Instagram?

[crockpotcauldron]

I have made an Instagram! I am very tired of wrestling with dreamwidth's picture hosting, and also I want to socialize with quilters. You can check it out - my screen name there is quarteryarrrd. I decorated a spool of quilting thread with a skull and crossbones for my avatar!

Speaking of socializing with quilters, I attended a modern quilt guild meeting. There was a lot going on, but I'm kinda on the fence. On the one hand, I want to try to befriend the two or three quilters my age there. On the other hand, I'm still not sold on modern quilting as an artistic movement, though they did like Smaug and my alien quilt.

Did I show you guys my alien quilt? I started it by hand because Otto's lightbulb blew but I still wanted to quilt, and then things got out of hand once the lightbulb arrived.

I hope this link works...

https://www.instagram.com/p/B32sRSwnWF3/?utm_source=ig_web_options_share_sheet

I'm very pleased with how it turned out with just scraps. I think the background was left over from a friend's Star Wars quilt years ago, and I see leftovers from at least six quilts of mine. I've doodled more alien designs, including a cow alien and an alien donut race, but we shall see how many of them make their way into fabric. Some things are better on paper - I was noodling around with a labyrinth design, and I tested it out on paper before committing to cutting and sewing several hundred squares of cloth. Turns out, not only is cutting squares awful, the pattern is extremely high contrast and busy and I would not like it on my bed. I don't even want it hanging in my direct line of sight - I stuck it to the back of my door, and enjoy seeing it occasionally. My mind won't stop following the paths, and while I enjoy that sometimes, I have other stuff to do!

https://www.instagram.com/p/B32z3iInISp/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

Comments

[which_chick]

The instagram links work great! Alien quilt is pretty awesome, but the path thing is way too busy for me, it's a headache just from looking at it. :)

My cousin does a bit with quilting. She doesn't have a group because everyone else here who does it is, like, a gazillion years old. She does go to a "quilt camp" thing one weekend a year. It generally does an in-depth specialized topic in quilting (bargello, applique, crazy quilting, color theory, that style of thing) as kind a workshop or whatever. She brings home a smallish project more-or-less done enough that she can finish it at home and some inspiration for her own work. She's not super-social, but she's been doing quilt camp for about ten years now, annually, so she's getting something out of it.

[crockpotcauldron]

Yeah, the quilters here are also a gazillion years old, have a ton of disposable income to spend on cloth woven of unicorn hair, and are super into modern art for some unfathomable reason. They're pretty nice, though. The internet tells me that Kids These Days also quilt, but they sure don't live around me.

Your cousin's quilt camp sounds cool. It's good to learn new techniques and see what everybody else is up to. My guild invites guest speakers a lot, and they run workshops, and also has little skill builder lectures during the meetings. Smaug was born of the lecture on attaching non-wobbly borders! The alien's (wobbly, alas) funky zigzag binding stitching was inspired by another.

I'm currently procrastinating very hard on quilting, and as a result have been very prolific in other forms of art. Stayed up until midnight yesterday framing a Sherlock Holmes piece.

https://www.instagram.com/p/B4AuZ3bHj87/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

[which_chick]

Eh, crafty anything counts as crafting in my book. My recent "craft" projects include sauerkraut from the Endless Cabbages* of the Horsepeople Garden (currently fermenting) and the potholders for my mother, which I just finished and blocked for delivery next week. I should take some pix of the potholders. The sauerkraut is not particularly photogenic, being basically chopped up cabbage in an exceptionally high-class fermentation rig (plastic five gallon bucket accessorized with unscented plastic trash bags).

*I did not discuss the Endless Cabbages but at the auction that my friend Lala's mother frequents, there was a super good deal on flats of cabbage seedlings this spring. She bought them. All of them. A really good deal, she said. Anyway, sixty-odd of the very cheap cabbage seedlings made some sort of cabbage head, from roughly a baseball-sized personal-small-cabbage effort to things that were more real-cabbage-sized. Lots o' cabbage. Endless cabbages.

[crockpotcauldron]

That is so much cabbage, oh my god. What a cartoonish situation. What could one person want with sixty cabbages? Is she just handing cabbages to everyone she knows? Sneaking it into people's cars? How long will your five gallons of sauerkraut last you?

I'd definitely like potholder pictures. What kind of yarn are they made of?

[which_chick]

I think she bought them because they were, like, a buck for sixty of them. The garden is hyuuge so there is plenty of room for cabbages which are pretty tidy plants as garden plants go. (Think "a wheelbarrow piled full of corn on the cob" or "twenty gallons of cucumbers" harvest large, here. Imagine an entire kitchen counter covered in tomatoes. There is bulk canning and freezing going on in these parts. We did, I think, 20 quarts of corn cut off the cob this year, which is an appalling amount. They have several chest freezers. This is a country garden for people who are still gardening for the depression.) There are cabbages for me and cabbages for Lala and cabbages for her mom and cabbages for random passers-by. Anyone who looks in need of a cabbage can have one. Or several. We are (mostly) germanic redneck peoples who enjoy cabbage in all its various forms, so this isn't a huge problem. Also, should we get that tired of cabbage, there exists a pig. The pig will eat the cabbages and then we will eat the pig.

Five gallons of sauerkraut (when it was fresh -- now a week or so in, it's down about six inches from the top of the bucket as it's sogged and collapsed onto itself) will last me about two years. I pressure can it and eat it and give it away to people who want it and so forth. I have my final jar from 2017 under the sink, will probably finish that in the next two weeks with some fantastic kolbassi from The Locker Plant, a decidedly local establishment that makes animals into meat. Like, if you buy a steer at the fair, The Locker Plant can turn your fair steer into white freezer paper packages that contain named cuts of meat. You don't need a truck or a trailer or any means of making a steer dead. You have to fill out a worksheet about how you want your animal cut up and if you have any... odder desires ("I would like the eyes, heart, and tongue" or "please save the feet" or "I would like the oxtail") you can write that in the remarks section. They don't judge. When I want a side of unprocessed pork belly to Make Bacon From Scratch, they can get that for me. They also make assorted meat products -- their jalapeno cheddar dogs are outstanding and so is their kolbassi. My brother is particularly fond of their shoulder bacon.

[crockpotcauldron]

Oh wow, that's hardcore. That is a heck of a garden. What's going to happen to the twenty gallons of cucumber? Pickles?

My mom has a little veggie garden, but the heat down here blasts the delicious stuff to ash while encouraging random bushes to grow twice their advertised size. So we have a sad gardening forum of Stuff That Doesn't Grow In Florida, and also a certain amount of gardening involving pulling things out of the garden with a truck and chain.

That sounds like a very efficient animal disassembling business. How often do people have a use for hooves and eyeballs?

[which_chick]

This year wasn't a big cucumber year. When we have tons of cucumbers, there are pickles and there are instant pickles and there are cucumber salads of various sorts.

Florida is a tough climate. I deal with mid-atlantic crud, but I couldn't do the heat/humidity in Florida.

I don't know how often people want strange things from the Locker Plant. However, they handle requests without judgment and if you want stuff like Calf Liver or Kidneys or whatever, you need to go there because the local grocery doesn't have that sort of thing.