Always Ridiculous

So the baby quilt was given and I got a little teary when she opened it up. And I made her take a picture with me afterwards. I'm so demanding.I also had decided the day before that I hadn't made anything to memorialize the fact that she and I went to college together so, guess what? I stayed up until 2 am or so making another baby kimono in our school colors. I like to think of it as "baby's first beer jacket" which made sense only to me and her and might have made all of the other guests at the shower look at us a little strangely when I said that out loud. (At reunions every five years we get new outfits called beer jackets, because there's lots of beer consumed at reunions. Really, it's just a class uniform.)
So, there it is an orange and black baby kimono that she'll probably never wear because I have referred to it as a beer jacket. And yet? I'm still amused.

Compounding the ridiculousness, I've been staying up late the last few days working on a gift for my former roommate who's birthday was yesterday but we're meeting downtown for a concert and picnic this evening. But, folks, Ikea fabric? Some of it is really fun. I might have bought quite a bit on Saturday when I stopped in there. And that was exercising some restraint. Pictures of the newest creation will probably go up on Flickr soon.

And hey, tomorrow the Brother and Brother's girlfriend arrive. I have done... oh... nothing much to get ready for their visit. Good thing I have all day tomorrow before they arrive. I think they arrive in the evening...

But posting will be (and has been) light. So sorry. My brain is working, I promise.

Also! 500th Post coming up! That's exciting and might involve some exciting participation from y'all and fabulous prizes.

Done and Done

The baby quilt is finished!

I'm always a little in awe of what I find I can do if I put my mind to it. I didn't make a good decision on the backing material so it's stripey. Hand quilting on stripey material may not be the wisest thing. Every little wobbley line is pretty evident. I had so much backing material that I made a baby kimono from a tutorial found here: http://habitual.wordpress.com/tutorials/. It's kinda crazy looking. I just decided this morning that I need to make a black and orange one with a tiger embroidered on it. So I guess I need to find a tiger pattern that will workAnd all signed. When I thought about what I should put, name, date, whatever, the Spanish wouldn't leave my head. Her parents are very international so I can only imagine that she will be as well.
Anyways, I'm a little pleased with myself. I've learned a lot with this whole experiment and can certainly see myself making another one or two in the near future. Especially since there's another baby on the way in December.

I could have rolled around on them For. Ever.

I have a bad habit. OK, I have several bad habits. But one of them is buying something and then not using it for a long time. Mostly because I'm worried to spoil the whole newness of it. I've done this with art supplies - waiting a year or two to try out new paints. I've done this with bathroom rugs - God forbid my dirty toes touch it before I hit the shower.

One of my most recent transgressions has been a set of sheets I bought, oh, back in August or September. They were on sale at Target ($13) and I had just gotten this new bed for which I thought new sheets might be nice. So I snatched them up and they've just been sitting around my house, staring at me. And every once in a while I think, "I should use those someday." Well, after Sunday's adventures, and finally getting the sheets and mattress pad and pillow covers and bedspread washed, I decided I might as well make the bed that hadn't been made since Wednesday morning (when I found out about my car). And I used these sheets that were new but not so new. Holy softness people! They're fantabulous! I kept petting them in wonderment as I worked on the quilt. I know, I'm weird.

It could have been worse

The weekend, well, it could have been worse. I had been hoping to get down to Hyde Park to see some friends do a benefit concert on Friday night but because of transportation issues, that idea was rendered near impossible. But, I did stop at the fabric store on my way home from work (after walking two blocks in the rain) and picked up some really fun fabric for cheap. I might need to find a skirt pattern for some of it that I bought, it's just that cute. Saturday I saw some friends and heard some good discussion on a topic that has been burning in my ear for a few weeks. Today I woke up and worked on the binding for the quilt. That is just a lot of work my friends, making binding. And I told myself that I needed to get the stuff washed that I had been planning to do this past week at my friend's house. If only I had gotten up from the quilting work earlier, it might not have been a problem. But the laundry room in my building has very limited facilities. Two washers working (of four) on a good day. When I got down there someone was just starting a couple of loads. So I trundled off to the laundromat a block away. Got my loads started. Came back home. Waited for about 45 minutes before I left again.

Except that I forgot my keys.
To my apartment.

And my phone. To call the janitor.

Noone has an extra set of keys these days, it just doesn't seem to make sense. Although an hour away is better than having noone. So there was just a sense of panic in my head. What do I do? First, I tried to break in. I did only lock the regular lock, not the dead bolt. If only I had a credit card, maybe I could break in. But I had nothing like that on me.

The next best option seemed to be that I could visit the corner store in my building. They should have the janitor's number and a phone. Which they did. Except that the normal guy is away because it's his day off and the person that is answering his phone is gone for the next two or three hours maybe. So, really, no definite time that I could meet him to get him to unlock my door. And I had laundry I was working on. So I waited. And I waited some more. I finished my laundry but then, where do I go with it? Thankfully, just as I was arriving to my door where I was going to wait some more, hoping that someone in my entry was would just let me in to at least drop the laundry inside by my door, I ran into another girl in the building who I had had a nice chat with, ironically enough, in the laundry room a month or two ago. She let me sit in her apartment while she went to the market and then when she got back I finally got ahold of the janitor person and he was at home and I was able to meet with him to get my door unlocked.

It could have been worse. I could have had something on the stove or it could have been raining or lots of other things. Did I ever tell you the story of my father getting locked out of his apartment barefoot and his manager was out of town with noone subbing for her? Yeah. It could have been that.

But then tonight I remembered that It's Yours, Take It was today in the UK and I hopped online to look at pictures and thought that life, despite my recent misadventures, isn't all that bad. Here's one of mine with the people that took it home.

You just can't shut me up

I don't blog but very infrequently for weeks and now two posts in one day! I'm not quite sure what the deal is.

Anyways, despite my angst, I did send two pieces off to the It's Yours, Take It curators a few weeks ago. The first show is going up on Sunday in Southsea in the UK. Squeeeee! The guy who is putting together this show did a Fantastic job the last time so I'm convinced that it will be bigger and better and hopefully there will be pictures Sunday afternoon of some person who saw a painting I did and wanted to take it home. How exciting would that be?

Current Project

If you were once a college roommate of mine, you should not read this post. I don't think you know about my blog though, so I think it's all OK.

Yesterday I promised glimpses of my current project. It's a baby blanket for a dear friend who will have her first in early September. The shower is next weekend and I am woefully under the gun, as usual. I think I work better under pressure though.
In case you were wondering, the baby is a girl. Which might have made me dance around a bit in glee. So, it's a quilt, a disappearing nine patch is what the pattern is called. I embroidered the white cloth with patterns from Andrea Zuill. She has an Etsy shop where she sells some of her prints and patterns which can be embroidered. She also gives away a free pattern every month which is really generous of her. One of her favorite things to portray is children dressed up like animals, which is what this pattern is. We have a bear, a bird, a squirrel (pink so it's hard to see) and in the top left, a reindeer! Then I embroidered free hand in the little white squares. I'm particularly proud of my acorns to go with the squirrel. I am farther along than this. At this point I was using my couch as a board to move the squares around and make sure the colors were balanced. I think it's OK. I probably needed to have used a few more fabrics. The backing is a striped fabric. I didn't realize how stupid using a striped fabric would be. All the quilting going in vertical direction along with the stripes has to be straight - or else you can tell. So the quilting part takes a bit more precision this time around. Live and learn though.

So there you have it, the baby quilt for the sweet pea. More pictures when it's done.

Retail Therapy

So, I did a little spur of the moment shopping this afternoon while sitting at my desk. I've been thinking (a lot) lately that an iPod would be a nice thing to have. No, I'm one of the seven people in the US that doesn't walk around with headphones always in their ears. But, now with the whole needing to use public transportation due to the stealing of the car, I felt like I needed something to help with the commute with the other cattle, I mean people, on public transportation. So I bought a cheapo mp3 player just to make due for a while. I like the idea of downloading books and such to it to listen to as well as music. I'm a little concerned about the low rating but I think the person was being a little harsh. I'm not expecting a whole lot and the similar player without the fm tuner has much better ratings and it's more expensive? so hopefully it'll be good enough, and that's all I need right now, something good enough.

One of the most annoying things about the car being stolen was that I was right at the very end of a book on tape. Yes, I had a tape player in my car. Shut it. So now I DON'T KNOW what happened. And that is going to drive me nuts until I can find the book somewhere and read the last chapter or two.

Tomorrow I'll share the project I'm working on. Stay tuned.

Sigh...

So, I was at a conference Monday and yesterday and didn't need to drive. I just took the el downtown and it was quite nice. Except that this morning as I was looking for my car I discovered that it wasn't where I am So sure that I parked it on Sunday afternoon. Of course, thanks to a friend who is out of town for a few days and had lent me her house key to do some laundry in preparation for the impending fraternal visit, I was hauling around about three loads of laundry that I hoped to do during the day today (she lives very close to campus so I could pop over at lunch). I doubted my memory. Perhaps I had parked it somewhere else? But, it clearly wasn't where I thought it would be and I wasn't going to find it while hauling around all this laundry. I hiked up to my third floor apartment with the laundry and paused to catch my breath (did I mention we're in the midst of a 90+ heatwave? dear God, make it end soon) and searched online to see if maybe, just maybe, for some crazy reason, it had been towed. Nope. No records of that found.

Then I walked around the neighborhood, searching the five or six blocks where I will normally park my car to no avail.

I came to the inevitable conclusion.

My car was stolen.

How sucky is that?

Connectivity

When I left it was hard. Then I tried to visit about three months later. And that didn't go so well. Maybe six months to a year later, I wanted to see a friend and met up with her at the church after the service and that was pretty much agonizing. Because she knows everyone. And it was the Saturday night service (smaller and much more just hanging around talking after the service) and I just was uncomfortable the Whole time I was there waiting for her. But Sunday, after all the goings ons at the old place, I thought "Maybe. Maybe I can visit and not feel like it's a waste and not, then, feel like the worst person in the world because I think church is a waste of time."

It was okay. It was nice to see some folks that I hadn't seen in quite a while. And good to see people that I love but had to give up for a bit and have them know exactly why it was safe to visit. It was nice to know that I wasn't the only person with their hands up or singing their lungs out or that the possibility that there was someone else around with unnatural colors in their hair was much higher. It was good to see my friends and their kids and get hugs from those kids. That doesn't really happen at the other church. Not anymore anyways.

But I missed the drive down LSD and pretty view of Chicago. And there are a few folks from the other church I kinds miss too now, since I haven't been there in three weeks or so. And I guess that's a good thing.

They're a Waste of Money

Except they are really beautiful.
Hope your Fourth was full of good things like mine was.

Because I'm stupid

I keep forgetting to download some of my pictures from my trip to Tejas (and little side trip to OK) to share with y'all. I put them onto my laptop and have been editing them at home but because my internet connection there is unreliable (someone else's wireless that I can sometimes connect through) I haven't tried to share them. But because they're on my laptop I need to save them on my flash drive to bring them with me to work.

Another thing that I keep feeling stupid about is the difference between life and physical science. I need to figure this out for my job for something I do on a regular basis but I am constantly unsure as to how things like chemistry or geology or astronomy fit into those differentiation. Now I have something hanging on my bulletin board to help me. It's ridiculous. And I hate having to ask every time it comes up.

Oh, hey, I made cactus last night. No really, I cooked nopales. My little grocery store sells the whole cactus pad but also sells bags of it all cleaned and diced. I've never eaten it before so I don't know if I made it right or not. I consulted my father while I was visiting and he said that my abuelita made it sometimes and told me how she cooked it. It turned out O.K. But, like I said, because I have no idea how it's supposed to taste, I don't know if it's right.

Thirty-three

When your brother turns thirty-three, well, it makes you think a little bit. I mean, thirty-three. That seems pretty close to ancient (except on you gentle reader, on you thirty-three+ is fresh as a daisy and better smelling). And perhaps grown-up. Except that he's not. He's still my big brother that acts like the youngest child. He still tries to get away with crap and is excellent at trying to manipulate the situation. But he's also very thoughtful and caring. Nor is he a bad cook. He even cooked vegan enchiladas for his girlfriend last week. But he is now thirty-three. I gave him two awesome Burger King Return of the Jedi glasses that I found thrifting.

Part of what I did last week was figure out my mom's new computer. Her old one wasn't working much and so I was enlisted to move some files from old to new. While I was doing that I found these pictures of my brother with our maternal grandparents. It must have been some sort of anniversary celebration as they are wearing flowers. But they are very sweet pictures.