weekend, O! weekend!

i've had this children's quilt on my couch for about the last 8 years. i made it when my friend eli & chava were expecting a baby. we had been friends up at humboldt, then in l.a. sometime before i finished the blanket we fell out of touch.

at this time i was trying to add pieced borders to my quilts. i'm particulary proud of the pieced stars in this one. :)
it's got a nice orange flannel back (another first for me back then).
pardon the wide, bland pic with the yard stick at the end. it was taken with my laptop for
someone interested in using it in a shoot. here is a nice detail shot:
those little shapes in the blue squares are fish. with smiles. i am very fond of this old fabric. :)

over the years i've considered giving the quilt to other friends who were having kids but never did. i like to make things with the recipients in mind, so giving it to another family just felt odd.

a couple of weeks ago, through the radness of f/b, eli and i reconnected! turns out we'd lost touch b/c he and his wife moved out of state. i'd completely forgotten. their family has since grown, and their youngest is a two yr old boy. i told them the story of the quilt and asked if i could send it to them. it's now in a box, awaiting a mailing label. this week it's off to my friends after all these years. awesome. (lord, my fatigue has depleted my vocabulary in a powerful way. sigh).

i'm happy about this for all the obvious reasons but also b/c now i have reason to make another quilt for home. woo! how cool would it be for all the blankets at my place to be handmade? one long-cooker of a project i have is to mend the afghan my grandma irene crocheted. just needs a little mending where the granny squares have been attached.

boy, this was a terrific weekend. got a few things done, did some knitting, watched "Dinner at Eight," had some unexpected social time with my neighbors, had two bagels, saw a movie, wrote a few postcards, went to the record store, and spent a good deal of time reading "wonder boys."

this evening as i rode my bike home from an afternoon at good & intelligentsia mmj's version of the velvet underground's "oh! sweet nuthin'" came up on the shuffle and just broke my heart. such a terrific song.
where effie st. crosses hyperion there is wide open view of the neighborhood. there were some low grey clouds over the hollywood sign and griffith observatory as the sun was setting. the area jacaranda trees are all in full bloom: luminous lavender everywhere! dotting the hillsides, along every street. one of those beautiful, cool evenings in the neighborhood.

(this pic came from a forum for landscape architects. i couldn't find a photo credit.)

and with that: off to bed. big week coming up: ira glass is coming to town for a this american life screening and i'm going to a new dentist. excited and a little terrified. my last dentist recommended gum grafts. this is how he became my Last Dentist. :|

postcard-a-go-go!

since i was about 6 years old i've been a letter writer. when i was in college and couldn't afford to make long distance calls that weren't collect, i wrote even more. i bought and used a lot of stationery and postcards. when i got to grad school, not only did i not make phone calls, but my letter writing dropped off as i was busy getting up at 4am to script supervise my friends films. oof.

to get to the point: quite a few of the postcards in my apt i've been carting around for years. decades.

in the last couple weeks of april i learned that the postal rate was going up. at the time i had about thirty 27¢ postcard stamps. i determined to use as many of the 27¢ stamps (and postcards from my stash) as i could before the rate change. by the last saturday before the rate increase i'd written 27 postcards. WOO!

now, i've found i'm kind of on a roll. saturday i stopped by the post office for forty 1¢ stamps (sigh) to continue my postcard binge. i shot myself in the foot in re: depleting the decades deep stash of postcards in my apt, though, when i bought a 20 pack of postage paid Simpsons postcards at the post office. DAMN! it may have been a reaction to realizing that i'd just added 20 more postcards back into the supply that had me sit down and write another 10 cards over the last couple days.

still, i did manage to send at least three postcards i've had with me since the mid 1980's. that felt FANTASTIC! one of them was an aerial photo of the Red Lion Hotel in north san jose. i took that postcard from hotel when i was there ringing in the new year 1987 or 1988. i don't remember the year but i do remember having a terrific time and dancing with my friend walt to a band in the lounge. also managed to use a card i'd purchased at a dead show in about the same time period. it had some very grateful dead related art work on it.

all this card writing has usurped my knitting time at cafes, so i haven't been knitting at all. each postcard is its own thing, so they don't require a continuing attention and focus like a knitting project. timing is good for that kind of activity, tho.

assorted fun facts: weekend cafe total: 5, finished reading paul feig's, "kick me," began reading "wonder boys" again, came home tonight to the neighbors bbq-ing in the courtyard and was met with, "you want a piña colada?"

and now, time for bed.