In the first half of November, the eastern part of the United States was 10-20 degrees above normal temperatures for November. This week, in D.C., our forecast is the opposite: 10 degrees below normal. In some ways, it's similar to October, where we had a much chillier than normal first week and a half, and then much warmer subsequent weeks. In short, the temperature in my apartment is never quite right. I can't control the heat because it comes from the physical plant that provides HVAC to the whole campus.
Yesterday, as I headed away from my house in the North Carolina mountains, at the higher elevations (1000 feet higher than my house) I was treated to lovely scenes of trees, houses, and barns frosted with a light dusting of snow. I don't have much time left to get a windshield scraper for the car.
Of course, most weeks, the car just sits in the parking lot outside of my seminary apartment. But let me not digress into a meditation on which parts of winter equipment and clothing/shoes I really need. Let me write about yesterday's drive and any last impressions from Quilt Camp (last for now).
As I do each time I make the drive down Interstate 81, I think about how the view from the road has changed. I made the first drive in August, where everything was green and lush. Now, most of the leaves are on the ground. I routinely thought about what I could see now: houses and barns, a river running beside the road, apples still hanging on the limbs of trees, the town of Harper's Ferry across the river. The austere vista of bare branches, with its variety of grays and blacks and browns, pleased me. There were some places where the vista had such texture, with exploded fluffy seed pods still on stalks that were still furry-ish, and tree branches that looked like they had been chiseled with imprecise tools.
I was listening to various NPR stations, so I heard the news conference where the news came that the shooter at UVa had been apprehended. It was a day where there were 2 campuses impacted by deaths of students by gun violence. I struggle to make sense of something that makes no sense.
Let me turn to thoughts that make me happy:
Let me take a few minutes to collect some last thoughts about Quilt Camp. I came away with a quilt top completed and the top-batting-back assembled, pinned, and ready for quilting. I am trying not to feel superstitious about this quilt. I bought a lot of the fabric for it on the very day that I was laid off. I came to Quilt Camp in April and went home with plans--then I fell and broke my wrist. Is this quilt bringing me bad luck?
No--let me remember that I also bought some of the fabric back in January when I went shopping with one of my best retreat friends. Let me remember that another good retreat friend brought me a huge box of fabric to add to the quilt. Let me not be superstitious.
But I also want to do some work on other projects. I continue to be intrigued by people making quilts out of scraps that many of us would throw away. I first wrote about this type of project at the October 2020 Quilt Camp (read more here). At that Quilt Camp, one woman made a quilt from a pattern that required her to discard triangles cut away from the edges of the squares. Another woman took those triangles out of the trash, added some additional triangles, and this week, she finished the quilt and the two women posed for a picture with the quilt:
Here's a close up of one of them in assembly:
So, I collected some of my scraps in a sandwich bag, and I'll see where it leads me. Will I be able to assemble them without worrying about which colors go together? That hasn't been my strong suit in the past. Let me see what happens. Let me remember that it can work. I liked what the woman was doing with her log cabin pattern from scraps, as did most of us.
I also have some big swatches of cloth, along with a few panels from the quilt that I assembled this past week-end:
It's not unusual for me to end up with so much extra cloth that I make another quilt or two or three. So, let me also assemble another larger something when I need the soothing that sewing long seams gives me.
Let me also remember that I can do this sewing in the in between times during my seminary studies. I can't only rely on Quilt Camp weeks. I'll be happier if I do some of this work in the in-between times.
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