Hat on Top, Coat Below
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Not According to Plan
December 21, 2003
We went to look at the Contour this afternoon. I’d hoped I would like it. I’d hoped we’d negotiate a price and write a check and drive it home and I’d have a new (to me, anyway) car. That didn’t happen. I wasn’t wowed. I liked the look of it, including the color, a pretty metallic red, but it didn’t sing to me. Well, actually, it sort of did, since it has a bad wheel bearing that made a lot of noise, so much that I had a hard time judging how the car would sound once it was fixed. Little things bothered me, like the position of the steering wheel; it wasn’t immediately comfortable and it didn’t have a tilt feature, either. I could adapt if that were the only issue, but I didn’t like the car enough to want to adapt.
After getting back home, I worked on the quilt. I’d gotten the top assembled yesterday, and that went really well. All my seams matched (not that it’s a hard pattern but it’s still nice when things line up), so it was time to baste. I’ve been using the fusible batting because it’s easy and fast, but this time it didn’t work out that way. I don’t know if the iron is not getting as hot as it used to or what, but I didn’t get a good bond and had to redo it. Even then, the layers shifted a lot more than I’d like when I did the first several lines of quilting. I suppose I could have ignored that, but I really didn’t want to risk getting tucks in the back, so I had to undo most of what I’d done and fuse yet again. This time the iron was plenty hot. It made contact with my hand and the surprise of the burn caused me to drop the iron the carpet, so after I put ice on my hand I had to clean the melted carpet fibers off the bottom of the iron. Finally I got the layers bonded and redid the problem lines of quilting but I still wasn’t happy. At least this time I realized it after only one line, so I took that out and used safety pins to secure the layers better. After that it wasn’t perfect but I decided it was just going to have to do. The baby will not notice if the seams are pulled slightly out of skew and even if he does, he doesn’t have any language skills to point out the problem.
A year ago, I wrote about lost objects. The basket still hasn’t turned up, and I still have hope that it’s in one of the boxes in the basement.
