Month: February 2008

Six seams to go!

Here are the 7 strips!

I’ll need to do a little bit of trimming (probably on the kitchen table?) before seaming these guys together. And I’m getting awfully close to needing to figure out batting and whether it will be possible to quilt this.

Regarding quilting, I’m sort of torn. The intense quilting (and the oddly stiff, oddly puffy result) is so much work, difficult on the machine that I have, and really not that attractive to me. YET, people (on the internet, my source of all information) really do seem so happy with and proud of the results. What to do? The cheat answer is to just use knotted embroidery thread to hold everything together. Compelling, but I would like to say that I’ve quilted something. Another thought is to just sew the exterior of some of the squares — easy, not fussy, but not particularly impressive, and I’m concerned that I’ll like the pristine pieced top more than the half-heartedly quilted one. I’m just not a fan of prissy things, and too much of the quilted things I see fall in that camp. It’s like knitted things from the 80s — no appeal. Can anyone offer a good guide to (machine) quilting that’s a little bit more modern?

In other news, Larry gets into WA tomorrow. I’m so excited. And I think I need one of these:

It has been SO GRAY here for the last two weeks, and I (never the up-and-at-em type, even under the best of circumstances) am running out of ideas for actually waking up and getting to work at a respectable hour. It’s funny, the culture out here makes a lot out of SAD (seasonal affective disorder) and espresso as a mood disorder treatment during the low-light months, but I don’t find the grey season(s) depressing. The moss and the clouds really are beautiful, and I love the January full-day glimpses of mountains and blue sky. It’s just very, very difficult to get up in the mornings. The cat option makes me laugh. Too bad Kevin’s allergic.

Tang!

I’ve been waiting to post a photo of our new little dude due to superstition. I wanted to give him a few days to make sure he was healthy and coping with the transition to his new home before sharing the photos.

He’s easier to catch on film than our last yellow tang, but still does his fair share of darting away, resulting in photos like the one above. He really doesn’t trust us, but he spends a lot of time, fins flared, dead still despite the current, just watching when we come into view.

I’m totally enamoured with him.

We took my parents to the fish store, and came home with a new xenia and the tang. He didn’t eat for the first two days until we moved the nori clip to the bottom third and back of the tank, at which point he tucked in with enthusiasm. Over the last week, we’ve moved it to the bottom half of the front of the tank, and he’s still eating which is obviously making us cheerful.

We have him on the kitchen counter in the 10 gallon quarantine tank. Some pvc elbows for cover, a 600 maxijet for circulation, a filter with carbon, and a CPR Backpack II skimmer. We’ll keep him there for a month, barring any signs of illness. On day four we started noticing black ich (little pin-points of black – it’s a tubeworm that tangs are very prone to) and some sort of unidentifiable fuzzy, white, fibrous growth by his right tang. We did a pH-adjusted freshwater dip, which seemed to take care of the black ich, and the next morning the white fuzz seemed quite diminished. We’re keeping an eye on him, and he might get another dip soon if the fuzz doesn’t completely disappear. He’s been very active and eating, dealt well with the dip, and doesn’t seem stressed (knock on wood). Here he is careening around the tank while we did a water change after the dip:

Points!

So all of the triangles are seamed into squares and pressed, and I was feeling sort of depressed about the likelihood that they would actually come together into actual squares of the same size. The more I looked at them and the more I pressed the seams flat, they seemed sort of defective and not-square and poorly measured.

So, a few nights off, and then I started sewing these non-squares into rectangles, and it was magical. With the exception of two or three squares that were truly ridiculous and lopsided going in, everything just worked. I have two piles – twenty more seams and the rows are done, and then it’s six more seams and the top is done and ready for straight borders, a back, and quilting.

The points on the seams are lovely. I’m ALL proud. For example:

Like the way that all of those Vs just *join*? The back of the squares are just as neat (I love seeing the wrong sides of quilts – the fronts always end up looking pretty and sort of OCD, but when you look at the back of a pieced square, you can just see exactly how much WORK went into the thing. Love all of those seams…)