Funny Compliment

My young friend who is just starting senior year at Harvard moved in to her new room this week. She went to Michael's and got advice from them about how she could hang her new quilt while following the dorm rules about tape and pins, etc. Once she got it up she took a picture and sent me a thank you along with a short note. She told me all of her roommates and friends were very impressed and a little jealous. One girl said, "No one loves me enough to make me a quilt," which she thought was very funny.

She said it was the nicest thing in her room and she felt incredibly lucky.

Stars and Chains in Progress

As I wrote in the last entry, I am working on a new quilt that combines piecing and applique, replicating, though not exactly, a quilt made about twenty years ago. That's funny to me since some of the fabrics I have used and plan to use in the quilt are from about twenty years ago. Anyway, the picture I have doesn't even give dimensions but I suspect the original blocks were a little larger than the ones I have made. I don't do a great deal of old-fashioned piecing. If I make a pieced quilt these days it is usually using foundations to assure perfect points and good matches. So these past few days cutting and sewing have been a reminder of what I liked and what I disliked in matching seams and trying for perfect points. Now that I have a fancy computer Bernina the work is a little easier but it still requires attention to detail.

My husband sort of picked out this project because he was entranced by the colors and the design in the original.  He especially liked the light grey background with the varied yellow squares. The center section is sewn but some of the edge pieces are only laid down next to that. It's laid out on my dining room table which is why the other finished quilt is underneath. There is another grey and yellow border beyond this piecing and then a very elaborate appliqued border, one that I have not drawn out as yet.

New Quilt, Old Tradition

If you have been reading this blog for any amount of time, you know that I am a traditional quilter. When I write or use that description I think of the classic quilts from the far past and the near past. There are some machine quilted creations that attract me, but far too many seem loverquilted with motifs that obscure the top rather than set it off. I don't like piecing that much anyway, and machine piecing is particularly frustrating. My current machine does a nice job of sewing true seams, running over seams without distortion, but that doesn't mean I like sitting at the machine.

However I have been making a pieced center since I finished my husband's quilt. He saw a photo of a forty year old quilt (or thereabout) made by a woman named Rita Ilene Ptacek. It has a pieced center that is an Irish chain with stars. The quilt has a grey background which my husband finds very pleasing. He also likes the yellow chain portions because the original quilter used bright and light yellows to make the quilt sparkle. The appliqued border is charming, each side differs with sunflowers, bees and birdhouses.

Anyway, I have been making something approximating this quilt. The source I have does not provide patterns, or measurements but I have made enough quilts to be able to approach the mastery of the original even if I don't reach that standard.

Mad Max

Although I think I posted this picture before, my husband thinks it's so funny he wants me to post it again. We have three cats with Max being the biggest and the youngest. He only weighs about 15 pounds so he isn't so big for a Maine coon cat but his hair makes him look bigger. Like most pet cats, he is the king of all he surveys.

The picture at the top of the blog is Max when he was a kitten. The quilt is a recreation of one I saw in an article in House Beautiful about 15 years ago.

My Samurai

My husband calls this the lovebird quilt. He picked that image to turn into applique but I am responsible for the rest. I adapted designs from a book called Japanese Design Motifs published by Dover Publications in 1972. The designs are primarily kamon or emblems, suitable for badges to show one's rank or family. I replicated those for the corners, with the family crest being the one on the upper left hand corner.

The borders were just inspired by the kamon, using images that are common or familiar in Japanese pottery or china like the eggplant and the peony. So in many ways this is my own creation. Even though the designs are ancient, as far as I know they don't appear anywhere as I have drawn them. As I wrote previously, the lovebirds were inspired by an embroidery design made to imitate Delft pottery.

The quilting just follows the curves of the design and there are some embroidered touches, most visible in the plum blossom motif in the bottom right. My husband really likes it.

Supporting Youth

One of the young people I have helped had a bad sophomore year at Harvey Mudd. She is a very capable and talented young woman but has not faced emotional turmoil. A year younger than the typical sophomore, she had not had a "boyfriend" before. She thought she knew what all of that would entail but she didn't.

Anyway, she came home early from school, finished her final exams here, and stayed at home rather than working as she did last summer. I am not her parent so I don't have any control over those decisions but I  invited her to the house several times this summer. I asked her what she liked at school and it turned out that she liked painting images  on walls and sidewalks at her school. So I invited her to paint a part of my ceiling.

Everyone needs to pay attention to young people. Sometimes they need more help than you know.

Still No Answer

The MRI didn't show trigeminal neuralgia so there still aren't any answers to why I have this recurring pain. The radiologist did see a venous malformation in my jugular vein on the left side so he wants to do a CT with contrast to see just what is going on there. At this point since no one can say that this even means anything, I don't know that I want the scan.

MRI Monday

I go in on Monday for an MRI of my head.  It's a long story but it boils down to my new doctor thinking I might have trigeminal neuralgia. I have recurring pain in my jaw, my ears. I have been to the dentist, the periodontist, the jaw dentist. I mean when your teeth hurt you go to the dentist first, right? Anyway, my previous primary care doctor retired, I got a new primary care person within the same practice and had a meet and greet with him three weeks ago.

I know nothing about trigeminal neuralgia. I really have been to all the mouth related people I could think of including my otolaryngologist since some of the pain is a very sharp stabbing pain in my ear that stops me in my track. The jaw dentist said unequivocally that I don't have TMD even though some of the symptoms are similar.

If the MRI shows what is expected, I will probably have to go back on neurontin. I took that about fifteen years ago before I had the discectomy and fusion on four vertebrae in my neck. Even that wasn't for the pain but because I was losing the use of my hands.   

Jury Duty Results

Well my husband wasn't impressed with much of anything at the court. The case was a drug offense (selling heroin to an undercover police officer) and then running away from the police. Although husband didn't think the prosecutor was particularly good, he wasn't impressed with the defense either. He also had a pretty low opinion of his fellow jurors, saying that the loudest one was a computer nerd who wouldn't listen to the other jurors because he didn't like the police. Of course my husband is something of a computer nerd as well. He also agreed that practically everyone has had an unpleasant experience with a police officer no matter how law abiding they might be. But he didn't see any reason at all for the police to lie in this case since it was so penny-ante (it was only $20 worth of drugs even if it was heroin) so he argued that the police were being honest and the drug dealer was lying. After nearly four hours of deliberation following a 90 minute trial presentation, my husband and the only other holdout gave up and agreed to let the accused go. He certainly didn't come home feeling that justice was served or feeling ennobled in any way.

Jury Duty

My husband who is 68 just got his first ever notice for jury duty two weeks ago. He filled out the card and sent it back and got the notice to appear last Saturday. Around here the system is that you get that notice that gives you a phone number to call every night to find out if you must appear in court the next day. Well he didn't get summoned for court appearance until this morning and he is sitting on a jury right this minute. I have no idea what the case is and he seemed very unsure about how long he would be at court.

It's sort of funny because I have gotten summons to appear in every state where we have lived except South Carolina since I didn't register to vote there because we were only there for six months for a Navy school. All the rest have called me up but I have never been picked for a jury.

Japanese Apples

Several years ago, a local quilt auction for charity featured an apple core quilt. It was in browns and reds and greens mostly in plaids. It sounds very mundane but since then I have wanted to make an apple core quilt. I don't know what pushed me to make this into Japanese apples, so to speak, but this quilt is for my husband, including his family crest and other kamon designs.

Some of the fabrics are true Japanese cottons, some are inspired by Japanese design, and some are regular American calico.  The side panels are my own take on mostly Japanese inspired ideas, with peonies and butterflies, Japanese eggplant, spider lilies, but the upper panel with the birds was inspired by a Delft embroidery pillow. The small spot on the right hand side is just water that I sprayed on it to press the edge prior to photographing. It was curling from working on the embroidery elements.

Enjoyable Reading

I don't remember learning how to read. As the youngest of four children of parents who were both readers, I don't doubt that someone was always reading to me or showing me a book. I do know, through family lore not personal remembrance, that I was reading the New York Times before we sailed to Germany when I was between two and three. My mother used to show me off like a trained seal and especially if she thought she was getting one up on her own sisters who were all older than she, so she told her sisters that I could read the NYT and then had me prove it. We all grew up with our noses in books including the encyclopedia.

I still read, usually two to three books a week plus multiple newspapers every day online. My husband was not much of a reader until relatively recently, but now reads every day and enjoys commenting on the books and authors. His turnaround occurred primarily because of my work with the high school students. It's often a frustrating task, one that pretty much requires talking it out with someone. Since my husband is a good listener, he is my sounding board and talking about characterization and point of view, dialogue and setting, et cetera, got him to think about literature in a way that no element of his education had previously. He is pretty typical of many very smart men. Reading was what you did to pass the exam. That seems to be an even bigger group now including many young women I meet. Sometimes I ask these young women how they intend to pass their time when they are my age since it seems unlikely if not impossible that they will still be playing computer games. The future does look to be largely devoid of reading as I understand the activity.

Anyway, I am reading Richard Russo's Bridge of Sighs right now. Sometimes I like certain authors because they describe people and situations that are quite foreign to me or to my experiences. Russo's work often embodies the opposite concept. His settings and his characters are like blasts from my past. Even though I was only about ten when we moved from western Pennsylvania, the neighborhoods and attitudes in this book, though it is set in upstate New York, mirror what I remember and in some ways also mirror what we experienced in Cleveland when we lived there after my husband finished graduate school. Of course Russo is describing pretty much the same time period in which I grew up so it has that familiarity as well.  Good writing, good reading.

Ordeal

The oral surgery was an ordeal which is hardly a surprise. Multiple anesthetic injections, gum flayed like a dead animal, grinding of bone, injection with pig collagen, sutures hanging down--I am glad that yesterday is history. Now I just have to maintain a positive attitude even though the pain is pretty intense and I am not allowed to brush one side of my mouth. I am thinking that my breath is going to be pretty bad before the week is up. Lots of salt water rinses followed by that nasty blue antiseptic mouthwash that stains the teeth and makes food taste terrible.

Dreading Tomorrow

I have an appointment for what should be minor oral surgery tomorrow. For most of my life I had very boring teeth, no cavities to speak of, good gums, no problems. Then in the last fifteen years or so my bite changed and I broke a couple of teeth, had to have some crowns, and had two implants. Still pretty good teeth according to my dentist, but when I broke one of my eyeteeth a while back I broke it in an odd way. Looking back I probably should have just gone ahead and had an implant on that one but my dentist said all I needed was a crown. Since the break was so odd, the lingual (tongue) side of the gum got damaged and has been an issue ever since. Never hugely painful, never a massive infection but constant and sometimes worse than others. So I finally took the dentist's advice and I am going to the periodontist tomorrow to have oral surgery to correct  the problem for what everyone hopes is for once and forever. I don't do well with the painkillers that are usually prescribed, ending up with nausea and constipation. Luckily mouths heal quickly but I definitely am not looking forward to tomorrow.