A sign of better times

I recently posted a sign over the kitchen sink. It reads: "If you dirty it, then you must wash it. The Management." Notice I've given myself a promotion. I'm no longer chief cook and bottle washer.

Mom smirked when I told her about my new plan to do less cleaning up after all the able bodied men in the house. I actually heard her do this over the phone. It sounds like it's spelled. "Smirkff," she said and right away I started worrying that this experiment in training my children and my husband to be better roommates was doomed to failure. She told me to tell her how it was going in a week's time.

Well, it's been a week and it's still working. It's all due to the paper plate with the marker message on it that's taped to the kitchen window. When the boys see the sign it reminds them that I'm right there, looking over their shoulders, making that Dog Whisperer noise, that "tch" sound that stops them from setting down a dirty plate or cup somewhere convenient and prompts them to run some hot water and soap over them and then put them in the dish drainer.

It hasn't been perfect. I still have to empty the dish drainer from time to time, otherwise the stack gets teetery, and broken china was never part of management's vision, but if you look at it as a way of counting how many dishes I don't have to do every day, it's impressive. I'm thinking of making another sign on a paper plate, enclosing it in a ziplock and hanging it in the shower. "If you shed it, you must clean it out of the hair trap. The Benevolent Dictatorship." I'm due for another raise.

Bleeding creativity

My fingers are sore and stiff today. Why, oh why do I ruin the skin on my fingers trying to execute these elaborate hand sewing projects? I must be going senile. I know this, not because words and names I used to know escape me, but because I've forgotten once again what a pain it is to push a needle through six layers of denim at a time. Satin stitching a teal border on a blue jean pocket is a cool way to hide a hole on a pair of pants destined to be made into a big purse, but it's also a very painful way to express oneself. Does it make you more creative if you bleed on your projects?

One minute I was searching the house for the pile of old jeans I'd last seen moldering in a corner of the living room, the next I had cut them up into rectangles and was piecing them together in interesting ways, not caring what this would mean for my poor fingers. If you're going to the trouble of hand making a fashion accessory, racking up hours of labor and pain in the process, then the end product has got to be cool, cool enough to draw admiring remarks and envious looks from all your equally craft-crazed friends.

Twenty four hours into this project, I've already decided to reduce the number of pockets on it from four to two, soon to be one, maybe, probably, definitely. And I'll just paint on any more embellishments I think up from here on out. For one thing, it'll be easier on my hands, and for another, this way I may even get to use the purse before Christmas. Besides, if I don't scale back on the amount of effort required to finish this endeavor pretty quickly, it will end up tucked away in a shopping bag somewhere, filed in my mind as another PTBCSWIFME (Project To Be Completed Sometime When I'm Feeling More Energetic).

The thing is, projects like this one -- labor-intensive, spur of the moment and falling into the category of Biting Off More Than I Can Chew in a Weekend -- always prompt me to think inconvenient thoughts while I'm doing them. Thoughts like, I could walk into any number of thrift stores and pick up a perfectly serviceable purse for $4 or less and paint it to look like something I would be proud to claim as my own and it would be a lot less trouble than what I'm doing now. The problem with this solution is that nothing is open until 10 am (it's 8 am now) and I have no money, not even an extra four dollars, which is precisely what prompted this whole project in the first place. Also, I wanted a bigger purse than what I'm using now.

Unfortunately, I think that this purse will also be too small to be practical. Stupid to start with my son's old blue jeans, really. They're a size 8. Slim. There's only so much yardage available in jeans this size. The purse I'm building has to be able to carry my wallet, my checkbook, my sketchbook, my notebook, any current sewing projects, my water bottle and snacks. In other words, about 20 pounds of stuff.

I had a bag like this when I was in college. It also held, in addition to the list above, a masonite board, clips, an 18" x 24" pad of newsprint, assorted drawing pencils, tubes of student grade acrylic paint, paint brushes and a plastic can for holding water. As I recall, it was while I was carrying all this plus four bags of groceries up a flight of stairs to my apartment that I experienced my very first back spasm, which put me on the floor, then in my bed for two weeks. I lay there, waiting for the pain to go away, meantime consuming ibuprofen by the handful and counting the minutes until my boyfriend got home from work every day so he could help me to the bathroom.

On second thought, maybe there's enough fabric here after all...