When the going gets tough...

The tough go quilting.

When life goes sour there are many ways to deal with it. You can go into a funk and rant against fate. You can lash out at others in hope that it will make you feel better. You can ignore the situation and hope it will all just go away.

OR you could go quilting.

Quilting?

That's right. When life gives you lemons make lemonade or others will do it for you.

For example, a friend's mother recently passed away and it hit her hard. Words can only give comfort at the moment. Its those times late at night and in the privacy of your own home when this type of loss becomes most difficult. This is when quilters have a unique type of lemonade.

Enter the comfort quilt.

Comfort quilts are made specifically for those times when you need a little extra something to hang onto, to keep you warm and dry your tears.

In this case the friends made blocks for a quilt with my friend's mother's favorite motif... penguins! Here is what we came up with:

Is this not a wonderful quilt?

We ended up with 15 different blocks (two are on the back). I had the priviledge of putting the top and back togeher, another friend did the quilting and binding and another made and attached an embroidered label. The whole thing is about 90" x 108" - a little bigger than originally planned but I don't think it could have been smaller.

The techniques ran the gamut from traditionally pieced blocks to very detailed paper pieced blocks. Every type of applique is represented and each is unique. I am in awe of all the work put into this project by such a large cast of characters.

The next time life hands you or a friend a body blow consider answering it by making a comfort quilt for yourself or others. Any size will do and you will receive comfort in the making and give comfort in the using or gifting.

BTW - Its tough to get sixteen people in one place at one time and keep it a secret. We gave our friend her quilt at a local Starbucks where some of us meet to knit. About half of us made it. I need to thank Starbucks for putting up wth us and our antics. The staff and other customers were very generous in making sure we had all the space we needed to give and display this special quilt. I hope the rest of the friends get a chance to see this collaboratve quilt in person.

Dress-up Schlep Bag

Last May I was shown a great bag called a Schlep Bag. I made one out of 5" squares of coordinated fabrics and was quite pleased with the results. The pattern I used is referenced here. Recently I was given a challange to make somehing from twenty different home decorating fabrics with at least five of them showing on the public side of whatever was made.

I was given a sample book of fabrics and have been staring at them for several months without any inspiration. Finally I came across a bunch of lovely fabrics in the giveaway pile at the ASG Houston retreat and have substituted them for the original fabrics.

From my new pile of decorating fabrics I have created a new Schlep Bag to be used for carrying around knitting projects in style. Sixteen of the twenty fabrics are on the outside and the final four are used in a little zippered pocket to hold small bits and pieces. The lining is silk dupioni that was originally sold as drapery fabric. I used six inch squares for the exterior and created the interior as you normally would for a tote bag. The base came out to be nine inches squares and the whole bag is about thirteen inches high. I added a pocket on one side of the interior for instruction sheets a small zippered pocket on the other side of the interior for scissors and things.

What do you think?

I did not decide to make a Schlep Bag out of the blue but from an article in one of the quilting magazines I have been getting for the Quilt Guild Fish Pond. It was from the early nineties and used strips of Japanese fabrics for the exterior rather than squares of fabric. The interior was a regular bag and there were little loops along the top for a drawstring handle arrangement. Obviously there is more to discover about this design and I am strangely satisfied to know where this design originated and how clever quilters transformed it into something that can pieced.

Sashiko e-book Cover

I took one of the sashiko experiments and made it into a book cover for my Sony e-book. Although the reader has a very nice leather cover I find that I am not the neatest person and spend a lot of time cleaning various foods off the cover. I guess that's what I get when I eat and read at the same time!

The details are that I used the grey twill sashiko stitch-out, cotton batting as the filler, a cord I made several years ago from leftover embroidery threads and a big, old grey button. The button has peices of 'Crystalette' (pink in reality, white in the photo) on it as an experiment in how this product works. I found it in a sale bin in Canada but it is distributed by Kandi Corp. in Clearwater, Florida. The website can be accessed here. The trim is some old dupioni from a failed project. I left the edges raw, which may have been a mistake as it seems to shed more every time I pick up the book.

This project worked and I think I will add it to my repetoire of things to make with leftovers ... besides zipper pouches and little dog toys.

Have a great weekend!

Bling

Yesterday I was trying to get my bead related stash in some sort of order. It shouldn't have been a big job but I found my various pliers in three different rooms and in the garage. The beads were in a drawer with the buttons, in another drawer with beading needles and in a bin with a couple of beading trays. Something had to give. I gathered all these supplies into one big fabric covered bin and brought a little organization to the chaos... not a lot but enough that I will only have to look in one place for the right supplies.BTW - this bin came in one of the silent auction baskets at the Kingwood Area Quilt Guild Auction in April and is much bigger than it looks - 15" x 7 1/2" x 20". The construction is pretty neat. The side walls are hard cardboard covered with batting and fabric. The whole thing is held together with Velcro at the corners. I wonder if I can replicate this technique the next time I need a fancy container?

While I was feeling down right smug about this activity I realised that I had a lot of hand held electronics that had little naked holders for charms. Not to let this horror continue I then proceeded to play with the beads and made some bling for my cell phone, Nintendo DS and my Sony e-reader. Don't they look less naked now?

I used 3 inch headpins, added beads from the jar of mismatches and then I attached them to these neat little jump ring holders made for cell phone charms. Here is a link to a wholesaler of these neat accessories. They sell them for $0.25 each at retail.

And now a special note from Alex:

Hey there! Me again. I just don't get it. I played with Alice for about six hours today, training her to play fetch with me. Even though she wanted to spend time embroidering stuff on nightshirts for her Dad, I got her out of her chair for some good exercise. Hey, she even got to retrieve the ball from under the dresser three times and the buffet about eight times. That kind of movement is good for the abs right? Now she's hidden the ball and is not letting me sit in her lap while she watches the evening news. You know what I say about all this.........NOT FAIR! Even though she spent most of the night sick and in the porcelain room, she should be thanking me for such a fun day ... definitely not fair.

Did you notice how my fur is almost back to normal? The Babes are loving it!

Techie Toys Part Two

The very first phone I remember us having was a black bakelite thing that sat in a little cubby hole under the stairs. Our phone number was 294 and you had to call the operator to get connected with anyone anywhere. Long distance calling was considerd only for an emergency because it was so expensive. Today I have to dial a 10 digit number to call the house next door. I have five extensions (four of them are wireless) and an answering machine. This is all 'necessary' to stay connected to the rest of the world. For a while I didn't have an answering machine and friends would get ticked off that they couldn't leave messages for me. When did it become necessary to be so connected?

Granted, the technology makes it easy to stay connected and who can resist one base unit with three other phones charging up in other parts of the house. No phone is more than five or six steps away from where I am. Is this why we are all a little more hefty than we have been in the past? My mother used to regale us with stories of drunks calling in the middle of the night for my lawyer father and her tripping over the end of the bed while rushing to pick up the hone in the center of the house. In the same situation today all I have to do is roll over and a phone is right at hand.

The greatest leap forward, at least in my opinion, has been the emergence of the cellular phone. I've had one for at least 15 years. In the beginning you never got charged for calls if you used less than one minute of air time. Paul and all his little buddies were able to make a zillion calls a month without any additional charges by timing their calls just right. The cell phone has also caused a lot of problems for me. At one time I had been out of town and left the phone with Paul. I got back into town and didn't have my house keys. I tried several times to call him from the corner market but he wouldn't pick up because he didn't know who was calling. I ended up asleep on my back deck waiting for him to come home. When did we stop automatically answering the phone? You could blame the telemarketers but I also blame the technology that allows them to reach out and touch us based on our demographics. Some of these calls are so specific to me and my needs I have to shake my head in wonder. The programming is amazing but I don't want any more calls from Bank of America asking me to sign up for their identity theft program - seven calls now and still counting!

Another area of technology that I love is the growth of calender and address book information keepers. The move from a pocket calender to a Filofax to a Personal Digital Assistant(PDA) seems to have occured almost overnight. The pocket calender was from the dentist and came in the mail in December with your cleaning reminder. The Filofax keep your calender and address book on seven hole punched paper so you could re-write pages when your friends moved for the fifth time in as many years and you could keep whole years of appointments in storage... just in case you needed them. The move to the PDA definitely met my technology love factor. It not only kept about 300 numbers and addresses and twelve years of appointments but I could also play video games on it. I kept so much on mine that I needed a memory card to hold the overflow. The only down side was that I couldn't doodle in the margins when I was in boring meetings. I guess there is still a need for pen and paper.

Yesterday my cell phone and PDA loves came together when I bought a new cell phone. My old phone was completely battered from being dropped on the concrete driveway so many times that there were whole chunks missing off it. I went to the Sprint store and found a flashy red number that was also a PDA by Palm. I am now in hog heaven. I can keep my calender on my laptop and on my phone. Ask me if I am busy on a particular day and I can now whip out my phone to check rather than searching for my calender. All 300 phone numbers are in both places and I have even begun adding mailing addresses to the laptop version. I just better keep the laptop backed up more frequently so I don't lose all this data.

Although this phone will also connect me to the internet to watch TV, read e-mail and cruise the internet, I don't think I want to do any of those things on a two inch screen. I now have my two favroite techie toys in one flashy red fashion accessory. All I need to do now is construct a carrier for it so it won't get as battered as the phone I replaced. My new high tech toy in a hand sewn pouch - .. there's something poetic about that.

Techie Toys Part One

I must admit it ... I love technology toys. Computers have always fascinated me even though I have not always been successful with them. My very first program code back in the dark ages was written in Cobol on IBM punch cards and resulted in 800 pages of error messages. As 800 pages was the maximum all the nerdy TAs had a good laugh at my expense. A couple of years later, at a summer job, the company decided that it would switch from punch cards to direct input to their mainframe. I was one of the testers and managed to kill all of the data entered since the project began one afternoon while trying to do an end run around an error code. As I said, I love this stuff but I can be the kiss of death when it comes to hands on work.

The first PC that I had at work had two drives for floppy disks - A and B. I don't think anyone but dinosaurs like me remember why you had a B drive. (It was for data while A was for programs)
My boss hated the fact that I spent most of my day on a shared PC down the hall from my office so I became the first person in our finance department to have one on her desk. On the home front my husband at the time was also fascinated by the emergence of the personal computer. We actually bought and built a Timex Sinclair and I taught some bats to fly and a turtle to crawl around the page. Anyone else remember the Turtle to teach children how to program???

The next big leap was moving from floppy drives to a hard drive. WOWSER BATMAN - It couldn't store any data but it could store programs. I think its total capacity was about 10MEG... about 1/100th of what I have on my little laptop today. The first portables we had were Compaq Portables that we all called luggable because they weighed about 50 pounds. On the home front we bought an IBM with a keyboard that you had to push a button to use the key pad. I remember using it one evening to do some data entry for a bunch of spread sheets and my husband sitting there mesmerized as I ponded away with both hands ... one to type in the numbers and hit enter, the other to activate and deactivate the key pad.

It was at about this time in the early 90's that my reputation as the kiss of death for any operating system came out of the closet. I had the computer techs running around like mad trying to unfreeze my system on a daily basis. At one point I even had my own tape backup system that I ran every day before leaving so that we could always recover the previous day's work if I accidently hit the 'format all' keys in Excel. This was also when I got a new system every couple of years. I would take the old one home, bring back the one I had and use the new one in the office. Laptops, wireless networks, high definition graphics, e-mail, instant messaging and gigantic storage devices have all made our lives so much more interesting.

I really can't mess up this laptop as I can always recover to an earlier configuration almost automatically. I used to load all my own software and do all my own configuration. Now I have no idea what's on this thing. This is a tablet PC and I can draw pictures and hand write text if I so desire ... unfortunately I don't desire to do that as often as I thought I would so this feature remains abandoned and unused most of the time. Although it is less than two years old is too underpowered for Vista, which may not be a bad thing considering all the bad press Vista has been getting.

Where am I going with all this? This is a preamble to a post, maybe several, that I am going to do on some of the techie toys I have acquired in the past year or so. I hope this has given you a flavor of how much I love this stuff.

If you would like to check out some of the early pieces of technoloy I have used, see this site. To see my current laptop check out Gateway for their newest version.