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

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

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

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

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

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

A Little Skewed, A Little Scrappy, A Little Scattered: Some Reflections

...being a look at how the wretched world bleeds into my peaceful hobby, and the people who get me through.

A while back, after I started saving and cutting up my scraps for easy use, I fell in love with the excellent Scrap-Jar Stars quilt by Amber at Gigi's Thimble.  I was idly testing some of those star blocks, not sure who they might be suited for, when my co-worker Colt stopped by my apartment and saw them up on the design wall.  "Beautiful!" he declared. "The colors match my living room."  Well that was easy. Sold!

Scrap Jar Stars: cool blues, greys and whites, with the odd green and purple

Design notes: The single squares floating around outside of the stars are actually

Mint, Mustard, and Diamonds: The Sophisticated Baby

....being a quick post for a quick binkie for a co-worker, who would probably rather I didn't.

So my co-worker Molls is preggo, and despite working with her 4 days a week since like February, for the longest time *I did not notice.*  This is because I am a poor observer of things, yes, but also because she is just about the least pregnant person you're liable to run across - not from a physical perspective, but from her general attitude.  She'd literally never said a single thing about it in my hearing at work, which I respect deeply: because, in general, it's nobody's life-changing undertaking but her own (and her hubby's) and she should not feel the NEED to offer it up for public consumption or have a fuss made if she'd rather avoid the whole being-the-cynosure-of-all-eyes bit.  And also because some folks get so so weird about it: I have witnessed things said to, and invasions of personal space of, pregnant women more times than I can count.  We speculated about the cultural origins of this, perhaps dating from when your offspring was becoming part of a smaller community that might end up supporting him/her, or the fear-tinged anticipation of a time when surviving birth was a pretty spectacular feat in itself. Or perhaps it is just the holdover notion that women are common property and their job is incubation.  I confess my own curiosity about what Molls thinks of the whole motherhood thing had me biting my tongue on several questions that were just, frankly, none of my damn business (though a few leaked out.)

Whatever the source, it results in encounters like