Wednesday, May 28, 2008

The Quilt, Part 4

Oh so much has happened on this quilt since I last posted in ... good gravy has it been 3 months? Well, truth be told, it's been three months since I actually worked on it too.

But this week, BREAKTHROUGH! Peep the results:


To begin, I took the images and cut them into their own squares, like the one below:


Now alls I need to do is cut up the rest of the pieces before I wreak massive sewing machine carnage over the unsuspecting fabrics.

But this is the stage where quilt fantasy meets quilt reality, and dies in a fiery crash. Creating a quilt entirely out of old t-shirts requires conserving your material as much as possible to maximize its use.

This means I needed to do (or not do) a couple things:
  • Measure out ahead of time so you don't leave odd-shaped pieces of fabric that are no good,

  • Use t-shirts with enough material for your project,

  • And DON'T make ANY cutting mistakes such as forgetting your seam allowances.
I failed at all three points. My Taiwanese t-shirt suffered from odd-shaped fabric, and poor planning. My Red Hook t-shirt suffered from poor cutting. My Flaming Lips t-shirt suffered from having large images on the front and back, leaving little blank material to use.

All of this would have been manageable on its own, but I did it all in one night. So there were a few major changes to be made. I used a lot more material from my Andrew Bird shirt than intended for one, but I'm hoping it doesn't overwhelm the entire design.

I've got about 12 more pieces to cut. After that I'll look over the whole design, do some market testing (read: get Megan to look at it and tell me if it sucks) and determine any last minute changes.

This could involve:
  • Shifting a couple colors around and redesigning a couple shapes,

  • Replacing some of the squares with denim fabric from old jeans,

  • Or crying, taking six months of work and tearing it to pieces before burning it in a fiery pyre in the flats of Skagit Valley while playing "Taps" on a bugle
Obviously the last option is a last resort. But the other two are possibilities.

Tuesday, May 20, 2008

I'm convinced it was intentional...

So say you're a photographer covering a discus event, where do you stand? On the sidelines? In the bleachers? Or how about right in the way of an oncoming javelin.

That’s what happened in Utah, and since I can assure you that the man came away with no serious injuries (13 stitches, but no major injuries I swear) I can tell you that this story is hilarious.

I'm pretty sure the local newspaper ticked off the school district at some point, and the student-thrower was urged on by the school board, but there’s nothing to indicate that in the article.

Kudos to the photographer for actually taking a photo of his leg while he was being treated on the field, and warnings to the faint of heart (and the faint of butt) — the story includes that photo.

As an aside, I learned about this story yesterday working at my NEW JOB at the Skagit Valley Herald where I'm covering health, social services and environment.

I’ve got some posts I’ve been working on, but I left my laptop down in Milton, and I be up in Mount Vernon.

Oh, another aside, we have a few fun pictures of us tip-toeing through the tulips several weeks ago during the tulip festival. There be an 8-month-old in those photos, so cuteness is about. Peep ’em at my Picasa page.

Monday, May 12, 2008

A Visit to Cologne Part 6: In which the author confesses he's not a huge Beethoven fan.

Let's just clear the air right now: I'm not a big fan of Beethoven.

I've got nothing against the guy, really I don't (I like him WAY more than Mozart, who I couldn't care less about). And I've enjoyed playing his piano pieces when I was taking lessons more frequently. But outside of one CD of string quartets I've got at home, I don't listen to him much. Being honest with myself, the name Beethoven brings up memories of Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure more than music.

And while in Bonn, I insisted on pronouncing his name like Bill and Ted: "Beeth-oven" not "Bayt-hoven."

So there was a humorous touch of irony when Chris, Kelly, Megan and I headed off to the maestro's home town of Bonn and we were almost single-minded in our effort to search for the grave site of Clara and Robert Schumann, who Chris and I like quite a bit.

But let's give ol' Ludy a break here. We did go on the walking tour, and it was quite a bit of fun swinging by the home where he was born, peeping out the pipe organs that he played (there's really not a pipe organ in Bonn that he hasn't played) and the public square where he macked on some local girl.

One sad note about the walking tour we picked up at the tourism office, one of his homes was rebuilt in the 1970s into an apartment building. They really need to just take that one off the tour. There's not even a plaque.

But then we hit the cemetery, which includes the mystery gravestone of Beethoven's mother. Someone came along, saw a neglected plot, put two-and-two together and figured it out. Now there's an updated, well-kept but modest site with a quote from a letter little Ludy wrote during her life.

But all of that paled in comparison to the giant marble behemoth of a memorial left for Clara and Robert Schumann. When I die, I want someone to erect something like this for me. There be angels, little girls with butterfly wings, it's got the works.

The main part of the site appears to be a statue of Clara, looking adoringly up at the relief profile of her husband. It's a little sad that one of the few women composers recognized in our history is depicted in her site looking up at her husband, who in relief profile seems somewhat outside of reality. But I also can't criticize because when I talk about it Megan elbows me in the ribs to remind me that there's another body under there other than Robert's.

Walking through the entire graveyard it's easy to get lost in the grandness of it and the history. The plots range from beautifully maintained homages to Bonn's lost saints to illegible rocks overgrown with green ivy. There's nothing new to be found here.

Those passed are long past at this site, and each plot, whether unkept or meticulously cared for, seems almost otherworldly to my American eyes.

Chris has lots of photos of the graveyard in Bonn found at his Picasa page.

The rest of our trip to Bonn involved a city-wide search for a chocolate shop Megan saw earlier in the day. We finally found it, and it was well worth the trip.

Megan snagged a whole bunch of chocolate that we enjoyed for several weeks after the end of our trip.

The shop doubled as a little cafe. The menu consisted of a tray of truffles, fondu or (what we ordered) dark chocolate hot chocolate! They brought out our glasses which had powdered chocolate hearts sprinkled on top. I almost couldn't drink it, until I remembered I had a camera. *click!*

Thursday, May 01, 2008

A Visit to Cologne Part 5: In which the author goes past the Prancing Pony, into The Hog's Head and through the wardrobe to a place called Bacharach.

Visiting Bacharach is like entering some Disney princess movie. Let me be clear about how cool this place is: There was not a single chain store to be found.

There were shops in and around this place that had nary a corporate logo anywhere. And I'm pretty sure I saw a princess and a bunch of small birds and mammals go running by in song. That was all before I stumbled into a wardrobe, met Elijah Wood as a hobbit and had a bottle of butterbeer at the Hog's Head. I'm sayin' this place is an idyllic faerie-tale land.

It's a small town along the Rhine, and best enjoyed going from the top down. The top in this case being a castle converted into a comfortable hostel.

That's where we started, and after taking the hike up the hill to get to our accommodations, I recommend checking out one of the taxis. It's not a bad hike by any stretch of the imagination, but it's not so fun with your gear. Once we got to the top we did not have a lot of interest in going back down in search of food. Luckily the hostel has a little cafe.

So we hung out and explored the building (and by explore, I do mean defend bravely with imaginary bows and arrows) I made an unending and unwelcome series of Harry Potter jokes and references. We wanted to get up to the tower (I had a letter to send by owl) but that's when we learned that everything has been converted to rooms, so there's not a whole lot to see from the inside.

After dinner we went to the "bar" (read "the place that was the cafeteria at dinner but is now a bar"). They served a pretty good variety of beverages, but it being Bacharach we stuck with items of the TWO MENUS PAGES of Riesling.

It's a white wine, and unlike my endless descriptions of Kolsch, I know so little about wine that I won't assume I'm passing on any knowledge here. I can say it came in three styles: Dry, medium and sweet. I take mine medium to sweet, Chris and Kelly leaned toward dry. Megan leaned toward grape juice made from grapes grown in the vineyard, which was really just as good as the wine.

This would be the first to glasses of MANY to come for the weekend because that's about all they serve in and around Bacharach. Wine, wine and more wine. There may be Kölsch or red wine around somewhere, but I didn't search hard enough, and I enjoyed trying out Bacharach's finest.

Plus, how often do you get to drink some tasty concoction and look out the window to see where the ingredients grew on the vine. That's the town in a nutshell: buildings on the inside, vineyards on the outside. Add cute old people riding on bicycles and you've got my stereotypical dream-view of Europe right there.

There was plenty else to see, but most of that came in the form of staring at interesting and distinctly European architecture and me forcing Chris, Kelly and Megan to pose for cute photos.

The one oddity of Bacharach (well, all of Germany really) was how fast and loose people played with the term "business hours." I wish I could work on a schedule like that. Sometime between 11:30 a.m. and 12 p.m. all the businesses closed up. Sometime around 2 p.m. they opened again. This trend was most pronounced in Bacharach.

We learned this the hard way around 12:15 when we searched for a bite to eat. There would be not bites or eating for us for another 2 hours.

After two nights and one full day in Bacharach (where we made many a joke referencing titles like "What's New Pussycat" and "My Little Red Book") we headed up to St. Goar. Our business hours lesson continued when we learned that the tourist information center closed on Saturdays. This wouldn't be so bad except we were relying on the center's free baggage check. So we carried our bags up to a hostel and threw ourselves at the mercy of a very kind local who let us dump our stuff in the facility's garage.

The castle was everything you could really hope for. Spires, walkways, dark corners. We did a walking tour from our travel book, which pointed out where they would pour hot pitch down on attacking soldiers. They seemed to indicate otherwise, but I'm pretty sure this place saw its fair share of orc attacks.

The fun part: there's really no where they won't let you go. There's no barriers saying "Stop, you might die here" at any point. We found one spiral staircase at the end of a long, dark, unlit hall. No one was there to say "don't go down there." We would have gone down, but for the fear in my heart. (bonus nerd points if you get the reference)

Now would be a good time to mention the numerous photos found at my Picasa site and also at Chris' Picasa site but be warned we overlap quite a bit.

Now, they say a picture is worth a thousand words, and if that were the case I should be able to get 70 entries in out about Germany, but I think people frequenting this blog (all two of you... hi mom) might get a little bored, so the next entry on Bonn will be the last.