Suffering for my art

You guys, it's a miracle I'm able to type this with all my fingers because a few days ago, I nearly chopped one of them off.  Do I have a story to tell complete with pictures?  Of course I do!


As you know, we're trying to sell our house and not being able to really live in it because it always has to be staged is annoying at times, nearly impossible at others.  Naturally, Sofia's new game is to take everything off of shelves one at a time.  She'll stand at her bookshelf and one by one take off all the books and throw them on the floor.  Only when the bookshelf is empty will she laugh, drop to her little butt and crawl away.  

Because she is my first child and I think her methodical mess-making

is cute, I put all the books right back on the shelf so she can take them off again.

We do this several times a day.

The mess-making really isn't that big a deal but because I can't live in my house, my creativity is stifled and that *is* a big deal.  I need to nest!  I need to decorate, to organize, to craft!  I have rearranged the living room which helped a little but I needed more.  I've been doing a tiny bit of sewing and that has helped too but I'm not good enough at it for it to be satisfying.  So, I brainstormed small things I could do to satisfy my crafty itch.  Naturally, I turned to Pinterest and found this little beauty.

from here via my Pinterest

It was perfect!  Drew and I are big winos so we have tons of corks.  Plus, it was even a sentimental craft as we were in Sonoma when I got pregnant.  I got all excited Googling around looking for the letters and was positively giddy when I found one.  It came a few days later, and because I have a baby, it sat in the box for several weeks.

One night, I finally pulled it out, got my corks, found my glue gun and got started!

These aren't even all the corks we have!

Setting up shop.  Please take note of the giant knife.

I have no clue how you're actually supposed to cut cork.  I rarely approach things with all the necessary information, I realize that now.  I should have looked up exactly how you cut corks safely, but I didn't.  Instead, I went to our knife drawer in the kitchen, pulled the biggest, sharpest looking one and said, "this oughta do it."

It's amazing I didn't chop my finger off because that knife didn't work very well on the round fricking cork.  I would go to cut the cork in half and it would slip away from me.  I even thought to myself I should be careful using this knife.  So what did I do?

Why, get a hacksaw, of course!

Isn't that what you would do?

I commenced to trying to saw that damn cork in half, holding it between my fingers to keep it steady.  After all, I had to make sure that I only had the cool part of the cork!  Except the hacksaw wasn't working that well, but it was getting late and I needed to get some sleep.

A few days later, Drew was out of town, the baby was taking her nap, and I decided that it was a perfect time to chop my finger off get back to my craft.  The big knife didn't work and neither did the hacksaw so I probably should have just gone ahead and glued the whole cork on the board.  But that's not what my inspiration photo looked like!  It was all cool and piecey, so that's how I had to do it too!  I went back to the knife drawer to look for something a little more substantial.

A meat cleaver!  It's thick and heavy, this has GOT to cut through cork!

PS, stop reading now if you don't do blood 

because we all know where this is going, right?

I used the cleaver to slice the tips off some of the corks so I just had small discs.  Then I re-attempted to cut one of them in half the long way.  I held the cork with my left thumb and middle finger and got about halfway through successfully.

Then the damn cork slipped out of my fingers and rolled just as I heard a dull *thunk*.

I didn't even realize what I'd done until I started bleeding.  I wasn't even surprised - I knew in the back of my mind that I was probably going to cut myself.  I just didn't count on it being so serious.  

It was one of those cuts that's so deep it doesn't bleed right away, kind of like when a baby falls and they don't immediately cry and you stop, frozen, wondering if they're going to scream or not, and you think maybe the fall wasn't that bad until WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!

It was like that, except with blood.

I even went to the living room to get my camera out of my purse so I could document this but it started bleeding so badly that I had to run back to the kitchen so I could hold it over the sink.

And take a picture with my phone, of course.

I knew it was a pretty bad cut when I ran it under water to rinse the blood away and it stung like hell!  I'd cut it so deep you could see the white part.  My brown people know what I'm talking about - when you scrape the color off your skin?  That.

I started to get a little worried when it wouldn't stop bleeding.  Like, for real.  I mean come on, I have clotting disorders!  Doesn't that mean I should stop bleeding like instantly?  But I wasn't and by this time the baby was awake.  Of course.

Which was why I didn't realize I'd cut my thumb too!  And it too was bleeding!  Are you kidding me right now?  Crap!  Now the baby was crying and I was bleeding into the bathroom sink and I was like *shit! What do I do?*

I grabbed a towel, squeezed it as best I could and went to get the baby.  I brought her in the bathroom and starting singing to her so she wouldn't get worried.

Ooooohhhh Sofiiiiiiiiiiaaaaaa, your mommy is a dork!  Sheeeeeeee cut her fingers oh yes she did!  And noooooooowww she's bleeding all over the place!  All over the place!

There was no way I was going to the emergency room by myself with the baby so I had to suck it up and do the best I could with what we had at the house.  I squeezed the heck out of my middle finger; my thumb was bad but the bleeding was slowing down so I put bandaids on both fingers.  

I soaked three bandaids on my middle finger before it slowed down.

You guys, my finger bled for like three days!  I seriously probably should have gotten stitches!  Thank God it stopped bleeding on the third day because I was really starting to get nervous.

I'm not going to be able to get a manicure for at least a month, if not longer!

It's been over a week and it still hurts and it doesn't look much better.  There's a big gash where skin should be and I'm still wearing a bandaid because it hurts so freakin bad if I bump it against anything.

I'm about halfway done with my craft and I'm really hoping I don't lose any more appendages before I'm done.

Because I'm not abandoning my little project!  I'm not going to let a little cut finger (or two) get in the way of my crafting!

I'll just have Drew cut the corks for me.