Quilting | BulgingButtons

August 12, 2014
by BulgingButtons 8 Comments

Damn You, Pinterest Divas

I’m sitting here in my office/studio/craft room (I haven’t settled on one name for it yet) surrounded by boxes waiting to be unpacked, and cursing the people who have posted all those amazing office/studio/craft room pictures on Pinterest. I have the room, I have the furniture, and I have the stuff, but I don’t have the office/studio/craft room of my dreams. I don’t even have one worthy of a photo. At least not yet.

I had an idea in my head of what my space would ultimately look like, but as I’m sitting in it, the reality of my environment is slowly sinking in. It’s not Tiffany Blue. It doesn’t have a hardwood floor. There is no chandelier. There are no built in cabinets. None of the furniture is white. In fact, it looks a lot less like Pinterest and a lot more like a cluttered suburban bedroom with a desk stuck in the middle. Go figure.

More or less my fantasy studio

The funny part about it is that the desk isn’t really even a desk. It’s a table, and it used to be my kitchen table. It’s from IKEA and it’s not terribly fancy, but it’s a great size, and it gets the job done. Add in two matching floating shelves for my flying pig collection and family photos, my four double cube units for quilting fabric, and my two big bookcases, and you might think I would be golden. You would be wrong.

I also have a set of matching IKEA drawers and a small Closetmaid nine cube unit. The fabric cubes and the big bookcases are brown, everything else is black. The walls and carpet are beige. Not a dull, ugly beige, but a modern pretty beige. Still, beige is beige. Stunning, right?

I can’t have a chandelier, I need my ceiling fan, and frankly it’s new and it looks pretty good. I won’t be getting hardwood flooring. I live in a super-dry climate and wood doesn’t do that well. Besides, the carpet is new. The paint job is new too, so Tiffany Blue will have to run its course in other people’s homes. I do love it, but will I next year? Beige is forever, people. Looking around, it occurs to me that I actually sort of like my space. I have my books, my fabric, my pigs, my computer, and my sewing machine. I have room to work, and if I’m in the middle of a mess I can shut the door and nobody has to know. I more than like my space, I’m growing to love it.

No, there are no cute decals on the wall about home and family and living and laughing and loving. And no, I don’t have color coordinated bins for my supplies or a chevron printed office chair, but I have space. I have space to think and plan and create and design and write and sew and dream and wonder. I have space to display the things that inspire me and space to store the tools I need to help me turn those inspirations into finished products. My room may not be Pinterest worthy, but I do love it here. Now if I could only get the rest of those infernal boxes unpacked…

August 7, 2014
by BulgingButtons 6 Comments

Throwback Thursday – Internet

Remember the good old days, before internet? No? I do, but it seems like ancient history now. Here are some of the oldies but goodies from my personal internet past. How many of these experiences do we share?

1. Dial up. Ugh. It was so slow, and it tied up the telephone line. Some people even went so far as to put in a second telephone line. Imagine.

2. Prodigy Online Service. I was never an AOL girl. I got my start on Prodigy and liked it just fine. I participated in a bunch of online quilting swaps through Prodigy, and really enjoyed connecting with quilters across the country.

3. Parent Soup. I loved this online community when my son was a baby. I participated in the mom’s group for the month and year of his birth and really got to know many of the other moms and their babies. We created a cookbook together, we celebrated milestones together, and one of the girls even sent me flowers in the hospital when I had surgery.

4. Geocities. They hosted all sorts of cheesy webpages. Our baby webpages from the Parent Soup mom’s group were hosted by Geocities, and by golly they were adorable.

5. Yahoo Message Boards. My scrapbook buddies and I were part of a group that used a Yahoo Message Board, and it worked really well for us. In addition to all the conversation threads, there was a chat feature, which we used for a formal chat session once a week, and informally all the time. It was so cool to chat with friends in New Zealand!

Today’s technology makes these formally cutting edge services seem antiquated, or at the very least, quaint. I wonder what’s around the corner to make today’s internet seem like it’s from the dark ages. Whatever it is, I’m sure there will be a place for me.

May 28, 2014
by BulgingButtons 11 Comments

All or Nothing Has Got to Go

I don’t know where we get the “all or nothing” attitude. I suppose it stems from perfectionism. If we can’t do it all, why bother doing anything? But that thinking is flawed, and it keeps us stuck.

I’ve been thinking about this as a negative, but let me turn it to the positive for a moment. I’m a “big picture” kind of person. A while back I had a principal who provided the whole staff with Strengthsfinder 2.0 books, and we all took the test to find our strengths. I wasn’t terribly surprised to find that my strongest came out as “ideation.”

According to the Strengthsfinder folks, “People strong in the Ideation theme are fascinated by ideas. They are able to find connections between seemingly disparate phenomena.” In other words, I see things as part of a whole, and can envision how they all connect together. This is very helpful when I’m planning lessons and units in school, when I’m renovating parts of my home, or when I’m designing a quilt.

The flip side of this, for me anyway, is that I sometimes get lost in the details. I know what I want the whole thing to look like and how I want it to function, but all the little bits and pieces of making it happen sometimes trip me up. That’s where I get stuck.

Instead of writing a whole novel, I need to start with an outline. Instead of cleaning the whole house, I need to wash the dishes. Instead of losing 100 pounds, I need to go for a walk. Breaking down these big goals into smaller, more manageable ones, isn’t hard, it just doesn’t come easily or naturally to me. I want to do it all, and I want to do it now. I know that’s not realistic for large goals, so I tend to do nothing instead. How crazy is that?

I have to stop myself and make myself hear how ridiculous I’m being. I would never expect a student to get an idea for a research paper then turn in that finished paper the same morning. I wouldn’t expect my son to take up a new sport and be and expert at it in the same week. I wouldn’t expect my dog to master a new behavior the first time she tries it. So why do I expect so much of myself?

I CAN lose a hundred pounds. It will take a long time and I will get tripped up along the way, but I have to expect that and forgive myself and keep moving forward. I CAN be a published author, but not if I don’t hone my craft and submit my writing to publishers. I CAN keep my home neat and tidy, but not if I don’t spend 5 minutes here and 10 minutes there to keep up with it.

Many imperfect steps in the correct direction will lead me far further down the path I wish to travel than just a few perfect steps. I have to keep this in mind and just keep moving. Living in a state of inertia, while easy, holds no rewards. With risk comes reward, and with work comes success. Wish me success and I try to learn this lesson over and over again.