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Honeycomb Dreams

Ever since I finished my green silk bliaut, I've been wanting another huge, incremental-progress, super-cool-when-it's-done project. And I thought it was going to be an illuminated and hand-bound manuscript, but it turns out I'm 100% terrified of failing at that not ready to start that yet, and also I'm moving house sometime this year, which doesn't exactly bode well for delicate paper projects that are sensitive to humidity and being crumpled.

So. I decided to learn how to quilt. And because I'm never one for starting small, I'm going to learn English paper piecing, and make a honeycomb quilt with itty-bitty (one-inch edge) hexagons. I have a pile of printed cotton fat quarters in shades of lemon-to-ochre, along with some plain daffodil yellow cotton leftover from my fighting pants, and scraps of the brown trim silk from the green silk bliaut, and half a yard of cream silk remnant I found in the bargain bin at Joann's, and a blue silk for contrast pieces, and I have this gorgeous marigold silk shirt that's never really suited me, but which would make a lovely textural counterpoint to the cottons.

Nine large and one small abalone buttons, on a detched breast pocket made of marigold silk, with a small blue-handled seam ripper overlapping the lower point of the pocket.
I love these buttons so much.
I got the pocket and the buttons off easily, and then started the real deconstruction.

A partially deconstructed seam, showing two edges of thin marigold silk with the cut edges folded in, and another piece pulled slightly to remove it from the center of the sandwich.
This is the sort of over-engineered crap I would pull. Who does that?!
Augh. There were several seams where one piece was cleverly inset between two others, with everything neatly topstitched down and enclosed. Beautiful finishing work, but incredibly time-consuming to pick apart. I could have just cut the fabric and lost whatever was taken up by the seams, but it's such lovely fabric that I hate to waste any of it.

Two large, roughly rectangular pieces of deep blue lightly slubbed silk, one laid flat at the far edge of a wooden table, and one crumpled at the near edge. A green and turquoise zippered pouch with a spool of red thread and a small, green-lidded tupperware full of silver sewing pins sit on the table to the right of the silk.
Yes, this was a bad decision.
Taking the blue silk apart went much more quickly, and gave me a number of close-to-rectangular pieces that ought to be easy to use in any number of projects—this one's likely to use only a panel or two.

A pile of crumpled and twisted cream, deep blue, and brown silk fabric on a white-spotted green fleece blanket and a red plush blanket. Long frayed threads from each of the silk pieces, but especially the cream, are tangled throughout the whole mess.
Always finish your silk before washing.
Having taken apart (most of) the clothes I was deconstructing for this quilt, I thought I ought to wash everything, to take care of differential shrinkage problems before my nice, perfectly matched hexagons were all sewn together and puckering like mad. I did, in fact, put all the silks in a lingerie bag. It was not enough. Silk just has to have finished edges before it's washed, unless you like untangling miles of very thin, very strong, very tangled thread.

A large piece of plain marigold cotton draped smoothly over a green-and-white print ironing board, with fuchsia flecks of lint all over and a long strips of silver duct tape smoothed across most of the width.
Yes, that's duct tape. It holds the universe together, you know.
I also learned another reason one should never buy cheap sheets: when you wash your cheap fuchsia sheets with your lovely daffodil cotton for a gold-and-honey quilt, you get lovely daffodil cotton dotted with endless fields of little fuchsia balls of fluff. And then you get to spend about half an hour peeling the friggin fluff off the cotton with duct tape, because you know everyone uses packing tape but you don't have any of that and besides duct tape is cheaper.

That last bit might just be me.

A black plastic seedling tray with twelve six-cell units full of potting soil, and a number of small two-leaved seedlings sprouting, the left ones slim and delicate and the right ones robust.
We may have been too enthusiastic about the cucumbers.
Meanwhile, the seedling farm is going strong, with cukes and tomatoes up and stretching for the light. They've also been shoved over to make room for the cats, who insist on using the heat mat for themselves.

A dormant garden with two large rectangular raised beds in the foreground and two square raised beds behind them. Three pairs of double-sashed white-framed windows are arranged in A-frame configurations, two across the narrow dimension of the nearer rectangular bed and one at the near end of the further rectangular bed. Light mulch covers the narrow paths between beds, and the garden is surrounded by a low fence made of worn wooden lattice.
No snarky comment. I'm actually really proud of these.
The Boy and I constructed these little cold frames for the garden, too. I'm not sure they need the sticks to brace them—they didn't even try to slide when we set them up—but there's no harm in preventative measures, and I don't really want to have to learn how to pick glass out of the dirt.

A close-up of the hinge of an A-frame constructed of two white-framed windows, with silver screw eyes inserted at eithe rend and the center of each frame, and a pale unpainted wooden dowel slotted through all six screw eyes. The white paint is flaking off the window frames.
Ingenuity!
No hinges, just a pile of screw eyes and some cheap dowels, which I eyeballed perfectly to suit the inner diameter of the screw eyes. This way we can deconstruct the frames to rearrange for the cotton fence/greenhouse, and for storage in deepest winter. Tension from not having the screw eyes perfectly aligned also helps keep the frames more rigid than nice, smooth-acting hinges would. (It's a design feature. Hush.)

A shot fom slightly above two pairs of white-framed windows arranged in A-frames, reflecting the pale sky and bare trees. The soil beneath them is dark and bare, and a dilute calico cat is walking under the leftmost A-frame, ignoring the photographer.
Garden helper demonstrating why we need to enclose the ends.
We'd planted lettuce and kale about a week before, but no sign of seedlings yet...and I think the cats, digging in the best litter box ever, may have disturbed the seeds past the point of no return. There may be a second construction stage to attach chicken wire to the open ends of the frames, and save the seeds from feline depredations. The weather's already warm enough that we don't need the greenhouse effect much, so I'll have all summer to work out solid ends for end-of-season work.

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