How not to make a quilt

I’m so pleased with myself. I finished my first quilt. It’s a pillow quilt, where you have a small quilt you can snuggle up in when you watch TV on a cold winter’s night, and then you can fold it up and tuck it into a pocket and it becomes a throw pillow by day. I found the pattern here.

I learned a few things along the way.

1. I have read that you should measure twice and cut once. I think you should measure twice, double check that you are actually starting with the ruler at 0. Do not rely on your poor math skills to remember that 2-11 is 9”; you will forget at some point and think it is 11”. Measure again. Then cut. I was supposed to make a 16 ½ inch square. It ended up being 15 ½ X 15. I tried to correct this by making my borders wider, but still miscalculated and ended up having three borders, the last a very thin rim around the rest of the pillow.
2. Make your borders a little longer than what you need, whenever possible, then trim off the excess. I can never measure accurately enough for the borders to fit perfectly the first time.
3. Sketch out the design and color it in with pencils or markers before buying fabric. This will avoid pink beside pink and light blue beside light blue. I just bought fabrics sort of at random, taking care that they would go together, but did not consider which colors would end up beside each other.
4. Blocks will never be perfectly square. It’s a good thing I am a laissez-faire Aquarian, or I would still be trying to square up the fabric.
5. Cats think they are helping, but aren’t, really.
6. Masking tape can be your best friend. It can hold everything down when you are ready to baste. It can pick up loose threads, lint, and little black cat hairs.

Binding needs a bit of work. It’s good enough for my own personal use, but it does not lie flat all the way around; it bunches up in places. I found wonderful instructions online to make continuous bias tape. I got confused with all the square root stuff, though, so I tried to devise my own way to figure out how much fabric to cut to make the length of tape I want. Since I had a bout 6” left over, I think I did it correctly. My figuring is as follows:

1. Measure the edges of the quilt and add them all up. For ease of figuring, let's pretend our quilt is 25" on each side. 25+25+25+25=100. Our bias tape needs to be at least 100" long. But we need to add some inches for going around corners and to allow for messing up calculations. Let's shoot for 120" of continuous bias tape.
2. Check the pattern you are using for the width of tape you are supposed to be using. My pattern says 1 7/8". I actually rounded up to 2”, as it’s easier to calculate and allows me to wander a bit when cutting (have I mentioned I cannot cut a straight line, not even with a ruler and rotary cutter?).
3. Figure out the usable width of the fabric you want to use. Let's say for ease of figuring that it's 40" wide.
4. To figure out the number of strips you will get out of this fabric, divide the width of the finished strip by the width of the fabric. In this case, 40/2=20. Therefore, you will get 20 2" strips.
5. Now you need to figure out how long your strips will be (and, therefore, the length of fabric you will cut). Take the total length of bias tape you will need, 120", and divide by the number of strips you will get from the fabric, 20. 120/20=6. Thus, your fabric length will be 6".
6. Now, add ½” to all sides of the rectangle you are about to cut. You do need to remember to allow for seam allowances. Your width will be 40 ½” and your length will be 6 ½”. If you really think you will mess up, add a bit to either the length or width.
7. Cut out your rectangle, then proceed with the instructions for making continuous bias tape.

The quilt, when finished, is supposed to be folded into thirds, then folded four times, then stuffed into the pocket to form a pillow. Here is how it really works:

1. Lay quilt on floor.
2. Remove cat, fold one long side over about 1/3 of the way.
3. Remove cat, grab other long side.
4. Remove cat.
5. Remove cat.
6. Remove claws from fabric.
7. Give up and lie down beside cat.

The front of the quilt

The back (the black blob is Oliver inspecting the quilt)

Oliver is testing the quilt

The pillow

Missing phone rematerialized

I went to work early Wednesday in order to search the house thoroughly for my cell phone before anyone else got there. The temperature outside reached the 50s Fahrenheit, so most of the snow from Sunday's storm had melted. As I was walking toward the house, there, beside the ramp, was my cell phone. Logically, it must have fallen off my pocket at some point in the driveway, either at the spot I found it or anywhere else and was subsequently pushed to that spot by the snow plow. Why I did not see it on the ground Sunday, when I was looking for it, was beyond me. I do remember looking on and around the ramp and driveway on Sunday, before the plow guy came.

The phone had a few drops of water on the pseudo-leather case, easily wiped off. I turned on the phone and it worked! The low battery indicator also turned on, but the phone worked. I turned it back off and then called Cingular and reactivated my phone. I told the woman I spoke with about what happened, and she was astounded that water had not ruined the phone. I told her that I put a phone through a washer about a year and a half ago, and that phone still worked fine until I bought this phone. It's a good testimonial to the manufacturers of cell phones. The old phone was a Nokia, the current phone is a Motorola.

One good thing that came of calling Cingular to reactivate my phone was that I discovered by accident that dialing random numbers will get you a live person. In the menu where they tell you to dial 1 for this or 2 for that, I tried dialing 0, only to get, "I'm sorry. I don't understand your response." So I got to a point where I was asked to enter my phone number, area code first. I forgot to dial the area code first and started dialing the rest of the number, then some random numbers. I expected this to get me a voice saying, "I'm sorry. I don't understand your response." Instead, I got, "please hang on and a customer service representative will be with your shortly." And shortly, a live person did come on the line.

I went out and bought a leash for my phone, added security for when the clip fails. One end of the chain clips to the phone, and the other to whatever. The photo shows the phone chained to my purse. That's Bodhi making sure the phone is secure.

The Vanishing Cellphone

On Sunday, my cell phone disappeared. Without a trace. I did not lose it. It was not stolen. It has to be in the house I work in (I work in a house with four women with mental retardation). But it's not there. It's gone.

I know I had it when I arrived at work. I had brought it to work clipped to the strap of my purse. Then I clipped it to the pocket of my jeans. Then I noticed it was missing. M, one of my coworkers, swears she saw it on my hip after I had taken a walk to the Dumpster with a client and five bags of trash. She is positive, because she had asked about my charger, because she needed to recharge her phone, but the charger for the house cell phone was the wrong type. My charger was also the wrong type. Anyway, she is positive she saw it when she asked about the charger, and that was after I had come back from the Dumpster.

I bought this phone less than a month ago. It cost me more than $300. I was not happy about it disappearing so soon. M asked me if I had it insured. She has her phone insured, so if she loses it, she has to pay only $50 for a replacement. I haven’t insured my phone. I never insure my phones. All the consumer advocates say this is a scam. I am starting to wonder if maybe insuring phones is actually a good thing (I put my last phone through the washing machine; fortunately, the phone still worked after it dried out – a testimonial to Nokia). Or is insurance a good thing, and extended warranties a bad thing? I'm losing it, can't think straight about what is right and what is wrong. I just want my $300 phone back.

I retraced my steps in the house. The staff room, kitchen, laundry room, living room. I walked back to the Dumpster. It was snowing, ever so gently (this is the day some parts of New England and New York got nearly two feet of snow; we got far less than a foot), and I could still see my footprints. I think the black case would have stood out against the snow, even if it was partially buried. I kicked snow around, just to be sure. I found nothing but a few stray leaves and some trash that had blown around by the wind. If a car had come and run over the phone, I would have, at the very least, seen the broken pieces.

Back at the house, I revisited all the rooms I was in. Nothing. M called my cell phone from the house phone. It rang on the house phone, indicating the phone was still on (my phone goes straight to voice mail if the phone is turned off), but I could hear no cell phone ring. Then, in the back of the house, by the bathrooms and bedrooms, I thought I heard the faint tones of the Charlie Brown theme, the ring tone I had recently downloaded. It gave me hope. But I could not be sure where it was coming from, as the clients were watching one of the Harry Potter movies in the living room, the one with the two-headed dog. M went and turned off the movie and told the ladies to be quiet. I heard no more when she tried calling my cell phone. I was sure I had heard the Charlie Brown theme, but maybe I was hearing the sound track to the movie. (Dang! That movie has gentle harp music. Is it possible that I heard that instead of gentle piano music?) The ladies all swore up and down that they hadn’t taken the phone (well, ok, one claimed she did it, but, since she cannot walk on her own, she was the least likely suspect).

M or J (I forget which) suggested the phone might have fallen into one of the garbage bags I closed up. Three bags had already been closed, but I closed the other two. So J stayed with the ladies while M and I walked back to the Dumpster. M kept calling my cell phone while we walked. It was windy, but I think I would have heard the phone. I’m sure I would have seen it peeking through the snow. At the Dumpster, still silence. We identified two of the bags as ours, but no phone. Someone else had come along and dumped bags of beer bottles into the Dumpster. We knew those weren’t ours (but they would have been a goldmine for someone looking for bottles to turn in for the deposit). I looked into one of the bags we had taken to the Dumpster. No phone, no ringing. It was cold and windy and snowy. We didn’t really want to go Dumpster diving too long. How deep would the bags have gone? We would have heard the ringing, if the phone was there, and still holding a charge, wouldn’t we?

I also checked in my car and, later, my apartment. On Monday morning, I tried calling my cell phone. This time, it went directly to voicemail, indicating the battery had finally run out. I called the cell phone company and suspended service, in case someone had found my phone and was using all my minutes for their own use. But I don’t think that’s the case.

This isn’t the first electronic item that has disappeared on me. When I was a supervisor, I had to carry a beeper every five or six weeks. While the beeper was in my custody, it disappeared, never to be seen again. Fortunately, the agency is smart enough to insure their items, so a new beeper was shipped within a week. Like my cell phone, there is no place the beeper could have gone. It just vanished.

This leads me to conclude a ghost took it. When I go back to work today (I have Mondays and Tuesdays off), I am going to demand that the errant spirit give me back my phone. Or maybe….the client who claimed responsibility has telekinetic ability? Worth looking into…..