Sure, some uncharitable people might call it my basement shop. Some particularly pedantic types might even note that I have a split-level house, so the basement isn’t even really underground. But screw them. I do experiments, so it’s a laboratory. And it’s probably as close as I’ll ever get to a supervillain’s lair. Let’s have a look!
In my post about the challenge quilt Snow Goose, I mentioned paper piecing. There are plenty of tutorials about it out there, but I thought I would show you how I do it.
When you are researching family history, you often find that names have changed over the years. It can make the search for your family’s history challenging.
There are a number of reasons a name might change – immigration, transcription errors, translation, marriage, a desire to fit in the local community or a desire to hide from something in the past.
In our family history, we have a few names that have changed over time – most notably Hoel. Several of Walt’s ancestors spelled it Hole. It seems to have changed back and forth a couple of times, and it also depends on which document you are looking at for a few family members. Walt’s great-grandfather was listed as John Swisher Hole. His son, Walt’s grandfather, was William Henry Hoel.
I worked in IT for 30 years. That usually meant you were on-call every other week to fix problems at night and on weekends. In the early days we had pagers that would just show a phone number. Eventually the pagers became smartphones, but we still called the alerts we got “pages”.
Some nights we got a lot of pages. Some weeks we would have a lot of those nights in a row. Sometimes we got pretty tired of it. I wrote the following on one of those weeks.
Rainy Day Pagers #12 & 35
(To the tune of Rainy Day Women #12 & 35 by Bob Dylan)
Well, they’ll page you when you’re trying to be so good
They’ll page you, just like they said they would
They’ll page you when you’re trying to go home,
And they’ll page you when you’re there all alone.
But that should not make you feel amazed,
Everybody must get paged.
Well, they’ll page you when you’re at the breakfast table
They’ll page you when you’re trying to watch some cable
They’ll page you when you’re riding in your car
And they’ll page you when you’re playing your guitar
But you should not feel so disengaged
Everybody must get paged.
Well, they’ll page you when you’re standing in the shower
They’ll page you every day and every hour
They’ll page you when they’re trying to pass the buck
Then they’ll page you and then they’ll say “good luck”
But your salary will not be getting raised
Everybody must get paged!
Well, they’ll page you when you’re freaky with your wife
They’ll page you till you think you have no life
They’ll page you when you’re riding on a horse
They’ll page you till your wife files for divorce
But that should not make you feel enraged
Everybody must get paged!
In my discussion of color in this post, I showed a quilt that used two blocks to create the design. This quilt also uses two blocks, and creates an interesting secondary design.
This was from one of the earliest classes I took after I joined my local quilt guild. It was before I started putting labels on my quilt, but I am pretty sure it was made in 2003.
The two blocks used in the quilt are commonly called a square-in-a-square and an eight-pointed star. Blocks often have more than one name, depending on when an where they were published. This square-in-a-square has also been called an economy patch.
The eight-pointed star in this quilt has two different color layouts.
The one on the left is the center block. The one on the right is the four corners.
The instructor was encouraging us to use our color placement to make secondary designs. I was so new to quilting that I didn’t understand what that meant until I took this class.
By this time, I had started to understand that the quilting design added to the overall appearance, so I spent some time deciding how to quilt this one. The arc shape is the same size in the pale green circles as it is in the diagonal line going across the quilt from corner to corner. You can see it much better in this photo of the back of the quilt.
When I was a kid Mom would always talk about the “Brigham Emkey” place. Or maybe it was “Brigham Empty”. Or “Bring ‘Em Empty”? She said it all as one word, like “BrighamEmpty”, and it was hard to tell. But the BrighamEmkey Place was where Mom lived as a little girl, and she told a lot of stories about it. But I could never figure out the name.
Quilts offer a lot of opportunity to play with color and color placement. When you change the color placement on a design, you can get very different looking results.
I have taken a fair number of quilting classes over the years. My favorite classes are those that stretch my skills and teach me new things.
In 2008, my guild had a teacher in named Sharyn Craig. Her class was teaching a couple of piecing skills – curved seams and y-seams. Piecing is the term for how you put the fabric together to make the quilts.
Delores was born on June 7, 1934 and died on January 25, 2005.
I remember sitting on the porch at my aunt and uncle’s farmhouse, listening to my Aunt Dee playing the guitar and telling stories. When I was very little, I thought she made up all the songs she sang for us. I remember being very surprised to learn that she didn’t write “You Are My Sunshine”
In this post and this post we made an alcohol burner to use as a backpacking stove. We’ve also made a snuffer and a pot support. But before we can call this stove project done enough to play with, we need to make a windscreen, and find a fuel bottle. I promise after this we’ll get to set it on fire!