Beautiful crisp Tuesday and I’m out and around trying to do errands.
Bad news: if you have a stash of real sequins, think long and hard before clearing them out to make room for something else. Two big craft stores = nothing but kiddy type sequins. Not much better in the small bead sections.
Good news: new Natalie Merchant album out and downloading as I type.
In quilting news, the quilting is done and let the hand work begin.
In “seen around” category, father and grandfather trying to explain facts of life to entitled twenty-something guy so he doesn’t quit in a blaze from his grocery store job. Lol. Not sure the advice will be taken.
In other good news in a fit of longing to see the floor of my back sewing room I excavated a bit, threw out a bag, recycled another bag’s worth… And found something I’d been looking for on the web for a number of years. Syllabi and course tips from a senior art studio class in Portland Oregon.
Years later, after much searching and not enough to go on, there I was, looking at four sheets printed out on January 12, 2001. What was on the sheets was just as good as I remembered it. I sat right down and converted the paper bound words to a digital form. Then I sat down and found the author, still teaching in Portland and still a working artist and I sent him an email of thanks, long overdue.
So yeah, all that and a bit more work space.
Here’s why you should push on through the sometimes dry, sometimes biblical, sometimes ridiculous appendices at the end of books. OK, sometimes they are ridiculously dry and stupid or just reference and bibliography. Fine.
But tonight, creeping toward the end of the audiobook version of Lord of the Rings, deep deep in the appendices, the story of Arwen, daughter of Elrond, Evenstar of the Elves, and Aragorn, sixteenth Chieftain of the Dúnedain, the Rangers of the North, heir of Isildur and rightful claimant to the thrones of Arnor and Gondor, crowned as King Elessar or Elfstone.
Many tears were shed by me as their story unfolded and fell open to its ending.
When I’m in the throes of quilting something, you might have noticed that I don’t post much but a stream of bobbin counts, about the only measure of progress that is handy and without figuring what percentage of the thing is quilted.
Big parts of quilting are, in fact, tied up with mathematics and arithmetic. What size, how to cut efficiently, how many sewn, how many still to sew, and how many bobbins.
When November comes around, it’s all about the word count. 1667 words a day gets you there to 50,000 words by the night of November 30th. Not an easy number to hit every day but a reachable goal. So in November, you get reports of how many words written or worse yet, not much of a report other than the little progress bar over there in the side bar.
It occurred to me the other day that the quilters in my circle probably roll their eyes during April’s NaPoWriMo, a month of writing at least a poem a day and during November’s push to reach 50,000 words by the arrival of December first.
Meanwhile, the writers I’ve encountered along the way probably watched the progression of this current bobbin count and thought “what the heck? That woman is out of her freakin’ mind!”
Yup, that’s me, just doing my normal weirdnesses, again.
Out-spread, angry wings
Quacking protest against sky
Blackbird torments hawk.Buff white, angry wings
Bleating protests high wheeling
Persistent blackbird
Big hawk, really light underwings.
Small blackbird everywhere at once.
It sounded like a duck quacking, sadly.
Anything you cannot relinquish when it has outlived its usefulness possesses you, and in this materialistic age a great many of us are possessed by our possessions.
