Quilts of Recent Years: an incomplete catalogue

Remember those prism quilts I was making before?

I made some more of those.

Then I made some baby quilts out of a lot of squares:

 

And some bigger quilts with squares and rectangles and birds*:

And now I'm working on some circles.

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*I've been using a lot of shot cottons**, which are super fantastically nice to look at and super fantastically difficult to photograph. Light quality and postproduction aside, even. The two bird quilts use almost exclusively the same fabric palette but you'd never know from the pictures.

Here's a 9-square piece of an unfinished project.

That's four photos of the same piece, which is made out of 9 squares of the same fabric. (Galvenized Sandstone is the name of it. I'm going to make myself a duvet cover out of this eventually.)

**Mainly these. Also now I have a notebook full of carefully curated shot cotton scraps, with warps and wefts exposed, because I kept accidentally ordering more of the wrong thing.

So if you need help selecting exactly the right shot cotton for whatever you're doing today, I'm your man.

Witchcraftle

The three-year-old has a bunch of little Disney princess dolls with weird rigid snap-on dresses. (Actually I think most of them are actually the seven-year-old's dolls, but Three is the one who plays with them.) They're about three inches high and all have the same identical creepy Disney/Barbie bodies and poses, but whatever. The kids like them.

So, I made a castle for the princesses to live in, for a birthday present for the three-year-old. It started out a relatively low-key papier-mache thing and turned into a big elaborate production, but I'm not sorry.

I made balconies out of toothpicks and hot glue and nail polish, and turrets out of oatmeal containers. There are assorted types of paint and wallpaper and tapestry on all the walls. There is a lot of glitter and pearlizing medium and sparkle tape and swirly decorative border action.

It's tougher than it looks, thanks to millions of layers of glue, and it's getting a decent amount of play time.  The princesses have to share it with some ninjas (turtle and other) and Star Wars guys, but they seem to be coexisting peacefully so far.

I'm pretty pleased with myself, overall, and Jamaal only rolled his eyes and groaned a little bit about how much space it is taking up in the back room. Whatever. At least I didn't make a kid-sized one like last time.

Platonic salience

Here's an art project of which I approve: Guy got random people to draw bikes. Just, like, a sketch on a bar napkin or what-have-you. It turns out people don't really think about what things look like, so they are pretty bad at this task, and the drawings are amusing.  They mostly include handlebars and seats and wheels and pedals, but they mostly aren't connected up in a very functional way.

THEN, the guy built the bikes.

It's so pretty! And not right at all! Like so many things in my life.

Update

Well, it's been a while! Let's see if I can ease back in to the ol' blogosphere without injuring myself.

 Plus ça change
I got diagnosed with some real weird stuff, and quit working, and gave my fancy truck to my brother, and moved to Texas, and cut off all my hair.

Plus c'est la même chose
I made some quilts, and some felt animals, and some terrible jokes, and a few huge messes. And drank some whiskey and ate some chocolate and played with some babies.

Plus demain, probablement
I'll try to think of something nice to tell you about. Xoxoxo!