It's working... *cries*

 

Two weeks ago, a man from telstra called my mum and told her that he could upgrade her internet plan. We were going to be getting 500gig of internet a month, at higher speeds, and a bonus free wireless dongle to use if we were away from home.

What we actually got was a 75 hour internet dropout and a new, separate phone bill for $30p/month for the wifi dongle. Data usage not included.

I've spent the last 3 days either on the phone to tech support or waiting for them to call me back. Someone today finally told us that the upgrade was actually a cancellation of the old plan and a commencement of a new one, so all our usernames and passwords were different, and that got us back online for all of 10 minutes (basically, enough to say thankyou so very much, we love you, bye and for it to die again) before the modem went aargh, I can't cope with ADSL2+ I don't wanna and gave up.

Tonight I borrowed a modem from Steven and smashed the keyboard until it took pity on me and worked. I tearfully hugged my mother and she went to bed (it was 3am by this point. She was working at the pub tonight) and I moved it all to my room and smashed the keyboard again until it all started working down here as well.

I'm so over tech support. And I still don't know what a DNS is, or why it was so hard for all these things to find it, but I don't care right now.

I need to cut back.

Since I've been spending *cough* about 4 hours a day on tumblr lately, I got to thinking about how my blog would be different if it was there.

Obviously, tumblr's a very picture-heavy place and I'm not much of a picture person. Small, cluttered bedrooms and an almost entirely nocturnal existence (afternoons, when I'm at work, obviously don't count) don't make for a whole lot of good photos. And quilts don't work well as gifs, static, 2D things they are.

I think my thoughts better in words or numbers but I like seeing other people's thoughts and ideas as visuals. I could happily read a million words but pictures (and even more so, gifs) make things so much more fun.

And the love... Oh, the love. I love to love the love. I love shipping stuff and going down with this ship and mashing two people's names together once they're a couple (My car, Taylor, just got a boyfriend, Harry... Tarry! My OTP*!)

I love the confessions posts and I especially love all the Texts From Last Night posts. I love feels and saying "right in the feels" and "I don't know what my feels are feeling."

On the other hand, tumblr is just a whole lot of people posting other people's stuff. For the most part, it's little more than a handy aggregation service, and even though people are pretty good about linking back, so much of it is the same stuff over and over and over. The fact that blogger/wordpress/livejournal aren't re-bloggable is something that I'm glad of. There's a lot of fantastic original content on tumblr, but, with the exception of a few shitty content thieves, pretty much everything in the quilting/sewing/crafting blogosphere is original content.

Speaking of original content, I haven't been making much of anything lately (a four hour a day tumblr habit being a big contributing factor there) So I'm gunna ease up on posting here every day. I've got other blogs to post non-crafty stuff on, so I'm not gunna force myself to write filler. I think it'd be better off for everyone if I put that effort into forcing myself to sew.

*Actually, I think my OTP (One True Pairing) is probably my last car, BJ (a Ford Mondeo), and his then-girlfriend Vroom (a Ford Laser, basically the next size model down). They were together for two years, Vroom's owner working similar shifts to me at Woolies. We would park them next to one another and talk about how one day they might have a little navy blue (they both were) Ka (the supercompact). This was before Tumblr though, so they didn't have a mashup name.

Genius.

Today at work, I saw a lady wearing skinny trackies. It was a revelation. Trackies fabric, skinny jeans cut. How genius. I have tracky fabric, it's what I've been making my jackets out of. I have a pair of skinny jeans that were in too bad a condition to give to the salvos, or I did until I chopped them up for a pattern tonight. I haven't actually made them yet, because the big bad internet got in the way, but I have hopes. They are on my tomorrow to-do list, along with not drowning in the puddles in the yard. It's been a bit moist out tonight.

#Shameless

So I've been thinking about maybe having myself a Shameless Saturday this weekend. Not that it would entail any of the kinds of things one might think something called Shameless Saturday should entail, on account of the fact that I still have only the barest of voices and a tendency to explode into an asthma attack as soon as I get too warm/cold/thirsty/horizontal - no, my Shameless Saturday would be a facebook thing, where, just like I did with First World Problems Night, I'd post a status of something I have no shame about every hour or so.

Stuff like:

Just spent 3 hours looking at cute animals on BuzzFeed. #shameless
 
Sniper bid yet another dress I don't need from someone who probably really wanted it on ebay. #shameless

I bulk buy huge amounts of chocolate when it's cheap and hide it from my family. #shameless

Haven't cleaned out my handbag since I bought it. #shameless

I mainly watch True Blood for the nudity. But only because the plots this season have been so ridiculous. #shameless


Or, here's some ones about sewing:

Sometimes, I quilt with polyester thread. #shameless

I hardly ever trim my blocks. #shameless #lazy

I never follow the instructions on a dressmaking pattern. #shameless

I don't press my seams, I iron them. #shameless

I sew over my pins. #shameless #hardcore

All of this was, of course, inspired by someone tweeting "Leg hair don't care" which is the kind of brilliant succinctity I wish I could master. I've spent a whole blog post wishing I could sum myself up in 4 words or less. #irony

It's a linkathon!

I'm getting kinda used to this whole feeling like crap thing now, but it's getting incredibly boring. So I went into town today, but after 5 minutes in Spotlight I was completely buggered and went back to my car for a sit down. I guess that's the most of it now; coughing, with a whole heap of lethargy.

So, what's a girl to do with her complete lack of energy but audition tumblrs to go onto her dashboard?

I've mentioned before that I hesitated on getting a tumblr until instagram forced me to. So much of tumblr is just the work of others endlessly reposted and I'd much prefer hang out where the content is user-generated. So I only followed three blogs, textfromdog, which I've mentioned numerous times and believe to be utter, utter genius, hungoverowls, which, for me at least, is insanely relateable, and truebloodsims, where someone has recreated the characters from True Blood in Sims2, and gets them to do amusing things.

But, for whatever reason, if you're not following at least four tumblrs, it shows random posts on your dashboard. And sometimes they're interesting, but other times they're weird and/or depressing, so I figured I'd better round out my fill, and a night with no energy to to anything but lay about on my bed seemed like the perfect opportunity. A couple of best lists pointed me in the right direction, and I thought I'd share the couple I picked, since they're pretty damn awesome.

The first one is Animals Talking in AllCaps. As they say in their tagline, it's just what it sounds like. It's kinda like Walk on the Wildside but with photos instead of video. It can take a bit of getting used to reading allcaps, but once I did I read through about 30 pages of this.

The second is Dads are the Original Hipsters. Now, I love hipsters. If I was a city native, I would totally be a hipster. I love the Mullet:Hipster or Redneck flowchart, even though I possibly wouldn't go as far as a mullet, but I've always been resentful that my 20/20 vision means I can't wear cute glasses, and I love my skinny jeans, and flannelette shirts, obviously. What's more, there's dozens of photos of my dad I could submit to this site, since he spent the late 70s and 80s in a sea of lush, wavy hair, trucker caps, tight v-neck tees and stonewash denim. And he had a stunning mustache. But, as with Hungover Owls and Animals talking in AllCaps, it's the captions that really make this one. I think I might buy the book.

This though, I won't buy, since I can make one myself. A like oven mitt. Genius!

serblerghfnek.

An evening spent trying to install Windows and all it's associated important drivers and connections and programs and the thirteen-disk monstrosity that is the Sims2 suite has left my brain in a small pile of mush. Also, note the use of the word trying - it hasn't been a great success. Windows was fine, I've done it enough times now that I can do it in my sleep, but it's on a quite old computer, without a whole lot of power, and I'm not sure if the USB drives are all working or not, and I can't get the modem to work, and without that I'm struggling to do much of anything, since I need to hope I'm downloading the right thing when I get it on my laptop and obviously in places I'm not, because it's just not coming together. So I'm giving up and going to bed, since I have to go back to work tomorrow.

I finished hand sewing the binding to the holiday quilt though, so I did at least achieve something today.

Heyyyyyy...

Before I begin, I'd just like to point out that the tumblr logo is essentially the facebook logo upside down, and I put tumblr next to facebook on my bookmarks bar when I noticed this just so I could look more closely at the two together, and now whenever I go looking for tumblr, I can never remember where it is.


Aaaaanyway. Stonerollers is in less than two weeks (squee) and, just like for the last 3 balls, my friend Anna has been saying she will buy a swag and come. She came to Harrow, but without a swag, and simply attending a ball will not earn you a quilt. If I love you enough, you get a quilt just for being generally pretty awesome (usually for your birthday, but sometimes for christmas.) If I just like you, the rules are: Baby or swag. That's it. And if I don't like you, it matters neither how many babies you squeeze out of your lady bits nor how many swags you buy: no quilt for you.

Since the purchase of a swag has been long intended by Anna, so has the making of this quilt been long intended by me. I found some bundles of pink batik and blogged them so long ago I can't find them online, and for her birthday I trimmed them down to squares and used the offcuts to piece a pillowcase, but the squares have just sat on the shelf waiting for her to get a swag, so I know how big the quilt will need to be. I think mine is about 100x180cm - long and skinny. But as swags come in different sizes, so too should their quilts.

What's more, the fabrics are all a bit same-y. There's mottled pink, pink with pink swirls, pink with blue swirls, pink with rainbow swirls, pink with rainbow square swirls, pink with rainbow lines... And I can't really come up with a design, so much as a jumble of similar pink fabrics.

So, what I'm thinking is maybe I'll add some strips of rainbow piecing. I've had these mottled solids in my stash for a while now, and I figure if I just cut a couple of strips from the end I'll be able to make a couple of nice little bits of spectrum to break it up a bit. I've got real solids too (the ones up the side) but I like it all being motley.

In more random news, the Vogue/McCalls pattern website is having an amazing sale, $3.50/$1.50 a pattern respectively. I bought seven and the postage to Australia was $25, but these are patterns that retail for $25 EACH here. I plan on making myself this in black, and going around looking super badass, maybe fighting some crime, or maybe just scissor kicking people in the face, because, in my mind at least, that's what you do when you're badass.

But the pants... I'll pass on the pants. They're a bit too genie for me.

And done...

A slight tummy ache was all the excuse I needed tonight to spend 3 hours looking at dresses on ebay and funny e-cards on the rest of the internet.

For those of you who don't know, most of the e-cards floating around the internet these days are a solid colour background, a drawn black and white image to the right and an amusing/smarmy/condescending/relatable message or statement to the left. Kinda like this.

I figure it's because once facebook actually existed, you didn't need to email someone a card any more. E-cards were just a stopgap between real cards and writing on someone's wall. I suppose it's ironic then that so may of them end up being liked on facebook.

Anyway, since Shay and I were discussing my drinking, I made myself this.

So, I guess the internet is complete now...

Naw, damn...

I've been in a bit of a quilting rut lately, and since even though Comic Con's over, the internet is still getting fuller every day with interesting new videos and articles, any attempts at having a play around at designing something new in Paint got repeatedly sidetracked by my "maybe I'll just check google's new video feed..." attitude.

So I broke out the graph paper and textas. After a couple of goes with nothing lining up I got the sizes of the rectangles sorted so that the edges of any potential quilt would be fairly level, and went to colour it in, and was doing the very bottom right hand corner...

And fucked up the colouring. On Paint I could just ctrl+z and then make the bottom corner rectangle pink, and then colour in the white square green, but in real life, I don't even have wite-out...

Also, to make it without doing T seams, you'd need to put a seam through the centre of the rectangles, and I don't want to do that (nor do I want to do T seams) so unfortunately, I can't actually make it either.

Still, it's kinda pretty.

Maybe...

I've finally gotten the hang of the middle of a crochet circle, though the necessary rate of increase is still a mystery to me. I haven't got the hang of a centre square yet (I just back and forth crocheted a square, and then went around it) but I'm feeling confident in my statement that for a treble stitched square, you need six on the corner.

I could be wrong though, because I've decided, just for shits and gigs, to not seek the wisdom of the internets. I'm going to do this the hard way, mainly because the internet is too busy keeping me updated on all the spoilers from Comic Con.

The good, the bad and the shiny...

The good: New episodes of True Blood drop on Mondays in Australia (since we're a day ahead of America) and drunk Sookie was brilliant but, even more importantly, this is the week when I get a new episode of White Collar! The only way this could get better is if someone could put Magic Mike on the internets for me.


The bad: Tonight, in the car, on the way home, The Dance* by Garth Brooks came on. And though those who know about all the ex-boyfriend weirdness that's been going on might think that my having a little cry to myself was to do with that, it wasn't. You only get one Garth song, and he got Friends in Low Places*. The Dance was how I felt about Honeycat, and tonight I found myself missing her. I guess the fact that I spend more time hanging out with the yabby than the dog means I need a pet of my own.

The shiny: On Thursday I went to Target to get a couple of things, and while I was there I saw a little boy, maybe 5 years old, and his RM Williams belt buckle was bigger and shinier than my RM Williams belt buckle (admittedly, mine is also a kids one) and when I was a bit tipsy on Thursday night I was thinking to myself "well, that just will not do". So I went on the internets and found this one. And it is big and very very shiny. Admittedly, I need to find a belt to go with it, but that shouldn't be too hard. Probably quite expensive, but not actually difficult.

*...for a moment all the world was right, how could I have known, that you'd ever say goodbye? And now, I'm glad I didn't know, the way it all would end, the way it all would go... Our lives are better left to chance; I could have missed the pain, but I'd have had to miss the dance...


**...well, I guess I was wrong, I just don't belong, but then, I've been there before; Everything's all right, I'll just say goodnight and I'll show myself to the door... Hey, I didn't mean, to cause a big scene, just give me an hour and then, well I'll be as high as that ivory tower, that you're livin' in...

If you insist, universe.

So lets say you had planned to spend the night making a pattern for a raincoat from one of your favourite hoodies, but then you couldn't find a tape measure. You'd be all "oh no, my night is ruined, I can't do this without a tape measure (sad face)"

But it's okay... I have the perfect solution...

Just spend the night looking at funny pictures on the internet instead. You know you want to. Take it as a sign from the universe. It wants you to do this. That's why it hid your tape measures.

Plus, Batdog.

Achievement?

For the first time since we upgraded to 200 gig of internet a month, about 6 months ago, I've actually hit my cap. 22 whole hours before it resets. I'm gunna have to spend all of tomorrow on 56kbps. It's both terribly first-world-problemy and an achievement I'm quietly proud of.

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.

Really

There's something almost brilliantly medative about shopping for fabric on etsy. The process of search and select, then looking through all the other items from the same seller to try get a good postage deal, and then repeating, over and over - it's almost like a warm bath for your brain.

It's not as much fun if you're super intent on something in particular, and have to try and work out who'll give you the best deal, but I'm just casually looking for brushed yarn dyed checks, and since it's mainly random Korean sellers, I'm picking solely based on what ones I like.

I ended up with this one... because I like it. I'll cut it very neatly into a couple of strips and make it into a nice long scarf - I've already got a couple that I made from the few brushed cotton checks that Spotlight have, but I really, really like this one.

Ironically whinging post.

Most nights, before I go to bed, I click on the bookmark for the latest xkcd comic. They only update 3 times a week but I press the random button a few times, just to see which of the thousand or so comics pop up for me. It's kinda like a weird fortune cookie/horoscope type thing.

Last night:

Having a positive attitude is almost tautologically good for your mental health, and extreme stress can hurt your immune system, but that doesn't mean you should feel like shit for feeling like shit.

I know that it's actually about his girlfriend having breast cancer, which is a whole lot worse than having a stupid cold, but the mouseover text (I put it as the caption) seemed to ring particularly true. At the end of last night's whingey post I considered hashtagging firstworldproblems onto the end of it, so everyone knew that I knew that I was being whiny and pathetic, but it got a bit too meta, and I already have a headache. Thanks to this though, I'm gunna feel shit. I'm gunna roll with feeling shit. I'm gunna shove tissues up my nose, drink Demazin like it's cordial, pop Panadols like they're smarties, sit in my electrically blanketed bed and watch all of season 1 of White Collar tomorrow. I'm gunna take my sick days, like a normal person would, and in a few days time, my nose will stop running, my eardrums will stop popping every time I blow it, and I will once again be able to bend over without feeling dizzy. This will happen whether or not I spend tomorrow in bed, but I may as well make the best of a snotty situation.

Oh, and the stunningly pretty yarn I bought to crochet myself a beret with is 100% wool, and not quite as soft as the cotton or bamboo I would like it to be.

#firstworldproblems.

A sign from the universe...

Today, I did nothing very much, and tonight, my internet is chucking a hissy fit and won't let me post. It's like it was meant to (not) be, or something...

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.

Why I have eaten a block of chocolate and done no sewing tonight at all.

My internet is running weird and it's driving me bonkers.

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.