Elettaria

A month or so ago, I finished the purple quilt for eye_of_a_cat. The story behind this one was that my boyfriend's mother gave me some matching fabrics last Christmas with peacocks on them. They were lovely but not my cup of tea, so I decided to make a quilt for eye_of_a_cat as a congratulations-on-finishing-your-PhD present. A few months later, she ended up house-sitting her PhD supervisor's peacocks and had many amusing stories to tell, so quite by chance this quilt ended up being very apt. You can see the quilt reclining in its new habitat here, and my photo beneath the cut. It's the third quilt that I made.

( Purple quilt )

For my second quilt, which ended up put aside for a while and which I've only just finished quilting, I was inspired by a fish quilt I'd seen in a magazine and raring to try Ruth McDowell's freezer paper method. My cousin is planning to have a baby, so I designed a fish baby quilt. The background is this fabric, which meant that the background templates had to be very carefully placed on the fabric. The piecing, appliqué and embroidery took 2-3 days each. My cousin's still in the planning stage of having the baby (last I heard they were sorting out egg donation), but my lovely herbalist/aromatherapist is due in January, so I'm going to give her the quilt tomorrow.

( Fish baby quilt )

Everything was completely hand-sewn. Larger images may be seen here and here.

By the way, sorry for not being around much lately, and not getting back to people on stuff etc. The ME's being entertaining, but that's nothing compared to the fun I'm having trying to find an electrician so that we can have the overhead lights in the living room/kitchen working again.

( Look what I made! )

I delivered it to the synagogue on Friday evening and it was received with a round of applause and much gratifying marvelling over it, especially the apparently wondrous fact that I hand-sewed it in just over a fortnight. I hope they work out a way to use it as a wall hanging for the High Holydays, they could really do with having something that looks a bit more Jewish in the church that they borrow for those services. Don't get me wrong, that Unitarian church is lovely and as churches go, it's relatively unchurchy-looking, but still, it's a church rather than a synagogue.

In other news, not only am I absolutely bloody shattered from spending four hours at synagogue (I'd forgotten how excruciatingly uncomfortable those chairs are), but I have what has been described by Gerald Durrell as a "rich, bubbling cold" and I want none of it. On the other hand, I've discovered that Potter's Life Drops (tincture of chilli, elderflower and peppermint, very useful stuff but HOT) go well in peppermint tea, and even better when you leave the used peppermint teabag in for the next cup and add a licorice teabag. Electric heating pads are also wondrous things.

I am also rather bored. Audiobook recommendations, anyone? You can see the books I have access to here.

And I've just posted about it here, if anyone wants to have a look and suggest how to quilt it (go on, it's a poll, everyone loves polls). I've been working on it on and off for the last two weeks and am rather proud of how it's turning out.

D and I, who are televisionless and staying that way, have discovered that you can watch reasonable-quality episodes of Doctor Who on BBC iPlay for a week after they air. So last night we watched the Christmas special, with the intention of watching the first episode of Season 4 in the next few days.

I know that the quality of Doctor Who has been steadily declining over the past couple of seasons, but this was quite excruciatingly bad. Could some merciful person tell us whether the first episode of Season 4 is as bad? If not, how bad is it? We thought that Season 3, with the exception of a couple of episodes, was generally dire, although we're glad to hear that they've stopped having idiotic love interest plots for Season 4 (mind you, that redheaded woman was dead annoying in the episode we saw her in before, though I still maintain that there was a certain amount of promise there).

Also, any thoughts on who would make an ideal Doctor, who would make an ideal companion, and what sort of relationship between them would work best? We've only seen half a dozen episodes of the older Doctor Who (The Genesis of the Daleks), but so far we are voting for Christopher Eccleston of the ones we've seen. D says Teh Internets has suggested Tilda Swinton as the Doctor, and this sounds good to both of us. Not sure about the companion, but definitely not the spunky-yet-vulnerable-young-woman-who-pines-after-the-Doctor model. Personally I reckon Tennant (who's just a bit too *nice* for the part) should get a lesbian companion who pulls more than he does. Of course, they'd have to feed them decent plots and scripts. Even Swinton or Eccleston couldn't pull off some of those toe-curlingly awful lines. (My toes really were curling in horror last night. OK, I have curly toes to begin with, but they went those extra few millimetres.)

Randomly: has anyone worked out what a solidophile is yet?

I've just finished reading Carol Shields' Happenstance, a novel written in 1980 which features a woman who is attending a quilting conference in Philadelphia during the course of the novel. During this conference, a psychology/art history lecturer who has obviously never picked up a needle in her life gives a Freudian interpretation of quilting which is even funnier than the Freudian analysis of Alice in Wonderland in Atwood's The Edible Woman. Apart from being hilarious, it does give a great example of what happens when academics get too far away from the reality of their topic.

( Quilting Through the Freudian Looking-Glass: A New Interpretation )

Joking apart, I'd be interested to hear what other people think about textiles, gender and meaning. Working with fabric is a sensuous pleasure, and I've seen a few rather sexy quilts, though generally not the traditional geometric patterns discussed above, not to mention that quilts are practical things and often intended for general family use or for children. (My grandmother, on the other hand, made a number of weavings which are quite ridiculously vulval in shape.) I'm keeping an eye open for literature which discusses needlecraft, for example Atwood's Alias Grace which manages to combine quilting and murder, Susan Glaspell's short story "A Jury of her Peers" which combines the two even more strongly, or Donoghue's Slammerkin, this time about dressmaking and, er, murder. (And sex!) There's a lovely Carol Ann Duffy poem I've managed to dig out again (a former tutor ran off with my copy of the volume it's from, The World's Wife) on ( Penelope ).

I occasionally wonder how someone could have done what Penelope reputedly did: promised that she would remarry when she'd finished making a tapestry, sewed in the day, and unpicked her work at night. I can't think of anything more frustrating than constantly destroying your own work, never allowing it to progress - and tapestry is slow, slow work, you might cover a few squares inches in a day. Perhaps she would unpick a part of the tapestry, then sew something different in its place, so that the work was constantly shifting, motifs leading to first one thing then another? A lovely image for multivocality.

cross-posted to my journal, quilting and literary_theory

eye_of_a_cat and catnip_junkie, I've finished the cushions I promised you. Here they are, I still need to wash and then press them, so the Grape Basket in particular is very creased, just imagine it looking better. I couldn't press them before, I idiotically used water-soluble pen which would have been set by the iron. I couldn't get the colours to come out well in the pictures, but the Grape Basket on the left is in softer, more purply blues, with a smoky blue for the darker pieces and a periwinkle blue for the three bits in the middle and the backing piece. It's all in Fossil Ferns. The Bachelor's Puzzle on the right is in shades of turquoise and darkish blue, and it uses a batik as well as the Fossil Ferns, which is also used on the back. The bits of batik on the front are turquoise, but on the back it's a darker blue, a bit like royal blue only not that bright, with spots in turquoise, green and pinky-purple. Both cushions are 12".

I'm planning to make a quilt for the sofa next, and made a sample block to check I could do the design, which is a Carpenter's Square. This too will be made into a cushion and donated to someone, though I may keep it hanging around while I start piecing the quilt. It's in the turquoise shades again and will use the batik for the back. The block so far measures 16.5", I'll probably squeeze a 18" cushion into it instead of messing around with borders, especially since I don't have much fabric left.

OK, ladies, which cushions do you want each?

( Pictures (not remotely to scale) )

P.S. I hate putting in zips.
P.P.S. SCREW "scant quarter-inch seams". *goes back to practising for the sofa quilt*

I decided to give tapestry a try, and made myself a cushion. Here it can be seen reposing against my green sofa with one of the slightly larger light green cushions I have. Fun and soothing to do, but it takes forever to cover both sides of a 12" x 12" cushion, so a tad boring at times. The first picture is four-sided Florentine work, a really basic pattern, and for the other side I did it as a sort of sampler and tried out various different stitches, including making up one or two.

( Pictures )

I'm just back from London, and will write about my adventures properly later, though it may be friends-locked. Meanwhile, here are photos of the finished holy tea towel challah cloth and the mug I made for D.

( Pictures! And explanations )

I'm going to a wedding next month, and I've just realised that there will be a walking stick problem. There will doubtless be lots of times when I don't want to have the walking stick around, for instance in the synagogue, during the meal and so on. In my experience, if you park it on the back of a chair it falls off with a loud clatter, and if you slide it right under a table it sneaks out and bites the ankles of people six feet away. I do have a foldable walking stick (third from bottom), provided I can strip and revarnish the handle, which is sadly chipped. When folded, it's about 40 cm long by 14 wide (for the handle), although if I bother to make it shorter before folding (I'm assuming it'll be set to fairly high as I'll be wearing heels) it will only be 31 cm long; bit of a hassle but manageable if I'm really desperate. It tends to spring open if given a chance, so either you put something on it to keep it together (like a big hairband) or put it in the bag in such a way that it won't leap out at you.

( I think I'll have to make the bag myself )Cross-posted to my journal, sew_hip and chroniccrafters, and edited to add a picture of my stick.

My best friend's kid sister (who's three years older than my boyfriend, but I'll ignore that, I've known her since she was three and I'm allowed to call her that) is getting married in October. I'm thinking of making them a challah cloth for the wedding, does it strike you as a good present for a young couple? I'm not sure of her level of observance, but I spoke to her mother last night who says that they do Friday night and seemed to think it would be a good present. I'm still fairly new at sewing and embroidery, although I made my own tallit last year and will hopefully be embroidering a Torah mantle once we sort it out with the shul council.

Any ideas for designs, and what size would people recommend? I have to confess that I don't do challah myself, being vegan, and anyway my family has always gone for a single challah whereas I think they use two. At the moment I'm gazing at a challah cloth my grandmother made which is 18" by 21" and trying not to think that I'm turning into my grandmother. Current design idea is a pomegranate tree. ( Read more... )

Would anyone be interested in joined an interfaith community for crafts and such related to religion and spirituality, by the way? I know people who make rosaries and people who make tzitzit, for instance.

cross-posted to my journal, faith_feminists and jewishwomen