ZOMG!

Not only did I finish quilting AND bind the quilt I was working on last night, I also improv pieced another whole quilt top!

It's mainly a bundle of 30cm cuts of Groove from Robert Kaufman that I got for $10 a metre at Stitch and Knit a while back, with another Kaufman (Iota) and a stripe that I bought the other week in Adelaide thrown in. I decided that what I didn't want to do was stand around for 2 hours ironing and cutting all my bits, making me bored with the project before I'd even started, so I cut a half dozen 10cm squares from each fabric, as well as a 7cm and a 10cm strip, and a few random other rectangles. And then I sewed, and sewed, and ironed, and sewed, and cut some more bits, and sewed some more, ironed and trimmed a little, and sewed and kept on going till there was a quilt top there.

Actually, I lie, about halfway through I stopped and got KFC. There was nothing else to eat.

Anyway, it's about 110 by 140, judging solely on the 33cm lino squares underneath. I've no idea what to back it with, nothing in the stash is suitable which is a shame, and even once it is backed I've no idea how to quilt it.

Still, it was a nice different thing to do to (hopefully) kick start me into sewing again.

Too Much?

How close to the end of a project will you stop? An hour of work left? Half an hour?

Of course, it's hard to know how long something's actually going to take. I have rounded (by about a centimetre) the last corner on the binding. I started it in the middle so there's probably less than 50cm to go, but I'm not sure how long it would actually take. And I'm ready for bed, so it can wait. It's not like I can't do it anywhere, right? Wasn't that the whole point?

Admittedly, I did kinda want to have washed it before I took it to Stonies, not just to (hopefully) crinkle it nicely, but mainly to get rid of the glue residue. When Casey and Jess got here tonight, the first thing they did was whinge that the room smelled a bit funny. I had meant to leave the window open today while I went shopping, but I forgot.

Nice little segue there: Shopping! Today I did a whole lotta op-shops, and thank god for my GPS. Yesterday I got from Parafield (mid north east) to Marion (mid south west) with no GPS, just to prove to myself that I could, but today I happily went wherever it told me too. I had to start in Port Adelaide since Dad needed me to get something for him from there, and I'd worked out a route that got me most of the stores down the west side of the city, all about 10 minutes or less apart. There was one I couldn't find, but I also found two surprise bonus St Vinnies stores and a Red Cross one too.

After 5pm I went to Rundle Mall because late night shopping in the city is on a Friday. And I bought some more stuff. A whole lot of it is basics - a half dozen each of bras, singlets and tees, to go with the four coats I've bought op-shopping, two ballgowns to stash (in January, for a friend's 18th, we're all wearing ballgowns to Dirty Shads, and these were $3 each, so the fact that they're to big for me was irrelevant) two kids rugby jumpers on end of season clearance, two long sleeve tops,  six printed tees, a checked shirt and a white jacket.

And the same shirt dress three times in two colours, because I really like it and it was only $10, and two handbags, and some DVDs, a few fat quarters, and a bit more booze too.

Because, like singlets, socks and fabric, you can never have too much booze.

I've had a fairly big day:

I bought some fabric.

Half price, and then another $40 off of a $100 spend meant this $200 pile cost me $60

I bound a quilt.

I realised last night that it's easier to try out tricky stuff If you use boring stuff as a run up. I'd already made the binding, so it just needed attaching.

And I finished piecing the math quilt.

I quilted it too, but it didn't photograph well.

I also did some other shopping, ate quite a lot of food, had some spontaneous visitors, took about 1000 photos (I'm gunna write up properly how I do my binding) and, as I said above, I've quilted the math quiltlet - just boring, evenly spaced vertical lines. I've cut the remaining rainbow fabric into strips to bind it, and a bit of fabric to make a hanging tube.

I'm pretty happy with my efforts.

Well there you go...

Can I say that finally doing the binding for the pink pavement quilt this afternoon wiped me out? I have to assume that's what it was, since I spent the rest of the evening at Meagan's watching movies with her, before coming home, trying an experimental wallet (it didn't work) and cooking a whole lot of bacon.

It's a good thing I did the binding though, becasue even though I was sure she would pick the white one, she went with the pink one. Admittedly, she then went with the white one, and then the pick one again, and then the white one again before saying no, she was going with the pink one, and I wasn't to let her change her mind again, but still, I though she'd go the white one.

Yay Me.

Although my day didn't go exactly as planned, I can comfortably say that I've had just 1 hour's sleep in the past 36, but I got a quilt finished, and a bit of handsewing done, and my clothes in the wash.

Pride.

The plan had been to sew the lattice quilt till 5.30am (my estimated finishing time, and I was only 10 minutes short), go to the dawn service down in Pt Mac, be home by about 8ish, bind the other quilt, have 4 hours of sleep while they crinklified themselves in the washing machine and the dryer, and go see Meagan and let her pick her favourite.

This of course got derailed when we got invited to an Aunt's for breakfast after the service. And then straight after breakfast, she brought out some booze. And board games. And card games.

We planned to leave at 10. We planned to leave at 12. We planned to leave at 2, and actually succeeded. But I hadn't finished either quilt at this point, so I was a teensy bit relieved when Meagan messaged to say she and Clayton were having a spontaneous afternoon roadtrip.

I tried to do the final row of stitching on the binding, bit I realised after about 10cm (and this was on the machine) that I couldn't concentrate enough. I had something to eat, I fartarsed on the computer, I moved piles of stuff from the floor to the bed and back again. Eventually I gave up, set my timer for an hour, and had a nap.

After I woke up I did the final stitch down of the binding and put it in the wash. I watched a few new episodes of TV, and I finally got the black wholecloth quilt and started to sew it. I sewed while I watched for about an hour and a half, and I'm maybe 2/3rds of the way along one side. Black on black is hard to sew, and there's a reason I use the machine. If I didn't, this certainly wouldn't be finished.

I don't think it counts as a finish in the finishathon though, since I only started it last Friday.

Still, 5 day turnaround. Again, pride.

Spontaneous Wholecloth

Tonight I got home and the idea of having to either start on bindings or finish the awkward quilting on the falling pinwheels quilt didn't exactly fill me with joy. Nor did I really want to do anything with fussy back and forthing from the kitchen to the sewing machine, so that ruled out either making a bag or starting a new quilt. I probably should have just gone to bed, but having not sat at my machine in 3 days, I was feeling a need to sew something.

So I got an about 1m square scrap of batting, a couple of metres of Kona Black and spool each of rainbow variegated Guterman Sulky in 12 and 30.  I basted in 10cm squares with dressmaking pins, and I sewed a consistent wave, with a left and a right between each pin. Then I sewed the same wave between the two, and reversed it between them.

I probably should have done a pillow before committing to an entire quilt, but really, it only took me a couple of hours. I'm not sure what I'll do with it, since it's a baby sized quilt in the least baby-ish of colours, but I like being able to say I've now done a wholecloth quilt.

Unfortunately, it's another thing now that needs binding, and even more unfortunately, it will have to be done by hand. I got all guilty about the fact that I'd caused myself to have to do more binding without having done any work on the other bindings, so I got the binding for the blue and grey quilt, which had been sewn but not pressed or folded, and did that with the black binding of the new one.

I've made the black binding very narrow (cut to 5.5cm, sewn .75cm wide) but I'm not in any hurry to get it finished. It's only small, so I'll do it over the next couple of weeks as new TV shows come out.

Home.

It's so nice to be home, in my own bed, under my own quilts, with my electric blanket. That 5 hour drive, after getting about the same amount of sleep last night, wasn't particularly fun. But loud music helped, and I only nearly died once. And even then, it wasn't that nearly.

Before that though, I spent a lovely afternoon at Shay's house, walking her through sewing a couple of zip pouches with really no swearing at all, trying to understand a tutorial that was missing about half the steps on a site which I had assumed would have higher standards, and getting there eventually, and then making a little pouch with a recessed zip, just to prove how easy it was. We also spent a lot of time playing with the dogs, being ignored by the cats, and watching my team thrash hers in the footy. Good times, and I can't wait till the end of July when we get to do it all again.

I've put all the new fabrics into their respective bundles, but there's still the other quilts in the finishathon to get through first - I think I have one more to quilt and then it's all bindings.

Ergh. I might have to run away again.

First Finish of the Finishathon!

It's been a pretty good day. I got some good packages in the mail: vintage flannels and peeled cows from etsy, and a massive stack from Hancocks, which also included this:

After spending an hour or so cooing over it and making imaginary bundles in my head, I got to finally quilting the Green Pavement quilt. I wont lie, it was dull, slow and unfun. But 2.5 hours of quilting, 45 minutes of pinning, 30 minutes of handsewing the corners and 30 minutes machining the binding down and it's all done.

I did a foldover for this one, since the backing was not only on point, but I like it better than the front. I'd cut the wadding to an inch bigger around than the top was because I wanted a wide border, and just folded and pinned it to the width that covered the edge of the top. I was telling myself that I was being artistic and organic, but better adjectives probably would have been haphazard and lazy. Still, I really like it, especially from the back. The lack of an edge, both of the design and of the binding, is something I've decided I am a big fan of.

Hopefully I comes out of the washing machine still looking nice.

Dontwanna.

I hate binding. I don't get people who are all "I love doing the binding! It's the best bit... I spend a week sewing it down by hand and really savouring the process..."

Blergh. I know you can send a top off to be quilted; I wish I could send off my quilts to be bound. I've worked out probably the quickest, neatest method imaginable and it still feels like it takes forever. One day I might time them both, and see which actually takes longer - the quilting or the binding. There's so much faff to binding, there's cutting and pressing and pinning and folding and turning and sewing really carefully.

To that end, tonight I trimmed my edges, zigzagged them together and cut the binding strips. Just doing that took 20 minutes, and I haven't started the complicated stuff yet.

I need a binding fairy.

It is possible that I am sewing too much. 

Last night my dreams were full of me having to hurry up and do whatever it was I was doing (stealing chewing gum from a hospital(?), smuggling my inflatable horse out of my hotel(?)) so that I could get back to sewing some more. And then this afternoon I found myself thinking, after I had gone to Spotlight to get some binding, that I wanted to go have a browse at Kmart, even though I didn't actually need anything, and when I asked myself why, I had to admit, grudgingly, that I was stalling on going home, because there was yet more sewing to be done.

Really, apart from going to the gym last night, and then to see Meagan at maccas, all I've done all holidays is sew. And yes, I know that was the point, and yes, Baby Shower gift is all done now, But I really really had to stop for a bit.

So while I was at Kmart, I bought a novel, called The Girl in the Steel-Capped Boots. It was... well, it was everything I thought it was going to be. Cliched, mainly, but that's not to say I didn't enjoy it. Main character, a newly graduated engineer, gets sent out to the edge of nowhere to help 350 blokes build a big jetty, overcomes all their sexist prejudices to win the affection of all and the heart of the gruff, sexy, mysterious head of the company that owns the jetty. Yay!

Still, for all that I knew the ending by page 24, it was a nice three hours away from the machine, and, time suitably taken off, I got to binding.

But, a step back in time. Had my internets not chucked a hissy fit last night, I could have shared with everybody the tribulations of Baby Shower Quilt #2.

See that missing triangle? It is supposed to be blue stripe. But you can only get 8 triangles from a fat quarter - not a problem with the red spot, since I had a spare 3 metres of it, but I needed 9 of the blue too. I had a similar stripe that I had put in there, but it was more aqua, and too close to the green, and I tried a red and blue spot, and a yellow stripe, and a blue check, but I didn't like any of them.

Solution? Change the direction the stripes faced and drop off the corners.

My first ever octagonal quilt. Bound in a yellow, terracotta and blown stripe that I absolutely adore for it's unashamed retroness. Backed in a red and white narrow seersucker stripe I had originally hoped to use for the front, but was too crinkly after washing. About 105cm at the wide bit.

And there's the back for the bright baby quilt - more HSTs.

I'm really loving HSts at the moment, clearly.

But which one do I actually give to Meagan? She said when I showed her the big bundle of pastels that she liked the idea of having a very babyish quilt, so that she could put it away when the baby got a big bigger in order to bring it out when it got a lot bigger. But she also liked the bright bundle, because it was bright.

I don't know.

Yay Stuff!

So, friday. Well, Saturday now, obviously, since my timing tends to be a little skew-whif, but still, that means favourite things.

I had been thinking that what I would put as my favourite thing this week would be my sheer unadulterated awesomeness, since I managed to design, piece, quilt and bind a quilt for my sister's birthday this sunday in just 3 days, but then I realised if I was as truly awesome as I thought I was, then I would have decided to get started weeks ago, and I'd be getting in some sleepsies before the BnS ball tomorrow night, instead of sitting here having just finished. I'd have also remembered to take a photo before I put it in the washing machine, and I wouldn't have made that cutting error as I was finishing the binding.*

So, other things.

The fact that mum is worried about the ethical implications of my messing around with her netbook and using Daemon Tools to convince it that it has a DVD player when it doesn't just makes me laugh. "But you're lying to it..." she goes, while telling me that it's silly for me to feel bad about the death of my old laptop.

My phone. Still. Three months on, I'm still loving how it just does stuff. No faffing or fart-arsing about. It does everything I want it to do, except maybe print me money.

Having a real laptop again. Sure, the fact that it's running Vista is really irritating, as is the fact that the touch screen only works with the pen, but as a stop-gap till I decide what I actually want it's excellent. Look at me, blogging away on it. Nice keyboard, too.

The "slow" button on the foot pedal of my sewing machine. I thought it was pointless the first time I saw it, but it was very handy tonight, stopping me from rushing the binding and making a(nother) mistake.

Being indecicive about which ballgown to wear, because it means I have the kind of life where I a) occasionally wear ball gowns and b) have enough ballgowns to have indecision between them.

Having a CD burner. Saying "I need a new CD" and going and making one.

Oh, and the fact that I'm going to a BnS ball tomorrow night, and I'm taking along one of my best friends, who's never been to one before. Toats exciting!


*Fourtunatelly, although it shit me, it really only added about 5 minutes of work, and about half of that was just me despairing.

It seems like a good idea...

Even though I said I wasn't gunna buy any more fabric till after my room was clean, I did buy some hot pink cotton sheeting today to use as a binding for the rainbow steps on black quilt, which is very nearly all quilted - it would be but the moving stuff around thing has left the machine even more, um, congested than usual.

I had originally planned to bind it in black. It has a black border and background, and well, it seems obvious, which of course seems to me to be a perfect reason not to. The quilt itself doesn't contain a hot pink in the piecing - The colours are all kona and the bright pink looked a bit faded compared to all the other colours, so it goes from the orange (I used tangerine and school bus) through to just the far side of purple (cerise). I've really struggled to find a super-bright pink in quilting fabric, but Spotlight has some 285cm wide 100% cotton sheeting that is exactly the colour I wanted. I also have to applique a heart in the corner, which will be the hard bit for me, though at least it will be quite small and in the corner. And yes, I have quilted it before appliqueing - I plan on shallowly needleturning it and then quilting through a foot's width* inside the seam just as I did with the piecing.

I have tomorrow off, so instead of cleaning like I should, I'm sure I will be finding new and exciting ways in which to procrastinate. Binding. Binding's toats fun!**


*by this I mean the width of the machine foot, which, being metric, is about .75cm. I don't mean I'm sewing a foot (12inches/30.4cm) from the edge. Obviously. That would be dumb.
**no, it's not. But it's better than cleaning out my room.

Apologies for the cheese induced delirium.

Do you ever wonder what happened to those people who dropped out of the blogosphere? The ones that used to post all the time, that you followed the lives of, who one day just... vanished? I always hope they're doing fine, living their lives without sharing them with the world but sometimes I worry. I worry that something happened to them, that there's a reason they're not online anymore.

There was a thing on facebook a while ago that said "After I die, I give you permission to hack my account and change my status to is chillin with jesus" - I'm not at all religious and nor do I believe in an afterlife, but the point stands. Should something happen to me, I expect someone to hack my account* and let everyone know. And for someone to finish up my half done quilts.

Speaking of half done quilts, I now have four less. That still leaves one unfinished top, five quilts than need a back and basting, two that need quilting, and two that need binding. But that's ten of a total fifty, or an 80% completion rate. I'm happy with that.

I've also realised that if you must bind, bind lots. Binding feels like it takes forever, and forever takes just as long if you do it four times as if you'd done it once. Admittedly tonight I only did the second (and third, because I bind in my own special way) lots of sewing - I'd sewn them on and done the join and ironed them around and pinned them down last night. It would seem that what I've actually decided is that if you must suffer through multiple eternities, make them all different.

Or, possibly, what's really happened is that I've eaten too much cheese and become a bit delirious.

Anyway, back to the point. Four more quilts are now all bound and ready to wash and crinklify*

45, 39, 36 and 18

Two are in the machine now, and I'll put the others in when they're done, and hopefully we'll get 5 minutes of sunshine tomorrow for me to do the photos on the grass thing.

The other thing I've gotten done is the top for quilt # 50.

I love the fabrics and the colours, but I have to admit, they're not right for this pattern. The Falling Leaves fabric having both pink and green in it means that depending on how you're looking at it, the background either merges into the rings or pops to the foreground. I can't help but think of it as my Escher quilt, even though that's really not what I was going for. I'm gunna have a do over - I've had some fabrics in my stash for at least a year now, a pink, blue and green with flowers that should work - it's been in an envelope in a box and I can't remember how big the flowers actually are, but if they're fairly small (I recall them being a bit under an inch across. I could be wrong) then it should be fine.

Parent's should be home tomorrow night, so that should cheer up my dog, prevent my house from making any more threats upon my life, and curb my until-4am sewing seshes. Still, it'll be nice to see them again, as much as it has been nice doing our own thang for the last fortnight.



*if shouldn't be hard - firefox knows all my passwords.
** my submission to the quilting lexicon for 2011.

Aussie music.

Americans may have it good with their free postage from fabric.com and... actually, I forget other things. I don't live there, so I don't know all the good stuff you guys have. But seriously, Australia is great. We have utes, and we're allowed to drink at 18, and the economy is holding up well, and we've all got a fairly relaxed attitude and there's plenty of kangaroos to eat. Oh, and Aussie music.

It seems to me that we're quite selfish about it. I mean, you even sent us Katy Perry for the Logies, and we know pretty much all of your songs, but apart from INXS doing a reality show, the last real music we sent over there was Savage Garden, and that was over a decade ago now*.

So here's three of my favourite Aussie songs. First up is Flame Trees. It's by a band called Cold Chisel, and they're like gods over here. My sister broke a guy's nose at a Barnsey (that would be their lead singer) concert a few years ago. A lot of people think Khe Sahn is a better song, but they're wrong, because this one contains the line "who needs that sentimental bullshit anyway?"



Next is Salisbury Street, by John Williamson. It's not on youtube, which is a massive shame. But maybe, just maybe, if you click here, it will download the first minute or so for you. It was written about his brother who died of cancer, and it's so, so good. John Williamson also wrote/sings True Blue, and that's really good too, and Bill the Cat, which includes the immortal lyric "we left his balls at the family vet"

Finally, Tenterfield Saddler by Peter Allen. Qantas and then Oprah pretty completely ruined I still call Australia Home for me, but that doesn't matter - I always liked this one better.



It's actually about his grandfather, his father was the "son of George Woolnough" and he's the "grandson of George." Hugh Jackman can almost be forgiven for participating in the Oprah stunt because he played a big part in getting this song back out there again with The Boy From Oz, although the fact that typing in "tenterfield saddler lyrics" brings up a version apparently by him before the one by Peter Allen makes me a bit cross.

And just for good measure, some stuff I like that isn't Aussie music.


I like sleeping half the day away.

I like having a new CD in my car.

I like finding the perfect print to bind a difficult quilt as I walk in the door of the fabric shop**

I like "searching through thrift store jungles" (thanks Sheryl Crow)

I like the fact that my batting is pretty much exactly two quilts wide.

I like the fact that doing my own quilting means I don't have to make my batting bigger than my quilt top. 8 inches extra? Seriously? How about 0 inches? Okay.

I like when the night where I'm feeling quite motivated is also the night I'm not working.

I like having the house to myself.

I like honey crackles.

I like it when Casey does the dishes.

I like it when it turns out I do have enough fabric after all.

I like telling my laptop to tell the TV to play me some music.

I like three day weekends.

I like late night sewing seshes.

I like procrastinating on my binding by cutting another couple of projects, maybe making a backing. Anything but bloody binding.

I like it when a rainbow of colours are in the correct spectral order.

I like it when I'm feeling indecisive about including a fabric and then it turns out there's not enough there, and the decision is made for me.

I like frozen apple juice.


*I just remembered Jet.


**although it was sateen, I bought it anyway because I'm a fearless bastard but then I got home and it nearly made me cry. Like binding isn't bad enough.

I Plead the Fifth...

Yes, I know it's silly to put up a photo of my epic fail and then say I don't want to talk about it. But I will say that it's all okay now - a combination of my feeling quite good going into doing the binding (see previous post) and that positivity stopping me from shoving the whole damn thing into the fire, and the fact that I appear to have chosen the one fabric on which it is completely impossible to see the seams, even when there's 3 of them in a 20cm section.

I just feel that it's important to show our failures, lest we turn into big blogging fakers.

And yes, I know that I'm not American, and that therefore any amendments to their constitution don't actually have any bearing on my rights. It sounds cool, okay?

I should probably have split this into two posts...

Firstly, I'd like to apologise for any aneurisms had on Sunday morning. When I pressed the publish post button, blogger told me that it had been scheduled for 5 minutes away, and I was too lazy to go back and make it post straight away. Then I fell asleep, without checking it had uploaded, and got a bit sad the next day that noone had said anything, but I figured it was just because I was being a grumpy bum, and it probably didn't deserve commenting on anyway. Then, when I went in to correct a typo on last night's post, I realised it was still there, labeled as a draft. I backdated the post and made sure it actually uploaded, and went to bed. I'm very sorry Helen, it was Blogger's fault, I promise.

Anyway, tonight, having bought myself a new cutting mat, I got started on my next mingle quilt. I hadn't realised it, but it's been ages since I chopped fat quarters up into neat little squares as a precursor to making blocks one at a time.

I gotta say, it feels inefficient. And after all that time pondering as I tried to iron out a not quite flat bit of strip piecing if it was actually any faster, what with having to do more cutting afterwards and all, I'm thinking it doesn't matter. Cutting (fabric) for two hours is almost enough to make you start cutting (emo style)

Still, my initial squares are all done now, so at least from here on out everything is perfect and regular.

This quilt design is odd, by my standards, since it actually contains no maths. None. At all. You cut four squares, the biggest you can from a fat quarter - I've gone 22cm, but honestly, there's no reason even to conform to whole numbers. Then you pick a point a little way from one corner along an edge, say, 5cm or so. Then you cut from that point to the middle-ish of the opposite side. You remove the small bit of fabric and go from the ghost point that would have been the 5cm or so (same as last time) from the corner in the other direction, and you go to the middle-ish opposite again. The only hard part is your ghost corner, but if you get a piece of paper, draw both lines, then cut one, and then the other, wallah! Templates. Then all you've got to do is shuffle around your insides and your outsides until you've got a design you like and sew it all back together, kite shape to short wedge, then attaching the long wedge to the side, lining up the wide bit with the top of the kite so that your overhang is the narrow bit, which you can then chop off without much waste. Doesn't even matter what your seam allowance is, so long as it's constant. Pretty much a perfect first quilt.

But it's not my first, it's going to be my 50th. Because, dirty little secret, this one was #38.5 - the quilt with no number*.

That's Graham. He's like a ninja, and it's very rare for he and I to cross paths.

This is the quilt I made for the Two Tyred Tutorial, and I'm glad I finished it on the weekend we actually won (please forward your insults regarding our Round 1 performance via the comments box) The colours above are the colours of the Hawthorn Hawks, an Australian Rules Footy team. Any non-Autralian readers should declare their support before Shay tries to woo you to the Adelaide Crows.

Anyway, as well as posting the instruction for this one, here's a quick little thing on how I usually bind quilts, when I'm not boring myself silly with hand sewing them on. I usually call this double wide binding, and it looks best on quilts that are straight line quilted on the machine. Go read this, and then I'll explain my changes.


Firstly, cut your binding 1/2 an inch wider than she says, or 1/2 inch wider than you usually would. I like 9cm, but I also put my needle to the far left so I get a wider binding.

Instead of pinning from the back, put your pins in the front, right up against where the batting folds back on itself. Try to keep a fairly constant amount of excess binding beyond where your pin passes through to the back, you want it to be a quarter inch or so.

Use a zipper foot - one of the ones that has the metal in the middle and open sides. This lets you get really really close to the edge - you want to be stitching into the ditch. Once you've gone the whole way around, tie off your threads.

Flip the quilt over. There should be a quarter inch or so of overhang to your binding. In some places it might be less, in some places a little bit more. Now sew that down from the back - when it gets narrower, you go in so you don't miss any of it, which you might have if you were sewing it blind from the front. I tend to not go out too far even on the bits where it's a bit wider - it makes for a straighter finish on the front if you only veer off in one direction.

Once you've done your full loop, tie off your threads.

The quilt from the front will look like this, with a narrow binding and a second line of quilting about a quarter inch from the edge, just like all the actual quilted lines where the seams have been echoed.

The back will look like this - binding a quarter inch or so wider than it is on the front, double sewn.

That's not brilliant explaining, I know, but despite the fact that this is getting published at 2.45, my body clock still thinks it's nearly 4am.

Damn You Daylight Savings!


*So we're disregarding it with regards to both my "finish half the WIPs before #50" and "do that one you've been gunna-ing since the beginning as #50" pledges.

Speed. I am speed.

I am not good with slow sewing.

I've done one tiny cross stitch, about a decade ago now.

Shown here sitting on a DVD so you can see what a truly epic achievement it's 651 crosses are.

No embroideries.

No, the image hasn't failed to load. There's really nothing to show for this one.

And I machine sew my bindings.

But even that takes too long, because even on the machine, you can't do it quickly. You have to go slowly, and concentrate.

You may be wondering at this point how the hell I manage to quilt at all. Well, I direct you to my Quilts So Far list, and you may note that in the last 10 months, I've made 48 tops. 48 very quick tops. Practically flung through the machine and under the iron.

They're all fairly simple ones too; I'm under no illusions about the lack of complicated, fiddly piecing in my repertoire. That stuff takes too long for my liking. Way too long.

Feel free to say it's a side effect of the "now" mentality of the younger generation. Alternatively, it's quite possible I don't like quilting it all, more that I like having quilted. Either way, anything that takes more than an hour without any visible progress is something I usually can't be bothered with. Usually.

So then why the hell have I spent the last day and a half hand sewing a binding down? Putting it through the machine may take an hour or so, once you've made your binding and pinned it and sewn it and ironed it and sewn it twice more,* but I've watched four movies (The Bounty Hunter, The Proposal, Blade Trinity, RED) in the course of attaching this binding. And an episode of Bones. That's a massive amount of time. And, after all that, I still had to slowly and carefully run it through the machine, because even though I've been careful, and it looks very nice, even nicer than the ones I look at at Stitch and Knit, I worry that it's not secure, and well, if I've invested half a weekend into this binding, I want it to stay down.

I did all this because I am in love with this quilt. A long time ago, before I was a quilter, back when I had a boyfriend, I had a dream of making a black and red chess board quilt. And I was going to make stuffed toy pieces and he was going to teach me how to play. He never taught me, and I didn't start quilting until long after he was gone, and most of my red fabrics I'd bought for it got used for making Mama Jan's Quilt, but I think this, my red and black and white quilt, is the rebirth of that mythical quilt that never was.

The weird thing is, this was never one I was particularly hyped about. I bought the bundle of fabric that I used for the top because it was $20, and I had already bought it in blue, orange and brown, and that bundle had turned into a quilt I love so so much, which now hangs on my wall.

I wasn't even super-psyched about the top - I put it away and left it for over 3 months.

But then I worked myself out a back, and it all came together. Just from looking at the photos, the back totally wins. But in real life, away from the flash of a late night camera, the greyer front is utterly snuggleworthy too. Normally, I have no trouble choosing a favourite, and therefore I have no trouble machine sewing the binding on (by that I mean I have no qualms about it, it's still a hassle) but for this one, having used wavy stitch for the quilting and not wanting to either mess up the back with a badly done standard machine binding, or mess up the front with a straight stitched double machine binding* I went for hand sewing it.

I'm glad, since it looks bloody gorgeous all round now.

I don't like having to choose sides. I also don't like hand sewing, but the latter you have to live with for a day. The former you have to live with forever.

*Tomorrow I'm gunna post photos of the Hawks Quilt and tell you all how I do my double wide binding. If you straight line machine quilt, it could be the thing for you.

No sex, some drugs, and no rock and roll either.

I really hate autumn. Not just because it gets cold, thought that sucks too, but for me, Autumn means asthma season. It means spending half the day barely breathing, and the other half vibrating.

It's very hard to explain the side effects of Ventalin and Bricanyl, and everyone seems to react a bit differently so when you bring it up you hear all sorts of interesting variations.

"Shaky" seems to be the main thing, for both Ventalin and Bricanyl, though there's agreement that Bricanyl is much, much worse, so I take Ventalin until it stops working (usually after twice in a day.) Ventalin at least is a very outward shake - if I don't have my feet flat on the ground, they bounce up and down really badly. And the longer I leave it for, the worse it gets. I'm okay while I'm actually sewing, but the times when I'm just sitting in front of the machine, not pressing down on the pedal? Bouncy Bouncy Bouncy. One of the girls at work gets a very bad twitch in one of her wrists, and she has to rest it on something so it doesn't make her hand flick back and forth.

But Bricanyl is worse because it's like all that shaking is going on inside. I actually feel buzzy. And my heartbeat goes kinda bonkers for no apparent reason. And the way it beats feels crunchy. And I can't concentrate, and if I try too hard to, I get quite dizzy. I try to time it so I use the Ventalin no more than twice during the day, and then if I have to have Bricanyl at nighttime I can just go to bed. But it means I spend a lot of time breathing very shallowly, because the harder I breath the worse my asthma gets.

I'm so glad I only get asthma 3 months a year. It would be utterly, utterly horrible to feel like this all the time.

And silly silly me has decided to garnish these feelings of crappiness with a bit of hand sewn binding. I quilted the Newsprint Mingle quilt (the top of which can bee seen as #37 in the quilts I've made list) with a wavy stitch, so my usual extra wide, double sewn binding would have looked a bit odd straight stitched*. I've only ever hand sewn one binding before - Maddy's Quilt, Quilt #2, before I worked out how to machine stitch it on (Quilt #1 had a folded over backing as binding)

It's boring. really really boring. And fiddly and slow and I wish quite badly that I could just do it on the machine, but I know that this time, I'm kinda in agreeance with a lot of people. I like the back better, and I don't want to drag it, or the front, down with a rush job binding.


So, in summation, the drugs both work, and make you worse, hand sewing is bloody boring, Gerard Butler is very very yummy, Jenifer Aniston can't act, and an entire share pack of maltesers eaten in one night will make your teeth hurt.

Life lessons: learnt.

*Okay, it probably would have looked fine. But I'm so so in love with both sides of this one, and since we all see nothing but our faults, I didn't want that to be all I would see, since it deserved better than it.

I very nearly went to bed without doing a post...

My laptop is working very hard right now to encode a divx file to a DVD. Poor thing is running at about 95°c right now, so I'm typing this up on palm pilot #2, because I don't want to lose the place I'm at in the ebook that's running on palm pilot #1. For the record, palm pilot #1 still has all the silver on it's power button. Other than that, they're identical.

Anyway, tonight, since I was feeling guilty about my complete lack of crafting progress, I bound the pink, orange and brown mini Stairways to Heaven quilt. Not that well, if I'm honest - my worries about bias cut binding were completely founded. I don't have one of those top-and-bottom-feeding feet that some people are massive fans of; well, I do but I think it's munted, since a) I'm not a massive fan of it because b) it doesn't feed at the top. It moves up and down, and gets in the way of me being able to grip and pull the fabric through. I just use a 40+ year old foot, polished smooth by literally miles of fabric. It usually works pretty good, but, to noones surprise, the fabric stretched and bunched and generally acted annoying. I've chucked it in the wash, so it should look better when it comes out, but I'll stick with straight cut binding, thanks.

Today before work I went to Spotlight and spent up on 20% off crafting supplies - I got a half dozen sculpeys for $3.20 a pop and some whole kits for air dry animals that were the same. And a sewing kit for a cat that's toats cute, and some bright tapestry wools and 20cm of tapestry... whatever you call it. It's not what I'd call fabric, but, you know, the stuff you tapestry on to. I'll draw some patterns on some and leave some blank. I considered going to the toyshop too - they usually have some cute kits but it was nearly 2.30 and I had to go to work.

Damn work, cutting into shopping and crafting time...

Big Plan Progress (because there hasn't been any other kind)

While some people used the public holiday to achieve a whole lot, I... didn't. Quilting-wise at least. I got the binding made for the two Mini Stairways to Heaven quilts. The one for the pink, orange and brown one is my first ever binding cut on the bias; I know it's recommended and all but it just seemed like an awful lot of work, and I've always been worried that it will stretch as I try to sew it on. That is a discovery for another day though, since I'm really not feeling like binding tonight (though really, at what point in the last nine months have I ever felt like binding?) The only reason I cut it on the bias anyway is that it was a stripe going across the fabric, instead of along. I know, weird right? So I figured, what the hey, it was only $2 a metre, may as well try something new and interesting, so I can at least know never to do it again, and it's only a small quilt so the horror wont last too long.

I'm so pathetically pessimistic when it comes to trying new things. I'm like an old lady "back in my day..." and "things just aren't as good as they used to be..."

One new thing I will be trying this week is going to Adelaide by myself. I've driven up there plenty of times, but always with family or the ex-boyf. It's only for one night, and I've organised it so I can stop at the Lucindale Field Days on the way, for all that I won't really have any money to spend if I'm gunna do a Spotlight crawl while I'm up there.

The boys went up this weekend to do a pub crawl. I'm going up on Friday to do a Spotlight crawl. I maintain that my unique, oddball attitude makes me interesting and hip, whereas theirs simply makes them hungover.

Of course, I've picked clipsal weekend, the weekend when everything is so much harder than it should be. But I've found myself the only unbooked room in Adelaide, in a backpacker hostel, and I've got 3 GPS devices (my spare phone has one, there's one that lives in my glove box and I'm gunna take Mum's too, just in case) to get me around traffic awkwardness, and I've spent an hour or so today on google maps, finding roads I can and can't take, and craft stores to stop at.

Truth be told, the circuit is disappointingly small, (which I know is a good thing for me, it's just that I was expecting something much more city-ruining) and in completely the opposite direction from Flinders Medical, which is, Spotlights not withstanding, why I'm going. To chillax with the other total freaking rock star from mars*, smuggle her in some contraband (that would be pepsi max) and perhaps have a crafternoon without any craft. I'm thinking I'll take up all the monster templates, and we can browse the internets for a fabric (or maybe pick something from my shopping adventures) and draw up some faces and I can do it all on the machine when I get home. Or I can break her out of rehab and we can shop together. What's their policy on illegally downloaded movies?

In the meantime, work, and quilting and binding. Ergh, meh and ergh again. For once, bring on the exciting new adventures.


*Actually, that should be the other way round. Charlie Sheen ain't got nothin' on Kelsey.