Brownies

Two weekends ago, DH had to go into work all day Saturday to help conduct interviews for potential college hires. I decided I should bake him something nice to make up for it, so I took some of the peanut butter cups left over from Halloween, chopped them into wedges, and folded them into some homemade brownie batter.

When they came out, I tasted them - delicious! I let them cool, put a bunch into a plastic container, and left a half dozen or so on a plastic-wrapped plate on the table.

Some time after dinner, I wandered back through the dining room and was shocked to find one of my cats on the table hunched over the plate stuffing her face!

I burst into laughter at the guilty look on her fuzzy little face - even while I began to worry, knowing that chocolate in quantity is toxic to cats. The question was, how much was too much?

DH googled for information. And, after I gave him the amount of chocolate in the recipe, and the weight of the greedy kitty, he concluded that she was right on the border. So I got on the phone to animal poison control, and, ultimately, they suggested we'd better take her in to the emergency vet.

We knew we'd be about 3 hours in the waiting room, if they were as busy as they'd been in the past, but there was nothing to be done about that. We loaded the guilty party into her box, and headed off to the vet.

Not 3 minutes before we arrived, my husband the engineer almost stopped the car: "Wait... did I get the math wrong? I think... I think I multiplied instead of dividing at the end!"

Sure enough, he re-ran the numbers and confirmed it.

We called poison control back while sitting in the emergency vet parking lot. As he suspected, they told us we could just go home. Sigh. (At least we figured it out before they put kitty through some unpleasant procedure. The car ride she didn't actually mind.)

Tomorrow DH goes in to do another round of interviews. I'm thinking maybe this time I'll stay away from the baking...

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