Quilting How-To: Fabric Selection

One of the bonuses of being done with my book—besides having time to return to this blog—is being able to spend time quilting again. I promised that when I began another project, I would document it as I went along and add to my postings of quilting how-tos. Since I had a good friend getting married, it was time to start another quilt. And so I start here with one of my favorite parts of making a quilt: choosing the fabric.

Actually, the first part of designing the quilt is choosing the pattern, which I'm just going to skim over here. I wanted something quick and easy, so I chose a two-color block with only four pieces. The blocks used several colors, combined into different pairings, so I needed several fabric colors and patterns.

I consulted my friend's registry and saw they had chosen sage and a kind of pale, silvery blue for their sheets. Hey! I thought. I've got some sages and blues in my stash, having made a purple-and-sage pattern for my own bed (still being hand quilted) and a blue-and-red lap quilt for a graduation gift. So I went through and found seven kinds of scrap that fit with the color scheme. I had enough to make one-twelfth of the squares, so I figured I needed eleven more fabrics for the project.

Next stop was my local  Jo-Ann, which has developed a decent selection of batik fabrics over the past few years. (Of course, my scraps are mostly batiks; I prefer the rich, saturated color and not-quite-patterned look most of them have.) They had a lot of olive greens, turquoise greens, and the like, but not much in sage. Fine. I found a really nice navy blue pattern and an excellent silvery blue fabric and added that to my collection. Now I just needed nine more fabrics to have a good selection to mix together.

Luckily, I had a birthday coming up, which meant a trip to Ann Arbor Sewing Center, my favorite place for quilting fabric. Not only do they have a fantabulous, to-die-for selection of batiks, they give a discount on one-yard cuts on your birthday. So driver's license in hand and my mom along to share the fun, I headed over to browse their batik room.

The batik room is a bit overwhelming at first; if you're not sure what colors you want to use, you can get stuck in front of one of the cases (there are at least half a dozen), looking at all the different shades. Luckily, I knew how I wanted to split my nine remaining fabrics: a couple darks, a couple lights, four medium tones in both grey and green, and one contrasting color to kind of "pop" out of the quilt. So I browsed and found a dark navy and one with both dark green and blue. I found two light grey, nearly white patterns (one escaped this photo), and then four mid-tone greens. You'll notice the one near the top left has almost no pattern to it; I find when you're using several fabrics in a quilt, you need a couple of patterns that aren't very busy so that the eye can rest once in a while.

I tried a lot of things for my contrasting "pop" of color: purple, a couple of burgundies, and a couple of rusts. I was leaning towards a golden-rust color when I found the fabric at the top of the picture: a batik ombre that shaded from pure golden yellow at one end to deep orange rust at the other. (In the picture one half of the fabric is sitting atop other half.) I liked the yellow, I like the orange, and it certainly was going to contrast! I got my one-yard cuts, took them home and washed them, and I was ready to start cutting! But that's a step for another how-to....

Photo of the Week--10/17/11

Sometimes the waterfalls themselves aren't all that spectacular, but where they are situated is. This one I snapped in Zion National Park, Utah. I liked the angle from under the overhang, and how that little tree is doing its damnedest to grow despite its precarious position. The multi-colored rocks are pretty cool; I'm always fascinated how water interacts with rock to create so many variations in shape and color.

What does it take to write a book? (Part 2)

So what does it take to write a book, besides letting the housework go to hell? Here's what I did for my book over the last nine months:

• Read 40 books cover to cover
• Read portions of another 23 books
• Read over 100 articles or encyclopedia entries (from databases or web sites)
• Compiled almost 1100 pages of single-spaced notes
• About 575 of those pages were written by me on books I read
• The other 525 were copied/pasted from online articles
• That breaks down to about 646,000 words of notes (338K original/308K copied)
• Chose 45 images to be included in the book
• Chose and excerpted 16 primary sources to be included in the book

And what did I end up with?

• A prologue and seven chapters totaling just over 38,000 words
• 12 primary sources totaling 18,720 words
• 10 biographies totaling 11,180 words
• An overwhelming sense of relief and accomplishment!

There still might be a few tweaks here and there (maybe a primary source or image cut here and there), and I won't know the final page count until the book is typeset, but I think I can feel confident that I was pretty thorough in doing my research and writing. We'll see when the book comes out and the reviews come in next spring.

A weighty decision....

Okay, it's only been three months since the last time I went through Boy's pile of college brochures, but the shelf where I keep them is close to bursting and depositing all that unwanted paper on my kitchen floor. I put them all in a box and they're sitting on my ankles right now, and the box is really heavy. So in the interest of keeping my shins unbruised, I'm going to go through these a little more quickly, and only comment if I feel inspired. 

Grand Valley State U (MI, 2): Not just a brochure, but free parking and a meal!

U of Kentucky (13-15): Just in case you forgot about us.

Davenport U (MI), U Detroit Mercy (2), UM-Dearborn (4-5), UM-Flint (1-2)

U of Southern Cal (2-4): Come to LA this summer!

Reed College (OR, 2): No chance, but their annual Nitrogen Day sounds like a blast!

Roosevelt U (IL): Downtown Chicago! Plus my cousin teaches there!

U of Toledo (1-2), U of Dayton, Wooster (3): Come to exciting Ohio?

New York U (2): We did mention New York City, right? 

Rose-Hulman Institute of Tech (IN): The best engineering school you've never heard of.

Aquinas College (MI, 1-2): "The most open-hearted, open-minded college in America ... rooted in the Catholic Dominican tradition." Um, yeah.

Eastern MI U (1-3): Oh, Eastern. You have about as much likelihood of getting Boy to attend as your football team has of going undefeated.

Oakland U (MI, 2): Card is nice, but the dancing bear in your TV ads creeps me out.

Central MI U (1-5): Let's see how many in-state colleges we can ignore!

Kettering U (MI, 2-3): That makes the count 12? 13?

Yale U (1-3): Boy believes in equal opportunity when it comes to ignoring brochures, Ivy League! So 2nd postcard addressed to parents. Then a 124-page soft-bound book. No wonder tuition is high.

MIT (3): News supplement for its 150th year; interesting but maybe unobtainable.

University of Michigan (2): Yeah, baby, we've got the president at the Big House!

Alma College (MI, 1-2): They're called the Scots and a picture showed bagpipes. Run, Boy, run!

Carthage College (WI, 2): There's a picture of a huge lake ... that means huge mosquitoes! Run!

Bowling Green State (2): Ohio trying to outbid Michigan in the number of colleges ignored....

Ohio State (4): ... or mocked.

U of Chicago (10): Whoa. They knew we were ignoring the quirky postcards so they sent a massive brochure. Plus postcards (11-12), letter (13-15), and huge brochure (16).

Rice U (TX, 2): They put the tuition right on there to scare you away. 

Missouri S & T (3-4); U North Carolina (2); Pitt (1-2); Carnegie-Mellon (3); Olin College (MA): ????

Northwood U (MI): "Where can you get a great BUSINESS EDUCATION?" Isn't a major part of business knowing your target market? Brochure FAIL.

Manchester U (IN, 1-2): Apply early, get a FREE T SHIRT!

Rensselaer (NY): If you can spell or pronounce it correctly, you're admitted!

Army ROTC: Please, sir, may I not have another!

Michigan Tech (2): Hmm, tell me more about this full scholarship with tuition and stipend.

And that's enough for this installment. I can feel my feet again, and there's room in the drawer, so the rest can wait for a while. I'm hoping that now Boy is actually filling out college applications, the mail will slow down. Boy's senior year could slow down, too, he'll be out of the house before we know it!

Photo of the Week--10/10/11

Sometimes nature comes up with an architecture more spectacular than anything humans can dream up.... This was in Florida in 2005, on a boat a trip through Everglades National Park. Pelicans landed on the boat begging for food before we even left, and of course we saw gators, egrets, and even wild pigs. I was fascinated by the shapes we found in the mangrove swamps, where roots and branches twist and combine and create a maze on the water. On a later trip to the state we would take a canoe into the waterways around Naples, where the mangroves grew even closer together and you had to play limbo under many of the branches.

What does it take to write a book? (Part 1)

I know this blog has been pretty bare lately. That's because I spent the last nine months (and change) researching and writing a history reference book. I was given a rather broad subject—a period of 35 years—and so I spent a lot of nights and weekends reading history books, biographies, economic histories, and other materials. (My next post will go into that in more detail.) As a result, I did not spend any time cleaning my office. So one thing it takes to write a book is to let entropy take over your office, like this:




Note: I'm not the only one in our house who was reading books for fun, and not the only one who couldn't manage to put them away properly.

All the boxes contain small knitting or crochet projects I was working on as a fundraiser for the humane society. When they decided they didn't have room to house our crafts, our store shut down and my projects remained "in progress" in my office rather than put away in my craft room.

Don't ask for a picture showing the entropy in my craft room. Some things are just too embarrassing to blog about.

...aaand here's the real disaster area: my desk. More craft materials, spare books I meant to read, printer cartridges and other supplies, individual papers with notes I need to remember, stacks of feedback from my critique group I'd been ignoring for the past six months....

It took me a good three days (lazy days, at least) to get a handle on this mess. After boxing and storing and organizing and cleaning and hauling things away, this is what I ended up with:







Books stacked neatly! In single layers! (Except for series, a clever space-saving strategy!) Organized! Old ones donated!

Look! My desk is made of wood! Who knew!

But now that the desk is clean, I have to get back to work. I have to try to reduce the stack of feedback I can no longer ignore and tackle the mammoth job of rewriting my novel.

....Unless ... yes ... my craft room needs cleaning! Be back in another week!

Photo of the Week--10/3/11

I love visiting archaelogical sites, especially areas where a whole community of buildings have survived, making it easier to imagine what life might have been like when the city was occupied. This is one of the many buildings that survive from the Mayan city of Tulum, on the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico. It's a newer city, at its height between the 13th and 15th centuries. Tulum briefly survived Spanish occupation; it was likely abandoned after diseases brought by the Spanish decimated the population.

It's a beautiful site, with temples and a pyramid along with many other buildings, some situated right on the rocky coast of the Caribbean. I liked this photo because of the relatively few tourists in the picture (Tulum is a very popular attraction) and the look of the columns that remain while the ceiling is open to the sky.