Halfway point

It's the midpoint of November, which is the halfway point in the blogging project.

The whole experience has been very... different. Unless I have something of a factual nature to report, I don't tend to write a lot. Having to sit down every single day and write, whether or not I have anything to say, has been both challenging (in a good way) and frustrating for me.

Today, I am feeling the obligatory nature of the project very much. With the time off, we've been gallivanting around the city quite a bit; as a result, no fabric has been purchased, no design decisions have been completed, and no quilting progress has been made. So there just isn't much to say.

It's never bad to write for the sake of having written; to just sit down and make yourself do it anyway. I just question whether it's necessary or desirable to go ahead and put it out there in a public place. (Of course you all always have the option to scroll down, and that grants me a certain measure of relief.)

Will it have been a good experience in the end? I think it may be one of those things that I will be glad that I've done. Waiting a few weeks for a sense of accomplishment... well, that's not so bad, is it?

Art appreciation

We were out and about today (a day off). We stopped off at the MFA and bought a membership, but didn't stay; instead, we headed off down to the south end, where we walked about and wandered in and out of shops and just generally looked around.

One of the shops featured an exhibit of the paintings of an artist by the name of Oana Lauric, and DH took quite a fancy to some of her work.

Ultimately the subject turned to how someone can guess whether any given piece of art might appreciate or not. I told him that unless you are loaded and can hire an expert, you can investigate where an artist has shown (to see if these are prestigious or come-as-you-are shows), and you can do a little research, but ultimately you probably just buy what you like. And if it ends up appreciating, well, that's a side benefit. (Hey, it worked for Gertrude Stein! I don't know how many misses she had amongst the hits, though.)

But to tell the truth, I haven't a clue. Any hints, Tam? Or should I just start googling?

Practice, practice, practice

When my mother was out visiting, she and her friend got me started on hand quilting. She gave me a special thimble and an embroidery hoop with a little lap stand, too, so now I am all set to start a hand quilting project using proper hand quilting - once I can truly figure out what it is I'm doing.

(Proper hand quilting isn't exactly intuitive. Take a look at the stitch here Confused yet?)

I've done enough to realize that it'll take a lot of practice before I'm confident enough to do it on a real project. So I have a hoop set up with some scrap fabric and batting so I can try to get a few stitches on a needle at a time without having my stitches be an inch long. And in the meantime, I'll go back to "cheating" and finish up an in-progress project using my nice old familiar stab-stitching method. Only another quilter would be able to tell ;)

Value judgments

DH has given me a little input on the sorts of colors and values I should be using in the photo quilt for the grandparents-in-law. This is group of potential fabrics we're considering - blues, browns, and neutrals that are generally medium to light in value. (I think he would rather that I not include the two darks on the right end at all, but I should be able to convince him with the ruby beholder.)

The photos scanned and printed on fabric will for the most part also be medium to light in value. That means you have a very low contrast quilt, so you need to look for a pattern where the blocks can be similar in value, rather than one that only works if there is significant value contrast. Like the snowball pattern. (uh oh)

Look at the examples here. In the ones with high contrast, where the snowball is significantly lighter or significantly darker than the surrounding squares, it stands out nicely and gives a nice crisp look. In the ones with low contrast, the pattern becomes a big muddle of slush.

I think this means we go back to the drawing board on the pattern here. :-S

Painting's a pain

Since we were getting someone to paint the outside of the house this summer, and because we have some water damage in a few rooms indoors, we decided to go ahead and get the same company to fix up a few spots inside too. Picking a color for the kitchen walls has been a major pain.

Here is how it looks now with the original white walls. The granite is new as of this summer; we changed up the knobs (originally brass) to coordinate better with the counters.

The paint guru at the hardware store was enthusiastic, for some reason, about a sort of drab greyish pink color which was about as attractive as that description sounds. We ruled out that color - and nearly everything else for various other reasons - and ultimately arrived at gray.

But even when you narrow it down to gray, you have to pick exactly which shade and value you want (one for above the chair rail, one for below), and Benjamin Moore has so many that a person can get a little lost.

Over a few visits to the hardware store, we picked up a bouquet of paint chips in just about every shade of gray they had. We've finally played with them enough over the past few days to narrow down the combinations to two:

1) Bunny Gray above the chair rail; Pike's Peak Gray below.

2) Sterling above the chair rail; Adagio below

(You can view them here)

DH has gone to get some quarts so we can see how these really work together in real life on our real life walls. Eep. The moment of truth!