Between the Sprit and the Dust: Love Letters to Strangers, Part 2

...being a second annual contribution, however humble, to a more crinkly, quilt-comforted world.

The world will give you that once in awhile, a brief timeout; the boxing bell rings and you go to your corner, where somebody dabs mercy on your beat-up life.

SUE MONK KIDD, The Secret Life of Bees

Greetings, fellow travelers, and lemme tell you this: on the list of quilts I am making IN MY HEAD (both the list, and the quilts) there are about 50 people who are due for some quilty-blog-love-letters and I have such grand ideas for you all!... but instead I make scrap quilts and give them to strangers, because they are patterns I wanted to try or color combos that seemed interesting or opportunistic usages of leftovers, but are not *just right* for my listees. So just know that if you're reading this there's a better than even chance you are ON the LIST (unless I made you one already, and then you are on the SECOND list, which is for when the first list is done) and I probably also have a Pinterest page devoted to you, which is probably like 500 quilts deep.  It's the thought that counts? (No, really, it's my life's mission to do this, and so it will get done. Eventually.)

Scrappy Brights Race Quilt

I do hope, however, that these 5 orphaned quilts are just right for someone, as they are going to Mercyful Quilts, run by the kind-hearted Bernie at Needle & Foot.  Mercyful Quilts gives quilts to folks who are dying in Mercy Hospital, Sacramento CA, and is one of the recipients of the Hands2Help quilt drive run by Sarah at Confessions of a Fabric Addict every year.  This mission of providing a little down-home comfort to terminal cases in the hospital struck a chord with me, because my mom was in the hospital when she died, some 13 (!) years back now, and it was just as clinical and depressing as you might expect; whereas my dad was at home, in hospice, on a sea of morphine, and that seemed like a considerably more preferable way to go.

Blue & White stripe 2 color quilt, "Chill"

One of the things I remember clearly about my folks dying was exactly how surreal and clock-stopping it was.  How disorienting and sad and scary, even for my sibs and me as fully adult people, to suddenly be in a world where we simply didn't have parents anymore - no matter how old you are or how prepared you think you are, it seems, this is still a mighty blow.  And sort of impossible and silly, too, like maybe they're just punking us and have really just boarded a plane to Vegas to get away from their damn kids for awhile?  As Bean wisely noted, after her mom passed, "It is absurd to me - ABSURD - that my mother will never meet my children."  Because it doesn't seem like that should even be a possibility, yet here we are.

In my dad's case, there was this exceptional hospice nurse lady - I forget her name, sadly, because she was a rock-like, clear-eyed Charon to Dad in his weeks before passing, and a wise counselor to us left behind, in our time of confusion and grief.  And I thought how amazing a gift it was, to be able to escort so many people to the very brink of the unknown with such utter sangfroid and tact and sensitivity, without ever losing yourself in the drama and sadness of it.  So hats off to you, good lady, whoever you were.  You appeared when we needed you and you gave us exactly what we needed, and left us grateful and less at sea, and that is more than can be said for most occupations (ahem, looking at you, plumbers and auto mechanics.)

Scrappy Neutral Strip Diamonds

Anyway, this morbid trip down memory lane, prompted in part by Keanu Reeves' touching surprise answer on Colbert awhile back to the "where do we go when we die?" question, was the impetus for donating to Mercyful Quilts this year, in hopes of providing help to those nurses who are right there on the brink with the dying and their families, who try to bring a little color and softness to what may otherwise be a relatively sterile, unforgiving environment of hospital palliative care.  And if a bereaved person wants the quilt when it is all over, they can take it home as a treasured memory.... or, in my case, they have carte blanche, if it helps, to ritually set the quilts on fire or cut them to ribbons in anger and sadness and wishing to never see it again, as emblematic of what may have been one of the saddest points of their lives.  Hey man: whatever gets you through, I back it 100%.

Scrappy 9-Patches

So: five quilts to Mercyful, one for each of my siblings and me, to honor those who honor the dying.  And for every other orphan, of any age, and to the nameless woman who held our collective hand and calmly helped with funeral arrangements and kicked off the healing reminiscences when we were still awkwardly trying to maintain our best oh-shit-we-have-company small talk; and to the nurses and caregivers of Mercy Hospital, and everywhere sad, scared people look around hopefully for someone else to be the expert at dying when clearly no one has much personal experience in the matter:  I salute you.  It can't be easy being on those particular front lines every day, but many of the rest of us, more sheltered from that final inevitability, appreciate the sensible, stolid escort, whether we are the one getting on the plane, or the ones waving goodbye, sadly, from the ground.

Rainbow Colorwash Quarter-Square Triangles and 4-Patches

May we all know a little peace before dying.

Gratefully,

Astrid

Alhambra Stars and the Slippery Slope of Perfectionism

...being a *really* long time in the making, because I kept having to fix prior decisions.

A year and a half ago my office had a silent auction for a charity fundraiser. I wasn’t in the office at the time, but I thought aha! I have a skill I can contribute here. So I entered “custom quilt, within one year…” as an auction item, knowing that my travel schedule was always going to be an impediment, but figuring that at least any potential bidders from work would understand that, and be cool with it.  (And shout out to one of our finance folks for pinging me during the day of the auction to keep me abreast of the exciting bidding war that was taking place, since I wasn't there to witness it.)

Thankfully, the auction winner, V, has been EXTREMELY patient with my itinerant lifestyle, even though I blew through the 1-year mark and then dawdled another 6 months (well, okay, for part of that I was not in the same country as my sewing machine, in all fairness).  And she had some great ideas for the pattern she was interested in, which were the Golden Ratio primarily and secondarily a vacation she took to the Alhambra... and voila! Let me announce, in what appears to be a trend of having one annual post, that A Star Is Born:

the stars are sewed / i've sent what's owed / (clap clap clap clap) / and now i'm back in Texas

In the end, even though I was mostly lurching from crisis to crisis trying to fix errors in judgement from the preceding step, the final product was.... nice.  I was proud of it, and I never want to see it again because it was so exasperating (aaaaand now I know how my parents probably felt about me during my high school years.)

And that's about the end of the story, unless you want to know the process, in which case... read on, pilgrim!

Just the facts, ma'am: 

• This is applique - I ironed WonderUnder onto chunks of fabric like I did for El Jefe’sFlag (the fabric here was 5 colors of Grunge), cut out the shapes from templates I created with craft plastic, and working outward from the small inner 8-point stars, centered the pattern on big dark navy squares, ironing on the orange/yellow stars and the (more faded blue) 5-point stars.
• At that point I sewed together my big navy squares on point, added setting triangles, and then ironed on the brighter blue 6-point stars (because those actually go across squares in the pattern, and are geometrically equal on either side of the seam).  
• Then I outlined all of the stars with 1/4" black fusible bias tape, which was ironed on, and then sewed on with a double stitch (alas, since I don't have a double needle on my Juki, that just meant I had to sew all of the bias tape twice.) This hid the raw edge on the star appliques, but it also made the for kind of a dense, heavy quilt - it started to feel a lot like jeans, what with the doubled fabric and the double-stitched tape on every "seam".  
• I only stitched the bias tape through the top layer/flimsy - then I made the quilt sandwich, and THEN I stitched each star itself in a matching thread to hold it in place through all layers, did one inside stitch-line around each navy negative space shape, and stippled the outside edge.
• I also for the first time included a contrasting flange on the binding. Go me!
• The back was a pieced-together piece of lighter blue double-gauze, my very favorite backing to use, for the snuggle factor.  And I even remembered to make the nap on the different pieces go in the same direction this time. 
• The binding was just slightly darker solid navy.  I figured the pattern was busy enough, so I didn't want to muck things up too much with the fabric.
• It was around 84x62 before washing, and shrunk down to just under 80x60 afterwards.
• I still can't take pictures worth a damn.

Stippled edges, flanged binding

The back, about halfway through outlining the stars

Once More, This Time With All the Angst I Went Through For No Reason: The star-tile-pattern on the left came from V, from her "Golden Mean Coloring Book," by Rafael Araujo, (which was a Kickstarter project! Very cool) as a possibility when we were discussing what she might like.  And the one on the right came from, uh, Pinterest, somewhere… and was promising because it can be divided into repeating squares that would enable me to create one template and use it as many times as I needed to get to the right size.  (You can see the dashed lines that divide this into squares if you blow it up: the 8-pointed star is the middle of the square.)

Pattern that V provided as an option...(Rafael Araujo)

Pattern I thought I could do.

For a color scheme, V gave me two different sets that both sounded cool: mostly green with purple or orange or yellow accents, or mostly blue with yellow or deep orange.  I opted for the latter... mostly because I have more blue fabric lying around, but also because it matched with my mental image of the Alhambra tile work (whether that's actually true, I dunno. I've never been there!) . Here are some color inspirations I had in mind:

stars

stars

and more stars

I also wanted to replicate the worn quality of the tiles, hence: Grunge fabrics.

If you take the pattern I settled on and blow it up at the FedEx Kinko's store, then you get a big ol' block for making templates that looks like this:

You can see here how the blocks in the above design repeat. I set mine on point.

I did try a variety of fabric combos, including the one with spots which was just a scrap test-block anyway, but definitely reinforced my decision to NOT go with patterned fabrics: 

An attempt at piecing the stars came first, as did this lurid spotty background fabric.

as usual 

the color selection

STRESSED ME OUT

Initially I thought I'd be able to make templates for hand-piecing, but when I tried that I realized I am a SHITTY HAND-PIECER.  The sharp angles of the star points resulted in irritating little tucks in the star-arm inside angles (the starmpits?) which I tried to fix and never could. Next!

Final colors selected....on to shitty hand-piecing!

The templates had promise, though. So instead of cutting out pieces to sew them back into squares, I just cut out squares, and then cut out star-parts to iron on top of them.

Step 1: find the center of the square. Step 2: center a star on your square. Steps 3 through infinity: Iron, iron, iron.

Below is 7 squares laid out. The top one needs its light blue corner 5-point stars. The one with the bright teal half-six-point-stars on the edges is the one I hand-pieced, but for the rest I waited until the big navy squares were sewn together and then ironed those brighter stars across the squares' seams.  Easy peasy!

Here the brighter teal blue stars are just lying on the top, where they will shortly be ironed into submission place.

I AM IRON MAN

Next up: how to make sure those suckers stayed down, and also was this pattern enough? The stars seemed ill-defined, like they needed the grout of the original tile work to help delineate where they were. I fretted. Eventually it seemed I could tidy up my raw edges, keep my stars aligned (ha!), and add a grout-like design element with some 1/4" bias tape, made all the more user-friendly by the good folks at Clover who have a fusible version (thanks, Clover!)

Cut the bias tape at a 45ish degree, and then attempt to match that angle for the piece on the other side (with mixed results.)

Starting to look kind of stained-glassy

Well duh, Astrid - you're still going to have to sew down the fusible bias tape, so it's not like you're getting out of any work by covering your raw edges this way.  AND, in the cases where the star points did not quite meet, and the tape didn't quite cover the edges, you experience slightly curled star points or edges anyway. Solution: sew EVERYTHING down REPEATEDLY so no one was going anywhere, ever.  And then stipple the ever-loving snot out of the edges, just to prove the point. TRY CURLING NOW, BEYOTCH.

In the end, it wasn't even that hard to do, but as I might have guessed, the figuring out things part,and going down wrong paths part, and the second-guessing myself endlessly part, and the wandering around for work part, got in the way of my deadline.  And I'm not really sure this is a quilt... or, at least, it's not patchwork since almost nothing is sewn together, just on top of one another.

But all's well that ends well. I have shipped it off to V (to the office - I had a moment of panic during which I thought "I haven't emailed her in awhile about this - I hope she still works here!")  I have several new techniques under my belt, and also like 7 extra spools of fusible 1/4" bias tape, and a new appreciation for Islamic geometry, and so I will count it as a success, even if it did take me 1.5 years to get here.

And maybe this year, I'll get more than one thing done.

Besos!

Astrid

(Linking up with Confession of a Scrap Addict's Friday Whoop Whoop)

Ups & Downs & Half & Half for Little Lambs & Quilty Hugs (Respectively)

... being my first contributions to Hands2Help, and a celebration of quilty community.

As was perhaps inevitable, I've been haunting the quilty blogs and inching my way into saying hello to the long-timers in that crowd: and also routinely being amazed and a little shamed by the volume of output these folks whip through.  I can't conceive, at this point in my life, of having so much time to devote to quilting but I now know what I'm aspiring to for retirement.  Long after I have made quilts for all of my friends and family, and have started in on Round 2, I hope to be retired.  OH but also contributing regularly to the many quilt-providing drives and organizations: whether for refugees or foster kids; cancer sufferers or those displaced by fire or flood; women's shelters or veteran's outreach; homeless centers or centers for the elderly - anywhere someone needs a hand or a hug, some big-hearted sewists are on the case, making sure the quilty community's love of the craft (and the fabric) is being translated into a truly staggering outpouring of goodwill.

Which is where Hands2Help comes in.  This mind-bending effort by Sarah of Confessions of a Fabric Addict has drawn a bigger response each year over year since she started in 2011; this popularity adds days if not weeks to her administrative load, I'm sure, but also adds literally hundreds of quilts every year to the general quilt population worldwide.  More importantly, of course, these offerings arrive with the humanitarian impulse sewn right in.  They say: "I see you, I think I understand a little of what you're experiencing, and I hope this helps you through.  How about a hug?"

Sarah picked 3 organizations for H2H to contribute to this year:

• Little Lambs of Utah - comfort kits for kids going into foster care, emergency shelter or who have been hospitalized.

• Quilty Hugs for Happy Chemo! - I guess that's pretty self-explanatory.  Another blogger, Em of Em's Scrapbag, collects these quilts to distribute to folks going through chemo.

• Victoria's Quilts Canada - for folks living with cancer in Canada, Linda (and friends, I hope) turn your quilt tops into full-blown quilts.

...but Sarah also made it clear that if you had an organization close to your heart (or your physical self) you could always make quilts for them instead, and it would still add to the overall bounty of H2H.  Very cool!  Being home for work for a change, and having access to my fabric and scrap pile (albeit tucked away in storage), I wanted to add a little bit of love to the pile.  So:

This one is going to Little Lambs (and hopefully it's not too big for a backpack, per instructions). I was trying to come up with something that maybe an older kid/teen would dig, because I feel like sometimes that age group gets short shrift, so hopefully this isn't too precious or young.  My sis-in-law gave me a brief glimpse into the life of a foster kid through her volunteer work and... it's brutal.  Hats off to these folks for giving a shit about these youngsters, whom the System seems to routinely forget. 

I call it Ups and Downs, for obvious reasons.  Seems apt.  I followed a pattern by Angela Walters, w/Kona Beige and scraps.

Excuse my thumb over there. Some spots, some crosses, and some swirly waves on the back.

Ugh, my first attempt at machine binding.  I'm..... sure I'll get better eventually.

And this Half-and-Half quilt, a pattern by Missouri Star Quilt Company, is off to Em for Quilty Hugs.  Er.  It will be.  As soon as I'm doing quilting it and bind it.  Which I'll do as soon as my replacement thread shows up in the mail, because I thought I had several spools of this Green Linen thread but turns out I had ONE of those, and a whole lotta Ecru I didn't want to use.  I mean, from a distance, it was *very* close.  Ecrulinen.  Linecru.  Like that close.  And my local Joann's utterly failed me by not having it in stock when I made an emergency run.

Made from some Kona... Old Green? maybe? yardage, and like 18 ten inch scraps squares of various sunny brights. 

A strip of hot pink among some other springy greens. They don't exactly go with the front green, but they are at least different enough that it is evident I wasn't *TRYING* to match anything.

The stalled quilting effort. Ha! Didn't get too far.  As I learned in B-school, if you fail to plan, you plan to fail.  Stupid Ecru.

This weather has been crap.  I took these in late afternoon after like 5 consecutive days of downpour, so the shadows are long, and the patience was short.

But I vow to get this done this week - I've taken Friday off for this expressed purpose, and I shall not be diverted from my task: nor rain, nor Joann's, nor Ecru, nor dark of night, shall stay this courier from the swift completion of my appointed rounds.  That is to say: check's in the mail!

I regret not getting something together for Victoria's Quilts too, but I can always send it along later, I guess, and at minimum I can make them something for next year.  I just ran out of days (and yet, retirement seems to be receding on the horizon, so I guess ol' Albert was right about that whole time being relative thing.)

To Sarah, and Em, and Linda; to all the quilters who have linked up this week, or sent quilts over the last 8 years:  hell yeah and well done, you all! (or "youse", as we say in Chicago.)  I hope that in my future - my near future, even before retirement - I am able to keep up with your generous spirit, dedication, and time management chops.  Or if I can't keep up, at least I can keep trying.

Besos, 

Astrid

The Architect and the Water-Melan: Some Adventures

...Make new friends, but keep the old; one is silver-tongued and the other, comedy gold.

In a flurry of productivity over the holidays, I finished up a few things that had been WIPs for a bit - among them this here blue-and-white hourglass dealio, which has gone to my ol' college chum, Loquacious_E, and his fabulous ladyfriend Melaquious Trombone (a favorite of her many, many Facebook nommes de plume):

Some shirting type materials + white, different hues of blues with the odd light brown thrown in.

I met Loquacious_E on campus as he was returning from a stint in Australia lo these 2.5 decades past, and I mostly remember two things: first, his anomalous blond dreadlocks (well, baby-locs, at least) and savage tan; and second, how he just appeared one day on the quad to his friends' aggrieved joy that he was back, but hadn't told anyone (this, clearly, in the Time Before Facebook).  He seemed the sort to keep his own counsel, but it was also pretty apparent that there wasn't much happening that wasn't being captured and analyzed somewhere in that big computer he uses for brains.  

Eventually I recognized a punny-tongued kindred spirit, an amused realist with a trenchant wit as dry as the Outback.  He was one of my four dude roomies in a college house that went by the deceptively bland name of "The Clark House" (for the street) but that house, though I only technically lived there for a semester, figures at least as prominently as any other campus character in my stories from that era. Apart from the open sewage drain in the basement floor (which did not seem to bother the bands that played there) and the crumbling ceiling tiles out of which may drop, for instance, an actual goddamn mouse, this house was situated strategically between where everyone else lived and the bars where we all drank and went to see rock shows, so it was routinely pressed into service as a way-station, or location of the after-party, or emergency quarters for any too "tired" to make it home (and/or too drunk to be afraid of sleeping on the couch, which was... not very clean.)  And at any given event one might find Loquacious_E holding up a wall somewhere, eyes shut and giggling in characteristic glee, and making wry observations at the absurdity of it all.  Certainly I saw him doing this way more than I saw him doing any schoolwork, which minor irritation apparently wasn't worth bothering to do if you have the sort of brain that E has.

Brain not pictured.  He's already thought of 10 replies to the stupid comment you haven't finished making.
Best Portrait Ever, from Champaign by Go Pellegrinetti, circa 2008 I think?

Anyhoo, E absented himself from the midwest after college to soak in the glory that was mid-90s Austin, TX, along with several others of our crowd - I swear for a good 10 years there I was never in want of a couch (cleaner than those of the Clark House) to crash on in Austin.  But as E returned in the early oughts to the midwest to go to school for another approximately 30 years to finish off an Engineering/Arcitectural combo platter, and as he has now purchased a 2 flat with his ladyfriend, I think we can call him local once more.  And that Architecture degree is going to serve me well someday too, when I scrape together the cash to hire E to design me my tiny cabin on the grounds of Mikuador, amidst the vegetal splendour of the SW Wisconsin driftless area.  (Amusingly, E offered to thank me for this quilt by helping the next time I needed butter churned or a barn raised - little does he know that this latter thing is EXACTLY what I will be asking for, down the road; at least, one raised on blueprints that can satisfy Richland County building codes.  Mwahahaha!)

Here is Loquacious_E, at left, cracking up me and another roomie from the Clark House, Murphy, in
the Logan Square kitchen of friend Ellen.  I am in danger of spilling whosever's leftovers those are, which I surely poached.  Was this the one where Ellen later injured her back trying to dance to "All The Single Ladies"? Picture by Krystal.

And at some point after his homecoming - I'ma wanna say maybe a little over 10-11 years ago now? - he located his petite amie Melaquious (who had also lived some time in New Zealand, so they could maybe compare notes on Australasiatic accents and foods)  and brought her into the fold, to the great benefit of us all, and to the ten-fold increase in the fart-smell-related-humor one might experience at any given cocktail party.  Sometimes your friends find a mate/spouse/partner who is always just their mate/spouse/partner, and that's cool - we don't all gotta be having sleepovers and shit - but Mel has become a friend in her own right, too.  For instance, I can't recall how many times I've asked her to explain her remarkable talent for getting free airline miles, which is like some sort of superpower; or made her promise to teach me how to properly lay tile, a trade she picked up in New Zealand.  It's also possible I've seen more of Mel than of Eric in recent past years - it was indeed the same Mel who came to visit me in Cape Town, the origin of this very blog, and also the origin of this extremely great picture that I cherish in my heart always, of Mel being forcibly ejected from our white-water raft somewhere outside of Livingstone, on the Zambezi River:

Mel in full extension. My god I love this picture. I will never not love this picture.

This is the event that inspired our river guide to call her "Water-Melan" for the rest of our trip.  Also, ask Mel to dance for you sometime.  It is incredible.  Cape Town will not soon recover from those particular stylings, and that was 7 years ago.

So, bound by their mutual love of travel, organic vegetable gardening, extraordinarily fat felines (RIP, Nastee - we hardly knew ye), and a keen sense of the ridiculousness of things, Loquacious_E and Melaquious form a dynamic duo who are instrumental to my greater social life back home - which is true even though I may only see them a couple times a year these days. (Which gives you a pretty good indication of what my social life is like, but that's certainly nobody's fault but my own.) One such event was the wedding of B & S  two years back - a wedding Mel both precipitated, by introducing the happy couple, and officiated, with all of the pomp and dignity one might expect from a mail-order minister with a hot line in bathroom humor.  (It was lovely, actually.  I was teary.) 

Side note: E and M also went to the Dalmatian coast and environs this past Labor Day, and damn me, I really should have gone with them: first, because that would have been fun, and cool to see, and second, because Mel is an excellent person to travel with, because she always has plans and ideas (which I tend not to have.)   AND she takes excellent pictures, to boot, such that you may not have to worry about taking substandard crappy ones with your shitty phone, because hers will be better anyway.  You can see proof of this in the afore-linked blog posts from Africa: if it's detailed and interestingly composed, that's Mel, and if it's grainy and possibly has a thumb in it, that's me.  Here's one she took of me as we safari'd, which is one of maybe three pictures of myself I actually like:

I don't have plans to make a musical record album or write a book, but if I did, this picture would be on it.

Thus, this quilt is for many things, even beyond taking a good picture of me or making me laugh for 20+  years: for shooting the breeze on a hot July night waiting for renegade fireworks to begin, surrounded by Mel's lush backyard jungle of a garden and her outdoor bathtub; or hogging the whole al fresco dining portion of old neighborhood haunts, from just before to well after happy hour; or driving across three countries in search of springbok carpaccio; or sitting on the Clark House porch, vaguely queasy from a night of music and beer, waiting for everyone to wake up so we could go eat at Fiesta and get back for a nap, back in the day.  

And among these, there is also that one time that I plant-and-cat-sat for them while they were gone for Christmas - Japan, I think? or was it Turkey that year?  - in 2010, which seems to be an odd thing to be grateful for, but which engagement came a critical juncture when I was stranded in Louisiana at sister Lulu's, recovering from unemployment, relative homelessness, and exploding appendix surgery, and desperately trying to return to my home base.  It was the combined efforts of many of my comrades, most chronicled here by now, that got me home; and it was staying chez E&M that got me that first foothold back in the locale and the life I was hankering for.  So a hearty mwah! and an egregious bear-hug to you both, essentially for leaving town right when I needed you to, so I could park my kiester on your couch and get my bearings in the company of your portly kitty and your large vinyl collection, and drink all of your herbal tea (I had a cold.)

I went pretty simple on this here quilt - when I asked Mel some months ago what a good quilty thing might be for them, she voiced "blue" and "modern" over traditional and other colors.  Though the hourglass pattern I used is anything but modern.  That sucker has been around since at least the 18th century as a quilt block, let alone the centuries prior as a regular old decorative motif favored by aboriginal peoples - cultures who never actually saw an hourglass in the flesh. I mean, triangles aren't exactly the intellectual property of any particular era.  

closer up on some hourglass blocks - not too tricky.  

While there are as many definitions of "modern quilting" as there are actual quilters, some consensus seems to have been reached about the "modernization" of traditional patterns being part of the trend - spiffing up the colors a bit, making the pattern outsized or deconstructed someway, to put a new spin on an old beast.  Simplification is also part of that overall aesthetic.  True modern quilters would probably poo-pooh this as an example of the art, though.  Whatever my modern intentions, E&M's blue and white hourglasses really call to mind something breezy and nautical, more than screaming MODERN (but really, who wants a quilt that screams at you?)  

I AM NOT SCREAMING YOU ARE SCREAMING

For the back, just a big old swath of more stripedy blue and white, which fabric came from the Stash of the Unknown Benefactress, and a skinny band of chambray at the top (or bottom, depending) because as usual, I was just short - and sometimes it's nice to break up an unrelieved expanse of one fabric anyway. Daringly, I made the stripes go horizontally across the width of the quilt, rather than the more traditional vertical stripes you might expect.  I KNOW.  I'M A RENEGADE. I liked the skinny stripes - they made me think of old school ticking, but not quite as Gramma's Featherbed as all that.

Just bashin' the status quo, that's me

And the quilting was a quarter inch to either side of the seam lines on the diagonals, making the back all diamonds, toute suite and easy peasy.  I have not had the energy to dive back into free-motion quilting on this machine; that feels more like pursuing an artform, whereas I just want to play with fabric and make geometric patterns out of different colors as a hobby.  Someday maybe I'll have the attention span to put into decorative quilting, but for now, peeps be getting straight(ish) lines and grids up the wazoo.

Diamonds are a quilter's best friend

And there you have it, my fine favored friends - a wee binkie for your lovely home, where I may yet need a couch to crash on, and will always need a beer to drink and some breezes to shoot.  No matter where you may roam, you should be prepared to find me sleeping on your porch or possibly in your outside bathtub (weather permitting).  And next time you cook up a travelin' plan, keep me posted.  Even if I can't go with you, I will still definitely want to hear all about the absurdities of the trip, since experiencing things through the prism of your particular worldviews is the next best thing to being there; and in some cases, way better.

See you soon, don't go changin', and save me a seat on the patio.

Lookit you, you starry-eyed wastrels.  photo by Craig DeA.  

Love! and Besos,

Astrid.