It's interesting what makes you happy, eh? I got this yesterday only mine has a cool grip spiral sort of handle. Now I'm really ready to make such things as pot roast and chili. In a flurry of related housewifery feelings, I got out my two cast iron skillets and found that the new lid fits the old pans. It's all good. And I think it should count as a work out, moving all that iron around.
All day long I enjoyed just knowing that all my little squares were home waiting for me. Tonight I came home and pressed the last 40 and then took a deep breath and tried trimming up a few. For those of you who aren't quilters, this step of trimming, or trueing
TRANSITIVE VERB: Inflected form: tru·ing or true·ing: To position (something) so as to make it balanced, level, or square: trued up the long planks.
is an important one. First off, it makes it much easier to join up the blocks since they are made into squares, not something approaching a square, sort of. It also assures that all the blocks are the same size, give or take a small tolerence. Finally, it has the added bonus of knocking off all the little ears of seam allowance that stick out past the edges. This makes for an easier sewing and nicer pressing when it's all said and done. Nitpicking? Perhaps. Worth it? In my mind, yes!
Finally, for those who know me, this cartoon from the Washington Post will make you laugh out loud. Oh what the heck - even if you don't know I'm the shopping cart police, you'll laugh like a hyena. Thanks Caity for the link!
Written at:
11:30:58 PM
That whooping and hollering around 12:30 AM? That would have been me, sewing the last seam on the 320th small pink and green block! YEAH!
And for those that think it's not "art" if you plan ahead or if you count the number of blocks or pieces, well there's no way I'd do more than a few extra above what I think I'll need. Yes, I'll make more if I need them. Like math? 320 squares X 9 pieces. That would be a lot of small pieces of fabric.
I found this beautiful photo statement on Womanchild - I feel like everyone should have these words on their mirror or frig.
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8:21:50 PM
Geesh, I missed the blog's anniversary - February 4th 2001! Are there belated blog anniversary cards? Did my three readers think - did she forget when she started this thing? Two years and growing. So maybe I can use the blogroll as a little gift to the blog fairies. That's it - a nice bow and we're done.
Written at:
10:41:26 AM
Thanks to Jason and Blogrolling, my links on left are now neat and tidy. If you see an asterisk over there, go see what the new update is. I'll probably start breaking out links into new groups, but it is a start. Not hard to do, nice additional features if you make a contribution and well organized info on the web site. I was nervous when I saw the coding options but basically it says - if you can make a web page, you can do this. And he was right.
As I said the other night, I greatly increased the number of quotes rotating in the box at right. It's a fine occupation and one that I've done since I was a child -- collecting and cataloging quotes.
Many of the blogs that I follow also have collections of quotes or occasionally point to new sources of quotes, for which I am grateful. Imagine my surprise then when today I realize that Bornfamous is now using the same text delivery device as I use - direct from htmlGEAR.
Now I must explain a bit. I had already begun to use GuestWorld guestbooks when I was hired on by Tripod to manage community volunteers. Remember those wonderful days of online life - net communities of like-minded folks sharing information and support via web pages and gathered into forums etc by companies like Tripod? I hit the ground running and much sooner rather than later the ground of that model fell away below my feet. Whether because of guilt at having hired me away from 20+ years of government work for a job that was ending before I got my desk set up, or because of my old-person work ethic I got kept on to do other things.
And my last job there was working for htmlGEAR. This small band of intrepid workers had plans to revolutionize web page building by making the coolest page gadgets ever. What an exciting thing. I worked with them as they planned, developed, tested and launched things. I did membership support for them, answering emailed questions and suffering through the waves of server failures and other things. We worked on and on despite lack of heated offices, adequate funding and staffing and support. It was a good time. The night htmlGEAR launched, we missed a big party at a nearby restaurant because the launch had unexpected bugs. We had our own party of delivered chinese food. We sat around on scavenged furniture with cable reels for tables. Glamourous, eh?
I learned more about how server stuff works than I really wanted to by listening to patient and very-skilled engineers who could make anything happen on your screen with just a few lines of code. I learned to be unafraid of accessing membership info on a Unix database. I learned how to figure out the answers to questions never expressed by the writers. I learned a lot about polite, supportive customer service.
At times like this when I enjoy the product of our work, things like the little textGEAR which rotates bits of text on your web site, I know how much I miss working with those folks and that big idea that was the dot.com/web hosting model.
