The Case of the Disappearing Pepsi

Once upon a time, I bought a cube of Pepsi. There are 24 cans in the cube. I don't think they sold them by the cube very long.

Well, they were rejected by my guests! I was reminded that carbonation has awful properties, and can actually disintegrate teeth. And cause gas. And has non-nutritive calories. I don't regularly drink soft drinks, but I thought that it would be just fine for a party.

I did remember that I lost about 10 pounds after college simply by stopping the daily soft drink, so I wasn't about to start up again. The case was too big to sit in my tiny kitchen, so I stored it to the basement with the extra dishes.

No problem, I had found a recipe that used a cola in roast beef, and thought these would be handy. I could just grab a can every time I made roast beef. At about that time, meat was rejected by my family. The daughter decided she was vegan.

Also at that time, I started noticing a definite decline in the quality of the meat sold at my regular grocery store. I would have continued to buy small quantities of meat for myself, but I didn't feel like finding another place, so I simply didn't buy meat.

So my soft drink cube sat in the basement and waited for another guest or another party or another recipe or a change in diet or when I decided to make pot roast just for me. Or I came up with another plan for it.

Yesterday I was doing laundry, and the floor felt sticky. It turns out that the soft drink can deteriorate the aluminum it's stored in. There is /are tiny hole (s) on the bottom of several cans from which the drink was leaking. Four or five of the cans were completely empty!

The "Best Taste Drink By Date" is July 14, 2008.

Instead of quilting, I got to spend my extra time opening and spilling out a cube of soft drinks. On the plus side, another step was taken in the basement clean-out and I gained some storage space.

Optical Illusions Quilt

Are you ready? Do you have your scratch pad and pencils ready? How about your compass and your protractor? And your calculator? And if you work anything like me, your biggest eraser? Got your thinking cap? This quilt is hand pieced and hand appliqued around 1910. This means this person cut out those million trapezoids probably with templates, and sewed them together. By hand. My brain comes up with this idea while hopped up on pain killers. It says "you know, this is just a simple checkerboard. All you have to do is strip piece some checkerboards rows, and rotary cut them at an angle and machine sew them together to make a circle. It's simple, you know like a bargello, only circular." Yep Quilt In a Day, watch out! This quilt is 85 x 85, which is way too big for me. I want a wall quilt. I can imagine my family members asking me to put it away because it is making them dizzy! When I told my friends I was making it, one of them said "you have way too much time on your hands." I am hoping that with this quilt, at least one person will say, "wow, you made that?!" in a good way. If I can have just one person say that, it will all have been worth it. LOL Yep, I'm still loopy! Here are some decisions we have made. There are originally 54 pie slices here. A circle has 360 degrees. 360 is not evenly divisible by 54, and my protractor can't measure fractions, we will pick a number smaller than 54 that is evenly divisible by 360. That's 45. 360 divided by 45 means that each arc is 8 degrees. The rows look like they are proportionately increasing. I thought of starting with 1/4 and adding a 1/4 for every row but that makes way too big a quilt. Then I tried starting with 1/4 and adding 1/8. The size is more manageable, but still kinda big. Since there is no way I am doing anything less than 1/8, I decided to lop off a few rows. So instead of 20 there will be 17. I'm going to skip row 1 so there is a hole in the middle of the quilt for an appliqued circle. I don't want all the seams meeting in the center and causing a big hump. Unless I badly mess up on the tiny pieces at the top, in which case the applique circle will be bigger! I don't know how they did the ring around that center circle. If you have any ideas, please let me know. Right now the plan is to find someone to just draw in those scallops. My math teacher, Steve, drew a pie slice at 8 degrees, with a few of the rows in the sizes I mentioned, so I can use that as a template. I will tape it on my ruler to make sure I am slicing the rows at the right angle. It looks like the rows and columns aren't proportional. So the width is long and narrow and gets shorter as time goes on. He recommended that I duplicate the size of the rows at least at the outside rows. This will also help make the quilt smaller. He gave me some formulas that I could try so that the trapezoids in last row is reasonably proportional length and width-wise. I'm not sure what is giving this optical illusion effect, so I want to try to keep it as much to the original as possible. What do you think? Do you think that the optical illusion will still work if the rows are the same size from time to time? Like maybe two rows are the same size, and then we increase the next two rows. If I can make them the same size, I might be able to add the last three rows back in. If I cover up the last three rows with my fingers, I can still see the optical illusion. Do you think I need the last three rows to show that it is a checkerboard? Or give the eye a little space to rest, although is a small border for that as well. We are working with finished sizes, and I know I need to remember to add in the seam allowance once we are done with all this planning. I think I can just add a quarter inch to each side of the pie he drew and cut that angle from the strip sets I create. I also need to figure out how much fabric to get. I did figure out that since the rows are increasing, I can only make the triangle shapes one way. You know how when you cut equilateral triangles, you turn the ruler and cut the other triangle using the cut edge of the first triangle? I can't do the opposite triangle the other way to save fabric. This means I will have enough triangles to make two quilts. We'll have to see if I am loopy enough to make two quilts when that time comes! The people at work have recommended I choose purple for a color. I like purple, so I will look for a pretty solid(ish) purple. Is there anything else I need to think about?

Math for Quilt

One of the best things about my job is that it brings people from many different walks of life together. Yesterday, I had a physical therapist "prescribe" some exercises for me to do for my back.

I have also enlisted the help of a math teacher to figure out the math of a quilt. I saw a photo in a book of a quilt that was made in 1910. It is made out of lots and lots of trapezoids, and I had to bring out my compass and my protractor. I don't remember how to use these things - I'm not so sure I really understood how to use them the first go around in school! The original quilt is 84 x 84" and I am trying to make mine smaller, more of a wall size, but that means my trapezoids are going to be teeny tiny.

I think I'll make this a truly group project and ask you to check over my work before I start cutting fabric, in case I've missed thinking of something.

I Love Spring

The weather has been so beautiful lately.

The Revolutionary Paul Revere

As you can probably tell from book jacket, The Revolutionary Paul Revere by Joel J. Miller is a biography of Paul Revere, the guy who lit a lantern as a signal and rode a horse through the streets yelling"The British are Coming!" I have to admit that when I was first learning about him, way back when I was a youngun, I wasn't too impressed with his doings. After all, I could do those things, even at my age, (well except for the riding the horse part, but I figured if I lived in that day, I would be able to do that part too) and I thought you had to do more impressive things to show up in the history books.

So when I saw the offer for the book, I liked that it was history, and a part that I haven't studied since way back when, but I was hoping they would have studied someone more, well, interesting.

The book is historical fact, but it is fictionalized. So the author tells you that the pen made scratching sounds as he wrote something, and how he might have felt at one time or another, based on the fact that pens do make sounds, and people generally feel a certain way when they do a certain action. It was an interesting read, and I do recommend the book. This is a wonderful way to make history come alive and be more interesting, and now I know a lot more about the Revolutionary period than I did.

The one thing it did do, and another similar book about a different time period did, is use today's values to color past events. It compared indentured servants with slaves, and I'm pretty sure that the indentured servants and apprentices in those days would have thought that it was a normal thing-that-you-do thing, even if they were worried about how well they would be treated.

Oh, and Paul is not all that boring.


Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from Thomas Nelson Publishers as part of their BookSneeze.com book review bloggers program. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

Sew and Tell: Little Nine-Patch Quilt

It's Friday, and that means it is time for AmyLou's Sew and Tell. I'm so glad she does this, because it gives me a deadline to have something to show. I scurried to finish this in time to photograph that in the daytime. It is a beautiful day outside. It was a fun little quilt to make, designed by Kathleen Tracy for Fairfield batting website. The pattern of Little Nine Patch Quilt is free here. I didn't use Fairfield batting, because I had received a free sample of White Rose from Mountain Mist that was just the right size. It is soft and very nice to work with. I used scraps to make it as I told you in my previous post. It's around 14 1/2" x 17". I hurt my back a couple of days ago, and that gave me an excuse not to finish the Quilts for Kids top I showed you last week. You should have seen me shuffling and hunched over at work. I feel better now, so hopefully I'll be able to get to the other ones for the next Sew and Tell. Be sure to click on the Sew and Tell link to see what others have been crafting.

Reading: The Future of Islam

I was walking by the bookshelf at the library when this one caught my eye. The Future of Islam by John L. Esposito. I wasn't sure what it would say, and was somewhat afraid to pick it up, but the library announced that it was closed! The times had changed, and I apparently had gotten there just in time. I decided I could just get it, and return it if I didn't like it.

The reason I was afraid to pick up the book was something that Esposito discusses in the book. "Islamaphobia" is a new term that has been coined to describe it. I hadn't heard it before, but I have seen it in action.

I've had discussions with several people who ask why the Muslims don't denounce terrorists or attacks made by other Muslims.

The other day, it was cold in the office, and a coworker was wearing a scarf over her head. I told her she looked Muslim, and she was very offended. She said she didn't want to be linked to the terrorists. I must have looked at her strangely, because she did follow up with "not that all Muslims are terrorists."

Always on the news when there is an attack, they always bring up the person's religion, if it's Muslim. It was clear from the beginning that the guy at Fort Hood was a Muslim, even though we didn't know if he was shooting for religious reasons. Many people assumed he was. If the person isn't Muslim, then the religion isn't brought up unless they are acting on behalf of their religion.

News about other countries which infringe on Muslim's civil rights by banning minurets, and hijabs are concerning to me. It seems like the world always needs someone to hate. Instead of learning from our mistakes - from when we hated the Native Americans, the Jews, the Japanese, the Russians - we simply shift the hate onto another group. The scary part now is that it isn't just one country that hates the group, it iseems like it is the whole world.

The one thing that irritated me about the book is the list of questions. The preface lists questions, and at the beginning, I was like "yes I want to know the answer to that question, that one too." but eventually I decided I'd rather skip ahead to the answers than read the endless list. And then anytime he asked a question, it irked me, not because it was an endless list, but because I was sensitized to that question mark.

The book jacket has some reviews made by other people. I was surprised at how many people talked about the author being an authority, and didn't really talk about the book. He's written other books on the subject. Makes me wonder if people actually read this book, or any of his previous ones. He says he can say the same thing again and again, in each of his speeches, and books, because people are still asking him the same questions.


I did read it, and afterwards, I've kept my eye out in the media to see if positive messages of Islam are available. They are. They are everywhere. In fact, when I tried to find a photo of the book online, there were many articles labeled "The Future of Islam" by other writers that were also interesting to read. I think people just don't bother to read them, because their minds are already made up, even though they don't know the facts.

There is no way I can review all of the things that are discussed in this book. Please read it yourself. It is a great book. It explains the basic tenets of Islam, telling you about the 1.5 billion Muslims throughout the world, the good ones and the bad ones. It talks about the sticky issues of terrorism, history, politics of different countries, the challenges, reformation of Islam, etc. in a balanced way.

I got this book for free from the library. I didn't even have to review it, but I think it is worth reading.