The Stitch Report #6

Catching Up While Life Keeps Moving

It has been a few weeks since my last Stitch Report, which means I had to reconstruct this one from completed quilt blocks, photographs on my phone and whatever details my brain happened to retain. Apparently, this is one more reason to keep reporting regularly. I do have a personal journal that could help with these things. The journal, unfortunately, cannot remind me to write in the journal.

Still, quite a bit has happened—both in the sewing room and everywhere beyond it.

Mom’s Quilt Is Finished

The most important finish was Mom’s quilt.

I made it for the treatment days ahead, although we are still waiting for the official treatment plan. There is something particularly difficult about knowing that something hard is coming without knowing exactly when it will begin or what it will look like.

The quilt was one thing I could do while we waited. I could choose the fabric, sew the pieces, finish the quilting and put something tangible into a situation that otherwise offers very little control. It cannot change the diagnosis or hurry the answers along, but it can keep her warm and remind her that she is loved. Sometimes that is what making things is for.

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Progress in the Sewing Room

Beyond Mom’s quilt, I finished the final blocks for Spring Dreams and completed Boo to You. I also finished the latest blocks for the Fat Quarter Shop Designer Mystery Block of the Month.

For someone who occasionally feels as though she has accomplished nothing, that is a respectable amount of evidence to the contrary.

Spring Dreams has now reached the stage where the individual work simply needs to be sewn together to become an actual quilt. Boo to You is finished, which is satisfying both because I enjoyed it and because completing something before the holiday it celebrates always feels exceptionally gratifying.

The Designer Mystery quilt continues to grow one installment at a time. A block of the month is a lovely system: someone sends me just enough work to feel productive, but not enough to make me question all of my life choices at once.

Football Season Has Arrived

Football season has started, which means it has become nearly the only topic of conversation between my husband, my son and me.

To be clear, my contribution to these conversations is limited and I’m generally an innocent (and silent) bystander.

My son plays on the line, which means his job involves a considerable amount of deliberate collision. While he is on the field, I am not analyzing formations, coverage or yardage. Other people apparently see strategy unfolding. I am watching my son make and absorb repeated contact while trying to determine whether he is all right.

The detailed analysis happens after the game, when my husband and son discuss what happened, what should have happened and what everyone else on the field was apparently supposed to be doing. By then, I am usually listening while washing a very stinky uniform and trying to follow a conversation conducted almost entirely in a language I still do not speak.

I have been around football for years. I recognize many of the words. I simply cannot guarantee that I understand what any of them mean when arranged into a sentence.

My real interest remains much simpler: Is my kid okay? Is he injured? Did he have a good night? The formations can be reviewed by the people who understand them. I will continue monitoring for limping and locating the stain remover.

Everyone Keeps Growing Up

Grandchildren have started school, that makes four attending now.

My daughter is now working two jobs and becoming an adult with alarming determination.

There is pride in watching her take on more responsibility and build a life of her own. There is also the strange parental adjustment of realizing that the child you have spent years guiding no longer needs—or necessarily requests—your opinion on every decision.

Apparently, raising children successfully results in them becoming independent people. This seems like something we should have been warned about more clearly at the beginning.

Between one child working two jobs and another spending Friday nights on a football field, I am being reminded that parenting older children is largely an exercise in standing nearby, trying not to interfere unnecessarily and remaining available when they need you. It is considerably less physically exhausting than raising toddlers, but I am not convinced it requires less worrying.

The Yellow Jackets messed with the wrong person

I say that with conviction now, but on that day….

The yellow-jacket situation began without any awareness that we had a yellow-jacket situation.

I was pulling weeds in the garden when I went to pick up what I thought was a rock. That was the exact moment the attack began. I was simply gardening, which the yellow jackets apparently interpreted as an act of war when I apparently jostled their home.

Yes, I was chased, yes I ran around the yard like a crazy woman, fortunately I escaped with only a few stings. Of course that would be after sundown, with ammunition and protective gear.

The nest was raided. The yellow jackets are dead. I would like the official record to show that they initiated hostilities.

Gardening is supposed to be peaceful. Mine now requires situational awareness and possibly protective equipment. So, I think I’ll stick to quilting, fewer insects.

In My Ears

While some of this sewing was happening, I was listening to Wedding Ring by Emilie Richards. It led me into an unexpected investigation of “pelsnickling,” a genuine Christmas tradition carried into the Shenandoah Valley by German-speaking immigrants.

I had never heard the word before and was not entirely sure I had heard it correctly. As it turns out, there are so many accepted spellings—Pelsnickling, Belsnickling, Pelznickling and several relatives—that guessing was practically the traditional method.

Pelsnicklers dressed in disguises, visited neighboring homes and expected people to identify them, usually while creating noise, confusion and general seasonal disorder. Christmas customs have apparently not always involved matching pajamas and carefully staged cocoa.

This is what happens when I listen to audiobooks while sewing. I begin with a novel and emerge several hours later researching masked German Christmas visitors. The quilt progresses, but so does the collection of information in my head that will almost certainly appear in an unrelated conversation later.

What the Past Few Weeks Added Up To

Mom’s quilt is finished while we wait for her treatment plan. Spring Dreams has reached its final blocks, Boo to You is complete, and the Designer Mystery quilt has moved forward. Football season has returned, along with the vocabulary I still cannot master and the worry I understand perfectly. Grandkids are growing up. My daughter is working two jobs and steadily becoming her own person. The yellow jackets have been evicted with extreme prejudice.

This is why the Stitch Report cannot be only a list of quilt projects. The quilts become the timeline for everything happening around them. Mom’s quilt will always belong to this period of waiting. These blocks will remind me of football games, stinky uniforms, children becoming adults, an audiobook rabbit hole and the day I tried to pick up a rock that fought back.

A few weeks from now, my brain may reduce all of this to a vague impression that I did not accomplish very much. The evidence says otherwise. I finished a quilt, completed blocks, kept several projects moving, worried about my children, survived a yellow-jacket ambush and learned what pelsnickling means.

That is considerably more than nothing—and exactly why I needed to write it down.

~Chris