Work in Progress Wednesday - #25

Here it is, another Wednesday already! To satisfy your longings for crafty goodness, please check out the other posts connected to Tami's WIPW.

I'm a little loopy this morning because I had to stay up to listen to the President's speech last night. I am avoiding the radio this morning because I get very tired of all of the analysis and the rehash. At the beginning of the speech, I wound a yarn cake from the next skein of the teal Malabrigo for the Every Way Wrap because I am within a couple of inches of finishing the first skein! Yay!

I have learned to not try knitting something complicated when I'm feeling sleepy, so I sat and really listened to the rest of the speech; breaking into song - "Once in love with Barry!" - only when he was talking about health care reform and otherwise confining myself to the occasional burst of applause. My husband, the moderate Republican, was not amused at my antics. Too bad!

We had a pretty cold weekend here, so I spent a lot of time in the sewing room. I got the third section of the Cone Nebula quilt done:

This thing is already HUGE, and I still have nine sections to go. I had to lay out the first three sections on the bedroom floor, and then sort of shoot the picture around the corner:

I am very pleased with how this is coming along; it's as though I'm seeing a picture in my mind coming to life. While I was setting up and taking this picture, I had an observer:

Baby Boy wasn't quite sure what I was doing, but it didn't seem to be threatening him, so he just watched. On the other hand, I did develop technical difficulties with the sewing machine in the course of Sunday afternoon. For some reason, the fabric just wasn't feeding through very well. Can anyone figure out what the problem was?

When I tried addressing the problem, I got some back talk:

My little cat mommy's heart is swelling with love as I look at this picture!

I am about halfway through Isabel Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns. This is a work of history written with a journalist's eye for detail. The book tells the story of the Great Migration of African-Americans from the South to the North and West of the U.S. over the middle part of the twentieth century. She follows three people from their childhoods through their lives in the South, their decision to migrate, their migration, and their lives afterward. Along the way, she gives us historical data, sociological studies, and other broader information. I am seeing American history in a new way, and I'm seeing a lot of things in my life and my family's life in a new way - putting into a new context things that were said by my Detroit-area relatives (some of whom were part of the "white flight" from the city in the 1960s).