Ah, the summer cold. Living, viral proof that life is neither fair nor dignified. I’ve managed to succumb to it on the last day of school two years running, thereby wimping out on the nocturnal faculty revelries that traditionally follow graduation. Since I don’t feel much like getting out and doing things, it’s fortunate that I’ve got endless table-top entertainment in the form of my mother-in-law’s rotary cutter and a big stack of newly washed fabric:

I’ve been merrily pizza-cutting squares for the Leafy Snowball quilt: the genius of the Leafy Snowball quilt is that it’s all squares, but ends up looking like circles – perfect for a beginner like me. I made one last run to Mill End, and now I think I have all the colors I need, save for a few more solids to form the diamond shapes in between the “circles.” I still need to sew the binding onto the Lap Quilt before I’ll let myself start playing with the arrangement for the Leafy Snowballs in earnest, but since the rotary cutter is on loan for a finite period, I feel justified in forging ahead with the cutting. Besides, my parents were here to visit over the weekend (Happy Birthday again, Mom!), and my mother was riveted by the rotary cutting action. Both my craftsperson parents like to see a particularly useful tool doing its bit. And while I made a few wobbly cuts at the beginning, I’m wielding the thing with confidence now. I may need to get my mother-in-law a new blade before I give it back.

Speaking of sewing, I finally got a picture of the Bend-the-Rules Denyse Schmidt (good catch, Véronique!) oven mitt in situ:

But any cleverness I might have been feeling about this has now been erased by the fact that the Charming Handbag Knitting Bag I just made from Bend-the-Rules Sewing has now flown out the door to be Katrin’s birthday present without posing for a single picture, in progress or finished. One big forehead smack for me coming right up. Go say Happy Birthday to Katrin – you should see her spanking new blue elephant ink! (Well, maybe in a week or so when it’s all healed. In the meantime, take my word that it’s really cute – I mean tough – and that the girl is a rockstar and barely flinched even for the ouchy over-the-tailbone parts.)

And now I’m off to down another mug of tea and summon the energy to go frisbee the dog.

How is it that the come-hither of new projects is most compelling just when it’s most critical that you finish what you’ve already begun? It should be a law, like Murphy’s. Sarah’s Law of Distractibility, maybe. Barring disaster (and we all know Disaster is skilled at the limbo and the high jump), the Mediterranean Ivy lace is going to be the most beautiful work I’ve ever done. But even the plain rounds take more than an hour at this point. When I was twelve or thirteen, there was a summer I spent with my friends Lizzie and Alice, nearly always in their swimming pool when we weren’t riding our horses through their woods and fields. We trained hard at underwater swimming, one end to the other and back again, hot blackness rising behind our eyes as we strained through the shallows to touch the wall and erupt gasping for oxygen. That’s what each lap of this stole feels like now: push a little further every time, right to the limit of punishment to the eyes and fingers. Five days left to knit, including all the time it’s going to take to crochet a single chain of edge loops.

So what led me to blow all of Saturday morning, the only crafting time I had that day, sewing an oven mitt? (And yes, I forgot to photograph it again when it was finished.)

Good question. It was for Mother’s Day. But that’s not much of an excuse. And still I itch to cast on six new projects. Fortunately, the knitting gods are keeping me on the straight and narrow: I discovered that I’d twisted the join in the Indigo Ripples skirt (which I never do), and that despite (or because of?) my math and swatching it was coming out six inches too large anyway.

1. Pull out all your quilt strips. It’s helpful if you didn’t put them away in perfect order last time.

2. Don’t look at the pictures you took before.

3. Lay out the strips more or less the way you remember them looking.

4. Make a few radical changes of the background strips.

5. Break out the scissors and start cutting. Don’t give yourself the chance to fuss.

6. Sew.

Then you can think about something else, like a) cutting up all the new fabric you just bought for your next quilt, or b) how nice the tulips that have survived the marauding puppy are looking:

Who knew it would be so difficult to arrange strips of fabric in a seemingly random yet balanced manner? This is not the kind of skill I’ve had a chance to develop through knitting, although if I neglected my poor Gee’s Bend meets Mason Dixon blanket a little less, I might get more practice.

Exhibits 1 and 5 were the clear favorites, with 1 pulling ahead late in the race. (The social scientist in me wonders if this didn’t have something to do with them being the first and last options, and whether they would have gotten as much love if they’d been in the middle of the group.) Actually, they were my favorites, too. And you all made me think harder about what exactly appealed to me about each one.

Number 1:

This one has the most overt balance, I think: the diagonal parallel shift of the pink flowers and brown polka dot short strips; the strong Amy Butler browns spaced wide like columns; even distribution of lights and darks, with the lights forming a capital N if you squint at them. What bugged me: the Butlers being the same height, and the short strips along the top being equal in stubbiness.

Number 5:

I liked the energy of this arrangement, the way my eye had to move over the composition. But ultimately it was, perhaps, a little too unsettling. Plus, using the squinting trick, there’s a vast past expanse at the lower center with no dark mass to counterbalance it. This is where I got to thinking that the lower edge might look funny with a dark binding.

I also realized I probably need a ninth strip for width if I want the thing to be square.

So I went back to the drawing board. I looked in Bend the Rules again and realized that Amy Karol’s version staggers the short strips in the middle of the long ones, as I did with the pink flowers in version 5. So I thought I might give that idea more thought. I also realized I’d forgotten what I was drawn to in Moonstitches’s pleasing sheets: the horizontal continuity she achieves by varying the width of the strips and keeping those with large patterns in the order they were cut from the cloth. That ability for the eye to slide sideways across the quilt gives it order, I think. Most of my fabrics don’t have a pattern that you’d notice repeating horizontally, but the Amy Butler does. I thought I’d try making use of it.

This time I’ve tried to reduce the chaos by reducing the number of darks on lights and vice versa. Seeing it on screen, I think I might make a further change: slide the brown polka dot interrupter up the Amy Butler background strip, and move the pale twiggy one down the green strip next to it. Swap them visually, so that the brown polka dots stay together and offset the pink florals diagonally, sort of as in version 1.

What do you think?

And yeah, I’m just gonna sew the dog hair right in.