I spent most of the afternoon - after I got my grading and other various things done - sewing on the newest quilt.

Or actually, I spent a lot of the time cutting; the way my back/hip were hurting standing was the most comfortable position (it's better now; I think the standing helped). I pulled out some of the cds I had not listened to in a while to play while I worked.

A couple of thoughts on Shostakovitch:
First, his music (at least the Jazz Suites, which is what I was listening to) is good music to rotary cut fabric by. Second - and I'm assuming this; I don't know anything about the man - he seems like someone who must have had a good sense of humor. The Jazz Suites are inherently amusing (if it's not disrespectful to say that) to listen to. They make me happy. I kept hitting "replay" for the last bit - his arrangement of Tea for Two (known in the Soviet Union, I guess, as Tahiti Trot).

It would make a very fun piece for some talented ballroom dancers (or, heck, the dancers on Dancing with the Stars) to dance to. (I know, it's probably been done to death, but I don't get to watch that much ballroom dancing).

I finished the first row of the quilt, got more than halfway on the second, and I have a bunch more pieces cut for later. I did wind up having to go to my stash - I had misread the pattern and thought it said 8 fabrics total when it was actually 8 of each color - but I have an extensive fabric stash and I managed to find things that will work well. I also found a couple pieces that I had almost used up, but would work, and I'm happy I can get a couple more patches out of them.

Some people have problems cutting the fabric they buy; they are sad to think they won't have any more of it. I used to be that way but now I have so much fabric - and some of it for so long - that I tend more to be, when I look in my stash, "Oh, there's that great fabric - what can I use it in?"

I enjoy sewing and I realize now how much I miss it when I don't have a project going. As much as I love knitting, sewing is really my first love. You might say it's the mother tongue of artistic expression for me (if that doesn't sound too grand). Sewing is the first fiber-related craft I ever learned, and it's a pleasure to return to it from time to time.

I suppose I knew how to draw before I knew how to sew, but I've never been able to draw with the comfort and facility with which I sew. I think I'm a 3-D art person at heart; most 2-D art forms don't come naturally to me.

I wonder if there's a genetic disposition to the type of art/craft/expression a person is most comfortable with and good at, just as there are genetic tendencies for math skills and music and (apparently) language ability. I come from a long line of people who knit and sew and crochet (at least on my mother's side of the family). Of course, it's hard to tease out nurture from nature - my mother taught me to sew when I was like 6 - when she figured I was old enough to be smart enough not to drop the scissors on my foot or stick the needles in my nose.

When I was a kid, I mostly made stuffed toys for myself. A lot of the toys I played with were animals I had made - either from patterns or not. I did a lot of my own designing when I was a kid, it was very loose and free, where I would design on the fly and recut or take darts as necessary to make the thing I was making match the picture of it I had in my head. (I still do that once in a while; after all, I made Wilbur.)

But it's nice to be able to go back and use a skill that's been a part of my life since I was six or so.

I've also been getting back more heavily into crochet, which is another skill I learned early and hadn't used for some years. And I think it's probably good in a mind-stretching sense to get out the old skills, dust them off, polish them up, and maybe add new skills onto them.

And I also was thinking about how knitters and quilters and crocheters and embroiderers (and I'm sure other makers-of-things but those are the ones I'm most familiar with) spend a lot of time decoding symbology, interpreting things. With quilting you often find yourself peering at a cryptic arrangement of shapes and figuring out how those shapes on the page (particularly if you're working with a different arrangement of colors) correspond to the actual fabric shapes you have in hand. And in knitting, there's all the charts - lace and fair isle and cabling. And crochet also has "symbolcraft," which I had never worked with before but am slowly beginning to understand.

And it's probably good for the brain to be making all those connections, to be working in different languages, so to speak.

And I also like the idea - especially with the crochet symbolcraft - that you don't need to understand the language a pattern is written in to make it (All the Japanese crochet books out there that people are making stuff from...). It's like the Universal Language of Craft. A crocheter's Esperanto. And that makes me happy, to think that all these people all around the world, could take the same pattern and interpret it and make something from it and it would make sense to them. Kind of like that old 1970s Coca-Cola ad with all the people on the mountaintop. ("I'd like to knit the world an Amigurumi"?)

(I would like there to be a fuller Universal Language of Craft, especially for knitting. Kind of like in the old days when all scientists were supposed to know at least some Latin, or when most botanists and ecologists knew German because lots of papers were published internationally in that language. Or how French used to be the international language of diplomacy. I suppose English has largely become the lingua franca in lots of the world, but, not everyone uses it (nor should they have to.) I know that there are "dictionaries of knitting" to translate, but there are still nations - especially those where a different alphabet or writing system is used - where it would be hard to interpret patterns from.)

Anyway. You know that ad for the new sleep aid that has the tagline "your dreams miss you"? Well, last week - as busy as I was - my fabric missed me. And my yarn missed me. And my books missed me. And my mental musings missed me - I was even too busy to really think. And I missed them, too. But thank God, this coming week looks easier, and I'm learning that I have to use a little enlightened self-interest and say "no" to things that I technically CAN to but that make my schedule so tight that I'm not a happy camper any more.