Now you see these nine-patches, and now you don't! I am enjoying this little crib blanket, it is also nice to see how my sewing has improved. If I were to do a quilt like this again I would pick higher contrast fabrics, but I think this is cute!

I love family book club. Every two weeks we take turns talking about a new book we read. Today I got to hear about the latest Marisol Rainey book from the 11 year old and a very enthusiastic review of Of Monsters and Mainframes from Lara. Hearing people be excited about books is itself exciting.

Whenever I am trying a new (to me) quilt block, I do a test block out of stash fabric. Accidentally made something mesmerizing with this disappearing nine-patch block using Kaffe Fassett and Morris & Co fabric. This feels like a Victorian drug trip, in a fun way.

Felt motivated to do something small(er). I was able to put together this quilted table runner pretty quickly. This is for my mother's dining table which is wider than mine. Log cabin blocks are so versatile, I spent forever deciding how to arrange them because so many ways looked good!

I realized I never shared the finished quilt. I learned a lot, and I really like how it looks. Hopefully my grandmother agrees!

It’s basically Deep Space Nine.

Having some people over to celebrate Halloween (by eating ghost pizza and decorating Halloween cookies). Behold my costume, the Other Kind of Mermaid!

"Oh yeah? You like baseball? What if I make you smoke *an entire pack* of baseball?"

Out of idle curiosity I checked in on the mariners/tigers game at the bottom of the seventh, and it was 2-2. That was two hours ago, we are now at the bottom of the 14th inning, it is still 2-2.

Every 2 weeks, my wife, our kid, and I have Book Club. We each read a book and share it. There's a giant gavel, it's fun. I just shared the People's Project, and read @mirajacob.bsky.social 's You are Here to the table. Thank you, Mira (also @theferocity.bsky.social & @maggiesmithpoet.bsky.social)

Last night Lara and I got dressed up and went to the theater to see The Play That Goes Wrong. I love a farce, and a -live- farce is such an impressive technical feat.

so many dead canaries and we just keep on mining

Okay, I am done with the news today. I have a pizza birthday dinner to attend (someone in this house turned 11 today), and I need a little time to get my party face on.

After dinner out, I read a book with a cup of tea. On my way back to my car I heard live funk music. I followed it to a little theater and was let in for free to see the last hour of an excellent band. It was a really great time! Fun little community event.

I have two quilt tops I much want to quilt but I do not have the space to pin one of them and I somehow miscalculated the yardage I needed for my backing on the other. I know I could make my life easier if I quilted small(er) things (or lived in a smaller place) but I dream in big cuddly blankets.

Every time my kid adds a new food to her list of food she will eat it is a celebration for all of us. She is so giddy from the success of tonight's vegetarian corndog (delicious) and side of red bell peppers with dip (the dip helped a lot) that she is right now reading a kid's cookbook in bed.

In 7th grade a friend lent me VHS of MST3K: the Movie. I saw it and suddenly got so many jokes. It was foundational to my friend group. I never saw the show when it aired (no cable), only tapes. Years later I found @glaiveguisarme.com blog b/c she also liked that show. We've been married 14 years.

On the last day of my vacation I managed to finish this quilt top. I really like how this one turned out if you stand back and look at it from afar. Now I have two quilt tops that need finishing.

Oh dang. I saw the X-files movie in costume (as Langley) on opening night for my 14th. Which also explains some of -my- lore.

Spent the first part of this week in Victoria. Lara and I just wandered around being tourists. It was lovely to see Beacon Hill Park in high summer. Last time I saw it was November of 2023 and it was Very Fall.

At Hereditary, the audience was rapt after the scene with Charlie and the telephone pole. It was dead quiet and 20 min. later during a quiet moment, a wag in the audience clicked his tongue Very Loudly and people gasped and jumped in their seats. If you've seen it you'd get why that was scary.

I subscribe to the federal register to look at proposed federal rules (because I'm fun), and I saw that the EPA is having a virtual public hearing on August 19-20 on the repeal of greenhouse gas emission standards for vehicles and engines. @lizneeley.bsky.social Do folks know about this?

Okay, so I am learning, and that is good. I need to square up my quilt blocks -before- I add the stitch and flip triangles. Would it have been useful to learn this -before- I had already completed all my blocks? Yes. But lessons come when they do.

One of the things I love about quilting is seeing how the blocks fit together to make a pattern or design. It makes my mind fizz. Today I found myself sitting for 15 minutes staring at my layout, brain fizzing away, completely overstimulated. This is a good stopping place for today.

Every year I get to fall in love again with summer in the pacific northwest. I was out at 8, it was warm and the sky was so blue over my head. I try to hold on to these memories to get through the gloom and dark of the rest of the year.

I have really been enjoying my little guy Tinvel, from @nora.zone. He sits on my desk with me and we feel our feelings together.

I love summer in the pacific northwest so much. It was 70 degrees and breezy at 7pm on this pier. I saw the sun set a little after 9pm on my way home after dinner.

Today was my birthday. 40 was personally good, even as it's been really rough living through these times. Here's to 41.

I have spent some time piecing together this quilt top. The news has been -so bad- and so many important things are being destroyed that all I feel I can do is try to hold things together every day. I needed to remember that I can -create-, too.

It’s really tiring, isn’t it, being scared and upset all the time

🎯

Drove to Portland yesterday for a show. Came back, took a 30 minute nap then headed to Snohomish for pride. Exhausted but worth it to watch my kid very seriously write slogans in the sidewalk chalk. She put a lot of thought into her protest words.

@michaelhobbes.bsky.social Have you seen this? HUD is proposing to remove their Affirmative Fair Housing Market Regulations. The language in the proposed rule is...sure something. This is open for public comment now (through 7/3). www.regulations.gov/document/HUD...

Anyway writing another comment in the federal register in the key of Stop Trying To Kill People, This is Not What The Goal of Your Agency Is, You Should Be Ashamed.

Happy Pride Month! In celebration, I sent off queer postcards to all the organizations I donate to who support queer people thanking them for their work. It felt nice!

What started as a small hole in the drywall yesterday has...escalated. I have less of a bathroom than ever, but the good news is the faucet is for sure not leaking.

My tub faucet has dripped since we moved in. I've put in order requests a few times, and they always stall out. This time they came in turned one wrench and then water started spraying out the wall. I have been listening to clanking and sawing noises for over an hour now. Seems like...not good news.

And done! This is for my mother, who is smaller than I am (but bigger than my model here). I have another vest in progress, which I need to finish ahead of her visit. This project was good for my brain and it gave me a place for all the emotions I have been having about The Current State of Things.

It's that time again! I gave a presentation on the history of windows. Prehistoric no windows, prehistoric open air windows, windows with non-glass coverings (paper, linen, horn!), crown glass, cylinder glass, float glass! Just me, verbally sprinting for 20 uninterrupted minutes.

I wish I could properly express how offensive it is to me as a local government worker who writes policy/regulations and tries hard to act for the public benefit all the time, to see some of the sloppy, reckless, and -mean- rules being proposed by the federal government these days. I am offended.

As a child, I believed that the sewage treatment plant off of a highway nearish our house was an actual gigantic plant, like a Piranha plant, that ate poop. And it smelled because the plant was a messy eater. Obviously I was outside of the educational reach of @neorsd.org at the time.

Okay, learning things about myself. I don't like piecing at this scale (these are 2.5 inch squares which I made from strip sets), too much time at the iron. I do love this idea (I am making a quilted vest for my mom), but the making process is really outside of my comfort zone!

@glaiveguisarme.com and I had a time traveling wedding. We had everyone dress as 19th century time travelers (our friends did Steampunk, our families went old west). The wedding g party had time travel devices as boutonnieres. The reception music was time travel movie/tv themes. It was awesome.

Today I was sewing together little floral squares for a project I am working on, trying to get these strips to look random but not have two repeats touching and I swear these little suckers move around when I take my eye off of them. I have ripped out so many seams.

Wow, was finally free to catch a showing of SINNERS, and the showing was -sold out-. I cannot recall the last time I ran into that! I will have to try again another day.

And complete! This quilt is called Love Letters and it is a gift for my wife Lara.

I am finding myself hitting a wall in my quilting. The things I want to make are hard to do with the tools I have at my disposal. All this to say I have been spending the last few days jamming a full sized quilt through the tiny throatspace of my cheap domestic machine.

Finished the Residence and I enjoyed it. But also, I am worried about the calligrapher. They never offered an explanation. Did anyone check and see if he had had a stroke?

I wrote about this a bit in my last book but it really shakes me that a defining feature of this catastrophic era is that we just keep going to work. We work through pandemics, we work through natural disasters, we work through economic calamity, we work through coups, we work, we work, we work.

Surely there is a more dignified way to pin borders on quilts than the floor yoga I have been doing. Child posing all over the room with my pincushion today. Does everyone have giant tables or something? Outer border next.