There are six blocks to my little quilt for the nieceling. Three of them have large trees, like this:

As I described in the last post, the circular part is pieced in. I sewed the trunk to the bottom of the tree before I set it in and just poked it through to the front, then sewed it down as a last step to finish the block. From the back, it looks like this:

I’ve been on kind of a sewing binge. I hope after the weekend I’ll have a finished dress/tunic to show you. My binge may also have included some fabric purchases. I may have discovered the rabbit hole that is Glorious Color. (Why yes, I do covet the Liberty assortments. Do you think I could register for one, you know, for the baby?) But with spring busting out all over, how could I resist these?

Hmm, Wordpress has once again managed to desaturate my photos. Imagine these brighter!

Some of these, at least, are going to become ducky little Oliver + S garments. If my sewing skills hold up, that is. (I had a small tantrum over the fact that my sewing machine has a maximum stitch width of 5mm and is therefore unable to sew a zigzag stitch over (but not into) a piece of quarter-inch elastic. I called the sewing machine store to find out if there was some magical way to sew a longer zigzag that I was missing, but there wasn’t. I actually tried manually shifting the whole piece back and forth between every stitch, but this was too ludicrous for words. Finally I pulled up my socks, thought through the problem, and used the other kind of zigzag that makes several stitches on each pass, having carefully stretched and pinned the elastic ahead of the needle. It turned out fine.)

One evening last week I was puttering about with quilt bits at the dining table (which sees dining only when there’s company, I’m ashamed to say… general-purpose work table would be a more accurate name for it, as it is currently covered in quilting supplies, leftover jetsam from our tax preparation, a vase of anemones and tulips that are beginning to drop petals, a friend’s novel draft, sundry medical devices, and goodness knows what else) when my eye was caught by a glow at the window.

A real photographer might have stood a chance at capturing the beauty of the last light slipping beneath the rain clouds to gild the tulip tree. I wish I could give you the peachy russet and ochre glow.

I love this hundred-year-old queen of the neighborhood, with her graceful branches and proud stature, her distinctive four-lobed leaf and outlandish flower. Even her name is beautiful: Liriodendron. She isn’t a true poplar, but she’s partly behind my rather arbitrary decision that my newly unvented quilt blocks are poplars.

This is only a dummy block to make sure I was getting the hang of the technique; the real blocks are more visually stimulating and I’ll show them to you soon because on the whole they’re pleasing me. But actually I like this scrapwork dummy enough that I may make it eleven or fourteen companions to produce a more sedate version of my little niece’s Poplar Blocks. I had planned to do this quilt with appliqué, but I had concerns about how my little hand-stitches would hold up to the repeated washings a baby quilt is likely to require. Just at the most felicitous time, some ladies in a local fabric shop mentioned Dale Fleming’s “six-minute circle” technique for piecing circles, and I thought I could easily adapt it to make my tree shapes. They take me longer than six minutes. The first one took forty, and I’d guess the following blocks have taken fifteen or twenty per tree. But it’s a darn sight faster than hand-sewing is for me and really should be sturdier. And I get to use a glue stick, which just makes me chortle. I have derided the glue stick as an inferior form of stickum since grade school, and here it’s exactly what you need.

I had a productive Saturday and the piecing for the blocks is almost half finished. I also managed time to take a class on encaustic wax painting from one of my favorite eighth graders (she’s been studying the art form all year for her independent project, a graduation requirement at our school) and to throw a couple of skeins of wool into a Kool-Aid dye bath to improve their color. That’s three new art forms for me in one day! Whew! And sure enough I woke up on Sunday with no energy and had to take a long afternoon nap again. Some days I feel so vigorous that I just want to make the most of it, but then I have to pay the piper. C’est la vie enceinte, I guess.

I’ve lost my heart to a new sock pattern and a new sock yarn. I ran across christhalinette’s take on Beate Zäch’s charming Bluemchen pattern on Ravelry and thought, “How whimsical!” Then I looked more closely. How exactly were those flowers constructed? Wait, are those decreases between the petals? Am I seeing little gussets in unusual places?

Sure enough, the pattern begins with a little stranded hexagon… and then another coupled to it, and then some funny little earflap pieces… and pretty soon you have something that really does look like part of a sock foot. A sock foot with genius reinforcement in just the places a sock foot needs it. There is a lot more sewing involved than in a regular sock, but I found it so engaging to watch a sock form emerging that I hardly noticed the extra labor.

As you can see, I totally copied the color scheme from that first pair I fell for. I already knew I wanted to buy something with long color changes for the flowers; I went hunting in my stash for a solid, pale base yarn and came up with a nice gray ball of Satakieli the color of gull wings. I took it with me to the shop and began to fret when I couldn’t find just what I’d imagined — a floral colorway that wouldn’t look too juvenile or too Vegas. Finally I settled on a ball of Noro in the lyrically named S185 C colorway. I’d had my eye on this one as my favorite of their offerings anyway, and I figured the remnants could go toward the ducky vertical-striped garter baby sweaters in my queue. It looked okay with the gray Satakieli, but it didn’t really sing. So just for kicks I tried one of my favorite yarn-browsing techniques: the Squint Eye. I held up the Noro at arm’s length, squinted one eye at it like a nearsighted pirate ogling a buxom barmaid, and slowly passed it in front of the wall of sock yarn to see if anything hanging there would give it that razzle dazzle that happens when two colors were meant to be together. (I imagine the performance of the Squint Eye looks mighty peculiar except to veteran yarn-buyers. Go on, I’ll bet you use it too.)

And there it was. The magic glow. And it was coming from something that looked suspiciously like plain, unbleached wool.

I quickly restored my face to its normal configuration so I could investigate. The magic was coming from the section of the wall housing the offerings from A Verb for Keeping Warm. No surprise there — Kristine Vejar is a visionary. I love her India-inflected color sense, and also her commitment to natural dyes and to farmers and mills in the U.S. and Canada. But what was this peculiar magic skein of Creating that didn’t look like it had been dyed at all? The color was called “citron.” I carried it over to the window to see it in what was left of the natural light. It still just looked like cream, but the Noro was crazy about it, practically slavering around its skirts. So I shrugged and had them put it on the swift for me.

The next morning I kept giving that unassuming ball little sideways glances as I cast on and began my first hexagon. Wait, was that a blush of pink grapefruit I spied? A hint of lemongrass? It was! This yarn may not perform to strangers the way its AVFKW brethren do, but Kristine really is a genius. It’s as if she stirred a single one of these into that pot of fresh cream:

(Just the tulip. Not the invasive wild geranium I need to rip out of every corner in the garden… again.) And not that you can really see it when I take photographs at 6pm after work. You’ll have to take my word for it until I can get proper pictures in proper daylight.

The first sock is finished, and so is the first hexagon of the second sock. Can I somehow have both socks blocked by Monday? My birthday girl may have to open a gift containing just one sock, with the second to follow later in the week. Gifting one dry sock would be better than two damp ones, right? Wet socks, even handknit ones with really pretty flowers, don’t exactly say I love you and I’m going to miss you so much when you move to Maine.

I had all these projects I was going to work on this weekend, all these pictures I was going to take to share with you here. I’m sewing a simple linen dress from this tutorial; I’m knitting these crazy awesome socks in a mad dash for a friend’s birthday; I’m mocking up a quilt block to practice piecing circles (sounds nuts, right?); I have two sweet Oliver + S patterns I’m excited to try. I did finish the neckline on the dress and got as far as the heel of the first sock, and then the zombies happened.

Actually, I was the zombie.

I just completely ran out of steam on Sunday morning and had to give over the entire afternoon to a nap, accomplishing nothing but a little feeble vacuuming. I dragged myself through an evening of marimba practice and grocery shopping and arrived home even more living-dead. Apparently Minnow is making some demands on my body right now and I just need to watch how I extend my energy. (Oh, and I was wrong about how big it is — I was reading my little journal again and apparently the baby had gained 100g, bringing its total weight to more than a pound! Which sounds like a lot until I remember it’s only got four months to put on at least five more… no wonder I need more sleep.)

Anyway, no fun photos and not as much progress as I’d hoped in any department. Except for that part where I’ve increased the size of my offspring by a skein of sock yarn in the last couple of weeks.