Dismantling the Herb Garden
I decided to deal with the herb garden by burning it down. The bed in the center is an 8’ x 8’ square. I took the pavers out of it, stacked them outside the fence, and relocated a few of the plants that I wanted to keep. Nothing ever stayed where it was supposed to in that garden, so if I need anything else, I’m sure I’ll find seedlings in the other beds. I raked all of the dead plants into the center bed and piled what was left of the rotted bed edgings (logs) on top. We’ll burn it this weekend. Except for the pile of debris in the center, the whole area looks much cleaner now.
I did have a chocolate mint plant in that garden that I’d like to find and keep, but I am still hunting for it.
At least one egg in the incubator has an embryo inside. I am trying not to handle the eggs unnecessarily, but I did take one out and candle it yesterday at day 7 (with two weeks to go). The incubator has 25 eggs in it. We’ll see what I get.
We are supposed to get some significant rain today and tomorrow, which is most welcome. Stuff is catching on fire here that shouldn’t be, at least not this early. An eight-acre wildfire broke out near one of the ski resorts yesterday.
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My order of waxed canvas from Klum House arrived yesterday:
I ordered from them because the supplier I had been buying from—AL Frances Textiles on Etsy—has become so popular that they are constantly sold out.
I was a bit surprised at what I found when I took these out of the box. Not unhappy, just surprised. This waxed canvas is quite different from the AL Frances waxed canvas. The product specs on the Klum House website indicate that this is 100% Better Cotton Initiative certified cotton canvas sourced from Scotland and the US and waxed with a blend of petroleum jelly, mineral oil, and paraffin. It is listed as being 10-12 oz—the same as the AL Frances waxed canvas—but this is a much tighter, finer weave and the fabric does not feel quite as substantial. It is, however, quite evenly saturated with the wax. That was one of my gripes with the AL Frances waxed canvas as I had gotten a couple of pieces that weren’t waxed very thoroughly. (They use Texas beeswax on theirs.)
I’ll report back after I make a bag or two with this.
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I’m trying very hard to give myself permission to play and experiment with some quilt ideas without always having an end product in sight. I find it odd that I am having so much trouble with this considering that I was very much a process knitter, not a product knitter. Apparently, I am a product quilter, not a process one.
However, this quilt pattern, from the book Fresh Family Traditions, by Sherri McConnell, has been driving me nuts ever since I bought the book a few years ago.
I love the design, but I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out what, exactly, it is that I love. Is it the block? Is it the layout? Is it the fabric/color combination? And once I figure out what “it” is, can I bring that forward into a quilt of my own?
What I don’t love are the instructions. Part of my frustration with deconstructing this design centers around the fact that it’s a sort of scrappy quilt made up, as the designer notes, with fabrics from several Moda fabric lines (Sew Mama Sew and various Urban Chiks fabrics) as well as some favorite vintage fabrics from her stash. The Sew Mama Sew line is one of the few lines, I think, that had more than one production run because it was so popular. I’m not sure why book publishers even specify fabric lines in patterns given that by the time the book is published, the line may no longer be available. And yes, I am well aware that knitting patterns suffer from the same problem.
The cutting instructions are vague, at best, and specify only total yardage—a useless metric, in my opinion, when using this many different fabrics—and only color values of light, medium, and dark. The designer gives one critical hint in the assembly instructions when she notes that she alternated the layout of medium/dark prints with light prints. Indeed, if you look at the quilt, you can see that rows 1, 3, 5, etc. have the “darker” shades. The problem is that value is relative. A medium value color can look dark when placed next to something lighter than itself and light when placed next to something darker than itself. I would argue that there are very few actual “dark” fabrics in this design. I think they are mostly medium and light prints, and it’s their placement next to something else that determines which category they fall into.
The one saving grace of this design is that the layout is ridiculously simple: quarter-square triangles alternating with plain squares. I’ve already got a chunk of my own version laid out so I can get a better idea of what is going on, and I’ll talk more about it in a future blog post.