it is done

[dragonlady7]

I have an embarrassment of riches on my Kindle, currently-- things I've downloaded for free from Tor.com or snagged during Kindle promotions, things I've seen on sale, things I've impulse-purchased. I figured out how to transfer things to the Kindle via email (they hide it, but there's a way to do it from within your Amazon account), and so I got a bunch of fics I'd long ago downloaded up on there, including some ones I know are gone off AO3 now, so that's nice.
I took it with me when I took Dude to the doctor, and so I was quite sucked in during my time in the waiting room. I read Witchmark, by CL Polk, and reviewed it on Tumblr so that should crosspost here-- it might still be free on tor.com, you have to give them your email address but they only seem to email you a couple of times a month, and one time each month is to offer you a new free novella to download. That's how I got The Only Harmless Great Thing, which is really a staggering work of heartbreak and genius and I know that phrase is from a cliche, but it's true in this case. After reading it, I bought the other novella Bolander has for sale on Amazon, No Flight Without The Shatter, and haven't yet had the courage to read it.
Her shit is intense, ok.

Dude is recuperating in bed, held there by the cat, and I am dutifully bringing him an ice back every 20 minutes, then taking it away after another 20 minutes, to the letter of the doctor's instructions. Ironically enough, he seems to be in no discomfort, and I meanwhile have been suddenly saddled with a terrible headache that I think is due to a sudden shift in the weather-- it was sunny, but now it is very blustery and cloudy, and I can barely see straight. I'm typing with my glasses off, so I can't really see the screen, but i can see the shape of it and that seems to be enough.

Last night at banjo lessons, we came in and stood awkwardly in the kitchen, as usual, while he finished the lesson ahead of ours, and the banjo teacher's wife has a little table in a kind of nook off the kitchen where the basement steps come up into a landing, and there's a microwave tucked in there, and this little table-- well, today she had sewing supplies spread out across it, and was clearly working on a quilt, entirely by hand, made out of small hexagons. I asked her about it, and she pulled it all out to show us-- it's based on the hexagon thing from Catan, but she's discovered that hexagons are perfect for hand-piecing because the surfaces all interlock perfectly. Sometimes with squares, she said, you wind up getting a little off, then a little off, then a little off, and it compounds-- but with hexagons, you have such short surfaces, they have to keep each other honest.
And she was right-- it's brilliant! And you can do repeating little patterns easily, and use up oddball scraps easily, and...
Maybe since none of my fucking sewing machines will properly work for shit, maybe I'll just take to carrying piles of hexagons around with me and hand-sewing them together any which-way. Sigh.

I am trying to think of how to tell the banjo teacher that his wife is super awesome. (Last time we were there, she appeared suddenly from the basement steps, brandishing an antique power outlet clearly wrested recently from its fittings, and explained to us how hard it was to patch plaster walls. She's alarming and amazing, and possibly some sort of witch.)

ooogh my eyes kind of feel like they might explode, I'm such a wimp about headaches. Ibuprofen didn't work for this one, and it started like half an hour after I'd just had breakfast and coffee, so I'm gonna try not staring at a screen for a while and see how that does. I bet it's just the weather, though, and it's the warranty on this body expiring. Blech.

Comments

[shy_magpie]

Please take care of yourself!

[dragonlady7]

Oh, I'm fine, I just needed a nap I guess, or just to not... think about anything.

I have accomplished nothing today but it's okay because I have tomorrow off too! Yay!

[paean]

Oooh, hexagons! Please report if you do try it.

I love the Tor emails, and have downloaded many stories. Stories actually opened? Zero. But I am really determined to at least open Witchmark and give it a chance.

I live across the country, but keep thinking that you just need the right (aka really old straight stitch singer) sewing machine for quilting, of which there are a surplus on my local craigslist. Which I am browsing because while I absolutely don't need another sewing machine (or repair project more likely) but I am jonesing for one. My circa 1949 machine works great, and I really could live my whole life with that just that one and never need anything else. But look, a (probably) 1890s hand crank that just needs a major overhaul and could be great for teaching Monkey. Or the 2 treadle machines currently posted for not a gazillion dollars.

Anyway, glad to hear Dude is doing well, and sorry about your headache.

[dragonlady7]

I own two antique straight-stitch machines. One is a... Kingston? A Singer knockoff. The belt broke, and I replaced it, and it's getting loose again. It resides in the granary loft at the farm, and I used it to make the few roof quilts I already have for the yurt. But it wasn't... hefty enough to pull them through, so mostly I quilted those by holding them in both hands and yanking them where the feed dogs weren't catching, an armload at a time.

The other one, my old boss gave me, it's his grandmother's Singer 15J, cabinet-mount, but... I don't have the power cord, the foot pedal, or any idea what I even need to make it complete, and it surely needs an overhaul and I don't even know what I'm missing or where to find it. I'm not even sure the motor works. So the cabinet sits in my living room, closed up, and my serger sits on it.

(I also had possession of a third one, an Elna Supermatic that was my grandmother's, but she technically gave it to my sister, and she wants it back, so it's staying in the granary attic until she can get her shit together.) (Oh and Farmsister owns a lovely Singer Featherweight, that she had reconditioned, and it suddenly started chewing out snarls instead of sewing and I can't figure out why.)

My mother-not-in-law owns seven sewing machines and I sometimes think of asking to borrow one, but she has a workflow where she leaves them all set up and does different things on each one.

My workflow is that every sewing machine that currently works is at the farm, and I can't get at any of them.

[paean]

The motor for the 15 is external, and should be easy to replace. It’s probably easier to replace it than try to repair, as motors do wear out. My Singer 15 with a new motor (motor found on eBay about 15 years ago) can do 4 layers of denim with the right needle. And if you can wire a circuit, you can definitely wire in a new motor. The foot pedal is an actuator, so basically interchangeable from any other machine you can find what’s in worse disrepair. Once you wire it it, you can’t swap it back and forth easily. Of course, my enthusiasm for this reflects that I really like old sewing machines, possibly more than I actually like sewing. The one thing I often fail at is when the tension gets awful. That’s when I put it off forever, and then finally take it to the professionals.

[wyomingnot]

<3

[lydamorehouse]

I LOVE your description of your banjo teacher's wife! (Also, I had to tell my quilting wife about the idea of hexagons.)

[dragonlady7]

oh man this lady is fantastic. don't get me wrong, the banjo teacher seems cool too, but like. his wife is forever just sort of appearing from Somewhere, doing something amazing, and disappearing. sometimes during our lessons I can hear her laughing in the kitchen, which is just the other side of the room we shut ourselves into for lessons; I think the woman who comes for the lesson after ours arrives early just to talk to her, and they laugh and laugh and laugh.

I looked up the hexagons and apparently everyone else in the world does a technique called English Paper Piecing, whereby you actually cut a small square, then wrap it around a paper hexagon, and use a careful technique to sew the edges down at the corners without going through the paper, and then hold the long extra bits of fabric down with the thread underneath before stitching the next corner, and then you carefully sew just the edges together with the paper still inside, not sewing through the paper, and then you leave the paper in until you've finished connecting all the hexagons, whereupon you pry it out and press everything and then you've got your quilt top with all the seam allowances neatly folded under and everything joined sturdily by the edges. (There's a great example with photos here, the first one I found myself able to actually understand; it's simpler than it sounds.) It's a venerable technique and there is an extant example of Emily Dickinson's handiwork, half-completed, scrap paper still inside, bearing traces of her handwriting; she'd joined the hexes into a flower, but hadn't removed the paper or finished the quilt top. (They used the fabric to connect her to a daguerreotype because it was the same, possibly, as the fabric in the gown one of the subjects of the photo was wearing.)

So apparently the banjo teacher's wife is the only person ever to have not used a paper piecing technique to do this, and I don't see how she has managed without it.
I might try it with the paper; I struggle, as a seamstress, with keeping my seam allowances even, and I had been wondering how to do that with her technique. Apparently the answer is to use scrap paper templates, just a whole lot of them.

(It also answers my question of how on earth you were meant to do quilting when all the modern tutorials involve ironing every five seconds. If you had a goddamn cast iron iron, you were NOT going to be ironing every time you sewed a damn seam, surely? The answer is that of course you weren't, and you can make a whole quilt like this and maybe iron it once, if you want, just to be sure, after you've taken the paper back out. You can even do it without a whole lot of paper, if you're short on supplies, but it's easiest to leave the paper in as long as possible and it looks like even in the 1840s people still did.)

So, in conclusion, the banjo teacher's wife is definitely a witch and I am in awe.

I didn't even mention her storage boxes-- she'd put everything into several chocolate boxes she'd glued tiny paper hexagons onto as if they were also a quilt, and had then varnished to preserve them. They were incredible. She said her sister had complained there weren't chocolates in them and I was like... but they... have an entirely hand-sewn quilt in them... and she was like That's what I said!!!!! Sheesh!