Given that I slept relatively well last night, I'm going to attribute today's total fatigue to yesterday's vaccination. I feel drained. The Professor notes that it's clear I did not get the placebo, not that anyone is on this massive non-clinical trial. The Sons got their clearance to make appointments for their first doses. Son #1 gets his shot on Tuesday, while Son #2 gets his on Wednesday. They're getting the Pfizer vaccine as I did. We should all be good to go by the end of April.
Yesterday, I promised photos of the quilt repair in progress. When I repaired Son #1's quilt, I patched the top with new fabric as matched to the old as I could find. I also put new batting under the repaired quilt, added a new backing, and quilted it with the original quilt acting as the top of a new sandwich. Son #2 requested that I not put in any new fabric unless absolutely necessary and that I not add new batting. He said that would make the quilt too warm to sleep under.
Here's the repaired quilt on its way to being pinned to a new backing. It's a Trip Around the World pattern.
Unfortunately, I did not take photos of the damage to the front of the quilt. It was extensive on the two shorter ends of the rectangle. The two long sides weren't that bad. Two of the fabrics were much cheaper than the others and in much poorer shape. The damage in most places was tears along the grain of the fabric, as if the fabric had just separated. In other places, the fabric had just evaporated. Here's a close-up of a small piece of the repaired top.
I closed the straight tears by zigzag stitching to hold the sides together. I also zigzagged over all the seams to stabilize things before I started to fix the tears. For small holes, I put a couple sets of zigzag stitching beside each other to fill the hole. The photo above shows one of the areas for which I had to add fabric. There was no way to fill that large of a hole with stitching alone. As you can see, the zigzag stitching pulled the two sides a bit closer and distorted some of the squares and borders. It also made the back look a bit funky.
Because Son #2 did not want any additional batting, I'm adding a new backing to cover up the funky stitching see above. I realize that should I be called on to repair more damage, this nice new backing will again feature funky stitching, but that's life.
The original quilt was tied, but with almost three decades of love, all the ties had come out. The batting was wadded up in spots. I cut out what was wadded up around the outside and figured that the lumps in the middle of the quilt will give it character. I plan to machine quilt around and between all the squares and then tie it to resemble the original. It will be my gift to Son #2 for his 31st birthday. The repairs are far from perfect or, perhaps even, from passable. They don't need to be. He will love having it back and, having done some sewing himself, will know the time put into it.
On the non-quilt front, Finland is the world's happiest country for the fourth straight year, followed by Denmark, Switzerland, Iceland, and the Netherlands. The US ranked 19th. We lived in the Netherlands for a year albeit three decades ago (Son #2 was born there), I can vouch that there does seem to be a very different vibe there than here. There didn't seem to be a preoccupation with bigger and better, which may have been in part because in 1989-90, the Dutch were really only a generation removed from World War II. The war was personal there as opposed to here. Having a war outside one's door does tend to put things in perspective. We've visited Iceland several times, and I will offer that there seems to be a much more relaxed feel there. I guess when you live on a very active fault line, you learn to roll with the flow. Speaking of the fault line, there is currently a volcano erupting to the southwest of the capital, Reykjavik, and there have been 40,000 measurable earthquakes in the past four weeks.
Finally, let's keep this a covid-free post. Louis Tussaud's Waxworks in San Antonio has removed the figure of our most recently deposed president after visitors kept attacking it. Attacks on presidential figures are evidently not all that uncommon. Visitors tore President Obama's ears off six times. Do not ask me why they concentrated on the ears; I know not. President George W. Bush's nose was punched in, but his ears evidently survived unscathed.
Tomorrow I hope to have the energy to get back to work on the quilt repair. Son #2's birthday is at the beginning of April, four days before The Professor's, but I expect we will wait to celebrate both until after all the vaccinations have had their full effect.
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