Oh hey, I just found the company that makes the Star Wars fabric Mom used in our quilt. Turns out they make quite a few other designs. Ours is called (appropriately enough) “Vader’s Revenge”.

Incidentally, we had a long chat Friday night about the whole licensing issue thing. Mom was admonishing me for even mentioning selling the quilt because the fabric had apparently come with a big warning that you weren’t allowed to use it in products for resale. That sent Rodd off into a tangent about end-user license agreements and whether they’re valid if you don’t sign anything (which of course Mom hadn’t). I said that I thought you were allowed to sell derivative works, like collages that included copyrighted pictures. (Turns out I was wrong.) So it looks like selling it would be out of the question in terms of legality. It just seems really odd to think that I have a personal possession that I wouldn’t be allowed to sell in a garage sale (or on eBay). But wait – I didn’t make the quilt. It was gifted to me. So I should be able to sell it, right? I didn’t “manufacture” any products “for resale.” (Just to clarify, I wouldn’t dream of selling it. This is just an interesting thought exercise.) I wonder if anybody’s contested this one in court yet…

Thanks to Helen for pointing out that this year’s list of the world’s fifty best restaurants is now available. Apparently the only Melbourne restaurant on the list dropped off this year; therefore I’ve eaten in all (i.e. “both”) Australian honorees! If we want to cross anymore off, we’ll have to go to another continent.

Episode III – Revenge of the Amish
Okay, so my mom’s been a quilter for a long time, and now that she’s not working full-time she’s had time to start cranking out quilts for everyone in the family. She told me a while ago that she was planning to make a wedding quilt for Rodd and me. About six months ago we had the following phone conversation.

Mom: Joe [her husband] and I were having an argument about your quilt the other day.
Me: Really? How weird. [Joe’s not a quilter.] What about?
Mom: Well, I had planned on making you a traditional-style quilt. But then we saw some Star Wars fabric in a store and he thinks you guys might like that better.
Me: [I can’t figure out what to do! I mean, DUDE, a Star Wars quilt? How cool would that be? But I don’t want to disappoint Mom. So instead I just hyperventilate into the phone.]
Mom: So I’m guessing you want the Star Wars thing then.
Me: Welllll… What if you used the Star Wars fabric but still did a traditional design? That would rock!
Mom: Yeah, that’s what I was thinkin’.

So she started the quilt. I didn’t hear much about it except for the occasional disturbing “I don’t know if you guys are gonna like this…” comment. Apparently she spent the past few weeks pulling out all the stops to get it finished in time to personally deliver it on this trip. Last Friday as soon as we got them and their suitcases unloaded into the apartment, out came the quilt. Quite frankly, we were speechless.

Isn’t that the coolest, evillest patchwork quilt you’ve ever seen? The fabric was apparently printed as a tie-in for Revenge of the Sith, though what they thought people would do with it, I can’t imagine. I took more pictures.Here’s a side view. According to Mom, she hand-pieced the entire quilt top and then used her long-arm sewing machine to do the actual quilting.

This is a close-up of the central star motif. As you can see, she “fancy cut” all of the pieces to center the printed designs within them. (She also said this was a total bitch to do because the fabric wasn’t printed evenly.)

Here is a close-up of the “Vader helmet” pieces. You can clearly see the quilting lines looping all around the printed designs. (I can only imagine how time-consuming that was.) The orange sections are even more heavily-quilted, though I couldn’t get them to photograph very well. She said she used several thousand yards of thread on the thing.

And here are the pieces with the scary, glowing red eyes. It took me about ten minutes to realize that the word “REVENGE” also appears beneath the gothic “Vader.” I told Rodd that every morning when we wake up under this thing, we have to enact the “Noooooo!” scene from when Vader wakes up at the end.

Mom also likes to personalize her quilts in very subtle ways. In this corner, she’s actually worked “Love, Mom 2006” into the actual stitching. Can you see it? Another corner has our names.

All in all, I can see where you’d think the quilt was kind of, uh, disturbing. Me, I love it. Mom wasn’t a huge fan though, so she decided to make the backing fabric something completely different (so that we could turn it over if we were entertaining someone who wouldn’t find a Star Wars Darth Vader “flames of hell” revenge-themed quilt as cool as we do). So she used a really neat print of Chinese cranes against a black background. Also, for the bottom thread of the quilting she used a metallic gold thread that goes really nicely with the cranes.

I think Mom was well into the construction of the quilt before she started poking around on eBay and realized just how much Star Wars items go for. (I discovered this when she stopped complaining about the non-traditional-ness of it and started casually mentioning how many hundreds of dollars people would pay for “this stuff.”) But there’s no way we’re selling this beauty. I’m sure she’d be interested in hearing from anybody seriously interested in commissioning one though, so drop me an e-mail if you want.

At the Easter Show today I found a booth exhibiting Nada Chairs and remembered that I’d tried one at the Craft Show a few years earlier and really liked it. So I bought one! I feel a bit silly wearing it – like I’m about to rappel down a cliff at any second – but it definitely makes a difference.

Bondi Beach
Joey and his Dad are dipping their toes in the western half of the Pacific for the first time. The surf isn’t big but it’s a lovely evening…

A Knitted Tank Cozy. Sheesh. That’s a lot of knitting. I need to get some Finished Objects happening myself!

Zoo fun!
Mom snaps pics of Sydney Harbour from the skyway at Taronga Zoo. It was a gorgeous day to visit the animals, and we got to meet Snookums’ family too!

Wentworth Falls
Today’s mission was the Blue Mountains. We saw the Three Sisters and rode the world’s steepest railway. Now we’re off to Featherdale to pet a koala!

Sydney Aquarium
We spent the morning looking for Nemo and we found him! And Joey petted a baby shark.

Indiana Court Clears Gay Couple to Adopt. Sometimes my home state makes me proud. Of course, the article does quote some idiot from the “American Family Association of Indiana” as saying: “When same-sex couples adopt, they are making a conscious decision to deny that child a mother or a father. Both play an important role, and kids do best when they have a mom and dad.” I take it this jerk also objects to all the hetero single parents in the world.