That was a mouthful!

Made this cake last weekend for a nephew. The thing is, I was told his younger brother was the one celebrating a birthday–turns out Dondie is actually, well, 16 years old now. If I was 16, I wouldn’t really appreciate a turtle cake, but he’s a sweet kid and didn’t seem to mind.

Made with cupcakes frosted as one to look like a happy Mr. Turtle. Who would eventually be eaten.

I’ve never been good with colors. For the longest time, I was stuck in the whole matchy-matchy color mode, where I was on the eternal quest to match my shoes with my purse. Hence, I could only make quilts that were the standard white and pink, blue and white, red and white, etc. Orange and blue? WHY?!?!

But over the past three years or so, I actually started discovering colors I never considered before. I really don’t know how it happened. I guess it could be my age, or maybe by the simple scientific process of osmosis–my brother’s studying art and there’s talk of color and the fascination with it everyday.

I still have problems figuring out color value, especially for quilts, but I’m finding out that as much as anything, color is a practice. You keep at it, you get better.

I continue to be fascinated by how visual artists see color and design, which is why they’re my muses. I need to borrow their eyes, because mine are, frankly, color blind. Or maybe color deaf. Whatever this affliction is, I realize that my eyes just weren’t built to process color the way theirs do.

That’s why my blog is this strange–though wonderfully new for me–palette. It’s my way of celebrating this stunning ad for Bassetti Tessutti, the almost-mythical, labyrinthine fabric store in Rome:

And Maison Martin Margiela, whose creative genius continues to awe me with every new season.

The crafting and cooking life is a crazy life if you don’t have an outlet for it. Ideas crowd your brain like the mosh pit at a Pearl Jam concert. The more obvious thing to do is to MAKE all of these ideas but there are only 24 hours in a day, and you only have two hands.

So you bide your time. You let the ideas pile up into big mounds of colored silk in your brain. You get by. But then you find yourself awake at 2 am in a foreign city (not good, because you don’t even know where you ARE when it happens.) What was that, you ask in the dark. The answer is an idea for a skirt, appearing to you from the ether, floating through the wispy levels of your sleep. On the way back home, you start seeing quilt patterns on the bathroom tiles in the airport. Finally, when you find yourself studying Japanese fabric patterns online at 6:30 am before you head off to work the day after your flight gets in, you realize you’re turning into a freak. A crafts freak.

So you decide to do something about it. Buy a notebook, write down all your ideas, flesh them out one by one. Sketch them out, even if you could never draw to save your life. And write about them, as much as you can.

You stop fighting your craftster self. You realize that you are, after all, the granddaughter of two amazing craftsters: one who could whip Swiss meringue into airy peaks by hand, and another who lived until she was 102 years old, quilting on a manual sewing machine up until she was 98.

So hello there, my craftster self. And hello to you.