as expected...

After a whirlwind week of sewing, it should be no surprise that I did next to no sewing this week.

What I did was hand-sewing.

Thanks to another blogger, I found a sew-along with weekly prompts to guide intuitive stitching and though I'm a few weeks behind, I think I'm going to have some fun...

Gone Rustic releases a video once a week with the prompt, thoughts about how to interpret it, but also just a general ramble about projects she is working on, highlights of previous prompts and such.  There is a Facebook group you can join, but it's not public.

So the first prompt - remember, I'm a little late - was "noble."

And I thought, being a science geek, it would be fun to try to interpret this in a sciencey way.  But I was struggling with ideas (someone else had already done noble gasses, so I didn't want to copy that!) and the interwebs led me to The Royal Society, a group of scientists that dates back to the 1600's, so I thought that was cool, but what else to do with that?

And I turned up a Wikipedia page with this crest:

That's pretty cool, but I can't stitch all that, can I?  I mean, in a reasonable time and I don't want to spend weeks on each weekly prompt.  I'm already behind!

And then I saw what those words at the bottom meant:

Do you see it?

"Take nobody's word for it."

SOLD!

So I screenshotted the crest and went looking for my printer-ready treated paper...

Yep, did that in 2018.  Let's see how it works?

Well, aside from my black ink cartridge dying, it's good!

So let's just work with the color the printer gave us.  This isn't meant to be an exercise in frustration, just fun stitching.

A little actual frustration later (I tried putting batting behind the crest and doing blanket stitches to hold it down and that got all wonky before I was even halfway around), I have the crest stitched to some tea dyed tea towel (hahahahahaha) fabric and a few question marks to represent that science asks questions and is not just a book of answers.

In fact, in my searches, the website Understanding Science, in a search summary (that I cannot find on their actual website), says this:

"Science is a collection of facts.  Correction: Science is both a body of knowledge and the process for building that knowledge."

I like this very much.

And it was at this point that I realized the word was "noble" not "royal."  I stomped out of my sewing room, mad at myself.  Not wanting to continue.  Debating just throwing this out and starting over.  Or quitting altogether.

I calmed down and decided it was fine.  It may be the wrong word, but there are no rules saying that I will be kicked out of the group for this error.  So I'm leaving it.

I haven't moved onto the next word (round) or the word after that (curve) and I think the next word after that is circle, but I haven't checked for sure yet.  Too many shifts at work this weekend.

But I'll get there.  Maybe.

(I do have the rest of that tea towel partly chopped up, so I guess I'd better do something with it!)

And that's it for sewing.

I did finish one book:

I've read at least one book by this author in the past and remembered enjoying it, so I snagged this one.  It's more historical fiction than I expected, but it wasn't bad.

Set in the first third of the 1800's, it follows the life of a real young woman (Sarah Grimke, and though it's based on her life, the actual events are mostly fiction) and a slave (Handful) on the plantation where she grew up.  Generally two separate stories, though they overlap in the first years quite a bit, as Handful is given to Sarah on her 12th birthday.

It works through how Sarah is opposed to owning people, how slavery has caused her to have a sometimes pronounced stutter, and her journey to become the abolitionist history knows her to be.  It was an interesting journey and not an easy one.

Also we see Handful grow up and struggle to be a person, not a thing.  While I think her owners were kinder to her than some, I absolutely don't agree that owning a person is acceptable.  And I was rooting for her every chance she got to rebel and grow.

It was a good book, but reading it in the world today was hard.  I see the videos and it scares me.  It scares me to speak out.  But it also scares me what I might lose, too.  And lately there have been a rash of people saying if you don't speak out against this, you're saying you agree by staying silent.  (I feel a little bullied by that, but....)  So in my little corner - I do not condone masked bullies shooting people in the streets, regardless of their so-called crimes.  I do not condone taking children.  I do not agree with a good portion of what my government is doing currently.

I don't have all the facts.  I'll never have all the facts.  But I want to feel safe in my country and right now, even just typing this worries me.  Will they come for me, too?

So with that, I'm going to go find myself some lunch and head to work.

Happy quilting,

Katie

PS  No one I've linked to should be assumed agrees with anything I've said.  This is all me.

PPS  We had super cold weather here and my washing machine water lines froze.  Thankfully no burst pipes, but we had an interesting setup to try to slowly unfreeze them.  Ugh.  Winter can see itself out now!