quilting

Scarlet was a short-timer, a quilt top nabbed for a song, given a few quick repairs, and finished up. I make no secret that I keep an eye on the auctions for used quilt tops; mostly I look to see what’s out there, and very very rarely I’m moved to pick one up.

She — and this quilt top was a ‘she’ from the start — just delighted me from the start. It was lovely, imperfect, and utterly without pretense; it was a hand-sewn quilt top in the log cabin variation known as “straight furrows.”

The description:

Vintage Log Cabin Quilt Top. Not sure of age. From an Estate of lady who was over 100 yrs. old.

About 70-74” wide and 80-84” long. All hand pieced, slight musty odor from storage. A few minor stains, showed a couple in last two pictures. They are not very noticeable.

Great old colors, blues, browns, reds, peach, pink, black, gray and others.

This … THIS … has been the secret project. The one I couldn’t explain much about, because if I said anything of substance, I would give away a secret that wasn’t mine to tell.

Here’s the problem, and the joy, of the Drupal community. Everybody knows everybody. Doesn’t matter that we all live in different states, or that we work for different companies. We know each other. Sometimes we know MORE about each other than we want to know, and the only way to keep a secret is to keep your big, yapping trap shut.

More on that in a moment.

* * * * *

On February 7, I got a message that caused me to leap from “tired” to “omg excited” within five seconds flat:

I think it was just the kind of boost I needed, because within a half-hour, I was muppet-flailing through my stash. I knew what I was looking for, but I pulled everything I had that felt right, and set it out on the table:

Yesterday, in sewing terms, was nothing short of an epic journey. I had to check my last.fm account to see a tally of exactly what the final answer was (the question, of course, being, “What do I have to do to finish this quilt top this weekend?”) —

• 4 episodes of the Splendid Table (200 min total)
• 1 episode of WireTap (26 min)
• 1 episode of On Being (50 min)
• 4 episodes of Trust Inc (112 min total)
• 1 episode of Marketplace (27 min each)
• 1 episode of The World’s ‘tech’ podcast (16 min)

431 minutes, or just over 7 hours. I had joked about treating Saturday like a workday, except a workday devoted to fabric instead of software troubleshooting, and I think it’s safe to say I actually followed through on my jest.

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.)