Quilt design

This is the first quilt that I have done from the beginning myself. Even that’s not really true because I had lots of help matching the fabrics in the squares.

The actual quilting design is happening on the design wall in the center background of the picture. If you look closely, you can see that it’s a piece of flannel that’s hung on the wall. These are called design walls and the fabric that will make up the finished quilt is simply pressed onto the “sticky” flannel. It can be re-arranged to try out different design options.

The quilt I’m working on is made up of squares containing a bright fabric that is surrounded by a black-and-white background fabric. The squares are 6 inches, finished size. There will be 96 different bright fabrics and 24 backgrounds, thus each background appears on four squares. The design hanging on the wall represents one square from each of the 24 backgrounds.

The finished quilt will look very different from what is hanging on the wall because what I plan to do is combine the four squares that share a common background into a “super square”. When I do this, the background fabric that is together will form its own square, and this effect will highlight the brights. Or at least that’s the theory.

Mine is a simple design. Cathy is working on a design for a quilt that will include a woodland scene. She has just begun it on the larger design wall.

High-speed train musing

There’s an interesting article in the Christian Science Monitor on Amtrak. We took a quick weekend jaunt to the Chicago area last weekend and were commenting on the drive back about how nice it would be if we had decent high-speed train service in the US. Having experienced the trains in Europe and Japan, we really miss being able to use this alternative for exactly this kind of trip. Rather than driving for 14 hours so that we could spend 8 hours at a quilt show, we could have used the travel time for something useful.

One of the quotes from the article that was particularly interesting was “more people now take the train than fly between Washington D.C. and New York.” That’s encouraging, and imminently logical. But one of the points that the CSM article missed is why the train works so well for this kind of trip in particular.

You might think that trains are passé, and anyone who could afford to do so would fly. It’s so much faster to fly, after all. But it’s not faster for a broad segment of travel, the NYC-to-DC trip being a prime example. This is especially true if you’re traveling from city-center to city-center. To take a train, you go to the train station in the city, get on the train, and get off at the other end in the city. To fly, you negotiate the trip to the airport, finesse your way through the airport security, sit around waiting for the plane to leave because you had to plan on a delay in the security line even if there wasn’t one, pack yourself onto the airplane, then travel to your real destination at the other end. The extra hassle of traveling to and from the airport and leaving time to make it through security can be more daunting than the entire train trip.

That’s not to say that the train is the right answer for every trip. I’m not suggesting it for the NYC-to-LA circuit. But how many of our trips these days are in the “sweet spot” for train travel? And how many more of them would be there if train travel in the US was up to the standards of, say, Japan?

On our trip to Japan, we used public transportation to get around. The trains and subways are great. The Shinkansen, Japan’s high-speed train, is truly outstanding. One of the interesting aspects, which one doesn’t appreciate until you actually ride the train, is that stops in stations are extremely short – less than a minute. The train stops, people get off, people get on, and it’s on its way in an incredibly short time. This is made possible by a couple of factors. First, the norm in Japan for long trips is that people don’t travel with their luggage; they ship it to their destination . . . so you don’t have a bunch of people trying to get on and off the train wrestling with huge suitcases. Second, the platforms are marked with the exact location where each car of the train will stop, and tickets are issued with the number of the car, so the incoming passengers know exactly where to stand. The markings on the platform even include lines diagonally from the location where the door will be, so the incoming passengers are positioned so that arriving passengers can walk out unobstructed, then they can enter the car. I suspect that this system might not be quite as effective in the US, what with pushy obnoxious individuals who would insist on standing in front of the door and pushing their way onto the train, but it would be nice to see it tried here.

Baghdad Burning blog

I don’t follow many blogs. For a while I followed Baghdad Burning, a compelling narrative by a woman in Baghdad that has been published as a book and received a fair amount of publicity. I checked it this morning after not having read it for a while.

The author of the blog has now moved from Baghdad to Damascus. Her current entry describes how it feels to be a refugee. I recommend it.

Cats help design quilts

I thought I would share yet-another example of the attraction between quilts and cats. (For others, do a search for “quilt” in the blog.)

My current project is to make a quilt using some of the bright fabrics that we have purchased lately plus some black-and-white abstract designs. The design is much the same as the one used for the quilt that is currently on our bed. Each square consists of a center of the bright fabric, surrounded by four triangles made by cutting two squares of the background in half. You get some idea of the effect from what is laid out on the table that Shadow decided to use as his latest cat bed.

I have just constructed the first (trial) square, and it’s not as easy as it looks.

95 to go.