Thought of the day

maybe what looks like bravery to other people is just you doing what you know you have to do.

this is apropos of not much, just me thinking about how many people have told me how "brave" I am to have taken a job that is 700 miles from my nearest relative and how I came here not knowing anyone, not being married, and not even owning a car, just trusting that I could work stuff out. And from my perspective, how it was just my taking the best job available and settling stuff once I got moved.

Anyway.

I did do some craft-work this weekend, the biggest thing I did was to start a new quilt top. This one I am tentatively calling "Snowman Snapshots" because that's how it's coming out looking.

I am making it from fabric I bought after LAST Christmas (2002) and never got around to working up. (I decided, after much thought, that my New Year's Resolution for this year is going to be to take some of those stacks of fabric I have earmarked for quilt tops that I have planned out in my head...and make the tops. And not think about "oh, my gosh, I need to make 99 of the same exact square for this quilt" or "ack, I have to cut 340 2 1/2" squares for this". Just to work and enjoy and not think about how long it might take).

It's hard to describe the main fabric of this quilt as when I list the colors in it, it sounds like a veritable dog's breakfast of ugly combinations. But somehow it works, and it has a charming retro feel. Sort of retro-forties in the design and perhaps also in the colors.

The fabric has a very bluish lavender background - almost a periwinkle. The design is skiing snowmen in the foreground and tiny red houses with plumes of smoke, frosted pine trees, and giant snow crystals. The colors (in addition to the background) are white, red, a sort of electricky lime green, orange, deep grey-green, and a paler grey-green. Sounds horrid, but the really bright colors are in tiny amounts so it works. And like I said, it charmed me immensely when I saw it in the store.

To go with the snowman fabric, I have three blending colors: a mottled red that looks kind of like the siding on an old barn, a black (which is actually close to the deep grey-green in the snowman fabric) that is done up as a starry night pattern with stars and the Milky Way on it, and a cream fabric with tiny red, orange, and blue dots.

I am making a modified log-cabin type block for this: cutting 4 1/2 inch squares of the snowman fabric and then sewing 2 1/2 inch strips of one of the three blending colors, log cabin style, to the square. So each 4" (finished) "snapshot" of the skiing snowmen is "framed" with one of the three colors.

I made about a dozen blocks last night - some red, some black. I think it will come out well. I have to sit down with my graph paper and plan a bit before I make too many more because it struck me as I was sewing that rather than just trying to randomize the different colors throughout the quilt, it might look good to have a diagonal pattern - that is, have diagonals of all black-framed blocks, and then all red-framed blocks, and so on, and that might alter the number of each color I would need.

Anyway. I have to say that this is the first time I've really used my sewing room much as a sewing room since I moved in (before this fall it has been a "box room" where I kept general junk). It's really a delight to be able to start a project, and then just get up from it and leave it in progress. No picking up so someone else can work there (the big problem when I lived with my parents). No picking up so I can eat off the table (the big problem in the apartment). No one getting into my stuff and "cleaning" it up, throwing things away that are important or putting things where I can't find them. (Not a problem for craft-work but it used to be a problem when I was a grad student and I had this one lab-mate who could be nasty about 'the lab must be pristine when *I* work in it')