Lovelihood

The tiramisu from the upscale hippie co-op down the street is by no means the best tiramisu out there. But tiramisu of any caliber, even some high-falutin' organically fair-traded tiramisu, refrigerated to the point where it's more dense than creamy, is not to be scoffed at as I settle in with some quilting and Lost on a Monday night.

I'm four days out from The Boy's deadline of Thursday for finishing up the quilt binding, and I'm about halfway done. Which is to say I'm right on track. Because, while I'm sure he's already forgotten about his deadline, an imposition that was, after all, a most arbitrary one, I am dead serious about deadlines.

The Halloween decorations were hauled out and put up today. Fake spider webbing and some local flora complete our resident skeleton's home for the next few weeks.

If it weren't for Halloween, I'd probably never sew any apparel. Besides the occasional hat, of course. Setting in a sleeve is so much easier than it seems, I really ought to try it more often outside of October.

The quilting phase finally done after nearly two months, I laid the robot out to trim off all that excess crap that extends past the edges of the quilt top. And then I attached the first side of binding. Now, I'm the sort of person who, upon reaching the final step, writes off the project as done, and then puts off actually completing that final step. But The Boy declared that he sure hopes that he'll be able to sleep under his new quilt next Thursday night (Why Thursday? No idea.) So I guess I've got a pretty firm deadline to meet.

There's a respectable list of things I'd rather do than prepare a pile of quilt binding. All the cutting and pressing and folding and trimming and more pressing... it really eats into a naptime. Still, there's a nice technical quality to the work. I've done it plenty enough. There's no chance of messing it up. Almost like threading up the machine, which is also a familiar pleasure. Like cooking up a meal entirely from scratch, it's a nice reassurance that there are things (esoteric, yes, but useful nonetheless) that I can make for myself that might seem completely foreign to somebody else. I mean, really, what percentage of people out there even know what double-fold bias tape is? And I spent the afternoon engrossed in its tedium.

There are a limited number of days left that The Boy can, without embarrassment or irony, use the word "beautiful" to describe something, like this pink glitter-filled ball.