etc.

• Walk the Line ****
• All the King’s Men *
• Bon Cop, Bad Cop ***1/2
• Little Miss Sunshine ****
• Snakes on a Plane *
• Elizabethtown **
• The Covenant **1/2
• The Wickerman **
• Failure to Launch **
• The Pianist ****
• The Night Listener ***1/2
• A Good Woman ***
• The Devil Wears Prada ***
• The Family Stone ***
• Broken Flowers ***
• A Fond Kiss ***1/2
• Fearless ****

Thank you to all the delurkers who piped up on January 11th! I didn’t mean to invite participation and then promptly disappear for over a week — apologies! In the intervening 10 days since we last spoke, a few things have happened:

• Winter arrived, including a snow day last Monday. The snow day was delightful, but now I’m ready to get right back to unseasonably high temperatures, thanks very much. Oh, okay, maybe not quite yet, it has been rather nice to see frosty tree branches for the first time this winter. But the novelty is starting to wear thin.
• I’ve arranged my travel schedule for the first half of this year. Here’s how it looks: Fort Myers, Florida for a week in February; Vegas for 4 days in March; Arlington, Virginia for 5 days in April; St. John’s, Newfoundland for 6 days in May; Boston for 5 days in June. And maybe Chicago for 3 days in July. Fun! Only two of those trips are vacations (Florida in February and Boston in June), but I’m rather looking forward to visiting a few states/cities I’ve never visited, even if most of the non-vacation time will be spent in hotels and convention centres.
• I ordered a replacement battery for my iBook. It was supposed to arrive 9 days ago, but it still hasn’t shown up. The store tells me Apple is notorious for being slowslowSLOW with replacement bits, so I continue to wait (rather impatiently), meanwhile I’m totally tethered whenever and wherever I want to use my computer. I’m down to about 35 minutes on a full battery charge, which really is abominable.
• I’ve started knitting a scarf for the mister, for whom I have only ever knitted a toque — something I have always felt rather bad about (not the toque, that’s quite nice actually, but the fact that I’ve only ever knitted him one thing!). He chose the yarn — a divine merino, silk, cashmere blend; he likes his luxury fibres — and pattern, I chose the colour (he’s hopelessly colour-blind). The pattern selection was far more painful than I thought it might be, he turned up his nose at every scarf pattern I showed him, from every knitting book I own, not because he disliked the scarf, but because he couldn’t suffer the model! There was a lot of “would you look at this guy?!” being tossed around, and try as I might, I couldn’t convince him that he wouldn’t look nearly as questionable if he wore the same scarf. I ended up sitting him down with my copy of The New Knitting Stitch Library and that went much better (no models in that book, just swatches). He chose a simple mistake rib-type pattern that I’m sure will look quite nice when blocked (and not questionable at all, oh no!), and the merino/silk/cashmere blend is pure joy to work with.
• I decided on a new year’s resolution

In the year 2007 I resolve to: Download twice as much music as last year. Get your resolution here.

OK, not really on the resolution (I’m actually aiming for fewer music downloads than 2006), truth is I have a “new year’s resolutions” post in draft that I’ve been sitting on since 2006, I’m just not quite ready to commit yet. I’ll be the only blogger who posts her resolutions in February, and that will make me seem like the kind of person who takes resolutions so seriously that I need an extra month to decide on some. Heh!

I’m experimenting with Snap at the moment. If you haven’t seen a Snap-enabled website yet, you might want to go ahead and hover over this link (forgot to mention: you’ll have to hop out of your aggregator and visit to get the full Snap-advantage). Nice, eh? I thought so. I have a terrible habit of embedding links with no indication of where they will take you (#4 on the list of top ten blog usability mistakes), so I figured that this blog would be a prime candidate for preview thumbnails.

Also, TangognaT reminds us that it’s National Delurking Week. If you’re a lurker, hello! Say “hi” in the comments, won’t you?

Happy Thursday!

Three. At least.

Thank you for your kind words about the quilt! I promised a post about quilting thoughts & lessons learned, so hopefully some of this will be helpful to you. I must admit though, this is as much for me as it is for you, because these are all things I need to commit to memory for my next quilting adventure!

• Quilting is my most favourite thing at the moment. Everything about it works for me — choosing the fabric, piecing the quilt top, arranging the blocks, hand-quilting, and even blindstitching the binding! I would marry quilting if I could.
• Notice how I didn’t include cutting out the templates and ironing (er, sorry, “pressing”) in that list? Yes, well, those are the caveats. Cutting out the templates was a major bore because when you’ve got your fabric all washed, ironed, and ready to go, the last thing you want to do is mess around with paper, scissors, cardstock, and glue. But when you’re working from a pattern, there’s no getting around it, is there? And then there’s the pressing. I learned that every time you stitch two pieces of fabric together, you must press the seams, regardless of how much you may detest ironing. I forced myself to do both the template-cutting and the ironing this time, and I’ll probably force myself to do it next time, too. While I can take my quilting lumps, I won’t do it without complaining.
• Once you’re done with the quilting, and once you’ve trimmed your quit and squared up the corners, it’s on to the binding. I followed the directions from Denyse Schmidt’s book down to the letter (the instructions are available here in PDF) and I took Kim’s advice and used the blindstitching technique described at the bottom of this page. All in all, I was completely delighted by the binding & blindstitching! I expected to be out of patience and ready-for-this-thing-to-be-done-already by that point, but I wasn’t, and hand-stitching the binding didn’t take as long as I thought it would (maybe 4 hours, total?). Of course, the process is a total treat when things fall nicely into place, and the quilt in front of you looks like the one in the pattern (my corners were in fact mitred and my stitches ended up being completely invisible!).
• You don’t have to understand every instruction to pull it off successfully & get your quilt to look like the one in the pattern. To wit: the instructions for mitred corners. If you’re familiar with the process, you know that when you’re sewing on the binding to the front of the quilt, when you get to a corner you have to fold your binding first to the right, then to the left, then pin in place. I followed those instructions totally on faith because I simply could not visualize how a couple of folds would get me a nice, square, mitred corner, but they did. Faith-based quilting!
• The one bit of instruction I didn’t follow? Drawing lines on the quilt top. Since I was working with a tight deadline, and since it took me 45 minutes to use my ruler and fabric pencil to dutifully draw parallel lines on the first block, I realized that something had to give (45 minutes x 25 blocks = more time than I had!). The grid pattern allowed me to pretty much eyeball the lines and while some aren’t completely parallel, they were parallel enough for me!

I will probably add to this post as I think of more. If you have any quilting tips or lessons learned, let us know in the comments!

What else can you possibly do when you’re sitting on the couch, quilting, eating cookies, and drinking tea for hours on end? Why you watch movies, of course! As many as you can! Here’s what we watched over the holidays, starred out of a possible five:

• Edmund **
• Slither ***
• Hard Candy **
• Mission: Impossible III ***1/2
• Tsotsi ***
• An Inconvenient Truth ****
• 5ive Girls *
• Tsunami: The Aftermath ***1/2
• Descent ***1/2
• The Black Dahlia **1/2
• Miami Vice (Director’s Cut DVD) ****
• Legally Blonde 2: Red, White & Blonde **
• Behind the Camera: The Unauthorized Story of ‘Diff’rent Strokes’ ***

The mister was a fantastic enabler throughout the quilting process, running out for DVDs and refreshing the refreshments when necessary. A crucial contribution!

And, you? Seen any good movies lately? What’s on in the theatre these days? I’m so out of touch.

Happy 2007, gentle readers! I hope you welcomed in 2007 in your own favourite way. We certainly did — with a big meal and a movie at my parents’ house. Tasty, quiet, low-key, perfect!

Here’s a little something that I’ve been keeping from you: my very first finished object of 2007! I had hoped it would be my last finished object of 2006, but it took about 16 hours too long to make the deadline. Astute readers might recall me dropping blatantly unsubtle hints about being consumed by a mystery project, and I know you’ve all been mighty puzzled about what it might be (hah!), so wonder no more! My parents celebrated their 35th anniversary on December 27th and this quilt was a gift to them from me & the mister, and my sister & her mister.

For any quilters who might be reading, here are some details:

• The pattern is “What a Bunch of Squares” from Denyse Schmidt’s excellent book.
• I machine-pieced the quilt top and did the quilting by hand.
• It took me precisely 30 days to complete, start to finish (and when I say start, I mean cutting-out-templates-start). When I wasn’t at work, or marking assignments, or doing other holiday-prep, I was working on the quilt. Activity definitely intensified once Christmas was over — I must have spent 16 hours a day on the couch during that final week, quilting and eating cookies and drinking tea. Not a bad way to spend the holidays!
• I used two different beiges and a variety of dark reds/burnt oranges. Here’s a picture of the fabric right out of the store.
• I followed every bit of instruction, down to the very last detail. I’m usually no good at that, I’m the sort of crafter who looks at patterns for “ideas”, then I ad lib as I go along. This time, the finished product was too important, and I acknowledged early on that I have too little quilting experience to make it up as I went, so I sucked that book clean of all instructions and diagrams. And it was worth it.
• All pictures, from start to finish, are in a photoset on Flickr.

More quilting thoughts & lessons learned coming soon. Welcome, aught-seven! So happy to see you.