1.
2. Check out this crosswalk sign hack:
3. And speaking of high fives, I took today off from work. Pretty awesome.
1.
2. Check out this crosswalk sign hack:
3. And speaking of high fives, I took today off from work. Pretty awesome.
1. I need to decide on an elaborate cabled sweater to make soon if I’m going to accomplish Thing 22 on the 29 Things. The latest Interweave Knits magazine had a cardigan that I know I would wear a lot, but is it cabley enough?
2. Check out this crosswalk sign hack:
3. And speaking of high fives, I took today off from work so I get a four-day weekend. That’s pretty great, too.
I was searching the Gourmet.com archives for a plum cake recipe that used ingredients I had, got distracted by their Cocktails of the Decade, 1940-2000 gallery (awesome), and noticed a cocktail called the Phoebe Snow. I knew the Phoebe Snow was a train, and that Utah Phillips wrote a song about it (her?), but I didn’t know the backstory: Both the cocktail and the train were named for
a character created for a railroad advertising campaign that ran from the 1880s into the middle of the 20th century. The original Phoebe Snow was a young woman whose white dress remained pristine while riding the train because it ran on anthracite rather than normal, sooty coal.
Both Wikipedia and Utah Phillips back that up. Cool.
(Here’s Phoebe, courtesy of Wikipedia.)
Then I moved on the The Joy of Cooking, still looking for a plum cake recipe, and I finally decided to look up “cockaigne.” Many recipes in there are called “Chocolate Cake Cockainge” or “Christmas Fruitcake Cockaigne” and while I’ve been reading the cookbook since I was about ten, I’ve never bothered to find out what it means. (In my head, I had decided it meant “with nuts;” I don’t know why.)
As it turns out, in medieval times “cockaigne” was a mythical land of plenty to peasants, kind of like the Big Rock Candy Mountain was to hobos. The Joy of Cooking authors had a country house named that, so all the “Recipe Cockaignes” were really just their house specialites–no nuts involved. Apparently this was in the forward to the cookbook the entire time. Thanks, Wikipedia!
It is Wednesday, right? Somehow I ended up with a re-scheduled doctor’s appointment in the middle of a day filled with meetings and projects that are demanding more creativity than I think I can muster at this point.
So let’s watch this video of a cat washing a fennec fox:
There. Now I feel better.
I wonder if all these “in progress” quilt posts will spoil the final reveal, but I’m just so pleased with any step forward that I can’t not show it. The latest step forward is, of course, the quilting. Like the Velveteen Rabbit, it’s a Real Quilt now. Behold the even machine stitching:
And look how it looks like a real quilt all folded up:
The only step left is to finish the raw edges with some binding. I hope to at least start that over the long weekend.
Some of what we do, we do
to make things happen,
the alarm to wake us up, the coffee to perc,
the car to start.
The rest of what we do, we do
trying to keep something from doing something
the skin from aging, the hoe from rusting,
the truth from getting out.
With yes and no like the poles of a battery
powering our passage through the days,
we move, as we call it, forward,
wanting to be wanted,
wanting not to lose the rain forest,
wanting the water to boil,
wanting not to have cancer,
wanting to be home by dark,
wanting not to run out of gas,
as each of us wants the other
watching at the end,
as both want not to leave the other alone,
as wanting to love beyond this meat and bone,
we gaze across breakfast and pretend.
1. Sewers and knitters, hurry and scour your stash–the Iraqi Bundles of Love project is taking donations through September 7th. The project wants to get sewing supplies into the hands of Iraqi women. It’s all organized by one soldier:
Willing contributors can send to me a flat-rate box of sewing / quilting [or knitting] supplies, all bundled up. I’ll open the box, pull out the fully-contained bundle, and hand it off (with others) to our counterparts in the Iraqi Security Forces (Army and others) or the local police, for them to distribute. Some of the bundles will also be delivered by US Soldiers.
I’m just not sure something can get to an APO address in a week…maybe Priority Mail is a better idea? I only heard about this yesterday, but I hope to put something together.
2. Bonnie Tyler brings back fond memories of my old roommate. Here’s a flowchart for “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” in case you need it (click for big):
3. And the quilt looks fantastic! On to the finishing–pictures soon.
I got a call last night that the quilt is done! So after work today we are going on a field trip to pick it up. Hopefully this will be my initiation into the quilting world–I’ve noticed that established crafty ladies (usually older ladies) are really unwelcoming to newer crafty ladies (usually younger, like me) until you’ve sort of “proven” that you’re not a dilettante. It took me months at the knitting store for the knitting ladies to accept me, and I noticed that the quilting ladies I’ve encountered during this process have a little of the same attitude.
Overall, though, the quilt ladies been more welcoming than the knitting ladies. Maybe it helps that I came in with a completed quilt top, so they don’t think I’m completely clueless.
Anyway, I’m excited to see it turned into a real quilt!
Third sentence from Out of Africa:
In the day-time you felt that you had got high up, near to the sun, but the early mornings and evenings were limpid and restful, and the nights were cold.
So it’s a good thing I got a call last night that my quilt will be ready this weekend. I need to get it finished and on the bed before the nights get truly cold.
Remember when I took days off from my old job to sew? I was a lot less busy there, but I didn’t like it half so much. And I had no fancy title.
I am taking the Friday before Labor Day off, though, ostensibly to hike Bald Mountain for the 29 Things and continue the tradition of doing something beyond our fitness level on Labor Day. However, it’s one thing to get stranded on the Jordan River Parkway, like last year, and another thing entirely to get caught in a lightning storm (or even snow) on top of a peak in the Uintas.
Which is all just a long intro to the fact that I bought more fabric to add to the fall project pile, just in case we don’t hike and I have four days to sew:
This is a Japanese import and it’s gauze, which I’ve never worked with before. I saw that Kara made a darling skirt from a print from the same line and was inspired. I thought the fabric would lend itself well to a tunic and the print would look really good with navy. Because even if I don’t get as many days off in this job, I can buy blazers now.
Oh, J. Crew. My on-again, off-again relationship with you just continues to cause me trouble.