Fragmentary

I'm not great at multitasking, especially this time of year.  I spaced out twice yesterday about "Mom" things -- I didn't make sure the kids were wearing their dress uniform for the assembly, but by gum, I did the calligraphy for the Math Olympiad certificates that were presented at the assembly!  And then in the afternoon I came home exhausted, napped a tiny bit, and then was entering grades diligently in the computer files when the phone rang to remind me that Tertia was waiting for me to pick her up for her orthodontist appointment.  We were 40 minutes late, but the grades are now done.  Anybody want to take over cooking dinner for the next two weeks?

I have no stunning progress to report on either the knitting or the quilting fronts, but I seem to be gravitating toward little mindless projects that use up scraps.  And I haven't finished reading any books lately, but I get a page here or a page there.  It's just that time of year.

 I started another rug out of scrap cotton yarn from recycled sweaters, like my previous one but a little smaller.  I'm reading The Story of English in 100 Words by David Crystal.  It's fascinating, with lots of little tidbits about "jail" vs. "gaol" and "shirt" vs. "skirt."

 Sunday Morning Quilts is inspiring, although I was just expecting another "modern" quilt book -- I want to reread all their tips for scrap organization, and I want to make most of those quilts.  What I am doing instead is sewing little lavender sachets with the gallon bag full of lavender from last year's crops and a bunch of Grandma's scraps.  Plus my old alphabet skirt -- people who knew me 20 years ago might remember that old favorite that I haven't been able to fit into since Daniel was born... now all cut up for sachets. It smells nice in my sewing corner!

 The Felted Box of Godric Gryffindor is now almost full of 3.5" string blocks, just as the design wall is slowly filling with 5.5" string blocks.

 Sock knitting on the brown Farmer McGregor socks is turning into a slog, so I started another pair that will be just plain knitting, out of some Tofootsies that Joyce gave me.  And I'm finally reading Suetonius.  About time, right?

A really cool book I found at the library, in the Geek-Out category: The Hobbit Chronicles II.  Everything you might ever want to know about how they have improved Hobbit feet, the proportion of Dwarf heads to bodies and prosthetic hands and head appliances, as well as snippets from the casting directors and actors.  Those are two different gray tweed sweaters behind it that I plan to deconstruct for their yarn soon.

I didn't blog yesterday because I was so tired and was planning to go to be early, but then a group of kids from church who play Frisbee regularly at the park down the street (and our kids bailed yesterday because it was raining) had an accident; one of the older boys broke his leg while they played soccer, and the rest of the crowd including the younger siblings turned up at our house as a waiting room until the ambulance left and other arrangements could be made for their ride home.  So they drank hot cocoa and played I Doubt It around the table.  I threw a sweater and slippers on over my jammies and carried on.  So poor Stephen's surgery is scheduled for this afternoon apparently, I found out at school this morning.  We'll be praying for him.

Monday designs and stash report

What I'm working on:

I enjoy string piecing, but it can't be an end in itself much longer.  I need to come up with a plan for my next planned scrappy quilt, or maybe I need to switch gears and make a very planned quilt from a pre-selected range of fabrics.  I haven't decided yet... right now I'm in a kind of holding pattern, just trying to get in enough creativity to stay sane during the stressful final weeks of the school year.

I did load Orca Bay onto the Megaquilter last weekend.  It will be quilted with black thread in my usual quick quilting pattern, squiggle-loop-star.

Grandma had me lay out and pin her "plus" quilt top.  She ties most of her quilts after they are pinned to a pre-quilted backing.

Here's another one I pinned yesterday.  These should keep her busy for a week or two!  I really like the scrappiness of both these patterns.  Take a look at some of the other designs at Design Wall Monday.

Stash Report:

Fabric:

Fabric used this week: About 5.5 yards for backing for Orca Bay

Fabric used year to date: 37 yards
Added this week: 0 yards
Added year to date: 17 yards
Net used for 2013: 20 yards

Knitting yarn:

Yarn used this week: 100 yards for a dishcloth!  woo hoo!
Yarn used year to date: 6000 yards.
Yarn added this week: 0 yards
Yarn added year to date: 1300 yards
Net used for 2013: 4700 yards

Randomday

Steve took the girls to the Hazel Dell Parade of Bands this morning... I took a year off.  I hear the Little League pitchers were pitching the candy a little too hard at the bystanders, and at least one injury requiring urgent care resulted.

Secundus ran a 5k this morning, and reportedly celebrated by jumping in a lake.  That and the lollipop injury have me reminiscing about all his various trips to the ER.  There was the attempt to pick kiwis off the vine by climbing the fence and hanging, monkey-style, over the pavement while picking.  That was about 2 weeks before his 3rd birthday and required a 911 call but not an ambulance trip, and the ER had to call in a plastic surgeon for the repair, and he lost his front baby teeth early.  That was our introduction to the traumatic injury ER trip.  The rest were relatively easy by comparison.  He followed it up with the injury from jumping/falling off a piece of furniture (I think it was a dresser) onto a Lego piece that imprinted on his scalp.  Then the time he fell off his chair during family devotions.  Then the time he was attempting to play Spiderman on the swingset and created his most interesting laceration, the one that the doctor used to train the intern on.  That was right before Quarta's delivery by C-section, and I remember using one of our 2 spare surgical staple removers to take out the staples myself while sitting in my hospital bed.  (I have no medical training, but by this time I was pretty close to confident that I could put the sutures in myself if they just gave me a pack of supplies to keep at home, and I can certainly take out surgical staples).  There was another one that Steve took care of while I was shopping one Memorial Day, and there was the foot injury when he was deconstructing some old drywall and boards and stepped on a board with a nail instead of around it.  I feel like there should be some others listed, but I've forgotten.  Here he is looking angelic as Pooh in the 2nd grade play.  This was right in the middle of those traumatic injury years.  Now, it's nice to see him considering a career in the medical field... possibly by way of giving back for all those challenges he posed the ER personnel.

The Orca Bay quilt is now mounted on the Megaquilter.  I'm planning a fast and easy, fairly mindless quilting pattern for it.  It has so many pieces it should really have simple quilting.  I keep coming around to Saturdays and thinking I'd like to go shopping, but then when I actually come around to it, I have so many projects and stash that I can't bring myself to add to them until I clear some things out.  Plus, I'm usually dead-bone-exhausted-tired on Saturdays after a full week of teaching.  So I guess I should be thankful I am not adding to my stash of fabric and yarn.  But I really wish I could learn Molly Weasley's trick of making the needles knit by themselves while I do other things.  And it would be nice to have a quilting or yarn shop nearby, too.  When you have to drive 30 minutes to get there, it's easier to resist the temptation.

Daniel is home and we are enjoying having his presence once again.  He is very appreciative of home cooking, but really enjoyed his freshman year.  He found a great time-waster game for Steve, whose fantasy has always been for someone to drop him in the middle of nowhere and see how long it took to figure out where he was.  Well, they made a game just for him, and it's fun for other people too, even if we don't come as close.  It's called GeoGuessr and I warn you, it's good for several lost hours.

A few weeks ago I was blog-browsing when a virus of some kind replaced the desired blog with a notification that my computer was under threat and I would need to clean my system by taking some sort of action, which was doubtless a bad idea.  I was suspicious enough about it that I wouldn't have clicked on the link they provided --hovering over it there was something about beer in the link -- but then I noticed the misspelling on the "Microsoft" alert - can you see it in the screen capture?  Potential threats that migth compromise your privacy?  My autocorrect even tries to catch that.  Nice try, virus people, but get a proofreader.

Blogger's Quilt Festival - Jack's Chain

 

 

For my 4th time I'm sharing a quilt in the Blogger's Quilt Festival hosted by Amy's Creative Side.  This time I decided to share Jack's Chain.  Many of you have already seen my tutorial on how to piece the top - it's the single most popular post on this blog.  I did, finally, get around to quilting that top, just before Christmas, and gave the quilt as a gift to my daughter Tertia.

So here it is in its natural habitat, complete with Disney princess poster and dirty glasses and homemade teddy bear nightgown.  I think she likes it.  Plus, she's always happy to pose for a picture.

These are the newest pictures -- since I've blogged about Jack's Chain so much there were lots of pictures at earlier stages.  Here are a few:

Jack's Chain was a UFO for a long time, until I resurrected it and finished it last year.  The quilt is 67x94", with scalloped edges.  I backed it with a vintage sheet and used another vintage sheet to make the bias binding (probably a mistake, the high thread count made it difficult to push the needle through, but I managed.)  I like the picture above which shows the detail of the feathered snowflake quilting I did on the center hexagons. It's hard to see in all the other pictures.

 

I go into detail in the tutorial, but I think Jack's Chain is a pattern that is visually fascinating and charming in an old-fashioned way.  It is well within the reach of an intermediate quilter and one, like me, who is too impatient to do English paper piecing but still wants to do hexagons.  You do have to be somewhat stubborn to finish it -- after all, there are a LOT of little 9-patches and Y-seams.  But I'd love to see more quilters bring back this pattern from the golden age of quilting.

 

 

WIP Wednesday and Yarn-Along

 Progress on the brown socks is infinitesimally slow.  I did make the first increase row for the gussets.  But I should really have Steve put them on to make sure I guessed right.  Sigh...  I needed to make a therapeutic washcloth this week to overcome the sock ennui.

 

It's that time of the year in my 8th grade Latin class - we are reading Julius Caesar's de Bello Gallico, excerpts.  We just finished the part about the invasion of Britain; interestingly enough, although Henle Latin says it is book 7, it is actually contained in book 4.  My poor students are a bit overwhelmed by what they call Caesar's run-on sentences.  I don't quite have the heart to tell them that Caesar is considered one of the ancient writers with a clear, easily-understandable prose style.  We'll have just enough time left to peek into some of the bits about Vercingetorix, but I'm also quite behind in reading them the stories of the Trojan War, Ulysses, and the Aeneid from Myths of Greece and Rome.  Today I talked about the marks of an epic, and we read the account of Thetis' marriage to Peleus and Eris, the uninvited guest at the wedding.  There seems to be a Disney Princess/ fairytale reference in just about every mythology lesson I cover.

 

 

 Like rabbits, my string blocks are multiplying.  I want to keep making them until my strings can all fit into one container.  I hope my String Fling book comes soon.

And here is Orca Bay.  I got it out from the shelf, along with its intended backing fabric, to motivate myself to get it onto the frame to be quilted.

Linking up to the yarn-along and to WIP Wednesday.

Political Tuesdays: Pick a Scandal, Any Scandal

It's tough being a news junkie on a day like this, forced to sit in teacher inservice and not indulge in the schadenfreude that I freely admit would be my preference today.  I wasn't always a mild-mannered Latin teacher with a craft blog, you know.  I started out as a junior employee at the National Right to Life Committee in Washington D.C.  I guess you could say I was a "community organizer."  Steve's job moved us away after I had been there only 3 years, but I have remained a news junkie and political wonk ever since.  I've stayed in touch with my pro-life friends, and when Tertia was born, and had Down syndrome, I felt that at least part of God's purpose in giving her to us was so that I could raise awareness about these dear people, aborted at a rate somewhere around 90%.

For my new followers: I indulge my inner wonk some Tuesdays (and there is no way I could sit this Tuesday out).  If you have political persuasions strongly different from mine, the usual disclaimer is that you might want to skip today's entry and come back when it's just about knitting or quilting.  But I hope you won't be scared off.  My starting premise is that there is more that holds us together as Americans than most people give us credit for; and even though I am free with my historical allusions to the fall of the Roman Empire, I don't believe the barbarians have won just yet.

My long-time readers should brace themselves.  I'm about to post a complimentary reference to Ron Paul.  (Although I will say that I think the casting using the Mad Hatter was brilliant.)  Here is Obama as The Lord High Executioner, with "I've got a little list."


I was looking for a straight-up rendition of the song from the Mikado, but I couldn't find one single version that hadn't been altered with contemporary references... it seems to be a theatrical tradition. So why not use the one that is the closest to what Obama himself has actually done?  A tip of the hat to the Ron Paulites.  Wow, I can't believe I just said that.  I should probably clarify that I am much more hawkish on foreign policy than the mad doctor, and that I think the sparkly Liberace suit on the Obama doll is just plain tacky - Obama looks much better in a suit, give him his due.

So where to begin?  Here's the list of scandals to pick from:

• The IRS targets conservative groups for audits and harassment; Obama's enemies list? Now, I'm well aware of the intricacies of political action, the need to keep a 501-C3 organization separate from a PAC, and transparency in reporting, etc., etc... but this is way too much coincidence.
• In the hearings about the Benghazi attacks, it becomes ever clearer that Obama's administration doctored the truth to make himself look good before the election, and most probably failed to defend American diplomats in harm's way. No surprise to hear criticism from conservative columnists George Will and Peggy Noonan, but now even Maureen Dowd has joined the crowd: "unworthy of the greatest power on earth."  Well, I guess she better prepare for the IRS audit.
• The Justice Department has been covertly spying on the Associated Press.  I'm having a very hard time understanding why anyone, no matter how incompetent, thought this was a good idea.
• I think the Russians are sensing weakness.  Maybe this is what Obama meant by showing more flexibility towards Vladimir Putin after his reelection.
• Abortionist Kermit Gosnell was convicted of 3 counts of 1st degree murder for severing the spinal cords of babies who survived his late-term abortion process.  They become "babies" and not "fetuses" once they leave the mother's body, apparently. NARAL blames the pro-life movement, saying Gosnell was a back-alley abortionist and committed "atrocities", while ignoring the fact that for decades he operated as a member in good standing of the abortion providers' club.  Gosnell provided cheap, unsanitary abortions to poor and immigrant women; presumably the proper way to provide abortions is to make sure they are performed in a more exclusive, boutique-like setting?  I will probably have more to say on the subject of boutique vs. back-alley abortions in a future Tuesday post.  Gosnell is responsible for his own crimes; but it is worth noting that President Obama voted multiple times against Illinois legislation to offer protection to babies who survived abortions like some of Gosnell's victims.  And it is also worth noting that some babies who survived abortions are adults now.

It will be an interesting week.  Enough to make the President cry.

Design Wall Monday and Stash Report

Grandma had some quilt tops to be pinned to their prequilted backing yesterday.  This one was made with batiks.

This one, about lap-sized, reminds me of the monsters in "Where the Wild Things Are," or maybe a really wild video game.  She said it wasn't much fun to piece.  There are several more tops waiting to be pinned underneath her bed.  And she keeps bringing over her bags of scraps for me.  Here's what I've been doing with them:

With the scraps and strings I've been accumulating and sorting, I have been piecing string blocks.  I'm trying some with "low volume" fabrics... that's what's on the design wall right now.

And some with more saturated colors.  These are 5.5" blocks, pieced onto paper from old phone books.

And there are several 3.5" minis.  I have no idea what I'm going to use them for yet, but they're fun and therapeutic to piece.

Stash Report:

Fabric:

Fabric used this week: About 2 yards gifted in the Sew Mama Sew Giveaway

Fabric used year to date: 31.5 yards
Added this week: 0 yards
Added year to date: 17 yards
Net used for 2013: 14.5 yards

Knitting yarn:

Yarn used this week: 0 yards
Yarn used year to date: 5900 yards.
Yarn added this week: 0 yards
Yarn added year to date: 1300 yards
Net used for 2013: 4600 yards