For Beulah, 20?? - Jan 16, 2024

 ...whom I love.

Trigger warnings: pet loss, maudlin self-indulgence, LONG rambling.

It's not like other people haven't mourned pets. 65 MILLION households in the US have a dog. For me this week, there is only 1 dog, and now she's gone. And it's not like she was a PERSON, right? People have lost way more important relationships in their lives. Haha! trick question! Dogs are far superior to people and the grief is just as bad.

I always said I'd get a dog when I had a yard. I was a dog nut as a kid, knew every dog in our neighborhood, read every dogly book in the library. But our family dog, ostensibly mine, for whom I begged and begged, and who arrived in my Christmas stocking when I was 10, always gravitated to my mom (who was home, and fed her, and let her out regularly.) She was a judgey and clannish Cockapoo (the dog, not my mom), and as I grew up and out of the house she protected, she waned, dying after my college years.  I was sad when I heard, but not unduly sad. I don't think I mourned her for long. Maybe that meant I was just in love with the idea of a dog. What did I really know about dogs at 10? or at 20?

A dog is fluffy and nice to pet, and will play with you in a yard. A dog and her person starts to look and act alike, haha. A dog must be exercised and fed regularly, and provided clean water. A dog is a commitment and a responsibility that should not be taken lightly. A dog dreams of running. A dog can smell 10,000x better than a human. A dog is an engine of love: put love in, get love out.

A dog only gets so many springs, though, and not as many as we do. This is an inherent cruelty in the dog-person relationship, one that must be accepted if you want the rest of the joy that comes with dogliness. With these rules in mind as I made my way to adulthood, I realized the itinerant lifestyle and late rock shows of my 20s were not conducive to having a dog. Nor were grad school or the dinner-and-karaoke-years, nor roommates, nor solo apartment living, of my 30s. Nor consulting in my 40s. NOT having a dog was in the theoretical dog's best interest, I thought - some might manage, but I am too lazy/forgetful/broke to care for another creature like a dog should be cared for. 

Fast forward: 2020, COVID, consulting travel skids to a halt.  Thus grounded, in July I buy a house, with a yard. Three months later, after a repost from a friend on FB with this mugshot, I get Beulah. 

The face of sheer boredom, October 2020

I was pretty sure I was down for a bully breed, so numerous in the shelters, and I was forewarned by the shelter that Beulah's dog reactivity meant she'd always be a solo dog. Reasonable....I am a solo person.  A senior should not be waiting in a shelter to die. A senior would also be a shorter term commitment for a commitment-phobe like me. The scars on her face and her legs were accompanied by checkered, uncertain past, a fear-aggression towards other dogs, a cautionary tale about a run in with a Husky at a dog park that led to her being returned by a foster to the shelter. Silly, I thought - anyone who knew her for 10 minutes knew she was not a social dog to take to a dog park. Setting about the task of getting to know her, I dusted off my Rules of Dog and conscientiously fulfilled my solemn duties. They didn't seem like duties, though - just accommodations anyone would make for a new roommate. One who depended on you utterly.

 

Meet cute

 

Gotcha day (cr: S. Talbott)

A dog must have a bed to dream in. Probably a few beds, for optimal dreaming. A dog must have a fenced yard, and be walked at least  2x a day for at least 30 minutes each time. A dog must have the finest fresh foods your disposable income allows. A dog should probably have a bone-shaped pillow. A dog needs a fuzzy pink waterproof blanket on the couch. A dog should be free-ranging, full-access, and provided a window to look out of at all times. A reactive dog should be helped to understand that she didn't have to fight anyone anymore, and that turning around and walking the other direction was the best course of action. A dog's environment should be managed so that she does not eat a tampon and go to the vet for a $500 "intestinal misadventure." A dog should be effusively applauded for managing the back yard bunny infestation. 

Paw Patrol

A dog only gets so many springs, though, so you should allow her all the time she needs to whuffle in the new grass, lay for awhile on the warming concrete, and sniff the delectable March breeze, ripe with cow manure and the diesel from the neighbor's lawnmower. While you're waiting, you can wonder at how much more information she's getting on that breeze than you are. She usually faces west, so you try it, focusing on the air. You both sit like that for 20, 30 minutes sometimes.

Zen and the Art of Sniffing to the West

So Beulah Belle - or BB, so named by the dogwalker who saves you both when you break your ankle - becomes an expected, comfortable part of the fabric of this new sedentary life you lead. At some point, she'd had all her ambition and moxy abused or neglected out of her, so every interaction with the world is cautious and reserved - why bother emoting if no one's looking, or if it just draws attention?  The arthritis in her back also means it's probably painful to wag her tail, so she saves that for very special occasions, when she's VERY happy to see you, or reactive enough not to notice the pain. She has no use for toys and is a little offended you keep asking. She diligently chases the rabbits out of our garden, for which she is handsomely rewarded with butcher bones and booty skritches. The fur on her booty is a different texture, more coarse and wavy than the rest of her.  It helps you orient to the part of her back that is tender vs the part she appreciates a good double-handed skritch on.

Booty waves

She oversees the comings and goings of all the furniture you buy, then return, then replace, as you fill up the house with things for her to lie on. She eventually stops snapping at buses coming up from behind you as you walk, stops redirecting aggression onto the leash upon seeing another dog (usually); but her sweetness to people never waivers, to the delight of a small army of neighbors, visiting friends, tradespeople, all surprised when her rippling physique is belied by her hopeful, derpy fatalism.  The velvet geometry of her impressive jaw matches perfectly with the curve of your ankle, when lounging on the couch, drifting to sleep, or when she regrets to inform you, in her quiet, insistent way, that you are done quilting for the night.

 

And as it turns out, an old dog CAN learn new tricks. To your complete surprise, she makes some dog friends: another bully girl, sweetest landseal on stocky legs, breaks the ice with her sunny nature and intuitive respect for a nervous old dog's space.  The unthreatening neighbor puppy, desperate for companionship, is safely behind a fence and easily left behind if he gets to be too much. Your brother's enormous chocolate lab, literally twice her size, is uncomplicatedly delighted by his tentative new friend. She follows him around like a white shadow. She buries her bones in the couch, her snorting and biting and arranging of the cushions making you laugh with the ridiculousness and rejoice at her growing confidence; that she can interact with her world and change it to suit her, that she knows she can come back to this bone later, that she belongs here forever. She likes to lounge on her back sometimes, feet in the air, looking like an Easter ham but as relaxed as she could possibly be.

 

Her farts could fell an elephant, but you don't really mind much. Hey, you're no prize to live with either. You suit each other: two old snappy, farty broads, sniffing the breeze on the patio, sharing the couch, maintaining a cheek on a foot or a paw on an leg, to anchor.

Bed #4

The changes are so gradual when you live with someone day after day. And then they are SO fast. You can't see a frosty face as much on a white dog, but you might catch a hind leg lagging behind its fellows, or a huffy reluctance to get up on the bed. If you impatiently yell at an aging dog, especially one feeling vulnerable with failing eyesight and stiffening joints, the wounded confusion in her clouding eyes might stab needles in your heart for weeks afterwards. You might suddenly realize that the vet's persistence as respects pain meds is no longer a suggestion for a future eventuality.  A dog needs some stairs to get up on the bed now. A dog needs blander food after that pancreatitis scare, help cleaning where she can't reach to lick, a heating pad for the arthritis. A dog needs you to be vigilent for signs she is ailing: a new lump on her belly, a shorter distance she can go before panting, an accident she tries to hide.

Still, though, there are days so good you can breathe easy.  It's coming, but it's not now.  Today she jumped on the chair to bark at those goddamn corgis across the street.  Today she ate her whole breakfast in one go. Today she ran in the yard like a puppy through the dying leaves. 

Today when she was napping, you heard a noise you've never heard before and look over to see her thumping her tail happily in her sleep. A dog dreams of running - but not of running away. Not anymore.

Perhaps a dog needs a companion? Someone else to get her through the tough times ahead?

Enter Bix, March 2023. He is supposed to be 6 or 7 years old - turns out he might be like 18 months. That was not the match you were thinking of, two seniors tottering their way through their golden years. He is energetic in a way she'll never be, now. But he learns that his play style scares her, learns to sniff politely and leave her alone. They reach detente quickly, both eager to avoid any trouble. We work out where everyone eats and sleeps, establish separate walk schedules, fall into a new routine.  You are a ridiculous dog lady now, have made dogs your whole personality, buy them the special bones they each like at different stores and scrupulously give them the precisely same number of treats and pats.  You can't help but wonder if you've made her life a little worse, though, by bringing him home. She was fine: it was you who needed backup storage for your heart. Because you know.

A rare cuddle - you can almost hear the long-suffering deep sigh out of BB

Popcorn vultures on movie night

But.

A dog only gets so many springs. And an old dog might not see her next. 

Sniff Westward, Angel

The lump you found was metastatic, after the first surgery wasn't enough to catch it. She won't make it through another anesthesia. You weigh chemo with its side-effects and realize with dawning horror it does not add time appreciably to her future. Her laggy back leg stops supporting her entirely. Embarrassed, she is slower to get up from the faceplants during your walks, which are down to a minimal 10-15 minutes. She doesn't even notice the accidents in the house now. She needs help up the stairs to the bed, sometimes prefers to just sleep in the living room where it's easier for her to pace, drink water, pace at night. Bix sniffs her surgery scar - interested, concerned - then her swollen lymph node, then her head. One day you look up from your phone to see him, who knows she prefers her space, touching one paw to her and looking directly at you. She doesn't even protest. This seems portentous and sad, even as you argue with yourself that you anthropomorphize your pets too much. He was probably just stretching.

A dog's sense of smell is 10,000x better than a human's. And they probably aren't living in denial.

She hasn't, you realize, stretched out on her back in some time. Weeks. Months, maybe. A rabbit freezes unnoticed as she limps by.

Now, when she puts her head on your foot, she is asking a question. Or maybe answering one. You've lived with her longer than any previous roommate.

Last day

You had her for three springs and she didn't make the fourth. 

You curse yourself for missing the first 10 or so springs she had without you, without knowing, maybe, that she was safe, that she didn't have to fight anyone, that she could bury her bones if she wanted and they'd be there for her later. 

What do I know about dogs?

A dog is a bottomless heart you pour your love into, without expectation, because she must be loved. A dog is a wounded glance that excoriates your shithead soul. A dog is a tail wagging, happy to see you, even when it hurts. A dog is a tentative nose boop, light as a spider, reminding you to put your damn phone down and go to sleep. 

A dog needs a space to dream of being happy, and a foot to nestle and a rabbit to chase. She needs someone to witness the time passing. She needs someone to love her for all the springs she has left in her, right up until the second that her impressive velvet jaw goes heavy in your hand and she finally doesn't feel the arthritis anymore. 

A dog is brief as a good dream, and you must skritch it with both hands while you can.

Miss you forever, Beulah Belle. Thank you for teaching me to walk a little slower, and love a little faster.

besos,

Astrid

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

Fuzzy Resolution: A Year in Review

....in which we acknowledge that 2017 was pretty unproductive, but vow to reform in the new year.

Fortunately for me, I do not make a living blogging, because I would starve.

In my defense, though, I was mysteriously blocked from logging into the Blahg for some time, and while it was not a difficult fix, in the end, it was an irritating and just-large enough obstacle that it overwhelmed my desire to hear myself talk - I know! - in this forum.  Until today, when I was looking for something to enable a vigorous procrastination session that involved neither any of my Four Adult Tasks (groceries, laundry, garbage and dishes); nor Work, which is something I generally do not deign to do on days off.

And here we are, all logged in like a real blogger!  Happy 2018, all!

So a few things happened this year that were not recorded:

First, in Spring, was a quilt for my old workmate and karaoke comrade-at-arms, Grassie.  I fully intend to get my shit together to write her the post I promised all those months ago.  But meanwhile, she had asked for a Kaffe Fasset pattern called StripeScape which used a heaping helping of his stripey, serape-esque fabrics which were really nice to work with. And this came together pretty quickly, which made me so exuberant that I decided I should hand-quilt it.  Yipes!  I had hand-quilted only Nene's Winding Ways prior to this, and while I really enjoy the process, there was FAR MORE hand-quilting in Grassie's Serape Quilt, I think, because it took me so, so, SO long to finish it.  And even when I gave it to here there was a section at the bottom that was not finished.....er, in homage to how our friendship will always be a work in progress, or some shit, I dunno, you fill in the gaps.  Anyway, here it is, better blog post to follow, Grassie!!

You can enlarge this to see the hand stitches, which follow the stripe directions in straight lines at about 1" apart. Whew! Also, most of my pictures of the progress on this one seem to have gone AWOL.  Stay tuned for those (I hope).

And then my niece Boolia had her Bat Mitvah in the summer - her quilt was what I considered a "sophisticated riot" of color which is, indeed, what Boolia is herself.   Sadly for me, I did not realize her BM colors were rose (which is part of her name) and silver, or something? So this quilt is decidedly not that, and is probably as opposite to that as you can possibly get and still be within the visible light spectrum, but hopefully still fills the bill for a young lady starting on her journey through the dark forests of teenager-hood, a time both for becoming more sophisticated (well, supposedly) and also for having a riot.  This navy sashed stars quilt is not a formal pattern but there are a lot of these kinds of star around - the Scrap-Jar Stars I made for Colt in 2016 is similar, though this one interchanges the solid background with the patterned colors on alternate blocks for a jolly dappled effect.  (How often do you get to use "jolly," outside of Jolly Old Saint Nick or For She's a Jolly Good Fellow? Jolly good show!)

(In the mix here was also Gramsy's Granny Squares quilt, which I already blogged about, and apparently also E & M's Butter-Churnin' Hourglass quilt was also sent in 2017, though it seems to me I finished that over the holiday break last year, but whatever.)

Lastly on the quilt front, my cousin CC had, some time ago, asked me to make a quilt for her partner Sher, which was supposed to be a Christmas present, but, um, is at least going to make it for Sher's birthday this coming week, I understand.  I was very pleased with this despite some minor emergencies that gave me something to fix on New Years Day.  As it turns out, though, it was also not a difficult fix, though it did cause me some angsty hyperventilation, AND gave me some new confidence about fixing my inevitable fuck-ups in the future, because once you've put a quilt together it's actually pretty easy to take it apart again, and restitch as needed.  Design-wise, CC was looking for "clean, flowing lines" and maybe mid-century or Art Deco, which left a pretty wide open field to work with. So this is a technique called a French Braid and the pattern "Thanks, Frank," by the venerable documenter of French Braiding, Jane Hardy Miller, is intended to evoke the Prairie School leaded-glass stylings of Frank Lloyd Wright, whose work spanned (and changed interestingly during) the period from Arts & Crafts to Mid Century.

If you're thinking this progression of colors would trigger my ColorStress (TM), you are correct.

The original of this in Miller's book was mostly dark and cool feeling, so I warmed it up with some earthy bricks and olives and browns, and used a background which was intended to evoke crackled old glass but is actually pebbles, and made the whole thing surprisingly (to me) traditional looking. It was also a little weirdly skinny, despite my adding extra borders.   I really like the thin black stained-glass-reminiscent sashing around the colors, though, and will probably use this technique again someday.

Finished crinkle, with beadboard-esque "piano key" vertical quilting. The back is an orangey flannel.

And finally, in related sewing news, I have a new friend which I ordered to be delivered to me here in NYC, who arrived in September, the first of many visitors to this NYC apartment!  Her name is Suki, and she is a Juki quilting machine, and she is the bomb.  She is about 3x the bomb that my old trusty Singer was, if you count bombness in dollars, but I love them both in their ways.  However, the Singer is tucked away in my storage unit at present, so Suki has been keeping me company on this NYC jaunt.  Though she is, if she will forgive me saying so, frickin' HEAVY.  Like myself, she is an semi-industrial workhorse.  She only does one thing (a straight stitch), but she has a powerhouse motor that makes short work of bulky seams, and has an elegant elongated throat (the hole between the upright part of the machine and the needle mechanism) so I can stuff more quilt in there and not wrestle with sewing on the middle of the quilts so much. She also has an easy thread-clipping mechanism and a needle threader for these old eyes, speed control, and is generally a cut above in all respects.  We are still working on some tension issues (thread tension, that is) but I think she's settling in nicely.  Welcome, Suki!

All function, no fuss.  Look at that speed control to the far right - I am definitely more turtle than rabbit.

And looking at this Blahg I realize I literally only posted twice last year, and that is kinda sad - not because I make a living blogging, because I do not, but because the aim of my blahg is love letters to friends, and I have many, many more of those to write.  This year was a bit of a downer, politically, plus I was on the road a bit more and in more different places, for less time in each, than last year.....but excuses be damned, I aim to be more productive this year; and to keep making inroads into this hobby which has brought me such delight, and provided a way to share warm fuzzies with my peeps.

Things to try in the New Year:

1. More hand stitching. It takes for-fucking-ever, but it is so very satisfying.
2. Along with that, i'd like to do some Sashiko patterns, perhaps working my way up to doing the traditional white thread on indigo fabric thing (that will REALLY show all the mistakes).  I just love the geometric precision coupled with the utilitarian, but nevertheless incredibly beautiful, Japanese art form.  Um. Anyone have a yakuta whose seams need some patching/reinforcing?

Traditional forms: Simple Sashiko, Hitomezashi, and Kogin, picture from Studio Aika blog

3. Applique.  The only applique I've really done was the Flag of Mikuador, but there's a wealth of patterns out there, traditional and modern, that have piqued my interest in this fundamental fabric craft.
4. And speaking of Mikuador, my brother and fam took the plunge and bought an old farmhouse on some acreage out aways in NW IL.  And a farmlet needs a barn quilt, i.e.,  a quilt pattern painted on wood and hung from a barn.... which is a whole 'nother artform, really, but I have that in my sights for spring, hopefully.  A quick Google search will come up with hundreds of barn quilts for you to peruse if you are so inclined (none, it must be said, that look anything like the Flag of Mikuador.  Viva!)

Random barn quilt from Guthrie Center, IA (picture posted here in 2011)

5. Free Motion Quilting.  I've avoided it for many reasons, but Suki the Juki gives me a new inspiration to try it again - also, she comes with a bunch of different FM quilting feet, and I just bought myself some new FM rulers, so I believe the die is cast for FMQ2018.  (I actually had a dream last night that I bought a new FM quilting ruler. It was purple.  It's amazing how deep and complex my subconscious is.)
6. .....and, of course, to continue writing thank you letters to my beloveds, so many of whom I still would like to send a humble fabricky offering and a few fond phrases. Don't know where I'd be without ya, peeps!  As the wise men of Extreme once, confusingly, put it: "More than words is all you have to do (sic) to make it real."  But since I have few enough opportunities to show anyone anything in person these days, I will have to make do with the words themselves, stuffed between layers of fabric and sent to you from the UPS STORE of my HEART.

I love you easily as much as this naked kewpie doll does.

As ever, Besos, Merry Craftsmas, and Happy New quilts Years to all,

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.

Laissez Les Bon Temps Rouler While You Still Can: A Late Celebration

....because they found love in a hopeless place.

I'll get political here in a sec, fair warning.  It's been that kind of week.

Back in the carefree, liberated days of March, 2016, these two fine gentlemen got married, because they are in love, and they wanted to celebrate that love with their loved ones....and because it was finally legal for them to do so.

This is grainy because my phone camera is crap, but also
possibly because I was trembling with joy when I took it.
Remember the bow ties. Those show up later.

I know JJ through his ex, an old college chum, and even though that is over now I am pleased to keep custody of both of them.  JJ is one of those organizers of people...because it was his job, for one thing, but it's also his nature to gather up the loose elements of disparate groups and throw them all together onto the porch and fuse them together with some wine and a string of christmas lights for an excellent dinner party.  It was JJ who up and moved from his wintery, urban-midwestern perch to New Orleans, convincing 4 of his besties to go as well, all owing to a dream he had that they had found happiness there.  He is a sterling host, an unfailingly generous friend, a devout lover of this cashew brittle I make every Christmas, and a mysterious jack of all trades that I'm pretty sure makes things happen with just the force of his mind.

And when I refer to him as a "jack of all trades," I mean the trades part quite literally, since he is a carpenter of some note but also a mason (the stone kind, not the Dan Brown kind, though...maybe! who the hell knows?), a gardener, an electrician, a restorer of all things vintage, and a tinkerer down to his very bones.  It was JJ who stepped up when I was fumbling my way through the last stages of a kitchen renovation, having to sell my condo - sweeping in, in a flurry of drills and circular saws and concrete mixing and levels to get me something presentable to sell in a matter of hours - the only reason my place sold when I needed it to, for which timely magnanimity I am forever grateful.  (Shout out also to the Bean's husband Senor "Sleepy" Fitzgerald, who hung my wall cabinets on brick with some fancy French cleats.)  So JJ was already due a Quilt of Gratitude anyway, but then, a wedding on top of it?  Get cracking, Astrid!

A hole in my kitchen brick wall, patched and still wet, by Mason JJ.
(It blended much more than this flash makes it appear).

The front of my island, fashioned out of leftover cabinet doors, by Carpenter JJ.

To my dismay, I haven't gotten to know Chris, JJ's betrothed, very well yet, apart from a brief pizza-n-beer outing and some good chats on FB. (And he has joined the select group of People With Whose Families I Routinely Argue on FB, because I have impulse control issues.) But I can tell he is wonderful: because he makes JJ happy, sure, but more vitally because of his measured equanimity in the face of puzzling callousness from people he loves and who love him; and his refusal to be anything other than who he is - a good man, in love, with a steady job and convictions he will defend to the end -  which should clearly be enough for anyone, and is definitely just the right cocktail for JJ.

ANYWAY: To the shock of no one who has read past posts, this gift was late.....7 months late. I had been plotting a quilt for them for some time before that, but I could never get it quite right - some hyper-rainbow-y attempts were set aside midway through the process as being too dissimilar to the proud, out, but nevertheless only moderately flamboyant couple it was for.  It's not every gay activist who wants a rainbow-brite bedspread in his spare-room, surely.  (And why SHOULD it have to be a statement of identity - why can't they just be married in peace and have an ugly damn quilt made by an old friend for the fricking spare-room, already?)  What could I make for them that was a little closer to their taste in, say, clothes, furniture, paint color, and general aesthetic, but still acknowledge the momentous (and, sadly, still brave) decision to unite as a matter of public record?

And so this is where I ended up.

Not quite large enough for the king-size bed.  Sorry, that picture is kind of dark.

The front is a old traditional pattern (I do favor the traditionals for wedding quilts) sometimes called Trip Around the World.  It's done in scrappy grays, some from men's shirt material, many of which were included in the first quilt I ever made - which quilt, coincidentally, I hand-bound at JJ's first N'awlins house, sitting in the sunshine on his back porch, listening to him putter around cleaning up old bikes to sell, after a night of raucous, farty, whiskey-fueled games of Trains some number of Thanksgivings ago.  (Thanksgivings were kind of JJ's thing, collecting many "orphans" who didn't want to, or couldn't, go home for the holidays.  Though I had a perfectly delightful family to go home to and no one second guessing my sexual orientation, I did enjoy their Orphan Thanksgivings, because they were fun as hell, and also because the food was second in fabulousness only to the company.)

If you haven't played Trains before, I recommend it.

Anyway, somehow that particular fabric reappearing in JJ's wedding quilt feels fitting, a circle completed - but also, these gradations shade from light to dark and back again, an apt summation of marriage if ever there was one (from what I can tell, being a single girl and all.)  And, perhaps as importantly, they will hide either the black or the white hairs of their Dalmatian, Lucky....though hairs have a way of finding their most opposite-colored fabrics to land on, which a regularity that suggests an actual Law of Physics, I dunno.

Not actually Lucky, but still a menace to white AND black AND gray fabrics.  And purple, forget about it.

The back is a stretch of startling, shiny purple cotton sateen from the Stash of the Unknown Benefactress, which shade I have mentally dubbed "Prince Goes To Mardi Gras."  The binding is mostly a nice N'awlins green, with a tiny 3-leaf botanical print, that will stand as my fleur-de-lis analog, and a little bit of gold binding thrown in on one side to complete the trifecta of carnival colors (but not much gold because light colors don't wear very well on the edge of quilts, as I discovered to my great regret.)

Purple Rain Down on Bourbon Street

Purple for Justice, Green for Faith, and Gold for Power.

But Astrid, you may be saying, what part of this quilt *does* shout "#lovewins!" so that all can hear it?  Especially now, the week we have found out our new president elect is not someone who will bear the rainbow standard going forward, but fosters a divisiveness that puts my gay friends and family at risk from people wearing homophobia openly and proudly, emboldened by an environment of xenophobia and mistrust?

It's not a grand statement, per se, but it's here, in the quilting, where I used a multi-colored variegated thread called "Over the Rainbow."

You can't see it much here, but Judy Garland would be proud.

You can see a bit more of the colors here, from the back.

My sewing machine and my skills were really not cooperating so some of the sewing is just...well, it's what I would term "bad," if I were to be judging this quilt for show.  Many of the quilting intersections ended up getting tucked, which fortuitously created a sort of intentional-looking ruching in spots; and the stitch length varies wildly from "teeny weeny" to "yeah, that's not going to stay in."  But though some of these stitches may not hold, I figure of the thousands of loops that comprise all the stitching, *most* of it will keep the rest of it together.  And I fell back, of course, on my very favorite wine-glass/orange-peel pattern, because wine-glass pattern!  I love it so.

A bit o festive green to hint at the party in the back.

And here, in the label, the bowties that my gents wore on their wedding day (bow ties are *also* kind of JJ's thing, a legacy from his own preppified youth and, let's be honest, the 80s):

From before I attached it to the quilt....attempted font based on
the wedding invitation...bow ties based on my boys' finery!

And in a week where they have discovered that their very marriage could be under fire from the new regime - don't believe me? "Cultural Warrior" and Governor-cum-VP-Pence wanted to defund AIDS clinics for promoting a dangerous lifestyle, ferchrissakes - I have finally finished their quilt: bits of light and dark, like clouds passing over a midwestern field of snow, underlaid by the shiny escapist promise of a midwinter Mardi Gras parade (and a good pattern for a time when many of my friends are contemplating their own four-year Trip Around the World, or creating their own wine glass patterns with greater frequency....); and all stitched together by the power of a single, fragile rainbow thread that nevertheless, woven over and under a hundred, a thousand times, ten thousand times, ties together the shifting layers into a cohesive warmth, as welcoming as dinner party christmas lights; or a new home town where you have found a dream of happiness; or a husband's embrace at the end of a day of anxiety and frustration.

Beautiful photo by Michele Encar, used with kind permission. 

And though New Orleans is only a tiny anomaly in reddest Louisiana, and not free of homophobic assaults, I trust that their adoptive city may provide some safe harbor.....or, failing that, one hell of a party in our darkest days to come, akin to Paris during the occupation by Germany, where the wine and the resistance flowed freely (unless you were Jewish, of course).  Sign me up for *that* float, boys!

So a belated toast to you, JJ and Chris - I wish I could cocoon you in the safety you felt among the celebrants of your beautiful wedding, that lovely March night in NOLA when we all really believed It Would Get Better.  But in lieu of that, a humble gift of love and ally-ship: good for a spare room, or for farting under while eating cashew brittle (or Toffi-Fay) or for wrapping yourself in to play Trains on the back porch; and hopefully you know that in wanting to reflect your identities I do not mean to tie you to a stereotype, but honor who you are.  And in honor of what you've both gone through, and what others who are denied a family or a place at the Thanksgiving table might experience, I also made a wee donation in your name....love you guys, and keep the faith.  Numbers, history, and the inexorable tide of demographics and time is on our side.

Oh....and about those hyper-rainbow quilts that were started but rejected as wedding gifts for being too TOO colorful?....those will find a home in a Community Center like this one, too, if they will have it; or a hospice care, or wherever those colors can proclaim to someone, even if they don't see it happening every day, that #lovewins.  Because it must, and because I believe that it will; and because I can, in a small way, contribute something to make sure it does.

Dusting off some old rainbows.

Besos, always and always,

Astrid.