Eight is Great

When I finished yesterday's blog post, I was seriously on my way down to the sewing room to work on Quiltmaker's Garden. Then, I paused on the stairs because I remembered that it was the beginning of Season 8 of Project Quilting. This is one of those challenges that can be so much fun, but me...with my long list of goals...I never feel as if I have enough time to participate. Well, as I said when I posted January's goals, mean, slavedriver, quilt til you wilt, finish-those-quilts-or-die me is a thing of the past. And this gives me a whole new lease on my quilting life.

So I check in on Persimon Dreams where all the news about Project Quilting is, and sure enough, the latest theme is posted. If you're not familiar with Project Quilting, it's a fun little challenge in which participants have a week to make a quilt, post to the linky party, take a week off, and on it goes with a new theme. This first theme of Season 8 happens to be "Eight is Great." Quilts have to incorporate "eight" in some way.

Well, don't you know I sat myself down with my friend Google, and we searched out phrases with eight, poems with eight, images with eight, etc., until I happen upon the phrase "eight-eight keys on the piano keyboard". Well, that's all I needed to see. And since I was a classical pianist in a former life, it only made sense to do something piano-related.

So I found myself an image of a keyboard to use for measurements...

and I hatched a plan. This is why it's so much more fun not to have goals ruling your life. My project engendered so much enthusiasm for sewing that I did the whole thing in a single afternoon. When I needed to quit yesterday, the only thing remaining was the hand sewing.

As of about five minutes ago, it's finished. From idea to completion in less than 24 hours. No flies on me.

It's simply quilted with the black lines delineating the white keys serving as the quilting. Also, I quilted a black outline around the entire keyboard. I used the triple stitch on my sewing machine for that. I'm calling this quilt "An Octave in Ivory," but I have some alternative names for it given my former life as a classical pianist. It could be called "Living My Father's Dream," or "The Hated Eight," or "Do, Re, Me and My Neuroses." That's the story of my youth in a nutshell.

It measures 14 x 19 inches. Here's how it looks from the back. 

You might remember the backing fabric from the quilted wall-hanging I made a few years back for my musician son Matthew, called "Perfect Harmony."

Here's my little quilting buddy. Don't know what I'd do without my lapful of cat in the morning.

She has stars in her eyes for our newest finished quilt.

My favorite winter weather set in here at the Three Cats Ranch. We had about 4-5 inches accumulation of snow yesterday morning before it stopped. When the clouds began to burn off, the landscape was positively breath-taking. You can see the wind chime Santa brought me off to the right there.

Looking out into the valley, it looked like this:

Our temperatures are forecast into the teens this coming week, and so it's going to be cold, clear, and crisp.

Today was the day I was supposed to be baking bread for the Virtual Bread Bake, but there will be no baking here. My starter never really took off, and it remains nothing but bubbly soup. I've done some reading about this, about how it looks, and about how it has looked over the past week. It seems that the initial bubbling I'm seeing is probably from bacteria, rather than yeast. The bacteria grows faster than yeast, and it can actually inhibit the growth of yeast. One solution is to use pineapple juice instead of water to mix with the flour in the beginning. It seems the citric acid in the pineapple juice will inhibit the growth of bacteria while encouraging the growth of yeast. I'm going to continue working with my current starter and try to get it to take off. In the meantime, I'm going to try the pineapple juice. My quest to bake a perfect loaf of sourdough is only just getting started. The more it resists, the more I persist.