…is make you brave enough to say, “Yes, I can.”

Back from dance class—my first real one in 11 months—tired but unbelievably happy. I looked like a hippo as I lumbered around in my leotards, but all I knew was I’d worked up the courage to rediscover a craft I’ve been too scared to go back to, buoyed by the hope that anything is possible. (America woke up to a new president today. ANYTHING is possible!)

I was a hopeful hippo, at least!

May YOU have the chance to say, “Yes, I can,” today.

It’s been around two months since I started working on my quilt. I haven’t posted any updates because I didn’t quite know what and how to tell its story. But today, I finally know how to begin. Today’s a perfect day for a beginning.

We start my quilt’s story with a question.

How many quilts have I completed in all my years of sewing?

And an answer.

One.

Quilts are tricky things, you see. I always start out thinking that I’m going to finish one in three weeks. Piecing squares of fabric together is therapeutic, mechanical and quick. All it is, quite often, is straight sewing, much like what I did the first time I learned how to use the sewing machine in home ec. Once the quilt’s started, I lose myself in the sewing machine’s steady hum, and something my grandma used to say when she herself used to sew: “One stitch in front of another, one stitch in front of another, one stitch…”

I think I’ll finish it, but I never do. My fingers find themselves tending to a new cake in the kitchen, or whipping cream for a strawberry mousse I’ve always wanted to learn, at the ends of a crocheted scarf or binding off a summer dress for my niece. These other projects are done in an hour, a day at most, so they’re quick fixes for my crafty twitchings. A quilt, on the other hand, demands time, patience and meticulousness. In the early years of my sewing I was much younger, and I had none of these.

And so it has been through many quilts: a silly dance around the possibility of completion. All in all, since I started to seriously sew about five years ago, I’ve started and stopped three wedding quilts for different friends, one of which was for Bona, who’s now not only married, but happily pregnant! Then there was my first attempt at making a Rail Fence quilt to keep my friend Gretchen warm when she moved to New York from Manila to study (she ended up graduating and I never got to finish it), another one to keep my friends Via and Noel cozy as they began the adventure of their lives in Torino, Italy. I even started working on a redwork quilt for Ross because red’s is her favorite color, though after all these years of never having finished the quilt, her favorite color is now, if I’ve heard right, brown (or orange? I can’t remember)! So many quilts…so many good intentions that ended up half-patched, half-made, half-lived.

But.

Somewhere in Manila is the only quilt I’ve ever completed.

It was made for a boyfriend from an old life, many seasons ago, a patchwork of colors he liked. I write about it because it was the first and last quilt I’ve ever made from start to finish. When you’re young, running on nothing but a dangerous mix of rock music and naive love, you can finish just about anything.

But I grew up, expanded my music library beyond the Foo Fighters, and allowed the years to roll on, some too quickly, others not quickly enough. When 2008 announced itself to me in the bright fireworks above Manila back in January, I decided that when I came back to Los Angeles, I would give myself the gift of a quilt in my favorite colors of green and pink. I would finally finish another quilt, just for me, and all on my own (my mom always helps me, and I’ve always wondered if I could make one by myself.)

I discovered that in the months leading up to when I actually started the project, I found my way back to the familiarity of sewing. I rediscovered my love for fabrics, reconnecting with a craft that’s been in my family for generations, making friends with the craftster in me who had fallen asleep between the piles of half-quilts in my closet through these years.

Choosing the colors for my quilt made me remember my favorites, but made me realize all the new ones I’d come to love.

Laying out the pieces and arranging them to make sense to my eye was almost like seeing myself on cloth (if that makes any sense at all)!

And sitting at my old post in front of the sewing machine, with Dave Matthews keeping me company, was like coming home.

I became whole, as the quilt did. A patch of old rose here, the delicate pattern of a gilded leaf there. Stitching those pieces together was like piecing myself together. (Yes, those are Band-Aids on my fingers. I’m a clumsy girl!)

And today, I look at how far I’ve come, step back and think, I believe I’m actually going to finish this. I know this with a certainty like no other. After this is done, I can truly say I’ve made not one, but two quilts in my life, and I’m on my way to making more.

I’ll be posting more updates, including a simple tutorial on how the quilt was constructed, in case you’re interested in making your own patchwork story. It isn’t as complicated as it may look!

However this post found you today: eating a bowl of strawberry porridge before you begin your morning, maybe as you’re rushing on your way to someplace, or as you’re taking a breather from a hectic day, I hope it reminded you that in the crafting of YOUR life, it’s never too late for beginnings.

You’ll celebrate with me when the final piece of thread’s been snipped off, won’t you? A brand-new quilt. I’m almost, ALMOST there! One stitch in front of another. I can’t wait.

Thank you to Ross, Via, Gretch and Ms. Nina for seeing me through this project in more ways than one. You are all pieces in my crazy patchwork life, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

(This is a long post. Mind you, I had two hours to write this—you’ll read why—and three days to edit it while I was sick in bed. So, only read when you’ve got lots of sweet downtime, maybe with a cup of tea, or better yet, with a glass of chianti!)

Mi manca Roma—I miss Rome!

You’re going to think me strange, because I’m actually writing this from the San Francisco airport, worlds away from Europe, as I wait for my trip back to Los Angeles. It’s after two full weeks (and weekends!) of work. Sitting here, looking out at the tarmac as the planes lift off, I’m reminded of a post I’ve wanted to write.

And so, here we go.

I write this today because I’m an obsessively early airline passenger and there’s two hours to go before I board the plane, because this is the first chance I’m getting to blog about anything in over a week (well, two weeks now as of this posting), and especially because sitting in an airport at this ungodly hour reminds me of the early-morning airport wait before that flight to Rome early this year.

The trip deserves a post, maybe the longest one I’ll ever write, because it was actually in the Eternal City that I decided to start blogging. It was a trip of many adventures, but the biggest one for me wasn’t the fact that I was in Europe for the first time, not eating authentic Italian gelato in front of the Trevi, not even gaping up at the colors that had bloomed from Michelangelo’s paintbrush on the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling.

I imagine that my biggest Roman adventure was actually quite commonplace and would be ordinary to many people. But to a crafter who didn’t speak the language, it was big enough for me to decide to write about my crafting (and cooking) life. That adventure was when, one cold day in February, I worked up the gumption to buy some fabric, in a country I’d never been in before, from a man who didn’t speak a lick of English and was flirting with me the entire time, despite the fact that he was old enough to be my father.

The fabric store of my undoing was Bassetti Tessuti on Corso Vittorio Emanuele II, 73, Rome, 186. It’s Rome’s largest fabric store, with a fabled inventory that draws famous design houses, seamstresses and crafters to its labyrinthine halls of cloth. It maintains an extensive collection of fabrics (almost 200,000 types) in every imaginable weave, from Lake Como silk to Piedmont wool.

I first read about it on NYTimes.com a few months before I decided to go to Rome. Non-crafters won’t quite understand me when I say that my heart was in my throat when I read that article. It was short but rife with descriptions that spun pictures in my head. I imagined getting lost in the store, half-mad at all those walls of fabric. It would be the highlight of a life spent falling in love with cloth. It’s a fascination that’s grown through the years because it grounds me to a shared history with all the other crafters in my family, especially my grandmothers from both sides.

By the time I took the trip to Rome, I already had the idea to restart a fabric collection. Reading that article made me decide to hunt down the store and make sure I had time for it on my itinerary. I took along a Moleskine journal published expressly for Rome, with maps of the city and pages that I could be creative with (I got mine from Amazon). One of those pages had a part of the NYTimes article, along with Basseti’s address, stuck to it. (You can click on the image for a larger view.)

Below is a group of fabric swatches that I already had in my small collection, most of which I wanted to use for a quilt. I stuck them in the journal as well, to guide me in case there would be any fabric available at the store that would fit well in the quilt’s intended palette. A line from Madonna’s “Material Girl” makes this a pun-y entry in my Roma journal, because I’m silly that way.

(That journal was my lifeline in that foreign city. It had Italian phrases taught to me by my polyglot friend Via, addresses and funny notes like the one below from my brother—an art student—on “Dorking Out Art-Wise” in Rome!)

When we found the store, the friend who was with me probably didn’t know how nervous I was going into it, but really, I was beyond intimidated. I hid my anxiety by gorging on a cone of pistachio gelato, standing outside the store and licking furiously, feeling the nervousness dissipate with each mouthful of the divine sweet stuff. With the last bite, I had enough gumption to at least start making my way up the two flights of stairs from the ground floor to the Basetti main lobby.

I wish I could post pictures, but frankly, I was so nervous that I couldn’t take my camera out. So, I’m posting these, but credits go to Chris-Warde Jones at NYTimes.com. The store’s interior really looks like this, with bolt upon bolts of cloth and staff members at cutting stations, waiting for you to point to your choices so they can cut them to your specifications.

My heart was on the verge of giving out as I stood there, overwhelmed, realizing that what the article said was true: Bassetti was THE Italian’s fabric hub, and nobody there spoke English. I timidly made my way down streets of silk and byways of brocade, around corners of chiffon. One alley led to another, and then another in a dizzying maze of colors and textures.

I stopped and had to take a long, deep breath.

And then I turned around, retraced my steps back to the entrance, down the flights of stairs and was back out on the street in under 10 seconds.

I was too chicken to do anything! I left without so much as a square inch of cloth. I mumbled an excuse to my friend who had been waiting outside. “Nothing matches my swatches,” I said. Which was partly true, because I couldn’t find any cotton suitable for quilting, and mostly that was because I was too nervous to actually look for it.

As we walked away, I heard my mom’s voice in my head (which often happens!): “Your trip to that store should be spontaneous. You go because you want to go, for the pleasure of it. Don’t let your swatches dictate the experience.”

And so, from across the street, as my friend withdrew some cash from an ATM, I looked up at the store, knit my brows, clutched my journal and declared that I was going back in. I marched my nervous (but determined) self back into Bassetti, into the belly of the beast, where I finally found a section with cotton bolts from floor to ceiling. Opening to the page in my journal with the Italian phrases, I called out timidly to a man with salt-and-pepper hair and flushed, red cheeks who had been regarding me quietly, with one bushy eyebrow raised: “Puo aiutarmi?” (Can you help me?)

His face broke into a slow grin, and the raised eyebrow turned into a wink. I was petrified. He ambled slowly over to me and mumbled something which I now forget. I just pointed to a bolt of cream cloth with tiny blue clubs on it (like the symbols from a suite in a deck of cards) and said, “Vorrei un metro, per favore,” looking down at my journal the entire time.

He glanced at it and bust out laughing. I joined him, collapsing in nervous giggles; his laugh was just contagious. He was so amused he was practically wheezing.

I was so relieved that I pointed out two more bolts of cloth. Most of them were simple printed cotton, but I’d never seen patterns like those in all my years of fabric sleuthing. Mr. Wheezy carried all the bolts to a long wooden table and started to cut them.

Over the sound of snipsnapping scissors, he raised his bushy eyebrows at me quizzically and asked, “Filipina?” I answered, “Si.” And then, he pointed to the cloth and with broad sweeps of his hands and arms, asked what I would do with them. I used my own hands to demonstrate a purse, a skirt and a blanket/quilt. He guffawed, suggested I buy more than a meter for the skirt print. I nodded a yes. I was fascinated that I was communicating with him, and not with a foreign language, but with sewing gestures as words!

Then, he asked, “Marito?,” a word I didn’t know. I looked at him skeptically, and suspected that he was asking me if I was married because the word sounded like “marital.” He held up his left hand and pointed to the ring finger, pretended he was hugging someone in the air and pursing his lips as if he were kissing an invisible wife. I laughed and shook my head, signifying a no. His eyes lit up. “Ahhh, (mumble Italian mumble some more Italian)…bella,” looking at me. I knew he was saying something about me being pretty, and I tried to hurry him, because all I wanted was to pay for my cloth and get out of the store.

After some more mumbling and more staring at me, he finally walked me to the front of the store to pay for my cloth. The sharply-dressed lady at the cashier was trying to explain something to me, but I had the most confused expression on my face that she probably took pity on me and decided to iron the matter out with Mr. Wheezy. He verified the amount, counted up my cloth, and handed it to me, making sure to hold my hands as he placed the bag of fabric in them.

And then I was out the door.

I looked down at all the fabric I bought. All very quiet, unassuming fabric, but all of which I love, because of what I had to go through to buy them. That night, back in my hotel room, as my big day drew to a close, I stared at my cloth once more and decided: I would write about that day. About how a love for fabric took me out of my self, and how it had reminded me that my creativity is only as rich as I’m willing to feed it—with new experiences, and people and places.

Here’s my loot from Bassetti Tessuti. Someday, the one with multicolored flowers is going to be my “Campo De Fiori” skirt. The nautical one will be book bags or totes with anchor appliqués for friends. The one with small blue chicks, a baby blanket for the friend who taught me to be brave with all those Italian words. And someday, the cream one with clovers/clubs, a quilt for my own daughter, who will fall asleep to the magical tale of how a girl with a curl found herself lost in the thick woods of an enchanted fabric forest (those velvet vines can be pretty scary!), and how she found her way out.

And someday, I hope to go back to Mr. Wheezy, flirt with him in fluent Italian, and buy myself a measure of fine Italian silk.

Sorry all, I’ve been in Sickville. The good news is that I’m riding out the tail end of this–whatever this is. My head feels like it’s stuffed with goo! I hope to be back before you know it, with posts on fabric, quilting and homemade Twinkies. Doesn’t that sound good? Check back soon! (Send me healthy vibes in the meantime, because being a goo-head sucks!)

…to the built-up stress from two weeks (and weekends!) on the road and on the go for work is to come home to crafting, with your favorite cheesy movies playing in the back, your sewing machine humming and the neighborhood cat staring at you from across the way like you’re the strangest thing it’s seen.

It’s been too long, all! There’s so much to write about, and cook about and craft about. Thank God I’m back, and just in time for Fall.

A quick post to say hi and to report from the front lines: I’ve finally begun to work on my quilt. It’s what has kept my hands busy these past few days. I’ve been cutting and trimming and sewing and ripping since Friday last week. And truth be told, the project has kept my mind busy, too.

See, this is a quilt of many stories, some of which I hope to tell in the coming weeks as the quilt begins to take shape. Already, I’m itching to share the tales this craft is allowing me to tell. The words jump over each other with the rhythm of my needles, so much that I laugh to myself as I try to herd all of them into readable lines–they refuse to cooperate! I’m reminded of that article in The New Yorker on brevity, about how six words are all you need to tell a story. So, to start off my quilting project, and to invite you to follow the quilt’s progress over the coming weeks, here are six words that hopefully start off this quilt’s tale :

Threads tread on fabric; fables unfurl.

The quilt won’t be ready for a while, but here’s hoping I keep at it as much as you can. In the meantime, posts on food, fabric, crafts and cupcakes are in the offing! (Next up is a post on making restaurant favorites for a picnic!)

Today is my birthday. It’s also my mixer’s! She turns a year young; she was given to me on my birthday last year. My friends all chipped in to buy her for me, and after years of baking with a handheld Sunbeam, I finally experienced what it’s like to see ordinary batter transform into magical stuff under her capable beaters.

We’ve been through a lot, my mixer and I. I couldn’t have survived the past year without her machine-humming my cares away, without her transforming the best of myself into gifts for many others. Cookies of every shape and kind, cakes of every flavor and fancy, candied confections and divine desserts. Even mashed potatoes!

My mixer and I thank everyone who have been part of our eventful and interesting lives in the past year—family who partook of our culinary projects, and friends both online and off who have kept up with our adventures in flour and eggs. On our birthday, we wish all of you the kinds of magical stuff we try to bake into each cake and cookie: laughter, and love, and wishes for a delicious life.

Happy birthday to us!

—-EDIT—-

When I got to the office this morning, this was on my door.

And this is what I saw inside:

NO WONDER Pam kept looking into my office by the end of the day yesterday, asking when I’d leave. Thank you Alicia, Eric, Bona and Simeen (oh, Pam too!) for staying late to deck out my office in true Twilight style, and making it look like a thirteen-year-old’s bedroom. I’ve never felt younger!

My birthday isn’t in 13 days, but somehow, two crazy girls in Manila conspired to send me an early present. Thank you, G and V, for kicking off the festivities in true Maring style. Your birthday parcel made me do a little dance in my office when the mailroom person dropped it off, and will most probably make me do the same thing in the shower! (My new gifts are Pink Martini sugar scrub and shea lotion from Klean. So THAT’S why V was asking what I thought about the yummy bath-and-body line! Sneaky!)

You girls have known me for 14 birthdays! And now that I think about it, how many cities and countries have we had to endure between us over these years (too many to count!) ? Thank you for sticking with me through it all. Frankly, when all of us ended up in Math 1 together, I knew we’d be friends for life.

Thank you again—lots of love and curly hugs from me!

Thank you, Ma!

- for being a big fan of my curls, sometimes even more than I am

- for always telling me, “Don’t say you can’t.”

- for understanding my “artistic outbursts” (that’s code for “pagka-alabuton”)

- for fueling my own creativity with yours (Please teach me how to tat. I know you’re been trying to teach me since I was in sixth grade, but maybe this is the year I’ll finally learn!)

- for saying, “This is my song for you,” each time you hear Lee Ann Womack’s I Hope You Dance on the radio (We both know it’s really corny, but we always sing along to it anyway!)

Happy birthday to the most interesting mother in the world. Your Girl With A Curl loves you!

(Yes, that’s me on her knee, and my brother behind her. Note that my curls are dormant, and will pounce on me like a thief in the night by the time I’m 12. And oh yeah, thanks Ma, for saving my virtue by your, er, creative hand placement!)

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about my love affair with vanilla.

Sugar is my first love. You know the kind: It happens when you’re young and wide-eyed and the world is still sweet. You never forget it. It stays with you for many years, even after other loves, and the experience of having known it’s enough to make you friends for life.

But oh, vanilla.

Vanilla was my first (culinary) affair. I say this because after sugar, which is like an old friend, it was the one other ingredient—with its dark, dangerous, sweet smell—that seduced me into baking bliss.

For many years, all I knew and loved was the imitation vanilla I grew up with back home in the Philippines. It came in a tiny, short necked, amber bottle with what looked like hand-drawn fruit on a paper label on the front. I wonder if it’s still being sold. I remember it being unsophisticatedly thick and gloopy, but I didn’t think it was made of anything but delicious things that grew in lush, exotic forests.

I fell under its spell, the way its fragrance rounded out the flavors of my baked goods. Nothing smelled half as good as a cake baking in the oven after a scented swath of vanilla had been stirred into its batter, and the heat was coaxing the heavenly steam out of it. Later, mouthwateringly warm, a perfect slice of it would whisper that flavor to your taste buds. The flavor will quietly fight for your tongue’s affection alongside the cake’s sweetness, its texture, all the other complex flavors that give the cake its personality. And in the food wars of my mouth, it was the familiar flavor of vanilla that always won.

When I came to the States around five years ago, my baking habits migrated with me. My first trips to the grocery were to pick up big bottles of imitation, generic, store-brand vanilla. I thought I had hit the gold mine. Here, imitation vanilla is smooth, easy to pour and measure. It dropped elegantly in a dark river into my measuring spoon. None of that silly plopping-out-of-the-bottle business, the way imitation vanilla did back home because it was temperamentally thick.

Even more than any of these qualities, the imitation vanilla here…it smelled like dreams.

About a year into baking in the States, I decided to splurge on a small bottle of pure, premium vanilla with my first salary. I bought it at a chef’s supply store and I felt wicked doing so. It was expensive—around $10 for a 4 fl. oz. bottle. I kept it unopened for several months, saving it for a special dessert.

And then my Lola Luz passed away.

Lola had lived with us for all of my life in the Philippines. She was my spinster grandaunt, my favorite feisty old crone (sorry, Lola!) who took care of me all those years when Mama was here in the States. She went to PTA meetings, taught me to use lampunaya (nightshade) leaves for bruises, made sure my school uniforms were pressed. I loved her for taking care of me and, because I was young, hated her for the same. We squabbled about everything because I inherited her feisty gene, from the proper way to hold a crochet needle (like a pencil, not like you’re going to stab someone with it) to the best way to work on fractions (she was a retired teacher and had her old-school ways of solving problems both mathematical and figurative). But for all the arguing we did, I can say she was as organic to my childhood as playing with mud pies, hide-and-seek under a merciless provincial sun, learning how to roller-skate and ballet lessons.

She died a little over a year after I first came to the States. I couldn’t go home for her funeral because I had just started a new job. I was devastated. I wanted so desperately to go home—for closure. I’m the sort of person who needs rituals to bookend events in my life. I was faced with the possibility of never grieving properly, as much as someone like me needed to.

And so, I went through my favorite ritual. Taking out the bottle of premium vanilla from its hiding place in the cupboard, I picked the most complicated recipe in one of my oldest cookbooks and started measuring. And sifting. And beating.

It took me six hours total to bake and decorate that White Chocolate Mousse Cake With Strawberries—my very first made with pure vanilla.

Alone in the kitchen, save for my ingredients and tools, I found a way to grieve my grandaunt’s passing in the best way I knew how: through motions that were so familiar they brought me the kind of quiescence necessary to deal with her death. Not only that, but I discovered how pure vanilla was so remarkably different from the imitation kind, so much that I haven’t looked back since. Just the smell of it—strong, clear and uncompromising—as I opened that bottle was enough to lift that cloud of flour and grieving that hung over my kitchen.

Then, I knew: If imitation vanilla smelled like dreams, the pure kind smelled like waking up.

I smile to myself as I write this now, because those descriptions of how my first bottle of pure vanilla smelled is like painting, with words, a picture of the unique character that was Lola Luz. It’s just like her to come back to me, after all these years, to teach me a lesson. Baking that cake taught me this: Never settle. Be courageous in choosing the pure and the good, in baking as much as in life. Look for, seek out, wait for that one premium, prime ingredient. The real thing, one that makes your guests say, as they bite into the gifts your hands made, “I’ve been asleep all this time, and the waking up is so sweet.”

Here’s wishing you a week full of waking up to sweet, pure, real things.

* Thank you to my brother W. for designing the vanilla pods that started off this post. I owe you cookies, Manong. With real vanilla, of course.

** Here are pictures of that White Chocolate Mousse Cake With Strawberries, which I’ve re-created countless times for many other celebrations (like Bona’s birthday) since that night. And if you’re interested, my favorite brand of vanilla is Nielsen-Massey’s Madagascar Bourbon Pure Vanilla. Costco also sells a Kirkland Signature one that’s easier on the pocket, but still excellent to use.