This weekend I went to The Textile Museum because they were having an exhibition on Amish Quilts. The quilts were amazing. The colors weren’t complex and most of the patterns, like the one above, were very simple blocks of color. But they were beautiful and the stitching was so fine and intricate. I really recommend anyone living in the DC area to go. The exhibit is up until September so if you’re going to be visiting make that a stop on the trip.
In other news, I’m still working on my Rabbit Socks but at the moment I’m not in the mood to take a picture of their progress. I’ve started the color work. They are very cute. Other than that there isn’t too many crafty things going on in m life right now. School is seriously stressing me out. I have a term paper due next week and three due the week after that. I also have a paper due at some point in the next few weeks but the professor hasn’t given us a due date, or any parameters AHHHH. To make my day even more hectic, during my writing class this morning I heard some people talking about registering for classes this morning and I was suddenly panic stricken thinking that I had forgotten to register. But after running back to my dorm (in the rain) I realized that since my last name starts with an M, I register tomorrow. Whew. Disaster avoided, though my nerves are still a little jumpy.
The other day the girl I’m living with next year and I decided that we wanted to see our room for next year. Now, all of the dorms are only accessible by the people who live in them and you have to swipe a student ID to get in. We don’t know anyone who lives in the dorm currently but we decided that it would be easy enough to get in. When we get there a bunch of people are sitting on the stairs and one of them lets us in. We tried to see a room with a similar floor plan to ours on the first floor but no one was there so we waited outside the door to the stairs (which you also have to swipe to get in to) for about five minutes debating whether we should just ask the people outside to let us up (this whole situation was so awkward we spent most of the time laughing). Finally someone came down the stairs and we were in! When we knocked on the door to our room we woke up the girl who was in there. But that all aside we got to see our room which is small but livable. A least we have a kitchen which is the only thing that really matters!
I’m discovering some new music. One is A Fine Frenzy, her voice is beautiful. I’m planning on buying her CD One Cell in the Sea. Her song Almost Lover is my favorite so far. I’m also in love with Ingrid Michaelson. Breakable is an amazing song.
I’ve been hearing a lot of weird thoughts about women artists (actors and singers) that I would like to take some time to comment on. I was talking to someone in my film genres class about movies (what else) and the conversation started with the film Children of Men and then moved to Clive Owen’s new movies The International and Duplicity. The person said that he wasn’t interested in seeing Duplicity at all because he doesn’t like Julia Roberts (I have to agree with that I think she’s kind of boring) but then he said something like there just aren’t any good and interesting female actors right now. Thinking about that conversation afterward I think he’s looking at it the wrong way. It’s not the actors it’s the roles. I can’t think of a film I’ve seen recently that I really thought showcased an interesting leading female role (granted I haven’t seen Rachel Getting Married, Doubt, or Changeling). I love Kate Winslet, I think that she is amazing and beautiful and talented but I hated The Reader (though I’m glad she won) I didn’t like Revolutionary Road either. 2008 seemed to be all about the men look at the films that were nominated for best picture: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Frost/Nixon, Milk, The Reader, Slumdog Millionaire. Not one of those had a strong engaging female role. You could argue that Benjamin Button had Cate Blanchet but as wonderful as she is, that film was a Brad Pitt vehicle to show us that he could be anything but macho, which is still debatable. The one film that I have seen to counter this is Vicky Christina Barcelona. That film was really well done and the female leads had something interesting to say about love and life.
To add on to this argument I read on a blog the other day (I don’t remember which one sorry) that someone didn’t think that women’s voices and music was all that interesting but I would have to say that that is wrong too. And just to prove that that was wrong I went through my iTunes and made a playlist of all of my favorite female artists. It was probably the best thing I did all weekend. Not only did it remind me of all of the great music I had and had forgotten about, it showed me that some of my most meaningful and powerful songs are sung by women. To name a few artists: Lykke Li, Emmylou Harris, Patty Griffin, Jenny Lewis, Jenny Owen Youngs, A Fine Frenzy, Ingrid Michaelson, Imogen Heap, Hem, Kate Rusby, Katie Herzig, Maria Taylor, Regina Spektor, Sara Lov, Susan Enan, Zooey Deschanel….. Look them up if you’re interested.
To name some films that showcase a great female character: The Hours, American Beauty, The Queen, All About Eve, Little Children, Aliens, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Elizabeth, Kill Bill, Away From Her, The Lives of Others (really this is just an amazing movie and will go on any list I ever make whether it fits or not), Vicky Christina Barcelona, Sunset Boulevard, Thelma and Louise.
I defiantly didn’t mean to go on this long and this turned into more of a feminist rant then I meant. I love men too. Die Hard is one of my favorites and that is just a showcase of raw masculinity at its finest. But Hollywood please give us girls some female characters to root for, a some role models, ones who breaks conventions and don’t stand in the shadows. Characters that we don’t forget about the second that we walk out of the theater
Anyway enjoy the rest of the week everybody. I’m planning on seeing Fast & Furious, and Sunshine Cleaning sometime soon. I’ll let you know what I think.
It would seem that she stopped right before the easy part. You just sew on the inner white borders, attach the big triangles, add a few more borders, some quilting and you’re done right? Well, yes but it wasn’t as easy as it seemed. As a 15 year old I went forth blindly into the world of quilting. Lets just say that the whole thing was a disaster. After I sewed on all the boraders the inner ones wouldn’t lay flat, they just puckered and wrinkled. I went ahead with quilting it together anyway thinking ‘maybe it would all work out’. Wrong again. I couldn’t figure out what to do and the whole project ended up being shoved in a closet and forgotten about. 
Cut to ealier this summer, about seven years later. I had graduated from college, I was home and jobless, I pulled this out of the closet and attacked it. I took out the quilting and the inner boarders. I managed to make it work, mostly. I could spend this whole post showing you all the mistakes but that seem a little pointless. The whole thing is around a 68 inch square. It should be 75 inches but the batting shifted some how while I was quilting* so I had to trim the boarder back. It took around two and half months to quilt the whole thing. I had some prblems with the chalk I used in the beginning, it didn’t come off right away and I think it stained some of the thread. good thing I used yellow! But I bought a really nifty pen called Pilot Frixion Ball. It just irons off!
Anyway that’s the story. I don’t know what I am going to do with this thing now. It was more a test of endurance and patience than anything else. In a dramatic turn of events it might just go back in the closet…
above is the first sketch of my idea.
here is the base. I just stater with white wool to make the shape.
Then I added the color. It’s hard to see now but it’s going to be the ocean at night.
Clew 