Is variety, the so called "spice of life", actually spicy enough that you don't need actual spices?

Or: How I learned that people without a functioning sense of smell probably shouldn't do cooking experiments on top of the fireplace.

We are nearly out of tomato sauce.

That might sound like a weird opening, but here's the thing: my body has an uncanny ability to crave whatever it is that we are running low on in the house. Want peanut butter on toast? No bread. Would give your left leg for a paddle pop? No ice-cream of an kind in any of the four freezers. If I'm having a hamburger (by which I mean a beef patty, and a bit of bread) I want tomato sauce with it. Ergo, tonight, midnight, I open the fridge, see a packet of mince, think "perfect, hamburger it is." Sure, the mince is one day after it's best before, but don't they play it safe with those things, surely you have a day or two extra, right?

Not only that, but it's winter (pretty much) now. The fire is lit. The fire, which gets super hot because it's 20 years old and all its insulating bricks have fallen out. The fire that, sometimes last year, I would cook a beef patty on, instead of having to wash a frypan.

Also, I decided to test that thing where, if you wrap a bottle of drink in some damp taper towel and put it in the freezer, it gets cold in 5 minutes. This will be an important part of the resolution to the story, even though it seems a bit random (ie. not as ominous as everything else Ive written so far) at this point in the story.

So I've decided to cook a burger on top of the fire. Normally I'd mix the mince with breadcrumbs and seasoning, but, well, I'm both hungry and lazy. And anyway, aren't Maccas burgers supposed to be all beef? If they don't need breadcrumbs, neither do I. So I squish the mince between some baking paper till it's flatish, carry it across the kitchen, and plop it onto the top of the fireplace.

It makes a satisfactory sizzling noise. There's a big bit of baking paper folded around it, but I've put the fold to the back so I can lift it up and have a look inside.

It appears to be browning in the correct fashion. But this is where the problem starts. Some beef juice is leaking out in the sizzling. This happens when I make stir-fry, but not when I cook myself a burger. Conclusion: the breadcrumbs are needed to soak up the juice so it doesn't leak everywhere. I get a spatula and try to hold up either side of the paper, so the juice will pool under the burger next to the crease and hopefully re-absorb into the burger.

I know very little about cooking. I now know more: I now know that this does not work.

When the underside appears to be sufficiently brown, I try to pick up the burger and flip it over, without letting the tiny, miniscule dribble of juice I expect to be leftover (ha!) come out the sides.

It doesn't work.

So now there's beef juice sizzling on the metal surface of the fireplace, and from the feel of it, there's still a fair bit of liquid in the baking paper. I carry it over to the sink, and drop down one corner. About 45 litres of liquid gushes out. My burger is half cooked. The baking paper is feeling a bit damp. I get another piece of baking paper, this time doing some foldy-origami type thing to the sides.

I take it back and cook the other side. The origami turns out to not be necessary: the fact that it's already managed to perform the scientific wonder of expelling 5 times as much liquid as it appeared to weigh (I too have done this, one morning when I was so hungover I peed for about 15 minutes) has left it quite dry now that it's time to cook the other side. And even more dry when I bring it over to the plate, and cut through it to make sure that it's cooked through.

I figure I should try clean the top of the still lit, still very hot fireplace, and fortunately, I have some frozen paper towel wrapped around a not-really-at-all-cold bottle of coke in the freezer. And it turns out that frozen paper towel does an alright job of cleaning the top of a hot fire, if by cleaning you mean wiping a few times in hope that it's making some sort of difference and also not getting burnt. I don't know if it's actually even slightly clean: I think the best way to tell will be to wait for someone to go "what's that smell?" since I, as ever, smell nothing. But the bottom of the now half sizzling, half frozen paper towel is a bit brown, as it would be had it cleaned up some well-cooked beef juice, so I figure, job well done.

Having given cleaning the top of the fire a, excuse the pun, red hot go, I go to the cupboard to get some sauce to have with my burger, and discover what you have known from the beginning; that all 4 bottles of sauce in the cupboard have just a tiny dreg in the bottom, which will only come out, accompanied by little fart noises, with a good deal of shaking and squeezing. There simply isn't enough sauce to cover the fact that my burger is a dried out, shriveled up blob of blandness, that may or may not have been fit for human consumption before I even got it out of the fridge.

I chop it up into little bits and put it in the dog's bowl, and eat my piece of bread, unsure how exactly I made it to the point where I am considered an actual grown up human being.

In conclusion, it's probably a better idea to just use regular herbs and spices, than to decide that cooking in a way you haven't done in about 8 months is going to be enough to make your dinner edible. Also, if you've been putting off writing a blog post for about 3 months because you know that it will be your 900th, and you want to make it worthwhile, maybe it's just better to do something so stupid that it deserves the spelling stoopid, and blog about that instead.

P.S. I just went to the kitchen and the dog appears to have eaten it. I guess it can't have been BAD bad, since his nose (I assume) would be able to tell the difference.

OhMyGodMail!

So one of my best friends is getting married in about 5 weeks, and since she's a short arse, she decided that us bridesmaids could all wear flats while she wore heels. I'm cool with this, since heels at a wedding pretty much inevitably mean either strappy ones or pumps, and I try to stick to boots when it comes to heels. But looking around the mount and a few shopping days in Adelaide hadn't turned up anything, so I had a look on ebay and found these.

I'd ordered them about a week ago and today when there was two blue parcel cards in my post office box I just assumed that, because I hadn't made it to the post office on friday, they'd accidentally just put one in both days. But no. As well as a little pink box of shoes, there was also a big brown box.

With cookies!

And gold lame fabric! And a crocheted snowflake, but I forgot to take a photo and yeah, I'm blogging from bed. But it was white and waaaay more symmetrical than any of my misguided attempts last year.

And it had come all the way from Thea in California! There was a card in there saying that she had thought of the gold fabric for my rock star-looking jacket from ages ago, but I'm not sure that it has enough stretch for the elbows so I think I might make myself a badass new pub bag with it. I might even use some studs on it. And a fierce, chunky chain link strap.

It might take me a while to get to though, because it feels as if I'll be spending the next five weeks in the lead up to the wedding making ties. Because I'm working in the afternoons when the other bridesmaids could help out with making invites and table decorations and so on, and also because I'm the only one that can sew, I agreed to make the ties for the boys in the satin to match our dresses. It's taken some trial and error with patterns and interfacing and such, but I've got my patterns sorted and now I've just got to work through the hours and hours of handsewing that the damn things need*.

I may resume quilting in a procrastinatory rebellion.

*I only need to make 5 regular ties, two boys ties and a baby tie, but blergh, they're so boring.

Getting high, every night, with every single, every loving girl in sight...

Someone pointed out to me the other day how silly it is that they're called "roofies" when they make you fall on the floor. Nonetheless, Kelsie's Free Candy and Roofie Lexia party is tomorrow night, so while Casey was working on a pedo-van cake, I decided to make some roofies.

Now, obviously, they're not actual date-rape roofies. This isn't Breaking Bad, it's an 18th birthday party. But my original plan, which was to just give everybody Splenda tablets, was derailed by the fact that artificial sweeteners taste like shit. So I needed something else. And I decided I wanted them to be nice and obvious - both obviously there and also obviously not-actual-roofies.

Solution - basically tiny, tiny pavlovas. Beat a whole lot of icing sugar into an egg white, pipe out little pellets onto some baking paper, put another piece of baking paper on top, bake it as low as the oven will go for 5 minutes, and voila - roofies.

Some of them got a bit burnt, but they still taste fine. And about 5 times as many as are here (that's a 125ml tub, about half full) decided to sortof implode as they were cooking, so they got et already. And I made another batch where I didn't put the second piece of paper on the top, hoping that that would reduce the implosions. It did, but since their tops weren't flattened out they look kinda droplet-shaped. Still, much like the ones that imploded, they're still a delicious sugar hit.

For the record, the don't dissolve, and they float. This, combined with the fact that they give you a sugar high as opposed to causing anterograde amnesia means that anyone hoping to actually date-rape someone is going to be hugely disappointed. The effect they have is more like that time we went around one high-school lunchtime with a box of sugar cubes and a heap of those sugar-sachet-sticks. Everyone's gunna get super excited and then need a lie down.

Well, it's an 18th party, they'll be doing that anyway.

Come at me, Carbs.

Why do they call the spaghetti that takes 8 minutes to cook "instant" spaghetti? That's not instant, that's eight minutes. There's 8 minutes of difference there. And when you want carbs NOW, 8 minutes is a lifetime. A lifetime in which I eat a whole lot of parmesan cheese. When I cook myself spaghetti, I cook less than a normal person would, not because I have the stomach capacity of a small child, but because I ruin my appetite on fake powdered cheese beforehand. But it's important that I have the real fake parmesan cheese, the Kraft one. Someone filled one of the real jars with the cheap stuff and thought I wouldn't notice. But the other day I was staring in the cupboard and there was a jar of cheese there and I had some and it was all wrong. So I knew today that I had to buy more, thankfully. Having fake fake cheese would have ruined my night completely.

I hereby declare Wednesday to be non sequitur day!

Today I decided I would sit outside for an hour. I did, I finished a book, and I made a point of breathing in and out quite hard. It didn't really help with anything, but I felt better for having done it. Having asthma and a nose that doesn't really work very well I don't consider myself to be particularly good at breathing, and I'm an inside/nighttime person too so I don't get much fresh air either. By Mt Gambian winter standards the weather today was quite nice, and since I'm still off work, I figured I'd go for it.

The nice doctor man made me wait for 40 minutes and pay him $60 so that he could tell me that I do actually have laryngitis, and to give me a piece of paper that made a giant robot pharmacist poop out a little bottle of pills for me. Apparently my voice should be back by Saturday, which means I have to go back to work on Saturday.

I'll probably be crazy by then. Weirdly, even my inner monologue appears to have lost it's voice. I'm talking to myself, mentally, soooo much less than I normally do. I'm freaking myself out with the awkward silences between me and me.

I appear to be quite badly allergic to shar-pei fur. A friend had hers out tonight and I ended up with a rash all up my forearms when I carried it to the car. Sucks, cause it's cute as.

Mixed Berry Mini-Wheats are a huge disappointment. I lived on the Strawberry ones in year 12, but they got discontinued and I had to switch to blackberry. The mixed berry ones only just showed up at our store, and I was toats excited, but the flavour is a bit too... If I say warm, that makes no sense. The blackberry flavour is sharper and stronger. The mixed berry one reminds me of juice that's been out of the fridge too long. It let me down.

It's hard to find graph paper this time of year, and Maddy "borrowed" most of my stash, leaving me none with which to design a nicely balanced wrapped-candy block, or calculate sweet, sweet maths to make it.

I had a go with some lined paper and a pencil, but I think the centre box needs to be a bit bigger - I don't want it to go all the way to the edge though, possibly if I had half sized squares I'd go to the next one out. And I don't know how to assemble it yet, or what colours to use. Graph paper is magical, and it would have the answers for me.

I need to find some graph paper.

The good in the bad.

So I woke up today with a terrible hangover. Some might say that it was karma from getting a really annoying advertising jingle stuck in the heads of my entire facebook friends list, and maybe they're right. Some problems, when shared, are multiplied instead of halved.

Anyway, once I finally achieved verticality (it was a real struggle) I cooked some homemade chips which, naturally, gave me horrible indigestion. From headachey and nauseous to crippling heartburn in under an hour. Thank god for Quick Eze, which is so much more than just a one-day favourite thing. Quick Eze has saved my life many, many times, and I'm so grateful for its existence. A world without Quick Eze is a world in which I would not wish to live.

Similarly, a world with only one like per Friday isn't for me either, so, keeping with the theme, I'd like to honour my hungover shirt. Yes, that's right, I have a shirt especially for being hungover in. It's a mens shirt I got for $5 from Kmart (actually, I have two of them the same) and it always seems to end up in my morning after bag for BnS balls, and so, whenever I feel hungover, and I look in my cupboard, it's the thing I pull out. it's big and comfy and still looks very good on me, even when I'm struggling to stand. It's awesome.

As is my new method of cooking beef burgers - squish the mince between some baking paper and sit them on the top of the fire. Flip them over and once it's cooked through, eat. With lots of tomato sauce, because that's the whole reason for having beef burgers. I don't know that it would work on many fires other than ours, which pumps out a stupid amount of heat because all the insulating bricks in it have disintegrated after 20 years, but for me at least, it's quick, doesn't dirty a frypan and there's less grease in it. It's a good thing about winter, finally, though I'm also loving the sound of the rain tonight.

Great? Great.

You know what's awesome? Rekorderlig fruit ciders. Well, having to type/pronounce the brand name is tough, but they're alcoholic deliciousness. I usually go with the Strawberry and Lime one. It tastes like warm strawberries, like a roadtrip to the strawberry farm in Portland and a $160 speeding fine. And they're $7 a bottle, so it's not to far off of that. And the Wild Berries one goes great with a Cherry Ripe. Which is great, because Cherry Ripes are great too.

And books. Books are great because even when you've had a couple, you can still read. Well, I can still read. I suppose it depends on how much, but I've not had so much that I can no longer read. But I've had enough that I can't really sew, or chochet, just now. So trashy romance novels (Molly Harper - love your work) cider and chocolate it is. Thursday nights are awesome.

Whoops.

Apparently these have some kind of special name, but all they are is two layers of puff pastry, cut into sticks (though there were two round ones in there; I think someone may have been making cheese tarts), brushed with milk, sprinkled with sugar and put in the oven for a bit.

And this tub was full when I got home from the gym about 3 hours ago. I feel ashamed. And quite bloated.

Yes, yes we do.

Do other people do this? As the crocheting gets longer, so it doesn’t get more and more twisted with every time you change direction, you roll it up and loop another bit of yarn through it.

If I were a biscuit, I wouldn't be in the sweet or savoury sections. I'd be in the section with the smart cookies :P

Okay, maybe smart cookies wouldn't stay up till 5am crocheting and watching DVD commentaries. But that's only because cookies are inanimate objects, without brains, and therefore have no concept of DVDs or commentaries. Smart is relative. And cookies are delicious. Even though this is Australia, and we call them biscuits.

Wine, Cheese and True Blood night

It's 5am, I'm in the pleasant place between tipsy and drunk, and I just wanna tell you all how much I love breadsticks, and that the choice between them and Ritz crackers and cheese is easy, (not that I don't love Ritz crackers and cheese) whereas the choice between Bill, Sam and Eric is hard. I know that 3 days ago I was in love with Bill, but a couple of hours ago I was in love with Sam, and then about a half an hour ago it was Godric (he's dead now) and now it's Eric, who, weirdly, looks a lot like Keith Urban sometimes.

As you can probably tell, Wine, Cheese and True Blood night is going well. Except for the bit where I've concluded I really need to stop trying to drink rosé, cause it tastes horrible, and switched to cider instead.

Whoop, in love with Sam again. I love being fickle for fictional fellas. And that's practically a tongue twister :)

I, anosmic.

Sometimes, like, that moment when you realise you might have blown out the flame when you shut the door of the oven 10 minutes ago when you checked on your food, but the gas has probably still been pumping through the whole time, but you're not sure if it has or not, and you've turned it off but now you're not game to turn it back on since the oven door's been open long enough for it to all waft out, so you won't re-light it in case the whole damn house explodes, and your food's still only half cooked, and you're getting seriously hungry but you're gunna wait yet another 10 minutes before you even turn the oven on... Sometimes, I wish I had a sense of smell.

A random blog post about random things, randomly.

Yesterday, I ate an entire block of Cadbury Peppermint chocolate, except for two squares, which I put next to my computer screen, because that meant that I hadn't eaten a whole block.

I used to subscribe to Fat Quarterly, but after about a half dozen issues I decided it was a bit to cliquey* for my liking, especially since instead of being popular and planning the yearbook and the graduation ceremonies, I was off getting drunk in the arts buildings with the teachers. That's why I'm a big fan of GenQ now - because I suspect they would have been too. I put some money into their Kickstarter so my first issue is on the way, but in the meantime they have a challenge up - a few squiggly lines they want people to turn into a block - it's like Mr Squiggle but with fabric! And instead of Blackboard going "Oh hu-rry up..." we've got my mum going (at 4am) "God, haven't you gone to bed yet?"

Admittedly, they just wanted a block design, but that didn't take long, and I can't stand a hypothetical** so I did the maths and made it. I don't even know if it's actually submittable yet (I put pink both sides of one of the lines they had drawn, but there is still a seam there, which I think counts) so I'm not gunna post a whole picture: instead...

Trimmings are one of the prettiest things I throw into the bin.

I took a photo of this seam because it looks brilliant, and you'd never guess that the other 3 are horrible.

That's my two pinks next to one another. I could have made one of them orange, but I didn't want to. A well matched pink, yellow green and blue is all that it needs.

McDonald's have fish at the moment, to celebrate the Olympics. Just say no.

My leg has gone to sleep, before the rest of me has even gotten undressed for bed. Stupid leg.
 

*The Wikipedia article on cliques is fascinating, and I don't care that it says I am misusing the word.

**There was a TV show way back when on the ABC called Hypotheticals. I really liked that show, but that's the exception.

PingPingPing

I'm just really really having a lovely night. I was going to do my favourite things friday, because I'm feeling so good, but I'm worried that by trying to quantify it, I'd end up losing it, so I wont.

I should also point out that that I've been downing sprinkles at a ferocious rate tonight - I tip them from the packet into an empty tic tac container, and then straight into my mouth.

It's heaps fun, I've had 4 containers worth tonight, my teeth all spontaneously fell out and I'm pinging so hard on a sugar high; now I'm just waiting for the soon-to-hit comedown at which point I will immediately fall asleep.

Gotta say, its cheaper than wine, and it tastes waaaaay nicer. It's 83% sugar, in case you were wondering. And rainbow.

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.

Favourite things (in bold)

Friday! It's a pretty good day, what with how I usually don't have to work and all, and today it was my last day off till next Saturday, and since I'm driving to Adelaide then, and back the next day, I'm not sure that it counts, so it kinda felt like today was going to be my last day off in forever.

But I got to go see this guy again.

And if I had to pick one actual favourite, it would probably be him. But I don't want my pseudo-nephew to grow up in a world where he can only have one favourite thing, so let's have more.

In honour of our hostess with the mostest, I'm going to go with some very mundane things;

The scroll button on my mouse. It is the unsung hero of all the input keys. While everyone's all rightclick/leftclick/spacebar/enter I'm just leisurely scrolling up and down. Using a mouse without one is horrible, and I feel that laptops would be greatly improved if they had one as well.

Those pop-up lids on drink bottles. You can open the drink with only one hand. And your mouth, obviously. But rarely am I laying on my other mouth. And they're less likely to spill all down the side of your face.

Little watchband adjuster tools. So much easier than trying to shove a pin into the little holes with a pair of pliers.

Chocolate Croissants. Croissants, with chocolate bits on top, and chocolate ganache inside. $2.40 from the bakery section at woolies.

Don's Salami. I don't know why it's so much better than Han's, but it is.

Getting your waxing done by a friend instead of a professional stranger, because the converstion is much better.

Having really long showers on days when it rains, because that's the whole point of having a rainwater tank.

CD burners. Remember when, to make a mix tape, you had to do it in real time? I do, but thankfully only barely.

Finding a fabric at lincraft that you've been looking fo the likes of on ebay for months.

Paying half price for it.

Favourite Things Everywhere

A couple of nights ago I paired together a four-patch block with a quarter-square-triangle block (is that its actual name?) and quite liked the results. And today before work I picked 4 colours on my Kona Card (Pear, Mango, Peacock and Taupe) and did some very basic preliminary maths, figuring that I could get a baby quilt from 50cm of each and a decent lap quilt from 75cm of each. And then, because it was Thursday late night shopping, I went to Spotlight in my meal break. And they had 50% off all their quilting fabric (till Sunday, apparently).

I'm putting favourite things in bold. It's 5am Friday now, and that seems Friday enough for me.

I only got 50cm each of the solids I picked, and the green is the only one that comes close to it's Kona counterpart. The orange is more melon-y, the blue more aqua-y and the grey - well, taupe is a light brown.

Back at work tonight, and I got some huge angst going on over my quilt math. How do you calculate how much bigger you need to make a square if you're going to make it into quarter square triangles and sew them back together? Is it two lots of your diagonal seam width (because if you did a half square triangle, and then did it again in the opposite direction, wouldn't it get the same amount smaller both times?) or is it only one (because each seam is measured one way, just like they are with the regular four patch?)

Turns out it's only once (yay knowledge!) but I only found that out by actually doing it, and having all my blocks be 1.8cm too big. But I took a pretty picture of my trimmings with Instagram.

Doesn't it look like delicious, rainbow linguine?

Because I got held up trimming, (and also with reliving the music of 1999 on youtube) I didn't get all my blocks sewn together, which is why in this photo, none of the points appear to match up. My batting should fit exactly to the top once it's all joined together, but at the moment, it needs 6cm of overlapping.

I'm calling it Every Which Way because even though they're not technically arrows, they kinda look like them. And once I see one of them as an arrow, I start seeing them all as arrows, pointing in every direction. I just don't know what good stuff they're telling me to pay attention to next.

Based upon the position of this on the floor in the lounge, the green is pointing to the kitchen, where today I ate some delicious chicken rice, the grey is pointing to the couch, where tonight after work I had garlic bread and watched the season final of New Girl, and the blue points to my bedroom, where I'm currently sitting on my bed eating some cadbury fingers.

Maddy (little sister) claims the white ones "changed her life" which is probably a bit superlative, but I will admit, they make my tongue very happy.

And there's a slew of things to keep the rest of me happy while my tongue's occupied, from books on my phone to clicky pens to nail clippers to funny, funny tumblrs.

Sometimes, the internet makes me cross.

I've never liked tumblr. Not only is it spelt dumb, but a lot of people who use it pretend like they're actual bloggers, when really, all they're doing is re-posting pictures they've found on other tumblrs, with occasional twitter-length posts about how they don't have girlfriends. Yes, there are some brilliant ones out there (if you can read textfromdog with a straight face, I will send you stash) but so much of it just an endlessly reposted waste of server space.

Nonetheless, tonight I got one, because, as I mentioned the other day, Instagram doesn't like Picasa, and since it makes me cross when other people spam up my facebook news feed with Instagram, I'd not only have to get a sword, but also fall on it, if I started doing it too. So it was a choice between Tumblr and Twitter, and since Twitter falls off the face of the internet after a fortnight, I went with the longer lasting of two evils.

And longer is right. It's taken me 45 minutes to get it set up and the first picture loaded. And all I wanted to do was show everybody a picture of my empty box of chocolate.

Gah. What a hassle. 45 minutes is almost half again on the time it took me to do tonight's project.

I suppose the proper name for it would be a pram quilt, or a car-seat quilt, but since they are both a bit dull, I'm going to call it a quiltlet. It's a bit under 50x75cm, so it's about a sixth the size of my usual quilts, and I just sewed around the edges and turned it right side out before quilting it, so no binding.

It's also got polyester batting, something I'd never used before. Spotlight had all their bags of precut poly batting for $3.99 last week, so I bought 3 queen sized ones, figuring I could use them for bags, or for cushion covers, or just let Maddy use them for her quilting endeavours. But I'd also used it under the lattice quilt, so I could take some photos without the darkness of the lino underneath, and so that I could roll it up without getting creases in the top, and the trimmings were the right width, so I went for it. I was only using random bits from the stash, and I told myself I wasn't going to spend more than 2 hours on it (all up, including cutting, it took an hour and 45 minutes) so I figured, even if I turned out horrible, it wouldn't be too much of a waste.

I haven't washed it yet but it seems okay - I suspect it will be a bit loftier than cotton, but I'm cool with that. It's a bit less clingy, obviously, but for something this sixe, I'm happy so far. The actual design of this one is very blah, but I might churn out some nicer ones for the facebook page.

Favourite things 5am Saturday

I had hoped to be able to get the tutorial for the Lattice quilt up tonight, but after I finished it, about an hour ago, I got a bit distracted by the all important staring-at-the-quilt-top-thinking step. It's still my favourite thing this week, but without a tutorial to go with it. Tomorrow night, hopefully.

I'm also loving Instagram, since it's hard to take nice photos of quilts at night in the kitchen. But I don't see why it can't just upload the pictures to Picasa - I know that one's owned by Facebook and the other by Google, but I think we should just all be friends.

I love it when I work out the maths well enough that there's very little wastage from my cutting. The pale blue of the background fabric started as a 1.8 metre (2 yards) cut, and that little pile was all the scrap leftover, including (mainly, in fact) selvedges and squaring up.

I love, partway through the pinning, realising, without intending to, exactly how much you would need to make this quilt using layer cakes. Answer - not much (34 neutral squares, 18 prints. The border would be narrower and the whole thing scaled up, obviously, but the only cutting would be the printed fabrics in half, 3 neutrals into quarters and 6 neutrals into HSTs, and then trimming it all square.)

I love a stripy binding.

I love now knowing how to crochet, even if, honestly, I don't find myself loving the crochet itself.

I love peppermint hedgehog logs, even if they make my arms hurt to roll them, and they look like poo.

I love the way the hands on my watch glow in the dark.

I love boiled potato with chicken salt. And a cold coke.

I love my electric blanket.

I love other stuff too, but I'm too tired to remember it.

Life lesson #576

If you eat about a bowl and a half of coconut while making peppermint rolls at about midnight, you'll still be awake at 6am, running back and forth to the loo.

Seriously, why do old people bother with prunes? Coconut tastes much nicer.

Favourite Things 5am Saturday

And so, It's a quarter to 5 Saturday morning again. I really need to start going to bed earlier.

Oh well, tonight at least I didn't waste, because I made a backing for a forgotten quilt top.

It's very bright. I wasn't planning on doing something this bright, but it was bulk stash, and it doesn't matter as long as I'm finishing things and using up stash. Also, loving the warm fuzzy feeling of achievement. But that might just be indigestion. I'd forgotten too how much everyone liked the pink pavement quilt top.

Also, loving the $10 spotlight vouchers, especially the fact that you can use them 4 times over the 4 days. Today, I bought 10 fat quarters, already reduced to $2 each, so with the voucher it came to $1 each. Then, I doubled the size of the bundle with stash stuff.

I think I'll use this to make another of those random-rectangles-arranged-into-squares-done-up-in-a-basket-weave-type-design-and-set-on-point quilts. And maybe think up a better name for it.

Also this week I've been loving nuts and dried apricot, but when I say dried I mean really dried. Dried apricots on their own are nowhere near dry enough, and I have to come up with a way to make them as dry as the little bits of apricot in the mini snack boxes.

Kellogs mini-wheats are now only available in blackcurrant, but they're still quite delish too. Strawberry was better though.

Magnets of course, remain awesome. They always, always will.

But really, my absolute favourite thing this week (and last week too actually) would probably be bacon. Bacon is delicious, and quick, and easy, and I particularly like it in the middle of the night when I get home from work.