The minister of my parents' church underwent 4 1/2 hours of surgery yesterday to rebuild his broken nose. My dad forwarded a message to me from the associate pastor with several cringey details of things he had to undergo in the surgery. (I had a broken nose that had to be surgically set at 13, but it was nowhere near as bad as what this man experienced.)

However: his optic nerve, which was thought to be in danger, is no longer a worry. And there's no evidence of a brain aneurysm, which was an early fear.

So mostly, he has a long unpleasant recovery (and more surgery to rebuild a sinus at a later date), but the worst things that could happen didn't.

And it's one of those "strange and mysterious ways" stories: normally he drives a van (or maybe minivan) but he had been loaned a small car for this trip - presumably because he wanted his wife to have the van available to drive in town.

The police who investigated the crash said he probably would not have survived had he been in a car that was higher off the ground - it was a chain reaction crash and he wound up apparently being shoved (in the car) UNDER a tractor-trailer that had jackknifed. The fact that he was in a small car probably saved his life in this case.

*****

I'm still thinking on the Bacteriophage socks. I do want to do them eventually. I also got to thinking last night that I could alter a lace pattern (there are some vaguely honeycomb-outline patterns) so the bacteriophage could be done in lace.

Or I thought perhaps I could do a BIG bacteriophage - just one, on the front of the sock, kind of a la Barbara Walker's spider (which is another thing I want to put onto socks sometime) using cable and twisted stitches.

But somehow, a lace bacteriophage seems wrong to me. (I suppose some of you are shaking your heads and thinking, "Any bacteriophage representation on socks seems wrong to ME."). I think I prefer the fair-isle idea, or, if I can play around with the charting, a cabled 'phage.

I spent most of the evening working up a backing for the zipper quilt. I did a pieced backing (or "Frankenbacking"). I had bought about 2 3/4 yard of the main backing fabric and found that wasn't quite enough. So I thought for a long time about the back - did I buy YET ANOTHER fabric (either ordering from eQuilter or waiting until I could get to a semi-local quilt shop), did I try to find something else in my stash that would work, did I just stick on an extra piece of something else to make it big enough?

I balked at buying more fabric, and especially balked at the wait - I want to get the quilt in for quilting, if I can, this weekend.

I looked in my stash and found two candidates where I had enough - one was an Asian style print showing those Japanese paper parasols, but the colors were wrong. The other was one of those "National Park Prints" - but it was a very directional print and was going the wrong direction for how I'd have to sew it together for the back.

So I decided to do a pieced back with the original fabric and two of the fabrics used on the top.



I just pieced in random bars of one of the browns and one of the blues (the only two I still had 44" wide yardage of; many of the others were fat quarters and still others I had cut from the selvedge so they were no longer that wide).

I did it - even though it was more time consuming than just sticking on a chunk of the blue at one end (my original idea) because I wanted the back to look "intentional" rather than "aw, crud, I don't have enough backing fabric."

I've also been picking up a little bit more embroidery. About a year ago, I bought a bunch of stuff from Sublime Stitching and had never done anything with it. So I printed off some of the patterns onto tea towels and started working

This is my first attempt. It's been a while since I did embroidery so it looks a little funky:



I also think I'm better when I'm working with less than the full 6 strands but I wanted to try out the "suggested way" a la Sublime Stitching - doing "split stitch" with all six strands.

I wound up doing the "stars" (or maybe they are fireworks) in backstitch and I think I like that better. I'm going to do the other Eiffel Tower (I printed a second one on another corner) the same way as this, but I think future line-type embroidery, I'm going to do with backstitch; it's easier for me to control the stitch length and evenness.

I'm thinking if I get good at embroidery again, I might do up a set of these for my mom for her birthday (with some other pattern on it) and maybe a set for my sis-in-law. (I'd be tempted, if I knew what chemicals she had studied for her dissertation, to look up the structural formulae and do THEM...right now she mostly analyzes drug evidence and I'm not sure how cool she'd think it was to get a towel with the molecule of, say, THC, stitched into it. Of course, I could always fall back on cats or hot peppers as the theme....)