Election, quilt, hope
Nov. 7th, 2020 06:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
flexagonToday: all the news outlets except Fox called the presidential race for Biden, it was 70 degrees out, and I went walking with my friend to get Belgian waffles while cars went honking and celebrating through Harvard Square. My favorite one was playing a song that, upon researching, was definitely FDT by YG... you can hear its chorus in this video at 1:28 if you want to and aren't clear on what FDT might stand for. It was all very celebratory and a huge relief.
Then I finished the last of the quilting for my T-shirt quilt, which had proven unwieldy with its stretchy, slippery top layer of jersey. I ended up being glad for my strategy of quilting the sashing (grid pattern) first instead of doing an overall quilting pattern, because that reduced the issue to 20 little puzzles and gave me the room to iterate on techniques in each square. In the end it seemed that squared-off zig-zag patterns worked well to pull the fabric around in ways that ultimately balanced, and I could adapt these around the printing on the squares; also, laying out the course with masking tape in advance would take the thinking out of it somewhat and make the fabric stretch less. Double win. In the end, the most visible mistakes in the whole thing are in the sashing itself, where there's a lot of wrinkling and pulling that distorts the littlest 2" by 2" squares, but I decided early on to leave all non-structural mistakes in this quilt. We're embracing wabi sabi or at least extreme casualness, which is appropriate for a quilt that is literally T-shirts and denim... even if I did end up quilting every square with matching-color thread and with a custom pattern, because I am me.
The very last piece of work will involve pulling all the thread ends through to the back, knotting them and pulling them inside the quilt with a needle; I can do that tomorrow while on Hangouts with Norwood or while listening to my latest audiobook, Multipliers.
I'm glad I took this last week mostly off work. Next week's going to be pretty intense; there are a bunch of summits, and I'm expecting two big pieces of news, one of which I might even be able to go public with. Also maybe my performance review with my manager, which... might gain a rather different flavor depending on one of those big pieces of news. Cross fingers for me, please. I could really use just one more win.
Then I finished the last of the quilting for my T-shirt quilt, which had proven unwieldy with its stretchy, slippery top layer of jersey. I ended up being glad for my strategy of quilting the sashing (grid pattern) first instead of doing an overall quilting pattern, because that reduced the issue to 20 little puzzles and gave me the room to iterate on techniques in each square. In the end it seemed that squared-off zig-zag patterns worked well to pull the fabric around in ways that ultimately balanced, and I could adapt these around the printing on the squares; also, laying out the course with masking tape in advance would take the thinking out of it somewhat and make the fabric stretch less. Double win. In the end, the most visible mistakes in the whole thing are in the sashing itself, where there's a lot of wrinkling and pulling that distorts the littlest 2" by 2" squares, but I decided early on to leave all non-structural mistakes in this quilt. We're embracing wabi sabi or at least extreme casualness, which is appropriate for a quilt that is literally T-shirts and denim... even if I did end up quilting every square with matching-color thread and with a custom pattern, because I am me.
The very last piece of work will involve pulling all the thread ends through to the back, knotting them and pulling them inside the quilt with a needle; I can do that tomorrow while on Hangouts with Norwood or while listening to my latest audiobook, Multipliers.
I'm glad I took this last week mostly off work. Next week's going to be pretty intense; there are a bunch of summits, and I'm expecting two big pieces of news, one of which I might even be able to go public with. Also maybe my performance review with my manager, which... might gain a rather different flavor depending on one of those big pieces of news. Cross fingers for me, please. I could really use just one more win.
no subject
Date: 2020-11-07 11:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-11-08 12:29 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-11-08 03:35 pm (UTC)Good luck with the coming week!
no subject
Date: 2020-11-10 11:02 pm (UTC)And haha yeah we heard FDT playing from multiple cars/boomboxes here! The celebratory mood was amazing - I first realized there was news when I was sitting in the living room with the windows open on Saturday morning and heard cheering and people banging on pots and pans. I went to the CNN website and saw the headline but couldn't go outside because I was waiting for a grocery delivery. Later, I went to get a latte and saw someone driving around the neighborhood holding a Biden/Harris sign out the window, honking her horn - she got a lot of cheers. On the Upper West Side there were musicians and people dancing on the sidewalk at Columbus and 72nd Street; a group of cyclists passing by started cheering and people on the sidewalk cheered back. And Central Park was so full of celebratory hangouts and dancing and waves of cheering. So good.