Too hot to turn the iron on

It's summer, there's no A/C, and it really is that awful.  Suppers are cold cuts, cold salads, and ice cream.  Thursday it was too hot to drink beer.  Such needless suffering!  And I used to live just down the road from Willis Carrier's place!

I got a couple of snowflakes into a new hexagon thingie before it became too hot to turn the iron on.

Think Snow

Still 1/2" hexagons; it's a sample for a possible larger effort but I don't know if I have enough blue/white/silver fabrics and I haven't talked myself into justifying paying for shipping new ones. 

Anyway.  Once forward progress was stopped, I dug into the Box of Parts and found some projects waiting to have bottle caps applied with shisha stitch.  It's been...let's call it "more than two years"...since the last time I attemped to apply bottle caps with shisha stitch, and I couldn't figure out how to keep going after the foundation stitches, so I hit up Ye Olde Interwebs and found a very nice tutorial here at Needle 'n Thread, along with some other stitches and videos. 

After a day or so of practice, she released an e-Book all about shisha, including some different foundations for irregular objects.  It's like the Universe is telling me I should finish these projects that I started...I'm still not admitting to anything older than "more than two years ago".

Here is a practice sample from last week (left) next to a sample from before (right). I don't even know what that red stitch *is*.  I like that looks open and net-like, but I have no idea how to replicate it.  I don't even know if that was the stitch I was originally taught in 2004, or my own mutation.

What was interesting about the old way is instead of the bottle cap resting on top of the fabric, I seem to have embedded it so the top is flush with the surface.  Not a great side view, but there is a very noticeable difference when I put them next to each other.

Weird.  Everything is weird.  And sweaty.

Mini Hexagons 1.0: Finished!

The convention for showing a finished quilt on a contemporary quilt blog seems a nice gauzy photo on a rocking chair or grass or antique oak table with flowers or cupcakes, strategically styled so you can't see the bobbles and bubbles and fuckups.

I don't have any of those things.  And even if I did, it's too hot out in the sun today and I am hiding in my Arbeitzimmer in the dark.  Please enjoy the reverse side of a cutting mat and the un-pointy points.

 

I finished over the weekend (I am 3/4 through Season 3 of Babylon 5).  Actually finished, quilting and all.  I decided to machine quilt the yellow centers, and the yellow border.

 

But only on the inside of the border.  I spent about a day working out the details for the binding on this sample; originally I stitched close to the edge of the outside hexagons, and it was too difficult to trim the binding because the stitches were too close to where my scissors needed to be.  Now I know why people do samples. (This green bit was an earlier idea that I had intended to be sleeker and not so puffy, so it goes into the Box of Parts.)

Border stitching.

 

Marks for trimming.

Binding hexagons.  Only made one mistake here.

The binding method has a thousand tutorials on the Internet.  I think I used this one from Quirky Granola Girl because it's the one I saved to Pinterest.

The starch step was interesting, because it's been literally 10 years since I've stitched anything that required starch (I prefer the imprecise), and on top of that I had no idea how starch is packaged and sold here.  The aerosol can seems very similar to US spray starch (plus it has a cat on it) but with more scent because all the German laundry products are drenched in scent.  There's also a liquid starch that goes in the washing machine with your clothes (the bottle had directions for T-shirts, seriously) that I think is similar to US liquid starch, but I haven't bought any to experiment with yet.

When I went to the Patchworkmesse in Erding in March, I was grumpy because I hadn't submitted anything because I never finish anything bigger than an index card.  Now I have something to submit.  Free admission, baby!!  Woo-hoo!

Fronleichnam

Today is a holiday, Corpus Christi. Last year I went to the Mass in the Marienplatz, just to check it out (I had to bail on the procession to the Dom after 45 minutes bc there was just too much sun). This year I've stayed home in the dark, with the recurring headache.

Had peanut butter toast for breakfast. I've been avoiding comparing the peanut butter I can buy here at the Edeka with peanut butter I haul back from America, but this morning there was one toast's worth of "Barney's Best" left in the jar and I was hungry for a second toast, so I got out my hoarded and rationed jar of Skippy, and turns out they taste pretty much the same. Stared for awhile at the labels, and they list the same ingredients in the same order. Barney's lists an importer, not a manufacturer, and Skippy lists a distributor, not a manufacturer.  I'm now very curious about American peanut butter factories.

Might also explain why I like the taste of the Barney's better than the more expensive brand called "American", which is also imported but with a different fat listed in the ingredients. But both have great labels, with American flags, which I am saving for an eventual paper quilt.

Bierfestival Moosburg

Yesterday we went to a beer festival a short train ride away, in Moosburg.  It was the first one held in the town, and there were a lot of people there so I hope it's not the last. Interesting mix of hipsters/beer geeks and Moosburgers made for some good people watching.

I like the German beer festival "pay per drink over an entire weekend" method better than the American "pay a lot of money for a ticket and drink all you can manage in four hours" method.  No one's puking on your shoes because they're determined to get their money's worth, you can bring a non-drinking friend for cheap (I skipped more than one Indiana festival that did not offer a reduced entrance fee for designated drivers), and they're more accessible to normal people, by which I mean people who aren't on Untappd. This last point seems like an advantage for breweries; you can't introduce casual drinkers to your product at a venue only hardcore geeks are willing to drop $50 attend.

We tasted 14 different beers, mostly by not ordering the same thing at the same booth.  The pours ranged from 0,1L to 0,3L and from 1-3€ depending on the style; most were more generous than advertised.  Notable were a Dampfbier (steam beer) and a cherry porter that tasted very American.  Even with the train tickets and food, we spent less than the price of two Indianapolis-area beer festival tickets for about the same amount of sampling.

I was well-hydrated before we left home, and feel a little dehydrated but otherwise fine today. Perhaps I did not eat enough pickles.

Here's a picture of my cat

I've had a headache for two days--probably related to the toothache I've had for awhile, but the dentist "didn't see anything"--and very little has gotten done.  But yesterday was not too hot and last night I was able to sit outside and listen to the Brewers.

FUZZ came out with me, but he watched birds in the neighbors' yard instead. He doesn't particularly care for baseball. 

Mini Hexagons--Now What?

Last week I very diligently finished Season 1 of Babylon 5 and also decided I had enough hexagon flowers.

I spent a day or so debating a border.  Monday at 5:30 a.m., after the cat who woke me up went back to sleep, I decided a border might make it easier to finish off (this is a design principle I may have learned in 4-H along with line, shape, balance, etc.).

Halfway through the second season, it looks like this:

I had not realized this yellow-gold was so...aggressive.

Anyway, now I'm stuck. I have no idea how to quilt this baby. I never get to a "quilting" stage of any project, I usually abandon pieced tops about 3/4 of the way through so I don't have to think about the quilting.

I have an idea for the binding, but that comes after the quilting.