A quest for serving spoons

For about a million years now, the morning after bookclub is a breakfast cereal scramble as I try to find one-just-one clean soup spoon so A can have his breakfast.  This is all because every soup spoon that lives here & a few that commute get pressed into service as serving spoons. 

This means that in the week following bookclub I haunt every TJMaxx, every Tuesday Morning, every discount store of every stripe looking for new (more) serving spoons.  There are plenty.  Plenty, plenty.  & given that nothing in my kitchen matches anyhow, you would think it would be easy to pick some up & be done.  But it isn't; the whole problem is drawer space.  Serving spoons are a pain in the...drawers!  Unlike EVERYTHING else which stacks nicely serving spoons, even the matching set spoons, will not permit the drawer to close.  Their bowls are just big enough to catch the edge,.  this means finding a new home for serving spoons, which means I spend fruitless hours searching for serving spoons I will never bring home.

Which brought me to these.   My thinking is that if we use these & not the flatware in the drawer we will have enough sop spoons + one for serving & A's breakfast.  I will let you know how that goes.  Also they have their own built in storage thing & can get pushed to the back of the cabinet for all but the nine evenings a year I actually need them.

My thinking is if we don't need to eat & serve with the soup spoons, there will be one left in the drawer for morning.  I will let you now how it goes. 

Quilter's confetti

Let's Blog About Fabric, part two

Last week, I did my Block Lotto linky on the theme About Fabric.  You can go there or I can give you the highlights:  I like NOVELTIES, the more off beat the better & I like to use them where plenty of other people would use a nice traditional whatever.

I was in the fabric store earlier this week...yes, an actual quilt shop.  I went because I have not been in a long time & I wanted a nice outing.  Also, their café makes a lovely lemon crème cake.  People who know me in real life will understand just how sick I have been:  by the time I was done shopping I just wanted to go home; I didn't even get the lemon crème cake to take-away because I just didn't want it.

But that is not what this post is about, it really is about fabric & it really is about my love of novelties.  It is also about my never-ending, often unfulfilled quest for....

Let me back-up.  I don't make many baby quilts, but when I do I rarely stick to baby fabrics & I almost never use anything with an actual baby on it.  & the reason is most of the babies in my world are not the blonde blue-eyed bundles that seem to dominate baby fabric.  It is true that I myself was a blonde, blue-eyed bundle....I still am actually.  I am, to be frank, the whitest person plenty of people have ever met, including many many white people.  I am white.  The babies I am sewing for are more often than not not. 

The bulk of my baby quilts go to grad students who have babies currently (at the time of the birth) in my husband's research group.  The number of his white grad students who have had a baby while under his watch:  exactly none.  This is mostly because his grad students are mostly not American, never mind not white.  They are Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Indian, & more & that's just right now.  Until very recently, the white students that even dated another white student were almost unknown.  You want to see the great American melting pot?  Cruise the graduate student lounge of a physics department.

Then there is my own social life.  More & more of my friends (who once upon a time WERE mostly white- you will probably not see the great American melting pot in an undergraduate English lit. & poetry program) have married people who are not.   & their kids are marrying people who are not.  & so it goes.  I have long exhausted almost all (I think all actually, but you never know what might be buried in there) my white-kids-only fabric.  I am trying to replace I with kids-of-all-colors fabric & this is the challenge:  there is not much out there.

For years I relied on the people at UNICEF; they used to have a line of fabric featuring lines of children in many different traditional costumes.  I used the last of it here.  For a long time I hoarded some ordinary yellow fabric with ordinary babies in diapers crawling around on it; what was extraordinary was that they were very clearly white, African/African-American & Asian babies.  I doled it out in the tiniest squares & still have some squirreled away.  I will happily share much more expensive fabric, discontinued, whatever...even my beloved hotdogs but you will have to pry that yellow baby fabric from me one quarter yard at a time.

Still, there absolutely is more than there used to be.  Last year I discovered some Russian nesting dolls fabric with all kinds of kids...girls.  It was a strange choice to go multi-racial (yes, yes that part of the world has been mixing a while, just nesting dolls?  They are so not multi-ethnic) & bought as much as I could carry way.  Which brings me up to my recent trip to the quilt shop. 

They had this (they don't anymore):  many ethnic mermaids.  I wish some of them had afros, but otherwise this is perfect-o as I have a mermaid obsessed white friend who will someday have a baby with a latino father & a black godmother & my only wish is I don't end up giving this quilt to a little boy!  & yes I would do that, his mother is the mermaid freak after all, but it would be nice to have some choices.

So here is my request: Dear fabric company president designer person.  Could you please think about mixing it up a bit when it comes to skin & hair in your juvenile novelties.  Anthropomorphized animals are all well & good, but ordinary people doing ordinary things would be most welcome.

//in an interesting side note, my husband has been trying to get an American student he worked with in a summer intern-type thing to come here for grad school.  The student is as American as he can be--that's right Native American.  Still not white. 

52 Photos Project: A present someone gave you, meaning me

In one of those "small world" things, 52 Photos Project this week is A Present Someone Gave Me & this month is our house birthday.  As in all the humans in the house have a birthday in March.  So we have been talking presents, new & old.  for the most part, we are ungiftable; we have what we want.  A few years ago A was anxious to upgrade my camera; he had given me one a year or three before & wanted to get he latest version.  It was lighter, more bells & whistles, etc.  But I liked this one & wouldn't give it up.   OKay, the real story is I started to cry when he tried to take it & I made the poor man eel terrible about trying to do something nice.  Also, there is no pleasing me. 

 

So this is the present someone gave me, that I am still using.  Weekly if not daily.  & I still don't want to upgrade.

Wish list (if you could just direct me...)

I am more than a little bit obsessed with Thursday Next.  I have been contemplating a tattoo à la hers from The Woman Who Died A Lot (I would tell you what it is but that would be a spoiler), in the not so secret hope that after I die, whichever med student gets my cadaver (did I skip that bit?  Sorry--after minimal consideration & honestly it is not like we have progeny, me & A both thought we would leave our leftovers to the med school)...which ever med student gets my cadaver might just think I WAS Thursday Next.  Wow, what a great sentence that was! 

In the interest of obsession mash-up (because one good obsession deserves another), I have been quietly acquiring Thursday Next-ish themed fabrics & patterns to make a Thursday Next quilt for myself.  I think the reality that there is no such fabric line makes this more fun (so please, Benartex, Lakehouse & Timeless Treasures et al, I honestly would rather do this without direct input from you; I realize Spoonflower may already have such a collection -they have the Dr. Who & tardis toile, after all- but I am confident they are not trying to lock it down).  Some of the stuff I have had for awhile, yards of rather regency looking characters-ideal to represent that book that disguises JurisFiction HQ for example.  I also bought the Wuthering Heights FQs when they were on clearance way back when & we can pretend it is really Jane Eyre, right?  & there are book fabrics & clock fabrics almost everywhere once you start looking.  I don't need to tell you that nursery crime, erm, I mean Nursery Rhyme fabric abounds.  I even have some rather off-beat generic saint-sort-of fabric that I am happy to call Saint Zvlkx.  Maps of the Crimea present their own challenge, naturally, but I think I can get around that one.  Maybe.  Cheese fabrics abound (who knew?).

But I am running into a wall with a few things & so I am asking:

Has anyone seen any dodo fabric?  What about a line drawing of a dodo for maybe a redwork design?  I have looked through my Dover clip art for same, but all the drawings are more detailed than I can manage.  I am toying with appliqueing a dodo, but that seems like it's own project & maybe not part of this one.

Ditto Porsche line drawings.  I realize I may just have to trace one (I am NEVER gong to find the correct make & model with the specific colors so I have given up on that), but I thought I would ask.

Neanderthals are shockingly neglected in all handwork resources.  There is really nothing more to say on that. 

So if anyone has any thoughts, I would appreciate the feedback, either in comments or message me or whatever.  Also, & I realize the answer is probably "oh hell NO", does anyone else want in...?

Color catcher

Brace yourselves, I am about to go commercial.  OKay, not really because no one over at that family company even knows I am typing this & since I am not getting any cash, I don't think I could be described as commercial. 

Anyway.

I am a dedicated pre-washer.  Let me back up.  As a quilter, I pre-wash everything but the thread; the fabric, the batting, everything.  Well, that is everything but you get my drift.  I do this because I used to get headaches in my sewing room.  Can you imagine the conflict I want to sew but my head hurts?  I thought maybe just maybe it was the formaldehyde in the fabric (a good thing or it would rot in transit to your local quilt store).  So I took everything down off the shelves & washed it. Also I had a new washing machine & I wanted to play with it.  & it worked!

Since then, of course, I have been made happy because of all the colors that never ran & ruined my quilts.  Or clothes, clothes are important, too. 

But this means you can trust me when I say everything in the quilt in the picture had been washed before.  Except the thread.  In fact, some of it had been washed more than once because it is made of little squares of many novelties & I often get these in swaps & trades & as gifts & not knowing their history, I wash them. 

Also, you cannot really see it, but the outer border is a very saturated red, & the background & back & binding is a kind of orangey maroon, & there are four panels of la virgin de Guadalupe with a lot of color & a lot of black so I took no chances & washed all of that at least twice before I even began to work with it.  Then when everything was all done, I tossed it in the machine with a color catcher sheet thinking "what the hell".

Imagine my surprise when this came out! 

I was expecting something maybe vaguely pinkish but not this.


This is the exact same color as the background, back & binding just a few shades lighter.  & I do mean just a few.   I am a little concerned about what will happen in its new home; I gave it to my brother saying this will be a good thing to hang on the wall near the door because you can always take it down & wash it.  He lives in another part of the country, but the world is, if anything, grittier & sandier & dirtier than it is here & we live on a dirt road just a few houses down from speed hungry red necks.  Seriously, it is like they think they're mud bogging out there.  A few years ago I could not get out of my driveway because one of them was stuck.  He had over rotated when he started to hydroplane.  On mud.  & he got caught, nose down, in a depression too narrow & too shallow to really be called a ditch.  In mud.  He had to walk home & get towed out, which is no easy fete on a road barely wide enough for two cars to pass.  Do you know how fast you need to be driving to hydroplane on mud?  Too fast!

Enough about my idiot neighbors, back to the color catcher.  I think I am going to include a new sheet, this sheet & the box top when I send this off.  He's a physicist, (no really), I think he can do the math. 

Proud to be a consumer

I don't know when it started but for years I have been telling anyone who will listen (usually my mother, sorry mom) that I am a GROWN-UP with my own CHECKBOOK & everything.  This is of course a big fat lie; I haven't had my own checkbook since I got married 18 years ago, but the gist is still there:  my own money is my own business...& my own problem.  As a married person it became our own business/problem, as the case may be.

If you got this far & are now worried I am going to start talking about fiscal responsibility, fear not.  I am thinking more about holiday (or non-holiday) on-line shopping.  Even more specifically about iGive.  The short version is iGive is a free-to-you service that collects a percentage of your purchase from the on-line seller & gives it to the charity of your choice (provided they are registered with iGive, which I am told is not all that hard if you are indeed a charity & not some backyard faux-non-profit cash cow). 

What that percentage is depends on the vendor. Amazon for example gives only  part of one percent, but because of the volume of orders that go through them (it's not just books anymore, baby), it can add up fast.  UnderArmour, who I started loving because they are not Nike (in fairness Nike is also an iGive company), then I loved more when I learned they will do embroidery for say, horse crazy middle aged women's specialty catalogs & now of course gets my love all over again for their 3.2% (same as Nike, but they are in a hole so deep I doubt I can ever love them).

So...I would encourage anyone reading this to double check if their favorite charity (alas you can only specify one....at a time) is listed.  Several of mine were but I quickly chose one that does valuable work & to whom my $8 (so far) does make a difference.  After I made my choice (& did a little shopping), I could see how much my cause has received so far - check by check, what their next check amount will be & how much of that is attributable to me.  I have never been a huge on-line shopper having preferred to spend my money locally, even if it is at a chain store, at least those are local people employed there, but ever since the kid at S***** A******** told me I "need to get over that" re: Michael Vick, Nike et al, I am just as happy to bypass some people all together.  Seriously, I may never leave the house again.

Running without

I know I have said before what stuff I run with that makes the whole thing more bearable (lime popsicles, Boudreaux's butt paste, etc.), but I thought I would tell you the things I do without.  Specifically, those things that many a running book, magazine, you name it would imply are commonplace or even necessary:

iPod or playaway or anything that gets between my ears & the sound of the world around me.  This was a new one for me, actually.  Whenever I had used our elliptical I made sure I had something to listen to.  Running in the world, though it turns out things go better when I pay attention.  A big part of this is becasue of the sheer number of people out there with me who are themselves not paying attention.  As most of them are behind the wheel of a car, the odds are in their favor surviving-a-collision-wise, so I like to know when someone is flying up behind me & you can only know that by listening.  //here's a handy little physics trick- if you hear a vehicle behind you but cannot tell if it is getting closer or farther away, listen to the pitch.  If the overall pitch gets higher, the vehicle is headed your way.

light weight running shoes.  My goal has never been to get done faster.  In fact I run with weights in my hands so light-weight would never interest me anyhow.  That aside, I don't seem to have delicate feet that require specialized shoes that do whatever those shoes are called upon to do.  In part this is due to the interval nature of my running (& by running I mean walk 1 minute, run 9-12 minutes.  Or rather stroll breathing deeply 1 minute & then jog chanting I hate this I hate this I hate this 9-12 minutes).  Or even the reality that most of my route is on dirt road so I don't have that jarring pavement-pounded feeling at the end.  Whatever the reason, whatever the cause I have 3 pairs of $50 sneakers & rotate through them depending on how wet it is outside (the oldest pair is for days I know I will run through deep puddles).

a heart or blood pressure monitor.  When it feels like my heart is going to pound right out of my chest, I slow down (don't worry mom, this hasn't happened in months & it was just that one time).  It turns out that the target heart rate for my age is almost certainly 5-8 beats per minute too fast so it is just as well I never aimed for any rate in particular. 

a pedometer.  I admit I would cruise past those displays of snazzy watches that also told you how far you had gone, but I run more or less the same route every day (adding a bit every now & then as my run sets get longer & I need to cover more road).  In the end it was easy enough to drive the route & look at the truck's odometer.  I was glad I did, too, because it turned out that the point on one stretch that mapquest & run keeper & google maps & all of those said was the mid-point actually isn't, if you drive (or run or walk).  This is because one side of that point is very flat & the other side of that point goes up & down what used to be fairly substantial gullies.  When the road was first created, it did not actually connect the two paved roads it now does; it dead ended at the last house.  The road was leveled & lime rocked to that point, but the dirt track that connected this point to the farmers field just a but further on got pushed further still until it came out on the county road.  This extension is not for the faint of heart or faint of suspension, as it can still wash out in a bad storm.  Running-wise, what with having to go down the side of one gully & then up the other side, & then do that again a couple more times, this 1/2 mile is actually more than a tenth of a mile longer than the other half.  Yes, yes, if I had a pedometer I would have known this sooner, but I still haven't bothered to get one.

& last but never least, Nike.  I have managed to avoid plonking down my money on what used to be the premier women's running brand & is now & will forever be those Michael Vick supporting corporate whores.  I know what they said, that they supplied equipment to the league & did not have any control over who used it within the league & my response is if Abercrombie & Fitch can ban fat people from working at their stores & the Situation from wearing their label anywhere in the rest of the world, it seems to me Nike could have said "while we appreciate the league doing us this huge favor of wearing our apparel at no charge to them, we would like you to stop handing it out to every felon on the payroll".  But Nike didn't & they have since gone on to sign Michael Vick to an endorsement deal.  That was Nike's call & they are entitled to it..  Walking quickly past every Nike rack in every sporting goods store everywhere is mine.

The 19 minute mile

The original title of this post was The 19 minute mile.  Then on Sunday, A took my actual run-time divided by my actual distance & came up with just under 18 minutes, so I changed it.  & then on Monday I upgraded my hand weights & it is back to 19 minutes a mile. 

In other two steps forward/one step back news I have now officially lost four pounds.  Naturally that does not include the ten pounds I gained & then lost when I first started (seriously, I still don't know what was up with that).  & I still think the runner's high is an emperor's new clothes style myth; the only people I know who claim to have experienced it have later back tracked & said "it is not so much a high as a felling you could just keep going".  Uh huh.  I have been high & I have felt like I could just keep doing whatever it was I was doing; I am confident I would never confuse the two. 

I have, however, gotten to the point where my overriding thought during my run walk intervals (more accurately described as jog stroll intervals) is not how much I hate what I am doing, how much I hate that I will probably have to do it for the rest of my life, etc.  Now during the longer stretches my mind can wander to all sorts of things & sometimes I can kill whole minutes.  Trust me, this is a good thing.

I have discovered a few other good things that make the ordeal more bearable:

Edy's Fruit Bars, especially the lime ones.  I spend the whole second half of the journey fantasizing about the lime fruit bar I am going to have when I get home.  One time, we got back from a run & A***** declined her fruit bar because she was avoiding the sugar-carb-thing.  I was appalled. 

& I was glad to refer her to the next good thing I have found, The First 20 Minutes by Gretchen Reynolds wherein there is possibility that the ideal post-workout beverage just might be chocolate milk.  I don't actually like chocolate milk, but I don't like Gatorade or other sports beverages either (they feel slimy) & I felt qualified to make the substitution.  There is a whole host of really good information in this book.  If you don't want to buy a copy, get it out of the library.

I have also renewed my acquaintance with Boudreaux's Butt Paste.  Why was I already acquainted with this stuff, you ask?  Because one of my horses has a really fat ass.  I mean big round monster fat.  She has the upper-butt cleavage of a Kardashian (seriously, she has this long thick pony tail hanging down across this thing.  I point to it & ask what celebrity it reminders whomever of & no one has ever guessed anyone else).  & while I have no idea how the Kardashian's deal with it (& I am not asking, if anyone who reads this knows, please keep it to yourself), I have used Boudreaux's whenever Coco gets sores from one cheek rubbing against the other.  I will spare you the details, but I too found a use for Boudreaux's before I discovered compression running tights/capris/shorts. 

There is one thing I have found no use for & that is an iPod or playaway digital book player or whatever.  Having your ears covered by headsets while running is a mistake.  I run on a country road with very little traffic & I have had enough encounters to know I am safer if I can hear the car/truck/doberman/really unpleasant old man walking up behind me.  Also, if I wore headsets I never would have heard the birds or the frogs or the cicadas or any of the other wonderful things about running where I run.  I would not have gotten to know my neighbors (we have lived here since 1998 & I am just meeting half of them) & if I hadn't met them I would never have learned that one unpleasant old man was also the driver of the two different vehicles that honk at me when they drive by or that the ex-marine on the corner had a talk with the old man's son to get him to stop.  I probably also would not be trying to find homes for stray kittens, but they are worth it too.

A tale of two yogurt makers

It has been many many years since I made yogurt the old-fashioned way: heat the ingredients, cool the ingredients, add the culture & let it sit, warmly, for upwards of eight hours.  It has, in fact, been decades.  The last time I made yogurt this way had to be sometime before 1992.  How can I be so sure?  Easy:  in 1992 I moved to north joisey & they have laws against doing anything good-for-you that does not involve a hefty gym membership...

OKay the real reason is we moved out of our apartment in Storrs, CT.  & what made this such a magical yogurt making apartment, you ask?  Well, let me tell you: sometime before my residence there hot water was included in the rent, but that changed.  As a result each apartment had to be fixed with its own hot water heater & in almost every case this meant what was the front closet became the hot water heater closet.  The hot water heater filled most of the space, but there remained a shelf at the top (for storing anything that could be subjected to daily increases in temperature with or without high humidity depending on the water heater's state of repair).  Between the water heater itself & the shelf there was a gap just big enough for a glass topped bowl & with a little big of plywood rigged up a yogurt making/bread dough rising space was created.  All I had to do was the heat, cool & add cultures thing, then A took a shower, then I took a shower, maybe did a few dishes, etc.  With adequate insulation & spreading these tasks out over six or so hours, it was perfect.

After we moved & alas, no such space existed, or could even be made to exist.  In Joisey, landlords never ever included hot water so there was space accessible only from the outside for the hot water heater & I caved & got a yogurt maker.  Actually I acquired my mother's yogurt maker, a machine that was looking retro even then.  & for many years we were happy together.

Sure, me & that old yogurt maker, we had our ups& downs.  That timer looking thing on the top there is more like a dial; you set it to the time you should turn off (which in the absence of a fancy-shmancy switch means unplug) the yogurt maker; the appliance itself does nothing on its own except make kinda-even heat.  More than once I had a batch of very very tangy yogurt when I left it too long, but it made lovely cheese so all was not lost.

Last week, I taught C****** the heat & add & keep warm thing & sent her home with a batch of not-yet-yogurt & my mother's old yogurt maker.  I did this, of course to make room for my new yogurt maker.  It arrived on Tuesday, just in time for me to gaze at it longingly while I got ready for bookclub.

8:56 (4 to 9, get it?)

It began with the red&white March 2011 Block Lotto block.  I am not what you would call a red fan; I was hard-pressed to find any red fabric at all for a much small challenge way-back-when but this time I decided to just bite the bullet & buy more fabric.  You know, to help the economy.

& since I was buying fabric, & I happened to have a 50% off any single purchase one-day only coupon in my purse & I was right there on that day...  I also bought a little (by my standards) cutting board with a lazy susan idea.  The short version is, if it were not for this purchase,many many 8:56 blocks would never have been cut; because of this board, I now have even more quilts in mind.

Almost everyone on the block lotto blog said how fast this block went.  That was not quite my experience, exactly.

I will say making the first step 4-patches was indeed a piece of cake.  Almost every selvage-to-selvage strip worked up into 8 pairs & then four 4-patches, so that pile did grow quickly, quantity-wise.

The next few steps really dragged though.  One at a time each 4-patch was cut one inch from that center seam four times.  Then the borders between the two were flipped, etcetera etcetera etcetera.  I like to do this kind of thing in bulk, but having one board from which to work & a desire to keep everything in order as best I could, it was one block at a time from here on out.

It probably did not help I was listening to the Fellowship of the Ring at the time.  All those elven legends, all that cut turn cut turn cut turn....stitch press stitch press...  Still so far I am happy with the results & I am 99.9% sure the worst is behind me (never say never).

George who

Last October (in aught-nine) when I visited my parents, my step-father gave me some cash the day before I left.  I do not remember why, although in another place I made a note that he was paying back $$ I had given my mother.  This is probably true, actually; ordinarily I don't care how money falls into place but at the end of a visit I am often squeezing around for bills to use to get my truck out of airport parking. 

Anyway...one of the bills he gave me had a strange stamp on it which directed me to a website:  Where's George.  Now that I think of it, I have a vague memory of begging for that one dollar bill.  Anyway, we logged in, confirmed the bill's (then) current location & when I got back home I set up my own account & set the bill back on it's way.  When someone out in the world entered it a few days later, I was thrilled.  & hooked.

It has been a bit more than a year, but I finally got around to getting my own Where's George stamp.  I freely confess this is because we are planning a trip off the mainland later this year & will be passing through more than one airport outbound & return.  I plan to buy a pack of gum in every single one, just to get them distributed.  I accept this is priming the pump somewhat, but I do not care.

Yes, this is a silly way to spend my time, but it was still interesting in a small way.  Since discovering the site,  I have been surprised that more civics teachers did not use it as a point of interest, but none of the teachers I talked to had ever heard of it.  Okay, that's a lie, M****** had heard of it & so had C****, but she was a reading teacher & was not even teaching when we had the conversation.  I should ask if she got the info. from a civics teacher.  Of course, tracking monetary bills is almost certainly not covered on the FCAT & that might be the answer right there.

Another quilt project

Yes, yes I am STILL clearing a December-holiday-of-choice backlog.  Once I know the gift has gotten where it needs to go, I loose up the post; I don't want it posting before it gets there because it is still a surprise after all.

I have said before one of my brothers whittles.  & what he whittles most is mice with cheese & chess pieces.  It was just a matter of time before he started making mice-with-cheese chess pieces.  I understand he has completed one side of the board but cannot decide what to make for the other (the tree people against the modern building people was a no-brainer but this set presents challenges).

Flash forward to my drug of choice (cotton): I was cruising a quilt shop for no good reason.  I had a reason; I drove South to Many Horse Town because the local feed store had failed several times to either order, receive or retain the four bags of specialty feed I ordered for Becca for almost six weeks.  The distributor is only about 40-50 miles south & I finally went & picked it up myself.  The cost difference is enough to make the gas savings worthwhile & I took advantage of the trip to check out a quilt shop I almost never visit.  Like I said: no good reason.

& there was this fabric.  Of bright, colorful mice.  Bright colorful mice working their way through a bio-lab maze.  I had to have it.  I have not been this delighted since I found that hotdog fabric with the hotdogs wearing chefs hats & aprons, bar-b-q-ing hotdogs.  Anyway...

I made a chess board for K's mice.  I alternated the mice-in-a-maze fabric with black because I still do not know what the other side of this board might be.  I cut three 2.5"strips of mice-in-a-maze & three 2.5" strips of black swirls to make the four squares that became the strips of four squares (four strips of four sets of four squares for 64 squares), then one 4" strip of mice-in-a-maze & two 4" strips of black swirls for the borders.  First the mice on either side (be sure the row you are sewing starts with dark & ends with light) & then the other two sides in black.

It went together so easily & it occurs to me that even with garden-variety checkers it would make a cute gift.  I think I know what everyone is getting next year.

Flexible art folio

I know I have been not keeping up post-wise for about a month.  The longer than usual warm season (the first freeze arrived almost a month late), the deeper than usual first freeze (I think the whole USA got part of that one) & then, once it did warm up, the weirdly warmer days have eaten into my time in ways I never would have thought possible.  There is also another reason:  I had queued up a few posts about holidays gifts & then realized I could not very well post them until the recipients' had them in hand.  That has also been impacted by the weather (no really, part of some of the gifts were emu eggs & they did not start laying until it started getting cold because they are confused & then it takes time to blah blah blahbity blah).

How about I get instead to today's post?  For December-holiday-of-your-choosing I made C****** an art materials folio.  Once upon a time, she sketched constantly, painted frequently & all that but now she has a real job (two actually), an apartment across town & a long-distance relationship so she spends a lot of her time in her car, carrying what she can in a gynormous purse.  It is not like the old days when she could retreat to her room & find her art supplies there; now she is killing time between jobs etc. miles from her stuff.  So I thought she might be able to use a folio for her pencils, papers, brushes & so on.

It did not take me long to realize that she would need more than one to accommodate whatever she might want to bring with her or something quite large to bring it all & that is when I realized I was going to have to deal with it myself.

It is quilted because I like to quilt.  Also I could not find any interfacing in the 30 seconds I was willing to dedicate my attention to looking & it needed something to give it body.  There are two different kind of pockets:  a long strip that can hold pencils &/or flat pencil case  &/or a long, thick sumi brush &/or a watercolor case &/or you get the idea.  The angled pocket can hold anything from a few sheets of postcard-sized paper to an 11x14 sketchpad.  Which brings us to why the folio ties shut instead of  buttoning or snapping or whatever.  The ties can work with any height or thickness of whatever she put in there.  She can fold the folio in half, in thirds & still tie it firmly shut.

This way, she can change what she carries on any given day (or week or month) & the same folio still works. Less crap is always good.

Big ticket consumer goods are really aliens from another galaxy come to conquer us

I am always interested when a group, of small or large size but preferably a group that had no idea they were grouped, get an idea, wrong, right or just a matter of taste all in line with no apparent source or reason.  No I do not mean Fox News or Ralph Nader or anything like that, besides grouping deliberately, they are more about a collection of opinions than any actual ideas.  I am thinking more along the lines of apparently small, usually unintended ideas that make big changes.

The Disney movie 101 Dalmations was released in 1961 but before it was a successful movie it was a successful book.  It was so successful that only about five years elapsed between the time the book was printed & the time the movie was made.  Compare this to the decades+ that elapsed between the book2movie of most Disneyfications.  I do not just mean Beauty & the Beast et al, there is also Mary Poppins, published in 1934, movie 1965.  Even A Life in the Woods was published in 1926, almost 20 years before Bambi appeared on the big screen; well over ten of which Disney had already been making full length animated films.  Something about The Great Dog Robbery was so strong that it grabbed the money-lenders-in-the temple by the throat & they could not wait for the author to die & try to slip a bastardized version of the story by a well-funded copyright review board; they had to have that movie right away.  Because it is not how much you spend, but how much you make.  & make they did.

One of the unintended upshots was the jump in dalmation purchases.  I say unintended because I am sure had Disney been aware this would happen, they would have cornered the market on dalmation puppy mills.  In the days before movie product marketing, this would have been hard to anticipate: it would be hard to find a dog less suited for families with small children than a dalmation.  Unless it was a cocker spaniel a la Lady & the Tramp.

Flash forward to 2009: the influence of 101 Dalmations is so strong that earlier this year a woman (who must be 20+ years younger than I am; our only connection is her adult-acquired step-mother is a friend of mine) was at my house picking out chickens & when she saw a crevecoeur & asked the hen's name.  When I said Perdita she said she KNEW that was what it had to be.  After all, what else would anyone call a female black & white spotted anything?  Unless it was Missus Pongo.

It is also from this vantage point that I can see quite clearly another upshot:  the death of the fur coat industry.  The last generation of must-have-a-fur-coat women were already adults in 1961 (except behind the iron curtain women, where it is often colder & there was no Disney).  Do not even start to tell me that this is an extension of animal rights activism & awareness.  If that were true there would have been no upswing in the purchase of leather coats, which have been steadily climbing for three+ decades.  Ask meat-eating, leather-wearing women why they do not want fur & they will tell you:  there is just something cruel about it.  They will actually use the word CRUEL.  PETA can take all the credit they like, I am convinced it was 101 Dalmations.

Which makes me wonder what the next big accident might be & I think I may have found it:  Transformers.  Check back in 30 years & see if indeed the new grown-ups are not fairly certain we do not need all that multi-tasking gadget crap.  Much better to keep everything to a single function so they will be more easily defeated.

& Happy Black Friday.


// The author of The Great Dog Robbery (which I am sure is a charming little volume, although I have never read it) also wrote what I think is one of the must-read books of the 20th Century:  I Capture the Castle.  I am 99.9% sure there are no dogs in it.  Read it anyway.

So easy a dog killer can do it

I have already said how (un)impressed I am with the NFL's decision to reinstate Michael Vick & now well, I am double dazzled by the Philadelphia Eagles. YesBiscuit! was good enough to put up the link to the Philadelphia Eagles Corporate Partners page. When I looked yesterday there were two standouts we use regularly & well I thought they might need new jingles in honor of this milestone. So this is what I came up with:

So much for being about the better stuff - Snapple
Even a dog killer can do it - Geico

& now I invite everyone to add their own to this page, but more important forward it to the appropriate Eagles sponsor.

I had zero faith that the Eagles will budge even an inch in their decision, until funnily enough less than twelve hours after the YesBiscuit! post, the Eagles took down their corporate sponsors page (although it remains cached here). Let me tell you who I was able to remember (with help from a few other not-Vickers I talk to) : Chrysler, Heineken, two different incarnations of Comcast, Lincoln Financial Group, BestBuy, USAirways, Taco Bell/KFC, Jeep, MasterCard, RiteAid Pharmcy, Pepcid, 7/Eleven, Pepsi, Miller-Lite, Dunkin Donuts, & of course Snapple & Geico. Oh & lets not forget my personal favorite: the American Red Cross. But thanks to For Your Entertainment I can point you to the pre-take-down list.

The unlucky thing about corporate sponsors is if they do not get credit for sponsoring, they do not think they got their monies worth so their logos are all over programs & tickets & their own websites. Anyone who has ever had a staring contest with a freakishly moist-eyed younger brother knows that in pulling the list, the Eagles just blinked. They could not have said "PLEASE do not contact our sponsors" any louder.

For Your Entertainment also suggests that the sponsors were probably blindsided & polite would be the best way to go when writing them (no such suggestion was made when contacting the Eagles directly).

Finally in the fairness of all things...well, fair, I should say A is not 100% with me on this. He is not sure Vick should have ever been banned from playing as the law is the law & MV was convicted, did his time & should be allowed to go on with his life. On the other hand, if the slogan "So easy a dog killer could do it" got well-known enough that they stopped running those annoying ads, well that would be killing two birds with one stone. Or should I say two dogs with the same chain.

//A' s exact words were...let me just fill you in: I said if MV was truly contrite he would have given up some names of others who had been involved & A said "Michael Vick does not live to satisfy you". It is moments like this that I delight in marrying someone for whom english is round-a-bout the third language. Or is it fourth?

The devil's plaything

That is what they used to say about idle hands; they are the devil's plaything. I have no talent for idle hands myself. I am not saying my hands are always productive, I am just saying they are always active. If I do not have something to do with my hands I will eat &/or make annoying tapping, snapping noises &/or shuffle papers &/or surf channels &/or & so on.

Apparently I am not the only one in my family with devil's-plaything disease. Yea, it is a condition, like restless leg syndrome only you do not have to be overweight to have it; also an over-the-counter pill like Tylenol PM will relieve the symptoms temporarily. But the best cure is to do something, anything with your hands. You could knit (like mom), bind quilts (which I have finally started to do) or.......whittle. Just like Lewis Black always said we could.

My brother started whittling ...uhhhhhmmmm... a while ago. I wonder who thought it would be a good idea to give him something sharp, but that ship has sailed. He now has a collection of blades that would make a neanderthal drool.

For the longest time he made mostly chess pieces. At least that is what he told us he was making. We did not care what he was making so long as he was not the unabomber. We were not really all that worried he was the unabomber; the first bomb was sent when he was not even a teenager & he has a great disdain for copycats. Still, you have to wonder about a kid who starts listing his life's ambition as 'to rule the world' in elementary school.

Now it is little objets. My parents have an emu sitting on an egg, my sister a red wolf & we got this guy.

In addition the devil's-plaything, my brother also has two dogs. Well, one dog & another that is visiting. For a year+ by now. Apparently that is also a family disease.

// I have previously taken some flak for implying everyone with RLS is overweight. Maybe they are, maybe they are not. I can say that I took a quick look at several (more than 5) "fact sheets" & the first non-prescription prevention &/or cure was always lose some weight. Aside from the pharmaceutical spokesmodels, I have never seen a person who claimed to have RLS that did not also outweigh me by at least 150lbs & usually more. & I am not the skinniest person you ever met. I'm just saying.

Salvaged wood

I was wandering around a local yarn store (not the new one, the other one) & came across a wooden version of something I have seen before: a disk, open in the center with a stick of the same material. I have seen glass ones & fimo ones & probably even wooden ones before, but never this far south. They are used to hold two sides of a knitted garment (shawl or kimono or even a sweater) closed. The stick goes thru the layers of knit stitches & across the disk, holding everything in place. It took longer to describe than it would have to show you:


I have mislead you. This photo is NOT of the one I saw that day. This one was made by Caleb Burton a local woodworker-cabinetmaker person. The wood is African, left over I believe from a larger project. He made several of these for me out of different woods after I gave him a not-nearly-so-nice-as-his example.

Actually, I gave it to his wife, Michelle (who you can reach at michelle_treewater@yahoo.com if you want him to make them for you). These pins are sanded as smooth you can imagine (my skin is rougher, no kidding) & oiled, but not sealed at my request. I want time to make her mark on them as I use them.

The knit shawl in the photos was a gift from my mom; last week I was no longer just 43 years old.