quilting

I finished the top for Pentagon papers tonight. I don't have any photos, because it's dark and it's late and it's Friday and … do I really have to make more excuses here?

… yeah, thanks.

I need to flip the quilt top over, trim any seam allowances that are too large, and then press it … but of course, pressing it means re-filing all of the fabric that I've pulled out this week to finish PP. It does seem like every round of tasks comes with seventeen codicils these days, but it is what it is.

I'll clean off the ironing board, trim the seam allowances, clean off the sewing table, pin the quilt, and get to work.

I'm actually mourning the lack of more pentagons to make — I never thought I'd say it, but life in its current state is often a lonely and solitary beast, and those pentagons have kept me company in a lot of strange places. I toted this project to …

Travel looks glamorous for the first thirty seconds, especially when it's work travel. New places! New things! The implication of being skilled enough that you need to take your skills to the people who need them!

Except it isn't really like that. It's looking at your cats and saying, "Shit, honey, I'm so sorry. Please don't bite the cat-sitter. I have to go to the airport again…"

I wised up with my book purchases some time ago. I realized I liked looking at craft books more than I liked owning them; I have a small-but-growing stack, and a realization that I don't actually need to keep many books. Keeping books leads them to eventually be part of cataloging and Keeping Up With and then sadly part of Clean ALL The Things. Those just aren't as fun.

My rationale: save my book-purchase money for the books that I just can't get through interlibrary loan, or books where $book->value > $cleanALLthethings->time.

(Yeah, I went there. Shut it.)

I've had a couple of projects on my mind today, projects I haven't added to my quilt list or spoken much about, but which have been difficult to stop thinking about. One has been brewing behind the scenes for a while, and another I just committed to today.

If they had a common denominator, I would describe them as "compassion projects." Some projects suggest themselves: baby quilts, marriage quilts, life-change quilts. These are different. I think I'd go as far as to describe them as "love projects" — projects you take on because in your heart, you know you must in order to be the kind of person you want to be.

Neither have names. I'm open to suggestions.

I mentioned recently that I'd been holding off on Adam and Brenda's quilt until I had my skills up, and that it was time to get started, because I had the skills. I picked up the very soothing English paper piecing, and the last thing left to do was master foundation piecing. If that last sentence didn't make any sense to you, the short version is that if I take my intended finished block design, break it into component parts, and print it onto some easy-to-tear paper, I can use the paper as a direct template to sew complicated patterns with dead-on accuracy.

This is a more natural-color version of the smallest, lightest star. The edges are rough because they'll be appliquéd under, later, and don't need to be perfect now:

I've been putting it off because…

1. I didn't know how to do it
2. I needed skills I didn't have
3. The prospect of trying this terrified me
4. That's a lot of damned appliqué

But here I am. It's been over a year since I've touched this project … it's time to get started. I've had a design in mind for some time, but it took a while to articulate it into even a simplified design — each time I drew it, it got simpler and simpler and simpler.

Adam and Brenda's wedding quilt is "Say Yes, Let's Go."

It has simplified itself into a tiny color palette. The largest stars will be subtler than this — possibly two-toned? but the intended effect is visible: a medium-on-dark star and a medium-on-light star, circled by stars of the opposite tone, with a medium-on-medium center star.