WIP Wednesday #6: Farmer with Lanterns

Despite crazy schedules last week and work being done on the house this week (the boys are helping get it ready to be painted), I've been getting some sewing done.  I'm finally beginning the quilting on my mother-in-law's Japanese Lanterns quilt.

I am relieved to finally be working on it, but I sure wish I could keep the stitching smoother.  Those big white squares are terrifying to quilt in a variegated thread.  I'm hoping the overall effect will be good.  Finished is better than perfect, right?  The good thing is that my mother-in-law doesn't really like super-close quilting, so I just have to do squiggle motifs in the bands of the lanterns and in the corners (and probably centers) of the white squares, and it will be done quickly.  After all this time worrying about it.

I had fun with the Farmer's Wife quilt this week too.  Here's block 20: Churn Dash.  Super-easy 9-patch: central square cut 2 1/2", HST's cut 2 7/8", rectangles cut 2 1/2" x 1 1/2".  Dark fabric is from an old shirt of Steve's, gingham from the thrift store, and the cute background is a vintage scrap from I don't know where.

Block 21: Contrary Wife.  I think she's pretty and demure, actually.  Another simple 9-patch: the orange gingham from a thrift store shirt, leftover yellow plaid from another quilt, and red dots from the thrift store.

Block 22: Corn and Beans.  I used a flash for this picture and the colors show up a little better.  I like how this turned out, but it was a pain to piece.  The fabrics: thrifted background; the black and brown fabrics are from my mother.  I tried to pick corny and beany colors.  The cutting: central hourglass triangles are actually HST's cut 2 7/8".  Then I cut 10 background 1 7/8" squares and 2 each the same size of yellow, black and brown for the small HST's.  Of these you piece (very carefully, because they're very small and most of them don't go into squares) the triangle units of 1 yellow and 3 backgrounds, and when they are together you sew them to the diagonal stretchy edges of the center diamond, and you have a square.  Then you need to cut a green square 3 1/4" for the smaller green QST's: add background HST's to turn it into a flying goose unit, then add black and brown HST's to the sides.  Those trapezoid units are pieced onto the sides of the center square, and then finally, you add four background HST's (2 7/8") to the corners.  Unfortunately, there aren't many fast-piecing methods that make sense for this block, and at each stage you're working with stretchy bias edges.  You have to take it slow and cut and sew very cautiously.  But this is close to being my favorite block yet!

Group shot.  I wouldn't have expected these little 6" blocks to be so much fun.  Be sure to check out the other WIPs over at Freshly Pieced.

Book Reviews: Paleolithic Lit

You never know where a curious mind will take you.  Because I knit, I joined Ravelry.  There I interacted with people who assume you're mentally deficient if you don't embrace evolution.  So I read up on the Intelligent Design debate, which is Ground Zero for atheism vs. any logical system of thought.  Because I'm a Latin teacher with a background in literature, I'm curious about the origins of the ancient myths.  If I had a time machine, I'd be going back into the pre-Abrahamic era to find out as much as possible about the stories they told, who travelled where, and how they did things.  I'm pretty sure that's where most of our myths started out.  The challenging thing, of course, is that we can never know for sure.  For all our talk about carbon dating and Young Earth vs. Old Earth, we can't observe that time period directly.  So, why are modern scholars so quick to deconstruct one of the few written documents that claims to describe that era?  Hmm.  Here are three books I've looked at recently that play with prehistory in one way or another.

The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, by James G. Frazer. 
Genre: Anthropology? Comparative religion? Mythology? Philosophy? New Age/Wicca?  Gnosticism? Could be any and all of them.
I skimmed this one.  It's really long, even in abridged form.  And it's all built around one idea: sympathetic magic (human and animal sacrifice, fertility rituals, etc.) is the basis of all religion.   By implication, Christianity is just one more example among thousands of the myth of the dying and rising god.  This is considered a seminal work in the field of anthropology, and it had an incalculable influence on the intellectuals who wrote the literature of the 20th century.  Also, if you're ever inducted into the language honor society Alpha Mu Gamma, loyalty to the Golden Bough forms a part of the quaint/silly secret initiation ceremony.  I presume it's this golden bough and not the original one that Virgil wrote about.  Frazer adopts the superior attitude of modern anthropologists, even referring to primitive societies as "savages."  He skips around a lot: the peoples he describes are united by similarity of customs, not historical era or geographical area.  I'd like to return to this at some point when I have more patience for it.  Even if you disagree with his premise, he successfully created the mythology of the modern era: i.e., that the old stories are all equally true, which means, of course, that they are all equally false.  His work definitely forms a part of the Great Conversation.

Before the Flood: The Biblical Flood as a Real Event and How it Changed the Course of Civilization, by Ian Wilson. 
Genre: Archaeology, history, literature, marine science.  This was a fascinating book.  The author is not a creationist attempting to prove the book of Genesis; the Black Sea flood at the end of the Ice Age, Noah's flood, and accounts from the Gilgamesh epic and other ancient accounts are presumed to be identical, and therefore the flood would not have been worldwide in scope.  The author takes an interdisciplinary approach, describing the Black Sea flood as documented by Ryan and Pitman and explored by Robert Ballard, postulating Turkey rather than the Fertile Crescent as the cradle of civilization, and pursuing tantalizing clues in ancient texts like Gilgamesh and the Argonautica.  Much of it is by necessity speculative; much (but not all) of the speculation is compelling.  I loved reading about the archaeological excavation of Catal Huyuk in Turkey.  I was less thrilled with the case built around the worship of bulls and the Great Mother goddess: Wilson spends a lot of time describing these widespread practices as being the ancient norm, including a matriarchal society and promiscuous sex.  He bemoans the overturn of this culture and the rise of patriarchy -- OK, we get it, this is the obligatory modernist distancing of self from the Biblical tradition.  Despite this, the book is enjoyable, readable proof that not all modern secular scholars dismiss Genesis altogether.

The Clan of the Cave Bear, by Jean Auel
Genre: Historical Fantasy.  Why I read it: I was curious, of course -- what other reason is there?  So in the '80's when everyone else was reading this I was underage, and THIS IS DEFINITELY NOT A BOOK FOR CHILDREN.  But there's something charming about the premise of this long-lasting 6-book series: a young Cro-Magnon girl, suddenly orphaned and homeless after a cataclysmic earthquake, adopted and brought up by a clan of kindly Neanderthals.  Part of the fun of historical fiction is learning what life was like in the old days... this is one author's speculation about life in the really old days.  You learn about knapping flint for knives other tools, how to hunt wooly mammoths and butcher them and dry their meat, and what plants Neanderthals used for medicinal purposes.  All very intriguing; but unfortunately, the impression I was left with was that it seems very dated now.  Not enough of "Little Cave on the Steppe" and too much proto-feminist manifesto, with a little bit of potboiler to swing it in the other direction entirely.  Ayla is a likable enough protagonist, and Creb the wise man and Iza the medicine woman are even lovable.  But the Neanderthals are a dead end of evolution, and Ayla's departure is inevitable.  I suspect that Ayla singlehandedly will advance early humans from Paleolithic to bronze age over the next several books -- but I'm not likely to read the later books based on the reviews on Amazon. 

The intriguing questions for me relate to the modern assumptions that prehistoric humans were less intelligent -- yet this story has even the non-verbal Neanderthals capable of living in an orderly social group, with laws and traditions consistent over generations and every member of the Clan performing necessary work.  The only things they can't figure out are how to count beyond 20 and where babies come from.  Then I look at modern young people, who diligently check the social media for the next scheduled riot but who couldn't cook dinner if they had to harvest the ingredients from their backyard rather than the local bistro, and have not even the faintest idea of basic economics, and I wonder if the technological age has really advanced us all that much?

Farmer's Wife #17-19

I can't stop with the Farmer's Wife blocks.  They're addictive little puzzles, kind of like Sudoku.

Block 17: Cats and Mice.  I had to bend my rule about fabric in this one to allow for the darling dancing Egyptian mice and fairy cats... both of these fabrics were from scrap bags I purchased.  When you stuff a bag of scraps for $1, it's almost like thrift store fabric, right?  More challenging was the block analysis... this is another one I drew out on graph paper and measured. It and block 19 are sisters.  The mice squares are a finished measurement of a generous 1 3/8", so I cut them a generous 1 7/8".  The QST's also finish to a generous 1 3/8", so I cut them a generous 2 5/8" and used the hourglass piecing method where you don't cut until after you've sewn the bias seams.  Then the side triangles: the base measurement is 4" so you cut one 5 1/4" square and cut it diagonally to get 4 triangles.  The corner triangles: 1" finished so you cut 1 7/8" squares (right on the line) and cut them once diagonally.

Here's sister block #19 - Checkerboard.  You can see that the square unit is the same (cut a generous 1 7/8"), but instead of the 4 larger side triangles we have 8 smaller ones - cut 3 1/4" squares and cut them diagonally twice for those QST's.  The corner HST's are again cut from 1 7/8" (not generous, just regular) squares.  To make up for my frivolous fabric choices in Cats and Mice I used all vintage or upcycled scraps - two of Steve's old shirts, two different old curtains, and some fabric from my mom.  Drawing these two blocks out helped me to remember some of my geometry from long-lost days of yore.

Block 18 - Century of Progress.  No way around it unless you want to piece it by hand, I think you're going to have to draw it out on paper (or print out paper piecing patterns) and use foundation paper piecing to get this puppy together.  Draw a 6" square, divide it into 4 quarter squares, and draw a line diagonally connecting the center points of the sides so you have a diamond in the square.  That diagonal measurement (about 4 1/3", but don't trust my math) needs to be subdivided into thirds, and a line connecting the thirds to the center or corner of the block needs to be drawn.  Then you piece it in 8 sections and sew them together.  I might have been able to get the center more perfect if I hadn't chosen a heavy-weight red ticking stripe, but I like the way it looks.  I had wanted to use more lime green, yellow and red in the quilt, so here it is.

Fortunately the next few blocks are easier to analyze and go together quickly.

End of the Week

I'm not used to weeks this busy.  Here's the tally, so far:

• two airport runs
• 11 dinner guests Sunday p.m. (sandwiches)
• 7 overnight houseguests Sun. p.m. - Thurs. a.m. (2 adults, 5 cousins)
• numerous carpools and car exchanges
• 13 dinner guests Monday p.m. (hamburgers, hotdogs, potato salad, baked beans, brownies)
• one trip, 14 people, to Powell's Books on Tuesday
• 13 dinner guests Tuesday p.m. (pepperoncini beef sandwiches, or with rice; cake)
• one 14-year-old boy (Secundus, of course) who broke his front tooth playing "fish out of water" and had to be taken to the dentist for an emergency filling at 8 p.m. Tuesday.
• 9 dinner guests Wed. p.m. (soft tacos/ Mexican mountains.  Made with ground turkey that I promise I cooked to an internal temp. hot enough to kill any possible salmonella).
• Early pickup for me Thurs. a.m. to carpool to Newberg, OR for the Veritas conference.
• One mother-in-law who waited until the cousins had all left before telling Steve about the chest pain she had been having and asking to be taken to the E.R.  One stent inserted through balloon angioplasty and one overnight hospital stay.
• Early pickup again this morning for the Veritas conference.
• Steve and the kids took in the Clark County Fair this morning and then picked up Grandma at the hospital and took her home.

The Veritas conference was good and very stimulating, and I'm almost done knitting my socks, but I'll spare you the brain dump.  I'm ready for a very slow evening of mindless TV.  And putting in a request for a very boring week next week.

WIP Wednesday #5: Mainly About the Farmer

Another WIP Wednesday over at Freshly Pieced. With a family reunion and cooking for 19 this week, I only have a few more Farmer's Wife blocks to add today.  Group shot above of the first 16: my fabrics are from my scrap boxes mainly, and I make myself use something vintage, thrifted or upcycled (from repurposed clothing) in every block.  I'm pretty happy with the mix of colors and not worrying too much about the final look of the finished quilt.  I think it will all work out.

Block 15: Buzzard's Roost.  Both fabrics in this one are from a recent trip to the Goodwill Outlet, where I found several scraps of interesting fabric in one bin.  I generally don't use large-scale prints, especially in such small blocks, but this one was interesting.  It ends up looking very modern even though the fabric is older.  For people who are following along with the block analysis and cutting, the central square was cut 3.5", the larger triangles are quarter-square triangles cut from a 4.25" square (twice diagonally - you will have two triangles of each color left over) and the smaller HST triangles are cut from  2 3/8" squares (once diagonally).

Block 16: Calico Puzzle.  This isn't puzzling at all, just a straightforward 9-patch variation.  Squares cut 2.5", triangles cut 2 7/8".  I'm not so sure about the color combination now, but it's very similar to the kind of quilts I loved when I first started quilting in the (gasp!) 1980's.  I needed more green to balance that #6 block, Big Dipper.  But what I think I'm going to need to do is put in more of the lime green, because it's just a lot brighter than anything else and really jumps out at me.  And I want more red, and yellow.

Part of the cleaning for the family reunion was in the girls' room, where the floor was at last cleared and vacuumed for the two sleeping bags in addition to the two beds.  In the process I took this picture of the valance I made several years ago when we remodeled and painted that room.  My youngest is the artist who makes the wall decorations...

... and the under-the-desk decoration, made from Bendaroos.  Why she felt the need to put up a fake spiderweb when she doesn't like real spiders is beyond me, but she's certainly creative.

Here's the quilt, 12 years old now, that the lovely ladies of the "Hearts and Hands" quilt group in Denver made for me when I was expecting Tertia and preparing to move out here.  I don't think it's ever been shared online before.  It's a real beauty.

Book Review: Demonic by Ann Coulter

Source: amazon.com via Katherine on Pinterest

After reading Demonic: How the Liberal Mob is Endangering America, I'm through apologizing to anyone for my fanship of conservative provocateuse Ann Coulter.  She's exactly right.  She knows her history better than many tenured professors at major universities, and uses her considerable research and writing skills to present a compelling case that liberal groupthink must be countered vigorously by ordinary Americans and resolute leaders if we want civilization to survive.  The question that kept coming to me, page after page while reading, was "Why aren't we taught this in our history classes?"

If Coulter tends to follow her meticulously-researched facts with a chaser of caustic wit, usually at the expense of contemporary Democrats, it's probably because earnest conservatives without that protective armor of irony quickly fall victim to the relentless attacks of the very mob psychology she describes here.  (Not that those who do write with the requisite irony are safe from attack, as Coulter's own biography demonstrates, but at least they give fair warning to the rabble that they are not intellectual lightweights, and that in itself does scare off quite a few.  I know whereof I speak.  There are sectors of the online knitting community -- yes, knitting -- where the liberal bullying and Palin Derangement Syndrome make it unsafe for conservatives to post.  And of course, the 2009 Ides of March purge has never been satisfactorily explained.)

Central to Coulter's argument is the neglected history of the French Revolution, which she retells in chilling detail in two seminal chapters that are not for children or the faint of heart.  Later in the book she returns to the mob-induced Terror and links it to its modern equivalents.  From pp. 265-266:

   ... In the course of France's short revolution, 600,000 French citizens were killed and another 145,000 fled the country.  That's in a country with between 24 and 26 million people, about the current population of Texas.  In terms of population loss, that would be the equivalent of the United States having a 9/11 attack every day for seven years.

   ... How did the nation of Voltaire, Descartes, Pascal, and Moliere transform itself into a bloody saturnalia overnight?  This is a question liberals don't want us to think about.

   The inheritors of the French revolutionary tradition always adhere to the same basic program.  Psychopaths from Lenin, Stalin, and Mao Zedong to Kim Il Sung, Pol Pot, and Fidel Castro have used the rabble to grab power, with essentially the same justification, the same objectives, and the same bloody results.

  All these monsters were praised in the New York Times and enthusiastically supported by the Democratic Party.

Some of the more shocking results of mob psychology in our times are terrible miscarriages of the criminal justice system.  Sometimes the innocent are falsely accused, as during the '80s, when false accusations of child abuse led to witch hunts and wrongful imprisonments led by, among others, Janet Reno.  Sometimes the guilty are wrongly excused, as when 5 attackers in the vicious 1989 rape of the Central Park jogger had their convictions vacated, despite their videotaped confessions and being found guilty in a jury trial.  (This is also a very difficult chapter to read, and the book as a whole is definitely not for children).

I challenge my Democratic friends to read this book.  You will not like it; you will probably be infuriated.  But ask yourself if your party is really going in a direction you are happy with, or, as Coulter contends, has become "the party of abortion, adultery, and everything bestial in society."  While I personally want Republicans to win at the ballot box, I would also like to live in an America where both parties are equal believers in basic human rights and dignity, and where there is a free, fair, and civil debate.

Sometimes, I think, living a decent life really is as simple as keeping the Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule.  Moderns who pretend otherwise, who base their morality on an attempt to be well thought of and sophisticated, nearly always fall into the mob mentality that Coulter so aptly describes in this book.

Rhapsody in blue