New Product, New Book

I don't know what the rest of you do with odd pieces of batting and maybe I am way behind the curve but I just used Heat Press tape from Jeanne Harwood Designs to join two smaller pieces of batting into a piece large enough for the small quilt I am currently making. I deliberately placed the tape so that  I would have to quilt over it (I am a hand quilter), so that I would have a reasonable test of the product. Well I am sold. Maybe this has been around for a while and I just didn't pay attention but the heat soluble tape works well and is easy to apply, at least on the cotton blend batting I used. I am not big on recommending products but this one is a keeper.

Another recommendation I can make without any reservations is the newest novel from one of my favorite authors, The Children Act, by Ian McEwan. It is quite short (I don't know how many pages since I read it on my Kindle) but very powerful. McEwan's use of language is masterful and the thought provoking ideas he explores always resonate with me. I am still thinking about the various dilemmas posed in this book about children and the law.

Make Yourself At Home

I changed out the quilts in the living room today, choosing one from a while ago and one from this year. Several hours passed as both my husband and I went about our day. When I went in to the living room this afternoon to read before finishing dinner preparations my Maine coon cat followed me.

He isn't as mean as he looks in this picture. He loves to have his head rubbed and he loves his "mommy". You can check his kitten picture online in the photo attached to this blog.

Change In The Weather

It was a very wet summer here by any measure. It never got overwhelmingly hot, with only one day at 100F or over, but it has been a fairly warm fall. It isn't unusual for us to have a white Halloween but I don't think that will happen this year. The meteorologists are predicting a couple of cold days--close to freezing tomorrow, but then a warmup. Still there is a good chance of snow next week not this week. I have been putting off getting new tires but I need to get my act together this week. I also have another date with the new dermatologist to get the second skin cancer removed entirely.   

Antique Blocks With Modern Pretensions--Anonymous Was A Woman, Of Course (With Pictures)

Anyone who has been reading this blog knows I have been working on a project involving some antique blocks I purchased a while ago. After some stops and starts and four months later, the quilt is complete. I know for a fact that the woman who made the original blocks intended for them to be put together without sashing but since I had to finish the points a touch shorter to make them into points again after some modern person cut them apart with a rotary cutter, I couldn't do that. Most of the blocks are still a little crooked or off center but I straightened the worst ones. 

 

This is the border and corner that I added with a closer look at the antique squares.You can see that the center/reel section of the original block is asymmetrical. That's where the maker had the most trouble and nearly all the blocks have some problems there. I only point that out to emphasize that even if some of your own blocks are not  "perfect", the final product will be all right.

And here is the quilt on our bed. It is about 70 inches square so more of a topper than a full sized quilt.

Nearly Done (Updated)

I have approximately 18 inches of one border, including the corner. left to quilt--two leaves and vines and all the acorns and half inch grid left. Although I cannot predict accurately since I have no idea what else will happen this weekend, the quilting should be done by Monday. Then there is the trimming and the binding but the quilt is very close to complete. I have no idea what I will do with this quilt. I have thought of donating it to a charity auction but after the last donation only made $125 and the individual blocks for this quilt cost me $85 apiece I hesitate.

My next project will be much smaller. When I made my Ties That Bind quilt, I thoroughly enjoyed the hand piecing of the bowtie blocks. So I found a quilt, "Shades of Pratt", by Kay Olivia, that uses bowtie blocks but in a non-traditional format. The original quilt was made with hand-dyed fabrics and I do not do any hand dying at all, but I have found appropriate commercial fabrics to replicate the original. I do intend to machine sew the checked border but if you haven't sewn bowtie blocks by hand you should try it. I found it to be like making origami with the final pull to complete the block almost like magic.

Update:  It is Sunday evening and I have made very good progress. I finished the quilting on Saturday. Made the binding today and have already attached the binding on the first pass. Tomorrow I will probably finish the binding though I hate to predict anything. Then attach the hanging sleeve, make and attach a label (I think this one will be very involved), and then get rid of the blue ink lines. Nearly there. 

Battlefields and Stores

My husband and I just got back from a trip east--a brief stay in NYC for my birthday dinner and then picked up a car to drive to Gettysburg. The trip to Gettysburg had two purposes--to see the battlefield and to visit antique stores in the area. We spent two nights in NYC, had dinner at Saul in Brooklyn. We used to go to Saul at least twice a year because the food was just so fantastic. Then they moved to the Brooklyn Museum of Art last year and this was our first visit to the new location. The food was still amazing and the manager and staff were so nice--champagne, oysters, and port gratis as a gift for my birthday. That was in addition to the tasting menu.

The trip to Gettysburg was nice, the very beginning of fall color showing on the trees. Some parts of northern New Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania can compete with anywhere in the world for lush landscape. We stayed at a B&B in Hanover, Pennsylvania. the Sheppard Mansion, one that I would not recommend to anyone. The house is not in very good shape and has a very funny smell. It was also odd that the manager/housekeeper didn't do any room cleaning so after three days our trash cans were full of all sorts of debris including the coffee grinds from the in-room coffee maker. The little town is quite depressing, boarded up stores and obvious signs of economic distress.That sounds terrible but there is still industry in the town--Snyder's of Hanover snack food and several other potato chip manufacturers--but for whatever reason the historic center of town has been allowed to disintegrate.

To top all that off, this was specifically a visit to Gettysburg, about ten miles away, and the B&B had Confederate flags and pictures of Robert E. Lee on display. Of course people always say that Pennsylvania is Philadelphia and Pittsburgh separated by Appalachia but my husband and I found the display off-putting. We did enjoy our visits to Gettysburg. We went two days in a row  because it would simply be too much to try to see it all in one day. No matter how much one reads about the battle, seeing the terrain makes it more real. We did it all from the museum display to the ranger walk and can highly recommend a visit if US history is an interest.

What would be hard to recommend is the selection of quilts at some of the antique stores in New Oxford. Yes, there were some genuine older quilts on display and for sale, none particularly noteworthy or anything. But there were some new ones mixed in and not marked as new. At first I didn't pay attention but when I started seeing the same fabrics over and over again at multiple stores, then I started looking more closely. It is perfectly all right for a quilter to sell new quilts but when they get mixed together with older ones and without identifying information I have a problem with the store's honesty.

Good Decision

Last week I had an appointment with a new dermatologist. Even though I have already been to my previous dermatologist three times this year I thought I better get the process started with a new one since the first one was proven to be incompetent or nearly so. The new guy did the full body map as necessary to start treatment. That was one reason I had delayed since any new guy was starting off with terra incognita. Well it was a good decision to switch doctors.

I had a few actinic keratoses frozen last week AND the doc took a biopsy of a suspicious spot, one that my previous doctor had dismissed. I just got the call saying that it was squamous cell but luckily small enough that there will be no need for the full-on surgical routine I had in August. Sure--it isn't melanoma but two inch incisions are never fun and squamous cell carcinomas do metastasize.

Historic Day

Today the Supreme Court declined the petition to hear the appeals of the federal decisions that allow same sex marriage in several states. The practical effect is to make same sex marriage legal in the five states in the recent decisions including Utah where I live. Back in December when the original federal decision was issued, several friends were among the 1200 plus couples to legally wed as I noted at the time. I spent many years working for other areas of lgbt rights and recognition. I was the coach of the local lgbt swimming team, President of International Gay and Lesbian Aquatics, and a voting delegate of the Federation of Gay Games, popularly called the gay Olympics though that term was prohibited by the Supreme Court. I swam in the Gay Games in Sydney, Australia and even won the first gold medal in swimming of that major event by swimming in Ian Thorpe's lane to win the 400 meter freestyle in record time, the first of my five golds from the meet. 

My husband and I are beneficiaries of previous court rulings that allow mixed race marriage. I am also someone who has gone through various types of discrimination including being  disowned by my paternal grandmother when I married my husband and ostracized by several members of my mother's family for that same marriage.  If the United States wants to be a nation of laws, then those laws need to be applied equally and rationally.

So same sex marriage is legal in Utah--hell has not frozen over and pigs aren't flying though a couple of moronic legislators have already proposed instituting two levels of marriage in Utah--religiously recognized marriage and something they are calling "pairage". Feel free to laugh out loud at that.

Serendipity

Our yard is very small but we decided when we moved in that we didn't want any lawn at all so most of what we have is planted with either decorative plants or productive plants with numerous trees. A couple of years ago I found some fingerling potatoes in my pantry that were just sprouting so rather than throw them away I planted them against our south fence. Most years I simply ignore them but this spring I marked where the plant shoots were so that I could find them come harvest time. Today I dug out a whole bucket of potatoes. I even left some in the ground for next year but I still ended up with a huge pile of potatoes.