Leftovers again

I am feeling MUCH better today - it must have been just some virus. I did manage to infect my husband and number two son though, so we all stayed at home together yesterday and sat around miserably. Number two son is still at the age where you give him some panadol and he goes straight to sleep - my drug-resistant frame takes a bit more to knock over, dammit. But we all seem to be on the up today.

I did sit in front of the tv and finished some binding on this quilt, originally from leftovers. When I made my clamshells it was from big circles - where you cut out a circle, then cut out a frame an inch smaller, then sew them together. Nice and easy, but it means that you are left with unused frames and unused circles - and you can't just sew them together because the circle is an inch smaller than the frame, and it's meant to be the other way around. Of course, you could cut more frames of a smaller size, but that would leave even smaller leftover circles, and you'd have to cut more frames for them of a smaller size until you ended up sewing circles together the size of your thumb nail…. That didn't sound very practical so I put the frames in the scrap bin and sewed the circles onto big blue squares and made another quilt.



This is rough as guts - raw edge applique which is already unravelling - I quilted the bejesus out of it so they won't actually fall off, but the fraying is fairly spectacular. And this is the quilt where my machine decided to spit the dummy on the quilting, so there are threads and breaks and dodgy quilting all over it! And it's in a hundred different threads because I tried everyone I owned to see if I could make a difference. So not a display quilt, but still useable.



It's called "A Dyson Sphere" which is this, according to wikipedia. I knew what it was through reading far too much science fiction … but on a walk a couple of weeks ago number one son was chit chatting about blowing up Jupiter or something and I was only half listening until he said "of course I would need a dyson sphere to capture the sun's energy to make the explosions because Jupiter's a gas giant which is hard for mining…" At which point I focussed my attention and realised three things:

• when I was eleven I was just being introduced to the concept of the molecule, and was struggling with it
• very soon his understanding of physics will be greater than mine, if it's not already
• even if I start studying now (which I have no intention of doing) in 20 years he will know more than me about probably everything. 

Does this happen to all parents? When you realise - when it properly sinks in - that they will understand things that you never have quite grasped? So, that's why I chose this name for this quilt … and also because, you know, spheres are round.