The Fold: Better.

This first appeared in the May edition of my newsletter, The Fold. Want to get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox? Sign up here, and be sure to check your email and spam folders for the confirmation.

We interrupt this newsletter to announce that Sarah Atlee is now accepting orders for custom-made quilts!

​This is the first time in a long time that I've been available for commissions. I'm really excited about making quilts for collectors, aka folks like you! If you have any questions, or would like to take your next step down the quilted path, please get in touch! sarah@sarahatlee.com

Invest in joy today. Click here to start your custom-made quilt.

Back to The Fold.

I'd like to thank you for joining me on this path. Writing an email newsletter hasn't always been easy for me, but this time around, I'm loving it. I get to share stories with you that matter to me, and you have been so generous in your reception. So pour yourself a hot cuppa and pull up a chair. There's pie.

Now, I'm going to ask you to indulge me, because I am having the most First World Problem ever.

I don't love folding laundry. People know this about me, including my musical friend Paris In Stereo. But I love having clean clothes. So. I learned that you can take laundry to a cleaner's and they'll - get this - wash it, dry it, FOLD IT, and give it back to you. (For a fee.) I don't indulge in this service all the time, but during a busy week, it's a huge help.

I like things folded the Konmari way. The service doesn't fold laundry the Konmari way.

So, do I spend time re-folding my laundry so it's more pleasing to put away? And does this cancel out the convenience of using the service? Or do I accept the folded laundry as-is and live with the daily irritant of my clothes not looking as nice when they're put away? And who even cares? Besides me?

Side note: Before I started The Fold, I asked my Facebook friends to name any associations they had with the word "fold." Angie LaPaglia said,

"I think about laundry. when all the towels are folded and stacked like soft terry cloth soldiers waiting for duty. I think about the act of folding my children’s clothes when they were little, how close to them I felt. I think about everything being folded and put in its place. everything is where it belongs. everything is in order. everyone is tucked in. everyone is safe. everything’s gonna be ok."

Laundry is a small problem that makes a big difference.

I get why we focus on small problems. They’re solvable. Controllable. Can I solve (huge problem affecting every living thing)? Not today, and not alone. Can I fold this t-shirt into its Optimum Form Factor? Watch me. Boom.

I have a challenge for you: Solve a small problem.

Identify something that irritates you, but that you’ve been living with anyway because it’s “too small” to spend energy fixing.

• Replace or upgrade a tool that’s worn out.

• Discard something that doesn’t fit any more.

• Clean that one thing that doesn't usually get cleaned.

• Set a boundary, with yourself or with someone else.

These two books will give you some great ideas: Set Boundaries, Find Peace by Nedra Glover Tawwab / The Lazy Genius Way by Kendra Adachi​

Please drop me a line and let me know what you fixed! I'm always open to ideas for small improvements.

There's a great recipe coming up, but first, I'd like to introduce you to Basic Split.

Basic Split​

Deconstructed garments and other cotton fabrics, machine pieced and quilted by Sarah Atlee.
60 x 43 inches, 2020.
$1,135 Click here to purchase.​

Basic Split is, in its own way, a series of small solved problems. The "problem" I set for myself was: take a rectangle, split it, insert a smaller rectangle. Repeat until the quilt is done.

Already have a crush on Basic Split? Wanna make it official? Click here to bring this quilt into your life.

As promised, here's a small improvement that's doing me a world of good:

Stupid Easy Chicken Tortilla Soup

Inspired by the cooking episode of How To ADHD (the salsa chicken starts at 8:59)

In a slow cooker or stovetop soup pot, add:

• 1 quart of broth

• 1 jar of salsa

• 1 packet of taco seasoning

• Any amount of chicken in any state (just be mindful of what “bite size” is for you)

• Brands don’t matter.

Add any/all of the following:

• Extra herbs & spices to taste

• 1 can diced tomatoes

• 1 can beans

• Potatoes, squash, greens, carrots, celery, onion, in either cooked or raw state (use up your leftovers!)

• ½ cup uncooked rice

Level 2: Roast the chicken and/or veggies before adding to the soup.

Level 3: Make your own taco seasoning.

Simmer until all the parts are cooked through. Then add 1 can of cream style corn. Wait until it gets hot again, then serve.

Toppings!

(Add these when the soup is being served, not when storing in the fridge/freezer.)

• Chopped fresh cilantro

• Chopped chives or scallions

• Avocado

• Shredded cheese

• Sour cream or Greek style yogurt

• Crunched up tortilla chips

• Lime wedges

Makes great leftovers, and freezes well.

Bonus for those who read this far:

​More ways to fold better.​

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It's About Surrender.

"To be is to be perceived. And so to know thyself is only possible through the eyes of the other. The nature of our immortal lives is in the consequences of our words and deeds that go on apportioning themselves throughout all time." Sonmi451 / Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell​

Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes (Knees and Toes)

Do you do yoga? I practice sometimes. I first tried it in college (where my $cholar$hip paid for classes!). My favorite asana has always been the forward fold.

"Uttanasana" translates roughly to "intense stretch pose," but for me, it's about surrender. I surrender to gravity. I surrender to the reality of my body that day. I surrender the desire to make a perfect shape, surrender to imperfection. I surrender my thinking mind to my physical senses. To stillness, non-doing. And I love the journey, from all-the-way-up-there to all-the-way-down-here.

What have you surrendered lately?

A Soft Place To Land​

A Soft Place To Land. Cotton fabrics, 13x15.5 inches
Machine pieced and quilted with additional hand quilting
$368 ​ Update: This piece has gone to a loving home.

This is a small wall-hanging quilt I recently made, in response to a thought-work exercise with Kyla Mitsunaga, aka the Asian Auntie You Didn't Know You Needed. I'll tell the whole story another time, but this piece is about surrender.

I surrendered to some scary thoughts, deeply embedded in my subconscious. I let them come to the surface, which felt like momentary freefall. With Kyla's help, I gave them a safe, soft place to land. This experience is already giving rise to a new series. A Soft Place To Land is the first iteration.

The Cutter

I have a quilt on my bed that's about a hundred years old. This is useful for several reasons.

1. It's warm. People sometimes ask me why the quilts they remember from childhood are warmer/heavier/cozier than quilts today. That may be partly nostalgia, but wool and cotton battings were much more common in previous decades. Now quilt battings are usually polyester or a cotton/poly blend.

2. It's beautiful. We musn't dismiss the utility of beauty.

3. This quilt was made with a technique unusual for the time. My friend Martha (a quilt collector who sold me this piece) told me that the quilting is freemotion, but it was done on a treadle machine. Now, if you're a quilter, your eyebrows are likely raised. Freemotion quilting is how you make loop-de-loops and pretty much any design besides straight lines. This is easy with a longarm quilting machine, and with some domestic machines (depending on the quilt's size), but I struggle to imagine getting this done on a treadle, especially considering the consistency of the stitches. Wowza.

[Why isn't this quilt being kept under archival conditions? Because some of it looks like this:

And some of it looks like this:

In the industry, this is called a "cutter."]

4. My favorite thing about this quilt: It has a history. And - this is crucial - I don't know what that history is. I only know what's happened since I saw the quilt at Martha's garage sale. Previous chapters are closed to me.

Here's why that matters.

Did you read the book or see the movie Cloud Atlas? The narrative is structured around big time jumps and seemingly unrelated characters. But it's all connected. Because no one knows what part of your life is going to go on existing after you're gone. You could be a lawmaker or a tycoon or a research scientist and your contributions to future generations might be obvious. But most of us don't know what our legacy will be. It's out of our control. We have to surrender.

Creators are often preoccupied with the idea of legacy. We are surrounded by messages telling us who to be, how to be, how to ensure our efforts make an "impact" in an atmosphere of noise. It's a lot of pressure. By choosing to acknowledge our very limited control, we can find freedom.

I don't know who made the quilt on my bed. There's no label on it. (FYI: Label your quilts!!) The maker was probably a woman. So I'll tell her now: Dear Ms. Quilter, Somehow your quilt made it into my hands, and I appreciate what you created. Thank you.

Everything Sucks, So... issue #8!

It's a good time to order the latest issue of the ESS zine. Why? Because issue #8 (Add It Up, aka By The Numbers) is the last one. For now, anyway. I started this zine as a pananoramadingdong project and I feel that it has served its purpose. Issue #8 is available now in my web store. Back issues of ESS (both paper and digital editions) will remain available as long as y'all keep buying them, whether that's through my website or in OKC at DNA Galleries or Literati Press Bookstore. Thank you for coming with me on this journey.

Thanks for reading!

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The Thing You Just Knew You Could Do

Image: Sarah drawn by Sarah's Mom, circa 1984

Remember when you were a kid and when you saw someone do something, you thought, “I can do that, too?” And then you just DID it, in your kid way? That hopefully didn’t result in serious injury? :) What was that thing for you?

I remember an episode of Reading Rainbow that showed a person playing a Koto. (I’ve already gone down the Youtube hole looking for this episode, I think it’s s05 e04, “The Paper Crane.” Here's a different video example.) I gathered up an empty shoebox, paper cups, and rubber bands. I wrapped the rubber bands around the shoebox, using the paper cups as bridges. Then I put paper clips on my fingertips and plucked away at my instrument. And then it was time for dinner.

I haven’t always been that confident. But as an improvisational quilter, I keep that YES sign turned on. I learned to apply the “Yes, and” mentality to quilting from Sherri Lynn Wood. If that sounds familiar, it’s a principle of improv theater as well. In my studio, the conversation is usually, “What if I did ____?” followed by “YES. DO IT.” 

Try saying "Yes, and..." to something today.

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The Business Tool No One's Talking About

tl;dr: Get yourself a plain text editor. You probably already have one.

Google docs. Sticky notes. Voice memos. Notebooks. It's a lot to keep track of. Don't you feel frustrated when you have a great idea, put it somewhere, and can't find it later? Ever write a killer blog post and click Publish, only to see an error message along the lines of "Oopsies, our bad, now your post no longer exists ha ha ha"? Ugh.

I’m not a programmer, or a novelist, or a journalist. But I do a lot of writing in the course of my work as an artist.

I compose all of my blog posts, social media posts, and even some emails in a plain text editor.

Not Word. Not OpenOffice, Google Docs, or any other text-capturing software. Not rich text. Plain text.

Why?

1. No weird formatting or metadata. Have you ever tried to copy a letter or outline from Doc to Word to PDF and had the spacing come out all wrong? Did you get up this morning thinking, "I want to fight with Microsoft Word about what is and isn't a headline"? Even copy-pasting "as plain text" isn't 100% reliable between platforms. Plain text is free of formatting, other than line breaks. When I compose in a plain text editor, then copy-paste to the text's final destination, I know I'll have the formatting under my control.

2. No bells or whistles. Sometimes I just need to write. I don't want to distract myself with fonts, line spacing, kerning, and all the things that make my document pretty, but should wait until after I'm done getting the words out. If I'm trying to write and I see a notification, popup, etc., my train of thought is derailed.

3. No vanishing acts. I use BBEdit on my Mac desktop and laptop computers. I save the files locally (see 3a). If my internet connection gets interrupted, my text doesn't disappear.

It's worth noting that I'm a ten-finger typist. I'm not great at writing on my phone. And while voice-to-text is getting better all the time, it still has a noticeable margin of error. So I prefer to write using a keyboard. (When I’m not scribbling on paper, that is.)

3a. My files are stored locally. I'm just not super comfortable with cloud-based storage. If that's a great solution for you, awesome. I prefer knowing that I can access my text files while offline.

BONUS: this makes it easy to recycle content from my archives!

I do back everything up; I use Time Machine for local backups and Backblaze for offsite.

4. A plain text editor is lightweight. No bloatware here. Text files (with the extension .txt) take up no space at all. It's easy to email them, put them on flash drives, etc.

5. Plain text is easily transferrable, for all the reasons I've listed here. I publish content on a variety of platforms, including Patreon, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Slack, WhatsApp, and my Squarespace website. I also use InDesign, Canva, and PDFs to run my business. I use Gmail for emailing. I can paste plain text into any of those without a hitch.

ARTISTS: This is especially useful when applying for shows, grants, residencies, etc. that have online applications. Compose your bio, statement, resume, or whatever in a plain text editor, then copypasta into the online form.

Composing offline, with minimal distraction, knowing that my text doesn't depend on a particular platform, makes a huge difference in my workflow.

Here's my favorite thing about plain text editors: most of them are free. Whatever operating system you're using probably already has one (including iOS and Android).

As I mentioned, I'm a Mac user, and BBEdit is my plain text editor of choice. When you install BBEdit, it will show that you're in a "free trial" period, but don't worry - you can still use the app for free after that's over.

What are your favorite tools for writing distraction-free?

So You Want to Donate Some Fabric

Too Much Fabric

If you have any quilters in your life, you've probably heard them joke about how much fabric they have in their stashes.

When a quilter passes away, dollars to donuts they're leaving behind some fabric and unfinished quilt projects. Their loved ones may be tasked with cleaning out their home and dealing with the miscellaneous items that make up a life. I've been through this more than once. I know how difficult it is.

Maybe you are a fellow quilter, or just a fabric lover, and you're taking the opportunity to downsize your collection. Bravo!

For whatever reason, you are rehoming fabric. Excellent! There are a few different ways to go about this.

Maybe you already know a quilter and want to offer the fabric to them. This will probably do the trick, because it's hard for us to say no!

Don't know any other quilters? Buckle up, because you will soon. No matter where you live, there is a quilting guild within driving distance (probably within spittin' distance). Here's a worldwide directory of Modern Quilt Guilds. Here's a directory of other Quilt Guilds within the U.S.(Not in the U.S.? Fear not! Google quilt guilds in your area.)

Quilters tend to get together for monthly meetings, and there's often a "Free to Good Home" table! Contact your closest guild and ask if they're accepting donations. We love to share!

There are also charities that accept fabric donations, such as local chapters of Project Linus or Quilts of Valor. Google "donate fabric" and you'll get lots of options. Different charities have different guidelines, so again, it's best to ask what they need and can use.

Be a Mindful Donor

You may be going through a period of grief and stress. I understand, I've been there. Maybe rehoming these fabrics is difficult for you for emotional or logistical reasons. If that's the case, try and recruit a friend for help.

It's a good idea to at least look at each fabric before you donate. Are they clean and undamaged? Is there water or smoke damage? Mold? Do they come from a home with cats, dogs, or cigarette smoke? Is there any evidence of pests? (Just think how embarrassed you would be if you gave someone fabric that had mouse poop in it.)

Think of it this way: If you wouldn't want the fabric touching your body, it may be best to throw it away. (I know, we try to keep fabric out of landfills as much as possible. If you know of a good fabric recycling source, please tell me!)

If the fabric has that "long-term storage" smell but is otherwise undamaged, run it through a washer and dryer. Did the colors run? Did the fabrics fray a bit? Don't worry about it. Quilters are creative.

Flat fabric is happy fabric.

I’m going to say that again for the folks in the back.

Flat fabric is happy fabric.

If you're not able to iron the fabrics yourself, just fold them into stacks and put them into bags. If you're feeling ambitious, you can even sort them into prints, solids, by color, etc. The recipients will thank you!

Sarah, would you like my fabric?

My answer to this question used to be an unconditional "Yes!" Since then, my boss (me) has had to impose a few rules to keep the stash under control.

These are guidelines for my own quilting practice. Others' mileage may vary.

I will take a look at your fabric if:

• It's 100% cotton. (Some wool is okay.) Denim is okay.

• It's been washed and pressed.

• There is no evidence of pests like moths or mice.

• I especially love blasts from the past, i.e. vintage prints!

I'm not able to use:

• Fabrics that are stretchy or slick.

• Lace, crochet, or knitwear.

• Fabrics with a loose weave that will fall apart if I cut into it.

• Upholstery fabric.

• Fabric that has been damaged by water, smoke, pests, etc.

• Unfinished quilt projects with "traditional" patterns, such as Sunbonnet Sue (check your local guilds for this type of thing).

You Are Doing A Good Thing.

If you donate mindfully, you are doing your fellow person a kindness. You are about to make a quilter very happy! Thank you.

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