Little Dogs Strip Quilt

This quilt was so super easy to make it's almost embarrassing, but I am very pleased with how it turned out.  The colors are so cheerful and happy, it's the perfect thing to cuddle up under on all these miserable, cold grey days we've been having!

I did this one twin sized, which I find I much prefer to the standard throw sized quilts.  Maybe that's because I'm on the tall side, or maybe it's because my two little dogs are blanket hogs, but we just don't fit too well under the throws.  I also used wool batting with this one which makes a huge difference in the warmth.  It's actually warm!  I think going forward I will stick with either wool batting or flannel backing, probably not both, but I don't find the cotton batting to be warm enough.  Nice for a summer quilt but even them I get shilled very easily so something a bit warmer would be nice.

The best part about this quilt is the back.  I tried piecing the back (well, part of it anyway) out of scraps for the first time and I am really happy with how it came out.  It's so cute I can flip the whole thing over for a different look if I get tired of the wild pink.  The whole project took a weekend.  Overall, a big success!  The dogs are happy with it too!

Dresden Plates, a modern take

Of all the crafts I do (most of which I write about over on my other blog), the one thing I do that is just for myself and my own enjoyment is quilting.  I don't have to please anyone but me with my quilts, and this is a joy that I have lost hold of in the last few years.  This fall, I connected with a new friend who is an avid quilter and rediscovered the joy of creating something just for the joy of it.  Making something to please myself, exploring my own sense of color, design and texture without a care for anyone's approval is deeply satisfying.

One of things I really enjoy about quilting in particular is the blend of very old, traditional patterns with new, modern sensibilities.  Exploring that idea, I came up with this take on the traditional Dresden Plate quilt.  Using scrapes of fabric left over from a range of projects, I made a series of Dresden Plates and arranged them asymmetrically to give the feeling that they were slipping off the quilt.  I had a lot of fun working out the quilting pattern itself, following the lines produced by the plates themselves, and interlacing them where the plate rays overlapped.

I am very pleased with the results.  The quilt is pretty, and with a nice flannel back it's a warm, snugly blanket to curl up under on cold afternoons with a book and a cup of tea.

Design wise, this is the most complex quilt I have done to date.  Making the plates was not difficult, but required more precision than any of my other quilts, and I also had to applique them in plate which I had not done before.  None of this was difficult but it was advanced than anything else I've done so far.  I am particularly happy about having used up so many scrapes, both for the plates and for the binding.

Panic and the Never-ending Socks

Panic attacks suck.  There are certain things I really need to get done that send me over the edge every time I even think about them.  Remembering what I need to accomplish in a given day is hard enough as it is without those tasks sending me running for cover under the nearest quilt.  So I get behind, and that makes the whole situation worse, adding one more thing to the list of things I can't stand to think about.

Thank God for Xanax.

I have been getting some knitting done, and finally finished a pair of lace tabi socks that I started in 2008.  Only 4 years to knit a pair of socks!  That's actually pretty good for me, socks are not my favorite thing to knit and I will do just about anything to avoid knitting the second sock.  Sadly, most people like wearing socks that match (I do to if I am being perfectly honest about it), so my one-sock knitting thing isn't very useful.  At least I got this set done.  The second sock is a tad looser than the first, but I think it will be ok once I wash them.  I'm quite happy with how they came out and am looking forward to wearing them with my flip-flops on my way to aikido.

Since I managed to finish this pair of socks, I started another in a fit of irrational sock-optimism.  I had gotten the yarn for this pair in 2005, possibly earlier, and I meant to knit them for my then-SIL.  That relationship broke down, so the project languished.  I've got one done and just finished the patterned cuff for the second, so I have some hope that I might actually get them done before the moths get to the first sock.  The color (pink!) is fun and the cuff bit was interesting to knit and very cute, which seems to be keeping my interest.

Next up will be sweaters for the fall and winter!  Sales and sewing orders are starting to pick up, which means I will have less time for knitting but if I start now I should finish one or maybe two before the holidays.  So far this year I have no major holiday knitting planned, which is sort of nice.  There are a couple of sewing projects, which I really need to start now.  If business it like it was last holiday season I won't have much time to work on anything for myself after the end of October.  Here's hoping!

Quilts!

I've taken up quilting in the last year or so, because I really need another craft in my life.  It's actually sort of fun, and I have a lot of scrap fabric that I can't use for costumes or much of anything else.  Using it for quilts, I feel like I'm being a good hippie and reducing trash.  Of course, I also end up buying a lot of quilting fabrics but I was doing that anyway, I just didn't have much to do with the fabrics I was getting.

Anyway, the first real quilt I did was a gift for my brother last year.  This summer, I finished #2 and #3.  I'm quite pleased with how they turned out, though I need to get better at the machine quilting part of the process.  Trying to wrangle a 70 inch square quilt through my machine is tricky and I ended up with some funny little bubbles on the backside.  Using the walking foot on my machine helped a lot, I suspect the rest is just a matter of practice.

The first quilt is lap or throw sized, I didn't really bother to measure it but I think it's about 50x60 or so.  The whole thing is done in nice cozy flannel, so it's very soft and will be great this winter.  The dog loves it already.  The piecing was easy, but for some reason the the boarders at the top and bottom get a little stretched out so they don't lay right.  I think the flannel may have stretched some when I was piecing it and I didn't really notice until I was doing the quilting.  The whole thing is scribble quilted, which was fun to do and worked well except for where the boarders didn't fit right and in one spot towards the end where things puckered.


The second quilt was even easier to piece, though the way the pattern was written a lot of waste was produced.  This made me upset, but the end result is nice so I can sort of let it go.  All of the fabrics are Asian-inspired prints I've been collecting over the last year or so.  The whole thing sort of reminds me of the trip I took to Kyoto in 2008.  I wasn't sure about the colors and prints together, but in the end it looks pretty and I'm very pleased with it.  For the actual quilting, I just stitched in the ditch, which created a really nice diamond pattern on the back.  The whole thing is a 70 inch square and I wasn't feeling comfortable with my quilt-wrestling skills to try free motion quilting on this.

Now that these two are done, I'm working a smaller piece that's based on a shoji screen quilt I saw I one of the local fabric stores.  It's going to be a gift for a good friend who just bought her first home.  The top is all put together, I just need to decided on a backing and do the quilting.  Because the colors are so high-contrast I'm having a hard time deciding how to quilt it.  I think I may try some of the invisible filament thread they have now and do free motion scribbling on it.  We'll see.  I'll post pictures one it's done and sent off.

She's back!

Ok, really I never left exactly, I did start a new blog to chronicle my fiber adventures in the SCA and I've had several major attacks of life since my last post.  Lately though I've felt like I needed to chronicle some of my other crafty projects that don't fit into my other blog, and to rant about the rest of life.

Life has been interesting since last I wrote.  I graduated from law school, got engaged, had an excellent post-grad fellowship, passed the bar, found a job doing something I like, got married, lost the job, and got in a major car accident.  That accident has changed my life more than anything I've ever done.  I have major migraine problems as a result and needed hip surgery last year to repair the labrum in my right hip which was only partially successful in eliminating my pain.  I can't work as a lawyer (or much of anything else) because of the headaches and resulting problems with confusion, anxiety and memory so I started a small business making knitting needle cases and bags as well as designing knitting patterns.

Thing are rough.  Married life is not much of a consolation.  It's given me a roof and keeps food on the table, but not much else.  Most days I feel like a glorified housekeeper.  I've found it difficult if not impossible to write for the last couple of years, which is one reason why this blog fell by the wayside.  So has my personal journal.  That has always been a source of comfort and a way for me to process things, be they events in my day or my sometimes confused emotions.  I feel stuck and stopped up and I'm sick of feeling that way.  Hopefully reviving this blog will help with that, if I have to write about something maybe I can start to write for myself again too and figure out what to do with my life.  Again.

The Fiber Diet

After some consideration and picking at the skeins, I think 4 more of the skeins I washed on the 4th are a loss. 16oz of potluck roving in a really interesting coral sort of color, probably gone. Sigh. That's nearly 2 pounds of fiber I spun and cannot use. I found that Paradise Fibers still has the shetland in the same color, and some similar silk and merino blends. Nothing quite like the potluck, but there were a couple of things on there that might be a good replacement, plus they have gotland at a really good price (that's the fiber they used for the Lord of Rings movies), and the LYM would probably love to have a Frodo scarf made out of that.

I speak of replacement fibers for one very good reason...all of these skeins were destined for Christmas gifts, except the shetland, and I'm supposed to be on a fiber diet for the year. After going through my (thankfully diminished) fiber stash last night, I don't have suitable replacements for the potluck or the silk and merino blend, and nothing I can approximate the shetland with. Yes, I have plenty of actual yarn, but again not in the right colors or weights for the people I had in mind. So what to do? Is this little washing machine disaster a good enough reason to break my no-fiber vow, at least to the extent that I would be replacing fibers, not actually buying new ones to add to the stash?

Fiber disaster!

It's amazing really, I've been spinning for years and yesterday was the first major spinnig related disaster to strike. And given that I'm a huge klutz, this is kind of a miracle.

Anyway...I coulnd't sleep yesterday so I got up at 5 in the morning and decided to wind off all the yarn I had sitting on bobbins. 16 skeins of yarn, all spun up since the start of the year. Then I decided to wash the yarn to set the twist. I put everything in wash bugs, dropped in the landry machine to soak, and walk away, only to discover 10 minutes later that we have the only washing machine on the planet with a soak setting that....agitates.

WTF?!

In what reality does the soak setting agitate?! Really?

So now I have 16 skeins of felt. Well...actually...only 3 skeins are totally hopeless. Tragically, two of them are/were beautiful laceweight shetland I had planned to make a Faroese shawl out of. Four of skeins may be salvagae if I can pick the strands apaart. The rest of them had just enough alpaca or whatever else blended in that while they did felt, it's still useable yarn.

Suprisinly, I wasn't all that upset about the whole sad situation. Disappointed, yes, but remarkably calm all things considered.

My gardening didn't actually go a whole lot better. I got the stupid box hedges out, then we tackeld the awful 8 foot phalluc holly bush. The stump is still in the hole and the flower bed looks like a minuature mine fleid. You know, like gnomes had a trench war or something. Hopefully I can get the rootball hacked up enough that we can get the damn thing out of the hole. I have a bunch of realy lovely plants to put in, and I want to get to the fun part!

Pantyhose rant

This is random but I hate, I mean HATE pantyhose. Especially the cheap-ass pathetic excuse for pantyhose sold at Target. Seriously. $6 and you can maybe get two wearings out of them before they shred. Not run. Shred. I know I'm not exactly Kate Moss but really, there's not that much friction going on that these things would shred the second or third time out.

If only I could really be a hippie lawyer like the LYM says I am and stop shaving my legs and wear Birks to work...and maybe also get in around 9:30 instead of 8...

Oh so lazy!

So I have been quiet for way too long. At least the last 4 weeks (ack) of that was not entirely my fault, stupid Cox locked out my web account right after I moved and won't unlock the user name so I had to move to blogspot. Which is probably easier anyway and has prompted me to change my template and all, but still, it's annoying. Having to remember which webrings I was in and find the code for them in a huge pain. At least I think I have that all saved on my machine at home.

Anyway, things are going pretty well. The LYM and I seen to have gotten pretty well adjusted to the cohabitation thing, the animals are mostly ok with each other, and the house is starting to look pretty well pulled together with all of our stuff in it.

I've even been knitting away on my UFO's! I've got about half a sleeve and a roll down collar left on the brown cabled sweater I started last summer and about 3 inches of cuff left on the first of my Liberty socks (Liberty because I got the yarn on sale at Liberty of London when I was there in 1997). In going through the pile of UFO's I did discover that the cat had chewed on a lace bed jacket I'd been working on. Unfortunately the chew holes were all over the place and too numerous to patch, so I scraped the 4 inches I had done. It was only 4 inches of knitting so I think there's enough yarn still to start over with the same project, especially since once I pulled the needles out I discovered the thing was WAAAY too big. We'll see, I might end up using a whole different pattern, there was a really cute kimono jacket in the spring KnitScnene I'd like to make and I think this yarn will work. It'll be a little lighter and more open that would be nice for a light spring/summer wrap.

I promise pictures will be forthcoming! I'm spending tomorrow knitting and gardening and grilling tri-tip (apparently a CA phenomenon that can only be found at Trader Joe's out here)and hopefully starting my first real bonsai project.

News updates

The latest news is that I am currently moving in with the LYM and will be starting a *paid* internship at an actual law firm tomorrow morning. Hurray!

Trying to get the dog and cat to live together in something approaching peace has been no picnic. The cat is still hissing at the dog when he gets too close to her, and the dog is still eating the cat's food, which pisses the cat off to no end, but mostly I think I'm more stressed about the whole situation then they are at this point. Once the cat stops crying in the morning we should have some measure of peace in the house and all will be well.

Aside from moving and trying to keep the cat and dog in line, I've not been up to a whole lot since school got finished. There's been quite a bit of spinning, some knitting, and generally loafing around and relaxing, which I desperately needed. Between than and aikido, kendo and iaido I've been keeping myself pretty busy. All in all, things are looking up and going well, and I am remarkably calm all things considered.

Now I must get back to unpacking. I brought over all my bathroom stuff and I have no idea where to put it all. The master bath is tiny (like a postage stamp tiny, smallest bathroom I have ever seen in all my life. I think the potty closet in my old apartment in San Francisco was bigger than this whole stupid "master" bath), and there isn't much storage space in the other bathroom either so my collection of bath products looks even more absurd than it really is. I'll figure it out. Creative storage is always fun.

What can you do?

Well...I'm two hours away from my 3rd exam and for some reason all I really want to do is knit. Or at least play with yarn. I started a washcloth last night and I really just want to finish it. I'm using Crystal Palace chenille and the star shaped dishcloth pattern from Mason-Dixon Knitting (which you can get here). So far so good, I did have to frog back the first couple of inches when I realized my gauge was waaaaay off and I needed to use size 6 needles instead of 8. The smaller needles made the chenille much easier to deal with too, so it's going pretty fast now. It might also help that I went from using Addi's to bamboo. I'm the only person I know who slows down with Addi's. They hurt my hands for some reason. I'll stick with my nice bamboo, wood and Denise needles thanks.

Anyway, no luck so far on the job search. All career services had to suggest was calling around to public defenders and judges and offering to work for free. Which isn't really going to work, I have to pay rent and eat somehow. I've pretty accepted that I will be losing my apartment and putting most of my stuff in storage. Where I go from there is anyone's guess. I guess it depends on where/if I can find some sort of work, what it pays, and whether or not the LYM decides shacking up is a good plan or not. We both want to live together, we practically do anyway, but neither of us wants me to move in because I have no choice. Hopefully we can work something out, and I won't have to pack my cat up in the car and drive back to CA for the summer to crash with the 'rents.

Edited to add a link to this amazing site where you can get hand-blown glass drop spindles and some really amazing glass knitting needles. *lust*

A sick joke?

Nope, just my life. My first final is Thursday. This morning I found out my summer job plans have fallen through. Yesterday I found out my car needs about $800 worth of work to pass state inspection.

No job, no car (well, ok, the car will be back sooner or later but still), and impending brokeness. Great.

Why do these things always seem to happen around finals?

How am I supposed to find a job now, when everyone who wanted to hire pretty much did that two months ago, and I have exams to deal with? Please. Enough already!!

Now I shall return to my outlines in the hope that I can salvage my sad GPA and thereby my career...

I'm ok!

Just that time of year...

Aside from finals starting next week (the first is on Thursday, a week from today, arrggg!!), life is good. Stuff is going really insanely well with the LYM, I got promoted again in aikido, the weather is getting nice, and I got to re-landscape a whole flowerbed last weekend at the LYM's house. Digging up over a ton of rocks was way too much work (someone had put down landscaping rocks as a ground cover, then covered the rocks with a 3 inch layer of mulch. WTF?!), but it was good to get outside and do something other than read for part of the weekend. I needed that. And for some reason I find digging in the earth very relaxing and comforting. I love the feel of well-tilled (and relatively rock free) soil in my hands as I plant things.

I did manage to re-injure my thumb last week, which made the gardening slow and somewhat painful, and has slowed me down a lot. Stupid thumb. I'm back in a splint for the next two weeks at least, which is annoying to say the least. At least all I have to do is study, so that's something. It just gets hot with this thing stuck to my hand and wrist all day long.

I'll post more when I can, for now it's off to my internship and then class, then aikido. Crazy days.

Finally, fiber!

My dad is in town to visit for a few days and brought me the best present ever! A shiny new Ashford skein winder! I was able to assemble the thing and wind off 4 bobbins full of yarn in the time it took to wind two bobbins with the niddy-noddy. This thing is a life saver for big projects, I had so many bobbins full of finished yarn after winter break, I was avoiding the task of winding them off so I could set the yarn. That much niddy-noddy action kills my arms.

He also brought me a McMoran yarn balance, which is a fun and geeky little spinning tool. It's a small plastic balance that allows you to estimate how many yards per pound you are getting. The yardage estimates seem to be pretty accurate too. For larger spinning projects this thing will be very useful. I think if you need a fairly small and precise amount of yarn for a project, counting yardage on the skein winder or niddy-noddy would be better, but for anything else this is the clear way to go.

Now if only my thumb was better and I had less reading to do, I could finish spinning the Shetland over spiring break. Oh well, there should be a few slow evenings for spinning before summer.

Thumb update

I went back to stupid health "services" today, missing two classes in the process, but it was a good thing. The doctor was actually nice about things, looked the thumb, stuck me a huge splint, and sent me (predictably) to the hospital to rule out a break of the joint. Which would be a Very Bad Thing indeed, and require trips to an orthopedist. I got lucky though, it's not broken, just very badly bruised. I have to keep it splinted for 10 days, then "wean off the splint" for awhile and if anything gets worse and fails to get better I have to go back. So really it's all good, and should be fine, even if the process of finding this out was hideously annoying and inconvenient.

At least this week is not so busy as last week. Aikido is on spring break, so I don't have as much training, and since spring break is next week most things have kind of slowed down a little. Which is good, since I have an extra assignment all the sudden I have to get done and Daddy is coming in to town on Wednesday. I'm calm about it all though, after last week just about anything seems sane.

As for knitting, probably won't be doing any of that for awhile because of the thumb, but the scarf I knit for the LYM while I was sick got used for the first time this morning and he seemed very happy with it. Seeing him wearing it and having fun playing with it was rather wonderful. He was absurdly cute for one thing, and having the satisfaction of knowing that I was keeping someone I cared about warm and comfortable on a cold morning is always a nice thing.

Oooo like I need another reason...

...to hate being a student. Add Student Heath "Services." Yesterday, being Sunday, I did something terrible(tm) to my thumb in kendo. It feels worse today and is swollen and tender and I cannot move the bottom joint at all, and there's a red patch which hurts really bad when I poke it.

So I went to the alleged Student Health "Services" office, and they said, well, sorry but we have no doctors you should go to urgent care and pay $100 for what we should be to do as part of the absurd amount of money you have already paid to have access to our stellar "care." To which I say, feh, and demand to see someone, anyone, who can tell me if this might be broken. Which someone turned out be a clueless nurse who told me nothing I didn't already know and put a splint on the WRONG KNUCKLE, and then informed me that I need to come back tomorrow to see the real doctor, who will send me to urgent care for x-rays I will have to pay for anyway. WTF? I have class all day tomorrow, and no money, and now you want me to run all over stupid town to get x-rays you really should be able to do on site? gah. What is the point of you people?!

So now I am in pain and frustrated to the point of tears and no closer to a functional thumb than I would be if I sat on it for an hour rather than wasting my time at Health "Services."

Don't even get me started on the brilliant people we have "helping" us over at the Financial Aid office.

Hmmm

So I've been sick as a dog, again, still, who can tell anymore, but I'm finally starting to feel better. I'm over a week behind in reading, but what are you gonna do? Really, I'm weirdly calm about this. No sense in freaking out about the amount of work I have to catch up on, that will hardly help anything.

Anyway, stuff is going ok in spite of the Flu of Doom and reading backlog. The LYM took fabulously good care of me while I was sick, I'm cooking dinner for his family this weekend, I got promoted in aikido, and for the first time ever I realized I'm actually glad to be out here doing this whole law school thing. It's not been easy, but I wouldn't change anything if I had it all to do over again.

I just wish I could sleep for about a week. I was out of school sick all last week, and came back into one of the busiest weeks of the semester. On top of everything else, we have a compressed ethics course for the next two weeks, so I have an extra hour and a half class, plus all the reading, every day this week and next. All to learn really complex things like it's a bad plan to take your client's money to Thailand to buy under age prostitutes. Very useful stuff. At least spring break is only a week away, then I can sleep a little and get caught up on the reading.

Blargh

Ok I am a little cranky today. Yesterday was weird, maybe in a good way but I don't know. I'm not sure the LYM gets the whole V-Day concept really, but he was really very sweet and nice even though nothing particularly special happened. We'll see how the weekend goes I suppose.

Anyhow, I want to go home and spin and finish this Shetland I've been working on. But instead I have class all day, then aikido with the group I am less than enthused about, and I'll be lucky if I get home before 9. This semester is just brutal, but at least it's almost spring break. And I should have a reasonably relaxing weekend, even though I have iaido and kendo on Sunday.

The brown sweater of doom is getting there, the first sleeve is done and I have at least started the second one. Maybe I'll get it done over break, I can only hope.

Trial, feh

Just a quick note about the trial...

We did really well, made good arguments, the prosecution offered no real evidence. Our instructor said we did great, the other sides instructor said it was ok they lost since we didn't call the defendant and they had no evidence anyway.

The judge came out.

The judge ruled for the prosecution.

He did this because it's Legal Skills, and he thought we had to appeal to case. My instructor and I talked to him afterwards and he said in real life, it would have been tossed out on the motion to strike if not sooner. Yet we lost because it's skills, a class meant to teach up how things work in the real world. Feh.

I hate legal skills. It's the single most useless program at school. If it's supposed to work like the real world, the judges should rule like it's real world and not make mistakes on purpose so we can have an appeal (an appeal, I might ad, no one in our group needs to make for the purposes of the class).

It was very demoralizing and I felt really bad after, but god bless the LYM, he managed to make a fairly convincing argument that we won in every way that really mattered so that's something. And thank god legal skills is nothing like real life. I'm just so tired of everything about law school being set up so that you fail. No achievement seems to come without some absurd reminder of how inept you really are. We did good, we won, just let us have it already.

Anyway, I'm cranky now and have pretty well decided that I'm going to relax as much as I can this weekend. So while I wait for the LYM to get up (he's been sick, he needs to sleep) I shall knit and watch Heros instead of read Admin Law or something else. Maybe I will even finish this sleeve, that would be nice. I'm getting tired of looking at it.

Nerves!

So today I have to argue a case in court for the first time ever. Not real court mind you, they won't let me at real clients like that quite yet, but Legal Skills court. Legal Skills is our practicum course at school, it's really pretty silly in many ways, not least of which is that it's a pass/fail class that takes up a huge percentage of your time, but there it is. Anyway, the point is, this afternoon I have my trial and I am really nervous.

Really really super nervous.

It should be ok. We are the defense in a criminal case, and there is no real evidence of any useful of conclusive kind, so all we have to do is not f* it up too badly and we should be ok, but holy crap I am still nervous. My head hurts and I don't wanna go. I have to go cross examination and closing arguments, both of which I seem to be better at than direct and opening, I think because you have to think on the fly and respond to what the other side has done more, but that's not saying a whole lot really. I know in my head this is all good practice and it will be good to have my "first" court appearance over with before I get out into practice, but the whole skills program is so contrived and so poorly executed that I don't think it really has the desired effect. Seriously, they give us dreadful cases and no evidence to work with and it's all quite absurd and in real life the cases would never get to court. But we have to argue it anyway. blegh.

It's a stressful start to a rather long weekend. Today is my trial, then I am off to the LYM's. Tomorrow we are going to my neighbors 30th birthday party, then Sunday there's an all day self-defense clinic. Somewhere in there I have to read for next week. Gah. Good luck with that. I am sorely tempted to just say to hell with it and really take the weekend off, but I sort of feel like I've been slacking as it is. Of course, I am a little behind, but only in one class, and once this trial is over my schedule will go back to something passably normal, so probably I am due a little bit of a break. We'll see I guess. Right now I just want to crawl under a rock and hide until this is over.

Hmm. Just realized, tonight will be the first time the LYM has seen me in full lawyer-drag. It's been nearly a year that we've been doing whatever it is we're doing and in all that time he's never seen me in a suit. Funny.