Lovelihood

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.

Just a few more nights of quilting in front of the TV before heading into the actual final stretch of binding. And then maybe this guy will get some use while there's still chill in the air.

I rarely ever sew from your typical commercial enveloped pattern because sewing clothes generally intimidates the crap out of me, and going through all those pattern catalogs at the store is a tedium I just can't bear. And some well-chosen books plus the infinite wisdom of the internet gets me rather deep into the list of things I plan to produce with my sewing machine. There are times, though, when I have to turn to the personality-dead language of the tissue paper pattern, and I can't help but feel that if it were all this kind of pattern, I would probably never sew.

Yesterday, out at dinner, I proclaimed (big flourish of the hands here) that the single greatest innovation to hit ramen was the addition of a soft boiled egg. Today I announce that the addition of animalian ears is the greatest innovation to children's hats.

What might befall a pin caught unawares by the oncoming sewing machine needle. See also: what will undoubtedly happen happen to my finger one day.