planning

Assuming the freecycler I've heard from comes through, I'll be getting rid of the old sofa and love seat in the Room Of Many Purposes within the next few days. We think the room was originally supposed to be a formal dining room; it has a chair rail and is open to the living room. We aren't 'formal dining room' people, so we tossed in couches and put in a few rickety bookshelves and called it the reading room.

I'm starting the process of revamping it into a sewing room, so the messes of my quiltmaking — which are spread throughout the house right now — can be condensed into a single room. I'm having a fun time thinking about what I want to do in there, though. I've never gotten to design a room just for me. Just for creativity! It feels disturbingly luxurious.

What do I want to do with it? There are a few definites:

Well, I have my initial answer for the quilt design:

Initial reaction: it’s close.  It’s very close.  I have eight stars left over, thus explaining the +8 or -10.  If I want to stick with the current number of rows, I have eight spare stars.  If I want to add one more row, which I believe I do, I’m ten short. Given that I’m sitting on several fabrics I didn’t use, I’m fairly certain of my answer. I’d planned to be a bit short on stars for that very reason; I didn’t pick out these fabrics, so I was going to be very dependent on lucking into a good order.

Two of those red fabrics just aren’t playing nicely, though. I don’t want to pull them out of the quilt; I’d rather blend them better. We’ll see.

Full evolution of the design is documented at http://flickr.com/photos/domesticat/sets/72157613043153779/detail/

I have little of use or consequence to say, but I’d like to note that all of the stars have been brought to the end of Stage One: Partial Assembly.

See these, down at the bottom of this photo?  All sewn now, baby:

[‘Soon, stars’ on flickr]

Stage Two seems to involve ironing the last 70-odd stars that haven’t gotten the Hot Steamy Smackdown.

Stage Three … you know it … brace for it … it’s TECHNOQUILTING TIME.  Yes, that great and glorious day when I set up a whiteboard, photograph all the half-sewn bits one by one, and fidget everything around in Photoshop until I’ve got a running order.  I realize most people use Photoshop for normal things, like graphic design and making one’s boobs look bigger in photos, but I’ve got plenty of boobs and normal is so damned passé.

Here we are. The clock on my computer says we have exactly a week to go, and the scary thing is, I think we’re more ready than we’ve been in years past. Jeff brought the Ops server up last night, and I started testing it to make sure the basic functions were ready to go.

I’ve found a few oddities, and it’s not fully functional yet, but I’ve got a list of fixes and tweaks, and everything looks manageable.

The tickets are booked. I will disappear for a little while in late July, and I would be lying if I did not say that the nighttime pathways of my mind have taken me more than once down the thought of sand between my toes. It’s peace and quiet I’m after, both for myself and for the friend who is kind enough to host me, but there is yet much work to do before I can board that plane without undone tasks.I am the sort that is good for crusades; when it comes to code I am more stolid than gifted, as Gareth and several other true coders, whom I count among my friends, can attest.

At this point, it’s just plain silliness: the cutting of a spare house key or the run to Kinko’s for sixteen color copies. Or, as said to Suzan the other night: “We do all this planning ahead of time so that when we finally get on-site, we can walk away from our lives for nearly a week.”