Sweet dreams

There's something snoring in my room right now. I imagine it's one of two cats who snores -- one because he's old, the other because he's overweight. My husband has sleep apnea but refuses to use his CPAP machine, so he's been relegated to the guest room. Even still, he snores so loudly that we can hear him through the walls and closed doors. When we were all staying in a hotel room in Montreal, I asked my son to jiggle Dad to get him to stop snoring. I don't know what he thought jiggle meant (I suppose he was 6 or 7 at the time), but he put a spare pillow over Dad's face instead. I can't imagine too many circumstances where jiggle and smother mean the same thing, unless you're talking about Christina Aguilera's breasts.

I've always been a light sleeper and, as a result, I've been tired most of my life. You know how annoying it is when you go to work and and someone says, You look tired? I never heard that: for me, the odd comment  was more like, Boy, you look refreshed. I can count on one hand the number of sound night's sleeps I get in a year. I marvel at my son, who can fall asleep anywhere, in an instant. When he was little, he'd try to climb into his crib, but never attempted an escape. One page of our cruise scrapbook is dedicated to the various places onboard where he fell asleep. I caught him not too long ago asleep on the glider in the backyard, with the neighborhood stray cat asleep on his lap.

In honor of sleep, I made some pillowcases this weekend. One is for my daughter's cat, who apparently appropriates all of her pillows and is not-so-secretly plotting to overtake her entire bed. Another is for her because, before I started this stash-elimination mission, I found in the remnant pile at JoAnn Fabric some licensed fabric representing her grad school. I donated the rest to the Million Pillowcase Challenge.

Added to last year's donation, I've now made 25 pillowcases for charity. I do hope they'll bring someone sweet dreams.

When I look back on all the things I learned in high school ...

So you can tell by my rhapsodic waxing last week that I was a fan of my high school teacher, Mrs. Mills. But hers weren't the only great classes I took. I loved Spanish all three years with Mr. Meredith, who wrote in my yearbook that I was one of the only true scholars of high school age, proving that not only was he a great teacher but an excellent judge of intellect as well. Mr. Fanning's Constitutional History class was mesmerizing and exposed me for the first time to the actor Sam Waterston, who I still have a bit of a crush on. Then there was Chemistry with Mr. Parker. He had a glass eye and was nicknamed "Gumby" for reasons lost to Appleton West history.

Although I didn't take sewing in high school, my junior high home ec sewing classes remain some of the most valuable, long-lived lessons I learned.  Sewing has been a way for me to relax, to contribute, to express my creativity. I've had articles about my quilting published in national magazines (fingers crossed for a new piece I'm submitting tomorrow) and I've enjoyed writing this blog tremendously. I never imagined when I was making that first doll dress and then the little apron that all these years later I would still enjoy it so much. And even though the teacher's name is long forgotten, I do remember that her husband was training to be a surgeon and would cut out her patterns for practice. We were all quite envious of that.

Yesterday I was at JoAnn Fabric and the young woman who rang me up started telling me how her high school sewing class changed her life. I don't know whether she was a star student overall, but she said that excelling in sewing class and having the items she designed and made modeled in two fashion shows gave her confidence she'd never felt before. Her career path, she said, would include fashion and sewing -- two things she had never considered just a few years earlier. She just looked so darned happy as she spoke, I wanted to hug her.

I have completed another Freedom Place quilt top. The featured fabric is a slightly more subdued cat print that has a lot of grey in it, which could be a problem. I didn't want the quilt to look too moody or dull, but foraging in the stash provided a great solution: a black and white plaid and a quirky heart-and-asterisk print that "called to me" during a late-night online shopping spree.

I think that together they are very young and refreshing.  They provide a counterbalance to the cat print and the other complementary fabrics.

Here's a closer look at the cat print. Cute, right?

And here's the completed top. 

Happy, Happy, Joy, Joy

Thanks to the generosity of five friends who are sponsoring Freedom Place quilts, I had the great pleasure of fabric shopping today, again with someone else's money. I shopped at JoAnn Fabric, where everything was on sale and I had a coupon. (I also shopped at Quiltworks, where everything was on sale and I had a coupon, for a quilt I'm doing on commission.) Because I'm an abject failure at running-totaling and the fact that I was drunk on fabric fumes (I've lost my tolerance), I overspent the cash I had in hand, but I'm still within my anticipated budget. I'm sure I'll get more than five quilts out of my purchases; my hope is to have a matching pillowcase for each girl, too.

Here's what I bought.

 It's not apparent from this photo, but the purple gingham complements the purple in the butterfly print quite well.

 I'll use this orange in more than one quilt.

I chose bright colors to cast out the darkness these girls and young women have experienced in their lives, butterflies and flowers to represent renewal, and cats because I like cats!

I'll be working on my commission quilts over the weekend.

Happy Passover, Happy Easter. See you on Monday.