Rayen

I want to make another embroidered art quilt, so once I take a rest and practice my stitching on some smaller projects I'm going to turn these scraps into my next large-size quilt. Because it shifts and frays linen can be a pain to sew, but there is nothing more comfortable than the first linen quilt I made. I also learned a lot from the previous experience, so I expect it will be (a little) easier this time around.

In the better late than never department, our strawberry plants have started producing with a vengeance; there are probably five pints of green berries ripening now. We're expecting a cold weekend, so it may kill the smaller berries, but I'm hoping the bigger ones survive. I'm definitely ready for some homegrown fruit. :)

It's been a while since I posted some pet pics, mainly because these two won't sit still for more than a second at a time. But here's Beau with his perpetual grin. He's noisy and playful and a big marshmallow, but a bit of a coward when it comes to cars, loud noises and strangers. Shadow is still slightly smaller than his brother, and the quieter, sneaky one I have to watch; he rarely makes much noise. He isn't afraid of anything at all, and he's bonded with me and defends me like a guard dog, even going after Beau if he thinks he's playing too rough. They'll be a year old at the end of May, and have basically settled down. They love to play Frisbee and we're starting to property-line train them now, although I prefer to keep them on a lead when we go out in the yard. An ongoing problem is that both of the pups are still perpetual chewers -- I've never had any dogs that loved to chew as much as these two -- and they have a thing fo...

Once I finished the koi quilt I had a gallon-size baggie of leftover scraps. I'm trying to be a zero-waste quilter, and the scraps are pretty, so I decided to make a gift bag for the quilt to use them up. For the inside of the bag I usually use muslin or a print fabric, but I sewed together a bunch of strips and then thought, why don't I try that stitch and flip thing I've seen other quilters do? Well, you can see how that was a mistake. I couldn't match up the seams because the strips weren't all the same size. Lesson learned. For the outside of the bag I used up the rest of the strips and trimmings I had of the patchwork fabric in a quilt-as-you-go pattern, and then used leftover scraps of the backing fabric to frame it on three sides. I'm quilting the patchwork now, and then 'll sew the bag together with handles from the backing fabric. Stay tuned for the final result.

Last night I finished up the koi quilt by attaching the binding and sewing on the fish buttons. I had hoped it would look whimsical with the little fish speeding along the patchwork around the furoshiki. I think if I could do it again I'd use larger buttons, but I'm pretty happy with the end result. Up close the fish are really cute. The back of the quilt, where you can see all the stitching I did. I was also able to use up a lot of leftover embroidery thread I'd been saving from other projects to do the feather stitching on the patchwork. The fish seem happy, so I will be, too. That's the wrap-up for first quilting project of 2022.

Why Women Love is a twenty-four episode Chinese drama I decided to watch out of idle curiosity, and kept watching with morbid fascination for both the very extended emotional foreplay and an utterly immaculate, wholly sterile imaginary world that I thought only existed in Disneyworld and Barbie's Dream House. Actually if you want a C-drama starter series you can't go wrong with this one. All of the female actresses are pretty and thin to the point of anorexia; all of the male actors are quite handsome and muscular. The dichotomy is quite painful for a Western female to see, but I think this is fairly standard in this genre. These two-dimensional characters work at fluff companies which wrestle with gritty non-issue issues like an important print order being stalled, social media fallout in comments, and he said/she said situations. They live in frankly gorgeous apartments that are spotless, drive brand-new cars and have the very best of friends. They look beautiful all...

As a reward for completing my first work project of 2022 (and for surviving my booster shot) I invested in the little silver thimble on the left. It's probably not very old, but it has four little light green gems around the base, and beautiful metalwork. For comparison the thimble on the right is my working thimble, but it's a bit snug. The new one is perfect. Backstory: an inebriated adult slammed a car door on my non-dominant hand when I was a little girl; as a result of the injuries the middle finger on that hand became a bit distorted in shape. Because of damage from multiple surgeries I later lost the use of my dominant hand, and trained myself to use the one that was slammed. Finding a rigid thimble that even fits over the end of my deformed finger is always a challenge, so I was very happy to discover this one is perfect for me.