(R&R)x10

It took a weekend full of reading Little Women and watching Anchorman from start to finish - have those words ever been combined in the same sentence before? - but I think I'm finally ready to kick this cold. And man, am I thrilled about that!

Hope your weekend included some R&R, too, Reader.

101 in 1,001: One year down

One year into the 101 in 1,001 project, and so much has happened!

The bevy of links:
Last month's recap
The whole list
Track my progress (more or less) via Google doc

Well, last month's main lesson is that December at Miles and Laurel is not exactly tailor made for 101 progress. I set two goals and fulfilled neither! I did not snowshoe and did not make a snowman, and now the snow is mostly packed down. I am crossing my fingers for another nice snowfall this season.

I did check off a couple of other items, though:

#22 Take at least one walk per week for an entire year. As mentioned awhile back, this became not much of a stretch because of this guy, who joined our household in 2012:

When I make my next list, I'll probably amend it to be at least one walk per week to a destination or errand instead of driving.

#70 Sew a quilt. This one!

I also kept making progress on other items, including visiting the dentist (#23) and saving incrementally for an item or trip (#55).

That leaves me with...

17/101 projects in progress
32/101 projects complete

This month, I will work on:

#62 Send one card per week for three months again
I think I'll retry #21 Take a vitamin daily for a month
#92 Read five classic books (finally)
#59 Create a budget
and possibly #47 Volunteer at six races

Maybe I will even have a chance to cross off the snow-related projects, too.

There were also loads of St. Paul and Minneapolis community ed classes that fit items on my list - especially the financial literacy goals - but I think I'll have to wait til next session. Sara and I signed up for a calligraphy class!

I am grateful for everything the 101 in 1,001 list kicked off in 2012. The list has helped me seek out new adventures both fun and challenging - lots of things that, in the past, I might have said "That sounds fun!" or "I'd love to do that!" and then just never gotten around to doing. The list helps me explore my neighborhood and community, connect with friends (and you all!), and make me stretch to learn and try new things. I give the project a major thumbs up and can't wait to see what progress 2013 brings.

2012 in review

Oh, Reader, I told you I really goofed on my timing. I know I'm supposed to be looking ahead to 2013. It's just that I had all these ideas in mind for year-end posts - and then saw other ideas from friends' blogs - and I just want to get to those, too!

The inspiration from this one came straight from Nat's blog. If I ever want to remember 2012's key points without reading through all 341 posts from last year, this will be the source.

January
I painted the main room in our apartment!

I read Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and then went to see the play with Sara at the Guthrie. We celebrated Josh's birthday and I made my first carrot cake. It was an unseasonably warm winter. I started my 101 in 1,001 list!

Josh's cake

February
I began practicing yoga at CorePower. I started planning my Arizona trip. We had my fam over for dinner to celebrate my sister's birthday. My family had our traditional White Elephant birthday party. I tried to see hot air balloons at a festival, to no avail. I saw some absolutely wonderful hoarfrost!

March
I celebrated my 28th birthday with bowling!

My mom taught me how to make a scrapbook. I went to Arizona, where I learned about hummingbirds with Natty, rode a horse, went to the fantastic Desert Museum and ran in Sabino Canyon.

April
I kept up my attendance streak at Opening Day baseball games. I ran a 25K trail race and a happy 10K at Get in Gear. I planted window boxes and a little herb garden. Right before my mom's birthday, my family and I went to Mill City Museum, one of my favorite family activities all year.

May
Well, I spoke too soon: there were a bunch of family highlights this year, including my sister's college graduation and a weekend trip up north. We celebrated my dad's birthday. Last but not least, we also brought home a little dog in May!!!

June
June was very Wish-centric - his first bath, obedience class, and pool party - with the exception of an exciting visit from Josh's family! This month really flew by.

July
The Fourth of July was roasting hot in Minnesota, and we spent the holiday at my parent's air-conditioned house.

Josh's dad came to Minnesota for a visit! Molly and I finished our second 25K trail race of 2012 together. We took Wish on his first picnic. Also, Nat and her husband stayed with us for a couple of days, and Wish made his first dog friend thanks to their patient pup.

August
August's big highlight was my unforgettable trip to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area with Sara and a bunch of other women.

That fell over my brother's birthday, but we celebrated before.

Josh and I took my grandma to our third annual Twins game together.

September
I raced and ran a bunch in preparation for the Mankato Marathon in October. We kicked off our second season as Tennessee fans. Josh and I bought our first piece of art together: My Old Dog!

October
In October, I got to travel to Montreal for a work conference. I also ran my eighth marathon and also ran a 5K with a troupe of superheroes.

November
November's undeniable highlight was our trip to Tennessee, where we stayed in a cabin near the Great Smoky Mountains and went to a Tennessee football game.

We also, you know, got engaged there! Later in the month, I spent Thanksgiving with my family and ran a Turkey Trot before flying to Colorado for the rest of Thanksgiving weekend.

December
Josh and I went into wedding planning mode and picked our venue, one of our first major decisions in the process. We enjoyed holiday traditions like the cookie exchange and decorating the Christmas tree. It also snowed a foot one weekend, and Wish could hardly contain himself.

We spent Christmas in Colorado before flying back to MSP to spend a few days at my parents' house. I got to help make tamales for the first time!

I already got sentimental in Monday's post, so I'll keep that in check this time. 2012 was a full and very fun year.

A book report

For whatever reason, I read more books in 2012 than usual. Was it because I A) finally let some of my magazine subscriptions lapse, B) gave up on staying current with my magazine pile, C) had some reading-related goals on my 101 list or D) just remembered how much I like books?

I don't know. But I do know that 2012 was a year full of remembering how many magnificent books there are being written today and how many magnificent books I haven't even discovered yet. I loved using this blog as a resource for gathering book recommendations from you all, so I thought I'd share this year's book list.

I share this list not to overshare (if you are thinking "Who cares what books she read?!") but because I would love if my friends all compiled a similar list, because I love perusing lists to get ideas for future reading. I suppose if this idea could ever get off the ground that I have to start by sharing my own list, right?

Here we go (with no italicized titles, just for easier reading in list form):

The Descendants (Kaui Hart Hemmings)
What is the What (Dave Eggers)
Friday Night Lights (H.G. Bissinger)
Gossip Girl (Cecily von Ziegesar)
This Beautiful Life (Helen Schulman)
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (Mark Haddon)
The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America (Bill Bryson)
The Art of Fielding (Chad Harbach)
The Marriage Plot (Jeffrey Eugenides)
How I Live Now (Meg Rosoff)
Salvage the Bones (Jessmyn Ward)
The Book Thief (Markus Zusak)
Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns)
Gold (Chris Cleave)
Just My Type: A Book About Fonts (Simon Garfield)
The Outsiders (S.E. Hinton)
I Capture the Castle (Dodie Smith)
Running the Rift (Naomi Benaron)
The Perks of Being a Wallflower (Stephen Chbosky)
Through No Fault of My Own: A Girl’s Diary of Life on Summit Avenue in the Jazz Age (Coco Irvine, edited by Peg Meier)
The Latehomecomers (Kao Kalia Yang)
The Newlyweds (Nell Freudenberger)
In the Garden of Beasts (Erik Larson)
Gone Girl (Amy Gillian)
Swamplandia! (Karen Russell)
The Tiger’s Wife ( Téa Obreht)
Wild (Cheryl Strayed)
Blue Nights (Joan Didion)
The Glass Castle (Jeannette Walls)
The Story of Edgar Sawtelle (David Wroblewski)
1Q84 (Haruki Murakami)
The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake (Aimee Bender)
The Master Butchers’ Singing Club (Louise Erdrich)
The End of Your Life Book Club (Will Schwalbe)

And my very favorites, the ones that have stayed with me for a long time and will continue to stay with me? My top five: Running the Rift, The Latehomecomers, The End of Your Life Book Club, The Book Thief, and What is the What. Oh, man, now I want to stay up all night re-reading them all at once.

Please, you must share! What are your top five books of 2012 - or if you can pick just one, your favorite?

The t-shirt quilt

Happy new year, Reader!

It is a frigid morning here in St. Paul, and I am glad I'm not running the nearby half-marathon today. I am still nursing a cold, so it has been good timing for holing up indoors...making my t-shirt quilt!

There have been rumblings around Miles and Laurel that this was happening, but if you count from the time I started stockpiling t-shirts for this quilt, it has been in the works for five or six years and I didn't want to share too many details before I had actually finished it. And now it's done!

I needed mega-guidance for this project, and I got it from the good old internet. I clicked around the top Google results for a "DIY t-shirt quilt" search and relied on several websites: this one for basic instructions, this one for a tutorial about sashing (the rows of fabric between the t-shirts), this one for finishing the quilt with batting and the back piece of fabric, and this blogger's recap, which I stumbled on randomly but relied on extensively for commentary beyond the basic instructions. If you are interested in making your own t-shirt quilt, you should definitely Google around, too - there are lots of good resources online and this post is just about the experience!

First, you gotta choose your shirts, cut the excess fabric away, and iron interfacing onto the back of each shirt square to stabilize them so they don't stretch. Before I did that, I arranged them in rows so the white, gray and color shirts were balanced. (Was definitely getting ahead of myself a little there.)

I also had a little conundrum regarding an abundance of Twin Cities in Motion event volunteer shirts, thanks to my role as a TCM committee chair this year. I was a little unsure about how to cut those shirts - just choose a few letters of "volunteer" to include? - and then Josh had the great suggestion of putting two of those shirts in adjacent blocks to split the word between the two, which worked out really nicely. (You can see one example of that in the photo above, in the bottom row.)

For some reason, I thought the quilt was going to be gigantic once I incorporated the sashing, but it's just a lap-sized quilt. I have zero idea what I was thinking! I wanted to make smaller blocks (roughly six-inch squares) than a traditional t-shirt quilt. My rationale was that I would still know what event each shirt was from, even if they were cropped, but that I'd end up with a colorful quilt rather than just a quilt full of big t-shirts. (Just my personal preference for this project.) My hope was that the colors would look prettier all together in smaller blocks, too.

I ended up using 42 squares from probably 38 t-shirts, mostly from races I've run. The oldest is a shirt from my high school Nordic ski team days, circa 2002. It was unexpectedly fun to remember the experiences that go with each shirt: a marathon in a noreaster, my first triathlon, a race I think of as a comeback half-marathon, a freezing cold half-marathon, a duathlon I did with my mom. That was a preview of why a t-shirt quilt is such a fun idea: the memories from the shirts combined with the project itself.

I had two work stations. Here's one:

And here's the other:

The work stations were on opposite ends of the same room, and the space in between was pure mayhem: tons and tons of fabric scraps, pins, and thread strewn around. Josh was in the living room for a chunk of that afternoon, and when he walked through the space, he said, "Whoa."

The sewing went smoother and looked better with each row, as I figured out the best way to arrange the sashing strips for each square. When you have a zillion squares of t-shirt material laying around, it looks a little strange, and it's hard to see the big picture. With each row that got attached to the quilt, it started to come together, and I started to get really excited about the project.

I also texted my mother with photographic evidence as each row was completed. I'm sure she appreciated that.

Wish hated my new love for quilting at first. In his book, anything that diverts attention away from him is a waste of time. (Don't get me started on how he feels about wedding planning.)

I'm sure you could manage something more productive with your time.

I read a bunch of blog recaps about t-shirt quilts, and a message from one in particular stayed with me: don't trick yourself into thinking that this is a cute Sunday afternoon project. Just laying out the t-shirts, ironing on the interfacing and getting them trimmed to the right shape took a long time. Then cutting the strips precisely for the sashing in between each shirt took a long time. And then sewing the whole thing took the better part of two full days. It was all-consuming to me - mostly in a very fun way - but make no mistake, it was a lot of work, probably because I wanted to do the sashing.

Finally, after a long day of sewing that flew by, the top layer was complete!

I did not want to get too confident, though, because I knew I wasn't out of the woods yet. Assembling the layers of a quilt is major new territory for me. I had never worked with batting before - the thick middle layer that makes a quilt heftier than a few pieces of fabric alone would - and I was nervous. I sewed together two large pieces of fabric for the back, laid that on the floor, cut the batting to the approximate size, and laid the top layer on to complete the little trifecta. Then I pinned it all together and cut away the excess fabric:

I sewed all three layers together with a seam about a quarter-inch away from the edge. Then, to finish it, I chose to do binding around the edges, which this link explains in the "binding" section. (Author's note: I tried to explain this in a coherent sentence and failed miserably - just know that I covered up the unfinished seam with a little strip of fabric on either side of the seam and zig-zag stitched it.)

And then - I could hardly believe it - it was done!

Somewhere along the way, Wish had started to warm to the project. Of course, he wants to get in a photo whenever he can, so when Josh was snapping a picture of me with the quilt, Wish trotted over, probably to make sure I was really done, so he could celebrate.

From a technical standpoint, this is a great project for an introduction to quilting. Precision, while still important in this kind of quilt, seems like it would be so much more crucial in a more intricate quilt. If you have a sewing machine and it still scares you, this project is also a wonderful way to get to know your machine, because you just simply have to sew a ton. You start to see what you can get away with and what you can't, how to become totally comfortable threading a bobbin without the instructions, when you can wing it and when winging it will really result in trouble. You learn by making mistakes, and I made plenty. It's kind a rare opportunity to tackle an in-depth project like this completely on my own, from start to finish, and I really had to think through each step, make some errors and then adjust and regroup and discover a better way.

And when I was done, I had this my first quilt, completed with lots of little imperfections, and I am so stinkin' proud. My little quilt!!