Dusting off the blog

That was an unplanned hiatus.  I spent the summer lost in a combination of grief and inertia.
I lost my dad in early June.  May had been a nightmare month as his health plummeted, with trips to the ER and tests and more tests.   He'd been fighting a long battle against a degenerative muscle disease and it finally won. 
I can't say enough good things about hospice - I literally don't know how we could have gotten through it without them.  So much help and comfort at a time when we really needed it.  Letting go was so hard, and they held our hands through it all.
Getting back into any kind of creative groove took a long time, and it's taken even longer to get to the point where I feel like talking again.
So, here I am, talking again.  Hello.

One thing I did do is get the quilting done on my granddaughter's Storm at Sea quilt, which I've been calling Sea of Tranquility.

(She's holding the other end of the quilt, but I cropped her out of the picture since I didn't ask her for permission to show her face.)
As you can see, I went ahead with my crazy plan to quilt it in a big spiral.  The beginning was a certified pain in the butt, but it was just the kind of simple mindless process that my frazzled self needed.  And I love the effect it gives of ripples moving out from the center, echoing the light to dark transition that I'd worked in the values of the blues and greens.

Big project, big quilt, done.  One positive to put up against the negative.
We just keep going.

Finally home again

My visit ended up being a bit longer than originally planned, but finally I'm home and reunited with my stash.  Oh, and with my folks, of course.  And the cat.
Now that I'm back on my own computer, I'm going to try to tie up a few loose ends for June as July bears down upon us.

First, the last of June's piggies, which I would have posted on Saturday for ScrapHappy Saturday...

 And I think these are all the rest of the May 365 Challenge blocks I've made, including some I'd forgotten to show.

I think I'm caught up through the 15th of May, which sounded pretty good to me until I remembered that it's nearly the end of June...
Though it wasn't all sewing while I was in Maryland.  There was another trip to the botanical garden (I could go every week, I think, and enjoy each visit just as much as the last!)  I did a lot of stopping to smell the roses,

while my grandson took a more active approach to the day.

There's a terrific maze next to the Japanese Garden, which most people walk.  Our young Mr C preferred it at high speed.

Back at the ranch, there was an interesting foray into the realm of rhubarb cocktails -

though I stuck with beer.  Pink is real nice and all, but not what I want in a beverage.

There were several monkeys, but this is the only one who stood still long enough to get a picture.

And I completely missed the boat on Log Cabin Loonies.  I did manage to get a few thrown together.  Though you'll notice that one of them is one log short of a cabin.

That may be my new favorite euphemism...

Well, they're not quilts, but I did manage some finishes.

No knitting finishes, either, though there's been a bit of knitting happening.

I'd actually finished these little projects a while back, but I was waiting until they had been presented to their new owners.  That would be the grandkids, whom I got to see in the last couple of weeks.
First off is a composition book cover for young Mister C.

A strip of Sally's snake fabric sneaked in, because 8-yr-old boy?  Brightly colored snakes?  Totally unavoidable.
He pronounced himself well pleased with the red swirls, too.   Because red is the best color ever, of course.

 My granddaughter's color preferences are in a quieter range.  Blues and greens are more her style, so her comp book cover went a whole different direction.

Inside, her comp book is graph paper, since she's a math enthusiast and is about to embark into the wilds of geometry. 

Here's a peek at the lining.  I couldn't resist sneaking in something a little noisier, without violating the quiet colors thing.

Back to the Boy.  Who is now a Boy and his Shark.

See the winning smile?

And check out the teeth.

And back to blue and green again for the Girl.  Instead of a pencil case, she got more of a travel case, which should prove more useful to her.  No teeth, alas.

The pattern for the shark is something that I saw on Sew, Mama, Sew quite a while back.  The other projects are things that I saw tutorials or patterns for somewhere out there, then had to wing it when sewing time came since I didn't have the foresight to print out a pattern or instructions or anything...  Having my sewing area and my internet-access area in two different places isn't always as convenient as I could want.  It does make me exercise my brain, though, so that's probably good.  Probably.
Wouldn't want Left Brain and Right Brain to get lazy, after all.  How could I dither without all the conflicting input?

So, I know the suspense has just been killing you...

The adventure my daughters took me on was a trip to Corning Museum of Glass, in Corning, NY.

(More about Chihuly's Fern Green Tower here and here.)

 We saw fascinating exhibits and dazzling demonstrations.  Stop and think a moment about how much glass there is in your life, from window panes to wineglasses, from prisms to pyrex.  Glass is an amazing medium, spanning the strictly utilitarian to the breathtakingly beautiful.  If you're ever in upstate NY, don't miss an opportunity to visit the museum.

But wait, there's more.  Because they also treated me to classes. 
And that's where the superhero costume comes into the story.  Because glass is HOT...

 Here I'm getting a taste of glassblowing.

The nice young man does all the ya-gotta-know-what-you're-doing work.  My job is just to puff on the blowpipe and make a bubble in the glass.

Reheating to keep the glass soft.

 Hey, look!  I made a bubble!  And don't be fooled by the red and orange - that's just the heat talking.  The actual colors of the glass are blue and purple.  (And clear.  Clear is a color, as I learned that day.)

Now for a little more knowing-what-you're-doing stuff by the nice young man (and I did ask him his name at the time, but I didn't think to write it down, so I've forgotten it.  He told me he'd been working with glass for 6 years, and had been with the museum for about 3 months.)  He's making a flat base on my bubble, and pulling a decorative top.

Tada.  That's a glass ball full of my breath.

Cool, hunh?

And there's more!

While I only needed goggles for the glassblowing, since there wasn't any 'hand-on' stuff, for this part I needed to be all geared up with safety stuff.  Sleeves, gloves, and goggles.  They even had foot protectors available for people who had showed up in sandals or flipflops.

This time I get to do some actual shaping...

 pinching...

 and more pinching...

and pulling...

and twisting...

And when it was all cooled off, it looked like this:

 For the third and final class of the day, we all got to play:  My two daughters, my granddaughter, and I all made glass beads, using a torch.  This was the biggest decision process of the day.  I'd picked a couple of colors each time for the previous projects, but this time, we had to choose 3 colors, a shape, a size, and a pattern for our bead.  The decisions were almost impossible - there were tons of gorgeous colors to choose from, several patterns which were all appealing, and round? Square?  Triangular?  So hard...

In this photo, you can see some of the colors we had available.  That's my oldest girl on the left, being assisted by her designated Redshirt.  And I was very glad that each of us had someone right at hand, as we fiddled with molten glass, playing with a torch that was burning at 1000's of degrees F.  (And all the Redshirts survived the mission!  Must be a first...)

 There's my youngest girl (in orange) and my granddaughter on the extreme right.  I had to stand behind a railing out of the way while I waited for my turn, so couldn't get any pictures of their beadwork in action.

And here's an out-of-focus picture of my bead.  (Sorry, that's the best of a sad lot.)  I chose white for my background, and purple and green for my accents, round, medium, and swirly.

 Here's a photo with my hand for scale.  (And yes, I have a boo-boo on my thumb.  Though it was a kitchen injury, not a glassblowing injury.)

Then, as if the workshops weren't enough, we visited the galleries and saw 3500 years of glass.  From ancient Egyptian glass (where a couple of guys playing with melting sand Changed the World Forever) to Roman glass to Medieval glass to Renaissance glass to Modern glass, and every age in between, with examples from every region of the world.  Glass!  Beautiful glass!  Mindblowing glass!

Makes me want to take up some new hobbies.  I'm sure Madman wouldn't mind if I put a glass furnace in the kitchen, right?


 ..

Have Hub, Will Travel

A quick visit to Radio Shack on the way home (my only nearby source for computer bits) put an end to my plug-unplug-plug-swear-unplug-swear-plug antics. Hurray for hubs!
And now we return to our regularly scheduled blithering...

So.
In early August, I made a trip with my youngest daughter to upstate NY to visit my dad. My oldest daughter, son-in-law, and grandkids drove up from Florida to be there at the same time. (And not-coincidentally, it was my birthday. A very happy birthday for me, to have both my daughters with me at the same time!)
Daughter-the-younger and I arrived the day before the rest of the crew, so we had a chance to settle in and check out all the cool critters.
There were freshly sheared alpacas

and some spiffy new Barred Rock pullets.

And piggies! These are either a week old, or two weeks old. (I got confused after a certain point. There were pigs everywhere - multiple litters in multiple colors in multiple barns.
My favorites are the polka-dotted ones...

On Sunday, while we were waiting for Older daughter and Co to arrive, we had some big excitement. Dad has cameras on several of the pens, in order to keep track of what's going on out in the barns. One of the young sows (who wasn't really due for another couple of days) was in labor and had already had two piglets. Which she was chasing and trying to bite. Naturally I grabbed my camera and headed out to the barn with the rest of the troops.
As a first time mother, she was irritable and confused. Here she was, hot and in pain, and suddenly there were these pesky things that were plaguing the hell out of her, snuffling and nuzzling and squeaking. We finally had to pull them from the pen, because she was too agitated to do anything but stomp around and try to boot piglets. Once they were gone, she settled back down and laid down again.

After about half an hour's wait, Piggie number 3 made an appearance.

Followed by Number 4.

By this time, she had her butt up close enough to the wall of the pen that I was afraid the babies were going to be born with concussions...
As each piglet was born, my WickedGoodStepmother would give it a chance to try to nurse, until mama pig got too agitated, then would rescue it and drop it into the bin we'd set up for the babies' protection.
These little squirmers are all looking for something - they don't know what it is, but they're sure they'll know it when they find it. They're sucking on each other's noses, tails, and ears, because Mother Nature had promised them that there'd be food. Gives a whole new layer to "Got Milk?", doesn't it?

Older Daughter & Crew arrived about that time. The grandkids were fascinated by the bin full of baby piggies.

The count mounted. Here we are at seven. I love the variety.

After about the 10th one, Mama just didn't give a shit anymore. So we pulled them out of the bin and returned them to her, where they proceeded to clumsily look for spigots.

This little guy finally figured it out.

And eventually, so did the rest of them. But by that time, my camera's batteries were out of juice...
*sigh*