My Studio is a Mess. But it's MY Mess.

 I haven't been working on much lately. I had this dress that I'd originally bought as a Halloween costume (as tempted as I am to put an apostrophe in Halloween, I'm too lazy to check whether the spelling I'm using is ACTUALLY correct, but it probably is, which is disappointing), when I went as Laura Ingalls Wilder. It was a bit... conservative. So, since my New Year's resolutions to lose a bit of weight have completely backfired, and since all my available funds have gone either into my car, or my new apartment, or books, or whathaveyou, I thought altering a dress would save some money over buying one. Turns out I did it perfectly, but the dress didn't actually fit in the first place. But I'll keep it on hand, in case the stress of the inevitable autumn fulfills my resolutions for me.

In other news, it is exactly one month until I move to Vancouver and everything changes. So, whenever I'm in my studio, I wonder what's going to happen to it once I leave, and that's stressful so I've mostly been quilting upstairs. I was all motivated yesterday thinking if I quilted a row a day I could be done in seventeen days! Then I remembered I still have the borders to do, but it's POSSIBLE.

 I've also nearly finished my proposed engagement present for Erin and Andrew! I'm hoping since she doesn't mind spoilers on TV shows, that she won't mind me putting this up a little early. My worry: Andrew's head looks so much smaller, and therefore my artistic sense says that the whole thing is unbalanced! But Erin just has more hair. All it needs now is a little varnish.

Which I found in a cabinet that I always assumed was empty! Yay!

Red Current Jelly, Wasps, etc.

 Spent another lovely weekend in Alma. But of all the beautiful things to photograph, I chose this infuriatingly hardy wasp.

 Most of the crafting and cooking this week has been done by my mother, rather than by me. She suggested we check out a tour of Little City Farm in Kitchener, which provided a ton of life-inspiration. I would love to live their life, but I'm also not quite ready to settle down just yet. Enough, though, that I helped pick a few red currants off of our bush, so my mom could make her famous red currant jelly. It's maybe not known outside of the house, but it should be.

And we've got a new dining tent for our family camping trip later this month! It's laughable how easy this thing is to put up, especially compared to the last one.

In other news, I've found a place to live in Vancouver that looks just perfect, and have booked my plane ticket for August 23rd. I'm also scared shitless about the whole thing. Coming up this week: second installment of First Aid Training, an interning session, and Willie's homecoming/birthday/graduation party!

Food!

I also forgot to mention that one of my two favourite brothers got me a subscription to Fine Cooking for my birthday! He tells me that I should keep cooking because I'm good at it, but cooking with recipes off of the internet is too much for me. I have to think of something I want, THEN look up a recipe, and then go through the entire thing in my head before making it and I still never trust that it's going to work. About a quarter of the time I'm right, and it doesn't.

I really want to edit cookbooks. It would be so awesome that I assume it would be too competitive to get into that line of work right away. I AM transcribing a cookbook at the moment,  but it's from the 1800's so it's a little different, and I think the recipes will have to be heavily altered. However, if society collapses and everyone loses power, I'm the only person I know who will still be able to make a mean soup. I just have to find out what a gill of water is. So there.

 But anyway, things are completely different with this magazine. I know everything's probably delicious, and I know how to do the recipes to make sure all the times line up so nothing burns while I'm chopping carrots. Or something.

SO! I aim to make beef rendang sometime soon, but so far I've made red curry turkey burgers and fresh asparagus pesto. 

 Toppings for the burgers include lime mayo and a cucumber-shallot-coriander mixture with rice vinegar. Rice wine vinegar? Who knows?!

 Dirty plate because I was too hungry to photograph my first one. This is why I don't write for my cooking blog anymore.

 Yay pesto! It's full of pine nuts, which are unfortunately quite expensive. On the other hand, this stuff is delicious, and completely worth it.

I've got to remember to get the camera out before I put things away, though.

Living in Waterloo, Reading about Napoleon

The quilt's coming along just fine, thank you very much! I will refrain from putting pictures up though because it's a huge mess and I don't know how obvious the stitching would be ANYway, so you'll have to wait until it's done, which will be... a while. In the mean time, my mom and I took on another big project: curtains!

We decided the decor in the family room was way too dark, and since everything my parents bought or chose in the last fifteen years was spruce green, the fabric for the curtains WASN'T ALLOWED to be spruce green. And as a second to the motion, my mom said that every house she'd ever lived in had had gold curtains, so we weren't getting any more of those either.

Equipped only with what we didn't want, I brought her along while I chose a backing for Willie's quilt, and we checked out some of the fabrics. I had been thinking that we needed some bright red or something, so as to let light in, but contrast the green, I didn't really know. We looked at everything, and had narrowed it down to two when, at the very last minute, we saw this and both liked it.

 Of course, a few weeks passed. We wanted the curtains to be insulated, because with such a big window, even though the glass has UV protection, there was no getting away from the sun. What's more, all of the electronics are in there, so of course the room gets very warm indeed. That's not a good environment for quilting. At ALL. But I'd never made curtains before, so I had some ideas and implemented them, and they worked just as I thought they would. But then I was stumped, and I cried, and the sewing room is in the basement with no windows and it was just beautiful out, so I gave up and started researching peony care. Turns out it's best to cut the buds off on the first year, to let the plant preserve its energy for the next spring. But I probably won't be around to see it next spring, so I let it bloom goshdarnit. And then of course cut the three measly peonies off and kept them for as long as I could. I brought SO many ants into the house doing this.

 But they're gone now, and my birthday begonias died, and my carnations finally wilted as well. I need new indoor flowers. I'm thinking a little rose plant, since I quite enjoyed one I had before.

Oh right, the curtains! Well eventually I got over my anxieties about not having perfectly crisp curtains, put on some TED Talks, and finished them in a couple of days. They're done now! And I actually like that they're a little rumpled. They look... comfortable. Which is great, because this room is the one we use for loungin'!

Willie says it looks like the 70's in here now. I like the 70's. Oh yeah he's back!!! I feel a great relief of some undefinable stress, which may have had to do with watching LOST and thinking his plane was going to crash and he would be stuck on a magic island for years, while a faked version of his plane was found at the bottom of the ocean. You know, the usual fears.

I've had my offer of residence cancelled. Which means I don't know where I'm going to live, or when I'm going to leave for Vancouver, or how easy this is going to be, or anything. I don't know what my classes will be like, I don't know if I have an entrance scholarship, I don't know anything about anything and it's maybe getting to me. Must just calm down and enlist some people to help me out. People do this. It can be done.

In other news, I'm reading The Last Cavalier, the latest in Alexandre Dumas' chronicle of French history. It's fantastic, and I'm  into all things Napoleon now (mostly brandy). We'll see how I feel once I'm done. Really this is just inspiring me to read all the books I have that take place around this time, such as Persuasion, although I've already re-read that and it hardly mentions the darn thing, or the one featuring the economic crisis in England caused by Napoleon's return... is it Bleak House? Yeah, that'd be good. Or Vanity Fair would be best, except that I can't find it and I'm pretty sure Katie has it. Right? Yeah?

In all, a few weeks ago I was complaining that even though I had so much to look forward to, nothing was really good then. But now, things are great :) And they will continue in this vein for a little while, before the Inevitable Autumn, which is what I will be calling it from now on.

Cheers!

Every Lost Episode Ever.

*gun cocking noise*

"whoa whoa whoa"

"WHO ARE YOU"

"just put the gun down"

"WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE"

"I'll tell you whatever if you just put the gun down"

"WHO ARE YOU"

"You really don't want to do this"

"WHY NOT. WHAT'S GOING ON"

"My friends are in the jungle with guns aimed at your face"

"NOPE"

*shots ring out, several other guns emerge*

"who's the guy with the gun?"

*scene ends*

I uh... I went a little crazy

 I meant to update a couple of days ago, but I've been doing nothing but work on this quilt since then, so I'll just put everything up in one big mess. This, of course, is the attached blocks, without the borders. I was already running out of room in the studio to spread this out.

 On the plus side, I found an excellent Willie-themed fabric for the backing. I tried to get one that was all cookies, but they were short a metre, so I had to go with whales n'stuff. I realize it's possibly more Sophie-themed because I have this travel mug that features a Haida design of orca and salmon called "Unity," but comparing the two makes the quilt a symbol of unity and that makes me feel sappy, so I just make fun of one particular salmon on this fabric that looks particularly surprised. It's that one right there. See it?

 Thanks to the cutting spree that I complained far too much about, the borders are already cut!

 Placing them down for this demonstrative photo was supposed to be the end of it. Seeing what it looked like was supposed to be enough. It wasn't. I attached the borders before I had a chance to get the memory card out of my camera. What's more, I pre-washed and assembled the quilt backing practically by accident in the middle of the night.

 So, what we have here is me in the middle of a beer. Also spreading the batting over the backing. This thing is so big that I can't even get into my bedroom.

Dante decided that it needed to be stepped on just a little bit right there. Everything's set up for basting now. In fact, if the quilt wasn't too big to fit into my quilting frame, I'd be done by now. But I'll have to quilt it in my hoop, which means a bunch of extra lines of basting. Did I explain what basting is? Should I? I'm sewing it together just enough that everything stays in one place while I stretch and sew everything for reals. It's like pinning it, but with fewer sharp points. Except for my needle, which is somewhere in there and I'm not exactly sure where.

Life Lately

 Since quitting my job last week, which was a surprise even to me, I have finally had time to accomplish some things, aside from self-medicating and having lunches with people. First, my mom and I worked together to bring this couch upstairs! The staircase is narrow and winding, so we didn't get it done without some damage to the walls, but it turns out that the scrapes and dents that were already there must have been put there when the same couch was moved down there in the first place. So the damage was no worse than what was already there.

 I also put together this lamp. You can see some minor damage to the finish, which I disappointingly noticed when I took it out of the box. Also, there are supposed to be pre-drilled holes to screw in the holders for the electrical cord. There weren't. Not a problem, since the wood was soft enough that I could put it at the back where it would be even less noticeable than the suggested placement, but nevertheless I was unimpressed with the design. On the plus side, we have a way to display some Newfoundland knick-knacks that were sitting forgotten on a shelf somewhere.

 The bookcases that were originally in the room upstairs have been moved down to the studio. They're not all there yet, but now when I'm doing my pressing I get to look at some of my favourite possessions!

 This section is, of course, the most relevant. Although this is less than half of my quilting and crafting books (obvs, since there are only five). That Good Housekeeping Family Health and Medical Guuide? I bought that at a used bookstore as a joke, but it turns out it's not outdated enough to be funny.

 Oh, and I've finished most of the strips for the quilt-top, but I'm having a hard time staying motivated enough to get it done quickly.

 I always thought I hated getting flowers, because in my experience only your boyfriend gets you flowers, and he only does that when he's apologizing for something. Then I got over my distaste for anything traditional or overtly feminine and admitted that I do very much like having flowers around the house and that they're a perfectly fine gift. So I got some birthday begonias from my mom!

 And I installed a hook on the porch for some hanging begonias that are to cheer me up whenever I have to leave the house. I installed the hook poorly, but as long as it doesn't come out of the post completely, nobody will ever know.

 Going through my dad's books revealed some language readers that might be nice to take a look through. If not, they're still pretty.

And more flowers, all the better for being unexpected, from Willie's family :) Carnations for my special carnation mug!