Mooving on up...

Just ordered my first set of Moo cards and am very excited. It's something I've wanted to do or a while, but I kept putting it off thinking I should wait until I had a blog to list. Above are a few of the pix I went with. The cards should arrive just in time for my first ever trip to Rhinebeck, yay!

Not a thrilling post for you, I bet, but a heads-up that I'll have loads of cool stuff to show you next month. And if I hand out enough cards at the festival, there might even be a few more of you out there reading those future posts.

My first quilt - done!

When I wrote about the 10-year quilt it completely skipped my mind that it is, in fact, my first quilt. Today is monumentous in that I have actually completed said monstrosity. As I finished the hand-binding and was confronted with some tragically contorted puckering I suddenly realized, "hey, I've never done this before!" and magically my shame at producing something so gruesome was transformed to knowing smugness: I had set the bar so low, my next quilt was bound to be much improved.

Also, I'll never again underestimate the value of basting!

First things first

It's match day (COYS!) and that means a sensible breakfast is in order before we go hit our local. Today it's sourdough johnny cakes. I started with Simply Homemaking’s recipe but tweaked as follows:
1/2 C 100% rye sourdough starter*
1 egg
3/4 C whole milk (cow’s)
1t salt
1 C corn meal
2 t baking soda
2T sugar
2T maple syrup
2T melted bacon fat

*I don’t pay much attention to the hydration of my starter; when I feed it I don’t measure anything. I just add some rye flour & water and give it a good stir. I’d say it generally has the consistency of muffin batter: thick yet pourable.

They were tasty, really tasty!

Ear crack

Stuck in my head like crazy for days, but so far I don't really mind.

Work in progress

I'm currently improvising a top-down raglan tee. If all goes well it could be my first (self)published pattern. Here's a peek:

Ten-year quilt

Here's a post I drafted over a week ago. Things didn't go my way so I didn't publish it, until now:

I started a quilt 12 September, 2001. I needed to do something so I gathered all the blue fabrics in the apartment. I cut up PJs, bed linens and, with permissions, husband's shirts. Nothing clever or fancy, just 7" squares. I worked straight and had the top pieced into strips in no time. Mr fab helped decide the order for joining the strips and the top was done day one.

Today it's been 10 years since I started that quilt and God help me if it's not done by the end of this day. As with starting this blog, a desire to do things perfectly made for years of planning and false starts followed by periods of neglect. Originally I intended to hand-quilt this one but the progress was so painfully slow that I might actually die before I saw the project completed.

Perfectionism yields to the need to finish something. Having decided to machine quilt, it only took three intense hours with the stitch ripper to undo nine years of hand stitching. This quilt isn't lovely or well made (guess who decided to skip basting?). Really, it's an ugly mess of unintentional bunching and the scars of original stitches. But these flaws suit the spirit of this project and won't keep the quilt from keeping me warm and comforting me.

Sometimes it's tough to let go of how you want something to be and accept it for what it is and move on.

Ah, the irony

I did set out to finish the thing same day only to realize I was short about five yards on binding. Five yards! I was beat. I gave up. Then I reflected on the folly of my deadline. More perfectionism? OCD? Who cares about the completion date? Would a quilt that took exactly ten years to complete be any less gruesome than this one's going to be? Why do I get myself worked up over this stuff?

At any rate, the 12th came and went and that quilt is still unfinished. Although I am happy to report that I picked up plenty of binding last weekend so who knows, you might get to see the wretched thing in all its finished glory sometime soon. Watch this space!