First steps to Quiltsville

So I am well underway on making a quilt top for the very first time.

Not surprisingly, at least for stitching together the individual rows, it takes much longer to cut all the cloth and arrange the pieces than to actually sew the seams.  Here are the first two rows.  This is going to be quite a large quilt in the end, and my daughter wants a purple border as well, though I don't know right now if I actually will have sufficient material based on what I bought (before Fabricland moved to a different location).

I'm still playing a bit with the machine settings.  It's close but not quite right, so I'll fiddle around a bit more tomorrow.  Anyway, I have sewn together the top row and it didn't take all that long.  It's pretty well squared up, so I'll just have to continue to pay attention while cutting the fabric.

Since the instructions are just a bit vague in terms of pressing the seams before joining the rows together, I am a bit worried about that.  It may help that most of the time a seam in one row will actually join up to the middle of a cross in the other row, so maybe it won't bunch up too much.  I think I'll assemble 3 or 4 individual rows before attempting to join them up length-wise.

Anyway, there are 15 more rows of material left to cut out (before deciding on the border).  I'll certainly need to get more white thread before this is all over.  If I plug away at it, I think I can be done with the top by the end of summer and then investigate the options for bundling it up for someone else to do the joining and long-arm sewing.  I won't know for a while, but I think I will have enough material for a second, perhaps slightly smaller, Xmas quilt for my son, but this one will be a Trip Around the World, which requires simpler and fewer cuts, at least when getting it started. 

Sewing jag

It has been so hot these past few days that it has been difficult to sleep.  And I think my daughter may have actually had heat stroke this morning, so it looks like the next time it gets this hot, we'll have to turn on the AC.

Anyway, I spent a fair bit of time in the basement, trying to cool down, and I started to use the time to cut out the pieces for the Christmas quilt I promised my daughter.  She liked the Plus pattern the best, but unfortunately for me it involves a huge amount of cutting.  More than any of the other patterns I am considering, which take advantage of clever recycling of material so the actually cutting is relatively minimal.  It's taking me some time to get used to the cutting board and squaring up the material, but it's getting easier as I get used to it.  Also, as there is less material left on the bolt, so to speak, with each cut, it gets somewhat simpler.

I have most of the pieces cut for the first two rows and should finish that up tomorrow night.  I'll press the pieces flat (all of these quilts involve a fair bit of pressing the seams, and I assume I'll get the hang of it before too long).  And then see how it goes to sew the first two rows.  Then only 15 more rows to go!

I thought I was going a bit mad, as I couldn't find this reddish pattern with dogs on it.  After much searching, I realized that I had washed it and hung it to dry.  I had really wanted to make some pajamas with it and then only after would I cut the necessary squares.

I followed a fairly simple pattern off of the internet, but the problem is that my son is just a bit too big, so there wasn't enough material in the seat area.  I'm sure if I had really thought it through, I could have staggered the pattern to get enough material, but I tried to sort of cheat on the material and cut it very close indeed.  That meant that I got a bit lost in the pattern and sewed too far up the inseam.  Then I had to rip the seams out, but I think I got a bit lazy and stopped too short.  Nonetheless, the pajamas actually look pretty decent, but I don't think they will actually fit him.  (And trying to rip the seams a second time is basically impossible.)

But he is fairly skinny, so I'll have him try them on anyway, before I worry about hemming or adding elastic.  I suspect this is the last time I will try to make him clothing, but I might make some clothes for my daughter now and again.

Amazingly, they do fit since he has almost no butt (oh to be that young and thin...), so I'll see if I can get red or black elastic for the top and then hem the bottoms.  It shouldn't take more than another hour or so to knock these off.

10th Canadian Challenge - 33nd Review - The Stone Carvers

Jane Urquhart's novel about WWI and the Vimy Memorial was a massive best seller back in 2001-2.  It appears it was long-listed for the Man Booker Award and a finalist for the Governor General's Award, but it didn't win either.  It's always hard to know why certain books win awards, but it may have been a few episodes that really strain credulity in The Stone Carvers that prevented it from finishing "in the money," as it were.

The novel opens with sort of an omniscient view where several generations' worth of stories are telescoped.  We find out that a German priest ends up being sent to Canada where he befriends a man who knows how to carve statues for his church.  This carver is the spinster Klara's grandfather.  I found this opening a bit annoying, partly because it felt like the technique had been lifted from Gabriel Garcia Marquez and partly because the author threw in occasional asides to prove how clever she was.

I persevered, however, and the story did get a bit more engaging, as it stopped jumping around and focused on Klara.  The reader learns that Klara's brother, Tilman, would run away from home so often and for so long, that finally their parents chain him up in the shed.  After he escapes, he leaves their lives forever.  Klara loses her first love to WWI (he somewhat foolishly enlists, hoping to learn how to fly aeroplanes for the army).  At one point she learned to carve from her grandfather (even though he had really wanted to teach Tilman), but she eventually hangs up her chisels and focuses on being the tailor for the village.  So she has a life that seems fairly cramped and mostly marked by loss. 

But wait, there's more.  However, at this point, I have to break out the SPOILERS warning.

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

The point of view switches over to Tilman who survived after running away and learned the tricks of the road from a variety of hoboes.  Eventually he pairs up with an older Italian man, who eventually returns home to Hamilton.  Tilman is welcomed into the family.  Things finally seem to be looking up, but then the an economic recession hits.  When the army comes recruiting, he and the Italian's man's son enlist and get sent off to France.  Tilman survives, grievously wounded, and makes his way back to his home village, where he reunites with Klara.

As Klara has never gotten over her lost love, she decides it makes perfect sense for them to go back to France and work on the Vimy Memorial.  I was not really aware of this, but it seems pretty astonishing.  Nonetheless, I'm fairly unlikely to ever see it in person.

The plot gets a bit unrealistic and even melodramatic at this point in order for Klara to first, get hired (disguised as a man) and then later have a sort of Indian summer romance with one of the carvers on the monument.  Tilman falls into an even more unlikely relationship.  I was a little annoyed when I thought Urquhart had misled the reader early on (to hide the fact that the novel has a happy ending), though I suppose it is possible to square the first and last parts of the novel.  Some other reviewer talked about the perverseness of giving a novel about WWI a happy ending of sorts, though I suppose life does go on and must go on, even in the aftermath of a massive war.  For me, The Stone Carvers didn't quite live up to the hype, though I'm not sorry that I finally got around to reading it.

Green Thumb Weekend

It was a nice weekend, if a bit on the hot side.

I took my son to the AGO to check out the O'Keeffe exhibit.  He liked it, though I wouldn't say he was blown away by it.  We did see where they had moved* the big Moore piece to the Grange Park behind the museum.  I am a bit miffed that basically the entire Grange Park is off limits. They really need to reopen it soon.

Then I found out there was another problem with my bike, so I wasn't getting it back on Sat.  That was unfortunate, and it basically reordered my whole Sunday.  Sat. evening was spent at TCR Writers' Group, and I'm still processing what I heard there.

It was obvious even in the morning that Sunday was going to be a hot day.  So I got my daughter to help weed and clean up the front before I went and did the groceries.

The flowers that get rain are doing well, but the ones closer to the house (which is more sheltered from the rain) aren't coming up.

In general, the yard looks pretty good.  I'm glad most of the plants are perennials that I don't have to think too much about.  Two of the plants I bought last year are fine, but the lavender all died off (due to the drought conditions last year).

Anyway, my daughter really wanted to go see this open house, sort of in the neighbourhood, so I took her around 1:30.  Then we went to the mall and I signed up for the gym that opens there in another week or so, and we also bought a lavender plant for another box in the front.  Actually it is supposed to rain a fair bit this week, so maybe it will take root and do better than the ones from last year.  I also tried to fix up the fence a bit.  We should have done a bit more work in the back, but we were kind of exhausted by that point.  (I should also mention that the pollen seems particularly high and my allergies, though minor, are flaring up.)

In the evening, I decided to go see The Lavender Railroad, which is sort of a SF play where homosexuality has been outlawed across the globe and is punishable by death!  There are two conversations (really more like cat and mouse games) about whether the Lavender Railroad will rescue the individuals from their fates.  It was pretty repetitive, and I can't help but think the script could have used a good dose of tough love, like I got last night.**  I was a little annoyed that the author wasn't there, since I had considered casting him in a part of my night of shorts (and thus wanted to talk to him), but the more I think about it, the more I think I might as well just cut that piece, as I don't think it works all that well.  What I ought to do is dig up the tape recording where it was read in Chicago and just digitize this.  I guess it was apropos that I was rereading PKD's The Man in the High Castle on the streetcar there and back, since this also was basically an alternative future story.


*I don't think anyone know what is going on the side where the Moore used to be, though I guess it will be something taller.  I hope it isn't one of the Caro pieces they were featuring inside, as those are pretty ugly.

** At the same time, it takes a lot of moxy and nerve to get anything produced nowadays, and I have to respect that.  I would say that I am a bit of a dilettante in that I get a bit discouraged when I hear that first no.  So far I am going further than I have before and plan to follow through.

Missing scene

This is basically a continuation of this post on how the writing is coming along.  The short answer is fairly slowly, since I continue to insist on working on multiple projects at the same time.

I have decided to move forward with the evening of shorts for Nov., though I am still a bit in limbo since most of the actors want to take most of June to decide.  (I only have one actor who has completely committed and another who is close to signing on.  In the end I'll need 6!)  And I can't do much else, including setting up the Artists Collective Agreement until I know who is actually in the case.  Nonetheless, tonight I am going to reread The Quest? and decide if I want to proceed with it.  It basically only existed as a response/parody to Kushner's Homebody/Kabul, and I have yet to encounter anyone who even is aware of this play!  But if I am going to put it in the line-up, then I should go see The Lavender Railroad tomorrow (at 8 pm on Sunday!) since I would recruit the author to read the long monologue that kicks off the piece.  (I actually was planning on going to see someone's play last Tuesday (also to support them and increase the odds of them participating), but then a bunch of things boiled over on the homefront, and I just couldn't swing it.)  At any rate, I think I'll put down the deposit today, so no one else can steal my dates out from under me.

I did get quite a bit done on the first act of Corporate Codes of Conduct and it feels like it is ready to be workshopped, but the second act requires substantial rethinking, not just tinkering around the edges.  I haven't been in the right frame of mind for that.

Since I really wanted to bring something to the Toronto Cold Reads Writers' Group tonight (they probably have one slot available), I went with slightly lower hanging fruit, and turned to a script I had completed while in Vancouver.  It is called Dharma Donuts.

(I can't recall if I was at all aware of Tracy Letts's Superior Donuts at that point, but I think I had my idea first (I mean before I heard of Superior Donuts).  I think the creative process was something like this: I returned from England and wanted to write a bit of a tribute to a very capable co-worker, but I didn't want to write another play about technical professionals.  I set it in a donut shop, since one of my high school students (in a previous life as a teacher) basically was in charge of her family's bakery for long stretches of time.  I also was able to go into the local Dunkin Donuts and soak in the atmosphere, even though I was not setting the play in a chain donut shop.  I knew I wanted the play set around Newark, NJ, and did do a fact finding trip to northern NJ at some point during the writing of the first act.*  I managed to get the first act finished in Chicago but kind of stalled after that.  After I moved to Vancouver, I actually enrolled in a play-writing class at Langara with the intention of using the class to force myself to really get this play completed.  And I did make steady progress on the play, getting a first draft finished.  I found myself drawing on the experiences of someone I knew from grad school.  She had basically fallen in love with someone through Skype, somewhat interestingly she had dated outside her ethnic group but got a bit more conservative with age and married within her ethnic group and religion.  At any rate, this is a completely different plot than Superior Donuts, but I still haven't gotten around to seeing that play...)

What I think is interesting about the play is that it focuses mostly on the interactions of women at work, though romantic relationships with men are a recurring theme.  The main character, Parvati, does sort of let herself go further than she had imagined, dating a white man for a while, but finds herself falling for her second cousin.  I know some people find this too conservative an ending, and it is a challenge promoting this as a liberating choice, though I think I showed that the white guy would not have been a particularly good fit for her in the end.  I kind of wanted a play where there are white actors but they end up being kind of marginal.  In fact, there is a customer who sort of serves as a Greek chorus (I probably need to find just a bit more for him to do**), but the focus really is on the interactions of the various Indian women and one Puerto Rican woman.

From a previous partial read through, I heard there isn't enough conflict when Parvati gives the guy the brush-off, though he does come back and amplify the conflict later on, including a scuffle with the other regular customer.  To prepare for the upcoming reading, I reformatted the play and cut almost a page at the end which seemed to be too extraneous.

I just recalled (a minute ago) some additional jokey language I had wanted to put in the play.  The white would-be boyfriend is always a bit obnoxious but always manages to bring it back in a bit in the end.  (To some extent I was being manipulative in not having the audience be sure if they wanted this to be a meet-cute play or not.)  He says something about how he has become a master a figuring out Asian ethnic identity, and he dares Parvati to guess what he is.  She says He is Portuguese.  He says that is not all, and Isabel says he is half-Portugeuse, half-Jerkish.  I think this can probably get squeezed in.

Anyway, I think the biggest dilemma is that there just isn't enough lead up to Parvati falling for her second cousin.  It all happens off-stage.  So I wrote out another scene where she Skypes him.  I think ideally this would be at the shop after closing, but then the cousin would have to be video projected or something, so not ideal.  But I cannot find the text.

Let me repeat that, I have no hard copy or electronic trace of this scene, though I know I wrote it out.  I searched all the hard drives and it doesn't exist anywhere, which may mean it was on the laptop that died and backed up on the external hard drive that died!  Pretty upsetting.  There is a chance I wrote most of it out by hand, and I do plan to go through the notebooks again.  I decided maybe I should get a second opinion (tonight or in the near future) and then I'll decide what to do about the second act and whether to rewrite that scene from scratch.

Nonetheless, in general, this is in slightly better shape than I remembered (though possibly shorter than I had remembered), so maybe I should just spend another week or two trying to clean it up, and then I can focus on Corporate Codes of Conduct and after that Straying South.


* Actually, the trip was made primarily to watch John Logan's Red plus a day spent in NYC museums, but I did spend the next day wandering around Newark and then met up with a friend to drive through Jersey City, where the play is actually set.  The photos do a good job of establishing the setting, so I may as well post them here.

Newark City Hall (with golden dome)

Newark Public Library

Newark Museum

George Segal, Man in Toll Booth, 1978 @ Newark Museum

Rutgers-Newark campus

The next batch are from Jersey City proper.

The last one is Tops Diner in Harrison.  It would be cool to squeeze it into the play somehow, but may just be too topical.

** At one point there was a second backroom worker who got cut and consolidated into one and two more regular customers, but this just diluted the focus.  Even after the cast cuts, there are still 8 actors, which is way too many (based on modern theatre economics).  I now remember that I might have sent it off to this theatre for one of their competitions, but they didn't want more than 5 actors.

Edit to add: It was an interesting session.  We read half of a feature film script.  It was dramatic though in my mind totally implausible.  I think it reminded me the most of Ricochet, where you have this antagonist who has sort of godlike powers (or the Anonymous character who is in V for Vendetta).  Also I thought a lot of the internal logic needed to be tightened up.  But there was certainly promise.

They had time to read the first act of my Dharma Donuts script.  It's clear that not only does there need to be a lot of tightening, but the conflict does need to be elevated.  The lead critic said you need to imagine that everyone needs something and they expect to get it, and then the conflict arises when they don't.  One of the more interesting things was that as I was trying to explain the conflicts, I said that the main character wanted out of the donut shop.  This sort of just slipped out as I was discussing the plot, but it feels right.  Of course, the entire point of the second and third act is that she performs this amazing balancing act to neutralize conflict and to accept an arranged marriage and that she can hardly stand to be away from the donut shop.  But that is such a boring story.  I've written it out and memorialized my friends as it were, but now I need to do something interesting with the story and that means she wants to be gone.  I'd say that probably means everything in Act II and Act III has to be discarded and Act I will get cut and reshaped significantly.  They basically insisted I bring it back in this revised format, and I will try, though it will take a long time to get my head around this -- and then find the time to do it.

What I guess I knew was coming, though it didn't come until quite late in the evening, was the question of cultural appropriation and why should I write this play.  I was surprised at what a hard line this one guy took, saying that it could never be read at Toronto Cold Reads as long as all the main characters were Indian (as if that really is my main motivator).  I would have thought that more people would have stuck up for the right to explore other cultures without boundaries, but perhaps that is the Canadian "niceness" of shying away from controversies (and basically only seeing one side of the appropriation debate).  In many ways that significantly complicates my cutting, since I don't want the white male to be the protagonist.  I already wrote that play (though based on tonight's comments, I still need a way to elevate or change up the conflict in each of the scenes of Corporate Codes, since it does play too much as variations on a theme).  I think I will deal with the cutting first and then the ethnicity issue later.  (Thank goodness I didn't share Lester's Last Testament with them!)

It was definitely a fairly humbling experience, but it was true that even as I heard the play read out, it seemed to meander and the last scene really dragged.  So a bit of tough love was definitely in order.

Edit (6/11): After sleeping on it some more, I had a few more thoughts.  #1) I workshopped the first act with a writer of Indian descent.  She didn't have any problem with the appropriation issue, but I think she ended up quite disappointed that a strong character took such a traditional path.  She (and indeed most artists) would prefer someone who does want "out" of a traditional setting.  Which leads me to point #2) if I want to leave the story more or less alone then I need to write it as a short novel, which can have more interior decisions and wanting to remain calm but in control is a legitimate aspiration (whereas it doesn't work on stage).  Finally, #3) assuming I accept the assignment to majorly rewrite and restructure the play, then I don't need the missing scene.  I'll either have completely written out Pramod or his motives will be completely different.  So in that sense, last night was particularly useful.

The Belly of the Whale

I couldn't resist this nod to the New Wave song by Burning Sensations (old-school video here).  I'm almost certain that I did not hear this on the radio at the time, but I came around to liking it from hearing it on a few compilations that focused on the early days of New Wave.  I don't recall the video, but I may have seen it once or twice.  By the time we had MTV on a regular basis, they would have moved onto other artists.

Anyway, I have been busy sewing.  I made a special figure that spells out RTP (sort of an in-joke at my work).  I'm fairly proud that I thought through how to sketch this out and put it together without any mistakes.  Basically, you have to do it in mirror-writing, since the entire thing has to be turned inside out.  Here it is right after the cutting.  (I also added some black lines to make it clearer that the letters were separate.

It was sort of a close thing, since what I had not taken into account was that to fully reverse the letters, the 'P' had to be pushed through the crossbar of the 'T'!  One thing that I have to get better at is just leaving myself enough room to work.

This came out reasonably well, but it was too small, particularly when trying to stuff the bottoms of the letters.  Even giving myself another half inch for all the "legs" would have helped a lot.  Well, next time...

I do find animals to be much easier to guess how they will turn out.  I have made a stuffed whale for a co-worker's daughter.  It was fairly simple, though perhaps I should have sewed the smile by hand rather having the machine do it.  As it happens, one side is considerably happier than the other side.

Here it is in its final form.

I did debate putting on a spout or even making a black dot on the top for the blow hole, but I am not really going for realism here...

In terms of remaining projects, I think I will make a fish or another whale for another friend's daughter.  I will make one elephant from a dress shirt sleeve (well, pair of sleeves).  If it comes out well, I might make a second one from the second shirt I cut up.

Then I will probably attempt to make pajamas for the kids (there may be a bit of a learning curve there trying to deal with the elastic waistbands).  And finally I will start cutting up material for these quilts.  So quite a few projects, though I would say they are generally something I can do in a day or two, so that I can see the progress.  The quilt is such a big undertaking that it will take a lot longer to feel I am making any headway.

10th Canadian Challenge - 32nd Review - The Soul of All Great Designs

I keep thinking this book is titled The Soul of All Great Desires.  At any rate, this short novel by Neil Bissoondath does involve desire, both sublimated and acted upon.  There are a number of steamy scenes throughout.

To cut to the chase, I found this novel fairly disappointing.  I found its construction too calculated.  Bissoondath has come up with two characters who have strong reasons to keep secrets.  One has built up an interior design company by pretending to be homosexual (more on that later).  The other is the only child of Indian immigrants, who have brought their notions of caste and a horror of their daughter marrying a non-Indian to wherever they actually live.

While I generally thought the woman "Sue" had a plausible back story, I had a bit more trouble believing the interior decorator's story.  Not to feed into stereotypes too much, but I think his original client would have eventually leaked the story that he wasn't gay.  More to the point, to have been in that business for 10+ years and to not have slept with anyone!?  People would definitely talk and start to wonder.  

(Actually, I found one of the more annoying aspects of the novel to be that Bissoondath seems to set the action in a totally generic city, though it is definitely not Vancouver or Seattle.  It is probably a Canadian city, but he talks about smog at one point, plus the difficulty of finding a downtown apartment due to the rent control system.  Toronto doesn't have any meaningful rent control, though that seems to be about to change.  Also the decorator seems to have gotten his start in the mid 90s or even late 80s (even the time frame is vague though there is one sentence that places the action after 9/11), and the gay community would have been far more organized in Toronto by then.  (There is some discussion of how everyone was just waiting for a gay interior decorator to come to town!)  Lambton seems to be a real place in southwest Ontario.  So it is possible that the city is Sarnia or London (unlikely that the father would have driven much further than that every weekend just to sell sandwiches and pop out of a van), but it seems pretty inconceivable that the downtown rents ever would have been particularly high in either of those places.)

Anyway, these two characters have a chance encounter, and, despite knowing the risks, begin a relationship that quickly gets hot and heavy.  It works quite well as long as both of them agree to sneak around.  But then one of them decides that the ground rules need to change, and things get out of hand.  Frankly, I thought the ending was a bit predictable.  Also, I'm finding myself picking more and more holes into the story a few days after reading it, which is always a sign that I wasn't really moved by the characters or the setting.  At least it was short...