Shit story, needs more unicorns.

So, tonight, I've got a story. It's not a great story, unlike that one about the time when I woke up still wearing pants, actually it's a bit dull; the basic plot is about a girl who watches a romantic comedy and subsequently re-evaluates her life. It's fairly par-for-the-course, and if it's anything like the movie within-the story (because I like to be meta like this) then the funniest scene will be at the end, after the credits, but if that's the case then I should have injected a little bit more hilarity in going out to the woodshed and filling up the wheelbarrow just now. Whoops.

Anyway, yeah, tonight I (the protagonist of this story) watched Any Questions For Ben, an Australian movie that just came out on DVD. I went and hired the DVD and everything. It's about a guy (Ben, the protagonist of his own little story) who's living the high life, working in advertising, footloose and fancy-free in a Melbourne that's a lot prettier than I remember it being. But then he realises that his life is kinda empty, and there's a girl, and it's all very hard, and then they end up together. I'm fairly confident that's not a spoiler, since the bit before the brackets coupled with the second sentence is pretty much the plot of every romantic comedy ever, just with the option to switch the genders. But it gets there in a lovely way, with some nice heartfelt/funny/touching sentiments in there, and yeah, it was, for me, a bit of a ...yeah... moment.

I have loved loved loved the last 2 1/2 years of being single. Well, okay, maybe the first five or six months weren't great, but since then, I've been rocking it. Queen of the single ladies, corrupter of colleagues and regular dancefloor gyrater. But I've been saying "I'm so in love with their love" a lot* lately. And just maybe I've been saying it out of jealousy. Or, not jealousy, but a milder version, not envy either, and longing is also too strong of a word. I think I'm starting to feel about the idea of a relationship the same way I feel about the perfect slim jacket sleeve design. I'd quite like that. It'll be hard to find, but whenever I'm about, in a place where it might be found (in the case of a nice sleeve, I've been looking for a coat to chop up, since it's proving quite difficult to find an actual pattern) I'll be keeping an eye out.

So you heard it here first, because I'm still not quite ready to post it on facebook yet, but I, Sara, am looking for more than just an epic fabric collection and six part-done quilts hanging from the curtains.

I think I want a boyfriend.

*Usually, it's about actors who are real life couples - Bill and Sookie in True Blood are married and expecting real life twins, and the lead actors in this movie are going out too. But I do it with real people too, just cruise around going "oh, good for you guys" quite sincerely, a totally different tone to my normal sarcasm. The signs have been there.

Question:

If you sew something, but didn't blog about it, did you really sew it?

I only ask because in the last couple of weeks what little sewing I have done has been clothes. My so-bad-it's-good formal mullet skirt, which will be saved for an actual BnS ball, and a gathered-front circle skirt in a brushed, yarn dyed plaid cotton, that makes me want to become artsy and hipster again, and start wearing roll-neck sweaters and trench-coats with skirts and tights and tall boots all the time, like I did when I was 19, even though those things don't really feature very much in my wardrobe anymore.

The problem is, clothes are hard to photograph. I am not good at selfies, and even worse at whole-body selfies. There is no big, full length mirror in our house, just a curious assembly of smaller ones, and you jigsaw together an idea of how you look between them. Also, as somewhat messy people, any picture featuring waist height or below is bound to have an... interesting background. But, because these things were made and worn fleetingly, without any record of them shared with the wider world, I find myself forgetting their existence, feeling like I've done no sewing in about 3 weeks, when actually I have; it's just been... ethereal is too artsy a word, but it's the closest I can think off. I made them, they were there and then they were, sort of, gone. Quilts I see on my bed every day, but skirts end up hiding in the cupboard.

Maybe I asked the wrong question, maybe I should have asked: If someone who does a lot of quilting sews some other stuff, does it sate the urge to quilt, in the same way that someone wanting garlic bread's hunger will be sated by spaghetti?

I think the answer is no, but I can't decide what it is that I want to quilt, and my fabrics are all a bit disorganised at the moment. And also, I couldn't find any garlic bread in any of the freezers, and even though my spaghetti made me full (to the point where I looked a bit pasta-pregnant) I still find myself at 4am, having just brushed my teeth, wanting garlic bread.

First world rainbows?

It's been an odd day. After my bottle of bad rosé last night, I was awake before my hangover was when the grandparents came to visit before lunch, but it had caught up with me by 12.30, only to be severely quashed by some homemade chips and lots and lots of tomato sauce.

I went to Spotlight and bought myself a pile of 10cm cuts of drill; I like it better for quilts that get taken on holidays because it's tougher than quilting cotton. Also, at this moment in time, the colour range is better in drill than it is in Prima.

I went to see a friend for an hour or so, then I got started with my actual plans for the night: First world problems night.

I organised it with one of the girls from work earlier, when we decided that first world-ing your problems, as long as you did it with a suitable amount of self awareness, was the best way to realise your life is actually pretty good. I started about 7pm, posting them on the hour...

I feel like going to the gym, but there's too many people there in the early evening.

Two computers running next to one another, with two mice and two keyboards. I keep getting confused.

Massive pimple on my neck, so I look like I've been bitten by a redneck vampire with only one buck fang.

My DVD box set doesn't have enough commentaries. Sixteen episodes and only three commentaries :( all done in 2 hours...

I'd really really like some fairy bread, but I make it with the sprinkles that are like little sticks of candy, and all we have in the house are 100s and 1000s, and it's just not the same.

Just had a massive freak out that there was some kind of hulking monster just outside the back door, but it turned out to be my 9-year-old sister's 4 wheeler.

I can't type an é - I have to google the word Nestlé and copy and paste it off the end.

One pillow is not high enough, two pillows is too high.

I actually cheated and came up with a whole heap of them ahead of time, but in the end, I didn't use any of them, instead thinking to myself each hour what was annoying me most. And clearly, yeah, my life's pretty good.

It would be cooler though, if I could rock this hair. And if I could just put the actual picture here, instead of having to link it.

Me: a work in progress.

Hopefully my existential angst for the quarter is over - I'm feeling better today. It's probably a combination of things: catching up with a friend I haven't seen enough of lately, a new watch coming in the mail, getting my bags from the weekend back (including the flannelette bundle I bought at lincraft Rundle Mall)

Marveling at the wonders of cyclonic vacuums (Shay, they use centrifuges, and centrifuges are interesting) Finishing season 3 of Buffy, devoting a bit of time to laying backwards over one of the big balls at the gym (when your thoughts are every which way, hang upside down for a bit, and they'll pool in the top of your head)

And knowing that if I keep on being glum, then I've got no hope of ever being awesome enough to rock shoes like this.

Okay, I might never be. But there's no point in not having a go, right?

Woe is me

I think that one of the big reasons I've been crocheting instead of sewing is that it doesn't take any time to set up. To sew something, I have to get the fabric, iron it, cut it, clear space around the sewing machine, and then when it's finished I have to pack it all up again. To crochet, I find a needle, guess some numbers and start. It also helps that I can sit in bed and re-watch White Collar in it's entirety while I do it.

I'm so excited that it's only a month or so now till the next season starts - I watch a fair few TV shows but it's probably my favourite. I always thought I would make an excellent con-woman: I can lie pretty well, fake sincerity with the best of them and I'm an excellent painter, even though I haven't done it in over half a decade, but I'm pretty sure that if I had to I could forge an artwork or two. Also, I could pretend to be whoever I wanted to be, and I would love that. I get angsty about all that life out there that I will never live, the books I will never read, the movies that I will never see, experiences I will never live through. I got genuinely sad tonight when I said "see you later" to the lady in the foreign callcentre and realised that only will I never "see" her later, I'll probably never talk to her again. 7 billion people on this earth and I'll never talk to even 0.001% of them. There's a whole world out there, backed up by 200,000 years of human existence, people thinking great thoughts, learning amazing things, and life's too short and too mundane to learn them all.

Plus, I'm quite lazy, and tend towards whatever is safest, and warmest, and usually also the most rainbow or the sparkliest. First world problem-ing, yet again: "woes is me, my life is boring, and I'm too lazy to make it more interesting"

Thank god for escapist TV, and a job that lets me sleep in till lunchtime.

OHGODWHATHAVEIDONE? Nah, it's okay.

It took me a looong time tonight to get started, but then, my day started off weird.

An 8am wake up to a pretty sight of the light through the curtains and two quilts, was followed by being up for 45 minutes, and then going back to bed till 15 minutes before I had to start work, because I have mad getting-ready-for-work-at-high-skeed skills.

Tonight it took a run up of another episode of Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries, a quite bad werewolf movie and half a webseries before I was ready to get cutting. Also adding to the pressure, I have finally cut into my Central Park stash.

Granted, it's only a 10 cm wide cut along the selvedge (I bought half yards) but still, it feels like a Big Thing. The other big thing of the evening was the sheer volume of white I had to cut to go around it - eleven 13.5cm strips, plus some little bits too - that's a metre and a half of white. But I'm feeling confident that it will look good.

I appear to have developed a habit of finishing for the night at the point where it's all in strips. I'm not sure why.

Segues

So today I asked Meagan what she thought about making another baby quilt. She didn't think I should, and I'm inclined to agree with, well, all of you. I don't feel that I'm being invited for the right reasons, so I'm going to do the dignified thing, and run away. She hasn't set a date yet, but she offered to organise it around my weekends off (suspicious much?) and I'm quite happy to run away on any of them.

Speaking of, I'm already planning to run away the weekend after easter. It's my soonest available chance, and 3 weeks before Meagan's due, so probably my latest for a while. If Shay wants to catch up, I am willing to share my zippy knowledge.

And while I'm on zippy knowledge, (I'm getting good at segueing) I bought some more peeled cows (actually, I believe one of them is a peeled sheep) on ebay and etsy, so I'm gunna get a go at making the angst bag as it originally arrived in my brain, complete with raw edged zip sewing. It's the one kind of zipper I've never done before, but I figure that the leather won't stretch in the same way as cotton does. so it should sit nice and straight, and be thick enough to not catch in the teeth if it is accidentally too far over. I spent most of last night on etsy actually, with the initial intent of looking for a good gender neutral fabric to use for the quilt I'm not even going to make any more, but it didn't take me long to start looking at rainbow vintage flannels and embossed leather.

Not all segues are good ones. Well, that's not fair - these were good, but also quite expensive.

A Zen bit of Angst.

In a strange sort of way, I feel incredibly zen about the Angst Bag. Maybe the clue is in the name - the fact that there was angst before I'd even designed it meant that by the time it came to make it* I was pretty chill about everything.

Not that there were any huge dramas - one of the cross stitch cottons ran out half way through a quilting line but I just magically joined the next bit up and kept going. I made the lining 5cm too big, so I just trimmed it down. I stabbed myself with a pin, but hey, that's what sewing's all about.

It's not perfect. It has it's faults. Some slightly messy lines, the stitching going completely mental when I just sewed on the tab at the end of the zipper.

Whatevs. It's nice. I like it. I think it's going to be liked. I can't wait to make myself a mini version in black with rainbow stiching.


*admittedly, it was about a 5 day turnaround, but I like my emotional rollercoasters like I like my real rolercoasters - fast.

Does anyone have a therapist they can lend me?

I find myself getting more and more anxious before beginning a new project. I don't know if I got it before and just didn't pay any attention to it, or if it's just a recent thing, but I've been so worried lately that if I start something I'll only screw it all up and waste all the fabric, that I just... don't. I get out a heap of fabrics, come up with a bit of maths, and then demure, and look at super magnets on ebay, and watch comic-con panels on youtube until it's too late to start, and then I put my fabrics away and go to bed. It just seems easier.

Couple my newfound unwillingness to start anything with an apathy toward binding anything, and I'm a bit stuck. The monsters have provided an alternative, but I'll be honest, I'm not a lover of machine applique, and the fact that they need it is what keeps me from doing them more often. I find I'm better at starting something if I use freshly bought fabrics (probably because they can be replaced if it does all turn to shit) but I still get worried about the amount of money I just spent on them.

Still, there are things that need making, and tonight I sucked it up long enough to make a strap. For a bag, which was a bit too much to ask of myself tonight. It's for a gift, so I want to get it right. Except I haven't actually decided what it's going to look like yet, and that's never been a good start to a project. Hopefully it'll be a quiet night at work tomorrow and I can sort it to my liking. I'm using new fabric at least...

Oh, and last night's post was #700. I knew it was coming up, but I forgot to check exactly when, and now we've missed it.

Working out my issues.

So last night I lay awake angsting over my backing angst. Yes, I angst about angst. I'm pretty meta. But eventually I realised why I was so unwilling to make a start on piecing a back.

Normally, I quilt on the horizontal and/or the vertical. Straight lines or wavy ones, but really, in a maximum of two directions on the one quilt. Which means that I can do very intricate pieced backings (often leading to arguments over which is the back and which is the front) as long as they are set on point, or at least, much nearer to a 45 degree angle, because this way I don't have to match up any quilting lines. But this design has quilting on the diagonal too. Both diagonals in fact, in different parts of the quilt. So pretty much anything I pieced would have to either line up perfectly, or else be cut on some really weird angle, in three different directions, so it didn't line up anywhere.

And because I'm lazy, both of them seemed too hard, and because it's only 120 wide, I went to spotlight in my lunch break (they were kindly open till 8 tonight, and had 30% off everything) and bought a really really really nice cotton chambray that was 140 wide and only $7 p/m. And you know me, I love a yarn dye, and because this was navy and white it looked grey, cleverly making the backing both grey and blue at the same time.

Having resolved that issue, I got home tonight, basted it all then quilted it.

Pretty quilt lines... I must confess, looking at solid backs makes me want to do something whole-cloth, even if it's just wavy line quilting in a rainbow variegated thread on some black.

Yet another thing to add to my to-do pile. It's getting pretty big.

Angst

Once upon a time, I could quite confidently throw together a bundle of fabrics, safe in the knowledge that the quilt that came out at the other end would be wonderful. Now, in the words of Eric Carmen, those days are gone. It takes me a day, maybe two, sometimes as much as a week before I'm sure of the choices I've made. Lately I've even been needing to chop bits up before deciding if I like them or not. What's worse is that back in the day I was mainly doing nice simple stack and slash quilts, that were solely about the fabric choice, without even a nice pattern to distract from a bad choice. And yet, most of them turned out pretty well.

So here's what I'm currently angsting over.

Some of these fabrics have been in stash since I started quilting. It's a huge variety - therse's some from the early Fabric Traditions bundles at Spotlight, before the quality turned to shit, there's some from Lincraft's mixed bundles, there's some mid 2000s Moda, a bit from the remnants bin at Stitch and Knit, a couple of bits of one of the  the new DS ranges and some random internet purchases too.

The plan is to cut them into 20cm squares and HST them into another, quite a bit more random version of the second baby quilt I made for Meagan.

Probably the middle one on the left.

As well as that bundle, today I bought some (well, a lot) of the new DS line, which went on sale today. Unfortunately, our store didnt get a very complete selection of the range - none of the greens and only about half the oranges, so I had to add in some solids when I (naturally) got angsty about having the blues and oranges together.

I'm bummed about the orange especially, because I'd love to do an orange quilt. Still, we're apparently going to Adelaide sometime late March so I might be able to find the rest then. These are 20cm cuts, and there's two more lighter oranges and two more darks, and that would give me almost enough to do the 7 by 9 quilt (top row) which is at least a decent grown up couch size, so I could use it instead of fobbing it off on a random child.

I need a supersoaker.

Tonight I had a look through an old harddrive, and if I'm honest, what I found ranged from amusing to horrifying, and that was just in the photos. 

Me, Casey, Glenn and Lisa, 16th Nov, 2005, Vansitart Park Playgrounds. Blowing off school with my sister, my bestie and his girlfriend.

I haven't even looked through the documents yet, though fortunately back in high school I password protected quite a lot of files, and I can't remember any of the passwords 7 years on, so that at least ought to protect me from reading the musings of 17-year-old me.

Me, 16th Nov, Vansitart Park playgrounds. After mucking about for a bit, we got fish and chips for lunch, then walked to coles and bought a bulk pack of icypoles. We couldn't eat them all, so we gave the rest to random kids.

Still, it's left me feeling a bit bummed and nostalgic and, frankly, irritatingly existential.

Out the front of the 2nd driveway of our house, 19th Nov, 2005. This was the week my camera arrived in the mail - A no-brand 8MP I bought on ebay for about $80, when to by a 4MP locallly was a massive, and expensive, deal. It took beautiful photos in sunlight, but was a piece of crap indoors or at night.

I'll be honest, I don't really know what I'm doing with my life - I live in an eternal now that I am, for the most part, pretty okay with.

Sunset from the back shed, 1st Feb, 2006. Possibly the only bad thing about working evenings is that I no longer get to take a million photos of every single sunset.

Did I think I would have done more with my life by this point? Well, frankly, I'm not sure. I have a really shit memory of everything except song lyrics and credit card details, but then I'm often unconvinced that reality even exists, and go through life in a bemused state of wonderment that life seems to be pressing on without me really doing much to facilitate it except eating and pooing.

Ignore the date shown - Mum never set the date on her camera but I know it was 22nd Jan 2006, because it was my 18th birthday.

Do I now, at 24, have a pressing urge to get out there and do something?

The Blue Lake, 14th Nov 2007. I was trying to be "artsy" with my framing.

Well, not really. Even though, in the words of Five for Fighting, I've "only got a hundred years to live..."

Me, Sports Day, 13th Feb, 2006. Big Red, the bear I am laying on, was the mascot I made us - He was essentially a massive bean bag. We would throw epic parties on sports days, bring in heaps of food and drink and have a wow of a time - we once got told off for having "too much fun" - apparently we were not respecting the importance of the day.

Life is going to continue whether I know what to do with it or not.

Inside the Cave Gardens, 15th Nov, 2005. The actual day the camera arrived in the mail, and the 14th picture taken. Since then I've had two other digital cameras that I've used a lot, before moving to mainly using my phone now, but I don't think any of them have taken as nice a photos as this one did.

In the meantime, I'm just going to get on with living it as it comes.

Me, 28th August, 2006. Judging from outside the window, I think it must have been taken at Potters Point. Judging by the date, the car was Elsie (LC), the little corolla.

Missing this little guy.

Ralf, 20th Nov 2005. I still have this picture in my wallet.

And wondering what happened to this little guy...

I made him as a present for my then-boyfriend, and we always joked that if we ever broke up we would sell him on ebay (similar ones have sold for over $500) and split the profits, but I haven't seen any money, and I really don't think he deserves to keep him. I just hope he didn't get incinerated.

First, I wasted 3 hours on etsy...

Due to sudden-onset-extreme-anxiety over the previous bundle not being gender-neutral-y enough, tonight I went back to fabric shack and ordered another 9 yards of solids - 4 1/2 yards of bright oranges, blues and greens as an alternative, 4 yards of very (really very) dark colours* for a quilt for me and a couple of quarter yards to add to the not quite gender-neutral-y enough bundle, because just because I'm worried that those dusky purples and reddish-browns are too girly, doesn't mean I'm not a girl, and would just maybe like the quilt for me. And that isn't the reason I'm doing this - If it was I'd instead be buying all the same fabrics as last time and making me and Meagan's baby have matchies. We'd be toats cute.

I'd suggest someone needs to take my credit card off me, but I didn't even have to get it out tonight - I know my numbers off by heart...


*angst = emo, emo = dark colours. Stop judging me. If I ever actually get around to making it it will be gorgeous, trust me.