So, I wound off the Blackberry Ridge "Northern Lights" yarn last night and swatched for the vest. I got gauge, or near enough for me. I didn't have the energy, though, to cast on the 260-some stitches it would take for my size, so I put that aside and worked on my quilt for a while.

I've decided to try to be more disciplined about putting at least a few stitches in the quilt each day. This one has been in the frame since October 2002, and I really would like to finish it and put another quilt in. I've got two full-sized tops yet to be quilted, two or three lap-sized quilts, numerous miniature or wall-hanging sized quilts, a throw in the process of being pieced, and four or five other quilts in the planning stages. I need to cycle back to doing more quilting. I'd rather have my heirs (whoever they may be) exclaiming over how many quilts I had rather than how much fabric I owned. (Of course, it's the same way with yarn...). I probably also should do a full inventory of the fabric stash (shudder) and maybe sort out pieces I'm not so fond of any more, and either give them to a charity or send them to someone I know who makes quilts.

I'm also contemplating hiring out some of the tops I make for quilting. I've been doing that on a small scale with the quilting group at my mom's church - partly, it was because they had no one else lined up at the moment (and I had a top ready) and partly because I liked the idea of making a contribution to the church and getting a quilted top in return. I have a couple of full-sized quilts - a turtle quilt from vintage squares (I should probably photograph it so you all can see it, it's pretty neat), another top from sort of ugly but nice vintage squares, and a quilt that my mom started piecing for me when I was a kid - she had me draw animals on plain squares with crayons (and, in a few cases, those ugly old "embroidery pens") and alternated with squares left from a quilt that she and her mother had pieced. (That last quilt, and I think the turtle one, she paid for as a gift to me). I also have a throw - which I have to admit, I use as a sit-pillow when I do yoga, probably not best for the quilt - that they quilted for me.

And I also pieced a top on my summer vacation that I have my name in the queue for. It's very pretty, or so I think - a grape print and a stone-walk print and a print with dragonflies. I didn't take a picture of it but I'll photograph it when I get it back.

But I have a couple of big bed quilts I want to be able to use someday, and I have numerous others in mind. And to be honest, although I like hand quilting okay, it's the piecing that I really love. It's the picking colors and mixing them and watching the top come together that excites me. It's harder for me to get really excited about quilting, and I'm more inclined to pick up knitting or sit down at the sewing machine than I am to quilt.

That said, I had a go with machine quilting this summer - I made a table runner sized piece, and tried out the walking foot my mother had on her machine to see if it was the solution to my slow hand-quilting. My conclusion is that I don't like it. I don't like how it looks all that well, it doesn't look handmade in the way a handquilted quilt does. It's also tedious. Hand quilting takes a long time but it's not tedious. It doesn't require the concentration that machine quilting does - I can carry on a conversation, or watch television, or listen to the radio or music while I quilt by hand, but when I was machine quilting, it was all attention on the quilt, all the time.

Speaking of the radio, I'm considering taking out a subscription to satellite radio. I've made some money this summer off of reviewing textbooks, and I'm getting a pay raise, so it doesn't seem like such an extravagance to me. And there really aren't any local music channels that I like, they all play either oldies or whatever "top 40" has morphed into, or country. My parents get some of the Sirius channels with their satellite television, and I was kind of intrigued - they have three classical feeds (well, one is opera) and a number of jazz feeds, and a world music channel, and bluegrass. I understand that the "full" Sirius has even more things, like an NPR feed. So I don't know. It takes me a long long time to adopt any new technology - I still don't own a DVD player and I just bought my digital camera this spring. But I like the idea of having every kind of music (not just "both kinds," according to the honky tonk waitress in "The Blues Brothers") at my fingertips.

Anyone have experience with either Sirius or XM? Is one better than the other? Is one going to dominate, and the other become the Betamax of satellite radio? Because that's why I'm slow to adopt technology - I hate shelling out a couple hundred dollars for something that's obsolete in six months or a year.