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julielivingstone

~ It isn't always about getting what you want. Sometimes it's about wanting what you've got.

julielivingstone

Monthly Archives: December 2011

The rythym of words

23 Friday Dec 2011

Posted by julielivingstone in Uncategorized

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language, quilting, reading, words, writing

Listening to the televison last night, not watching as I was in the next room. The sound was turned low so I couldn’t hear what was being said, but found myself listening to the rythym of speech. The show was a comedy, American I think, with audience, canned, laughter. I found that I could almost anticipate when the pause for laughter would come. There were two male characters, and although I could not hear the words and did not know which lines were going to be funny, there was a rhythm to it. If conversation is like a game of tennis, where the speech gets hit back and forth between two people, then this was like a game of tennis where every few strokes the ball goes into the audience. By laughing, the studio audience showed that they had understood, and were supportive. They tossed the ball back to the players so that they could continue.
I have also been reading recently The Little Red Book of Writing, by Mark Tredinnick, and he speaks about the rhythm of writing. Read your work out loud, he says, so that you can tell if it flows, or is stilted and unnatural. The best writing is like speech, only you have practiced it and polished it until it has rhythm. I think this is something I have generally done anyway, but it makes sense, and I shall certainly make a point of doing it in future.
I finished Dad’s quilt this morning, the last step being to stitch on a label. I included his name, where he lives, the occasion the quilt was made for (being careful to say given for, not on, since I have missed his birthday by almost a month). I bought a laundry marker to write the label with, a Pilot one here, which is supposed to have a point made especially for writing on fabric, and it is certainly much better for the purpose than a normal permanent marker, which is what I have used in the past. The only remaining thing is to take photos, which I will do tomorrow, and then give it to him. I’ll post photos here too.

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Lessons Learnt whilst Making a quilt

13 Tuesday Dec 2011

Posted by julielivingstone in Uncategorized

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life lessons, quilting, sewing

I’ve been making a quilt for my Dad, since it’s his 85th birthday. I ordered the fabric online months ago, choosing patterns from nature. There are butterflies, bees, dragonflies, birds, trees and leaves, and one fabric is tree bark. Dad is and always has been a lover of nature. I got the top pieced quite successfully, and this week started to put it together with the batting and the backing.

I laid it out on the biggest table I have, since it’s not a big quilt, only single bed size. Designed more as a lap quilt or knee rug than anything else. I had to join the backing, so I did that first and laid it on the table, then the batting on top. I used Warm & Safe,  a rather advanced batting from America which is made of sustainably grown trees (more nature) and is also rated as being fire retardant, which I thought was a plus. It comes from The Warm Company, but this particular product doesn’t seem to be on their website yet. Then I put the quilt top over that, and smoothed it all out.

I’d decided to pin baste rather than thread baste, and used as many safety pins as I had. Then I took the quilt to the machine and started to quilt. Nothing fancy, just quilting round the edge of some of the blocks to start with. I had done maybe a third of what I intended to do, then got too tired and went to bed. Next morning I laid the quilt back out on the table. Disaster! What I thought was a nice reasonably smooth job looked shocking, with more wrinkles than a Shar-pei puppy. Nothing for it but to indulge in a spot of reverse sewing and start again.

This time I thread basted, lines of long stitches about four inches apart over all the quilt. Then I looked on the web for any hints as to how to get a reasonably good result. This was one of the best pages I found. Put the sewing machine on a bigger table was first, with clear space all round, and so that the weight of the quilt would be supported and not dragging against the needle. Closer basting also helped, other things I could have done but didn’t include spraying the table with a silicone based furniture polish to help the fabric move over the table evenly, wearing gloves so that I could manoeuvre the fabric better, and making an extension to the sewing machine bed so that I had a bigger flat area to work on. I decided to try without all these things since I don’t quilt often (actually I think this is only the second time). The furniture polish I would have done except I didn’t have any and it was Sunday.

Then, with some trepidation (I’d already done enough reverse sewing for one project) I started again. This time I’m pleased to say that the result was satisfactory, although more practice might have improved it a bit. Now all I have to do is add the binding, and the quilt is done. Oh, and I need to remember to take a picture of it when it is finished.

I titled this post Lessons Learned Whilst Making a Quilt, and I bet you can guess what the lessons were! As with almost everything in life, preparation is the key to good results, isn’t that boring?

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ABC Classic 100 Twentieth Century List

06 Tuesday Dec 2011

Posted by julielivingstone in General Interest, Uncategorized

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buy online, carmina burana, cd, classic, mp3, music

ABC Classic FM – Classic 100

I spent some time listening to ABC Classic’s Top 100 20th Century music last week. Not all the time, as I was at work for much of it, but I did catch some of it. Strictly of course it’s not the ABC’s top 100, but their listeners’. I think this point might have been forgotten by some of the people who called in to comment, and criticise the choice of music. The list was the choice of ABC listeners, or at least those who made the effort to vote, and as such the presenters can’t be held responsible. I was particularly struck by one caller who said that as soon as Elgar came on (I think Pomp and Circumstance, number 21) he turned off. The gist of his comment was that he was not prepared to listen to Edwardian English colonial propaganda, and judging by some of the comments on Facebook he was not alone. Personally I love it, memories of watching the Last Night of the Proms on TV, and I think the point is that it is a very evocative piece of music, it says what the nation felt at the time, and whether that feeling was moral or ethical or whatever doesn’t change the fact that it existed. Perhaps we know better now, perhaps not.
If there is a group of people who could justifiably feel miffed about being under-represented in the listing then surely it is women. So far as I know there was only one women who made the list, which means all the other 99 pieces were written by men. In the nineteenth century this might have been expected, but in the twentieth? What is it about writing music which has made it such a male domain? If you considered writing as in literature, or painting or drawing, the inbalance would be far less.
Elgar must be pretty popular amongst the ABC listeners, he got 5 pieces in the Top 100, and his cello concerto came in at number 1. One of the high ranking pieces which blew me away was Carmina Burana by Carl Orff. I knew the first part well, the O Fortuna as I now find it is called, from many TV commercials, movies etc. It immediately brings to mind the Old Spice TV commercial. I had never heard the whole thing though, and I loved it. So much so that I went online and found and ordered a CD copy of the recording which had just been played.
The issue of CDs against MP3 music is something I have been thinking about recently, having just bought myself an MP3 player (one of the few which has nothing to do with a certain fruit). Looking for places to legally download MP3s though is not as easy as it would appear. Amazon won’t sell to Australia, although reading various forums it seems there are ways round that. I’m not sure I want to do that though, apart from the legality of it, my feeling is that if Amazon doesn’t want to sell to Australia, for whatever reason, then I’m not going to go round in circles trying to buy from them. ‘Get stuffed Amazon’ just about sums up my feelings!
There are other sites, but they mostly seem to be biased towards current and popular music (nothing wrong with either, just not generally what I’m interested in). In the end I’m thinking that I will just continue to buy CDs and rip them onto my computer. At least that way I still have the CD, so if the computer dies or the MP3 player does then I just rip the CD again.
I found a couple of promising looking sites for buying CDs online, both Australian. One is called CDWow, the other Buywell
Both seem to have a good selection, at least for the few random things I looked for. I have ordered from the Buywell site, look forward to listening to the music when it arrives.

My orchid cactus has been flowering recently. For an ugly looking plant it does have beautiful flowers. I think its proper name is epiphyllum, but I don’t know if it is a species plant or a hybrid. Another thing I should know more about!

Orchid cactus

Orchid cactus

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