blog touring some more

Kathleen Ernst, who writes historical fiction (including some of the American Girl books) and who used to do living history performances for a living, is hosting me on her blog:

http://sitesandstories.wordpress.com/2012/04/11/meet-meg-justus/

This one's about the Job Carr Cabin Museum and quilting in public [g].

A time to reckon, I guess

These were my goals this time last year

1) Complete my first two freelance museum gigs.

I did. Both well enough to get rehired [g].

2) Find more potential clients and land more gigs.

I found one more new client, which I've been working steadily for since April, plus, as I said, rehired by both my old clients, although one has since gone dormant till spring for lack of funds.

3) Go to more museum workshops and a conference, and continue Heritage League committee work.

I've been to two workshops and taken two classes, but I didn't make it to any conferences. The HL committee I was on finished its work in September, but I've been asked to be on the board, and probably will.

4) Write the mystery house rough draft.

Well, no. I've been working on the Yellowstone trilogy, though, and I will get back to it after I'm done with it.

5) Revise Sojourn, last year's NaNo book.

Again, no, because of the Yellowstone trilogy. It's in the pipeline, though.

6) Figure out what I'm going to do about the rest of the Yellowstone trilogy (which may end up as a duology), and get back to work on it.

I did figure it out, and what I did was do one more edit on Repeating History, create a cover, and format it for Amazon and Smashwords. I self-published it in early August, and it's been selling a steady trickle of copies ever since.
And, no, the Yellowstone trilogy is not going to be a duology. True Gold, the second book, has an almost complete rough draft, and I have begun revisions.

7) Finish piecing the Imbolc Flame quilt, and finish quilting the Yule Log Cabin quilt. Maybe start a nice, simple throw of animal fabrics and the animal cross-stitch patterns I did last summer.

The Imbolc Flame quilt is pieced. I haven't layered it yet, but I'll get there. The Yule Log Cabin, well... It's the disaster I finally ended up giving away partly quilted. First time I've ever done that with a quilt. The throw has just started to materialize (sorry, bad pun). I started piecing on it last week. I've also created several quilted pillows and am almost finished quilting a baby quilt for the great-nibling due in April.

8) Find some good 6" square flower cross-stitch patterns for my Beltane quilt and begin stitching them.

I've stitched half a dozen of them, but I got sidetracked with some other projects, including a cross-stitched pillow. The Beltane quilt will happen. Eventually.

9) Go to Crater Lake, Yosemite, and WorldCon in Reno in August with my friend M.

We went, we had a great time [g].

10) Do more research on Washington history -- find some more good stuff for my writing.

I did some, but I got kind of sidetracked researching True Gold.

11) Blog regularly.

Weell... Regularly, but not nearly as often as I would have liked.

And now this year's goals

1) Complete the new museum exhibit by the end of February, and keep getting rehired to continue the textile collection work.

2) Pursue more collections work as opposed to exhibits work. Only sign with the dormant client if they have sufficient funds to finish what they hire me to do and a concrete objective for that work. Sign a contract with at least one new client.

3) Join the Heritage League board. Take a Photoshop class. Pursue other career educational opportunities including the Washington Museum Association conference, in Seattle this year.

4) Finish True Gold and self publish it by the first of June.

5) Write Finding Home (the third book in the Yellowstone trilogy) and self-publish it, hopefully by the end of the year.

6) Learn better book marketing skills and put them into practice.

7) Redecorate the living room. My living room has had a lighthouse theme for the last twenty years, and it's time for a change. I have picked out some cross-stitch patterns and quilt fabrics with North American wild animals on them, so it's a start.

8) Finish the baby quilt. Finish the animal sofa throw. Make a new table runner for the sofa table. Layer the Imbolc Flame quilt and start quilting it.

9) Make new cross-stitch pictures for the living room. I have eight picked out. We'll see how many I can finish this year.

10) Make my first long car trip alone in five years [sigh]. The plan is to take off for two or three weeks in June and drive east. Maybe a night or two in Yellowstone to scatter bookmarks, but I want to go farther east than that, maybe as far as Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota. I also want to visit some of the historic sites like Fort Benton.

11) Get the garden cleaned up.

12) Blog more frequently.

So, what are your goals for 2012?

Mono Lake and on to Reno

The next morning, much refreshed after a clean shower and a good night's sleep, we stopped at Mono Lake before heading north to Reno. 

Mono Lake has a very impressive visitor center,


No, I don't know who those people are [g].

We not only learned about the geology of the lake, but also about its natural history and human history.  I must say that I'm very glad I wasn't an Indian in this area.  They apparently lived on larvae harvested from the lake.

The lake itself is beautiful, in an extremely austere way.


From the patio behind the visitor center. The beige things in the water are tufa formations, which are a kind of rock that forms in water this full of chemicals.

And another view.  The lake is many times as chemically saturated as the Great Salt Lake.

 We stopped at the Mono Basin Historical Museum, too, but unfortunately it was closed.

The building is an old schoolhouse.

 There was a rather odd-looking building in the yard, though,


I've never seen an upside-down building before.

 After that we headed north from Lee Vining through the desert along the eastern edge of the Sierra Nevadas, through several tiny towns with gas prices that made me really glad I'd paid that $4.20-something in Yosemite.  These prices were almost up to $5.  As soon as we crossed the state line into Nevada, though, they dropped back to around $3.65.  Politics does strange things to gas prices...

We arrived in Reno in time for a late lunch (just fast food), and then visited our first quilt shop of the trip.  Both of us walked out with fabric, and I found a couple of patterns, too.  Then we went to the strip and found the con hotel.  It took a bit of maneuvering and figuring out how things worked, but we finally did, and found ourselves in the lap of luxury, for about $20 more a night than we'd paid for that tent cabin in Yosemite.  We went to register for the World Science Fiction convention, held in Reno's convention center, which looked very retro-sixties but was air-conditioned, which was all that mattered at that point.

It was in the 90s and single-digit humidity the whole time we were in Reno.  I've never felt so much like a potato chip in my life.

And on a completely different subject...

I finished a quilt top today.  Not just any quilt top, but my flame quilt top, which I've been working on, off and on, for about a year and a half now, from fabric selection to hemming and hawing about how to do non-half-square triangles (I wound up cutting the diamond blocks using templates, and rotary cutting the others), to cutting the pieces to sewing the blocks to sewing the blocks into a top.

It'll probably be a while before I get around to quilting it.  I'm a hand quilter, and I have two other projects to finish first (a throw that will be a wedding present for my nephew in July, and the Yule Log Cabin quilt that I am going to be sleeping under this coming December come hell or high water).  So I probably won't start quilting it till at least Thanksgiving.  But the top is finished, and here's the proof:

                                     

The golds look a bit more brown in these photos than they do in real life, but otherwise it looks exactly as I had planned.  Which doesn't happen very often.

Houston, we have quilt top!

11 years ago today, Day 29

Eleven years ago today I headed to one of the count 'em on the fingers of one hand things I missed (and still miss) about the Midwest, the Amish country of Ohio.

Most people associate the Amish and Mennonites with Pennsylvania, but there are Amish communities scattered all over the place (including not far from Libby, Montana), and the largest Amish community in North America is actually in Ohio, sort of between Columbus and Akron.

On my way there I stopped in the town of Coshocton, to do my weekly email at the library and to find an AAA office so I could pick up my next installment of maps.  I also wanted to revisit Roscoe Village, which is sort of like Williamsburg, only as a small Ohio canal town.  I love reconstructed historic villages, especially with living history exhibits and historians, and, well, Roscoe Village does a pretty good job of such things.  I wandered up and down the main street for an hour or so before heading on to the Amish country. 

When I lived in Ohio, my favorite overnight getaway was to the Amish country.  I learned to quilt while I was living here, and the Amish country, with its fabric shop (sometimes more than one) in each little town is pretty much a quilter's fantasy.  The restaurants and bakeries are nice, too.

And the countryside is beautiful, in a serene and bucolic sort of way:

The time of year didn't hurt, either.  Neither did the weather.

One of my favorite places in this area is the town of Berlin (BURR-lin), where the Helping Hands Quilt Museum is located, as well as a nice little cross-stitch shop.  Oh, and the bakery here, well... Yum.

Another favorite place is the tiny town of Charm:

This is just outside of Miller's Dry Goods, one of my favorite fabric shops in this part of the world.  The sign says Ole Mill Crafts, which is next door to the fabric shop.

The last must-stop for my tour of the Amish country was Der Dutchman, a Mennonite-run restaurant that makes some of the best pie I've ever had. 

It was a fun day.  Probably the day that was the hardest on my credit card for the entire trip, but I had no idea when and/or if I was ever going to get back there again (I haven't been able to swing it again yet), so I sort of splurged.

That evening I drove on over to New Philadelphia to find an inexpensive motel (the one I'd always stayed in when I lived in Ohio had gone way upscale, as had everything else I found), and got ready to see if Ohio really would grab onto me and not let me go the next morning.

quilting in public

For some reason, that always sounds faintly risqué.  Not sure why...

Anyway, yesterday was Pioneer Day at the Job Carr Cabin Museum, and here is the pictorial proof:

This is the gold-panning activity area.  It's very popular with kids, mostly because there's water and sand in that trough.  Lots of opportunity to get wet and be messy.  And find shiny things.

This is the old-fashioned clothes-washing activity area.  We also had areas for learning to churn butter, grind coffee, shuck corn, hang wallpaper (one of the many things Job did to earn a living once the population grew was hang wallpaper), and crochet.

Several areas were set up for demonstrations, as well.  Besides my quilting, a weaver shared the porch with me, and under the tents we had a blacksmith and these extremely talented woodcarvers.

And our brand-new canoe display.  This is a permanent exhibit, and it both tells about how Job found his land claim (by paddling along Commencement Bay in a canoe) and provides a nifty place for kids to play.

Oh, and here I am, quilting in public. The dress and apron/pinafore belong to the museum. The project I'm working on is a whole-cloth pattern (whole-cloth is the term for a quilt that's just one big piece of cloth, not pieced or appliqued or whatever). It will eventually become a pillow. The thimble, if you're curious, is leather.  And, no, I don't use a hoop or a frame. In 22 years of quilting, I've never been comfortable with one.

The weather was beautiful, if almost chilly.  Pioneer Day was a lot of fun.  I hope it was for everyone else, too.

There's more to Portland, Oregon

Than stores on steroids. 

Perhaps I should explain.  Portland is a lovely city, don't get me wrong, but apparently there's something in the water that grows stores which are the giant redwoods of their kind. 

First, for this quilter, there's Fabric Depot.  Take a building the size of your average Target.  Or football field.  Fill it with fabric of all sorts (although about a third of it is all quilting cottons) and notions and tools and patterns, and it is a seamstress's or quilter's paradise.  Plus they have these periodic sales...  Anyway, I now have the yardage for the last four fabrics for my flame quilt.  Among other things [wry g].

Then there's Powell's.  People dream of visiting Powell's, just once in their lifetimes even from half a world away.  Well, hardened bibliophiles do.    The flagship store occupies an entire city block, five stories high.  They hand you maps when you walk in the door, and color code the rooms, but I still always feel like I need a trail of bread crumbs to make it out safely again.  Hours later, usually, although I was good yesterday (for which I was amply rewarded, see below).  Powell's sells new and used books, side by side on its many shelves, a laudable practice I've never seen anywhere else.  They also bought two bags of books from me yesterday.  I try not to go to Portland without at least one bag of books to sell there, which helps keep the credit card from getting too hot.

But, as I said at the beginning of this post, there's more to Portland than stores on steroids.  After I pried myself away from Powell's, I headed up to Washington Park, on a hilltop to the west of downtown.  Now, I knew Portland is known as the Rose City (so is Tyler, Texas, where my mother lives).  But I hadn't really thought about it all that much.  Well, now I know why.  Washington Park is home to the most enormous, gorgeous rose garden I think I've ever seen (and I've seen a few).  Here.  See for yourself:

I don't know how many acres the garden covered.  But apparently Portland does rose gardens on steroids, too.

And views.  The views from the rose garden down the hill towards downtown are something to behold:

Then there were the blossoms. 

This particular variety is even more dark purple than in the picture.  I've never seen such purple roses before.

And, of course, something that wasn't a flower, but awfully cute.

Washington Park isn't just a rose garden, though.  It's an enormous park with a zoo and several museums (some of which I really need to make more time for someday), and an arboretum.  I took a short stroll through it, as well.

There are at least a dozen different kinds of firs in this picture.   Aren't the textures wonderful?

This is a Douglas iris.  It was an iris.  I had to take a picture.

And that was my marvelous day in Portland, which isn't just stores on steroids.  Much as I love Seattle, I think Portland may be my favorite city.  What's yours?

starting again

Now that I'm back from Yellowstone, and my last day of classes in the museum studies program is this coming Saturday, it's time to start some new projects.

First, I am now officially job-hunting in the museum field.  My resumé is here, and if you know of any openings for anything in the museum world within commuting distance of Tacoma, Washington, I would be grateful if you'd comment here.  Or email me.  Or phone me.  Or send me a carrier pigeon [g].  I am primarily looking for a position where I can work with collections, but I know since I'm being choosy geographically that I'll be lucky to find a position in the museum world, period.  I'm also M.M. Justus on LinkedIn, although I haven't done much with that yet.  Another thing to work on.

On a completely different note, I am this close to done with the half of the True Gold that takes place in the Klondike.  When I finish it, hopefully by the end of June, I will be starting on the other half of the book, which takes place back in Yellowstone and Helena, Montana, the settings of Repeating History, with a completely different point of view character.  When I have finished that half, I will be putting the two stories together in alternating chapters, and weaving them together at the end.  It's going to be complicated.  Wish me luck.

And on one last again completely different note, I have finally started piecing the new quilt that's been in the planning stages for a very long time.  It is a Storm at Sea pattern, but I am doing it in flame colors, and with an unusual color arrangement, mostly to avoid needing "light red," otherwise known as pink, which is not a flame color.  This is what, with any luck, it will look like someday:

As of today, these are the nine blocks I've got pieced, but not sewn to each other yet:

Everything about this quilt so far has been a challenge.  Flame colors are completely outside my normal fabric palette.  Working around the pink issue brought me to a halt for quite some time.  The color configuration makes me think I've lost my mind (there are over twenty colorways of each of the three blocks in this quilt).  So I guess I shouldn't be surprised that figuring out how to piece it has been a challenge, to say the least.  I had my brain set on doing it in a way that does not work (geometry and I have been known to have knockdown dragout fights occasionally), and I had to convince myself that, yes, I can still do templates as opposed to rotary cutting, and be taught by some ladies on one of my online quilt communities that plenty of starch will help keep bias edges from stretching (I hate bias edges with a purple passion).  All of which I have done.  Now, at last, I'm on my way.  I've got a long way to go, but that's okay, too.

So, what new beginnings have you got going these days?

I'm famous!

Well, I have a quilt in a museum, at any rate.  Doesn't that count? 

A few months ago, I was asked by the program director of the museum where I docent if I would possibly consider making a quilt for the bed in the cabin.  They already had a quilt.  It is a 150-year-old antique log cabin quilt.  What she wanted was a quilt that she could use in her schoolkids programs.  One that the kids could touch and lie on while testing the rope springs and straw mattress.  I enjoy quilting, and I was tickled at the idea of a quilt of mine being in a museum.  So this is what I made for them:

The pattern is a variation of the traditional block called "Corn and Beans."  The quilt is 54" square.  The fabrics are all Civil War reproductions, because the original cabin was built just after the Civil War.  These colors and prints were a stretch for me.  My usual inclination is towards jewel tones and florals, but I am more satisfied with these colors and patterns than I thought I would. be.  The batting is cotton, and I washed it to make it nice and puckery and antiquey-looking (also, although there was no doubt in my mind that it would, to make sure it washed well because it will probably be washed fairly frequently).  This is a closeup:

You can't tell from the photo, but it is hand-quilted in a diagonal grid through the center of each square.  I have machine quilted a few quilts in my time; I hate the process of machine quilting, however, and I love the process of hand quilting, plus hand quilting is more authentic for this particular quilt.

And here are a couple of pictures of the quilt on the bed:

So now I am famous, because I have a quilt in a museum!

Quilting and writing and claiming the act of creation

I’ve started a new quilt. It’s an avoidance tactic. Whenever the list of things I need to do becomes longer than my arm, I usually wind up in my sewing room closet, picking fabrics and combining them and deciding on patterns. Dusting off my 50-year-old Singer. And creating something solid and tangible out of what appears to be nothing if I don’t look at it too hard. My twenty-year-old fabric stash (that’s how long I’ve been collecting fabric, not how old all my fabric is) enhances that particular optical delusion, as my father used to say. Never mind that I’ve probably spent several thousand dollars collecting it over the years. It’s nothing, really.

That’s how I feel about writing fiction sometimes, too. As if I’m creating something out of nothing, as if the lifetime of experience gathering and imagination sits in my brain as magically as the fabric appeared in my closet. Writing used to be an escape, too. Until the moment I sent out my first query and began to hunt for an audience for the stories I have to tell, it was a joy, an act of creation, something full of potential that others would see as having value. The tangible result of my existence, a legacy to leave behind.

But you see, I can call myself a quilter. I’ve been quilting for almost half my life. I’ve never sold a quilt, although I’ve bartered a couple. As a matter of fact, I’m trading the wallhanging I started piecing yesterday for a hand-knitted sweater with an internet friend halfway across the world. But that isn’t necessary to the purpose of being a quilter, or to claiming that part of who I am.

I’ve been writing for at least half as long again as I’ve been quilting. I started writing fiction not long after I started writing, period. I have completed seven novels in the last fifteen years alone. But it was the moment when I began the effort to find an audience for my stories that I realized I could not be an author without being read. That in fact I have very little control over whether I will ever be able to claim that title, at least in a traditional context. That all I can do is keep trying to find an audience, in whatever way possible, no matter how frustrated I get.

And that’s why writing is something I have begun to use quilting to escape from.

Because I am a quilter, even if I’m the only one who ever sleeps under my creations.