Bean Bag Improvement
This is the Nook by designer Philippe Malouin (via Design Milk). It is a crocheted chair - sort of crocheted using his hand/arm instead of a hook. It reminds me of a bean bag. It can be uncrocheted, I understand, and redone in different ways. The crocheting is done by hand, and the “yarn” is stuffed cotton tubing. You can go to his page, linked above, and see him make it.
The good, the bad and the ugly
What a long weekend it has been. The good, the bad, and the ugly. To be honest, it was mostly ugly. It’s not my job to be perennially sunny, but this weekend was so ridiculous I felt my innate optimism falter. All I did was to travel out of town to support someone I care about in an election. And I’m glad I did, I’m so very glad I could be there for her, I just wish it had been a better experience for her. I admit there were up sides: I was able to support someone I love, one blanket is nearing completion, I saw something really inspiring in an unexpected place and we had a long sit-down with a good friend. But …
About the election: I am going to barely restrain myself here from slandering certain people by name who cost a person I love, respect and admire dearly by cheating in an election yesterday. I’m ragingly pissed at what I witnessed, but still so proud of her for holding her own anyway and showing such strength in the face of an awful situation. I will just say that this election was a fine example of what can and does go wrong in democratic politics. The reasons why these people voted for their elected leaders were more abysmally stupid and cruel than my normally optimistic sensibilities were prepared for … I am truly disappointed. Apparently to win you must be selfish, and you must be good at throwing money at things, cheating, backstabbing, mouthing empty words and fostering the good-old-boy system. To hell with issues, loyalty, trust and honesty. Values clearly had taken a back seat to winning. I know I’m biased toward her, but even without my admitted personal involvement, it was still a sad day for our political system.
And then there was the city.
The location of all this nonsense was really absurd - it was an exercise in repetitive manufactured commercialism. My surroundings were entirely composed of tract housing and strip shopping malls. There wasn’t a single non-chain store, and the entire area appeared to be one large planned community designed to maximize consumerism. I’ve seen this sort of thing before, but this was that concept on steroids. There was so much sameness everywhere that I kept getting lost for lack of distinctive landmarks. Every blade of grass was mown into submission, the landscaping was subdued and regular, and all the building colors were a matching, orderly tan and brick. Everything was designed to maximize drive time and minimize walking. I longed for color and personality and irregularity. I longed for something that felt real, longed for the organic chaotic vibrancy of heterogeneity and mixed cultures and creativity.
I returned home with indecent haste. That was a mixed blessing, for though I love home and missed my comfortable bed and fuzzy furbeasts, I didn’t love finding that my building was burglarized for the second time in six months.
Maybe I’ll start again tomorrow.
Quilting Patterns
One of the major struggles I’ve had in upgrading my computer equipment is that I can’t abandon Mac OS 9. The trouble is that I used to use the glorious program WordPerfect until the evil empire Microsoft started turning everyone into software zombies. So now I have lots and lots of documents in WordPerfect, stuff I still use, that I can’t access if I upgrade. I’m working hard on moving them all to other formats, but some of it’s pretty difficult to move.
The BIG PROBLEM is that I used to design quilts in the old vector graphics program that was included wihth WordPerfect - it was actually quite good for piecing patterns. The limitations of the graphics program closely resembled the limitations of actual piecing. Helpful! So I probably have 40 quilt designs that are stuck in the WP graphics program.
Anyway, as I drag the designs kicking and screaming into this century, I’m going to start posting them here. I started creating these designs in maybe 1998, about 10 years ago. I might make a gallery of them, start using fabric swatches to flesh them out - I quite like these old designs I made. They’re almost all queen-size, I think, and I included one-foot-length measurement bars across the side and top for scale/sizing. I also often made a pillow design to go with it.
Amish-Style Quilt
This first design is a tribute to Amish quilts. Amish quilts have several hallmarks - dark, solid colors, extensive use of black/navy/brown as a unifying theme, very strong graphic elements. The designs are often simple and with non-repeating motif (like one big central red square on black). Amish quilting, like many things Amish, is meant to be simple and plain, and is made of strong, practical fabrics. This one that I designed is meant to focus on those elements, using only one brighter color - which in this case would be unbleached cotton, although it looks yellow in the design.
In fact, I think Amish quilts influenced my quilt design decisions a lot, thinking about the ones I have yet to recover. I see the simple large-central-diamond motif that’s common in Amish quilting in my designs. As time went on, many Amish quilts became brighter and more detailed, or just brighter in some cases. If you are interested, the Lancaster Quilt and Textile Museum has a lot of great resources, being sort of ground zero for this style of quilt.
