I'm starting to feel the Diamond Wars pressure. Always, I want to make, like, all-new clothes for big events. I don't know why, but I get carried away. Originally, I was going to make, like, 2 new Turkish outfits, and a Mongol coat for Neale. Not happening, not with the embroidered tiraz bands I'm making for his sleeves. Instead, this is the list:

For Neale: new short-sleeved tunic, long-sleeved lightweight undertunic, Mongol coat

For me: blue Turkish coat I've been planning to make forever, new salwar (pants for Turkish outfit), tunic I can wear to work in, new linen kamis

The tunics are easy, if my sewing machine is being nice and cooperative, I can knock one out in an hour or two. The pants are easy, too, they're just baggy drawstring pants that taper to the ankle. I'll use a pair I've already made as the pattern. Seems manageable.

Julie and Julia was very good. I agree with the NPR reviewer, Nora Ephron's stuff is annoying and condescending. The parts with Amy McAdams as Julie Powell are annoying, and when she gets heavily into Julia-worship, just a little uncomfortable. Meryl Streep as Julia Child is awesome, and very well complimented by Stanley Tucci as Paul, and their awesomenes makes the movie worth watching, in my opinion.

I haven't made a lot of progress since I last posted. I've started sewing the blocks of Hunter's quilt together. I have, I think, 4 complete pinwheels, and 5 more to go. The last time I made a Roman Stripe quilt, I sewed half the pinwheels going clockwise, and half going counterclockwise, and I was so tired of sewing, because it was all hand-pieced, that I just went with it. It's not that bad, it's just not that great. It's not one that I would bring out as an example of my best work, but it's still warm. It's not holding up well, though. I tied it instead of quilting it, and it's starting to show its age. When I used it to make a pallet for Hunter to play on at Live Weapons, it got pretty torn up, which is okay, it's fairly old, and not my best work. After I finish Hunter's quilt, and garb for Diamond Wars, I may make myself another quilt.
My other project has been embroidering trim for Neale's Mongol coat. I'm going to do a band around each sleeve. I think I'm almost done with the first one.

I have to say, one of my proudest moments of the last week or two was explaining to a Laurel and two apprentices (arts and crafts equivalent of a knight and two squires in the SCA) that yes, a complex design can be successfully appliqued, and explained my bastardized English paper piecing technique. In English paper piecing, you make a paper template for each piece of cloth, cut around it, turn the seam allowance down and baste through the whole thing, press it, whip-stitch the pieces together, then pull out the basting stitches and remove the paper. It's usually used with a pattern that I think is called Grandmother's Garden, or something like that. It's a pattern of little hexagons. Anyway, that's how I applique. I make a paper template, pin it to the fabric, and cut around it, allowing 1/4 inch seam allowance all the way around, then I turn the edges under, and baste them down. I iron the pieces well, and then you can pull the basting stitches out, remove the paper, and they should be creased so that the seam allowance stays down. Then, you just sew it onto the background.

Why I shouldn't write a cookbook

Red Currant and Plum Tarts: Makes 6

Shortbread pastry (from Simply in Season)
1 cup flour
2 tbsp powdered sugar
1/3 cup butter

1 cup of red currants
1/3 cup of sugar
1 tbsp flour
1/4 cup of water
3 red plums


You should probably start with the pastry, or you could do it backwards like I did. Take the currants off the stem (or not, you're going to strain it, anyway, and stemming these suckers is probably the most time-consuming step).
Add the currants, sugar, water, and flour to a small saucepan and cook over medium heat until the fruits burst and the liquid boils and thickens. (I wasn't paying attention, so I don't know how long. Mine turned out great, but it was a happy accident.) Strain the liquid into a bowl. Use a spoon to push the good stuff through. Throw away the seeds, or compost them.
Halve the plums and remove the pit and any crunchy bits. I didn't peel mine, but you could. Cut the plums into small pieces and stir them into the currant mixture.

For the pastry, cut the fat into the dry ingredients until it has a sandy consistency, with no big pieces. It should stick in a clump if you squeeze some, but still be very crumbly.

This recipe could maybe make a very shallow tart, but if you don't have one of those shallow tart pans, you could make mini tarts. Put about 2 tbsp of the crust mixture into a muffin tin and press it into the bottom and up the sides. Cups might be helpful, but I didn't think to use them. Fill the shortbread cups with the filling mixture. Bake at 350 (I think, maybe 400) for 15-20 minutes, or until the filling is bubbly and the crust is slightly golden brown around the edges. Once they've cooled, a knife run around the edges should mostly loosen them, unless you were smart, and used paper cups.

Finally getting started

I've been planning to make a quilt for the goddaughter for, oh, 7 months now. I got most of the stuff a few months ago, like in April, and cut some pieces sometime after that. Yesterday, I finally started sewing some of them together. It's going to be a roman stripe pattern. It's an Amish pattern of pinwheels made of half striped triangles, half solid. I've made this pattern a couple of times before. The stripes are made of five different solid fabrics, and the solid is traditionally black or navy. The pattern is from Quick Quilts to Make in a Weekend. It's all strip-pieced, and the pieces are fairly large. The finished size is about 5 feet square, which is great for a lap quilt. I was actually thinking of making one for myself in shades of blue, eventually. The stripes for the current one are three different shades of purple, hot pink, and baby pink, with navy blue as the solid. The narrow border (a traditional feature of Amish quilts that I quite like) is a medium lavender, and the same fabric as the middle stripe. The outer border is more of the navy. I don't know if I have enough of the navy fabric to do the back in all navy, too. I was going to get a little bit of a patterned fabric, and insert that as a medallion on the back. Or, I may go back to Hobby Lobby and get another yard of navy blue Kona cotton, one of the two.

I'm piecing the quilt by machine, but I'm going to quilt it by hand, and I'm going to do more hand quilting than I have ever done before. I'm going to quilt diagonal lines through all of the pinwheel squares, and I want to find a quilting template to make a pattern in the border. I'm kind of thinking flowers. The batting I got is a needled cotton batting, and it has to be quilted every 4 inches.

I started looking at other Amish patterns online, and I found another one I want to make at some point. It's a pattern of squares, in an almost starburst design. It's basically concentric diamonds of alternating colors radiating out from a central square. The one I saw had a narrow border, a really wide, probably 12-inch outer border with contrasting corner squares. I think that's going to be the next quilt I make.

Coming Out

No, I'm not gay. I'm a heretic. This is kind of a project of sorts. It's research. I've been researching several early Christian heresies for years. Some of them have kind of gone mainstream, thanks to the DaVinci Code. Given that I live in a fairly conservative part of the world, this may come back to bite me, but I feel compelled to write about it.

I am still a Christian. I practice as an Episcopalian, but I am a Gnostic Christian. For one thing, I believe that Mary Magdalene was a very important figure in early Christianity, that she was a teacher and apostle in her own right. I also believe that she was Jesus's wife. Yes, the DaVinci Code is somewhat based on truth, but he got a lot of things wrong. For one thing, Leonardo DaVinci was connected with a different heresy, he was a follower of John the Baptist. There was a different sect that believed that John the Baptist was the true Messiah. Allegedly, their rituals included spitting on crucifixes, calling Jesus a false priest, among other things, and reverence for a skull called Baphomet. These are also among the charges levied against the Knights Templar when the order was, um, disbanded in the fourteenth century. If you're looking for hidden Magdalene symbolism in art, look at Botticelli's fresco "Primavera." Mary Magdalene is usually depicted with a red veil, as is the central figure in the painting.

For another thing, I don't think the idea that there are descendants of the Grail bloodline still living is as important as the idea that Jesus was just as human as he was divine. Conventional Christianity has promoted divinity over humanity, and I think the human, family man side of Jesus deserves just as much respect.

I'm not sure why this came up now. I'm just finishing my second reading of the first two books of a trilogy by Kathleen McGowan, The Expected One, and I'm just finishing The Book of Love. I'm not sure why I felt compelled to read them again. I'm sure it will make sense in time. Those books speak to me in a way that I don't quite understand. They're fiction, but a lot of it just seems right to me. Some of it is verifiable from outside sources, from some of the Gnostic gospels in the Nag Hammadi Library, and books like Holy Blood, Holy Grail, but the rest of it, the parts that come from the oral tradition of the Languedoc (southern France), they seem right, too. I think some things are just right, proof or not. There's also the fact that the Church led a crusade against these people in the thirteenth century. If it wasn't important, wasn't a threat, why did they care so much?