Mondazed

The time change is rough this year, I think. I've been somewhat zombified since Saturday night/Sunday morning. I had more caffeine today than I usually do today, just trying to flip from night to day after my graveyard shift on Saturday, but it's been a rough transition made rougher by the time change.

Being dead tired didn't stop me from finishing a quilt for David though. It's kind of an interesting quilt, longer than it is wide (since Dave is longer than he is wide, unlike me!) and made with various shades of gray and blue solids with an Aboriginal Australian-inspired black, white, and pale blue print on the border. There's also purple fabric with pink polka dots thrown in for good measure. (Dave picked all but the gray and blue fabrics himself, by the way.) I really need to upload some pictures of these things, don't I? I tried a new way of binding the quilt, which took some extra work. It came out really nice though, probably the best binding I've done so far, so I'll try the same technique again, maybe on the next quilt.

Speaking of the next quilt: I have finished three large and one small (wall-hanging sized) quilts in the last two months (and have one in the works to finish in the next week or so). Before that, my output was one almost-lap-sized quilt in two years. What changed? I started quilting things in sections rather than putting a whole top together and then trying to quilt an enormous quilt using my small sewing machine. (I looked at sending the tops I had made out to be quilted and the $250-$400 per quilt--some quilters call it "quilting by credit card"--that it would have cost stopped me. I'm not at the point where I'm making quilts that I want to spend that kind of money to have others quilt for me.) Anyway, like I said, I've been quilting things in sections and then connecting the sections together after they're completely quilted. That means that I'm not wrestling an enormous quilt under my small machine from start to finish. The thought of having to do that was a huge mental block for me, and it meant that I was getting to a certain point and then just stopping and starting something else. I like the ragtaggedness of my finished quilts so far though. (I really have to take some pictures, no?)

As far as sewing, I don't know what is coming next. I want to start another quilt fairly soon, but I also want to make a few Christmas gifts and a new cross-body bag for myself. (My summery bag is still fine, but I want something new and wintry.) My mom texted me earlier that fabric is 40% off at her work, so I should probably go and check that out. They have good solid colors, and I want to build up my collection of solids. Also: I just placed a $60 order for fabric online at fabric.com, so...but none of it solid colors--and I have plans for some of the fabric already.

I might have a problem.

I've been doing other online shopping as well, including some books last night. Lynda Barry has a new book out about making comics (which I don't do, but I still love everything Lynda Barry, so). It's called, funnily enough, Making Comics. I also ordered Roz Chast's book Can't We Talk about Something More Pleasant: A Memoir. (I love Roz Chast and have another collection of her comics called Theories of Everything, but I didn't buy Can't We Talk when it came out because it seemed uber depressing (it's about her parents dying) and I was not about that at the time.) I also finally ordered a copy of Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way, just because I should probably read that book sometime. Everyone raves about it (which is why I've stayed away from it for so long) and I finally read a few pages online and they made me think that I might get something out of it.

Currently, I'm reading a book I got a long time ago but couldn't bring myself to read until now. It's called Trauma and Recovery and it's by Judith Herman. It was used as a reference in one of the online courses on PTSD that I had to take for work, and I went: Huh, I already own that. So I've been reading it. It's pretty harrowing stuff. You probably don't want to know what a kid has to go through to have PTSD by the age of five or six.

Other shopping? Well, I'm in the market for a new computer. We probably will go by the apple store tonight (after the fabric store) and look at MacBooks. In addition to another Mac, I'd also like to have a smaller computer or tablet to take to work with me (something that doesn't cost an arm and a leg in case it walks away and also something that has absolutely no personal information about me on it), although I really want to have something with a hinge that stays up by itself and a keyboard, which means that a tablet is not my first pick. (Also, I just kinda don't like tablets.) The last cheapie laptop I got didn't even last a year, though, so maybe I'll get an iPad and a keyboard for it.

And, uh. Yeah. That's been my day. Quilting. Caffeine-ing. (And yet more fabric shopping after a Middle Eastern dinner with Dave.)

Okay. Here's a pic of the quilt, post washing and drying, laid out on the bed in Kelly and Kevin's front room:

And here's this sign that I saw while buying fabric tonight: