Dresden Plates

Awhile back it rained and I took its picture.  (Not sure why. Maybe as a talisman against the hot, dry days we've been having recently.) I was waiting in the car while Dave ran into the grocery store for some things.

Sewing Things

I finished the last quilt, the Loosey Goosey one (which I ended up calling "Big Chaotic with lots of Bones" since it was big and chaotic and I watched almost the entire run of the TV series Bones while making it). My new quilt is a Dresden plate quilt. Dresden plates are made from "blades" cut with a template and sewn together into a plate. The number of blades needed depends on the template width. My template is a commercial one and takes twenty blades to make a plate. With my template, I can cut blades up to ten inches long. I did that as a test and the plates were twenty one and a half inches across, way too big. So I went down to five inch blades and now the plates are just over 12 inches across.  

 

They're often scrappy quilts, but I wanted to try making some with shades of the same color. I had a lot of pink (because I rarely use pink), so I started with pink and then it was way too pink for me. It looked happy and fun, like a happy pink flower. I wasn't into it. 

I made five of those and quit. Too much happy energy makes me crazy. (Kind of like when this one time I sat under one of those anti-depression lights that's meant to mimic sunlight. I sat under there for, no joke, ten minutes and when I turned off the light, I felt crazy, like the mothership had beamed all new instructions into my brain kind of crazy. And I never used that awful light again.)

 

So instead I thought I'd try to make this marigold-like plate. 

Each blade is made up of two shades of orange. The gray background is my wool ironing mat. I was auditioning backgrounds and tried green. It seemed a natural choice and I love green, but it strangely washed out the orange. Instead I went for blue and it looked amazing against a blue background. (I will say that normally I really, really don't like the pairing of blue and orange. They are complementary colors, yes, but to my eye they are so ugly together, like a sports team logo. For some reason it works here, though.) Anyway, once the blades are sewn together, there is an open center that requires something to go over it, so I'm fussy-cutting some of my skull fabrics and making these centers. The whole thing will get appliqued to the background fabric. So far I have three plates done (one is appliqued to the background and two are pinned and ready to applique).

 

So that's what I'm doing quilt-wise. 

 

In sewing-related news, I placed orders for yet more fabric. I usually spend around $100 at a time (which is the minimum for "free" shipping for the places I order from online), so from one place (eQuilter) I ordered $100 of stuff. Then I noticed that the brand of solid fabrics I use (Moda Bella) has been disappearing from the places I order from. I went looking and suddenly lots of the big online places don't have them anymore. I don't know if it's because of tariffs (they are made in Korea) driving the prices up or some other reason, but I wanted to restock my solid fabrics before they disappear. All this to say that I placed a HUGE order of mostly solid fabrics from the one place online that still had some in stock. When I say huge, I mean HUGE. HUGE. Like, scary for me to spend that much money at once kind of huge. I checked with Dave before ordering and he's an enabler so he encouraged me to add MORE to the shopping cart.  So now I've got around 150 yards of fabric coming in the mail.

 

Gulp. 

 

Binge Watching

 

After Bones, I needed some new background noise for sewing. I put on North Of North (an Inuit comedy which I loved, but which was only five or six very short episodes), then I watched a Netflix miniseries called Eric (sexual assault, child abuse, and worse, Benedict Cumberbatch doing a lot of acting--but a really good soundtrack). After that, I watched a creepy true crime documentary, Amy Bradley Is Missing, about a young woman who disappeared off a cruise ship in the late 1990s. Then I needed something much lighter, so I watched The Birdcage (again--love it and it gets funnier each time I see it) and finally I started in on The Bob Newhart Show, the one from 1972. It's...weirdly comforting, like a less frantic Frazier.

 

More Goodbyes

 

I shed a tear over Ozzy dying. When I was a kid (a kid, like 9 years old), Rudy and I used to listen to his music.