Lineanongrata

a finished quilt and a scary ghost story

We might say that I'm no better person than before. Time still is a concept that escapes me. Completely. I underestimated the time it takes to quilt a queensize by about a week.

Now that I think about it, I like time in a historical sense. The time you can name. In ... Julius Cesar had a bad stomach ache because Brutus... . The time I need to do something is a kind I don't manage well and which thus has it's threatening sides.

I managed to finish Hanna's birthday quilt while she was already preparing desert for her birthday barbecue.

After sewing straight through a couple of nights and more than one entire day. Quilting it took so much longer than I anticipated. Very very veeeeeery long.

Scary, too. The last night before my sister's birthday I got home later than I wanted to and decided to sew a little bit before going to bed. At around three in the wee morning hours I went into the kitchen (may I  mention that I was alone at home and that my parents live in a rather big house...) and saw two glass bottles in a place I was sure I hadn't put them in. Really absolutely sure. Because when we were little, putting glass bottles into that space would have meant certain death. Death by housekeeper.

Oh yes, that lady sure had rules.

So there was no doubt I had put the bottles there and had forgotten. It was impossible. 

But nobody else had been in the house the entire day, I was sure.

Immediately I started sweating and my illustrator's fantasy got to working overtime.

You know the drill: 'What about those ghosts and monsters' and the likes. 

Cellar - check. First floor - check. Second floor - check. Third floor, nobody either. Neither monster nor chainsaw murderer to be found anywhere, not even under the beds (God, am I glad nobody was at home to see me peek underneath the beds and behind every door.It's the stuff family legends and family jokes are made of.).

I got myself another beer to assure better sleeping, switched on the alarm and told myself there was no way anybody could get into the house or move downstairs without me knowing.
Which is the absolute truth by daylight.

Only at night I continued hearing noises from the kitchen. Glass making 'clink' against glass. Ghosts putting bottles where they're not supposed to be put.

At five thirty I fell asleep like a stone. Put out by the last beer and sewing straight lines across a quilt for hours.

To wake up at eight because the housekeeper (the one with the strict rules who still works with my parents) made the alarm go 'iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii' and didn't know how to turn it off. Which might have been a good thing because I didn't really go back to sleep and started sewing again earlier than I would have otherwise, finishing the quilt just in time.

Oh, and about the housekeeper with the strict rules ? Turns out she was in the house the night before, while I was still at a friend's house. She came to take in the milk and yoghurt left on our doorstep by the milkman and she seems to have taken to putting glass bottles into no-glass-bottle places.

So what about death by misplacing bottles and breaking the rules, I wonder. The world is coming to pieces if you ask me.

But the quilt is fabulous. Absolutely worth it scares and work. When my sister unwrapped it (got the cheesiest wrapping paper, too. Silly circus scenes on dark blue. After all my parent's house is in a village of 8000 people and an estimated six ghosts per person. One can't expect to find anything super fancy there.) she uttered 'oh my...'. And something about a lot of work.

I quilted each circle circly and every square separately with straight lines. One with a larger space between seams, the next with minimal space between them, and the result is something very lively. The back is white, made of old cotton sheets that still show my grandmother's and great grandmother's monograms.

 

Thank you, Amy, for sharing the roundabout design.  

it just needs binding

 

Do you remember Benoît ? The huge blond man who works with us ?
He just had his second son. Yanael. Little Yan in breton. Has us all wonder who in the family is from Bretagne...
Benoît sais the baby is perfectly normal: Every time he sees his father he starts screaming at the top of his lungs.

I don't know if 'stacked coin' quilts are a symbol for wealth or not. The name sure makes me assume so. And I don't know if, that being the case, a stacked coin quilt and the implied wish for wealth is really something one should give a baby.

There seem to be a hundred better things one should wish a newborn.
But the stacked coin quilts are pretty, no matter what might be their symbolism. I like their simplicity and the way they are quietly colorful.

So I guess once this quilt is bound and finished, it will go to Yanael to accompany him for a while.
With my best wishes.

becoming a better person

'Dogs again' you think. But the picture is there because I can't post pictures of what this post is actually about.
Because it's a secret !

If you are my sister Hanna, you may read this post, but you shouldn't click on any link and under no circumstance should you head over to my Flickr page. Really, don't. You'd spoil it for both of us.

For all the rest of you, if you would like to see pictures of what all this is really about, head on over here. And here, keeping in mind that it will be my sister's birthday on July 29th. Now that I think about it, you should have a peek at this, too, because Amy makes such beautiful things.

At this point my family is howling with laughter because I managed to start a gift three weeks before the birthday. That's a first. Usually I come home and tell everybody 'I've got such a neat gift for you, I just need time to make it'. In June, when it's a christmas gift, for example.
So bets are probably up that I'll get home with something half-finished that I need to finalize in the wee hours before my sister's actual birthday. We'll see.
They'll see. I'll try. To be a better person, in at least one tiny way.

If you comment, could you please not mention the words (the q-word, for example) that would reveal to Hanna what she's going to have ? You may break out in admiring 'oh's and 'ah's and we'll just have a good time all together without her, discussing the roundabout... something.

That's evil, isn't it ? Having people in more than three countries know what she'll get and pretending all the while that I do it only to be a better person ?

patience, my dear

'Patience makes a woman beautiful in middle age' , Elliot Paul.

And a wise man he was, indeed.

By the time I finish my Ohio star quilt, I might indeed be a middle-aged woman. But I will look beautiful, huddled up on a decorative couch, wrapped in my new quilt. Indeed.

Or do you think one should consider oneself middle-aged at thirty one ? Because if that is the case, I'll be old-age when I finished the quilt.

But then, maybe patience is completely overrated as a virtue. I'll tell you more about that when I'm about half way through quilting.

 

crafting for myself

In the last couple of months I have made so many things for other people (let's not talk about finishing Christmas presents in June), that I almost forgot what it feels like to make something just for myself. And something without any imminent use, at that.

It's the puzzle ball from 'Last-minute patchwork and quilted gifts' by Joelle Hoverson. A pattern I have been looking at for some time but which seemed rather complicated.

Now that I have tried I can tell you that it's not complicated at all, and it's fascinating to sew something '3D'.
On one of the blogs I read (sorry, but I forgot which one. That must be the age. Once you're over thirty memory goes down the drain, it seems.) somebody suggested that this is a great gift for babies. Helpful in developing tactile skills and the like. It is also a very good gift for thirty one year old adults, though. It's pretty and a pleasure to touch and to hold, and what more can you ask of a gift... to yourself ?

All right, I do have to admit that you can't cover yourself with a puzzle ball. Or snuggle up in it.

Like Vincent when he goes to sleep with his new quilt. Whom I envy just enough to have started sewing my own quilt.

I'm feeling traditional, can you tell ?

tadaa

I mean: TADAAAAAA !

As in 'an entire-herd-of-elephants-tadaaa'.

Please meet my first entire big (huuuuuge) quilt.

Don't ask me if this is a queen size. When I was in London the Queen wasn't there to have tea, so it don't matter much to me whether or not this is a queen size.
What matters is that it covers the whole length of a boy's long feet and body.

Because this is Vincent's quilt. Therefore the boy colors.
He did chose the red, last fall in Barcelona. Not for a quilt precisely, but he still likes it. Or else he doesn't dare tell me now.

I used some new and some vintage fabric and absolutely love how impossible fabrics (the apples on dark blue, for example, are from out of space if you see an entire meter of the fabric, but cut up in pieces they're quite acceptable. So are some of my grandparents old dishtowels.) suddenly melt with the entire piece and become not only acceptable, but beautiful.
The backing used to be a duvet cover in an anterior life, worn but not so much it couldn't stand some more years of wear and tear.
The batting is a lovely cotton/linen mix from Retrosaria. Very thick and makes lovely 'sheep' or 'snowflakes' if you leave the quilt out too long without binding it. Sheep everywhere you look. My studio and my clothes were covered in fuzz. I breathed it in, and was still ridiculously happy about it. Go figure.

Just one question remains: How do you photograph a quilt so it doesn't look boring ?

generally cute

This is absolutely not for me, so don't get your hopes up. One of Vincent's many cousins just had a baby girl. And with a name as beautiful as 'Juliette' (and as resembling my own so very marvelously) the new little baby should be offered the cutest outfits possible.
That's only logic.

Maybe the apple buttons on cherry fabric make something of a fruit salad, but it's a cute one, if you ask me. So that should be allowed. Actually, IF you ask me, I would probably be able to justify a lot of things.
Like why people with hypoglycemia should eat store bought cookies with refined sugar.
Or why a girl needs to buy more sewing books, cook books or just reading books (a matter of some urgency, always. What, if one ran out of books ?!).
Why one can't give away one of the puppies when one knows they'll grow up to weigh 70 kg ? The list goes ever on and on.

Why you should go over and have a look at the Lineanongrata shop, for example, is a good one, too.

Well, you see, there are these monstrously cute buttons that just arrived...

Everybody needs a button (don't they ?).

Right.

useful sewing

Useful sewing ?
You may now say that 'of course, sewing is useful'. And you're right.
But this post's title was more because for once I made myself something that's not only pretty but also something I will actually wear. I have a natural tendency towards sewing the pretty and the easy. Skirts, for example, are something I consider to be excessively pretty, easy to sew most of the time, and something I usually don't wear. I'm a slacks kind of girl.
Trousers, on the other hand, are usually more difficult to sew, not as imminently pretty and usually I can't muster the courage to make myself some.
Lounge pants, though, well, lounge pants are another story entirely. These are from Amy Butler's book, easy to sew, pretty depending on what fabric one uses, and I can wear them, no matter how many flaws I sew into them. They're my new pajamas. Who really ever has a closer look at the seams in pajamas ?!
My grandmother might have had. But she's busy sitting on a cloud and catching up with my grandfather.

And while grandmother is chatting away, I have not only made myself some pants, I have also invented something new.

The artist's traveling pouch.

It's not entirely a new invention, I have to admit. It was inspired by existing pencil rolls.
But this pouch stores a sketchbook, pencils, a metal pencil box for fragile art pencils, you can unroll it or spread it out, it has a strap you can either attach or take off, and I think it's bloody brilliant, if I say so myself.

It's also a gift for someone else (a boy, if you haven't guessed by my choice of fabric. It's actually quite a grown up boy, so I hope he won't mind the robots, but they were all I had on the male side of fabric), so I'll have to make another one for myself.
I'm already thinking about the fabric I'll use.

one of my best jokes

This clutch (pattern by Amy Butler) was my belated Christmas gift for my mother. The fabric is Amy Butler as well. I like how the colors will harmonize with many of the bonbon-like-colors my mother favors.

Another of my plans for this year, probably inspired by Tracy and her quilting projects, is a quilted cozy something that starts out like this:

I think I know what it's going to be, but I'll tell you later. About when I'm sure I'll actually finish it.

For the next two weeks we'll be gone to Bruxelles and Rotterdam to attend to three trade fairs with our wines. The hotel's websites pretended they had Internet access, but I'll believe that when I see it. So if ou don't hear from me regularly, don't worry. I'll be fighting freezing temperatures with good beer and hopefully in insulated houses (I'll not start ranting about the houses they have here in the South of France, but they often remind me of the cars in eastern Germany while it was still called the DDR.).
Which makes me think of a joke:
A rich American sees a Trabant for the first time in his life and a German friend of his tells him that it's a car that's extremely hard to come by (people needed to order their car 10 years ahead in the DDR).
So the rich American decides he needs one of these for his rare car collection and orders one.
The constructors of the Trabant tell themselves that this is the opportunity to show off their car in the West and send him one four weeks after his order.
When he gets it, the American in absolutely stunned:'Just look at those Germans. They know I'll have to wait ten years for my car, so to make the wait less hard, they send me a cardboard model of the car !'

Well, so much for eastern German cars and french houses.

I hope to be able to update you in the coming two weeks.

Christmas

Our Christmas preparations and Christmas night went by so quickly I didn't find the time to write again.
The house seemed so quiet in the morning. I started to make desert,

and all of a sudden my brother was awake, my parents came home from work and the house was alive with cooking, yelling 'where is the tape and scissors' or 'has anybody seen the wrapping paper ?', one of our all-time favorites. This year someone had seen to it that there were actually scissors for every family member, but they all got lost during the day anyways.

Orange-Aperol jelly for desert,

pajamas for gifts. I bought the shirts and made the pants, the pattern is for the lounge pants from this Amy Butler book.

Our church choir always sings the same songs at Christmas, so I can sing with them even though I haven't lived in this village for ten years.

While my dad and I hurry to church to 'warm up' our voices my siblings lay the table, my mother yells that they're late and they come hurrying after us, hoping that they'll find seats somewhere in the very full church.

Dinner, singing, gifts, we went to bed at around two thirty in the morning. My brother and I managed to get into a heated discussion about women and literature, heated and well-oiled with wine I have to admit.

Christmas morning was slow for us, rather hung over on my part but I can happily report that we celebrated the Lord's birthday in style.

I hope you all had a peaceful and blessed Christmas.