At certain kids’ pizza arcades, you can jump into a huge roomful of these. Image: Wikipedia
Creating the tags for these posts is enjoyable for me; tags on a blog post are strings of words that will help people google search for the post later. Like, if you liked my post about considering the moon landing hoax, you might type into your search box, “moon landing mary fons blog” and, because I wrote that tag into the post, you’d find it easily.
I have a lot of fun writing those tags, and I always (always) end my long list of tags with something having to do with chips. Have you ever read those tags and wondered why I do that?
There was a time not so very long ago when I had moved to Washington, that I figured out a few slick subway train transfers within the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, which is called “WMATA” for short, which sound’s like something Tony Spaghetti’s big brother says to the pipsqueak who’s lookin’ at him funny:
“Ey, yew! Yeah, yew, kid. You keep lookin’ at me and my brotha like that, I’ma wamata ya right in ya gavone face. Capishe?”
Anyway, there I am in Washington, and I’m stepping out from the Red Line to Shady Grove to the Gallery Place/Chinatown station because I need to transfer to the Green; you can catch the Green Line there, as well as the Yellow Line. As I did that, I recalled how I know the NYC Metro 6 line pretty well and the Q, and that I used to take the 1 train up to the Upper West Side to get to The Yarn Company to sew because there was no room to sew in the tiny, tiny, I-hate-you tiny apartment I was living in with Yuri.
A few weeks after the WMATA moment, thinking deeply about two cities’ subway systems, I was in Chicago for a weekend and, wow, I know the train system here like the back of my hand, which, after at least thirty years (do two-year-olds consider the backs of their hands?) I know pretty well.
All these train maps in my head and the solid knowledge I have of navigating them came together and I felt like a monkey swinging from one big vine. Shoop! The L train in Manhattan that crosses the Lower East Side over to the west side. Shoop! Down from Cleveland Park in DC to get the Orange Line to Eastern Market. And then, that first, peaceful ride on Chicago’s Orange Line to go to Midway to catch a flight, knowing I’d be coming back on the same tracks.
The other day, though, I went down into the lower level of the Chase building because I thought there was a post office down there; I realized when I couldn’t find the post office that I was thinking of a post office in the basement of a building in Penn Quarter in DC. That was weird.
Unidentified man with unidentified object that is too cute to be human, puppy, or kitten. Photo: Me, carefully.
My mom is in town for the lighting of the first (or “beta”) test of The Wabash Lights. We had plans to meet at the new Maggie Daley Park Ice Skating Ribbon. Mom and I love to skate; we both love it enough and are good enough to have our own skates. Stand in line for rentals? Not these girls. We just lace up and go.
Mom lost her phone, though (first time in her life), so she had to deal with that this afternoon. The last time we communicated was earlier in the day via email; as of then, the plan stood. So I went to the Ribbon at the appointed time, but no Mom. I couldn’t call her. She couldn’t call me. So I skated by myself until she showed up. For an hour, with no headphones, no pal to chat with, I skated round and round that magnificent ribbon. It’s less of a “view” you get than a “movie” you get on that thing. You get a moving picture and you’re the thing moving and the air is crisp as can be. The city of Chicago is the sky below the sky and the endless blue of Lake Michigan rounds out the whole world. They did a really, really good job with this thing.
I love this city so much. The Ribbon is one more reason to be a jerk about how much better this city is than any other city now or ever. But what I really want to talk about is that baby.
There is good in the world. Because nothing could be cuter or more wonderful than this baby. Strapped tight into its little snuggly, winging around on its dad’s back as he deftly — and carefully, I assure you — maneuvered the Ribbon, this baby is everything. I have other pictures. I tried so hard to not be weird, but I had to take pictures of this baby. This is the best one I got, I think. I’m on Instagram, so follow me for more of the Perfect Ribbon Baby images that I cannot stop looking at. You will not be disappointed.
The accessory pattern: tote, wristlet, and plucky headscarf.
In 1870, a Scottish immigrant named James McCall — odd, because “McCall” doesn’t sound Scottish — put out an “illustrated guide” to a pair of gloves he was manufacturing. The McCall’s pattern was born.
Fast forward nearly 150 years, and I’m posting a picture of a McCall’s pattern on a phantasmagorical thing called the Internet. What would James McCall think? He’d probably go look at the books and see how his company was doing and whether or not it was being publicly traded. (I think it is, but it’s confusing.)
When the Small Wonders line was shown to the nice people at McCall’s by the fine folks at Springs Creative, they liked it a lot. In fact, they were immediately inspired. They felt the line could be put to use in their business. When making garments and the sewn accessory, larger-scale prints may be harder to work with for folks who don’t do these things on a professional level. Matching seams becomes a bit trickier; a large flower gets chopped in half and suddenly looks like something from Little Shop of Horrors and you just hope no one looks at you from the back. A toile can give fits. A damask languishes in the stash. Projects stall.
The small print is a lovely choice for an apron, say, or a painfully adorable romper outfit for a baby, because these problems cannot occur. Besides, tulips are cute. So McCall’s and Springs joined together and I worked with McCall’s to create an 8-piece pattern line for sewists. These are bag, accessory, and clothing patterns and I’m so pleased with them because I know you will be, also. And I’ve never claimed I was a garment-sewing person; I’m not, though I’ve made bags in my day. No, I’m just the fabric designer and pored over patterns until I found the ones that fit the best. It’s interesting to note that these are the first patterns McCall’s has produced for independent retailers in…ever.
Today, I’m giving away a 3-pack of these patterns — which, again, are available only at local quilt shops and independent online retailers like Fabric Depot, Missouri Star, etc. The 3-pack goes to Ms. Lou, who made an adorable bag of her own from the China group of Small Wonders. I think you’ll like the bag patterns you’ll be receiving in the mail soon, friend. You’re getting the pattern above, plus the painfully adorable romper outfit, plus the girl dress with matching doll dress one.*
Congratulations, Ms. Lou. Send me your mailing address (smallwonderswednesday @ gmail) — and you keep totin’.
*I was never the girl with a dress that matched my doll. So I’m passing my pain onto the world to fix. Everything always works out.
Welcome to today’s existential pain. Date + Scan: Me
Earlier today, I flung onto my couch and slammed my knee right where the two cushions come together in the center of it. I had never hurt my knee flinging before, so I investigated. Ah. There was a big ballpoint pen in there and I had landed straight on it.
The pen wasn’t all that was in the couch. As I looked, I realized that I was looking at 1.5 years of other people’s couch cushion stuff. Don’t worry; there wasn’t anything wet. Just a peanut, some hair. A quarter. Pink fibers from a pink blanket. That damned pen.
And I found pink post-it note with my handwriting on it. It said “AUG 29th”, a date important enough to be singled out for its own neon pink post-it note to be stuck someplace where I’d see it. The post-it has to be at least three years old. Because on August 29th, 2015, I was in Washington, D.C. On August 29th, 2014, I was in New York City. This note has to be from 2013 or 2012; I got the couch in 2011 but I’m pretty sure I’ve cleaned the couch since then.
Being a dedicated journal-keeper, I have the luxury — or the bad luck — of going back to the books. I write in my journal a lot, but it’s not every single last day that I write; there are days I don’t. But it appears I have entries on August 29th, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, and 2015. I thought I’d pull one line from each for you. I think each line sums up pretty nicely what my life was like that summer, if not that year. Note: “dumping” was what I called it when my ileostomy would just dump liter after liter of liquid/fluid out of my ostomy and I couldn’t get it “stopped up,” if you will. It sucked when that happened and I would get extremely tired and dehydrated.
August 29th, 2011: “But my stomach flips inside me like a fish and I’m dumping today; can’t fill the hole, the hole. It’s probably good I’m going to Iowa to film TV.”
August 29th, 2012: “I’m putting myself on a white wine diet.”
August 29th, 2013: “The reality of love is pile-driving me and the wind that it has knocked out of me is stale in comparison to the air we breathe in bed. He cannot be unmagical to me. He cannot be wrong.”
August 29th, 2014: “Day by day. Meal by meal. Cooky by warm cooky. Earnest conversation by earnest conversation.”
August 29th, 2015: “The summer isn’t quite over, but everyone is assuming the close. I so look forward to the fall, even if the Autumn Dread grips me possibly tighter than ever. Statistically, I should have an easy year in that respect; 2012 and 2013 were both heavy with hospital in the fall. Can every autumn be a crisis?”
When something like this post-it happens, I realize that it’s so painful to have these books. But they’re my life. Literally: they are my life. If I go, they go. If they go, I probably will, too.
