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 Little Interstitial Music: A Miscellany

...being not one thing or another, and certainly not the things they probably could have been.

Continuing my inability to focus on Things I Said I Would Do, being distracted by Things That Seemed Like A Good Idea At The Time, here are a couple of quilty things that happened lately instead of things I've told some folks I would do for them.  I mean, I will.  Soon. Meanwhile....

First, a baby blanket for the cousin of a friend - kind of an odd color palate, but she gave me free rein on pattern and color, and I had been noodling with some orange-yellow-green-purple bits and bobs I had sitting around.  At her wise suggestion I swapped purple for blue and in the final analysis, it's a cheery, bright, non-gender specific lil Broken Windows strip on a mottled Grunge white, with a cozy gray windowpane flannel on back + a strip of yellow 40s juvenile print flannel I inherited from the Estate of the Unknown Benefactress.

Then there's this: a scrappy low-volume Rail Fence quilt with bonus Scrappy Rainbow Pinwheels - a super easy quilt for beginners, if you have a ton of semi-neutrals lying around and some bright squares.












This has still not quite used up all those shirt scraps that made Chris and JJ's Trip Around the World quilt and also appeared in the Cap'n's Low volume Postage Stamps, lo these many years past.  In fact, it was probably some of the first fabric in my stash, when I started a sewing class 7 years ago this fall.  (Seven years! That's kind of nutty. I was thinking 2015 but, no, per this very blog, it was 2012. Yowza.) Below, you can see I used the blue-er shirts more centrally and as I got out to the edges it was more whites and grey-er ones. This has very little to do with a grand strategy and everything to do with that being how it got laid down on the Design Floor the first time around.

Continuing a proud tradition of not having enough backing width by mere inches.

Anyhoo, these are 2.5" x 6.5" strips with the 2.5" color squares sewn in diagonally - though, trickily, since the blades of the pinwheel need to be free to spin, you can't strip piece these because the colors are on the inside, not the outside, of the block, so you cut out all of the 6.5" lengths, add the colors, and then sew the Rail Fences together.  It's great mindless sewing for summer baseball game "watching."  (Go Cubs!)

This quilting was a BIG DAMN DEAL for me - my first entirely free-motion machine quilted quilt, instead of just select easy-to-reach areas.  I did wavy lines in the direction of the rails which, as it turns out, may have been kind of wasted effort and I could have just done it as an all-over pattern, because you can't really see how the wiggles change from Fence to Fence unless you're looking for it.  But it was exciting to finish and I'm MUCH more comfortable with freehand wavy lines. I started with closer lines, almost a wood grain texture but soon discovered that was going to take me an ice age to finish, so loosened up a bit. That results in a nicer drape to the quilt anyway, IMO. 

Also, the binding: rainbow ombre! I dig how it looks, especially on the gray/black back.  Cheery!  Except maybe for the gray binding strip (centered on at one side - I just hadn't prepped enough of the rainbow stuff for binding and didn't care to go back and cut one more strip of it, when I had the gray binding already made for some previous project.  Because I'm lazy. Or thrifty. Or whatever, it didn't happen.

 Then there's this odd raspberry cotton-candy colored confection which is just a basic Coin quilt (also called "Chinese Coin", "Roman Coin", and "Bar Quilt" - mine's more of a Bar, since I think coins are supposed to be narrower columns, and sometimes also different heights).  (Why do people pronounce that "heighths"? I never understood that.) (Of course mine WOULD be a "Bar Quilt.")

But the color scheme has been in my brain a lot lately - this pink-yellow-orange-purple series.  Not sure why. Missing sunsets? Strong yen for sherbet?  Trying to rekindle a childhood love of FruitStripe Gum? Maybe being in Houston this long has made me a secret Astros fan, but in 1983?

Colors a little more true in the sunlight (if wrinkly)

The only thing I could think to use for sashing (since I am quite bored with white and gray, for a change) was this very light blue, which is a linen texture from Henley Studio, which *kind of* sets it off perfectly and *kind of* makes it look like the colors ran in the wash, which they haven't (yet. But I guess now it doesn't matter if they do.)

Finally, there's this unfortunate top, which probably needs several borders to make it a usable size.... except that it is wildly out of true, with these rows of wee 2" squares finishing up pretty dramatically different lengths, despite having the same count... uh, woops.

At upper left, we find.... wait, WTF?

So because this is not critical, it has been summarily wadded up and thrown in a corner until I have energy to fix it or take it apart for reconstituting some other way.  Bleh.

Looks better when you can't see the corner in question.

These will likely be donated at some point - but first, I have to get them back to Illinois, because I will shortly be ending my stint at this gig in TX and heading off for ... somewhere else, tbd.  And every time I move hotels/airbnbs/ accounts, I gotta pack up whatever giant mounds of fabric have accumulated in my pro tempore Sewing Studio, and shove it all into my teeny Mazda for schlepping to the next port of call. 





You'd think this constant upheaval would make me more conservative when I buy fabric in a temporary location, and force me to Kon Marie the crap outta my traveling selections, but.... then you'd remember who you were talking about, and you'd laugh and laugh.

In my defense, there are some GREAT fabtic stores around here.

In conclusion:  I might not be doing what I've told myself sternly to do, but at least I'm sewing, and mental-health-wise, that's better than not sewing and waiting for The Right Inspiration to hit.  I mean, these piles of fabric are not going to cut themselves into smaller pieces and sew themselves back together.  Right? Right!  Back to work!  Except maybe I'll just take a bath for a bit, and check out Pinterest, in case there's anything VERY CRITICAL that I must make RIGHT AWAY.

Linking up with Confessions of a Fabric Addict for Whoop it Up Friday ... er, Saturday.

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

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.

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.