…the links are mostly pictures today, but that’s ok too.
1. So accurate this month: 
2. This gave me an instant serotonin boost:
3. The “Wow!” kills me:
i love when NASA just tweets something like “Check this out — space sounds like the wailing of billions of souls trapped forever in Hell! They are calling for your blood! Wow!” https://t.co/VSv3Meql8D
— libby watson (@libbycwatson) August 22, 2022
Via an Austin Kleon newsletter, here is writer Matt Thomas talking about throwing away the idea of a daily routine for a seasonal one, and mapping out a year of habits and goals rather than just focusing on the day-to-day.
Fall is a time to write for me as well, but it also means welcoming—rather than fighting against—the shorter days, the football games, the decorative gourds…Come summer, I’ll feel less stress about stopping work early to go to a barbecue or movie because I know, come autumn, I’ll be hunkering down. More and more, I try to live in harmony with the seasons, not the clock. The result has been I’m able to prioritize better.
This is why I quit my job: So that when friends are in town and we talk the day before about going to the hot springs on a Tuesday afternoon, I can…just go to the hot springs on a Tuesday!
I introduced a couple more people to Maple Grove and truly, fall is the best time for it–golden light, fall colors, the river not-too-cold, the hot springs not-too-hot.
Maybe every Tuesday afternoon should be an adventure day in my new freelance life!
I put on headphones and Beethoven piano concertos and spent about three hours Sunday machine quilting this (small!) throw:
I’m proud of how the diagonal lines are exactly lined up with the corners of the blocks on the front, even though I was pressing each block with steam and I only read later that that can distort the grain.
In the week or two it took to piece the top, the bottom sheet from a Target set ripped out at the corners when I was making the bed–so I made it the backing for this. It still feels weird to cut up brand-new fabric to sew into a quilt, but at least I could recycle a little.
Toby has already claimed this so if I can get it back from him, I just have to do the binding (by machine, I think, but we’ll see).
This is me re: freelance taxes, making quilts, pretty much anything lately…but I am having a good time so I’ll go with it. (Art by Made By Nelson and I love the nasturtiums.)
1. What a game review: “Trombones. Hot dogs. Baboons. Collectible cards. Lore. Trombone Champ has it all.” Be sure to turn the sound on for the video examples of actual game play; I was cry-laughing by the end.
2. All the reading I’ve been doing in the throes of Quilt Fever has been from various blogs and books, curated by white folx, perpetuating an aesthetic that’s pretty rigid, not really questioning the stories they’re repeating. So I was excited to find the work of Grace Rother, who’s making beautiful quilts but also writing about these unspoken rules and picking apart the popular narrative:
Here in the US we have long had a very white, very narrow definition of what a quilt is and how one can be made. Sometimes non-white aesthetics have been incorporated- but almost always through the curation and discernment of white collectors. I am not saying that particular techniques, materials, or patterns are indicative of white supremacy, but that US quilt history is long and white supremacy has aided in keeping very specific opinions about quilts at the forefront. Those opinions have become solidified into an exclusive and rigid set of rules and I am in community with quilters who are dismantling them.
3. Words to remember, especially if you are in the middle of changing up your life and are impatient, too (ahem):
(by artist Made By Nelson)
It’s the Autumnal Equinox today and I, for one, am ready for this Autumn of Ease & Abundance. And I think it’s off to a great start–look at these glucose numbers for Toby on his increased insulin dose this week!
(For reference, he was averaging between 300 – 450 for numbers on the lower dose.) He’s already SO much sassier–I think he’s ready for the Summer of Struggle to be over, too.
So yes, happy fall! Don’t forget to be pagan about it in between checking your cat’s blood sugar.
After playing with every possible arrangement for my rainbow log cabin blocks, I had a brainstorm to put a block of print in each corner and that was the winner:
Using all pieced blocks is probably more traditional but I’m just making this up as I go along, and I like how the rust helps the colors flow.
After all that thinking and rearranging, it only took about 30 minutes to sew the blocks together into a quilt top:
If I think too much about it, piecing a quilt still just seems odd (to this garment sewer, at least): you take small pieces of fabric and just sew them into ever-larger pieces? But it’s fun. At least, it’s fun until I try to wrestle 54″ of fabric under my machine to quilt it (the next step).
It’s my big brother’s birthday today and, as you can tell from the card I unearthed from one of my mom’s quilt books, I’ve always looked up to him. (I loved those owl postcards; I remember my mom not wanting to dole them out just to get scribbled on, so clearly using one I wheedled from her to wish my brother “ha-ppy bthbay” was a big deal.)
I try to talk about my loved ones as whole people here in their birthday posts, and every person contains multitudes. Like my brother: Generous with neighbors but proud of his self-sufficiency. Deeply loving and protective but also teased me growing up (like any older sibling). Worried about the state of the world, worried about his family, but still delighting in nature, in human feats of engineering, in just being alive.
He’s a good man, a good dad, and a good family member and I’m proud to not only know him but be related to him. Ha-ppy bthbay, Alan!
…that’s the weekend summed up in two words, ha.
I took a “freelance Friday” and went to the fabric store in the next county with my friend, where I bought more quilt fabric:
That bottom row of fat quarters might become a quilt coat? With a white background this time instead of black? How many quilt coats does a person need?
Toby has another glucose monitor on at the moment and we’re increasing the dose, which gave us a scare on Thursday when his blood sugar plummeted. So otherwise I hung around the house most of the weekend, watching him do a lot of this:
(Saturday, his numbers were normal for most of the day and he was SO happy. That’s a good sign! Hopefully we can get this dose dialed in for good.)