Month: January 2008

Two afternoons of work well done

I’ve been wanting to post this for the last two weeks, and the weather keeps being crummy, and I can’t take pictures (either it pours, or there is NO light – those held hostage under the deep, dark Seattle clouds will understand). So pretend this was posted back on 12/27.

When we bought the house, I also bought a pruning book, read it, tried out a few things, and then gave up and decided to wait for better instruction. Kevin’s dad is an arborist, and both of his parents are gardeners, and so we and our yard have been waiting with high hopes for their visit. We weren’t disappointed. Our three fruit trees were massively pruned (and did they ever need it!), five pine trees and the half-rotten enormous leaf-producing monster tree outside the kitchen window were de-limbed, and our shrubs have been taken from unwieldy monsters into much more manageable creatures.

Kevin’s dad was impressed (to put it mildly) by all of our moss, but once he adjusted to see past it, it was a treat to watch him work. As gifts, his parents brought out a handsaw, many yards worth of screw-together poles, a saw attachment, and a neat little pulley-operated clipper attachment. In two full afternoons, we learned a lot about what to cut and how to go about it, but the best part was watching Kevin Sr. confront the branches on a tree.

The tree on the side of the house, for example, stands in the 3 yards between our neighbor’s fence and our house, looming over the plate glass window and the kitchen garden window. (photo from early November)

Working from a ladder and then from the room, he gradually took down about 2/3 of the tree, dropping all of the limbs down onto the same 2’ stretch of walkway. (after-photo from the opposite vantage point):

Same with the fruit trees – 20’ branches consistently avoided the two fences, the neighbours’ yards, and the squashable surrounding shrubs.

Kevin got to “raise the skirts” on the back five pine trees, though with slightly less grace. 🙂

I spent more time on the fruit trees and the shrubs, and cutting up enormous falling limbs with the handsaw. We amassed QUITE the brush piles. The main one is on the back patio

and the auxiliary one is by the six-foot-tall side fence.

The plan is to try to get rid of the side pile via our semiweekly yard waste collection, and then possible rent a chipper for the enormous guy out back. Good luck, us.

The two biggest successes were the tree out front by the driveway, and the fruit tree right out back. Before, the pine by the driveway hid the house almost completely from the street.

Whereas now, you can see the roofline! Kevin’s dad took the branches up the trunk about 8 feet (and it seems like more from the ground, since the limbs drooped so much). The front yard is so much lighter!

For comic relief feel free to ponder the mass of the branches removed vs the two 96-gallon, black yard waste bins to the right of the garage. Ha, ha…

You can see all of the cuts on one side of the trunk from this photo:

The backyard tree is another joy to me. The poor thing was hacked within an inch of its life and then abandoned, and the suckers had almost entirely taken over. (Picture, with snow for contrast, from a few weeks ago.)

Now, there’s a defined center-top, very few suckers (the two that were left have some of the only branches that are growing at the back of the tree, so they stayed), no more hacked-off knobs, and much sparser, healthier-looking branches. We’re delighted.

It’s still probably in its twilight years, but it looks so much less abused and dreadful.
Next step: convincing them all that we want them to visit for more than tree work. 🙂

A week’s worth of progress

I’ve finished the first row of my new daybed quilt!! Yay!

Even better is the fact that I now know how many rows it will all take – looks like seven is the magic number. (This is exciting to me – you don’t often get to use sevenths, and for some reason I still remember all of the fraction-to-decimal conversions from Mr. Valle’s 7th grade math class. It will be fun to employ them in the blog sidebar.) After mulling over the first two squares for a few days, I did end up adding a ¾” strip of magenta and reducing the size of the outer pink by ¼”. I think it’s a little less striking, but far more balanced – a tradeoff that I am completely willing to make. I’m no longer left wondering what’s missing, which is still my reaction on the old one. The first two will make great pillow tops.

Equally exciting, and probably deserving a fair amount of credit for my speedy progress so far, is that I have a new desk! It was a Christmas gift from Kevin’s parents after I’d mentioned that I’ve been considering a side-by-side setup for ages. Here it is in quilting mode:

I love that I can have the sewing machine set up while still having easy access to my monitor, mouse and keyboard! I tend to listen to NPR online while I quilt, and this makes seeing the story information, clicking to email, or changing shows so much easier. It’s also nice to me not to have to move the machine every time I’m done with it – it can stay put while it’s needed and then retire to the shelf when it’s not.

Also, I can finally cut long strips at my desk, instead of having to decamp to the kitchen table. 🙂 Certainly helps in keeping the creative mess contained.

Also, all of my mats, rulers and the rolling cutter can live on the spare keyboard tray when not in use (they seem most prone to my knack for finding perfectly-sized and subsequently unrecallable storage spots). I’m all pleased.

Tonight, after washing dishes, I finished cutting the strips for the next seven rows.

The decision remains: do I sew up all the strips, then starch, then cut into triangles and seam? Or do I only do enough for a row at a time? I’m torn.

First sewing on the new quilt!

I probably should have just waited an hour and kept going in the previous quilt post, but recent posts have seemed so long, so I decided to save it for another day.

I finally lived it up and bought pinking shears. Kevin was skeptical, but they were a great addition to the party. After washing and ironing all the fabric (all 52 inches by 19 yards of it, which happily didn’t fray in the washing machine), I cut a preliminary batch of strips. I was pleased that I remembered the lesson of the stretchy way vs. the firm way (aka, with or against the selvage) from two and a half years ago.

I sewed the strips into a panel.

I pressed the seams flat and starched them all stiff. (This was my first time using, or for that matter buying, starch. Very confusing – I had no idea what form factor to even look for. I finally found a spray can in the drug store, and the “heavy” version seems to be perfect for quilting. Once I started using it, Amanda seemed a bit jolted and said it smelled like her mom ironing her dad’s shirts – to me, just “how 1950s”. :-))

Once everything was nice and immobile, I cut the panel into squares, and the squares into triangles. (The bias cutting, and later seaming, creates the need for the starch.)

22 seams later (the same number as for a single 6”x6” log cabin block), I had two 11¼“ squares.

I’m very pleased (especially with how close the seams are to lining up. Yay, starch.), though I feel like the pink square needs more of the magenta flowers. Perhaps a strip around the outside of the diamond? Debates continue, though I think I’ll end up changing it – better fix it now and use the first two squares for pillows than continue to be irked by it.

Welcome, I suppose…

Well, we have a new dude in the tank. We took Kevin’s family to the fish store on their last day here. (To be fair, we merely suggested it as an activity and then they asked – we didn’t drag them.) Along with the typical late December purchases of new lights, more sand, and the hermit crab and snail cleaner crew, we brought home an emerald crab.

The upside to emerald crabs is that some people claim that they eat bubble algae (a constant nuisance, and we have plenty). On the other hand, many people say that they also eat corals, other crabs, and any rock-dwelling fish (like the gramma) that they can corner. I don’t doubt it – those claws are pretty big. But Kevin’s family was here, he loves them, and he promised to trap it and bring it back to the store at the first sign of problems, and so we came home with one.

Once in the tank, he promptly acted like a crab (ie, dissapeared into the rocks and became nocturnal). We’ve seen him a handful of times since.

See him? His green forearms and pinchers are hugging the top of the acro. (There’s also a brown shell of a hermit crab on the acro just under the tips of the crab’s claws, and the pointy purple shell of a medium-sized snail to the left.)

I’m still deeply distrustful, and Kevin’s disappointed that he isn’t more visible. New name: Green Monster? He’s certainly big enough…

That helps a bit

We decided to live it up and buy a second yard waste bin. Another 96-gallon bin costs $7 a month, and we have been rapidly realizing that unless we get seriously into vermiculture (something that has been researched, considered, and rejected), our single bin just will not cut it.

I’m so impressed by the yard waste and composting services provided for curbside pickup. ANY food product, plus pizza boxes, counts as compost and can be put in the yard waste bin (including meat, fish and dairy, which you generally can’t compost at home due to pests and odor). I’m slowly gaining the knack for stuffing yard waste bins to the hilt: start with leaves and pine needles, add tree limbs to the corners and then stuff and stamp down all of the random branches and clippings.

Our clipping piles are basically never going to disappear. I’ve started researching rental chippers, but they’re seeming like more trouble than they’re worth at this point. The ones that actually could fit in my car are called shredders, but they’re harder to find for rental and they only handle things up to 2”, and they are apparently crummy at dealing with pine needles (we have a million). 90% of our branches could be handled by a small chipper (up to three inches), but the units need to be towed home with a trailer hitch (can you picture adding that to the mustang??), and they’re too big to get through the gate, so we’d have to haul the entire huge piles out to the driveway, and then haul (presumably via a new wheelbarrow?) all of the wood chips/mulch back to the backyard.

So, the default plan for now is to just max out our two yard waste bins until it’s gone. The pile on the side of the house is my top priority, since I can’t even imagine what kind of creepy crawlies are finding homes between our limbs and the dirt they’re sitting on. Yard waste is collected every other week during the winter, so it may be a long haul. To get a sense of how much a yard waste bin holds, here’s the before

and after (that’s a six-foot fence):

A new quilt!

I am all excited about the daybed quilt. After more thinking, the goal was to have a pink and brown quilt that would coordinate between the daybed and the light pink walls, and improve the coherence of the rest of the room’s layout and furniture. Given the mission-style rails on the sideboards, straight lines seemed better than curves, squares, or diamonds. Stark and geometric lines, but smoothed by color. I didn’t want something with too much movement – lots of quilt designs have strong diagonal or top-to-bottom lines. And I love the log cabin pattern, and plan to do many more, but I feel like I shouldn’t get into a rut (the world is wide, might as well explore a bit). Again, here’s the shot of the space to fill:

Surprisingly little searching on the internet yielded the Hidden Wells quilt design -– perfect! There’s a great (long) tutorial here, a short cheat sheet here, and some awesome samples (plus this and this). I particularly liked the strip widths and the colors (a bold square, with a lighter shadow) in this one. I whipped out the pencil crayons to come up with a pattern,

calculated fabric in each of the colors (and then doubled them… anything I don’t use for the quilt can be put towards pillows), went to Joann Fabrics, and bought these.

There’s a conventional wisdom that you need at least one “ugly” print to make your quilt pop – to me, an annoying rule. I’m thinking that a mix of colors (dark brown, whites, pinks, and one red) plus different textures will do the trick. Time will tell.

Oh, 2007

I know that the new year is going to bring new things – my job sounds like it will be changing a good bit, some friends are leaving Seattle while others are returning, we have half a million house projects on the horizon – but I’m so sad to see 2007 go. And, for that matter, I still miss 2006. The last two years have seen a new career path for me, two new jobs for Kevin, one fishtank redesign, one fishtank move, a proposal, a wedding, a honeymoon, 6 trips to the east coast, 1 roadtrip to Wyoming, 4 visits by family, a slew of wonderful wedding gifts, two friends’ weddings, 3 house inspections, 2 offers, and 1 new home, a finished quilt, uncounted finished knitting projects, 4 babies born to friends and family, and many, many bunches of farmers market flowers. I’m reasonably confident that the new year will not jinx this fantastic roll, but it still makes me sad to bid farewell to 2007. I feel like there probably aren’t so many years in life that are this happy.

I don’t think I have any resolutions. There are certainly plans (to walk and bike to work instead of driving, to quilt, to plan the weeks’ worth of dinners on Sunday, to attend our 5th-year college reunions, to finish painting, to redo the kitchen in the fall, to replace windows, to replace light fixtures, …). But for the most part, I am happy and settled, and my projects don’t count as resolutions. I suppose if there’s anything to focus on, it’s taking time to mellow: to read fiction, to not be tied to the endless to-do list.

Here’s hoping that 2008 continues the trend of 2007.