a quilt block, there ain’t nothin’ new under the sun. But I do feel proud about the bourbon I added when the recipe called for no such thing.
Mary’s Test Kitchen Chocolate Cake + Chocolate Icing
INGREDIENTS + INSTRUCTIONS – CAKE
– 2 cups flour, sifted
– 2 cups sugar
– 3/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
– 2 tsp. baking powder [Note: there was no baking powder, so I did a cream of tartar/baking soda substitute. It’s 1:2 ratio and was this one of the secrets to the cake’s success?? Necessity? Mother? Invention? Could be.]
– 1 1/2 tsp. baking soda
– 1 tsp. salt
– 1 tsp. espresso powder
– 1 cup half-and-half
– 1/2 cup vegetable oil
– 2 eggs
– vanilla, which I never measure but just pour in
– a nice splash of Wild Turkey and then some more
– 1 cup boiling water
1. Put on an apron for heaven’s sake. Set the oven to 350-degrees. Butter and lightly flour two cake pans. When your mother’s dog looks up at you for a treat, say “Scram, kid. It ain’t gonna happen.”
2. Mix all the dry ingredients in a stand mixer with the paddle attachment. Start boiling the water.
3. Now put in the wet ingredients while the water is boiling. Be methodical about this — do I need to say more? I mean, do the oil. Then an egg. Then the other egg. I did the bourbon last.
4. Take that cup of boiling water and add it — slowly — to the batter as it’s mixing. This adds air bubbles. Reflect on how rad baking is.
5. Pour batter evenly into the two pans. Bake for about 35 minutes or till the knife comes out clean.
6. Take out the cake and cool it. I hate, hate waiting for anything to cool, so I put the cakes in the freezer and they cooled pretty fast.
7. Frost. Dust with cocoa powder. Go out into the garden and pluck a rosebud from the bush. Place atop. Receive hugs.
INGREDIENTS + INSTRUCTIONS – ICING
Caution: Get icing out of your field of vision immediately after making. Its power is total and will disable the part of your brain that says, “I can’t just eat spoons of icing out of a bowl.”
2 (1.65 oz.) Trader Joe’s 72% cacao chocolate bars because they were in your luggage and looked better than the Baker’s chocolate in the cupboard
1 (14 oz.) can of sweetened condensed milk
Pinch of salt
Lots of vanilla
1. Focus. Say to yourself, “A minute on the lips, a lifetime on the hips.” Say it again.
2. Melt the sweetened condensed milk and the chocolate in a heavy saucepan. When you add the vanilla, it will probably catch on fire for a minute, which is awesome. Be careful, but enjoy the moment.
3. Add the salt.
4. Cool the Pot of Evil until you can’t stand it anymore and have to ice the cake.
Last night, I slept in the sanctuary of a church in rural Iowa.
I just got a bee in my bonnet and felt like I needed to commune, so I got in the car, searched on my phone for “country church, Iowa”, and drove north. I found a humble church, broke open the door, and poked around. When it was time for bed, I had to try various pews throughout the night because for some reason I slept poorly.
Just kidding. But I did sleep in a sanctuary!
The Quilted Steeple is a retreat center in Lone Rock, IA, far and away the coolest retreat center I’ve ever retreated to. Several years ago, this church was shuttered and up for sale. The fabulous Julie Dodds, who had attended church there most of her life (and whose mother played the organ there for decades) came down from Michigan to buy the collection plates for sentimental reasons. She ended up buying the church itself, partly because she was not keen on the idea of a motorcycle gang taking over the place; they had put in an offer and it looked like they might get it. By the name of the retreat center, you have surmised Julie is a quilter, so she followed her vision to make it a haven for quilters to come and sew and relax. Hooray!
It’s amazing how perfect a church is for a retreat; I am teaching here this weekend and I saw it for myself. Classes take place in the in the church basement. There’s a fully tricked-out kitchen down there for big-group meal prep. Lectures and trunk shows happen in the sanctuary, and the (many bedroomed, many bathroomed) parsonage across the gravel sidewalk serves as lodging. Cornfields as far as the eye can see muffle the big world beyond and I can’t even talk about the sunset/sunrise out here.
When I got the tour, we went into the pretty-but-definitely-country sanctuary; there’s no stained glass here just wood lattice work over the peaked windows — this is no mega-church. It’s not chapel-small, but seeing as I have not been in a chapel except in Vegas, I might be wrong about this. At any rate, it is neat. Julie pointed up to the choir loft and said, “That’s a bedroom now.”
I took the Lord’s name in vain and whirled on Julie. “Is it taken?? Can I sleep there??” Julie said that I could.
I take it as a good sign that I slept like a damned baby.* The trundle bed was comfortable; I wrote in my journal after gazing down at the big bowl of prayer below for awhile. This morning, the sun from the front door lit up the whole aisle in toasted, golden light. I am not a church-going woman, but I do recommend sleeping in a choir loft at least once in life. Very peaceful, even for a depraved sinner like myself.
The Quilted Steeple isn’t just for quilt retreats. I have no compunction about endorsing, even shamelessly advertising this place. Weddings, funerals, any kind of educational retreat, family reunions — whenever you need a bunch of people for at least one overnight, book the Quilted Steeple. One lucky person will get the choir loft bedroom and if the cat’s out of the bag that it exists, I recommend early dibs.
Thank you, Julie. And thank you for taking the organ out because I had room for my suitcase and my purse and my computer bag.
I will write about the movie theater. Until then — because I need to do some more fact-checking and get the perfect picture of the theater in the 1960s or 1970s — a photo of my mother and me. This was at QuiltCon in 2013.
Mom and I just wrapped taping the public television show we co-host, “Fons & Porter’s Love of Quilting.”
I love you, Mam. You are really good at making quilts.
I smelled donuts this morning and recalled the summer my older sister got a job as a night baker for the bakery up on the town square.
Hannah was in high school; I was in middle school. When she got the job making donuts and rolls through the night, I thought there had never been a cooler thing to happen to anyone, ever. A job that took place at night? A job making donuts? I didn’t even know donuts were made. I thought they just appeared in a box. How was a donut made? Did she get to eat some as she went? Hannah would be able to tell me.
Many times that summer I would get up at 4am and go down to the backyard. I’d lay back in the hammock and look up at the pre-dawn sky and wait for Hannah to come home. The small bakery was just up on the square, which meant it was roughly three blocks from the hammock. Before too long, Hannah would open the gate and she would be so stoked that I got up to meet her. She’d lay on the hammock with me and we’d talk about all kinds of things. She smelled amazing because smelled like donuts.
Those days are so far away, now. We all know being home is a fraught thing. Here’s the bakery where Hannah worked and the place where the hammock used to swing; there’s the familiar creak and groan on the eighth and ninth step of the staircase; there’s the place where the armoire used to be. A lot of people who live far from their childhood home don’t go back nearly as often as I do; I come back at least twice a year to tape TV; this means I have an ongoing relationship with my hometown past but I also see changes as they occur.
Last month, my mother bought the old movie theater on the square. It’s right next to the bakery. More on that tomorrow. Will we all smell like film?
I’ve come to Iowa to tape the PBS show. This means I am in Winterset and will be working in Des Moines this week. It also means I will be sleeping in the bedroom I shared with my younger sister from the age of nine to the age of thirteen or so. Thankfully, it does not look the same as it did back then, though I miss the Madonna posters.
Here is who lives in this house:
1. My mother
2. My stepdad Mark (a.k.a. “The Cap’n”)
3. Scrabble
I walked into the kitchen this afternoon and saw Miss Scrabble in the position you can see in the above photograph. It is a difficult thing to simultaneously gasp, laugh, and try to not make a sound as you move slowly for your phone/camera in order to take a picture of a dog before she moves a single inch. In fact, this is a physically painful experience. But I did it. I got the shot.
It’s been beautiful since I got here late Friday. Crisp and clean, and better take a jacket.
Appropriately bummed out orphans in “Annie” the musical. Photo: Eva Rinaldi via Wikipedia.
Today was pretty lousy. Like, real lousy. I’ll spare details for now.
It’s a good thing that I have a method of popping myself out of a miserable mood. I’d like to share with you. Note that this technique only works for a matter of minutes, but if you’re really low, it’s all you got. It works the best if you’re crying and alone, a state easy enough to find oneself in when having a truly rotten day.
Step 1: Raise your head from your hands.
Is your face hot and wet with tears? Good. Is watery snot from your nose squishing onto your palms? Fabulous. This is all good but actually unnecessary for Step 2.
Step 2: The first thing you see when you open your eyes, take a deep breath and holler at it, calling it stupid. Holler, “Stupid chair!” The hollering is extremely important. When you call out the chair and tell it it’s stupid, you must holler it. Don’t say it, don’t scream it, and definitely don’t whisper it unless you want to take a hard nosedive into The Abyss. You must holler. Holler like you’re a kid whose older brother just took his favorite pack of baseball cards. There’s no malice in this. It’s a rather innocent kind of yelling, I guess. It’s the kind of yelling kids did in 1956. That’s hollering.
Step 3: Call everything “stupid.”
Everything you lay your eyes upon, you holler at it and call it stupid. For example: “Stupid chair! Stupid table! Stupid pitcher on the table! Stupid pitcher on the table that doesn’t even have anything in it!”
Step 4: Riff. Get abstract. Turns out stream-of-consciousness, free-association hollering feels fantastic. Continuing with where we left off with the pitcher: “Stupid pitcher on the table that doesn’t even have anything in it! Stupid stuff with nothing in it! Stupid stuff! Stupid negative space! Stupid modernism! Stupid fancy modernist bullsh*t! Stupid that I still want an Eames chair! Stupid wanting! Stupid hungry-ghost-Buddhist-definition-of-suffering! Stupid Eastern religion! Stupid religion!”
TIP: If you go too far afield, just bring it back to what you can see, e.g., the couch.
Step 5: Blend in your problems and holler them, as well. “Stupid couch! Stupid sitting down! Stupid people sitting on stupid couches in stupid outfits! Stupid me! Stupid me for sending that stupid email! Stupid email! Stupid me for saying X to Y! Stupid human nature. Stupid human nature. Stupid mistakes. Stupid everyone.”
By the end of a round you’re sure to be a little calmer and this is for a couple reasons. For one, all that hollering is tiring. For two, you’ve put things in (stupid) perspective because you’ve connected with the absurdity of life. Changes are very good you’ve also made yourself laugh at some point. You can’t holler, “Stupid Spanish textbook I bought at Half-Price Books to teach myself Spanish six years ago and never even opened” without .00008 of a smile occurring.
Good luck to you. Tomorrow will be better but you are well within your rights to holler, “Stupid people saying ‘tomorrow will be better’! Stupid Annie! Stupid musicals! Stupid crushed dreams! Stupid dreams! Stupid etc., etc., etc.”
When making patchwork, one often has to snip what are called “dog ears” from units that create triangles. Dog ears are tiny. Quilters will know what I mean; non-quilters have to be delighted that we call bits of triangle-shaped, confetti-sized bits of fabric “dog ears.” It’s adorable! We also have scissors we call “snips” and when we rip out seams, a common term is “frogging” because: “rip-it, rip-it.”
The above picture is one I took from the floor; an ant’s view of a pile of dog ears. Though I didn’t collapse on the floor yesterday evening, I did have to sit down on it for a minute. I’m feeling quite poorly. I think it’s iron. I saw the dog ear pile and thought it would make a good picture from a level perspective. I’m headed to a clinic in a few hours to hopefully get a blood draw and see what’s what. Maybe I’m just suffering from acute ennui. It’s possible, but would ennui make my legs feel like my legs are moving through syrup? I was so tired last night while I ate soup, I considered putting my face in it. It wasn’t the soup I was after but the opportunity to rest my head.
If it’s not iron or ennui, I’m not sure what’s going on with me, but add to the list a touch of depression; I haven’t been sick in some time and have been feeling fit as a fiddle. It always seems like a matter of time, you know?
Needles are awesome. My appointment can’t come soon enough!
All readers of the ol’ PG are valued, but there are a handful of you who get a clandestine extra squirt of chocolate sauce on your sundae. There are three readers or so who actually send me three-dimensional objects, otherwise known as “gifts.” Margaret’s Pocket Pendennis is a good example; Mark, you are way past due for your very own post and don’t think I don’t have you in my sights.
The other day I received a package that contained remarkable pencils. They were in a box with a full description of their origin. They write better than any pencils I’ve ever used. There was also a note in the package. Written with fine pencilmanship (bam!) the author’s optimism and bubbly personality positively lifted the page. My entire week was made.
The pencils were a gift from a reader who is a member of the Pencil of the Month Club. Yes, there is one. Yes, she’s a member. And yes, as soon as I learned of this Club, I went directly to CW Pencils’s website to sign up. I urge you to do the same and if you don’t want your pencils, you can send them to me so that I have more.
But I have found myself in a horrible situation. I cannot for the life of me remember who sent them and the note is not in the big stack of papers that I know I put it in. I asked Rita. I asked Carole. Neither of them were The Pencil Giver. Oh, Pencil Giver, I am painfully sorry. And I am almost as embarrassed as I was when this happened, but not quite. That was pretty bad.
Pencil Giver, will you email me? I have a present to send to you and a thank you card but your identity is hidden from my brain. I love my pencils so much.
17th Century engraving of a Griffin, image courtesy Wikipedia.
Below is a conversation I heard tonight as I waited for the east elevator here at the beautiful Kennedy Warren. In case you are just joining us, my towering, Art Deco, super-historic building borders the Smithsonian National Zoo. My neighbors are animals. From time to time, one can hear the call of the wild when heading out to the store or opening the window for some fresh air. And now:
IT WAS LIKE A DRAGON:
A short play by Mary Fons
Woman 1: It was like a dragon.
Woman 2: A what?
Woman 1: A dragon.
Woman 2: Maybe it was a wild boar. They’ve got the wild boars out right now.
Woman 1: I don’t know…
Woman 2: Maybe it was just the zebras. You know how they’re always going on.
They rejected the idea of a beating heart — barely. Doctor-themed cupcakes by Clever Cupcakes of Montreal.
A couple moons ago, I told a story about going on a date with a doctor. He diagnosed me with a fatty deposit when we were making out. As you can imagine, this cooled things off for me pretty quick. But there’s more to the story and when you learn the rest, you’ll see why I was cooled off before The Smooch Heard Round My Hip.
We’re at dinner. Low light, pretty dress, etc. And the doctor is talking. He’s talking a lot. He eventually asked me: “So tell me more about what you do. Knitting, right?”
I answered in an abbreviated manner because as I explained how I earn my living, he looked away at least four times. I was not yammering on. I was not entertaining myself. I was answering his question and attempting to engage in the “Let’s get to know each other” thing. Crazy to do on a date, I realize. But the doctor was eating bread and glancing around as I spoke and I hate that. I don’t like talking to people who don’t care one cc what I’m saying but also, lucky for him, I like listening to people talk about themselves way more than talking about myself. I figured out pretty quick that the best thing to do was to clam up and ask him questions about himself and get through dinner.
So I asked questions. I let his tape run. Yes, he did have interesting stories to tell and he was intelligent. Successful. A father. A widower, as I’ve just recalled. But when you spend the first forty-five minutes of a date smiling and nodding and going, “Mm, I see,” it’s tiring. It’s a drag. One can also be in danger of drinking too much wine because there’s nothing else to do with one’s mouth.
My date excuses himself to use the men’s room. The head waiter comes over and removes our first course plates.
“Did you enjoy your beet salad, Miss?”
“Oh, it was wonderful, thank you so much. Really good.”
I engaged him in a conversation about how beets are gross unless you get them on a fancy plate. He agreed; we had this instant rapport. Then he gave me a strange look. An earnest look. A conspiratorial look. He looked toward the men’s room and back to me.
“And how is your evening going?” he asked, cocking his head and squeezing his eyes at me. I, too, glanced at the men’s room. I, too, cocked my head and squeezed my eyes.
“Can I be honest?”
“Please do.”
“It’s not good. He is just talking and talking and talking. He hasn’t asked me a single thing about myself! I don’t want to go on and on, but we’re supposed to be on a date. I’m pretty bummed.”
“We give you forty minutes, tops.”
“What?”
“We’ve been watching you two since you came in because your table is right in the line of the service area. He hasn’t let you get a word in since you got here. We all feel really sorry for you. Can I bring you another Champagne? On the house, Miss.”
I looked over my left shoulder and saw two bartenders, a busboy, and another waiter at various positions near the wood paneled, chrome bar. One of the bartenders saw me looking and gave me a little wave and a cringe. My date appeared from around the corner to the restrooms and came back to the table.
“I would like a glass of Champagne,” I said to the waiter, my new BFF. “Thank you so much.” My new BFF and I shared the most awesome, subtle look. We were in cahoots now; we were allied. He asked my date if he wanted anything from the bar or if he was ready for wine with the entrees on their way. He was ready for wine, and I was ready for dessert. Yes, I know, I sold out for some smooching at the end of the date. What can I say? It had been a long week.
The last thing to say about it is that I didn’t have to fight the doctor off with a stick; neither of us pursued a second date. Maybe he thought I was a dull conversationalist, that I had nothing good to say, nothing interesting to talk about.
That’s me the other day. I can’t remember why. Illustration by Kate Greenaway, b.1846.
I’ve been spending time with A Person. (Not the doctor, who was a one-date situation but I get asked about it a lot for some reason. I keep meaning to tell the rest of that story because there’s more; I promise to do that tomorrow.)
Person and I have spent enough time together over enough months now that parts of myself that I don’t understand have come back and are staying in my guest room. Relationships bring out sides of ourselves that don’t exist when we’re on our own. Unless you’ve been married fifty years and have done a lot of workbooks, the negative stuff that gets revealed is hard to change. The older I get, the more annoyed I am when I realize I’m doing X again in a relationship, or that I responded so badly to Y when I damn well knew better.
We all have a relationship style. Some people try out that style on one person their whole life; some people try it out on a whole lot more. There are fabulous elements in a person’s relationship style, (e.g., a photographic memory for how much butter you like on your popcorn); there are not-so-fabulous elements (e.g., yelling.)
Now that I’m seeing A Person, I am reminded once again that I am the most impatient person I’ve ever met. Now that I’m seeing A Person, I am reminded that I am moody. Now that I am seeing A Person, I must remind myself that it’s okay to let someone else chop the salad and that if it’s not done exactly the way I like it — which is of course the right way — no stars will fall out of the sky.
Now that I’m seeing A Person, I am reminded how frightening it is and frankly how exhausting it is at this point it is to stick my heart out.
