rose quilt – Page 5 – Deborah Makarios

September 23, 2017

Remembering the Crazy

It’s been 20 months since I finished the Giant Quilt of Craziness, and the memory is perhaps beginning to fade a little. I thought about it a lot this last week, though, as resuming work on the Rose Quilt (moderately giant & definitely crazy, albeit not a crazy quilt) convinced me that now was the time to make the Hussif of Perpetual Remembrance, crafted from the leftover materials of the GQC.

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This hussif is not only going to save me a world of trouble (in carting about a needlecase, scissors, thimble, pin container and reels of thread), it is also going to remind me of a Very Important Lesson.

Small is Beautiful.

Small is elegant, well-designed, pleasingly executed. Small is, in fact, Sanity.

Even the process of making the hussif has been a revelation. The careful planning and exquisite care of a small thing well done is infinitely more satisfying than the ambitious blaze of a Big Thing Begun followed by years of procrastination, dutiful slogging and regret.

Not that small things are guaranteed to go well, of course, and something going less than well in an enormous ‘just get it done’ project is probably less distressing than something going badly in a project which was, until then, Just Dandy. (Do not click for larger images unless you want to see some terrible stitchery.)

Mad ambitions aside, it appears I still have some lessons to learn.
Stretch + Non-Stretch = Frustration, for example. Physics is (are?) non-negotiable. Except you can finagle a little when you’re dealing with fabric – but only a little. Except for stretch fabric, which finagles itself whether you want it to or not. Ditto slippery fabrics such as satin.

Other lessons include: always check carefully that the line of stitches you are snipping and unpicking is the line of tacking, and not the line of intended permanence; and always assume that everything will take longer than you expect. (Try to enjoy this.) The lesson about proper needle-thimble interactions I will spare you; and don’t worry, it doesn’t look like I’m going to lose the nail.

I am considering this as a working toile: something which you do for practice and to see how it works, but which can also (hopefully!) be used as a thing in itself. Which takes the pressure off a bit: every time the reality fails to connect with the beautiful dream in my head, I remind myself that I can make another. (Without stretchy or slippery fabrics.)

Who knows? Perhaps when all this is finally done and dusted, I will make another one out of the leftovers from the Rose Quilt. That sounds a bit more cheery than this one of black and grey and purple: the colours of Victorian half-mourning. Rather than refer to it as the half-mourning hussif, or the Hussif of Perpetual Remembrance, I am using the less mellifluous but cheerier title of the Butterfly Hussif.

As you may have guessed by now, I did not make much progress (translation, any progress) on the main projects this week. But I did make (and finish!) a useful tool which I trust will make me more efficient in future.

Consider this a sort-of-progress report; your Gargoyle Chips for the week. Rose Quilt 0, Curtains 0, Hussif 1.

September 16, 2017

Gargoyle Chip Report IX

You win some and you lose some. Sometimes they’re the same one. Which is to say, when I put the sides-to-middled, patched and darned sheets on the actual bed, I saw another area that probably needs patching (which of course didn’t show up when I was actually looking for it).
The sheets are holding up, however, and to my surprise the seam isn’t noticeable unless you go feeling for it. So I’m going to call that a win, and add another patch at my own convenience.

As for progress on the other projects:
Curtains – none.
Rose Quilt – one evening (about two hours) of appliquéing the motif onto the background.

Slow progress, but still progress!
How are yours going?

March 4, 2016

Preparing for an Uncertain Future

No, I’m not suggesting that we should all become preppers. It’s a good idea to be prepared for whatever kind of natural disaster your area is prone to, but I don’t think it pays to mortgage your present for a merely possible future.

I have, however, been preparing for a change this past month. At the beginning of February it seemed distinctly possible that by the time the month was out we would have moved to a house half the size of the one we currently live in. And while that didn’t happen, I still needed to prepare in case it did.

Cue a major pruning. So major, in fact, that I gave up the idea of writing for the month (apart from keeping up with the blog, obviously) and didn’t bother with trying to keep a purge list, because it would have taken too long. The downside of that is that I have trouble remembering everything that has left our house (a sure sign that we had too much stuff).

There was a whole boxful of kitchen things, including the sole survivor of my first ever set of wineglasses (the other three leapt to a glittering end during the first Canterbury earthquake); there were more books, some cassette tapes and CDs, a variety of clothing (some so worn that it had to be binned), and half a recycling bin’s worth of stuff I’d been keeping in my desk. Also a whole bunch of what might be described as general stuff.

I’ve also been working on my stash of unfinished projects – important for peace of mind, freed-up space, and maintaining my Finishing-Person reputation. The crazy quilt was finished last year, it is true, but that still left me with the rose quilt (a project even older than the crazy quilt, if my memory serves me correctly at this distance), a pair of half-knitted gloves, a block quilt to be assembled, a cardigan to be knitted from recycled wool, and a large backlog of mending.

During February I made progress on the rose quilt, finished the gloves, and did most of the mending – there’s just one more waistband to be done and it’ll be finished. I am pleased with my progress, but also horrified at how much work there still is to be done. The Grand Purge is now mostly finished, and I’m back to writing (or rather rewriting) in March, but chaos, as ever, still lurks on the horizon.

Chaos, you ask? In a post-purge household? Well, yes. While we didn’t end up moving into the half-the-size house, we may find ourselves three weeks from a move at any time. This is exciting, but also somewhat stressful, particularly since we have no idea what size house we’ll end up moving to, and therefore whether or not a further Grand Purge will be required to fit. Because as much as we’ve got rid of, there’s always more that could be pared away. Like the rest of life, our simplicity is a work in progress – but the progress is feeling good.