Catchy Name Needed

I was reading today about how the Color of the Year is Greenery. (I wrote a nail blog post for this earlier with a lot more information - look for that tomorrow night, but I can't link to it directly til then.) "Greenery" is sort of a spring green, not-quite-lime color - it's not a color that I would wear, really, because I don't think it would be flattering on me - but it's a color I like. And then that made me think of this quilt.

Some of y'all who have known me for years have seen this quilt before, probably many times, but honestly I hadn't taken a good look at it in ages, it seems like. It's physically in my dining room right now but it's kind of shoved back in the corner and I tend to forget it's there!

I put this quilt together using blocks from a swap. I love the colors in this, but if I had made all the blocks for it back then - it was more than 10 years ago - I would never have used these colors. And it's the greens I'm talking about, not the purples. Apparently I was afraid of lime greens back them. If you look you can see that a couple of the blocks are quite bright, and I remember getting these back and wondering what I was going to do with them. I finally came up with a layout that went from palest at the top left and worked down and to the right to the brighter and then a few in the bottom corner that were a bit darker. Purple and green used to be a fairly unusual color combination but I don't think that's as true as it used to be. On a color-wheel, they're two-thirds of a triad, meaning they're one-third of the wheel apart from each other. I think maybe it makes more sense to say that what they have in common is blue, because purple is blue + red and green is blue + yellow, right? Anyway, I wasn't looking at a color wheel or any of this when I came up with this combination, I just decided they looked pretty together. This quilt was finished before I ever looked at a color wheel and figured out why that was.

For those interested in the pattern, this was a commercial pattern called "Faceted Jewels" and if you google that name you'll come up with a bunch of multicolored versions of this pattern (plus a really nice red & white version that I've never seen before) - the multi version was the way it was done in the original pattern. I called mine "Faceted Amethysts" since I used purples for the "gem" sections. It's basically a variation on some standard blocks, though. It's two very standard quilt blocks that alternate. It doesn't have any curves in it although it gives an illusion of curves. One of the blocks is usually called "54-40 or Fight" but the way the colors are arranged in that block is not the standard way, so it looks different. And the other block is just a combination of a square in a square and flying geese (the triangles are the geese, see). I can't remember offhand if that block has a particular name.

(Oh, wow, look at the very tiny version of this pattern in this post.)

I'm not doing all that well with Holidailies - I think that little number on the front page was what usually kept me going, and that's not there this year to prod me. Still, I haven't given up yet.

I've been watching Doctor Who season 2, most of which I haven't seen but once or twice - and I've finally hit an episode I haven't seen ("The Idiot's Lantern"). Rob and I were watching "Love and Monsters" which I had seen but he hadn't, and then we watched the rest of the disk ("The Impossible Planet" - which I might not have seen before either, come to think of it, but I had seen "The Satan Pit"). Rob was not really a Doctor Who fan until recently, but he seems to be getting more interested now. I knew he'd like "Love and Monsters" because of all the ELO, if nothing else. Rob loves him some ELO.

I'm trying to do Weight Watchers again. If you follow these things (hey, it was in the New York Times), you know that WW has changed their program lately, and that it's somewhat controversial. Well, not really controversial unless you're part of the Cult of Points (aka the old system). I didn't realize how freakishly attached some people were to the whole point system until this happened, even though I've been going to meetings off and on for years. There's still a point system, it's just changed some. They're making an attempt to keep up with all the latest in food science. The old system calculated points by the calories/fat/fiber in a food. The new system throws calories out the window and goes by fat/carbs/protein/fiber. It seems to make a good bit of difference - some carb-heavy foods, in particular, seem to have gone up a lot. Still, it seems workable. You can now eat all the fruit you want, and I like fruit, so that makes a big difference to me. We'll see how it goes. My history has been that I can stay on WW in the short term but not the long term, so I don't know if unlimited fruit is enough to make a difference.


The color of the year for 2011 is "honeysuckle", according to Pantone. Which is a dark pink - not the color that the honeysuckle around here is (as the WSJ article notes - ours is the yellowish kind) so I'm kind of thrown by the name. But I really like that color, whatever it's called. I'm a fan of pink, in general - I've been threatening for ages to make an all-pink quilt - but I particularly like that dark almost-red pink. I've been seeing it around the last few years and I didn't know what to call it. Now I guess I know!


Anybody make icons? I really feel the need for an icon that says, "You're an elf. You go Keeble!" (from here) - I do have Elements so I suppose I could figure out how to do it myself if I tried, though.