All work and...

...not enough play make Erica something something.

I took a stack of journal articles home yesterday afternoon (I bugged out of campus around 2:30, after doing what grading needed to be done). I read for maybe an hour and a half, and then started up yet another article and realized that the information was getting absolutely no traction on my brain, so I gave up and started the newest quilt top instead.

This is one of those jelly-roll quilts. I have five (well, four now, since this one is being used) unused jelly rolls stacked up, and thought it might be a good idea to take them apart and start making something of them. (Non-quilters: a jelly roll is a set of (usually) 40, 2 1/2" wide strips, all from one fabric manufacturer, all from one "line" of fabrics. It's a relatively cheap way to "sample" the entire range of a line, and to get a decent sized (usually small twin to twin, depending on how much other fabric you add) quilt top out of it. There are books of patterns just for jelly rolls, and many of the quilt magazines periodically run patterns for them.)

The pattern is called "Knickerbocker Glory," though I'm sure versions of it exist other places by different names - it's just four-patch blocks, set on point, with large setting triangles around them to make the quilt a rectangle. Four patches are nice, and easy, and they sometimes look better with busy fabrics than a more complex pattern.

The fabric line I'm using is called "Flutterby." I'm not even sure this one is still widely available. (One of the frustrations of quilting - and one of the things that probably leads some of us with more compulsive tendencies to acquire large stashes of fabric - is that some of the lines are only printed for three months. And then when they're gone, they're gone. And so you wind up buying stuff you want when you find it, even if you've got 10 other projects stacked up...I have fabric dating back to the early 1990s somewhere in my stash.)

This is actually a lot funnier and cuter than I realized. When I started looking closely at the fabrics I realized that a lot of them are - trompe l'oeil isn't quite the right word, but I don't know what is - they have insects or other invertebrates worked into the design, and it's so subtle and funny you don't catch it at first. For example, there's a swirly-almost-paisley that's actually a stylized snail's shell, and (my favorite) one of the broad stripes has, in the center of the widest stripe, a design that is actually tiny centipedes!

So this quilt is going to make me happy. I pulled out a big piece of that "Dimples" fabric in a green to use as the setting squares; it should work well. (And also, it's using stash-fabric.)

I got the first two sets of four-patch blocks sewn up; I hope to do more this afternoon after I get my grading done. If so, I'll photograph some of them and post them on here.

After sewing for a while, I stopped to fix a "proper" dinner for once. ("proper" dinner = I actually cook something, instead of rinsing some spinach leaves and glopping salad dressing on them, or making peanut butter crackers and eating them with fruit). I made refried beans. I had found a container of pinto beans I cooked up and froze (when I couldn't eat them all) in the freezer. It had lost its label so I wasn't sure how long it had been in there (anywhere from 4 to 8 months). I decided to thaw it and use them for refried beans, because if the texture or flavor had suffered, they'd still be OK as that.

Refried beans are easy to make. I don't know why I don't make my own more often.

All I did was to heat some olive oil (and a little butter - I thought that might help the flavor if the beans were at all freezer-burned), added some freeze dried shallots (I only had a small amount of beans, and I didn't want to cut part of an onion for them). Then I dumped in the beans and mashed them up with a potato masher. (You do need some liquid in there. The beans had their own liquid, plus there was still some ice on them.)

I flavored them with some adobo seasoning (If you like southwestern or Tex-Mex cooking, Penzey's adobo seasoning is a nice thing to have on hand. It's a well-balanced seasoning, and it's good in a lot of things).

They were surprisingly good, for beans that had been shoved in the back of the freezer. (I didn't make tortillas; no time. I put a little Mexican blend cheese on the beans and let it melt, and then ate them with some crusty bread and had some canned pineapple on the side, for an attempt at balance in the meal).

And then I relaxed and did a bit of hand-quilting while watching television. ("Community," you are so mean and snarky, and yet I laugh at you so hard.)

I need not to push myself as hard as I've been. I used to talk about the New Rule? Where I expected myself to do one hour of research work (either actual research, data analysis, writing, or reading) per day (excepting Sundays, and Wednesdays, which are my busiest day)? Well, I think New Rule has to also have the component that I not push myself to do more than two hours of that in a day - at least not the reading. (Fieldwork is different.) Pushing myself too hard and overusing my brain like that probably isn't good for me.