Syzygy Means the Planets Aligned Long Enough For Me To Get This Done

... being a quilt of a graphical nature, for dancing queen and designing woman, DB.

Welp, so much for resolutions.  A short post, just to get this sucker out the door.

It's not so much that I'm not doing anything crafty, as that I've been shuffling around a little for work: this quilt, for instance, which I call Syzygy, was started in NYC and made a trip to Ecuador before being finished in Chicago:

You can maybe see why I thought of it as "Syzygy", though it could have also come from Zzyzzx, CA.

Which is suitable for DB, who is herself a jet-setter of some reknown: a boot-scootin' country & western music lovin' Francophile that I know via an extended college crowd.  DB then moved into my neck of the woods in Chicago and promptly opened shop as THE best-catered party apartment north of Irving Park Road (and by "catered" I mean "she did all the damn cooking, holy shit", which is nothing short of magical to me and my pop-tart eating, can-opening culinary habits.)

Ms. DB, whom you might remember as the talent behind the Gramdrew's Home for Wayward Girls logo, is hereby the recipient of this cracked mirror of an offering.  She had expressed a desire for something of a graphical nature, and as always, these airy descriptions coming from an actual designer just baffle and terrify me and I demanded examples. So she picked out some of the quilts I had made for other folks that she had liked, and the one that stuck with me was Sister Lulu's Fractured Flowers quilt.  This pattern is "Arrow Point Path" by MeadowmistDesigns and seemed to fill the graphical bill, AND had the advantage of not being too complex to piece when I was in transit for pretty much 3 solid months.  I did a little bit of an ombre fade thing with the shades as I moved to the outer zigzags.   And I went with toasty reds and oranges, and a linen-y taupe-brown, in part because it was freaking cold out when I started to do this and I couldn't even look at my glacial blues and cold water greens in January or whenever the hell that was; but also because my impression of DB's living room revolved around these warmer shades.  Hopefully I'm not misremembering that, DB!  But if I am, let us just say this color scheme is reminiscent of the endless vats of salsa I have cumulatively consumed at your annual Cinco de Mayo party, as well as the cheery warmth of your hostessing in general.

The flip side is one of my favorite patterns (which I compulsively draw in my graph paper notebook) in oranges and yellows with one strip of the central red tone from the front to make it fit lengthwise:

Man, I love this pattern.  In Sashiko I think it's called Asa-no-ha, or hemp leaf.

As I pieced this top, it reminded me of many things: zippers, tire tracks, the cymatic visual representation of sound waves caused by dance music... this last, of course, because DB is a dancing fool extraordinaire, and once stayed out dancing so vigorously that she broke her foot (okay, or exacerbated a running injury, maybe): like, on and on until the *actual* break of dawn.  I know this because I witnessed it, since we were the only two that stayed out that late after many other wimpy dance-haters had left hours prior..... and we might have made it out at the same time they were leaving except at that crucial moment "The Killing Moon" started up and that was all she wrote.  Hence: broken foot. Eternal respect for your dedication to the craft, lady.

I started working with Suki the Juki on free-motion quilting, but my lines were still just straight(ish).  However, it's still like 50% faster than using a walking foot, IMO, because you don't have to wrestle with your quilt to reposition it so much.

This is to say nothing of her karaoke prowess, which runs a funky gamut from Stevie Wonder ("If You Really Love Me") to some classic Country & Western ("Tiger By the Tail") and I even saw her captivate a live-band karaoke crowd with that venerable old chestnut "Hit Me With Your Best Shot," because she is a born entertainer, and a natural onstage (something I never, for all my karaoke obsession, ever mastered.)  And indeed it was DB who introduced me to the dearly departed Carol's, the last honkytonk on the north side, which was within stumbling distance of her apartment, and mine, back when I was her neighbor in the RavensHood.  In addition to being the bar voted Most Likely To Be Playing a Patsy Cline Torch Song At Any Given Moment, it was also home to a truly David Lynchian cast of neighborhood characters, including a tiny, reedy-voiced librarian-looking woman who used to on occasion bust out with "Birthday Sex" at Thursday night karaoke (one of my favorite karaoke nights in the city, especially during the unemployment/grad school stint of the late oughts.)  Think the C&W bar at which the Blues Brothers sang, minus the protective chickenwire, mating with the Isle of Misfit Toys.  Aw, Carols. We hardly knew ye.

The edges are a little different from the diamond centers, nothing too crazy.

In any event, I hope this one works out, DB, and satisfies your preference for something of a graphical nature. Surely you know by now that your fancy pants artistic terminology falls on deaf ears when it comes to me, but maybe if you think of this as tire tracks or dance tracks or as an abstract rendering of the excitement one might feel upon being gifted a one-way ticket to a prepaid apartment in the 11th arrondissement, it will endear itself to you anyway?  In a pinch, at least, you'll have something to throw on top of any party guest that might decide to take a quick snooze on the living room couch, in spite of the raucous dance party going on in the dining room (ahem.)

In which it becomes clear that colors really do look way better in sunlight than in whatever you call the light in the basement I'm living in right now.  "Grotto-esque"?

I would tell you to let me know the next time you get your rock show on, but let's be real: these old bones do that like 1x per year these days and would likely take a raincheck. On the other hand, Summerdance starts in June with Samba, Swing, and Salsa - right up our alley!  Hollar if you're going: I'll bring a walking cast, just in case.


Besos!

Astrid.

Linking up with Confessions of a Scrap Addict - Fridays Whoop Whoop

What I Learned in B-School: The Wedding of A and R

...a compilation of mistakes I made in and around grad school, where what I learned was "don't go."

I was delighted this fall to go to the wedding of my b-school classmate and sterling fellow Alex, and his bride Rachel (wherein I also got a chance to catch up with another classmate Greg and his ladywife Liz).  I'm not sure why I went with a quilt based in brown for Alex and Rachel - the wedding color was a superb and gorgeous deep purple - except that I'm down with brown, as anyone will tell you, and it seemed to set off the glowing jewels of these shot cotton squares quite nicely.  (I tried gray: it didn't work. That's about as far as my neutral color palette extends.)  This quilt itself is no great feat, just squares and sashing, so I'm mostly going to write about why grad school was a terrible idea, but I'll still show pictures.  Like this one:

Post washing - all the quilting is in the sashing, so the colored squares look kind of puffy/saggy, but are quite soft.

Granted, Alex was only really my classmate for a hot second before his interest in, and aptitude for, Advanced Corporate Finance far outstripped mine, and we parted ways in terms of curricula, but by then we had discovered a small posse of like-minded folk within the greater group of tiresomely brilliant Type-A financiers, entrepreneurs, and engineers-turning-managers that comprised the rest of the school. Though to be clear,  I was probably the most notably Type-B person in the entire university - even my friends were clandestine over-achievers, though they were humble about it, kind about my LAS-induced lagginess, and often helped me with my homework, which probably seemed laughably remedial to them.  Thus my first mistake was in going to the school I did, which was....over-challenging, shall we say:  as I lamented at the time, I'm pretty sure I only even got in because they needed SOMEONE to be below average.

I was trying to capture the pretty iridescence of these colored
squares, but I'm afraid that subtlety is beyond my phone's camera.

I believe I have mentioned how big of a tragic financial disaster I found b-school to be - part of this was my age when I went back, which basically dictated that I would never make up the truly ridiculous monetary outlay in future salary gains before retirement or death, whichever comes first (am betting on death).  Part of it was my own inability to focus on absorbing the material, an albatross-y legacy of carefree days when I could remember things after reading them once, and majoring in languages and literature, surely the path I could follow with the least effort.  Because, you  know, I like words. (No, it's true. I know it's hard to believe.)

The back: deliciously soft double-gauze. The strip on the left was inadvertent - apparently double gauze
has a directional quality of which I was unaware.

(Side-note: At b-school orientation, of which two-day affair I quite characteristically forgot about/blew off the first day, I learned that on that first day they had shown a pie chart of the incoming class' undergrad majors, in a get-to-know-ya exercise of the sort I find most tedious - "40% of this incoming business school class majored in - business!  The rest majored in Accounting or Engineering." Revelatory! But I know this because the next day a new classmate, upon hearing my undergrad major was Russian, exclaimed, "Oh! YOU'RE the Slavic Languages person!"  and, faced with my evident confusion, explained that the pie-chart had had a tiny sliver of "Slavic Languages and Literature" to account for me; and that the orienteers had announced this to the group, perhaps as evidence of the "diversity" of the matriculants, and tried to find this exotic beast in the crowd when in fact, I hadn't even bothered to show up. (Hmpf. Typical Slavic Language major.) In spite of my mortified mumbled defense, "Well it was a double major with English," this was a clue that I was going to be an anomaly in this cohort right from the get-go, even in advance of my failure to grasp the Weighted Average Cost of Capital or the Dupont Equation or whatever the hell; and probably my only sad chance at ever being considered A One Percenter, to boot.)

The quilting was just 4 lines in each sashing, crossing in a grid at the intersections, easy peasy.

 
Another mistake of grad school turned out to be the lack of an actual job market for my new skills when I graduated, which was just after the bottom fell out in the economic shitstorm of 2008-09.  And Alex, who clearly did grasp market nuance much better than me (to the surprise of no person), cleverly read the tea leaves, and commenced to taking one class at a time forever, such that he graduated with his shiny new degree as late as possible, when employment prospects were already looking up a bit and that degree was legit just worth more.  (I had wanted to career switch and in fairness, I did end up in a job I love, albeit 5 years after graduation; and despite my employer's protestations that shiny degrees did not matter to them, I have to think that mine at least got my foot in the door.  Curiously, that job was in the same building in downtown Chicago as Alex worked, which we realized to our mutual surprise one day when I saw him unexpectedly in the lobby.  Which made it delightfully easy for us to have lunch...at least, one time, before my travel schedule intervened, and now he doesn't work in that building anymore. Boo!)

In spite of all of this disparity in ability, Alex proved to be an absolute rock-solid friend, a true salt-of-the-earth fellow, and another alum of our flagship state school (where he went some years after me, and where I'm quite sure he did not major in Russian, given that he and his family had emigrated from Ukraine sometime around the first heady days of Glastnost.)  And since each of my favorite b-school buds were Secretly Weird - this one collected Ivy League degrees, each of which made him successively less employable; that one kept her dirty dishes in the freezer when she did not feel like washing them and hoarded incandescent light bulbs; another had apparently been some kind of semi-pro soccer player - it was no surprise to me that Alex's secret hobby was collecting antiquities from ancient worlds, an off-shoot of his love of history.

I went simple on the label - a wedding date, and a blanket-stitched heart for the newlyweds. 

(History to me is one of those infuriating sandhills that one labors to climb, only to discover 50 million shifting layers lie between you and the "truth", or whatever truth got recorded, at least.  My brother Hercules also has a head for history, inherited from our mom, and sometimes I like to hear him take flight, with as little prompting as: "Knights of Malta, 16th century - go!"  Alex is quite the same way.  I trust in the future I will get more opportunities to shoot the shit with him over some beer and hear his collected historical truths.  As always, I am sure to have a LOT of questions in those cases, as I struggle to connect whatever random pieces of information have lodged in my brain without context or details, such that I might brightly burp out "Queen Anne Wars!" or "Boxer Rebellion!" or "Bessarabia!" at odd intervals, like Wikipedia talking in its sleep, possibly while also experiencing some mild dyspepsia.)

Sadly, I have only met Rachel on a couple of occasions, once when she had to run the gamut of our grad school posse on a lovely summer day at a riverside bar after work - which is really an overwhelming sort of way to meet a pile of people; and again on the day before her wedding, when I foolishly and hilariously got the date of the ceremony wrong and showed up 24 hours early, right at the end of their rehearsal.  How I managed that I will really never know, but Rachel to her everlasting credit did not laugh me out of the venue, but instead kindly asked if I would like to join them for the rehearsal dinner - which generosity I truly appreciated but hastily declined, as there's already enough stress and expense in a wedding as it is without dopey friends of your fiancé showing up a day early expecting to be fed.  In any case, she is accomplished and fascinating in her own right, having been a roving news reporter at several local stations before moving into the already saturated news-media market of Chicago to be with Alex....and I have a lot of questions for HER about that, and how she likes the job switch, and whether maybe we shouldn't go on that canoe trip down the Chicago River like we'd talked about three years ago.

Here's the label from the front: just a ghost heart on the purple.

But not really getting to know Rachel does highlight the last mistake of b-school, which is:  losing track of my b-school friends.  Because this was a part-time/weekend program, everyone already had jobs and lives and in many cases families of their own, so it was dissimilar to undergrad in that it was not the sole pre-occupation of most of us.  And let me tell you, there's nothing you want to do more after 8-10 hours of work than sit in a classroom for another three hours, twice a week, squinting at formulae and modeling economic theory and TALKING TO PEOPLE SOME MORE.  (Well, the economic parts weren't that bad.)  But b-school was nevertheless a deep bond: of fatigue and of stamina, of handling hyperactive partners in group projects, and trying to sort out when one might have time to write a 15-page paper; of meeting to grab some Chipotle for dinner to fortify ourselves before a slog through Implications of Foreign Currency Valuation, and meeting afterwards for a relief beer in the student lounge.  And while I do not miss those classes particularly - especially the stats class that made me cry every week and required me to run on a treadmill for two hours after each class to decompress - I miss the hell out of those people, and their quirky secret weirdnesses, and their brilliance, and their willingness to let me play their reindeer games, despite being a Slavic Language (and English) major.  To not know their spouses - or children, or about their new jobs and how they might be applying that wretched degree to them - strikes me as the worst mistake of all, one I hope to rectify, and soon.

I was going to put "Sept 24", for the day
I showed up to the wedding, but is it really
something I should commemorate?

So, Alex and Rachel, congratulations to you, you delightful weirdos - I trust you will revel in each other's eccentricities for many many years to come, and I hope to be able to appreciate them some more in the future myself.  Because if there's one thing I learned in grad school - and actually, it might have been just the one thing - it's that appreciation increases the value of things over time; in business, in friendship, and with some luck, in marriage, too.

Besos to you both and Mazel Tov!

Astrid.

Hand-Pieced Stars and Basement Dwellers: A Fan Letter to D&D's B&B

...being another Quilt of Gratitude for a friend and her hubby, whose basement apartment has a revolving door.

Last year around this time, after I started my traveling job, I decided I was going to have to figure out how to hand-piece quilts, not knowing yet how I would cart my sewing machine around to client sites.  I wanted something portable, with small pieces I could kit up and throw in my carry-on, to while away the dead hours at the airport doing something more useful than scowling at other business travelers.

At the same time, I had been keeping in the back of my mind that I wanted to do a traditional-style quilt for my teammate D, and as it turned out, those two notions dovetailed nicely into this:

Stars n Stripes 4eva.  Figured out how to mitre the corners on multiple borders finally, too.

After some fiddling, this turned out to actually be really easy and relaxing, and I am readily starting up another hand-piecing project as we speak.  I used 2" hexagons and diamonds

Positively Educational: An FMQ Primer

…Part one of I don't know how many.

Testing, testing…….

Or that's then plan, anyway.  This here top, colloquially known as a "Plus Quilt" or "Cross Quilt" among modern quilters, is my guinea pig for Free Motion Quilting.  You know how I've been complaining that I don't want to f*ck up anyone else's quilts by practicing my FMQ on them?  Enter one quilt, not earmarked for anyone in particular, and in need of a great deal of stitchery.   When the student is ready, the teacher will appear!

This guy has actually been a number of months in the making, at least in the "thinking about it" stages - ever since March or so,

The Imperfect Quilter

 ...wherein it transpires that sometimes the process really IS more important than the result.

So the last few things I've made have been for Other People, and that is an honorable and worthy pursuit, and one I will happily continue.  But I do find myself stressing a little about making something worth giving away, and that slows me down (as it well should.)  However, with as many theoretical-quilts as I have floating around in my brain, and with as much fabric as I've amassed over the past year, it behooves me to whip out something small and meaningless from time to time, both as a sop to my increasingly loud and insistent quilt-muse, as a skill-building venture, and a reminder of the pleasure to be had in making something practical, but not perfect.  Sometimes I just itch to do, without thinking too hard about what I'm doing.  In fact, that's pretty much the story of my life.

So I'm usually quite comfortable with perfection as option, rather than necessity, but this time it wasn't even a secondary or tertiary goal.  This time, the goals were simple -  make something fast; test the use of double gauze as a backing in case of any oddities requiring different sewing techniques for "real" projects down the road; and use one of the hundreds of patterns I've dog-eared (digitally speaking) to work on values as a design element.  This is the result, evidencing varying degrees of success - it's about 60" x 70" or "napping size," in the vernacular:

Sort of a crappy picture of the result, but you get the gist.