She made a page in her blank book for me and she told me to write a story. I have nothing else to add. You may recall the strange affair of the Fabric Covered Bulletin Board, a mystery never fully explained. We are told, ladies and gentlemen, that this is the very bulletin board which figures in the famous disaster. Our wiser for wear teacher has restored it, and fitted parts of it with new fabric, so that we may get a hint of what it may look like when fully covered in fabric. Perhaps we may frighten away the board from so many weeks ago with a little illumination! (Ladies and) Gentlemen! 
(PS, yes, all from memory. I'm just embracing it at this point.) PPS: For all my teacher friends out there who may be tape-measure challenged as I apparently am, here's what I did: I bought two yards of the blue polka dots and one yard of the yellow and purple flowers. I cut the polka dots in half and hung them up with staples on the edges first. Then I centered the flowers on top of the polka dots and stapled them up. THEN I rummaged around and found purple edging and edged it up. I thought of hanging up ellison letters for the headings, and then I remembered that I wanted this project to be complete in no more than an hour, so I just printed the signs you can see in the picture. Now nobody can say I never gave an online tutorial. Sometime in the summer, the Babykid, the Big Guy and I took a trip to a the quilt shop in Charm. The Babykid came upon a big basket of pretty little fat quarters, all folded up and looking all eye-candy there on the end of an aisle. Stealthily, she selected one... and then two... and then three, and she carried them all around with her until my mission had been accomplished. (This would have been the Madrona Morning Glory outing.) I suppose it's important to mention that two of the fabrics she had selected were actually lovely, very pretty coordinate prints to the one I had selected (complete coincidence, promise), and one was an ocean scene. Dolphins. Very happy looking dolphins.  Who am I to judge? I'm certainly not going to stand there and tell a kid she can't have the dolphin fabric if that's the one, in her heart of hearts, that she wants--and anyway, even if I did say that (and gently highlight the winning qualities of the other 2 fat quarters she had been carrying around), there's no changing her mind. And anyway, why should her mind be changed? My tiny kid likes fabric! So we settled on the dolphins. No fat quarter has been loved more, let me tell you. We talked about what her plans for the fat quarter were, and for a few weeks she used it as a blanket for a variety of her toys. And then I mentioned something about minky. Yes friends, I volunteered to make a tiny minky blanket from the dolphin fat quarter. The astonishing thing here is not that I told my kid I'd make her something, nor that said thing was going to be out of the most ridiculous fabric in the house. It is that I have 1) never made anything with minky, and 2) more or less gave up on making blankets YEARS ago. Sometime in junior high, a friend of mine taught me how to sew. From her lessons, I figured out how to cut and piece 4 or 5 inch squares. For the next several years, a little handmade blanket would be my go-to gift for friends leaving for college or families expecting babies. Fast forward to my mid 20s, when the Big Guy came along. I left my teaching job then to stay home with our little man. (He never actually was that little... 8.5 pounds, thankyouverymuch, though that's a story for another day). I decided, once life consisted of more than sleeping and feeding and changing diapers, that I needed something creative to do. So I made a few blankets, with intentions of selling them at craft shows. (I also enrolled in grad school--again, another story.) Three or four blankets into it, I had the very important--even life-changing revelation--that I LIVE IN AMISH COUNTRY. Everyone around here makes better blankets than I could ever dream of making, and I had no choice other than to be pretty okay with that. I decided I'd make purses instead. After a couple really important years of fumbling around and crying over the sewing machine and generally figuring things out, SOMP became something close to what it is today. I build a pretty awesome bag, but I'm not much of a blanket maker. But let me tell you: the Babykid loves this thing so much that it has gone to school and to bed with her all of last week. It had lunch with her today (and tried to steal her cheese quesadilla). So it's worth the awkwardly pointy corners and the ridiculous happy dolphins and the residual minky fluff stuck to everything, I suppose.  |
by the Seat Of My Pants...the stories behind the bags and beyond.  Archives
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