Friday/Sunday Felicities

this is my first Friday Felicities post! i've loved Felicity's weekly posts(Felicity's a member of VMQG and she's pretty much one of the nicest, awesomest people i've ever met!), and i love the word "felicities" and i totally wanted to do my own friday posts, but i didn't want to be a copycat, so i'm super excited that now i can copy her, not only with permission, but even with a blog button! yay for Felicity!


here are some Friday Felicities -


- blogging! yay, i'm writing a blog post! i was saying to someone the other day that not only do i have a ton of things to post about, i'm building up a ridiculous backlog of pictures to be edited. basically, i'm getting further and further behind! she tried to console me by telling me that my occasional long posts were better than short daily posts, but i'm not sure i'm buying it.


- QuiltCon!!! remember how i mentioned the weird glitchy problem with my registration? i'm really happy to say that QuiltCon was FABULOUS about resolving it! apparently there were 11 people out of 950 who had problems, and two of them happened to be Vancouverites. i'm on waiting lists for the two classes that i didn't get into, and as a completely unexpected bonus, they comped me a full 4 day lecture pass. that's awesome, cause i'd only signed up for one day, thinking that i couldn't justify buying passes for the days when i was taking classes and would only be able to attend one or two lectures. and today i booked my flights! i'm arriving on the tuesday, so that i'll have wednesday to recover before QuiltCon starts on thursday (fibro & air travel aren't friends), and maybe i'll even do a bit of exploring too. exciting!!!!


- i need AM going to start making myself clothes again and on thursday night i bought sparkly silver and black leopard print fabric that will make the best mini-skirt EVER. i'm so excited/impatient! i bought fabric for two other skirts as well, and i preshrunk it all on friday night. that's as far as i've gotten, because fatigue has been seriously kicking my ass this weekend, but maybe tonight i'll draft up a pattern!


- this one is a very small felicity, and my excitement level might seem a bit high for something this minor, but.... twin needles are the best thing EVER! seriously, omg. i hemmed a few pairs of knit pants for my mom a few days ago, and i bought a twin needle just for the job (cause i broke my last one), and damn, that works slick! i'd forgotten for awesome they could be, because i've always been scared off by the $7 price tag for ONE needle (ok, two, attached to each other, but still). i think as long as you're only using them for specific things, and you're careful not to break it right away (ie: don't try to use your machine's needle threader on them! don't do it automatically because you're not paying attention and you've been so spoiled by it that you never think to thread a needle by hand anymore....), and especially if you buy the needle during a 50% off sale, they're totally worth it. they make the hem look so lovely and professional, and because the bobbin thread makes a zigzag between the two upper needles, it allows for a lot more stretch than two rows of straight stitch would. i'm trying to think of what else i can hem with a twin needle now.... if you've never been introduced to the wonders of a twin needle before, Sew4Home has a good intro here, and this blog talks about using them for topstitching, links to a great pdf, and briefly mentions one of the other cool things you can do with twin needles - pintucks!


- i actually meant to blog about this long ago, but i'm a terrible child, and i never got around to it. my mom has a blog! it's called Painting a Story, and you should go check it out. i'm biased, obviously, but i've always loved my mom's writing style, and i'm really happy that she's started blogging. go visit her and leave her a comment, kay? i don't know how to suggest that she gain readers, writers don't have link ups or post tutorials like quilters do!

her most recent post, What goes around .... does it for a reason, brought tears to my eyes. she only told me the story about that real estate seminar a few years ago, and it's another piece to add to why i'm so proud of my parents and what they went through and fought for during that time in their lives. it blows my mind to think how young they were, and how strong they were.


in addition to that, i really love the overall message of that post. we honestly have so little concept of how our actions, even teeny tiny things that seem so unimportant to us, can have such a profound impact on others.

i think i've mentioned before that in a previous life, i was a youth worker. the fact that i even got into non-profit work boils down to a single two-hour time period in my life and a specific action by an amazing teacher, and i honestly can't imagine the path my life would have taken if it weren't for that afternoon. every single aspect of my life stems from her encouragement and my actions that day. it sounds overly dramatic, but it's honestly true.

and one of the amazing things about working with youth is that things can change so rapidly. five or six years ago, a young woman came up to me at a party. i didn't recognize her at first, but she introduced herself and explained that when i'd known her, she'd been a teen mom living out in the bible belt, struggling to figure out who she was and what she wanted in life, trying to finish high school while raising an infant (the result of the oh-so-common "i can't be a lesbian, i'll prove it by having sex with a boy" experience). by the time i saw her again, her child was in school, she'd come into her own, and she'd started her own successful business. she wanted to tell me how well she was doing, and thank me for the role i'd played in her life at that time.

i was floored. she hadn't been one of my "clients" per se, kids that i'd worked with closely, but she'd been one of the youth that came to a weekly drop in program i worked with, and i definitely remembered her, but we'd barely even interacted one-on-one. i was unbelievably honoured, and oh-my-goodness, so thankful, that i had been able to help her without even realizing it. back in those days, so much of our work was focused on "crisis" situations, and i rarely thought about how my smaller actions might affect the people around me.

which is basically my point. my looooooong blown out point!

my mom's blog post is a good reminder of how our actions can have profound impacts on others. even when we're wrapped up in the circumstances of our own life, the things we do and say can make things better for others.

another example - a few years ago, i reconnected with someone that i'd met briefly years before. things had changed for her, time had passed, and she'd come out of the closet and was dating a close friend of mine. i was super excited to get to know her better - especially since she's crafty, and i always need more crafty queers in my life! after we'd connected and hung out a few times, she told me that meeting me and my (then) partner years ago had been really significant for her. we had been the first queer couple that she'd spent any time with. wha? for me, having spent so many years doing HIV/AIDS work and working within the LGBTQ community (as my friend Sass calls it, "Gay for Pay"), that was completely foreign to me, and i'd had no idea. we hadn't done anything special when she met us, just hung out in the park for an afternoon, but it had had an impact on her life. it made me incredibly happy to hear that our relationship, which frankly didn't end that well and is not something that i look back on with a lot of nostalgia, led to something positive for her, and it further illustrated the idea that such minor things that we do can impact others in ways that we'd never dream of.

do you have a story like that? how have you impacted other people?


- did you read all the way down here? congratulations! another minor felicity, but very important for me, a long-standing member of the last minute club - Felicity's link up doesn't end at 12:01am! yayy! there are a few link ups that i like that i end up missing half of the time, because i don't manage to get my post written by midnight. it's the curse of being a night owl AND living on the west coast! in fact, her link-up is still open as a i write this now, on sunday! i've been writing this post off and on all weekend, so i'm glad that i can still play along.


whew! next week's felicities won't be as long winded, i promise!