Thursday, September 14, 2006
 OK chilluns - pray to the camera deities that my slides come out tomorrow! That was tonight's project, photog to film and digital. Now to spend a bit of time with the entry form. Guess that means that title MUST be chosen. Sometimes I have a working title but somewhere towards the end the real title is - I can only say it - revealed to me. Unfortunately, sometimes not. This is the latter time. Go with the working title? Sleep one more night on it. Actually, I have at most another couple days. Eeeks!
This quote was just in my sidebar - love it: Always lines, never forms! But where do they find these lines in Nature! For my part I see only forms that are lit up and forms that are not. There is only light and shadow. -- Francisco de Goya
Wednesday, September 13, 2006
May I say a few words about my new quilt that's almost done (hurry! hurry!) First off - I really like the colors - earthy, warm greens and browns balanced with deep cool blues. I like the subtle glittery silk strips. I like the faintly window-like design. I gave up worrying about making things perfectly straight. It's impossible (at least for me) to sew pieces that are so small and make them perfectly straight, especially after all the quilting. Get over it if it bothers you. But what I really like about it is that when it was just laid out, it looked not so concrete - not SO defined. A little sketchy. And when I decided on the quilting, I gave up on making beautiful straight or curvy lines and just went whereever I had to in order to get around. This means I have many places with more than one line of stitching. Took some getting over everything I've ever done, but it went right along. And you know, I think it increases the sort of drawn look of it all. It's looking to me like a quilt I'd draw. The stitches shine with their own outlining light. I have to hurry up and come up with a title for this baby.
Tuesday, September 12, 2006
This 'n' That I did sew down the first side of facing, so I can get the sleeve sewn on enough to make it usable. Next up - finishing the dangling threads. Then - slides! All good. Thank goodness for fast developing! Now, sew faster! New ipods announced today... 'nuff said about that. I had delicious bruschetta for dinner tonight - my own ciabatta, cheese, sliced fresh tomatoes... mmmmmmm. Another chilly night tonight - at this rate I'll be forced to make green tomato mincemeat! Interesting, but the tomato munching slugs only seem to like red tomatoes. What's up with that? And in other interesting stuff, as I was doing major blackberry pruning, I had a nice handful of berries as my thank you from the berry patch. Thank you thorny things! I found a dog rose bush that, no kidding, has a 4 or 5 inch trunk. Yes trunk! I actually used the chain saw to do a bit of pruning there although the trunk is still intact. I have one nice little butternut squash coming along... I need to either make cookies or get some. Serious cookie jonesing going on here. I settled for a .... um... sample of nutella. Had to make sure it was still good now didn't I? It was still good.
I've always thought that setting a day aside to do ordinary things is a good way to mark September 11 since 2001. I take the day off from work, although working is a pretty ordinary thing. In the first couple years I went to an event, but to me it wasn't a necessary part of my observance. I like having a quiet day to remember what happened. I can read emails from the days after the event. I thought about waking up in the middle of the night between the 11th and 12th, 2001 because a plane was flying overhead. What a bizarre thing. Today I woke up before all the observances began and saw just a few televised moments of names being read, crowds of people gathered together. Then I went off to my day. I thought I would mow but instead managed to saw down quite a number of small weedy trees. I discovered that dog roses can have 4 inch trunks. I had no idea! I realized that not only does next year's garden have to have better fencing, but it must have tomato cages to raise up the plants from the ground. When I couldn't do any more of that work, under that pure blue sky so reminiscent of 2001, I went in, enjoyed a bit of lunch, chatted up the cats and headed off to work on my quilt. I got the facing on last night so it was ready to go today. I pressed. I sewed the facing to the seam (remembrances of dressmaking). I trimmed, I turned and I pressed some more, this time with a pressing cloth. Well it looks pretty darn good, even with its dangling thread so I hung it up and took a few photos. At seven pm I went out and lit 5 candles to honor all the memories of the day. I thought of all of the vigils that were held in 2001 and ones I'd been part of. When I went out much later, two of the candles had gone out, so I renewed all of them so they could keep the moon company and perhaps make a passerby think about the day. Well, I guess I've got miles of hand sewing to do now, so it's off to bed with me.
Monday, September 11, 2006
REMEMBER
Sunday, September 10, 2006
I spent today doing stuff like cutting down a lot of brush. Like Fortune, I made pizza. I also made bread. I felt the tears just below the surface. Just now I went back and read my blog entries about a year ago and the days following Sept 11, 2001. There was this which did a good job describing what many of us felt that day. Where are we now? There was a period after September 11 when many commented about how kind people were being to each other. I can't say that this is on-going. Perhaps for some. I work in a mall, and there's a lot of anger and entitledness and rudeness going on. I began my current job in the week after September 11. I got a cheery congratulatory email about my work anniversary. All the emotion came back to me then of that September - knowing the job was ahead of me. Knowing that I was ready to take on a new challenge, that I was ready to let go of parts of my life. I took a few days to think over the future and while I was gone, the world changed. I postponed some of the changes. but eventually they came to be as well. I'm still in the job against all odds. I'm still left wondering about how people can bring on such destruction in the world. I've often thought that we all shar so much, no matter our culture or religion: sun overhead, air on our face, the faces of children, the love of others, our love for them. What can bring a person who has the assortment of small pleasures of every day life to cause such great destruction and grief in the world? More importantly, what can I do to help people see those small every day treasures, to remember all the little things that make up life?
In other less-ranty news, I finished the quilting on my quilt last night. I'm pleased with it. I hope to get the facings and sleeve on today so I can photo it in the next couple days. Nothing like a deadline. Yesterday was quite stormy with an inch of rain and a lot of thunder. Not sure how my ride-on-mower-kinda-guy neighbor (ok, the guy who keeps nipping at my squash plant! grrr) is managing to mow, but my lawn is too wet today. Actually I do know how he's able to mow - his lawn is VERY short. Mine is a few inches longer and yet not untidy looking. So, instead of mowing today, I went out and did battle with brush and blackberry bushes. No big blood loss for me so I guess I won this round. I need to get back out there, maybe tomorrow and take out some larger things.
Of little interest to anyone else:As I get less and less interested in a large email list I'm on, I was uncertain about what I'd miss if I unsubscribed. It's useful for hearing about some exhibits, questions about materials etc. I've met some very nice people there and have met some in person and had off-list email conversations with others. For a long time I've had quite a number of filters that deal with various topics and, um, people, that I have no interest in reading whatsoever. That sounds so crass - sending people's emails to trash based on who sent them rather than content, but there you go. Not that I never read them. Just that I read them from the convenience of them already being in trash. Anyway, I got the idea one day to re-route all the list straight-to-trash mail to a new mailbox called listname_trash. There I could get a better look see at how much of the mail I wasn't reading, for whatever reason. I vowed that when the percentage unread hit 50 I could unsubscribe without a glimmer of loss. After doing the filter changes I got everything into one folder and it was sitting around 20 per cent. That was less than I expected. Another few weeks and many off-topic posts later, that number hit 43.26 per cent today. Guess I'll be getting a lot of time back someday soon. Guess bean-counting pays off, eh?
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