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dragonlady7For real every time I click in the "Subject:" box it pops up really ridiculous suggestions of long-ago entries, and I don't need that. There's got to be a way to clear that without nuking my entire browser history and all the form-fill-in memories I rely on for passwords and usernames on other sites. (I know, I shouldn't, and yet.)
Dude is lying on the other half of the sectional half-napping, and sometimes answering me if I say things, but mostly he's got his eyes half-shut and staring at nothing and it's a little creepy, lol.
Have spent this weekend busy, and getting nothing done, as usual. I spent all morning yesterday rereading and lightly editing and contemplating the Mammoths novel. Finally, in the afternoon, I got to go get ice cream, as I'd been wanting to literally the entire week, since Tuesday. Picked up my package from the UPS drop point and got a fancy sundae. It snowed all day, light fluffy beautiful terrible snow, and accumulated maybe two inches, and was like thirty degrees, and if it were December I'd have been delighted but it's March and i'm over it. The sundae place was a zoo; people here are not deterred from ice cream in the cold.
This morning we got up and got out and went to the co-op, bought all the groceries we could get there, and then Dude dropped me off and went onward to Wegmans, where he had so little left to get that he came home quickly because he could go through the express checkout lane instead of standing forever in the regular line.
Today I've done three loads of laundry and seam-ripped several old garments, and now am trying to lay out a quilt to be the... there's a special name for it, in Kyrgyz / Turkic-style yurts, there's a band that goes on at the junction of the roof and walls, before the wall insulation goes in. It's narrow, and usually a bunch of layers of felt, facing inward but on the outside of the wooden parts of the yurt, draped over the bottom of the rafters where they bend, and tied to the door frame. (Then you put on the wall insulation, which is like a bamboo/reed mat. Then you put on the wool panels of the walls. Then you put on the roof, in two sections usually. Then you put on another band around the outside, which is your outermost layer.) I can't do my yurt quite like that because #1 I've got straight Mongol-style rafters and #2 I'm not in a desert, that kind of design would trap way too much moisture. But I do think I could put one layer of insulation there, between the roof and the walls, and it would go a long way toward making the whole thing more weathertight. My question is whether I should have the quilt be backed by waterproof fabric, or if I should put on a separate, larger layer of waterproof fabric that I could then remove in fairer weather. I think I'll have to experiment, and so I'll start with the latter approach.
For this, I'm using a pair of fleece pajama pants my mother made one of my sisters, who later gave them to me as scrap fabric-- they're straight legs, and each panel (there are two per leg) is a full 16" across all the way down, they're faintly ridiculous (I just counted, I have four 16" by 32" panels to work with). They're made of polyester Polarfleece, which is terrible stuff but also totally inorganic and so would not harbor mildew, so if it gets damp it won't matter internally. However-- if I'm having a woodstove, I want at least the inner layer on that side to be wool, because wool smolders and doesn't melt. (Polarfleece dissolves into napalm, basically, if touched by an ember.) So I have some old wool pencil skirts my mother wore as a bank teller in 1973, which moths have visited, and I'm seam-ripping those and I'm going to piece them into a quilt top. I'm still debating technique, but I think what I'll do is foundation-piece all the bits of wool fabric onto an old cotton sheet, because I think the wool has too much intrinsic stretch to stand alone. So, a layer of wool, a layer of cotton, a layer of Polarfleece, and then a layer of cotton on the back, and there's my yurt underwear inner layer.
It's a good excuse to learn foundation piecing, except I think maybe I'll do it as applique, which i know nothing about, and I just can't do anything the easy way.
So anyhow, I need about eighteen inches by thirty feet. I actually have sixteen inches by ten feet of the pajama pants, I just figured out! So I'll start with that.
My first quilt is done-- the rag quilt from old pajamas. I pulled it out of the dryer and the seams didn't puff up quite as much as I'd hoped, but I get what it's going for, and it might just be fine.
I guess this is the late-winter-of-quilt-experimentation, after all. I've tried crumb quilting, abortively, and I'll go back to that; I've done rag quilting, I've done whole-cloth quilting, and I'm going to figure out applique. We'll see.
Dude is lying on the other half of the sectional half-napping, and sometimes answering me if I say things, but mostly he's got his eyes half-shut and staring at nothing and it's a little creepy, lol.
Have spent this weekend busy, and getting nothing done, as usual. I spent all morning yesterday rereading and lightly editing and contemplating the Mammoths novel. Finally, in the afternoon, I got to go get ice cream, as I'd been wanting to literally the entire week, since Tuesday. Picked up my package from the UPS drop point and got a fancy sundae. It snowed all day, light fluffy beautiful terrible snow, and accumulated maybe two inches, and was like thirty degrees, and if it were December I'd have been delighted but it's March and i'm over it. The sundae place was a zoo; people here are not deterred from ice cream in the cold.
This morning we got up and got out and went to the co-op, bought all the groceries we could get there, and then Dude dropped me off and went onward to Wegmans, where he had so little left to get that he came home quickly because he could go through the express checkout lane instead of standing forever in the regular line.
Today I've done three loads of laundry and seam-ripped several old garments, and now am trying to lay out a quilt to be the... there's a special name for it, in Kyrgyz / Turkic-style yurts, there's a band that goes on at the junction of the roof and walls, before the wall insulation goes in. It's narrow, and usually a bunch of layers of felt, facing inward but on the outside of the wooden parts of the yurt, draped over the bottom of the rafters where they bend, and tied to the door frame. (Then you put on the wall insulation, which is like a bamboo/reed mat. Then you put on the wool panels of the walls. Then you put on the roof, in two sections usually. Then you put on another band around the outside, which is your outermost layer.) I can't do my yurt quite like that because #1 I've got straight Mongol-style rafters and #2 I'm not in a desert, that kind of design would trap way too much moisture. But I do think I could put one layer of insulation there, between the roof and the walls, and it would go a long way toward making the whole thing more weathertight. My question is whether I should have the quilt be backed by waterproof fabric, or if I should put on a separate, larger layer of waterproof fabric that I could then remove in fairer weather. I think I'll have to experiment, and so I'll start with the latter approach.
For this, I'm using a pair of fleece pajama pants my mother made one of my sisters, who later gave them to me as scrap fabric-- they're straight legs, and each panel (there are two per leg) is a full 16" across all the way down, they're faintly ridiculous (I just counted, I have four 16" by 32" panels to work with). They're made of polyester Polarfleece, which is terrible stuff but also totally inorganic and so would not harbor mildew, so if it gets damp it won't matter internally. However-- if I'm having a woodstove, I want at least the inner layer on that side to be wool, because wool smolders and doesn't melt. (Polarfleece dissolves into napalm, basically, if touched by an ember.) So I have some old wool pencil skirts my mother wore as a bank teller in 1973, which moths have visited, and I'm seam-ripping those and I'm going to piece them into a quilt top. I'm still debating technique, but I think what I'll do is foundation-piece all the bits of wool fabric onto an old cotton sheet, because I think the wool has too much intrinsic stretch to stand alone. So, a layer of wool, a layer of cotton, a layer of Polarfleece, and then a layer of cotton on the back, and there's my yurt underwear inner layer.
It's a good excuse to learn foundation piecing, except I think maybe I'll do it as applique, which i know nothing about, and I just can't do anything the easy way.
So anyhow, I need about eighteen inches by thirty feet. I actually have sixteen inches by ten feet of the pajama pants, I just figured out! So I'll start with that.
My first quilt is done-- the rag quilt from old pajamas. I pulled it out of the dryer and the seams didn't puff up quite as much as I'd hoped, but I get what it's going for, and it might just be fine.
I guess this is the late-winter-of-quilt-experimentation, after all. I've tried crumb quilting, abortively, and I'll go back to that; I've done rag quilting, I've done whole-cloth quilting, and I'm going to figure out applique. We'll see.
