Stepping and Christmas. What a Weekend!

 Many of my weekly posts are reflections on activities or experiences I have had in the previous week. This week, two activities are vying for attention, and I decided to write about both of them. It’s a Saturday night/Sunday afternoon special report.

 Saturday night we attended a performance of Step Afrika!, a 30-year-old Washington, D.C. dance company that specializes in step dancing. I hadn’t ever heard of stepping before I saw it and, to be honest, I thought we were seeing a company of dancers from an African nation. We were not.

 Wikipedia describes stepping as “a form of percussive dance in African-American culture that uses the performer’s entire body as an instrument to produce complex rhythms and sounds through a mixture of footsteps, spoken word, and hand claps.” Step Afrika! also added drums, flute and saxophone, and singing to the mix.

 We are dance aficionados. We have season tickets to the Houston Ballet, attend four or five dance programs a year that, like this one, are brought to town by Performing Arts Houston, and attend many small company or pre-professional company programs in Houston and the surrounding area. Trips this year have included Sam Houston State University in Huntsville and AIMED Dance in Beaumont.

 That is to say, we know dancing. And we have never seen dancing like the movement swirling before our eyes on Saturday night. They presented an all-encompassing visual display—feet moving faster than the eye could follow, legs repositioning in ways the brain couldn’t decipher, hands clapping rhythms that beat right into our bodies.

 It was a “Wait, what!?” kind of experience that made both halves of the evening flash by as though we were there for minutes, not hours. The performers engaged the audience throughout the program, mostly with invitations to clap, and call-and-response exchanges.

 Black audience members outnumbered white ones significantly, and, as in Black churches, people joined right in with shouts of encouragement and joy as the performance unfolded. I was shouting and clapping myself before long. What a night!

 This brings us to Sunday afternoon. The Houston Ballet sponsors a huge Christmas fair every year called the Nutcracker Market. When I say huge, I mean enormous. It brings in $6 million dollars over four days to support dance education for the Ballet.

 I have never attended, primarily because I’m too cheap to buy a $20 ticket and the $25 parking at the venue—which is part of Houston’s football stadium—is very difficult. However, the Ballet included two free tickets in our subscription package this year. I have been excited about going since April and had a long-standing arrangement to go with my daughter Alix.

 That all changed when I broke my foot. There was no way I could manage getting around on my knee walker in that vast space with those vast crowds. I sadly decided to give the tickets away, but Alix intervened. I still have the old wheelchair from my non-walking days of illness. She offered to do the driving and the wheeling for our adventure. I offered to cover the parking and incidentals. Ta-da! We had a plan.

 Parking was horrible. It took 40 minutes to drive to the venue and another 40 minutes to find a space. Using my handicapped placard, we managed to weave our way through numerous parking lots on secret routes that the attendants whispered to us. We eventually ended up right at the front door of the Nutcracker Market. How about that!?

 Inside we found a riot of Christmas paraphernalia, gifts and treats of all magnitudes, costumed visitors that included families in matching Christmas jammies, friends in matching nutcracker outfits, and every sort of red and green design you can imagine on shirts and leggings. We drank in a delightful visual feast.

 I love Christmas and have a really extensive collection of Santas and other seasonal knick-knacks that I love to put out every year, but I do not need another one! I steadfastly refused to buy anything that required a place to put it. That left food.

 Alix and I sampled every single offering we could find, and I eventually left with Mexican vanilla popcorn, Wisconsin baked cheese, sugar-free (mostly) saltwater taffy, a giant cashew turtle (for Michael), and one gift for a friend. I went way over budget because I didn’t plan to buy anything. Silly me.

 On the way out, I bought us both a large soda for the road. That cost $19!! I can get pretty incensed over the abuse of customers at convention-type venues. Just did it at the Quilt Festival, too. Highway robbery, but we needed the drinks. Alix and I breezed out of the parking lot and made it home in good time.

 Stepping and Christmas. It was a wonderful weekend! I wish you could have been there.

Tschüß (Tschüss)

Finding My Inner Cobbler

 

Several months ago, my quilt guild announced a class coming up in November on making quilted sneakers. My brain exploded! Making Quilted Sneakers!! I HAVE to do that. I already loved handmade and custom-made shoes. In fact, I own two pairs. The idea of walking around in the world in fabulous sneakers (yes, mine would be fabulous!) that I made myself just rocked. I signed up on the spot.

 A prodigious amount of work had to be completed before the actual class, and I undertook it with relish. First challenge, acquire the shoe kit. The kits are not readily available, but Tandy Leather sells them, so I went to the local shop. The shoe is sized in four ways: American men, European men, European women, and finally American women.

 Because of the sizing, all the American woman shoes are half-sizes, so my size 10s were going to have to settled for 10½s. And I would have to wait several weeks for the order to arrive at my local store or pay an exorbitant sum for shipping. Spoiled by Amazon Prime, I waited.

 When I opened the box, I found the inner and outer soles, three different patterns for the uppers, and very basic instructions. The patterns included a high-cut, mid-cut, and low-cut silhouette for the uppers. If I made a quilted fabric, I wanted as much of it as possible to show, so I went right for the high-cut pattern.

 Now, to design and construct the quilted fabric. I spent a lot of time thinking about what parts of the quilt would show on the sneakers. It would have to be a small pattern, meaning that I would have to sew even smaller pieces of fabric together to create the look I wanted. After lots of quilt bingeing, I decided to make a pinwheel design.

 Each pinwheel consisted of a square made from eight pieces of fabric sewn together. I needed to make 25 pinwheels to have a large enough quilt. And—this is tricky—I needed the two shoes to be mirror images of each other as much as possible. Planning the layout required contemplation and, ultimately, a little help from my friendly Copilot AI to do calculations.

 I had raided my fabric stash and discovered forgotten riches: an ombre charm pack in coordinated jewel tone colors. (A charm pack, for non-quilters, is a selection of precut five-inch squares. Ombre simply means that the colors graduate from light to dark.) Copilot told me didn't have quite enough, but with a little more searching, I found extra pieces that blended in.

 Each square had to be cut into four 2½” pieces, matched to 2½” white pieces and sewn back together into 5” squares that now looked like pinwheels. It took some time, but the final product pleased me. Quilting is kind of magical even when you know what’s behind the curtain!

 

Before I sewed all those pinwheels together, I looked at my pattern and figured out how the fabric would actually fit on the shoes and plotted, as best I could, the optimum layout for the project. It should have been straightforward, but it never seems to be. I ripped out a lot of seams and turned a lot of squares around before I got everything in the right place. But, finally, success!

 The actual class took place last Wednesday. Me and my handy-dandy knee scooter showed up with Michael schlepping my sewing machine and a large tote bag of paraphernalia. The classroom space was cramped and I was oversized, but friendly classmates helped me make it work. Crafting the shoes took patience and attention to detail. There were do-overs aplenty. Hand sewing through the layers of quilted fabric and the rubber soles took tremendous strength and concentration. My right thumb tip is still numb 5 days later!

 In the course of that day, I only managed to finish one shoe, but I had the foresight to create a LEFT shoe. Since my right foot is encased in a boot for the foreseeable future, that's all I need. I left the class a very happy camper!

Tschüß (Tschüss)

P.S. I would not recommend trying this without a qualified teacher. There are some extremely tricky parts and other parts that are not intuitive at all.

 

Broken

Today has not been a regular Monday, so I am behind on writing my blog post. I spent the day dealing with an orthopedic doctor about my broken foot and with buying equipment to help me get around. For those who may not have seen my Facebook post yesterday, I had a run-in with the door of my dishwasher Saturday night. Tried to walk around the open door to throw something in the trash and caught my shoe on the corner. That somehow flipped me over and I landed on my fanny and my right foot. The dishwasher was uninjured.

 I knew immediately that something was broken, but stayed in denial until the pain got too bad. Then I dragged Michael out of bed to take me to the ER. They took x-rays and diagnosed a broken bone in my 5^th metatarsal. After putting me in a temporary cast and giving me pain medicine (yay!), they sent me home.

 As it turns out, I do not have a broken bone in my foot. No, I have two broken bones. One of them is fairly minor, the other more serious. Here’s how the doctor put it as he pointed to my x-rays, “If you were a professional athlete, they’d ignore this one and immediately do surgery on this one. But since you aren’t, you can just take the time needed to heal naturally.”

 And how much time is that? A long time, as it happens. Could be months. For now, I can’t put weight on the foot. And, since it’s my right foot, I can’t drive. If I’m lucky, for a month, but it could be two. This is terrible news for Michael, who is now my designated driver, because I have lots of activities and appointments and lunch dates. For his sake, I’ll have to trim them down. And there are things I want to do on days he can’t drive me, so that will be disappointing. It looks like my quilting bee is off the calendar for the duration because they meet on Michael’s day to lunch with the boys.

 Geting around from Saturday night until today was awful. They gave me crutches at the hospital, but I couldn’t manage them and fell again before I gave up trying. I tried to use my cane and then my old walker, which Michael kindly climbed into the attic to retrieve. You know, with only one working foot, you have to hop. To hop, you have to have quad and shoulder strength. I am sadly lacking in both.

 The next option was to unearth my old wheelchair from the garage and set it up, which took a lot of WD-40. It’s about 25 years old, so very heavy and unwieldy compared to modern wheelchairs. It worked though; I could thankfully sit and move myself around. But it doesn’t fit through any doorways, so my bedroom and both bathrooms required me to get around by hopping on one leg. I did not know my bedroom was so big until I faced hopping across it to the bathroom door!

 The doctor put me in a walking boot (but told me not to walk in it!) and suggested a knee scooter. My sister Janet used one for a long time while healing a serious foot injury, so I knew what they were. The local Walgreens had one in stock, and so this afternoon, I finally got wheels that work. Thank goodness!

 The knee scooter is not perfect. It turns like a tractor-trailer rig and requires maneuvering to back up, so getting around in tight spaces, like the bathroom or hallway, is tricky. (It made me think of my dad backing campers into the driveway: always an ordeal.) But it is doable. I’m back in control and absolutely chuffed about it. I have a big class on Wednesday that I thought I might have to miss, but now I can attend. That adventure should be next week’s blog and I’m expecting it to be a doozy.  

 For now, I’m fairly exhausted by all the commotion and my shoulders are aching—not to mention my foot—so I’m going to go to bed early. What a weekend!! Here’s to a better month ahead.

 Tschüß (Tschüss)