Not So Smug Now

Day 145: Having come away from my first dose of the Moderna COVID vaccine with nothing more than a sore arm, I was hoping I'd breeze through the second half as easily. Nope. By bedtime (early) last night, I was beginning to have chills and aches. By midnight, there wasn't a muscle in my body which didn't feel like I'd been on the losing end of a bar brawl. Even my hand muscles hurt! A blinding headache accompanied the other symptoms, my eyes very light-sensitive. This morning, I'm somewhat improved, but definitely a long way from "perky." In fact, I only got up in order to check in with friends and family, all of whom know what it takes to lay me low.

A Quilt Of Cats

Day 311: Yeah, yeah, you're getting tired of quilt pictures, but in case you hadn't noticed, we're in the middle of a pandemic and I'm not going anywhere. Besides, this merits celebrating. I began cutting the pieces for this Cathedral Window "Kitty Quilt" on July 20, and finished tying it (tacking at the "meets" to secure the top to the backing and batting) just after dinner last night, a mere 30 days from start to finish. It was not the only project on my agenda, either. In between bouts of hand-stitching kitties into their frames, I was also hand-quilting my friend Mousie's heirloom quilt as well as cutting and piecing the hexagons I posted yesterday.

I am no stranger to social isolation. I spent most of my married life at home, doing much the same as I am doing in COVID times, i.e., needlework, reading, gardening, walking, bicycling. I did not "neighbour" or go visiting, and no one expected it of me because I did not drive, an excuse I found quite handy to justify my naturally anti-social attitude. In fact, since my husband worked nights, our paths generally crossed for no more than an hour or two each day, a situation which suited me just fine. He had a television set in his den; I never watched it, preferring the sounds of birds, rain and wind outside our prairie home to the gabble of nonsense the annoying box seemed to emit. The merits of isolation far outweigh its bad points, to my way of thinking. I amuse myself with the hand-work I love doing, and select friends benefit from the results. I keep very little of it for myself, but the Kitty Quilt will be an exception. It's mine, all mine...well, and Tippy's, because he helped.

Kitty Windows

Day 290: Handwork on the kitty quilt is proceeding much more quickly than I'd expected. By bedtime last night, I'd sewn a total of ten prints into their frames, a total of six for the day. The quilt has 72 "windows" to fill, so even if I only do four per day, I could be done in under a month. To me, this is the fun part of making a quilt: hand-sewing. I find machine work tedious and monotonous, words which I've heard many people use in reference to hand-stitching, ironically. A cozy, homey feeling accompanies sitting with a piece of fabric in your lap, meticulously placing each tiny stitch so that it is almost invisible. As you watch the project develop beneath your hands, a sense of pride in your workmanship wells up and you find yourself striving for perfection without being conscious that you are doing so. Memories rise: a patient grandmother teaching a four-year old to "go over four threads and back two" to form a perfect stem stitch on an embroidered handkerchief, or putting three winds around the needle for a neat French knot. The hours slip by, and the forty minutes it took to sew one print into its frame seems negligible when balanced against the prospect of your work becoming an heirloom to be passed down through generations, or hopefully so. I find myself wondering: have I done enough handwork that one piece will survive into the next century? Will something of my stitchery endure beyond my time on the earth? I'd like to think it will.

Cathedral Window Kitty Quilt

Day 283: "Desperate times call for desperate measures," and living in pandemic days has necessitated breaking one of my life-rules, the one which says, "You cannot have two projects of any one type going at the same time. One must be finished before another is begun." In part, I can justify why I have four quilts in progress currently, two of which are in the "hand-quilting" phase and two which are in the "piecing" phase. Mousie's grandmother's quilt replaced Kevin's son's on the frame because it is a time-value project. When I reach the point where only two blocks remain to be stitched, I'll shift back over to Daniel's. The orange quilt is at the point where it requires a trip to the fabric store, and since that won't be on the calendar any time soon, I started a "kitty quilt" to replace the one I donated to the Nisqually Land Trust.

Cutting fabrics is time-consuming and certainly not the most exciting part of putting a quilt together. At this size, the quilt requires 168 squares of the background fabric (light aqua) and 288 squares of white. The white squares form the "windows," and must be folded and pressed on the diagonal so that the folded edges can be turned back over the prints. A rotary cutter makes this part of the project go faster. Mind your fingers while you're ironing those points, though! There are other methods to ensure accuracy, but I find this one works best for me. Next, pin the white triangles to the background fabric and stitch them in place. Then join the squares until you have a strip either as wide or as long as your quilt will be. The outermost squares only have one white triangle applied, leaving half the background fabric to form a nice border around the quilt. Once two strips of squares are made, you're ready to join them. This is where the "meets" get a little tricky. The points of the triangles should come together perfectly, so accurate pinning is mandatory. Join strips until your quilt is the desired size. Then the real fun begins: adding the prints. I like to cut the prints 1/2" larger than the white and aqua squares so that I don't have to fuss with the corners where stitching can sometimes be very close to the cut edge. Once you have the prints stitched in (hand-work!), you're ready to batt, back and bind. I rather suspect I'll have this one done before I finish any of the other three.

Kitty Quilt

Day 29: The Kitty Quilt is done! It was stitched entirely on the machine, a process which has left me older and wiser. Never again will I try to wrestle the bulk of half a double-bed sized quilt through the arch of my small standard sewing machine, driving pins through my fingers and into the undersides of my forearms in the process. I am not entirely happy with the result which, owing to the struggle involved, created uneven and wobbly stitching, less than perfect "meets" where the window frames come together. Still, the combination of coloured background and white frames is not possible if using the traditional piecing method for Cathedral Window, and it was that look which appealed to me and why I made the attempt. That said, it turned out fairly well for not having the proper equipment to assemble it. I have enough kitty prints to make another quilt (perhaps in a different style), so now I am debating: keep it, or donate it to the Nisqually Land Trust's fund-raiser auction?

Home Arts

Day 348: An unexpected windfall of Asian pears from my botany partner Joe set Tuesday's course of action. I spent the morning peeling them (a process which dyed my fingers a lovely shade of orange), and then dragged out the water-bath canner and my biggest cook-pot which was necessary to accommodate sixteen cups of pear bits. I prefer to chunk them up rather than canning halves or slices; you get more in the jar, and fewer jars require less storage space. I put them up in pints rather than quarts so I can parse them out judiciously over the winter months. That said, I've never canned Asian pears before and was unsure how long to process the firmer fruit, so gave them a slightly longer boil in light syrup than I'd have given standard pears followed by twenty minutes in the water-bath. A dose of ascorbic/citric acid product will keep them from turning brown. Oh yeah, that's the kitty quilt in the background. I'm a little over half done with the machine-quilting.