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.

Whoops

Time flies when you're drafting patterns.

Some lovely wool blend coat fabric on clearance, an old jacket cut up for a pattern and high hopes for a drapey collar I haven't quite worked out yet, and suddenly it's after 6am :/

Slow stripes

I'm not sure why it took me so long to cut my fabric tonight. Maybe it was because you have to be more careful to align your stripes with your cutting. Maybe it's because I kept getting distracted by youtube videos. Maybe it's because I was simultaneously cutting the binding*

Probably the one about alignment, mainly, I think. Yes, definitely that one.

It all looks very pretty from the edge though.

*Stripey rainbow pieced binding, same fabrics as featured in the piecing of the top. It will be brilliant.

How dull.

Today, because it was on special, and there was only one there, and I am a sucker for either of those and both was making my nearly wet myself, I bought a new keyboard and mouse combo.

The new ones are the untethered ones.

No-one in the house knows though, and Casey has expressed a preference toward the corded kind (they're harder to lose) so naturally, I'm gunna wait till she's on the computer next and start moving the mouse counter to what she is. I'm mean like that sometimes.

I really only mention it because, despite a couple of hours hard work, this is all I have to show tonight.

One day, hopefully soon, it will become 8 satchel bags. The flaps are, for the most part, quilting fabrics, and I've already picked the one that I will either be keeping for myself or re-making. The body of the bag is cotton ripstop, which was $3 a metre at spotlight, and I still have to decide whether or not to add a zip - I want to, since I like zips, and they aren't even that much extra effort really, but I'm torn between the idea of having them be library bags (which is what they're really meant to be, for little kids who might not be able to handle a zip) or actual grown-up satchel bags (except that, even though they're fully lined, they don't have any interfacing, so the shape and stability of a proper bag just isn't there)

I think that instead of doing every step of all of them in unison, I might have to make one in it's entirety tomorrow night to get a better idea of the finished weight of one before I decide to add a zip.

I'm also using belts that I bought at op-shops around town as the straps on half of them, so we'll need to see how that turns out too.

Pathetic. (Me. I'm pathetic. Not the monsters.)

So, with the new sharper pointier scissors that I bought yesterday, I started cutting more eyeholes in monsters this afternoon.

Well, I say started. I pushed the tip through the fabric and straight into my fingertip.

See that tiny, tiny spot on my fingertip? Look closely, it's tiny. It's been 14 hours and it hurts like hell. I'm a little bit of a sook, in case you haven't noticed. But I appear to own the world's sharpest, pointiest scissors, and they only cost me $7, which seems pretty good value...

Anyway, tonight after work I got the rest of the eyes done, I got all the little arms and horns sewed (all 62 of them) and I snipped all the inside curves and turned them all inside out and I've stuffed 30 of them, but I've run out of episodes of Long Way Down to watch and also, it's 3am.

Just to amuse myself, I've strung my little rope of arms across my fabric shelves - if you're going to mass produce 62 tiny arms, leave them in a chain together, because it makes them much easier to turn right way out and stuff. And you can hang them on your wall.

Oh, and in case you were wondering, here's Casey's poem:

The number of this Aristocrat,

Is the answer that you seek,

Don't get hooked on the Enchanted Forest,

We've a wedding this time next week.

Two to go, and about an hour tomorrow to do them in.

Those monstrous eyes...

Before I do monsters again, I think I need to get myself a BabyGo or a Cricut - my poor thumb has been rubbed raw from cutting all the little circles for eyes. The main problem is how thick it is - I fuse together some white quilting cotton with white wool felt and then another layer of webbing to fuse them both to the face. And since if you draw on the fabric or the webbing it bleeds through when you iron it, there's the layer of paper too. A single layer of cotton isn't enough to cover the print and the wool tends to pill, which shits me, so this is pretty much the only way to get the finish I want.

Still, fusing down the faces is the least production-line-y bit of the process, and therefore one of the bits I like better. What were just shapes now have personalities, even though they don't have eyeballs. One of them appears to be a reincarnated BeeGee, and one of them is shrugging without having shoulders. That's quite a talent.

I also seem to have mainly single-eyed monsters - possibly because I went with bigger eyes this time (easier to sew down) and less eyes also means less cutting. Still, I like one-eyed, since it gives the impression of monstery-ness even though most of them are four-limbed creatures same as us.

Actual quilting!*

I'm a bit behind on my TV viewing. Now that my laptop is home downloading has resumed, but there's still 2 weeks of watching to do, and not much time between work and sleeping and going to the gym and doing stuff for christmas.

Tonight when I got home I decided I'd make a start on the christmas quilt. And I decided I'd watch some Castle while I did it. I must say, the episodes were both brilliant. Beckett working through her issues with the sniper in the first one, all deep and emotional, with crying and stuff, and then the odd comedy/thriller of the next episode, where they're trapped in a room and don't know how they got there, and then there's a tiger. And they're trapped in a room with a tiger. And it's oddly hilarious, while absolutely gripping. It held me up quite a bit. The morals of this story are a) don't quilt and watch new episodes of Castle at the same time, and b) a tiger can knock over an on-it's-end chest freezer, making it an unsafe place to stand atop of. If there's a tiger.

Still, although progress was slow, I did get all my triangles cut. 80 of them, though I only needed 72, but since I placed them randomly it was good to have some spares to get a good balance.

It's a shame I didn't have another darker red triangle. to put at the right hand end of the second row down, but all my leftover triangles were of the mid-shade.

I'll see how I'm feeling about it once my pairs have been sewn - I've got more than I need of the binding fabric to cut another one to put in, but I don't remember it looking that noticeable in the real world. Taking photos of quilts does funny things to them.

*That title's a lie since no actual quilting was done, but cutting up fabrics is what quilting's all about, even if my sewing machine didn't get plugged in.

Going nowhere fast...

Tonight, I cut 18 pieces of fabric 46x60cm, and interfaced them together into nine big double sided bits.

That might make it sound like tonight was another night of procrastination, but that took me two and a half hours. The ironing and the measuring and the cutting and the ironing and the measuring and the cutting and the ironing. I didn't even take anything to watch, cause I was doing it out in the kitchen while my new harddrive talks to my old harddrive and they get cross when you want to watch TV at the same time.

I guess the moral of the story is that attempts at mass* production usually leave you feeling a bit crap. All that work for a nice neat pile of really big rectangles. Whoopteyfreakingdoodah.

I've tried to pick some boy fabrics, or at least some gender neutral ones. There's a Riley Blake that I seem to recall getting last time I was in Adelaide, something with cute animals that I think came in a mixed remnants bundle from fabric.com, a Kaufman and a variety of Spotlight stuff.

Tomorrow I need to cut out the little bits on the sides and take the offcuts, which suddenly becomes a set of handy colour cards, into town and find some ribbons to match to be the handles.

And now I'm off to bed, to fall asleep to the dulcet tones of 3 little hardrives whirring furiously. I think they'll be at it for a while.

*the m key on my computer doesn't work sometimes, and it's a good thing I re-read all my posts before hitting publish, because otherwise you would have all been thinking I spent the night producing ass.

Chop chop.

So after not really achieving much all day, midnight hit and I felt the urge to sew. Two and a half hours later, I had a quilt top.

And now, an hour after that, I have some bits.

*

And I can't be bothered putting them back together tonight.


*Don't worry about the missing corner, I have spare fabric. Actually, the main reason I can't be bothered finishing is that I need to cut those two squares.

Cuts and new fabrics

I like fat quarters. I've designed quite a few very easy fat quarter quilts. But I've also designed a lot of quilts that use a standard quarter. Or ones that only use 10cm of each fabric.

I tend to stash small amounts for the most part. Actually, I tend to come up with a project, buy for that and then get distracted with another project and end up with exactly the amount of fabric for a project that I'm now bored with*

When I'm going crazy stockpiling, I usually go for half a metre, unless there's only two fabrics that go together. If that's the case I'll get a metre of each, that way when I inevitably never ever find another fabric to go with them, I can just make my Two Tyred quilt again.

I find the minimum cut thing quite interesting. Fair enough for proper quilt shops to have a minimum 20cm cut. They're a little store, trying their best, and a 1cm leeway on a 10cm cut is 10% of the profit gone. But Lincraft are the same, and their profits don't really come very much from quilt fabrics. Worse are their half price specials, with 1m minimum cut. Apart from backings, who does spontaneous stockpiling of 1m cuts? Especially when they're still $10 a metre when they're half price.

Spotlight have always been very good. 10cm minimum, 5cm increments, 50cm minimum on clearance fabrics. But now they've changed to 1m minimum cuts on their clearance stuff, and today, when there was a metre and 30cm left on the roll, the lady went "ergh, do you want that bit too?" I said not really but I would take it, and so I was charged for that, and when the second fabric came to the same I said "no, not really" and she seemed very miffed. If I'm already having to buy 50cm of fabric I didn't really want, why would I want to by 80cm of fabric I don't want? You're still charging me $6 a metre for it. And you didn't even have any of the black I wanted in the first place, which means I'll ahve to have a hunt through the shed. It would be much easier for me to just bring in the tubs and start putting it all on the shelves I bought for that very purpose, but they are heavy, and I am lazy, and here are many many old episodes of Angel to watch instead.

Anyway, new fabrics.

The start of yet another blue and green quilt. Not that I have a usual quilt or anything.

I absolutely cannot justify these. Except that I like them.

The only DS fabric that I liked that we didn't have at the local spotlight. None of the other yellow ones were very nice.

Two batiks and a Michael Miller I would now have about 4 metres of, except, well, I can't find any of it.

Some stripey fat quarters. I don't have much stripe. And the orange is really pretty.

*This is why fat quarters are good. Lots of patterns use a fat quarter.

Whoops.

Not only did I not mean to stay out all of last night, I had my laptop and an emergency internet connection with me anyway, and I still didn't get around to blogging.

Basically, I'm campaigning for the award of bestest bestfriend ever, and it's hard work, at odd hours, and involves driving people places, yelling at boys, cuddles, making jelly shots, sitting on bedroom floors till 5am, movie marathons during power outages and cutting letters out of Lifestyle1 magazines at maccas to make ransom notes. If it becomes official, not only will I have a small trophy declaring me the bestest bestfriend in the world, I will also have a very impressive CV.

On the crafting front, I have chopped up all the strips to make the extra blocks to expand this quilt. And I'm kinda wishing I paid a bit more attention to how long it took me to strip piece the other half, because every time I strip piece a quilt I find myself wondering how much time I've actually saved. It feels like it's taking longer, since there's cutting and sewing and an extra thing of cutting again, but I suppose the time is saved in lining up the bits as you feed them into the sewing machine. I'd like some kind of mathematical proof though, so if anyone out there's willing to strip piece half a quilt and chain piece the other in the name of science, let me know.

Magnets

It's very difficult to take a photo of a frige with a shiny surface, did you know that? I should have just taken some photos of a couple sitting on my cutting mat, but I'm a really big fan of context, so bad fridge photos it is!

Ignoring the calendar, and Maddy's plasticine figures, some photos, a couple of drawings and some whiteboard markers, and down the bottom you have my last two night's worth of work. And I'm not even done yet - there's another 10 small ones still to do. The big ones are about half a metre, roughly 20 inches, long.

For those of you who are from overseas, those cows are actually the RM Williams logo, RM Williams being an Australian clothing and boot brand that is EVERYWHERE. Yes, All Caps everywhere. Locally, I would say you see this longhorn on the back of maybe one in ten cars. Of the six cars/utes in our family, five have a longhorn on the back. I only have RM jeans, a vest and a jumper, because they're quite pricey*, but I know people whose entire wardrobe consists purely of RM Williams stuff. And thanks to vistaprint, and the temporary sacrifice of the use of a fingertip (razorblades can hurt you even when they don't cut you - the pressure of pushing down on it for about 3 hours last night has left my fingertip bruised and raw) I have a fridge covered in them.

The other little square magnets say "I think your tractor's sexy" and "Save a horse, ride a Lawnmower" but they came pre-cut, and the others are all "rootin' in the back of the ute" ones - the three people who like this, facebook style, are apparently you, your sister and your mum. And hooray for quilting - I cut those with an old blade on my rotary cutter.

And now I have decided, and I'm sure this will end in abject failure, but I'm gunna try anyway, to go to bed. At 1am.

Wish me luck. I could be about to waste 3 useful hours of my life.


*admittedly, my jeans were $6 at the salvos and my vest was $20 on ebay. I bought the jumper new, but it's kids sized so it was half the price.

Distractions.

Blogger is chucking a hissy fit and insisting I'm not following any blogs. What a poo bum. So if you've done a post today, I'm sorry, I can't read it.

There's not much point reading this one either, since I haven't actually done anything tonight - well, anything sewing related. Today there was not one but two big boxes from Vistaprint and I've spent the last 3 hours cutting out shapes from a magnet with a razor blade. Those things are in serious need of a ergonomic redesign - my fingertips feel very strange, and it took me at least two dozen goes to get the lighter to work. Good news though, sheet magnet burns just fine, but I really need to empty out all the ash from the fireplace. I need to get one of those blades on a stick tomorrow, but the best I could come up with at midnight was a raid of Dad's shed. Lucky I have a wide range of cutting mats to use in conjunction, and I discovered that the back works better because it doesn't have all the little bumps and ditches caused by cutting on the same line over and over.

Now that The Thomas Crown Affair has finished, I'm gunna go to bed, and try to get up at a reasonable hour (by which I mean 11.30am instead of 2.30pm)

I have made progress...

And it feels good. It also felt very slow, because I was fussy cutting a repeat that wasn't printed straight. Not fun, so the progress I've made is barely enough to blog about, but I have cut wonky strips of birds into nice neat rectangles 20cm high by 45.5cm long. Took me just under an hour, and I must say, couldn't have done it without my awesome new 60cm ruler.

The birds are for the back of Helen's quilt, and while I had originally planned on doing something more random like my recent backs, I'm going to just make it a zigzag. 18.5cm of birds and 22.5cm of blue leaves on beige. Sound a bit dull, but it should look modern, classy and refined. That's what I'm telling myself anyway. If it does, fantastic, if it doesn't, I like the idea that Helen will like the front better on at least one of the quilts I've made that live at her house.

And then, because I'm a sucker who subscribes to newsletters put out by people who sell stuff I'm inclined to buy having merely been reminded of the shop's existence, I've bought another 7.5 yards of fabric from The Fabric Quarter. $18 for this lot of postage - no more flanelette, so it's flat-rate-envelopeable. $5 per yard, probably less depending how the dollar is feeling tomorrow afternoon.

I have a rule that says you're not allowed to buy something from a seller when the previous package you ordered hasn't arrived yet. If they continue to time their newsletters for the day after I get their package in the mail, I could end up buying a lot from these guys.