Grace Under Fire: A Quilt for a Comrade Going Through It

 ....being a master class in handling bad news, and a love letter to another work colleague but not THAT kind of love letter, please don't call HR.

I've mentioned the crowd I've worked with at a past client when I wrote about Ronnie, my non-boss boss; and how there is a tendency to seek out the teams that we know work well together, and try to rebuild those high-functioning (or at least highly fun) teams, especially when times/clients are tough.  Avengers assemble, if you will.

image stolen from internet

So it comes as no great shock that when one of our cohort - in this case, data strategy wizard (and explainer extraordinaire for his, ahem, less technical colleagues), destroyer of legacy systems, west coast Cub fan, and stalwart dinner companion, KB - started going through his own individual hell last year, the collective still wanted to assemble somehow: tricky, though, because if it were a work shitstorm we could all just pitch in and take some of the weight, and help him shake it off in time for beer at his favorite restaurant (Kordyshack tonight, anyone?).  In this case, all we can do is sit around in our respective zip codes, sending crappy, morbid jokes by gchat, approximating normalcy, and hoping for the best......our way of showing KB that we love him like fried chicken and we are thinking of him all the time, basically constantly, I mean 24/7, in a way that would be uncomfortable and weird if he weren't a liberated progressive man (despite also being a salty and phlegmatic Canadian, +/- one tam-o-shanter).

American war poster, 1942, demonstrating howAmericans have long needed things
to be spelled out for them when it comes to geopolitics. 

Anyway, KB sent a group of his past-team Avenger A-listers an email awhile back outlining some pretty craptastical medical ish he had just discovered and was coming to grips with: and despite the fact that it was Very Bad News indeed, he impressed me deeply for just how gracefully he conveyed it - directly to the point, specific where it helped to understand, practical in envisioning the murky future but not dwelling morbidly on any of what was at that time some upcoming heavy weather he would have to endure.  I can only assume that the zen approach he'd developed over multiple decades of explaining data strategy to complete fucking morons came to his aid in this, his darkest hour, as he brought to it the same unbelievable patience, the same knack for breaking down and summarizing of the strategy into smaller digestible pieces, and the same spirit of polite inquiry that I have always benefitted from in my time in his august shadow.  Whether he was doing it for his benefit or ours, I managed to admire the approach through, I freely admit, some bitter tears on his behalf.

So it was to this same A-team email group, minus KB himself, that I sent out a plea in turn - would anyone like to write KB a note that I could include in a quilt for him? And the answer there was a resounding yes: in part, I think, because we were all feeling that same sense of "Well shit, how do we help on this one?"  So I gathered up these sentiments, scribbled on post its or envelopes or index cards and captured on phones and emailed from all over the globe, some from folks I haven't worked with but whose signature I can probably now forge (KIDDING) and transcribed them on to some squares embedded in this simple pattern, in the same way signature quilts  were collected for life-changing events in days of old.  Back then, it was usually a gift to a leaver: "we're packing up the Conestoga wagon and will probably never see you again, community I was born and raised in!"  In this case, of course, we hope very much it is a gift to a stayer - at least, a stayer for a good long time, which is I guess all any of us can really hope for anyway.

The signatures/notes are in the 3x4 grid, alpha by first name
which is probably really annoying to a data strategist. :)

Here we are! Though this red is almost as hard to read as the handwriting, sheesh.

Close up on a corner to show the faux flange binding, ie, that little purple
stripe, which still delights me even after, I don't know, 6 or 7 quilts
I've done this way now.

(I should mention, too, that some of these signatures are ones you'd find in, like, a book of the history of Agile software development, and most certainly in a book of the history of this company, which added a little archival shine to these proceedings - KB has some friends and supporters in high places, is what I'm trying to say.  And now he has proof.)

As any of the quilting community can tell you, our first impulse ALWAYS is to wrap someone in crisis up in physical fibers as a proxy for an extended, heartfelt and possibly unwanted bearhug. And as anyone who knows me can equally attest, I'm prone to attempting a grand gesture when maybe a better, more useful show of support for someone whose world is turned upside down might be a constant stream of terrible jokes and tasty casseroles delivered with heating instructions. Of course I would never cook for anyone I care about, that would just be disrespectful, bordering on lethal.  

But  also just know, KB, that if you were feeling the quiet was a little too quiet - feeling any strange absence of gallows humor or noxious puns - that I was THINKING of them, and you as I poked every stitch of this quilt over these last few months, and making a mental note to send them along to you before I forgot them, and then forgetting them anyway because my brain is still damaged from that one time you tried to explain applied data mesh to me. But I certainly have not forgotten YOU, or this shit hand you've been dealt, one which you are nevertheless playing with such utter grace and equanimity; and neither have your other Avengers who are assembled here to provide you with that heartfelt bearhug/casserole in fabric form, captured  in allegedly fabric-safe marker that will nevertheless probably bleed and fade over time, as will we all.  Rest assured, though, that our regard for you will not. It could never.  

The picture that is supposed to be "artfully tossed over a chair" but ends
up usually more like "someone forgot to put the laundry away again."

So, to sum: in the immortal words of Winston Churchill, "When you're going through hell - keep going!" With much love, KB, and extended, heartfelt, and possibly unwanted bearhugs from the whole gang (whether they got their squares in on time or not).  Miss you bunches, and looking forward to assembling with you again soon, at a Kordyshack-to-be-named-later. 

Besos,

Astrid

PS...one for the road....

hahahahaha

(Technical quilty notes for anyone wondering)

• I copied everyone's handwriting through the simple expedient of pulling up the JPGs onto my laptop, heightening the contrast where necessary, and then painters-taping pre-washed quilt squares to my actual goddamn screen, which acted like a lightboard and made tracing everyone's notes quite easy. This also made it simple to resize the signatures until they each fit their designated square.  There are some tracing goofs where the contrast wasn't great so each signature looks a lot like my own handwriting if I were practicing to become a check forger, WHICH I'M NOT, so I sent along a paper copy of each note to KB as a guide and/or for posterity, and so that if my tracings aren't legible you'll know who said what, and that "Carlos" is not "Carbs", for instance, even though I kind of fat-fingered that one (sorry, Carbs.) Unfortunately, I lost the pictures of all of the above in a terrible I'm a Fucking Idiot phone accident - if they ever surface I'll add them.
• The pattern is Squareburst by Running Stitch Quilts, and I think it ended up being like 72x86 or so? This pattern is pretty easy to increase size on, depending on whether you can stand to have the top/bottom and left/right rows NOT be identical
• The fabrics are - well, started out being, anyway - an off-white Grunge, Kona Limestone, and an old French General forest green that has a pleasant striation to it while still being wholly solid.  I say "started out being" because then I used a rather violent purple as backing (it's Kimberbell wideback "Connected Stars" in Purple) which bled like a motherfucker DESPITE both prewashing it AND throwing the finished product in there with a whole phalanx of Color Catchers....it pretty dramatically turned that Kona Limestone into a pinky beige which, while still okay visually, was not at all how this started out.  Good thing I didn't at all stress out for weeks about which colors went best together, hahahah! haha! ahem.  The best laid plans of mice and men gang aft quilty, etc.

The bleedin' purple culprit....

...turned that Kona Limestone (the lighter green swatch on top) into the
lighter pinky-beige color in the quilt itself.  Look at that Color Catcher! (The fuschia thing
at top, which started out white). The darker green didn't change too much.

Another view of that astounding color change, woopsie.

• Quilting was a pretty basic "holy shit it's been 6 months and I haven't sent this fucker out yet" stitch in the ditch around the basic star design
• Batting was a thin, pleasantly drapey bamboo, because let's face it, we might want to give KB a bearhug, but he doesn't need to be smothered by it. He lives in a tropical rainforest, for chrissakes!

And just because progress shots are always fun:

A Placeholder for Hands2Help 2022....

 ....being a way to share what I have sent out this year at a moment when I don't have time to write a whole screed about how they happened, and Instagram is kicking me off for not giving them a copy of an ID card proving I'm over 14, to which I say to them: fuck right off.

Not so much to share this time - hoping to join the linkyparty for the annual Hands2Help event, sending quilts all over the country/globe for charitable causes. This plus quilt went to Mercyful quilts:

The flimsy on my design wall....

The front after quilting...

...and the back.

And this low-volume strip-pieced diamonds top went to Victoria's Quilts:

Harder to see, but at least sewn together here...

A little easier to see but in pieces (strip pieced on a small phonebook-sized page) on the pleasantly cold concrete floor of my brother's basement, my temporary sewing quarters when COVID broke out.

And I wish it had been many more, but if wishes were horses, that would be really weird, as the old saying goes. 

Besos!
Astrid.

Dafuq?: Some Colorful History Lessons During the Apocalypse

...Being another wildly overdue thank you note,  for an enabler and colleague (and his wife).

Listen, I said I'd get there eventually, and I did. And here we are. Even if it took a Pandemic apocalypse for me to fulfill my end of the bargain:

The Finished Beast, inside where you can see colors.... 

...and outside, where you can see the quilting better...

...on both sides.

This is for my friend and colleague Ronny, whom I call "boss" even though he's not my boss and he hates it, who has done me the great service not just of getting me formally promoted to my current position, but the even greater one of inclusion in his Stable of Talent.  Ronny is a Delivery Principle, which means he is responsible to clients to make sure we do what we said what we were going to - and his greatest talent is spotting really dependable, flexible worker bees and collecting them all up so that he always has a set of non-crazy (preferably) swiss army knives at his disposal to get that job done.   Once he identifies you, no matter what far-flung project you are staffed on after that, he's got you in the back of his mind for something, and will throw his weight around to get you back in the fold.  This is gratifying for a number of reasons, but the main one is that it means you are always working with the utterly reliable, awesome-at-their-jobs, smart, and incidentally hilarious assholes that Ron prefers. That. Is. Awesome.

A few of the assholes in question.

The other nice thing about working with Ron is that, if you are pretty sure you're right about something, he completely has your back. That seems to be true of most of my colleagues at this job, but the theory has only really been pressure-tested with Ron and he was 100% true blue. Valuable, in a not-boss boss.  I've in general gotten lucky with bosses, but I only call a couple of people "boss" which in my book is a term of respect, and earned (even though they all hate it, which come to think of it might be part of the criteria for earning the title.)

Also, he swears a lot, which I appreciate in any coworker. If you've read this blog at all, you'll understand why.  Ron's finest epithet, IMO, is a standard, Jersey-boy "Daaaafuq??" which he's had cause to employ on many occasions, mostly involving client decisions. Some day I will embroider it upon a pillow for him - retirement party, maybe? Also, I need to learn how to embroider first.

So it was important to me to get this quilt right, and results are in, FINALLY... a mixed bag on this one, to be honest. This was a rocky road, so the fact that it took almost 2 years, and came up a few inches short in the wash was not *entirely* avoidable. Let's take a trip in the way-back machine:

1) San Antonio, Summer 2017: On an intensive project with just a couple other teammates, Ron and I are trapped in a conference room for 8 hours a day fighting over client metrics and where to eat dinner. A delightful friendship is born (as is my newfound love of obnoxiously overpriced steak).  I idly mention to Ronny that I should make him a quilt - he agrees.  A king size quilt, huge, tremendous, in a traditional style for his bedroom.  I laugh nervously. King size quilts are really big! Ha ha! That would take some time!

Good morning, Budapest: Deals with the Devil On the Banks of the Danube.
You can tell I took this shot because of all the crap in the foreground.

2) Budapest, August 2018: New project, 2 projects later. At dinner (again) Ronny and I literally pinky swear that if he can get me a promotion, I will make him his thank-you quilt any way he likes; a quilt pro quo, if you will. He points out it'll be any way his wife likes, and king-size, and that is added to the fine print of our verbal contract.

Curiously, a lot more people know where Wuhan is now than when I stayed there in 2018: namely, 7200 miles away from my sewing machine.

3) Wuhan, Fall 2018: Ronny promptly sends me to China for 5 months, which is really very far away from my sewing machine.  The fine print dint say nothing bout making this sucker by hand out of hotel bedsheets.  Case suspended while I stuff myself with 5 months' worth of pork shu mai.  Ron visits our team there, and while I do make it to dinner with him twice (once in an airplane parked in a mall!) I selfishly refuse to come along when he and fellow worker bee Bear visit Beijing for the weekend, where they are accused of being gay by a street procuress after turning down her many offers for wine, women, and presumably song;  Bear breaks a tiny chair at the Great Wall by sitting on it; and the finest Peking Duck in the land is discovered at a hole in the wall on the way to the airport, making me regret my refusal (somewhat.)

Ron goes to China, picks up a new hobby.

4) Houston, Jan 2019: My return to the States....and Promotion Unlocked! Around the same time, Ronnie announces an upcoming sabbatical for which it'd be really nice to have a Going-On-Sabbatical present done, and Ronny's wife Jo finds a pinterest pin of a quilt she likes and gives me a pink/green palette.

The original pin-spiration, and some pink from the stash I was spray ironing to see if it was useable .

Now the pressure is on, and I am reunited with Suki the Juki at an Airbnb in Spring, TX, where....

5) Houston, Feb - August 2019....months go by.  This is the point in the movie where there's a furious montage of calendar pages flipping as I buy fabric, match colors endlessly by dumping said fabric all over the floor, draft a pattern (because that pin was from a blogger's picture of a trip she took to a quilt shop in 2013, and there was no pattern), sew sample blocks that I then reject, and try again...several times, because I am good at the jobs Ron gives me but I am bad at quilt math. (The montage can skip over the parts where I worked on other, lesser, stress-relieving quilts rather than go to Buffalo Wild Wings with Bear.) Also, the montage will show me repeatedly grilling Ron exactly which green and pink his wife had done their bedroom in, admittedly using descriptions that probably only make sense to me and like 2 other people, and him answering me in such a stereotypically I'm-A-Guy-I-Wasn't-Paying-That-Much-Attention-To-The-Throw-Pillows way it STILL makes me laugh:

"Would you say it's like a dusty pink?"
"Well, it's ... I dunno, like a coral? A salmon? She put the pillows on the bed and I thought, "Hey, that looks pretty good!"
"Is it like a sage green with grey in it, or a spring green? Are we talking pastels? Is it pink and green like William Morris wallpaper, or more Izod/ Preppy Handbook circa 1984?"
".....dafuq?"

Chaos in fabric form. I mean - do you know how many different pinks there are?  A LOT.

In the beginning there was...trial and error.  Two star color sets.
Why choose? Use em both!

And let me state for the record that Houston has some kick-ass fabric stores, in which I spend a lot of time wandering, not sewing, but investing heavily in my retirement stash. I substantially finish most blocks at this time, now just need about 1000 flying geese units to make the sashing, the part between the blocks.  (Kidding! not 1000 geese....just 180.)

"Flying Geese" are the name of those triangle units, which will sash each of the star blocks. But green on cream, or cream on green? These are the questions that keep me up at night. (I opted for the bottom, cream triangles and green "wings")

6) Houston, Late Summer-Fall 2019: Ron takes his leave. And so do I, from Houston and the project. Quilt is still in blocks in a bag, packed securely in the hatch of my wee Mazda with the rest of my life.

The state of things upon leaving Houston.

7) Oct-Dec 2019: I'm assigned to a miscellany of other projects but none of them take: I cycle through Cincinnati, Washington DC, San Francisco, Christmas/New Year's, and vacation in Wisconsin before landing in...

8) Peoria, Jan 2020 (Peoria? O The Glamour!) for a month before they....put us on hiatus and I go back to Wisconsin for 2 weeks.  I actually did get all the blocks, flying geese sashing, and setting triangles finished in Wisconsin.  Except I realized I used three different ivories for the background. Woops.

At work in an Airbnb in Wisconsin....note trial star as the cornerstone of the sashing, which I rejected.

...and the state of things when I left Wisconsin the second time. Almost there.

8) Here and There, March 2020: Project contract runs out and the pandemic hits the world, and in lieu of living in hotels in Peoria I stay with my brother in Champaign, where he has an expansive semi-finished basement that is entirely empty until I start bringing all my sewing supplies down there. Despite having a hard time concentrating on anything else, sewing is my happy place, so it is SO ON.  The blocks and sashing are sewn together and the top/flimsy is complete! Now where did I put that giant backing I bought in Houston?  Oh god! Is it STILL IN HOUSTON??

Top coming together - will need some borders to bring it to he right size. How about some pieced pinwheels and some William Morris green from the geese units?

Pinwheel borders, yes.....

...Light green pattern outside no, in favor of the darker green from the darker stars.

Also - how the hell am I going to quilt this thing? Yikes.  Draw first; then quilt.

The blue things are templates for use with chalk pads, to mark a design to follow. I only used one on the green border, but I did manage to get chalk all over every goddamn thing I own.

9) Champaign, April 2020: the plague makes it a little slow to get the wool batting and matching threads I have to order since I can't go shopping, plus I get sidelined making masks for friends and family, etc.  When I appear to be running low on a key border fabric I have a near-meltdown.  Turns out I had another THREE YARDS of it folded away in a different box buried in my car, so I am abashed but relieved. Wool batting comes! Thread comes!  Backing from Houston located! Thread doesn't match but I'll make it work! I am determined to do full custom quilting on this king-size monstrosity, and turns out that's really hard and I'm still pretty bad at it! Last minute decision to make a flanged binding almost ends in horror!

What it looks like to stuff a (then) king-size quilt through the harp of a domestic sewing machine.

10) Champaign, Basement, End of the World, 2020: And the final trauma: custom quilting took a couple of inches off the hefty, 106-107" inches square that it started as.  (Not sure why, exactly, but I assume this is because quilting is basically a really widespread, lazy ruching.) And then when I WASHED it (warm/cool dry), it shrunk another couple inches, down to just barely 100" square. A regular king size quilt is usually, depending on whose chart you read, around 98x106, or 102x106 for a California King. So this was a Queen+ or a King-, depending on how you look at it. It was also wildly out of square with ruffly edges, something I either hadn't done before or never cared about enough to notice.

Custom quilting: looks cool from a distance, sucks up 2-3" of your finished quilt top size.

also, easier to see on the back. But....

  

When your borders go ruffly after washing.  Sigh.

After much pouting, and pondering, and whining to a facebook quilting group who sagely pointed out all the things I did wrong (including "too much quilting" and "not enough quilting" along with "never pre-wash batting" and "always pre-wash batting"), I re-wet the quilt and blocked it (meaning: as you do with sweaters, instead of cavalierly throwing them in the dryer you lay them out on an absorbent under-layer and gently pat/tug it into the shape you intend it to be in when it dries, and possibly even pin it down along its edges every 1 inch, which is a tedious process I would not want to put any of my giftees through.  Folks mostly use it for show quilts). This did cure some of the ruffly edge problem, though I couldn't very well make it any bigger, and then I thought long and hard about whether I was going to send this bad boy to Ronny and Jo anyway, given it wasn't a genuine king and had ruffly edges.  Or whether I was going to remake it. Goddamnit!

Blocking, but not exactly by pinning it every inch. 

And it sat, laid out on the floor for a number of days, being mostly square but mocking me with its sub-par dimensions and shoddy custom quilting, while I scolded myself for being a perfectionist and also scolded myself for not being perfect.

(Parenthetically, I'm thinking of collecting all the wisdom from the FB group that responded so kindly to my plea for help into a self-help tome entitled, "Why You Should Never Seek Help On the Internet.")

In the final analysis, I figured Ronny and Jo would rather have a mostly-there quilt, that is suffused with great effort, grit, and earnest gratitude, than whatever would come out of a second stab at this, which may be nicer looking but might not show up until after the apocalypse/plague/murder hornets take us all, and also probably tainted with exasperation and a growing hatred of pink and green together. Besides, Ron is a DELIVERY PRINCIPLE, and he held up his end of the pinky swear bargain, and I've taken long enough - time to deliver. So now it is mailed, and I've switched back to fretting about whether the pinks and greens selected were the right ones, or whether they clash horribly with the coral (or was it salmon?) that's already there.

stolen from the internet

As an apology, I sent along some matching face masks for them and their son, because just because there's an apocalypse on doesn't mean you have to be a savage and wear PPE that doesn't match your bedding.

So to Ronny, a huge round of thanks for being an awesome not-boss whom I nevertheless will continue to call "boss"; and to Jo, my gratitude for steering me in the right direction, pattern and color-wise.  I hope this quilt finds you both hale and well, is warm enough to withstand the coming apocalyptic winter and thick enough to ward off murder hornets, and big enough to demonstrate my vast appreciation for your agitating on my behalf at work, and for plucking me out of relative obscurity to join your band of merry fuqin' jackholes.

(I heartily recommend that you not dry this all the way in a machine, because that cause ruffly edges AND might trigger flashbacks for me which I'd rather avoid.  And next time, I'll bring a color chart to distinguish which pink and green, exactly, you need.)

Besos! Be well, and also please please please save me from Peoria, PLEASE:

Astrid.