The Process Pledge

Time spent on Google Reader always pays off. No, no, it's not wasting time. Not at all.

I was eating at my desk with one hand and web surfing with the other. I hopscotched through several quilt blogs, ending up at Rossie, founder of Fresh Modern Quilts at Flickr, finding a wonderful manifesto on process and purpose.

I have made a process pledge. The goal of the process pledge is to create a new sensibility in quilting blogs where we don’t just show finishes or occasionally confess about our moments of indecision, but chat openly and often about our works in progress, our inspirations, and our moments of decision. I know that many of us are already posting about our thinking on quilts and the processes involved from start to finish, let's do more! And let's post about quilts as we work on them. I want to see more half-done quilts, not just the finished thing with a journal entry about the process.

I have always shown a fair amount of process here, but sometimes have felt inadequate and frustrated, because what with a full-time job and all, I don't get things completed so fast. Process can be a long and drawn-out affair in my sewing room.

But that's OK. And really, 'finished' isn't the whole story of any quilt or other project. Sometimes we have to cover some miles to get there and that can be important and instructive. Process is good and I'm going to try to get more of it down here.

New Life

We planted a baby oak tree today to replace the grandfather oak lost in the tornado. It won't grow huge in our lifetimes but it's an investment in the future and in our confidence that someday it will be massive and sheltering for some other family.

And as long as the tree guys were coming, they brought several more red maples for the back yard.


As with the oaks, it's going to take awhile, but even a little more fall color will make me happy and remind me of the flaming hillsides back home in northwest Pennsylvania. I don't care what New Englanders say about their home turf, the Allegheny Mountains of Pennsylvania have the best fall color anywhere.

And so it goes...

Another new beginning of a quilt variety:


I think we've pretty well established that I'm an acolyte of Bonnie Hunter, and of her super ideas for dealing with scraps. And so, here is another scrap quilt underway. This one is her braid with cornerstones. There's lots of sewing yet to do in this quilt, but this will be one to peck away at on sewing evenings with friends and at quilt retreats. And maybe even on my own.

I really like these scrappy projects--they use up bits of fabric I've collected and they make me feel virtuous, making something from nothing. Well, about five drawers worth of nothing...

It's also just so much fun to see the strange bedfellows marching next to each other in the braids.


The dogs-behind-the-Chinese-restaurant fabric sits next to a bright basketweave, which is next to my all-time favorite Smithsonian repro (From the Rising Sun line--it came in four colors, you know, and I still have some of all four). Then there's one of those pesky fruit fabrics I'm STILL trying to get rid of, and then ...sliced green peppers. Who says they can't all play nicely together??

Even the lights make for some wacky combos.


I think I'm going to be pretty happy with this one, and I'll post my progress, no matter how slow it may be.

I'm usually not a matchy-matchy person. I don't like the idea of someone else choosing my palette, so I'm not much for the idea of working with a single line of fabric in a single project.

It's good to have ideals and policies and to stick with them, but there's also a time to break your own rules. And I get to say when that time is for me.

When I first saw the French General Rouenneries line last fall, I was pretty much enthralled. Loved the look and loved the palette. I loved it all so much I couldn't wait for the yardage to hit the stores; I bought myself a layercake packet of samples from the line.

This is just so unlike me.

I ended up chopping the layercake into fourths.


I didn't want a quilt entirely made from plain squares, so I bought a bit of Rouenneries yardage, once it was available, for a subtle alternate block to throw in every here and there.



I found a complimentary brown for sashing and used one of the Rouenneries solids for cornerstones. The border is another of the Rouenneries fabrics--why be inconsistent now?



Voila--one Rouenneries quilt top, all ready for quilting. Not a groundbreaker as quilts go, but I think the tones and prints are just lovely.

Still, don't look for me to go the matchy-matchy route again anytime soon.

It's been a busy and expensive summer. Our brush with the tornado brought with it a fair amount of uproar, none of which was covered under any insurance whatsoever. Of course, our expenses and inconvenience are NOTHING when compared to the folks around here who are out of their homes for months and months to come, and are just beginning to haggle with contractors and insurance companies, etc. But our own little uproar has kept us busy.

Mr. Kathie decided this was the time to invest in a shiny new chainsaw, and he has been pecking away at chopping up the big oak tree.


Lucky him--being retired, his work schedule is governed by when the weather is cool. Looks like we'll be well-supplied with firewood for this coming winter.


Next week, we'll have a few new trees planted--an oak to replace the big one we lost, and several red maples for the back yard. Meanwhile, the view of our front yard is much changed. Next to the spindly little mulberry tree in the foreground there used to be a huge oak. And may again be some day, albeit not in my lifetime.


Some friends and I have begun meeting to sew every other week and this is just about all the sewing I've done since the Mineral Point retreat in May. There is a quilt top nearly finished and I'll get it photographed once it's done.

One new accomplishment is knitting socks on two circular needles. Yay! A friend offered to teach me how to do this, but the teaching amounted to "cast on the stitches, split them between two circular needles, and you'll figure it out."

It wasn't quite as easy as that. I got totally confused about knitting the foot gusset in May, while visiting my daughter in Washington, D.C. After a frantic email exchange, the intrepid Jenny from Knitch sent elegantly concise instructions, and the rest of the sock was a piece of cake. I owe her a large quantity of chocolate.



This sock is also one of my first departures from the plain ribbed sock. I like ribbed socks; they FIT, and that's key. But they get a bit boring.


This is still a rib, and so has some stretch--it's K2P2 for several rows, then a row with a twist stitch, then several rows of P2K2.


After a couple repeats, I discarded the row counter and the sock became Mindless. This pattern is in my go-to sock book Sensational Knitted Socks by Charlene Schurch, and I will definitely knit it again.

Sock #2 is already cast on and on its way.