End of Year

This is the day for the annual gazing at the navel.

Last year I made a number of resolutions and plunged into the new year with great resolve.

Well.

The scope of my non-keeping of those resolutions takes one's breath away. Work got in the way of just about everything. I do like having some disposable income, but it certainly screws up the rest of my life. And yes, that's a lame excuse.

It was always the art that took a back seat, that got lost in the shuffle. And "quilting content"? Clearly not enough.

Question to self: if not now, when?

I feel like I've slid pretty low with most of the best practices I'd like to keep going in my life. I haven't darkened the door of the gym since we got Lucy. Daily walking went out the window when the snow and ice moved in to stay. The holidays have contributed to abysmal eating habits.

Clearly I need to get things back on track. Onward. No resolutions, just onward.

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.

Leonard Cohen, Anthem

Will's Birthday

Will someone please tell me where the 80s and 90s went? I think the answer to that holds the key to many mysteries.

Today is my baby boy's birthday.

How on earth did he get to be 26, 6'4" tall, and the man about town he is today?

Will is a dry-witted and sardonic delight, always ready to share an ironic story. Or to get together for Indian food. Or to do an artsy date with his mom. I knew he was golden in that way when he became my enthusiastic antiquing partner when he was only five years old.

Too bad those artsy dates are so few and far between. We'll strive for more of those in 2008.

Will and Kelley came over for dinner today. We had birthday cheesecake and embarrassed him in front of his girlfriend with stories and pictures from when he was little. Very fun.

White--Outside and In

Eight inches of snow!

My main preoccupation was snow removal. A very kind neighbor (who has half the driveway we have) toodled over on his tractor and blew our driveway clear. Going down the street he looked like the guy who traveled by lawn tractor in The Straight Story. A thank-you batch of English Butter Toffee will be delivered to him tomorrow.

The patient is doing very well. I brought him home from the hospital on Thursday afternoon and he's been improving steadily. He still is in some discomfort but that seems to be getting better.

Little by little we're realizing the big effect this accident will be having on our lives. No mid-January quilt retreat for me; no February ski tournament for Mr. Kathie. We'll be thinking small and focusing on home the next few months.

We had to laugh today--his 92 year old Aunt Tyyne learned of his accident through this blog. Thanks to all for all the well-wishes.

::::::

I've been knitting.


I finally got around to counting stitches on the wedding shawl. Two more repeats to go, and then it's on to the knit-on edging. Yes! The Kid Silk Haze is amazing--like a pile of foam in my lap.

Surprise!

The lighthearted part of our holiday celebrations ended with a bang Wednesday morning when I got a call at work from Mr. Kathie saying he had fallen and suspected he might have broken his ankle. I arrived home to find two squad cars and two ambulances in my driveway and my poor DH flat on his back on the ice. And so we launched into a day of ambulances, emergency rooms, doctors, nurses, X-rays, IVs, gurneys, and the rest.

He had indeed broken his ankle--or more precisely, three bones in the leg just above his ankle. He had surgery last night to put everything back together again. He'll be in a cast for at least six weeks. And no doubt we'll have a major restructuring of life around here for the time being, as we move into caregiver and caregivee roles.

So glad he had his phone with him when he fell. Otherwise he might very well have lain on his back outside until 5 p.m., when I would have come home. No one would have seen him. Or heard him.

A Merry Christmas

Written by my mother, aged 8.

I can't wait to open my boxes either.

Merry Christmas to all.

Socked In

The scene on our driveway, Christmas Eve Morning, 2007. Negligible actual snow depth but 50 mph winds produced license plate-level drifts behind our cars overnight.

What fun.

I plan to stay in today.

Settling In

Fog set in solidly around here on Friday, making for a White Christmas of a different kind, and disrupting lots of travel plans. It was nice to be able to stay at home, but we did miss a dinner out last night with our son and his girlfriend and her family, because her family was not able to fly out of Cleveland. We're hoping a raincheck date next week will work out.

I spent the day tying up the last few holiday loose ends, doing grocery shopping, etc. Last night I made a gift batch of English Butter Toffee.

Every bit as good as the variety that costs $20 a pound.

English Butter Toffee (eternal thanks to Rebecca Stegall, wherever she may be)

1 cup butter (no substitutions)

1 cup sugar

½ tsp. vanilla

¼ tsp. salt

Chopped walnuts or almonds

6 ounces chocolate chips

Cover a cookie sheet with foil. Spread chopped nuts on the cookie sheet, to about 9X13 inches. Have folded kitchen towel under cookie sheet or use some other protection against heat.

In a medium sized saucepan, combine butter, sugar, vanilla, and salt. Heat mixture to boiling over high heat, stirring constantly. As it cooks, the mixture will take on a frothy and foamy appearance. Gradually it will begin to color. When the frothiness subsides (as bubbles break they will no longer look foamy) and the mixture is caramel-colored, quickly pour evenly over the chopped nuts on the cookie sheet. The cooking process may take ten minutes or so.

Sprinkle the chocolate chips on the hot toffee on the cookie sheet. As chips melt, spread evenly over mixture with a knife. Top with more chopped nuts.

Allow the chocolate to set up—may take overnight. Break into pieces to serve.

**Cooking candy to the hard-crack stage by eyeball is a dicey business. You can also cook the butter/sugar mixture and use a candy thermometer to judge when the hard-crack stage is reached. I've always used the eyeball method, and in 20 years of making this candy, I've only ruined one batch.

I will say that if the phone rings while you're making this, let it ring!

Enjoy!

::::::

This morning, the weather has changed. The temp has dropped by 30 degrees and it's blowing and snowing. Kind of ugly. We're planning a run to a Chicago suburb to watch the Packers/Bears game with friends. My knitting will go with me.

Have a good day, everyone.

Winding Down

It's nice to get to the point where the holiday frenzy starts to slow down a bit. It's a good place to be. I have a few things to do yet, but the pressure is definitely lightening up. The events on our this-year holiday social calendar are all pretty much low-key. And I'm off work till Wednesday! Whoopee!

Last night I picked up the Sandy's Palette socks that have been neglected a bit too long. Let's see--I started these in late September, so I'm right on track with my usual two-pair-a-year output.All done but the Kitchener-ing on this first one. On track to have this pair completed by March or so.

I was planning to make butcher aprons for Brenda and Maria, the two of my co-workers that I work with most closely. But time got tight and I sort of gave myself permission to table those projects. I bought them potted paper white bulbs for January forcing. Sure enough, when Maria brought gifts yesterday, she had gotten amaryllis bulbs for both Brenda and I. So it will be a flowery January for us all and that's a fine thing. It's been a month of solid snow and, while deep winter has its consolations, I yearn for some live and growing greenery.

On tonight's schedule: finalize the grocery list, wrap a couple gifts, and then to the couch for some down time.

Noodling Around

I see I haven't been the only one playing around with Electric Quilt lately...

After I finished my Crossed Kayaks quilt, and was pretty happy with it, I got to thinking about other patterns that produce secondary patterns that make for visual complexity in a quilt. I love that effect.

Back when I worked at the quilt shop, back in the days when Electric Quilt was new and very challenging, we would play with it when business was slow, learning how it thought. I practiced drawing blocks from this book

and found this block,

which has all kinds of possibilities. And what do you know, the block was called Wisconsin's Star.

I always thought this was a cool block--one you don't see used in many quilts. Heck, I've never seen it used in any quilt. It's been on my back burner about as long as can be, at least a decade.

It's interesting enough when you color all the blocks the same and play it straight:

But things start to seriously percolate when the color values are flipped:


And the plot thickens further when the a little asymmetry enters the game.


How about a setting with an alternate block?


Ooh, I like that one.

No end of fun. But the trouble with EQ is always that so many possibilities present themselves, I get paralyzed with indecision.

Will I ever make one of these? I'd like to.

Put it in the queue.

Mug Shot

The weatherman told us last night that we'd be getting just an edge of a major storm crossing the midsection of the US this weekend--maybe a couple inches of snow, tops. The forecasts seem to have been changed now, in a Newspeak kind of way, to reflect the much greater snow depths actually laying on the ground. We have about 6 inches here, with up to 3 more predicted by morning. And winter doesn't officially start for another week.

It was a good day to get the Christmas cards out of the way and to work on holiday gifts. And I finished this fellow and his hat today.


I don't know what there is about the humble sock monkey that I like so much. Pictures of them always have a mug shot effect, all the funnier, as this guy's past only involved lying around as two socks in my sewing room for a couple years. For sock monkey inspiration enough for several lifetimes, check this out. And these.

Mr. Kathie is out in the snow, trying to help a neighbor find a lost dog. After our close call with Lucy running off into the night a couple weeks ago, he wanted to do what he could. We know first hand that frightening sense of helplessness. Hope this episode turns out as happily as ours did.

*****

Later: Happy to say that all is well, the neighbor's dog was found. Apparently from the tracks in the snow, he had spent a good deal of time running around in our back yard!

Winter Lights

Every once in awhile a book crosses my desk and I have to drop everything else and drink it all in. Today's distraction was Winter Lights : A Season in Poems and Quilts by Anna Grossnickle Hines.

Our Children's Services diva was planning a holiday-themed Preschool Storytime, and wanted to include other winter celebrations besides Christmas. So her theme, Bright Lights, was perfect for this book, which illustrates many kinds of winter lights, from moonlight and Christmas to the aurora borealis and Hannukah.

I thought the quilts illustrating the book were perfect.

Sorry my photography is so dreadful.

This, below, was my favorite of the whole book. The look and feel of the luminaria is captured so perfectly in the pieced strips that make up the quilt. I could have spent the rest of the day looking at this quilt. Great economy of color usage and of design.


This one was wonderful also.

I came home tonight and poked around a bit on the web and found the author's website, with a wealth of information on the quilts in this book and how they were made. On the homepage, click on the "For Quilters" link on the left. On the "For Quilters" page, scroll down and click on the image of the cover of the Winter Lights book. Prepare to lose yourself for quite some time.

Snow Day!

A great gift--a snow day. The day was beautiful but treacherous, with lots of ice and freezing rain and snow. It was just the temperature where the precip keeps switching back and forth. It was nice to be able to watch it all play out from inside the house.

And to sew!! Three gifts are made. Pretty cute if I do say so myself. Wish I could show them here but alas.

So let's talk about the mail, which has been very exciting over the last week or so.

Mail 1. Remember the Pay It Forward Project? Wherein I promised to send a hand-made gift to three bloggers on the condition that they, in turn, agree to send a hand-made gift to three others? And so on? That would be the project that only one brave person has signed on to?? (So far...)

Anyway, I received my PIF gift from Gerrie.


It's a diaphanous hand-dyed scarf, which I love. Thanks, Gerrie.

I'll be campaigning for my two other Pay It Forward giftees to sign on, once Christmas is over. Anyone who would like to take part, please let me know. Come on, people, it doesn't have to be anything on the scale of a Baltimore Album Quilt... Slightly more modest items would qualify nicely.

Mail 2. I first met Sara Lechner through her Flickr photos and then through her blog, The Fabric of Meditation. She has a wonderful, art-filled home in Austria, and makes dreamy, evocative quilts and other fiber art. And she has an article on needle punch in the latest issue of Quilting Arts. Yay Sara!

Anyway, she showed a charming new mixed-media piece called Family Tree on Flickr one morning a couple weeks ago, and it spoke to me. REALLY spoke to me. I saw that one of the tags on the picture was Etsy. Yes! Family Tree was for sale! I was lucky enough to grab it before anyone else could and it has now arrived here.


Isn't it lovely? I'll be shopping for a frame or shadowbox for this right after Christmas.

Mail 3. I've been a fan of Lazy Gal Quilting for some time. Tonya has a fun free-form way of approaching piecing--and I AM going to get cracking on some of her free-pieced lettering soon. Plus she lives the glamorous life in Paris and posts lots of great photos.

Tonya's been greatly influenced by Gwen Marston and her liberated approach to quiltmaking. I had a couple of Gwen's books but was lacking some of the most important ones, according to Tonya, and I've set to work to remedy that.

A couple weeks ago, she mentioned Liberated String Quilts, which seems to be out of print. And she mentioned that Gwen herself still has copies to sell.

OK, I'll freely admit that I've always been pretty much a sucker for peer pressure. So apparently I need this book. I wrote to Gwen right away and my book arrived today, autographed by the author.



Pretty cool!

Back to work tomorrow, but it's been a great holiday today.

Hustle Bustle

Our family has a long history of action-packed Nativity Scenes. When they were little, one of the kids called it The Activity Scene and that was about it, as baby Jesus was regularly found hanging by his fingertips from the roof or was suffering some other indignity. I've been wanting to do a nativity scene like this


at the library since I saw something similar on Flickr last year. I ordered the basic Playmobil nativity back in July (so as to beat the Christmas rush). Then we added all the little toy character figures kids have lost at the library, and my own personal toys too--like the Nunzilla, the tiny Barbie and Ken, and the wobbly necked St. Gertrude (patroness of crazy cat people). Festive, especially that creature with the maraccas'!



Now we're just waiting for someone to complain. Will it be too religious for them or not enough?

I spent most of Saturday in an unrelenting shopping blitz. Left the house before 9 a.m. and arrived back home at nearly 5. There is no such thing as "running a few quick errands" when you live 40 minutes from the nearest shopping area.

Actually I hit TWO malls quite thoroughly, and a number of other places in between. The timing was good--got out just as the crowds were really beginning to get to me. And before the mall parking lot road rage had spilled over into outright violence. Peace on earth and good will toward everyone!

Is the shopping finished? Unfortunately, probably not quite.

I was able to squeeze in a lunchtime get-together with my son and his girlfriend. That made the day a good one, despite all the other attendant hassles of mall-crawling two weeks before Christmas.

Now I have some gift sewing to do. Can't include photos because it's all Top Secret Stuff, and apparently everyone I know looks in on this blog.

Close Call

Snowy morning here today. Not enough to close schools and LIBRARIES (rats!) but enough to gum things up a bit.

Oh yes. We are into THAT time of year.

Terrible scare Sunday night when I returned home from my weekend trip. As Mr. Kathie was helping me unload and get my gear in the house, Lucy squirted out of the door. She circled around us for a bit and then started running, circling the very huge meadow that is our back yard.

Then she was gone.

We both ran and got flashlights and took off after her. But it was a stormy night, sleeting, snowing, blowing hard. Slow going--the yard was full of the kind of crusty snow where walking is hampered because every footstep breaks through the snow. And worst of all it was pitch dark.

I thought she was a goner.

Happy end to the story--Mr. Kathie caught up with her about an hour later in a neighbor's yard two streets over. Though Lucy didn't know it, she was headed straight for the 55 mile per hour county highway. And there she would REALLY have been a goner.

Tops on the agenda: working on the concept of getting Lucy to pay attention and COME when she's called.

Spargo-ing

Back from Iowa. Absolutely top-notch weekend with friends, taking a much-anticipated class from a much-admired teacher. Absolutely horrendous weather--black ice, snow, sleet, and high winds. My Beetle was plowed in during our class Saturday and had to be dug/pushed out at day's end by some lovable drunks from a nearby tavern. And then there was that drive, amid all that weather, across a very narrow and high bridge across the Mississippi River. White knuckles for sure. And we were staying on the Wisconsin side of the river, so I had to navigate that bridge several times...

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

First of all, Yellow Bird Art. This shop, in Lansing, Iowa, is great fun, with its bright and funky fabrics and its many, many samples, most of which were kitted. Then there are the notions and findings--beads, and threads, and other baubles. Kimono silks, vintage items. On and on. Lots and lots of inspiration. Owner Amy and her staff really know how to get the sewing adrenalin pumping.

They also know how to throw a great weekend, even though they could have done just a tad better with the weather.

The Sue Spargo class was outstanding.

Sue is a lovely British/South African lady whose color sense and design ideas are outsize and crazy-wonderful. African art and motifs inform her designs and it all makes for a colorful, happy-happy melange.

She brought a boatload of samples and I learned so much about the way she works with color and pattern just by studying them.

Oh my gosh, aren't these a delight?

She also brought fabulous threads, beads, hand-dyed velvets, and other embellishments. We were all like kids in the candy store.

I'm quite unskilled in hand applique but Sue's funky and stylized look really spoke to me.

I bought this pattern:

and was just about hyperventilating, thinking about odds and ends in my various stashes--fabric, beads, buttons--and how nicely they'd meld into this bag. So excited!