First Nine Blocks - Mosaic

First Nine - Mosaic, originally uploaded by bellflowertextiles.

Just a quick note to share the first nine blocks from the block-a-palooza quilt along - I think it's coming together nicely! I'm trying to work more solid red into it now, since that seemed a little lacking in some of the blocks where I used mostly red stripe or dots.

Seven more blocks to go!

Small Quilt for Daddy

Sof and I started playing with tracing and fusing her handprint yesterday because next week, we're signed up to do a class quilt with her preschool.

Yesterday we made a prototype with the fabrics we think we're going to use, and we liked it so much that we did the other hand too and turned it into a quick wallhanging for Daddy to take to his new office. Here's the final project, at left.

For her class, the blocks will be the pale yellow background surrounded by the plaid sashing, and the hands will be a variety of prints in red, green, and blue. Each kid gets to sign their name with a fabric marker, and I'll put it together and quilt it. I think it's going to be really cute!

I made a pillow!

Pillows are one of those things I've just never known how to make, but it turns out that your basic envelope pillow cover is ridiculously simple. Wow. My first project, at left. This is a hunk of flannel remnant I bought a while back and never used. It's soft and cheerful and I'm really happy with it!

There are many, many great tutorials out there - here's the one I used, from Megacrafty.

Now that I know how to do this, I predict that we're going to see a lot of changing pillow covers around the house. I've always liked the idea of swapping out pillows and throw blankets with the change of seasons - something a little more warm and cozy in the winter, something lighter and brighter in the summer. So yay! New skills.

On other fronts, Brett is off to a new job this week which will have him working out of the house most of the time. This has brought about a number of changes for the family, one of which is that because he now gets up at six a.m., Sofie inevitably hears him putzing around in the kitchen and wanders out around 6:30 to join him, which is a whole hour earlier than she is usually up.

It's actually very sweet -- they sit down at the dining room table and have breakfast together every morning and chit chat. I'm usually awake but I like to stay in bed and listen to them having their little moment of connection. It reminds me of growing up; my dad was an early riser and I often had my cereal with him sitting at the kitchen table with me, while the rest of the house was still asleep. Those early morning talks were always important to me, and I like that Sofie is now doing this too.

That said, it leaves her tired and cranky by her normal bedtime, this getting up at the crack of dawn. Yesterday, we had friends over to play and at 6:30 p.m. she just lost her marbles, cried and yelled, and them climbed into bed with a book to wait for me to see everyone out and read to her. She was asleep by 7:15. *boggle* This might actually be a good thing, as it means Brett and I get a nice long evening together and lots of time for studying and projects and whatnot.

The other big change with Brett's job, of course, is just that the house is empty now during the day and kind of lonely! I'm getting used to it, though, and finding it makes me want to clean. I did Flylady's weekly home blessing routine yesterday morning for the first time ever -- a one hour cleaning that you do once a week, where you spend ten minutes each on a series of six tasks designed to make your whole house look a lot more presentable in a quick way. Vacuum the middle of rooms, quick mop, take out the papers and magazines, change the sheets, etc.

And it was awesome! Things felt really clean, and Sofie even helped me do it. Except then we had a huge playdate and messed it all up again. :) C'est la vie.

Today I'm slow cooking lamb shanks in wine and rosemary and garlic and the house smells divine. It's a recipe, from The Italian Slow Cooker by Michele Sicolone, which I got yesterday with my reward dollars at Santoros, our favorite little neighborhood bookstore. It smells fantastic and in eight hours I'm sure it will taste really, really good.

That's it for today!

More progress

I got quite a ways behind on the quilt-along project last week, with being out of town, and since we got back on Sunday I've been impatiently waiting for my sewing machine to be returned from the shop. They're a week or so behind and I finally had to break down and beg one of my friends to loan me one. I had a customer order that needed to be finished like yesterday, and the prospect of also being four blocks behind on the quilting thing by the end of the week was too daunting too.

So my lovely and talented friend Kate kindly let me borrow her machine, and I got all caught up, on both the customer and the fun sewing project fronts. Whew!  You know what they say... a true friend is someone who loans you a big honking piece of machinery when you really need one. Or something like that.

Here are the things my borrowed machine and I made today:

Customer order - a wedding knife holder with a notebook for recording who used it.

This is a terrible picture because it was gray and pouring rain and this is just one of those items where the colors are impossible to shoot except in sunlight - all these pretty pale aqua blues just wash out in Seattle's dim gray muck. Trust me, it's much prettier than this. :)

And here are the three blocks I was behind on from the quilt-along -- I had them all cut and marked and pinned so it was pretty quick to whiz through them today and get them finished.

Block five - Geesey McNine Patch, by Miss Print. Lots and lots and lots of flying geese in this one. Let me just say, Miss Print's techniques for doing this were freaking awesome, and I learned a ton, but someone please shoot me if I decide to use a directional print like a stripe again in a project like this. None, none, NONE of these "make a bunch of geese at once" techniques take into account people with directional prints! Arg. So that meant that half my geese ended up with vertical stripes in the triangle and half of them ended up horizontal. However, once I put them all in place around the edge of the block, I have to admit it's kind of a cool effect -- all the stripes on the block run in the same direction, regardless of the orientation of the triangle. Hrm.

It's straighter than it looks. It's the camera angle. Really.

 Block Seven: You are Here, by Happy Zombie. This one looked kind of intimidating but wasn't all that hard once I figured out what all the pieces were - since I'm using different colors than the posters are, it sometimes gets a little complicated to make their instructions correspond to my fabrics. But I'm really happy with how this one came out! I'm trying to end up with something really graphic and modern on these and I think it's working.

Block eight - an easy, restful block by Ala Mode:

And, finally, here's a shot of the three quilts I bound and finished at the cabin last week! All of them are tiny - one was a baby quilt for a friend which we delivered on Monday, one is for Brett's office, and the other one is just for fun:

Remembering and Forgetting

"What did grandma look like? I can't remember."

Sofie is beginning to forget. It is the way of early childhood -- some theories hold that around age four, the brain essentially rewires itself, cutting extraneous neurons, streamlining and becoming more efficient, and for most of us, removing most of our memories of the first few years of life. I've known it was going to happen for some time and wondered if we'd be able to tell.

The answer? Yes, we can tell, because she can tell. She's aware that she suddenly can't remember Grandma as well, and it bothers her. She asks for long retellings of the life and death of Grandma, wanting excruciating levels of detail about her last days and what happened after. We curl up in front of the fire and tell the story, which can take twenty minutes to get through with all of her questions.

When we're done, she sits for a moment, then says, "Tell me again."

So I do.

After that version, she wants a new story where Grandma comes back to life in a "magic fire" and never dies aain.

It's perfectly natural, both the forgetting and the trying to reclaim the stories. It's bittersweet, my shining little girl who loves and misses someone she can no longer fully recall.

***

I want to set some of her memories. I desperately want Phoenix, our oldest cat and her great favorite, to live long enough to be cemented in memory as her first pet. The first pet you remember is a little bit of childhood magic; this will immortalize him in a way. 

I want her to remember Mom so badly because Mom, for all her complications and defenses, was at her best with Sofie. Her relationship with Sofie was simple and straightforward and full of joy. Her loss seems so magnified, somehow, if that disappears.

It's been a while since I've choked up much about Mom. Nearing the two year mark, it's become more bearable, less sharp. I miss her badly sometimes, but life has moved forwards and it's not so deep a pain. I'm surprised, then, to find myself caught up in a fresh wave of grief after Sofie's endless retellings and the beginnings of her forgetfulness. Nature takes it course, both on the elderly and on little girls. Time marches on. We grieve, and hold things dear, and sometimes, we let them go entirely.

In the end, I pulled up a picture from this blog to show Sofie her grandma's face. She took a long look, and a huge smile broke out on her face.  

Oh right, she was thinking, I could tell. That's her. 

 

winter in the woods

Life in the woods. We get up whenever Sofie makes her way down the stairs - this morning in a baffling bump-bump-longpause procession that we laid in bed puzzling over before realizing that she was slowly making her way down on her bottom, one thump at a time.

After breakfast we draw for a while, then go out to play in the snow. Today we trudge over to the empty cabin behind us, which involves busting through a lot of knee-high, untouched snow -- Sofie, light as she is, floats on top but it's rather a harder proposition for me.

After we peer through its windows and confirm that yes, it's still completely unoccupied, we make our way back through the same footsteps, then pull out the trusty sled for a trip around the loop of our road. It's a gorgeous day -- 31 degrees, utterly clear and brilliantly sunny. The road is snowy in most places, icy in some, but we make it most of the way around without too many mishaps.

A quick trip down our favorite sledding spot doesn't go so well today. Now that we've been visiting it daily the sled run we've carved out is getting icy and hard and, as a result, exponentially faster. The first trip down was fun; today's trip was heart stopping for a brief moment, and entirely too much for Sofie, who cried but insisted on trying again. When we skipped out of the track the second time halfway down the hill and got dumped out on our sides, she decided she'd had enough and we had a whiny and sobby walk back to the house.

Oh well. Hot chocolate and whipped cream fix most things when you're four.

Brett works upstairs with his window looking out through an impressive field of icicles into the woods and snow. It's an awesome spot to sit. He puts on Mozart later in the day, quite loudly, and we all enjoy it. Between the gorgeous weather and the fireplace crackling and just the calm and quiet of this house, the most ordinary things seem so much more beautiful here than at home. Maybe we'll stay longer, we discuss at lunch. One hundred days, Sofie suggests. She likes it too.

Sofie and I putter most of the rest of the day, except for a quick trip into town to visit the hardware store so that I can carry out an impulse project. One of our vacation rental tenants has rehung the bedroom curtains so that the top third of the windows is left clear of fabric, and I've decided that they're right; it's much nicer that way. You still get a little privacy from the road, but you can see the trees and sky while you lay in bed. However, the half-assed way they're rehung bothers me, so we go buy an iron so I can chop off the bottom ten inches of each curtain, iron in a new hem, and sew them up. By hand. Which takes about thirty minutes, looks good, and is very satisfying. 


Dinner is yesterday's homemade soup. Since I've learned to cook better, I find the difference in how I shop and travel for these vacations interesting. Instead of bringing a bunch of fancier ingredients to a week up here, I now bring things like chicken broth, flour, and yeast. Cans of beans. Some meat and greens. We'll make good food out of it, I'm sure.

So far we've made biscuits, homemade bread, turkey meatball soup with greens and white beans, and a pasta bake. I'm on quite a midwinter carb bender right now, wanting warm homemade bready things all the time. It's not doing my waist any good, I'm sure, but it's definitely comforting, and the ritual of bread making is my new love. Yesterday's loaf I brushed with olive oil and sprinkled with sesame seeds and sea salt before putting it in the oven. It was a revelation. Not one ounce of it remained in the house by morning. "Can you make more of this?" Brett asked. Maybe tomorrow. The fireplace shelf is a great place for letting bread dough rise.


It's Brett's night to do bedtime, and time for one of my favorite rituals -- looking through Sofie's notebooks to see what twenty or thirty artistic creations she came up with today. She draws more than she does anything else, constantly, all day long, and her work is always evolving. Today she's using her markers to make huge washes of color alongside the ever present cats she creates. A bright fuschia couch, a blue chair. Some of the cats are surrounded by music notes. Many of them have sly humor to them -- a perfectly normal-appearing cat, until you notice the eyes of two other cats peeking out from behind him. A toilet, with a cat perched to drink from it, only his backend and tail showing over the rim. Funny, funny stuff.

In the moments when Sofie is amusing herself or absorbed in a drawing, I am utterly wolfing down Just Kids, by Patti Smith, which I'm finding beautifully written, and I'm binding a small pile of quilts, taking a few pictures, staring up into Lucky Jim mountain to try to see deer (must buy binoculars!) and generally relaxing. We don't do anything remarkable here, but all three of us seem to feel as if it's a kind of nirvana. I read somewhere once that humans are evolved to need the sensation of dappled sunlight, sun filtered through trees, to be happy. I can't possibly find the reference now, but it was something about dopamine and how we evolved from forest-dwelling creatures so that this interplay of light is hard-wired into our happiness centers. I believe it. 

It's neighborly here. This afternoon the ladies who clean the house after each vacation rental stopped by, just to chat and see how we were doing, and we ended up chatting with them for almost an hour. Sofie took them up to see her bedroom and they were kind enough to play along, despite having been in there at least a dozen times already, I'm sure, and we all talked about kids and life in the valley.

We're having our friends who live across Highway 20, the main thoroughfare here, over for dinner in a few nights, and Sofie and I regularly run into the very nice lady across the street and her dogs on their daily walks. At the hardware store, the older gentleman ringing me up volunteers that I really ought to exchange one or two of the things I've picked out for a better deal, and another man kindly carries my fifty pound bag of rock salt out to the car and then stops to blow up balloons for Sofie. The ladies at the country doctor's clinic where I had to take Sofie yesterday morning were funny and chatty and made use feel quite at home.

It's slow and small-town and very welcoming. It's nice to know a few people. I always fantasize about living here fulltime and hope that maybe sometime we'll get to spend a year up here, at least. It won't be for a while, since we have ties and responsibilities that keep us happily in Seattle, but it's fun to dream about it.

Quilt-along progress (and snow)

As I mentioned a few days back, I'm doing the Bloggers' Block-a-Palooza quilt along right now. Here are the first four blocks - starting to get a sense of how this might look:

 The top right square was the first one and is the least good of the set - I wasn't quite sure of my color and fabric choices that week, but has been evolving since to the point where I have a pretty good idea what I'm doing now. I'll be remaking that block at some point before the end - in addition to not quite being right in terms of layout, it's a little smaller than it's supposed to be.

The latest two are the bottom row, both of which I really like. It's evolving into a very modern looking quilt, making a lot of use of polka dots and stripes and simple, graphic fabrics. I'm also liking the dove gray accents in place of much white.

***

And, because I don't have enough projects going on at one time, I've started one of these quilts, from Crazy Mom Quilts, one of my quilting heros. It's a great way to use up a ton of scraps, which are literally eating up my studio space. I have baskets and baskets of scraps of truly wonderful fabrics I've used over the last couple years of making things for etsy, all of which would look awesome in a quilt. And nine patches are so quick and easy to make that it's going to be a breeze to accumulate 70 blocks in no time - I've already made over a dozen in the last few days.

***

We're heading up to Mazama this weekend for a week's stay. I'm very excited  to get up there and see all the snow (the pic above is from about a month ago, sent to us by our neighbors across the way), and to spend some time relaxing and sitting by the fire. Sofie is bringing her sled and her dollhouse, and I'm bringing three or four quilts that need their binding sewn and a big stack of books, and I think it will be a very idyllic week in the snow.

Quilting in progress

quiltingprogress, originally uploaded by bellflowertextiles.

Bloggers Block-a-palooza Quilt Along - First Three Blocks

So I've decided to do the Bloggers Block-a-palooza Quilt Along that launched last week. Two blocks a week, each from a different quilt blogger.

Thus far, QuiltDad, Oh Frannson, and Sasikirana Handmade have posted three gorgeous blocks, with the next one due this Thursday.

The official fabric being used is Moda's Sunkissed, but I'm always one to rebel against someone telling me what to do, so I had to pick my own colors. I'm trying to do it in a red/aqua/white/gray/pink colorway, which sounds complicated but will be really pretty, I think.

Most of the fabrics I'm using, plus a few others from my stash.

What's really fun about this is watching the flickr group to see what other people are coming up with. It seems that most people are doing their own thing fabric-wise, and it's really fascinating to see all the different ways the same quilt block can be interpreted through the use of color, shading, and pattern. It's like a quick mini-course in color theory. I have to admit that I'm addicted to watching what people post and am on there at least three times a day, probably more.

My block three, just finished today

I'm also finding that doing a quilt-along is revealing to me some of the deficiencies in my skills. I'd call myself an intermediate quilter at this point - I've been doing it long enough that I'm not at beginner-level anymore, but there are still many things I don't know. I've never made a flying geese block before, and I'm getting comfortable with them really fast since it's been a big feature in two of the three blocks. I'm sure there will be other techniques I don't know.

Block two - this one was actually pretty easy, although I'm kicking myself
for not realizing how directional that polka dot fabric is. I may go
back and turn those three vertical ones around.

 Also, I'm finding some real holes in my skill set. Like, my accuracy when I cut is very hit or miss. I whizzed through the first and second block but had all kinds of trouble with block three because I just wasn't cutting all these pieces that were supposed to be some multiple of an eighth of an inch correctly. I had to make it over again, and did a much better job the second time. This, I think, will be a good process for me, and I'll be a better quilter at the end of it.

Block one - more flying geese!

Anyways, it's  fun process and I can't wait to see what's next!