It’s almost obscenely enticing, isn’t it? Sewing Studio, 134 W 29th St, New York, NY 10001. Phone: (646) 961-4747
See that picture up there?
Add some fabric, some friends, and some patterns to work with, and that’s a lil’ picture of heaven, muchachos.
Next week, I’ll be leading a “Patchworkshop” at NYC’s fabulous, adorable, info-rich Sewing Studio. I’m kinda pinching myself, honestly. Teaching people to quilt in New York City?? Whose life is this?! I feel very grateful. I’m working on all my packets of info, I’ve got a friend at Dear Stella who is making some goodie bags. I’ve got quilts to share. I can’t wait to meet my students.
There are still a couple slots left in the July week-long class; same for the August class but you should not tarry. Here are the deets:
Master Series: “Patchworkshop” with Mary Fons July 21st-25th (Monday to Friday), 6:30pm-9:00pm; or August 18th-22nd (Monday to Friday), 6:30-9:00pm
“No matter how cool our gadgets are, no matter how fast we can pin images and send files, human beings still want and need handmade quilts. If you’ve ever wanted to make one, this class is for you. Primarily, we’ll focus on what comes first in any quilt: making the patchwork top (you will get some quilting instruction.) You’ll learn “the patchwork quartet” (cutting, sewing, pressing, and ripping); you’ll learn how to properly rotary cut fabric; you’ll get tons of pointers on fabric selection; you’ll construct blocks to either finish or get a beautiful, running start to your very first quilt. (You’ll get lots of quilt history, too, and tons of tips from the pros.) Come learn how to make patchwork — and probably change your life while you’re at it.”
About the instructor: Mary Fons, aside from being an avid quilter, national teacher, on-camera host, author, and magazine editor, is a self-proclaimed “beginner quilter’s BFF” and will never make you feel foolish for not knowing how. Mary is a celebrated quilter and TV host, and the founder of Quilty, a weekly online program for the beginner quilter. For more about Mary, visit MaryFons.com.
Course outline: Full course details will be posted the week of July 14.
Class limit: 10 students Cost per student: $650 Materials: Bring basic sewing supplies plus a selection of fat quarters: 4-6 light, 4-6 medium, and 4-6 dark. (Bring more if you want!)
It all begins at about 6am. It’s gone this way for years, now, with few variations.
1. Wake. Blink. Consider previous day: Was exercise executed? Were healthful comestibles consumed in sane quantities? Was enough work done to avoid panic immediately upon the opening of the eyes? If the answer is “yes” to at least 2 out of 3 of these status questions, optimism is available.
2. Look left. Consider sleeping man. Kiss sleeping man’s shoulder. Sigh with contentment.
3. Rise. Pad into kitchen. Fill kettle. Put kettle on stove. Activate burner.
4. Enter bathroom. Perform noncommittal morning ablutions. Mostly just look in mirror and make faces. Consider birthday next month.
5. Cross back through kitchen. Eye kettle. Prepare tea tray with honey, milk, spoon, mug Rebecca made for me in her pottery class that I love more than life itself, cloth napkin, French press with tea in it. Consider a) cutting back on the tea; b) loving the mug slightly less because it’s a mug for heaven’s sake.
6. Feel generally anxious about day.
7. While waiting for water to boil, flop on couch and pick up something to read. Read a little bit of it before the kettle whistles.
8. Bolt up, leap in three bounds to the kettle to flip the lid so it doesn’t wake Yuri. Pour water into French press. Take tea tray into living room. Set on coffee table. Consider the hurt feelings of the tea tray: coffee gets a whole table.
9. Drink tea and write or read for a good hour. Toward the end of the hour, feel more anxious about day but internally struggle with need to have a few more minutes. Consider taking a short, post-tea nap with sleeping man.
A poet friend of mine in Chicago used to do a piece about his heritage. Rather than examine his family tree, he focused on behaviors he had picked up over the years and memes that had stuck. His “heritage” was more about the people he knew or had known, rather than dead people he had never met. A certain expression he used came from his dad, for example, and years back he had consciously adopted specific laugh from a kid in school he thought was really cool.
I always liked that piece because it hit on something so true: we are the people we know. We know the things we know and care about the things we care about because of what we pick up from others that we feel looks good on us or works well. It can be a laugh or a political view. A gait. A preference. An entire life path.
There is perhaps no faster meme generator than The New Relationship. Yuri and I are swapping behaviors and ideas and memes right and left. I see it, I feel it; he sees it, he feels it. It’s great fun. (Think of the inside jokes you have with a loved one. That’s meme-swapping.)
Here’s a great example of what I mean by all this:
Yuri has shown me that I never need to buy deodorant ever again.
Wait.
Yuri smells good. And so do I. Neither he nor I are advocating going au natural, here. What he has shown me is that baking soda — pure, straight up sodium bicarbonate — is the best deodorant money can buy. After your shower, you put a little in your paw, maybe with a little water so’s that it’ll stick, and you apply it in those cute armpits of yours and you will not smell. You will stay dry and fresh and you will not have purchased a cake of deodorant at the store that a) smells weird and b) costs a lot and c) has plastic all over it and maybe aluminum or weird stuff inside of it. I’m telling you: baking soda works. It works better than any deodorant I’ve ever tried. I’ve been using it for months, now, and it has not failed me.
The natural deodorants you buy at the store that use baking soda? Pffft! Skip ’em. Not only do those very expensive “all-natural” deodorants not work, they’re just puttin’ lipstick on a pig! (I don’t know if that’s exactly what they’re doing but I have been wanting to use that expression for several days.) Listen to me: you do not need to buy any of these products ever again.
Put. Baking soda. In. Your armpits. Put it in your armpits!!
I’m all worked up. But it’s just that wonderful. Think about the money a person could save over the course of a lifetime because of this tip! If you switch to baking soda, why, together we could save millions! At least a few thousand. That could go to a lot better things, that dough. I don’t know what.
And so it happened that I became a woman who has baking soda in her medicine cabinet. If anyone ever asks me about it, I will say, “Oh, yeah. It’s the best deodorant you can use. Just plain baking soda. I learned that from Yuri.”
Is Hollywood destroying humanity or am I just no fun?
A couple months ago, my internal struggle was refreshed with the blood of Godzilla, which remains the last movie I saw, in the theater or otherwise.
Yuri and I had a night off, and I was actually the one who suggested we go. I’ve been to the movie theater maybe five times in two years. I completely get that many folks love movies — my sister and her fiance work in the industry and I have tremendous respect for them, their art, and their specific path — but feature films just aren’t my jam. I don’t see a lot of movies like I don’t read a lot of fiction. I’m a documentary-lovin’, non-fiction readin’ real-time junkie. I feel manipulated by film, I guess, and not in a good way. Still, every once in awhile, there’s a film that looks like such pure spectacle, such pure, 21st century American entertainment, I gotta do it. It’s like eating a Cinnabon or a Auntie Anne’s pretzel once every couple of years: indulging feels very wrong/momentarily good. The 2014 remake of Godzilla looked cool from the previews my sister Nan played for me; the monster was so big! The cities were so small!
“Yuri, let’s go see Godzilla.”
“Seriously?”
We got our tickets and sat down with cups of tea and smuggled chocolate, fully prepared to be entertained. I had an open mind. I really wanted to have fun.
But I didn’t have fun. Because Hollywood sucks. Hollywood creates a facsimile of life for scores of people whose general well-being I care about. Hollywood cheapens the human experience. At its best, Hollywood inspires great floods of emotion that can be cathartic. But at its worst, Hollywood movies are irreverent, disrespectful, and hypnotic. And false. And confusing. And they are all expensive.
My main trouble wasn’t with Godzilla. It was not a great movie, but that’s okay. I was more troubled by the previews, the first one for a Scarlett Johannsen film coming out soon called Lucy. In the preview, we see a clip of Johannsen enduring forced abdominal surgery. The bad guys open her belly and insert something inside of her that she must transport against her will, the thing now being inside her and all. I’ve had multiple abdominal surgeries that might as well have been forced — if I didn’t have them, I’d have died so the choice was nil — and take it from me: There is nothing entertaining about being filleted. The reality of that sucks so much. I realize I have personal experience that most folks do not regarding this plot development in Lucy and clearly, I am going to be more sensitive to seeing such an experience portrayed fictionally, but like…can’t you pretend about something else? There’s so much to choose from.
Like…war. After Lucy, there were several previews for war movies where people were getting creamed right and left. Legs were getting blown off. Men were screaming, men were crying. After that, a preview for Non-Stop, which is about an airplane hijacking. Jet black guns, exploding pieces of airplane, crying women with hysterical, terrorized babies, a rugged Liam Neeson flinging himself backward down the aisle, shooting multiple rounds.
Am I missing something? Why is this entertaining? I’m not being rhetorical. I don’t understand. Surgical procedures, wars, gunfire, terrorist plots on planes, and death are things that create suffering. They are realities of life that require seas of compassion and support to endure and process. It’s not funny to see someone get shot to death on a plane flying at 35,000 feet. It’s terrifying. It should be terrifying. I beg someone to explain to me why people spend millions of dollars to create fictional suffering to last on film forever for people to watch in theaters while they sit eating snacks. Escapism? But how?
Maybe I’m just no fun.
That’s entirely possible! I do feel like I have blind spot, that there’s a “Kick Me” sign on my back and I’m just being snippy and snobby and old and lame. Everyone goes to the movies, right? Folks have preferences, too, and discernment. I shouldn’t say “Hollywood is this” because Hollywood is a lot of things and people and there’s good art that comes out of the place, I realize. But just when I was thinking, “Mary, chill. There is more to the movies than the crassness of Non-Stop,” the last preview presented itself. It was for a movie called The Other Woman, in which three hot blondes are real ornery about a man and exact their revenge on him for his misdeeds. There were boobs everywhere. And toilet humor, which is always better/grosser when there are girls involved, I suppose.
It’s just all so hostile. To be sure, there is great cinema in the world, but this is the stuff the general public is eating, the movies that are “in theaters everywhere starting Friday.” Mere blocks from where I sit, there are art house cinemas and legendary film centers that show incredible stories put to film. But people go see the Godzillas and The Other Womanses in Des Moines because that’s what’s playing there. I grew up not far from Des Moines, so I know. If you don’t have options, how can you discern?
No one should be stopped from making whatever sort of movie they want to make. Advocating for censorship will never be on my list of things to do, as much as I dislike these kinds of movies. I’ll just stay home.
(On my list of things to do, “Take on Hollywood” was also not there. Oh well.)
That’s Pendleton wool, by the way. I’m never leaving this place!
Whatever you’ve heard about New Yorkers not being nice, or that they are flat out rude, that is not correct information. Let me share three things that happened in the course of a single day here in the Great Big City:
1. The Scruffy Kids at the Resale Shop Welcomed Me To the Neighborhood
After fully unpacking and settling in, there were a few items of clothing that would not fit in this small apartment’s closets. We actually have kind of a lot of closet space, which is nothing short of luxurious, I know. Still, that weird, never-worn, neon-jacquard-leopard print blazer that sorta fit but not that well? That had to go, along with a couple pairs of shorts and a few dresses that never really worked too well. Off I went to a nearby resale shop, and I engaged with the scruffy kids behind the counter. Well! We had a blast! There was this crazy rapport right off the bat for some reason: I said something funny, they said something funny, and I’m selling my clothes and we’re talking about NYC vs. Chicago and it was just this delightful experience. When I left, we were all on a first-name basis. As I went out the door, the guy with the lip ring said, “Hey, welcome to the ‘hood!” And I was like, “Rock on!!”
2. The Lady Who Held the Door For Me When I Had a Big Box There was a box. I had to go pick it up. It was huge and heavy — very huge and very heavy. There is a gate to our building. It is a heavy gate with a weird button lock that never works except on the third try. So there I am, balancing this big box, trying to get the code right and I finally do, but then I have real problems. Because I have to hold the box and open the door and get down the stairs. Well! Along comes this older lady and just comes right up and puts her friendly hand on the door to hold it for me and like we’d known each other for years, she goes, “There better be something prreeeeeetty good in that big heavy box!” and I’m like, “It’s quilts!” and she goes, “Well, that’s pretty good!” and I’m like, “Yeah!!” And that was that. (Well, then I took it up three flights of stairs and then that was that.)
3. The Fashion Designer Who Is Giving Me Fabric Okay, so there’s this fashion designer. I met her when I was in NYC in 2008 for a month, doing the show here with the Neo-Futurists. I was at yoga, and this glamorous girl comes into the studio wearing this stunning cloak. I’m like, “That is a stunning cloak!” and she says, “I made it.” And she told me her name and I went to her website and she was a small operation but her cloak was still too much money for me to buy one. Well! Over the years, do you know what happened? That fashion designer has really gotten to be a big deal! I have seen her name in fashion magazines — big ones, like Elle and stuff! So the other day, I’m walking around the Lower East Side, slightly lost, and I see that this designer has her own storefront. I go in. She’s there. I’m like, “You do NOT remember me, no way, no possibility, but I did meet you and this was years ago and I just wanted to tell you congrats because I’ve seen you sorta rise through the thing, and I am a big fan!” We get to talking and do you know what happened next? She says, “It’s so cool you’re a quilter,” because I told her I’m a quilter, “And I wonder if you’d like these Pendleton wool scraps we have in the back. We were going to make makeup cases from them but it didn’t work out and I wonder if you’d want them.” So I signed a copy of my book and I’m going to take it over there tomorrow and pick up these big bags of wool — Pendletonwool — scraps!
