I got #1 son’s quilt sewn together this weekend. Yes, I know the corners don’t match properly, but if they did, he would feel as though someone else had made it, and not his mother.

My husband and I got the quilting frame out of the garage and set up, sandwiched the quilt top, backing, and batting, and put it in the frame.

Then #1 son came back from his adventure at Hueco Tanks. This is a climbing area in Texas, near El Paso, and the link goes to a place that appears to be about climbing there, but its main navigation also includes “Capitalism” and “Tyranny,” so use your own judgement.

It snowed one day, so they went to the Carlsbad Caverns. In the evenings they went to El Pasito and hung out, and they did a little sightseeing, but mostly it was serious climbing. Sounded fun, assuming thtat you’re 22 and quite fit.

#1 son told me all this over a dinner of chicken curry, rice, strawberries, cucumber, and pineapple upside down cake. Then he biked off and my husband and I bedded out a bunch of torenia (clown flower or wishbone flower, like a short snapdragon) and hypoestes (polka dot plant or nosy neighbor).

All in all, a very pleasant weekend. Usually on spring break I like to travel a bit, but instead I worked for 60 hours this week, so a restful weekend was just the thing.

First things first: the new Knitty is up. It’s mostly tiny shawls, though there is a nice little cardigan called Petal and a nice raglan T shirt style top called Gemini, plus a pretty traditional sock called Phloem. Those are the ones I like, mind you. There are several more each of socks and warm-weather sweaters. I just didn’t like them as much.

I was planning to single out the knitted pineapple bag for special scorn, I confess, but then I read the notes on it. Apparently, Victorian women were mad for bags shaped like pineapples. How can it be that I didn’t know this? Knitting bags in the shape of pineapples was, according the the pattern’s author (or erhaps editor), le dernier cri for  the ladies of the mid-1800s. Like wearing Ugg boots or something.

I’m not the sort who wears Ugg boots and I’m not going to make the pineapple. However, sice it was written by Franklin Habit, I recommend that you go read the story.

There’s also a new Anticraft, which includes a Celtic style cross-stitch alphabet. The AntiCraft is generally not worth the bother of looking at if it’s knitting patterns you want, but you might want cross stitch, for all I know.

My new sewing machine arrived and I am hoping to get that quilt top finished up today, along with some errands and housework. I haven’t opened the box yet, so I am still operating in the realm of fantasy. In said fantasy, this magical new sewing machine that threads itself and makes its own buttonholes will not only work so splendidly that I can finish the quilt in a weekend, but will also make it possible for me to finish up the SWAP I started last summer. It will make up for my lack of skill and for the fact that I don’t oil my machine and also for the sleep deprivation which continues to be the main truth about my life.

I bought the sashing and sewed one row before my sewing machine died. I found a great deal on a little Brother machine with all kinds of fancy stuff like automatic buttonholes at Amazon, and hope it’ll arrive fast enough for me to get the quilt sewn for #1 son’s birthday.

The weather has been gorgeous. Nothing to complain about here, and you can’t say better than that.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

I’m taking the day off, or at least most of the day. I played around online first, and then got all my T-shirt squares prepared and organized.

I think I’ve got a good variety of colors — enough that I can arrange them in a design with a reasonable degree of balance.

Now I need to decide about sashing and setting. I think this will make a great quilt for #1 son’s birthday.

I’ll be heading out soon for groceries.

I’m overlooking all the work I ought to be doing. I’ll be reading, cleaning, baking, and sewing. In fact, I will pretend that it is Spring Break, which it is and that I’m on vacation (which I’m not).

In business, it’s normal to go through cycles of comfort and discomfort. #2 son, who studies economics, told me the proper name for it and drew me the chart, but I don’t remember the official details.

Anyway, you grow and have plenty of work and money is coming in and everything’s good. Then you get too busy and you have to hire someone else, so the money goes out in another direction and things are less comfortable financially, but there are enough people to do the work and you grow a bit more and there are enough people and also enough money and you’re comfortable again. It may not be people, of course; it might be a larger building or more machinery or something, but for us it’s people.

We hired The New Guy, and that helped, and then we increased his hours, and that helped some more, but now I’m absolutely swamped again.

This is where it’s uncomfortable. Not only am I back to working way too much, but The New Guy is a student and can’t be expected to be the additional full time person we really need. I’ve been imaging that #2 daughter might come on board at this point, but it looks like that won’t happen.

So I’m back to 50 or 60 hour weeks for a bit till we figure out what to do. The danger here is not only that I’ll be living in squalor and eating take out pizza while my husband languishes alone, but also that things won’t get done, or won’t get done fast enough, and we’ll lose customers. We’ve lost one already this year, actually. He was very nice, very positive, but it’s entirely possible that we screwed up on that account.

This is the big danger in growth. For a company like ours that has been bootstrapped and has no extra capital, it’s a danger that we face every time we hit this point in the cycle.

Yesterday, in addition to some hours of work, I also got started on my T shirt quilt. You cut squares of interfacing (I used 10″ squares) and fuse them to your old T shirts. Trim them to match the squares, sort them by color families, and keep going till you have enough squares to make your quilt.

An interesting corner of The Art Professor’s office. I was there for a video project with a group of students and The New Guy. Said New Guy told us that this was done with a hair dryer, but The Art Professor didn’t say anything about it. He has all kinds of wild stuff in his office, as befits an art professor.

I lolled around on my birthday as planned. I went to a bookstore and bought an actual paperback novel  and a tiny box of Godiva chocolates, cleaned up the living room, and relaxed. Later, I cleaned my nightstand and put fresh sheets on the bed, used a Kose or sekkisei lotion mask, and lolled in bed reading till my husband came in. I think I did enough lolling to last me for a while.

I learned about the lotion mask in Little Tokyo while visiting a friend of my youth a couple of years ago. You can see it in action here. My friend and I put these things on our faces and rested for 5-10 minutes as directed, and then told one another how youthful and bright we looked. I think the great thing about these masks is that you rest for 5-10 minutes. However, I really like it and can recommend it as an anti-stress measure.

Does it do anything at all for the skin? I don’t know. I can tell you that I now have less visible sun damage than I did a couple of years ago. Unfortunately, I don’t know what has caused this. I’ve used Erno Laszlo soap and Korres botanical treatments, often together, and of course I have been holed up at my computer most of the time and getting very little sun, so that might be it.

Of course, at the same time that I have been reversing the discoloration to some extent, I’m also becoming more wrinkled, so I don’t expect to end up looking fabulous. However, I do feel that the coming year will be a fabulous year for me. This may be the result of lolling about eating chocolate rather than of any rational expectation, but it’s quite a pleasant feeling.

I told this to #1 daughter, and she told me that she had had just the same feeling on her birthday a couple of months ago. She has ended an unproductive relationship and moved into a snazzy new apartment in that time, so that sounds pretty good to me.

Today there’s church, and the Australians’ blog, and I will also need to work on this church history book I’m helping out with. It’s volunteer, and should be fun.

It’s my birthday today. I’m not working. I have a lot of work to do, and lots of housework as well, ut I once read somewhere that it isn’t fun to have nothing to do — it’s fun to have lots of things to do and not to do them.

That’s the plan. #1 son baked me a cake, with layers and everything, and I have plenty to read, so I expect to be doing lots of lolling around. Possibly a nice walk once the sun comes up. That;s it.