Now that the Elderly Gentleman’s system seems to be firing on all cylinders again (at least for now), I’ve gone back to work on the Arkansas Rainbow wall hanging. This is the Log Cabin pattern made with fat quarters I’d picked up in Arkansas last November when we went to visit my Aunt H, and while I had to fill them out a bit with fabric already in my stash it turns out that I had enough to make a rainbow Log Cabin.

And man, I have to tell you that chain piecing a Log Cabin quilt is the fastest, easiest thing in the world. Chain piecing (also called continuous stitching) is something you can do if you have all your pieces cut out for your blocks—you put a bunch of two pieces that are supposed to be sewn together with corners and edges matching and run them through the machine one after the other without cutting the thread. You wind up with something that looks a bit like a little flag banner. Cut those apart, press them, then match them up with their partners and start stitching again. It’s kind of like assembly line piecing, but with a Log Cabin pattern I can literally get multiple blocks done in an hour or so.

Which is good because—well, I was going to say I lost a lot of time while nursing J.J. but it’s not like I’m on a deadline. Let’s just say that I’ve gotten a chance to recover some of those evenings when I was tending to him. Pictures will come when more of it is together and I can give you a full view.

Also, in re: the Oscars, while I do wish Angela Bassett had won Best Supporting Actress (mind you, I have no real problem with Jamie Lee Curtis’s performance and win, and I especially liked the fact that she shared her award with everyone who works in genre fields, but I think Bassett also deserved it), on the whole I was happy with the choices for last night’s Oscars, especially since it meant that a science fiction film won Best Film for the first time in history. Most of the gowns were lovely, Jimmy Kimmel’s jokes were only occasionally flat (dude, seriously, Malala is not a good target for comedy), and they moved it along at a good clip considering that they added all the categories back in.

That being said, did anyone think the Best Film win was telegraphed when they asked Harrison Ford to present it, knowing that Ke Huy Quan would immediately home in on him?