Nerdy one offs

There are a lot of things I do because I’m a nerd. For example, I crocheted this little hat for my kid (and one for a friend of mine’s kid). Points for you if you know WHY I made this particular hat. I still think of the episode and chuckle. I looked for a pattern, but in the end I realized that it was just easier to make it up as I went. I made it for an average infant head – i.e. 13-17″ or thereabouts. It’s double crochet, so there’s stretch.

I also made that circular crocheted rattle, which I rate as “meh.” I need to find better toy patterns. I kinda used a pattern for this, but honestly I had no fun with the original pattern, and I don’t want to insult the pattern designer. Mostly I finished it because I felt compelled to finish. The Kid is welcome to drool on it, in any case.

In other news, last week I indulged my inner medieval nerd and went to an Anonymous 4 concert at Grace Cathedral. Anonymous 4 is four women who are known for performing medieval music, aka polyphony or chant. I spent a lot of time imagining medieval music in my head when I was studying how to read and understand it in graduate school. Since very, very little medieval music has been transcribed and recorded, those few times I’ve gotten to actually listen to something ancient that I spent hours translating/transcribing – well, it’s really an experience beyond compare for me.

Plus, the voices of the women in this group are beyond breathtaking. Seriously, they’re amazing. Plus the acoustics of a huge vaulted cathedral like Grace Cathedral are amazing, particularly with the cathedral’s 7-second reverberation. I’ve embedded a video track below in case you want to listen, but you’ll only be able to see it on my website.

Peperit Virgo, 14th c., by Anonymous 4

Can you see it?

This past weekend Jeff and I took a couple of days off and had a mini-vacation. It’s our 11th anniversary (when did decade two happen!?), and it was going to be hot in SF, so we figured – why not? So we went.

There must be hundreds of beautiful places for a weekend vacation within two hours of where we live, but after due consideration of the weather and the possibility of the San Francisco Hordes descending upon our chosen location, we chose a small Sonoma Coast town a couple of hours north of here. We picked the town and the inn sight-unseen, but as it turns out, we chose quite well. The town was fairly quiet, it was cool and breezy, we got to go beach hiking, we met the owners of every single lovely place we went, there was a surfeit of Sonoma County wine and we even got a surprise fireworks show before the fourth to boot. WIN.

In retrospect, it was a bad idea to drive ALL the way back down the Pacific Coast Highway to SF, due to the aforementioned SF Hordes. It wasn’t too horrid in the end because we were driving toward the city on the third instead of away from it. Just as a Public Service Announcement, if you’re in the area don’t ever think it’s a good idea to go to Stinson Beach on a holiday, unless you think it’s a grand idea to sit in a seven-mile, four-hour traffic jam on a small, windy two-lane road. That’s not my idea of a good time.

When I got home and was downloading the pictures from the trip I came to a sudden realization – I take most of my pictures with the idea of turning them into quilts! No kidding. Not ALL the time, but most of the time. A very few pictures I take are actually to remember a place that I went or a person or because something’s amusing, but I have quilting on my mind enough that I seem to keep it in the back of my mind whenever I have a camera in my hand. So to illustrate, all the pictures in this post are ones I took with a quilt pattern in mind. Can you see the quilts?

The pictures I take with the idea of a quilt in mind generally …

• have fairly simple structure,
• focus on a single element or the play between two elements,
• are somewhat abstract,
• have a strong message of some kind of sensory or emotional “feeling,” and
• usually feature a high-contrast color scheme.

I think that learning to frame a photograph well is analogous to learning to choose subjects for any kind of representational art – quilts, paintings, whatever. You have to decide what you want to show out of the millions of elements competing for your attention in real life. In the photo below it was really windy and chilly, there were plants with thorns that kept sticking my elbow, I was super worried about getting a sunburn (I did), the gorgeous Pacific Ocean was crashing at my back, there were butterflies flitting around, and I was up to my armpits in these flowers and could barely see the trail, which had an unnerving tendency to suddenly disappear over sharp dropoffs. But what I chose to show edits out most of that in favor of a simple field of yellow and blue.

Out-of-focus pictures are often better for the purpose of quilting (larger pixels), so sometimes if I really do want to make a quilt out of one of these photographs I will edit the photo in a few different out-of-focus or otherwise edited ways to think about composition and pattern. Other parts I’ll crop out and put in high, sharp focus to concentrate on the possibilities for embroidery.

I may or may not make a quilt out of any of these (I think the fireworks and the yellow/blue ones are the most likely) but I do keep a scrapbook of possibilities that I add to on a regular basis. If I started now working full-time I probably wouldn’t finish all of my ideas in my lifetime! I guess it’s good that sometimes it’s enough for me to just think about them.

Hope you’ve had a lovely holiday weekend if you’re in the US, or just a lovely weekend period anywhere!

Let there be light

I almost forgot!

It’s been my goal this year to try to work in classes and at least attempt to find other crafty people around here. The trouble is that I am by nature a lifelong, dedicated, sincerely introverted person, so I crave a lot time where the rest of the world just goes away. I often get that time only when I pick up a needle or a hook (or a book, to be fair).

But I am trying. I figured there were certainly things I want to learn, so I looked around for who could teach me, and went from there.  So that’s how I found myself in a class on lamp-making at the end of May. The class was a lot of fun! It was taught by Gil Stancourt, who has been making lamps for 20 or so years who will (as he says on his business card) put a light bulb in anything. I thought it was really funny that he said he’d started teaching classes just so he could talk about making lamps more   And at the class I made this!

I know, it’s not an exciting of a lamp, being a wine bottle with no shade and a vaguely Asian base, but who cares? I made it! And now I understand how (simple) lamp wiring works, and what sort of (basic) components you need to build a lamp, and (sort of) how to drill a hole in ceramic or glass, and (mostly) where to get various components should I wish to build a lamp myself.  This is a super crappy picture, I know, but it’s really exciting that I know how this socket works. It is deeply satisfying to that part of me that always wants to take everything apart to see how it works.

I suspect that I will go to next month’s antique fair just to search for miscellaneous items that I can turn into a lamp. Because, you see, there’s going to be a follow-up lamp class that will teach me more intricate wiring, and I have to (a) practice and (b) find possible suspects for that class. And then I will construct Frankenstein lamps and lamp shades. I’ve been waiting for this class a long time, as you can see by the list of lamp tutorials that I have collected:

• make a custom lampshade
• heirloom linen lampshade slipcover
• ruler pendant lamp
• photo lamp shades
• string ball chandelier
• cork-covered lamp base

There was an unexpected bonus to this class, too. We got to cut and sand metal using that machine you see above there. I’m a power tool dork, so I was quite thrilled by that. I was extra happy that a professional machinist took the class as well, and he was kind enough to give us his expert rundown on cutting and sanding metal. It was fascinating. I’ll tell you, I run into people who make things for a living with their hands, and I just think sometimes that I did the absolute wrong thing with my life. Not that I dislike what I do, but there’s just something about making things and working with my hands that just isn’t the same as anything else. I was almost ready to give it all up and see if Gil wanted a lamp-making apprentice.

Anyway, since my house is actually rather lacking in lamps at the moment I may actually be able to do something useful for the house while I explore this new hobby. And then, of course, I will take another step toward making Jeff’s earlier statement true, that I won’t be satisfied until I’ve made everything in my house.