Lovelihood

Having done my time in Houston, I know better than to characterize this weather as "pouring rain." I've seen veritable rivers surge past my front door because the sky had opened up and was dumping water faster than could be drained into the sewers. But what we do have here, what Seattleites like to remind tourists to discourage them from getting too comfortable, is a constant and widespread dousing. Today, it rained in earnest, big cold drops, all day, enough for one to forget that we're a week and a half into spring. Except that everythings is in bloom. I had no idea this tree was going to do that.

I'm still deep in the fabric cutting stage of quilt-making here. My original calculations had it hovering around 1000 pieces to cut and fit together. To ease the pain a bit, I treated myself to a larger, less warped, cutting mat. At 18" x 24", it's by no means huge. But it plays nice on the table with the sewing machine, and it doubles the cutting surface of my last mat, which was one of those cutting/ironing hybrids that I may have, in multi-tasking haste, abused with the iron a bit. And it lays completely flat, which seems to agree with the rotary cutter. Also, treated the cutter with a new blade, so we're rolling along quite smoothly now.

The Mr. skipped town this morning, and took with him the iPad, a fact I am not in the slightest bitter about. Not in the slightest. The man's job, after all, is to work with mobile devices. Still, even though I'd been doing my nightly crossword puzzle on paper for the sixteen years prior to the introduction of the iPad to our home, it felt a bit strange to sit down with paper and ink again.

I wouldn't normally advocate coffee as an appropriate go-with for microwaved quesadillas. But on Tuesday nights, coming off the bus after the kids have already been put down, and having had nothing you might call a meal all day, what's left of the evening has to accomodate my needs for both quick and dirty nourishment and the sweet comfort of my nightly coffee and crossword puzzle habit.

This little stack of cut flannels represents the teensiets of dents in the body of fabric that will need to be pressed and cut and pieced and pressed and sandwiched and then pressed again for good measure. It's nice to know, though, that I have an entire month's work (at least) of work lined up for my evenings.

Sometime last month we converted Bear's crib to a toddler bed, and if I haven't mentioned it before, it's because it's been an unnoteworthy passage to this new era of kid-dom, with the children sharing their room, now, as peers who enjoy each other's company. It's all good, even when, like today, instead of the silence of a well-deserved naptime we're witness to a cacophony of giggles and teasing and toy guitars secreted into the room. Today's image was captured in the 15 seconds it takes Bear to stumble down after her brother from their room upstairs once they give up pretending to sleep.

It stands to reason that someone who regularly measures out bits of fabric with a pica pole might also use a program like InDesign to plan out a quilt's color scheme to present to The Boy for approval to move forward with the project. What's left to be seen is how eye-aching that high-contrast background proves to be. The book, Boo Davis' Dare to Be Square lays out the plans for a tonal orange backdrop to a blue-and-bluer robot, a schema completely down my alley. But there's a stack of gray cotton sateen bedsheets itching to be paired with the stack of baby blue flannels that used to be his receiving blankets. So today color theory will have to cede to the demands of my stash.