Ugly City, Under Construction

Quite a few months ago (March, I think?) we went to a quilting convention and expo. We thought it would be super-dorky, but it turned out to be a bacchanal of beautiful fabrics and quilt patterns and marvelousness; we emerged with our life savings greatly depleted but our fabric stash greatly improved. One of the most exciting purchases of the day was a kit for a quilt that was hanging up at a Kaffe Fassett-heavy vendor booth. It was a swirl of rich reds and oranges with daring swaths of bright green, and I was thrilled at the prospect of making such an exquisitely gorgeous and intricate design.

Then I got the kit home, opened it up, and laid out the fabrics.

Dear God! Those fabrics are all ugly! And they don’t go together! What was I thinking???

We decided to own the situation as best we could, and call the project Ugly City. It was going to be so ugly it was cute. Or something.

The instructions for this quilt are totally wackadoo, so I kept putting off starting it; it was going to require intense involvement by Pookie and Boomer, so we all needed to be ready to undertake a group project. Finally the opportunity presented itself in our stolen vacation weekend of not going to Montreal for the NHL Draft, so we girded ourselves and jumped right in.

The gist of the pattern is that you cut up all the ugly fat quarters into random-width strips, then sew the strips into “strata”. (Pookie did the cutting, as always, and Boomer stepped in to sew the strips on her machine.)

Then you cut squares out of the strata.

The squares then get cut in half diagonally, and are set on the sides of 6-inch center squares.

What I discovered today is that this process goes up crazy quickly (I hand-pieced all the stuff after the strata got put together), and all those ugly fabrics come together to make beautiful, beautiful music. I’m so excited for it!

However, I’m also deeply, deeply concerned. For starters, the pattern seems to have been written by morons, and I’m fairly confident the amounts of stratae they think I need won’t yield the amount of pieces the quilt calls for. It’s going to be a major pain in my ass if I have to order more yardage to pepper throughout the project, and it’s going to be a major pain in my ass to figure out how much I might need without getting this to the point where it’s going to be really hard to work extra fabrics in. Also, the pattern calls for a yard of the red-and-gold polka-dot fabric that goes around the center squares. The kit came with a half yard. Those feckless a-hole quilt expo vendors! I found a place online that was selling yardage, but they called literally as I was pressing this first finished square to tell me that the fabric was out of stock. Sigh. I think I may have found another source, but it’s still up in the air. If any readers out there have a half a yard of Kaffe Fasset GP-70 Red Spots fabric they want to give me, I’d really appreciate it. Heh.

[Posted by Schnookie]

How The Garden Grows: Early June

We’ve had rain and gray skies for over a week. On the one hand, we don’t have to water. On the other hand, you can practically hear the peppers crying for lack of sun. Still, the garden rolls on. We’ve had some big milestones since the last garden report: flowers on the potatoes, tomatoes, and peppers, onions that look like real plants, scapes for the harvesting, and even a tomato! A wee baby tomato!

We took the camera out in the garden to explore and to document.

The potato thicket is, as usual, out of control.

The garlic, meanwhile, is fabulous. We’ve been harvesting green garlic for pesto for weeks now, and had our first scape pesto last week.

Next to the garlic bed, a few volunteer radishes from last year are coming up in the ground. Rather than pull them up, we’ve decided to let them flower and then go to seed. One’s a little ahead of the other, so we were able to compare the flowers to the buds.

The onions have done their annual miracle of turning from this:

to this:

The peppers are doing their thing despite the lack of sun. They’re already as big as they ever got last year. The Tolli’s Sweet Italian peppers are the first in the race to flower.

And last but not least, the tomatoes are busting out all over! (Literally. There’s a volunteer tomato in the onion bed, nowhere near where we had tomatoes planted last year. It had better not be another yellow pear tomato — those plants have been springing up all over for the last two years. There will not be a third!)

Hey, what’s that?

Yeah, that! Is that…

It is! A tomato! It’s a BLT in nature! In the immortal words of Grandpa Simpson, “I can’t wait to eat that monkey!”

The one problem area of the garden might be the area between the Ramapos and the onions. It’s become volunteer Catnip Alley. There was some talk of carefully weeding it all, but then we decided that the cats really, really, really, really love it and it’s a nice free treat for them. So what if our shoes will smell like catnip every time we go to harvest tomatoes?

Sage Advice

Recently, IPB Proper was home to some advice columns from some “NHL players”, so I figure why not bring the helpful hints over here to the sister-blog? It’s occurred to me that while I’ve shared all manner of pictures and stories of my crafting, I’ve not imparted the number one most important lesson of handiwork I’ve learned over the years: The Far-Away Test. Gentle Reader, have you ever gotten so sucked into a sampler that all you could see was the one strand of silk that didn’t end up lying quite right? Have you ever had tunnel vision that made it so you could only see the one point on a patchwork star that didn’t lie up perfectly? Have you ever been held hostage by one color that looked right in concept but once you got working with it just seemed wrong, wrong, wrong? In short, have you ever gotten so focused on a project that you could no longer see the forest for the trees? Of course you have! Everyone does! That’s where the Far-Away Test comes in. Have someone else hold you project up for you, or drape it over the other end of the couch. Step back. Admire your fabulous work. Suddenly you can’t even remember where that wayward strand of silk is, the star looks pretty darn pointy, and that weird puke green is showing us as a lovely dark olive. Problem solved!

I bring this up because I was recently in such a funk with “Broken Dishes”, my latest quilt project. I paired up a black and white geometric print with one that was a soft pink. I worked night and day (okay, night and later night) over the long weekend putting each teensy tiny triangle into place. When the block was finished, I made the mistake of mumbling something about how it looked a little ’80s. Schnookie jumped right on that and said, “It is just like Miami Vice! HAHAHAHA!” Well, of course at that point, all I could see was the cover of the Starship cassette that lived in Boomer’s car in the mid-’80s. That’s it! The whole quilt was ruined!

A-ha! Not so fast! A little Far-Away Test could clear that potential disaster up! I laid all the blocks I’d done up to that point out on the floor and stepped back.

Nothing about that screams Don Johnson! (Author’s note: If if does, please don’t tell me.) Thanks to the Far-Aawy Test, I could see that stressing the individual fabric pairings is really not that big a deal. The whole thing is going to look scrappy and jumbled (dare I say it, like broken dishes?) anyway! In just one simple step, I was able to refocus on the project and stop stressing about how one little square out of 72 was going to effect the overall look. Thanks, Far-Away Test!

Lately, thanks to quilts being much bigger projects than cross stitching, the Far-Away Test has spawned an off-shoot: The Walk Away Test. Quilts can be a bit overwhelming, what with the balancing color and patterns and having no idea how it’s going to translate from a pile of, say, 2 inch squares into a full queen-sized blanket. When the time came to lay out the hexagons for Merry Go Round, I discovered the only floorspace empty enough for that endeavor was the downstairs “den”. (We use it as a seedling greenhouse, an ironing station, a mail dump, and a supplementary pantry for bulky items that don’t fit in the kitchen.) I carefully put the hexagons in rows and then started to go nuts about color and pattern placement. It was grueling! I was interrupted for dinner, though, and had to leave it out on the floor while I went to go eat. After dinner, I happened to walk past the stairway to the den and could see all my work laid out on the floor looking… well, looking like a blanket! By stepping away and refocusing on something else, I was able to come back at look at the project with fresh eyes! I tried that with Broken Dishes today, and the result was like the Far-Away Test but magnified. I dare you to find the Miami Vice square now!

Apologies for the awful photo. The light in that room is tricky!

So when in doubt, try the Far-Away or Walk Away Tests. Break free of the chains of the process for a quick moment, and bask in the gloriousness that is your fabulous project! (I refuse to accept that I have ever worked on a project that was not fabulous.) (At least not since the wizards.) (We shall never speak of the wizards again.)

Posted by Pookie

The State Of Our Garden, Through A Different Lens

Last week we found ourselves outside after work, releasing ladybugs around our apple trees (for aphid control. Who knows how well it works? We’ve seen neither hide nor hair of the ladybugs since. Yeah, we just got played for fools by Big Ladybug, but what gardener hasn’t?), and attempting to document the event with the first camera Pookie grabbed. As it happens, it was the camera with the 50 mm lens on it. The pictures of the ladybugs were uninspiring…

…but when Pookie took the Fiddy around to the side of the house where the hanging baskets of flowers are, she rediscovered what’s so great about this lens.

Even though the Fiddy is our smallest and lightest lens, we tend not to use it in the garden because it doesn’t do wide angles and doesn’t do super-duper, eensy-weensy close-ups like the 100mm, but after seeing those flower pictures, we decided to spend the weekend undertaking a Fiddy Challenge. It was time to document how our garden was coming along while taking baby steps toward mastering that lens.

The marigolds are all still just wee seedlings, with funky textures abounding when seen through the Fiddy:

The garlic is bustin’ out all over, and we’ve been harvesting it to make into green garlic pesto, which is crazy delicious:

The onions finally look like bona fide plants instead of scraggly little green strings:

The peppers are ever so close to being planted in their forever beds:

The tomatoes are in the ground and growing away:

And the potatoes are, once again, trying to be the plants that ate Maple Hoo:

Also, our overwintered pots of sage are bolting:

And we’re completely indifferent to the encroaching weeds creeping in through the fence:

Of course, just as I was falling deeply and irrevocably in love with the Fiddy, Pookie went and took this picture with the 100, with all the awesome fuschia bokeh. Oh, macro lenses — how can we choose which one we love best?

[Posted by Schnookie]

Merry Go Round

Ever since Boomer and I gave Schnookie her 30’s scrap quilt for her birthday, she’s been raving about what a fabulous blanket it is. Cool in the summer and warm in the winter, always perfectly in tune with the other blankets on the bed, and forever in a state of “Bert and Ernie Bed” (that being when a bed feels as comfortable as Bert and Ernie’s beds always looked on Sesame Street). I’d look at my lame-o woven cotton blanket and whimper. I’d look at the quilt Boomer had promised to make for me (which for six years was stalled at “one half of one squares finished” and now is steadily progressing at a rate that suggests the quilt will be finished in about three years) and sob. Clearly, I needed a quilt, and clearly I had to be the one to make it. I chose a pattern — “Merry Go Round” by American Jane” — and fabric — “Look and Learn”, also by American Jane — and got to work. All I could think of while working on it was that each stitch was taking me closer to having a quilt for my bed. When I’d walk into my bedroom and dream of having a riot of adorable hexagons all over the bed. I’d lie in bed on chilly Sunday mornings and wonder just how much longer until the quilter would call to say it was finished.

Finally, on April 11th, I got the quilt sandwich back from Mary, the Long-Arm Quilter. Sadly, it still needed 2 weeks worth of work to get the binding finished (note to self: no more bindings with 60 degree angles). But then came the triumphant evening when I stuck the last stitch in the binding and cut the last thread on the quilt. It was 11:45 on a work night with two periods to go in a Ducks-Sharks playoff game. “Hm,” I thought, “The quilt needs 45 minutes in the washing machine and then probably 60 or 70 or so in the dryer… Works for me!” I tossed it in the wash and it was fluffy and dry and wrinkly and fabulous before the last whistle of the game. It was close to 2 a.m. when I yanked the nasty cotton blanket off the bed and unfurled “Merry Go Round” in its place. Cue “Rocky” music.

It looked wonderful. Just fabulous. I had worried the color balance would be off with too much bright orange near the bottom, but once it was on the bed, no one color dominated. The trouble spent on the hexagonal binding paid off, as the edges looked so darling hanging over the side of the bed. And my fretting about it puckering thanks to my learning how to correctly cut equilateral triangles after I had my cutting done was all for naught. The one problem — the one problem — with my first ever bed-sized quilt was that… well, it’s not quite bed-sized. It’s about eight inches too short, and could stand another eight inches on the width, too. But you know what? I don’t care! Why? Because it’s the most fabulous blanket ever. Cool in on the hot nights, warm on the cool ones, perfectly in tune with my duvet, and forever (so far) in a state of “Bert and Ernie Bed”. I don’t know how I managed without a handmade quilt before and hope never ever to go without one again.

Of course, now I’m greedy. Clearly I need more quilts! And clearly I need to make them!

In my last quilting update I was working on “Darla”, a massive Irish Chain monster of one inch strips that need constant pressing. Not cool. I’ll finish it someday, but it’s just not speaking to me now. I finished the top for “Prairie Gothic”, and discovered it has the opposite problem as “Merry Go Round” and is much larger than the throw I was counting on. Of course, it’s still only twin sized.

I put together a few more squares of “Magic Carpet” and strung together a bunch of strips for a coin quilt using a jelly roll of “Neptune”, but both of those projects were going too quickly. I learned with “Prairie Gothic” that if a quilt takes too little time to make it’s just not that satisfying. I needed a quilt that would be big enough for my bed and which would take a nice long time to make. The perfect project presented itself in the form of “Broken Dishes” from Kaffe Fassett’s “Kaleidoscope of Quilts” book. I’m looking at hand piecing a few thousand teensy-weensy little triangles. Woo-hoo! That is exactly what I need!

That’s one border block. The main blocks are pieced the same way, but with four times as many triangles, which are in turn, half as big. There’s no way I finish this puppy any time soon. I’ll probably spend more time cutting it than I spent sewing on “Prairie Gothic”. I’m so excited to sink my teeth in this project, especially knowing that months and months and months and thousands of triangles later, I’ll have another perfect blanket for my bed!

Dandelions!

For no reason other than that we love the 100mm macro lens, here are some pictures we took today of dandelions in the front yard. On a day where hockey was deeply, terribly bittersweet, it’s nice to find beauty in the simple things, to be reminded that all is not misery and woe.

[Posted by Schnookie]

April 25 At Maple Hoo: A Morning In Pictures

There’s not a ton of new or exciting garden news to report here yet, what with this being a ridiculously chilly spring so far. Last year we had no real concerns about the last possible frost date, since we were confident it was over once March was in the rearview mirror. But this year it seems more likely that we’ll have one more crazy cold night before Mother’s Day, so we’re being hesitant to move any of our delicate summer belle plants even into the cold frame, let alone into the garden beds proper. But today was one of those “taste of the season to come” summer-esque days, with the sweltering sun and the temperatures near 90, so we took the opportunity to document the grounds in photograph.

Our peas are still wee little winkies, and we don’t have a lot of hope that they’re going to yield anything before we need the bed they’re in for our pepper plants. We were kind of wishing the potatoes, which have been lagging, wouldn’t sprout so we could keep the peas and move the pepper bed into the failed potato bed, but no such luck. When we went out this morning, sure enough, the potatoes were just starting to poke up out of the soil. We’ll just have to enjoy taking pictures of the peas while they last.

The garlic, meanwhile, is coming in like gangbusters. It’s a veritable forest already, and tonight we’ll be pulling up a few of them to have some green garlic in our Saturday pasta dinner.

Elsewhere in the yard, we’ve got all kinds of blossoming, growing things to be turning the 100 on. Like the azaleas:

And the petunia I got as a door prize (!) at a meeting this week at work:

And the peach trees:

And the apple trees:

Even the dandelions are pretty:

As are the ladybugs:

And inspired by Sarah’s fern photo from last week, we stopped by Boomer’s fernarium in the backyard and took a few shots there, too:

[Posted by Schnookie]

Garden Update: The Seedlings Are Growing!

As much as the weather here is trying its hardest to stay on the “chilly” end of the springtime temperatures spectrum, it can’t fool us into thinking summer is never going to come. It might not be warm out, but the sunlight’s getting more and more garden-y, and in our little plant window the seedlings are getting readier and readier to be in the garden.

Our baby onions have all been moved to their bed in the garden (and look typically tiny, pathetic and unlikely to ever amount to anything, as onion seedlings are wont), so now the windowsill is just filled with tomatoes and peppers. Today we finished transferring the peppers from their planter-trays (which were just take-out containers from the place we get frozen ravioli from) into peat seedling pots, and if the first wave of transplants was any indication, they will spend a few nerve-wracking days looking horribly shocked. But after a while, they’ll stop being such drama queens, stand up straight, and start growing in earnest.

Meanwhile, our tomatoes were put into their peat pots a few weeks ago; they’ve even had two days sitting in their trays in the garden, to take the sun, but they’re still a long way from moving into the cold frame. They’re such delicate little things.

They’re also tall enough now that they’re flopping over, because they can’t support their own weight. Man, being a gentlewoman farmer is so much work because these damn plants can’t do even the slightest thing for themselves.

Of course, it’s nothing a few bamboo skewers and some kitchen twine can’t fix — after a few fussy minutes of untangling the leaves and trussing up the wee plants, our tomatoes look sturdier, happier, and even more eager about a summer of giving us tons of delicious rewards for all our labors.

The Works and Other Maple Hoo Blooms

A few years ago, Schnookie and Boomer spent a Saturday planting “The Works” — hundreds of bulbs for a variety of daffodils. The majority of them ended up around the base of the locust tree out front; they looked so spectacular the first year they bloomed that our neighbor asked if she could copy us! This year I decided to take the 100mm out to take a tour of some of the different kinds we have growing. While I was there, I stopped to take a few shots of other blooming wonders in the yard.

Posted by Pookie

Living The High Life, Sabres-Style

So last week our dear friend Katebits reported that she had attended a Sabres game in Buffalo, and in the doing, sat in the really, really, really swanky seats. How swanky, you ask? So swanky that they have waitress service, to bring all the food and drink you could desire directly to you at your seats. Pookie and I have been to literally hundreds of hockey games, and we’ve hobnobbed with the high rollers a few times in our days, too, but we’ve never managed to swing in-seat waitressing. Katebits told us all about how wonderful it was, with the not having to get up and wait in line and miss action while refilling your beer, but the thing that really stuck with us was that her friend Robin had a hot fudge sundae delivered to her.

A HOT FUDGE SUNDAE. DELIVERED TO HER SEAT. DURING A HOCKEY GAME.

I’m not normally a hot fudge sundae kind of gal, but hearing it put that way, I suddenly had to have one. Sure, it wouldn’t be delivered to my seat, and it wouldn’t be at a live sporting event, but we could totally make up for that by being in our pajamas and watching hockey in HD at home.

Coincidentally, Smitten Kitchen had a post about hot fudge sauce just a few weeks ago, so as soon as Katebits tantalized us with the notion, we embarked on a week of planning to build our own sundaes.

We ordered sundae dishes from Crate & Barrel. We arranged our weekend plans around stopping to pick up ice cream at Jann’s Sweet Shoppe. We made a special grocery run to get whipped cream, sprinkles and cherries. We forgot that we didn’t have corn syrup, so had a second special grocery run to get that at the last minute. And after all of that, it took us about 15 seconds to devour our sundaes.

You know what I recommend? I recommend these sundaes. The hot fudge sauce (which I made with Grand Marnier instead of rum, by the way) is so phenomenal that you won’t even notice there wasn’t personal waitress service.