Okay, kinda a little bit dead.

Remember back in MAY when I said I was gunna make quilts?

I procrastinated. 

Remember how I said they had to be in America by September? 

It is September.

Now, these fuckers have 1200 pieces per top. I'm gunna blame my procrastination on the fact that my laptop was in a truly terrible state*, and noone wants to try designing on something that takes 5 minutes to open a file in photoshop. I’d designed the first one, and got a top made, but the other two just weren’t working (though I ordered some fabrics based the requirements of a design I didn’t love, in a fit of misguided optimism) and I slogged through attempts with about 6 different reference pictures to no avail. But then I got a new laptop, and I could use photoshop again, and make the designs work. I ordered more fabrics, and some spoonflower labels before that, and waited. 

When the labels didn’t arrive on their due date (the 26^th of last month), I worried. Then a couple of days before the solids were due to arrive (I was hoping for the 5^th), with the labels still nowhere to be seen, I discovered I had my due date wrong. Not only was the post office not giving me what I needed, but I’d fucked up all on my own too. They needed the quilts by the 19^th, not the 26^th. 

On the one hand, I accepted my fate. Got over it. It wasn’t possible. No more worry. I agreed to work an extra shift that weekend after all. I made plans to go out and get drunk afterwards.

On the other hand, the universe had had my back on this one thing – Spotlight happening to have the one exact shade I had incorrectly ordered. So it came down to: if the solids got here by that Friday, and I could organise some kind of express courier to get them halfway around the world in a week, it would be possible. Not necessarily a good idea, but a doable thing. A thing that I could do. Possibly.

The fabric came that Friday. I still had a full quilt top and a half to do, as well as making the backings and doing the actual quilting for all 3. I timed my steps along the way:

Cutting:                      3 hours

Sorting:                      4 hours

Chaining:                    4 hours

Pressing:                    2 hours

Pinning:                      2 hours

Sewing Rows:             4 hours

Pressing blocks:          1 hour

Assembling:               1 hours

Backing:                     2 hours

Basting:                     .5 hours

Quilting:                     4 hours

Binding:                     3 hours

And even considering what I already had done, I worked on these for over 60 hours in the past 10 days. I cancelled on the going out and getting drunk thing, but I still worked 36 hours too. Oh, and uni, though I gotta confess I did the summaries I had to and ignored the rest. And...

Tomorrow I need to get up really early and call the DHL people and find out who I need to drop the box off to so that they can send it for me. Like, 7am early. The kind of early I’ve been going to sleep at (cause you don’t do secret projects in the middle of the day).

The nice man on the phone when I rang to check on Friday said that if they got it Monday afternoon, it would get to Dallas by Thursday. That’s the goal.  

*To be fair, I spilled hot chocolate on it.

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.

A new quilt and too much other information.

Once again, it's been a while between posts. But the combination of "ergh, I'm so much ache right now I could die, I'd better say my farewells" and "OMG OMG OMG I actually made a quilt" have come together to inspire a post.

Second things first; that's right, quilt! A whole one, pieced top, quilted, bound, everything. Admittedly, it was a fold over the back binding, but whatever, I was rushed. It was for a birthday last Tuesday, though fair's fair she really only wanted to show it off Saturday night, and I made it Friday night so all's well.

It's for Casey, obviously, and tells the gripping tale of a man and his tractors. I'm not sure where he gets these tractors to try and fail to pull up a tree, but maybe there's a prequel panel somewhere out there. It's about 1.3x1.6, and the backing is butcher's twill. Never in the whole of human history has there been a quilt so perfect for someone.

And last night, quilt showing-off night, was Harrow BnS. My first in over 6 months, what with missing Longy with laryngitis and Paruna getting cancelled. We took two virgins (by that I mean people who'd never been to a ball before) and a 5L keg of strawberry cider and about 100 jelly shots. And we drank and danced and ended up funny colours and found boys and new exciting ways to inadvertently injure ourselves.

As a result, I suspect this will be my last ever post*, what with the culmative aches acquired on the weekend all banding together and leaving me convinced I won't survive to the morning. A nasty bruise 3/4 of the way down my spine. Don't know how I got it. Another quite large one on my left leg. A painful, odd looking friction-burn-and-bruise combo on my right elbow that I got by miss-executing a decent down the chain ladder on the playground. And a friction burn on my knee that I got becasue I managed to pick up the only guy there with a swag smaller than mine. But I guess that's what I get for picking up floppy haired emo boys at BnS balls. "But I love them... They're my favourite" I say when anyone warns me against it. Of course, they're not quite as specific as, "Don't do it Sara, he'll have a tiny swag and very long gentleman parts and it will be quite awkward trying to reconcile the two in a sexy sexy manner without injuring either yourself or him" and I kinda think they're worse friends becasue of it.

Real friends will violate the laws of space and time and find this shit out for you and travel back and let you know to hook up with Dreamboat instead, in order to avoid the kinds of aches that follow an evening with a boy still in his teens. But it's okay, I am, for another 48 or so hours at least, still in my early twenties, and can therefore still choose the 19 year olds instead of the 30 year olds.

Even if it's a terrible decision. No matter, I'll be dead soon. Remember me fondly, and raid my stash fairly...

*I am of course, being over-dramatic for comedic effect. When I don't post for another month, it'll be because I'm too busy being an alcoholic and watching sitcoms to post, not because I died from the assorted aches of a debauched last-big-weekend-before-entering-the-mid-twenties booze-and-boys-fest.

So there's this tag on tumblr: "Coat Porn"

Tonight while I was watching Sherlock I realised that the wrong side of the fabric I used to make the very first version of the draped collar jacket would be a pretty much perfect match for the epic trench coat he wears in the show. So now I'm obsessed with finding the perfect trench coat pattern, even though I'm still yet to make the draped front jacket in either the faux leather or the caramel wool I've bought for them.

What's more, it won't be long until the weather starts to warm up, so I've got a pretty narrow window in which to find a pattern, refine the pattern, make a coat and wear it before summer gets here. That's why I spent a good couple of hours on etsy and the rest of the internet tonight looking at vintage patterns. I got a bit carried away, and ended up buying about six of them. Hopefully one of them will be okay.

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.

This is hard.

The Awesome Blitz is on this weekend. It's a big retro themed party that they hold at Dirty Shads these days - last time I went, years ago, it was at a big out of town place called The Barn. But it moved a few years ago, and now I'm worried that it might cramp my weekend somewhat. I know plenty of people who are going, but it could get in the way of the natural progression of the night for us, which is The G, then Shads, then Maccas.

The problem, of course, is the outfit. A retro party needs a retro outfit. I have my fabulous vintage sequined christmas present, but I don't know that the evening will live up to the dress. Also, I only own cowboy boots, nothing go-go boot-y. I could go something a lot more 80s, but I really don't know what. I'd made a decision for what to wear in a general sense, based mainly around my gorgeous new cowboy boots, which I'm thinking were totally worth the $150, and the price of which makes it okay that I'd be wearing a $15 dress.

Is there some kind of magical outfit that I can wear with knee-high black cowboy boots and black tights, that will make my ex-boyfriend feel a bit regretful, look normal at The G and like a costume at Shads? And can I sort it out in the few hours before work tomorrow evening?

You Guys...

Guess what everybody! I've had too much to drink. On a Monday/Sunday night. Brenton was drinking so I figured it was okay for me to drink. And I've spent the evening chatting with my ex on facebook. Why the hell not?

...

You guys, I'm really drunk. I've agreed to a True Blood marathon of season 5 with my ex boyfriend this weekend, and, even worse, I'm looking forward to it.

Shame

I've spent the past few days waiting for the urge to clean out my closet to hit. I've known it was about to arrive since mid last week, though I couldn't tell you how or why. I just knew that I was about ready to do it, and that when it was going to happen, it would.

Tonight it happened. I was going to make a start on the back of the striped lattice quilt, using more of the blue as well as the 9cm strips of striped fabric I'd cut way more than necessary of for the binding. But then I couldn't find said strips, and bam! Suddenly it hits, and I'm pulling everything out and trying it on to see if I should keep it or not.

I accumulate clothes like something else that accumulates a whole lot of things without noticing it. I cant think of a good simile for that one, so I'll say this: every time I clean out my cupboard, I can fill at least two big garbage bags worth of clothes and shoes to give to the salvos. Without realising it, I end up with a couple of dozen pairs of jeans, and twice that in shirts, and then all my piles topple over, because I'm not very good at folding things that aren't quilt fabric.

And even though I feel bad that I have so freaking much stuff, I don't know if it's okay for me to be ashamed (because oh boy am I a victim of capitalist consumerism) when I'm giving all this stuff to charity. Not to mention the fact that probably half of it came from the Salvos to begin with - I think the fact that it's so cheap there is a big part of how I manage to accumulate so much.

Maybe the Salvos should be ashamed?

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.

The BnS Post - Stonerollers 2012

...

(That would be the pause I give when someone asks me how my weekend went.)


Well... (that would be the traditional beginning) It was awesome. I had been a bit worried for the last couple of weeks that a) the weather would be shit and b) that I would have hyped it up a bit too much in my brain, resulting in the inevitable dissapointment.

But, thankfully, wrong on both counts. Saturday morning we left a dreary grey sky'd Adelaide, and we took the curly mountain road (Eagle on the Hill) instead of going through the tunnel, and that was AMAZING. All Caps amazing. Pulling onto the the off-ramp from the freeway, going up the mountain, it got super-foggy. There was NO view. Just white. Curly, twisty roads, up and down hills, white either side of the road and visibility ahead of about 50 metres. It was like living a dream sequence. I considered doing a loop and having a second go, but Casey was driving her car ahead of me, and I wanted to keep convoy. But back on the freeway it all burnt off, and even though it wasn't exactly warm, it was nice in the sun.

There was a pretty big line at the gate, and we all decided that, obviously, we'd start drinking. But I accidentally got one of my strong ciders, and had 3 standard drinks in a half hour... by the time I actually got to pay for my ticket I was dying of indigestion and trying really hard to play it cool. One we were actually in I pulled back a bit, but I kept at it and didn't return to real sobriety till today.

The ball itself consisted of me dirty dancing with as many people as I possibly could and making out with a dozen guys. I stopped my actual alcohol drinking at midnight, which is a good plan if you don't want to wake up with a walking dead hangover, and got on with the all important picking up. I even managed to get about 4 hours of sleep.

Recovery today was almost more bonkers than last night, because I did it all again sober. More overambitious dancing, more boys, and a wet tshirt contest that was very much about the wet and not so much about the tshirts. They'd chopped them down but thankfully my boobs are small enough that they were still covered. No-one else's were, so I kept a shred of dignity by comparison and got my horrible sticky clumpy hair somewhat rinsed out.

We hung about till about 3pm, sitting in the afternoon sun at the campsites after recovery stopped at 1, then we eventually got mustered to go, got KFC and headed home.

Tonight, I faced the biggest challenge of the whole weekend - there wasn't enough hot water left when it came time for me to take my shower.

It was horrible.

The Impulsive, Handsewn Holiday Quilt

Last night, while I was watching weird movies, I was bummed that I didn't have anything to do while I was doing that, so today when I was wandering around shopping I tried to keep an eye out for some little crafty thing to do while I was bumming about my motel room. You know, crochet or something.



Instead, I found some pre-pieced fabric on the clearance racks of one of the spotlights for $4 a metre. And there was some coat fabric for $3 a metre. So I got them both (150cm of the pieced stuff, since that was the width of the coat fabric, and 110cm of the coat, since the pieced stuff was narrower) and I picked some woven tape for the binding, since I couldn't find any actual binding in a colour I liked, and anyway, since this'll be going to a BnS ball, I wanted it to be tough.

While caught in the after-school rush hour I thought about it some more, and figured that maybe I should get some spray baste. So I got some of that at the next Spotlight I went to, as well as some Husky fleece as batting. The three fabrics ($6, $3.30 and $5.50) came to less than the price of the spray baste ($15.95)

What does one choose as a soundtrack to getting high on glue fumes in a motel room, on your own, 500km from home?

Well, I went with Chasing Airplanes by Gary Allen, but then, right now, that's my go-to song for pretty much everything. And once it was all glued, I switched to a bit of Dierks Bentley. That's not a band name, that's what the guy's actually called. Also, he totally looks like Waz from The Block last year.

Amazingly, I got it all quilted in 2 1/2 hours, but then, I haven't done an award winning job or anything. Big chunky stitches on the diagonal through every second row. Double thickness variegated brown cotton, if you were wondering. It took me another hour to get a bit under a quarter of the binding done, but once again, the sewing is rubbish.

And then I devoted some time to trying on all the clothes that I bought today. Huzzah for late night shopping in the 'burbs; I managed to get a lot in cause I could keep shopping till 9pm. No pics though, cause I suck at selfies.

Nah Uh.

The great thing about quilting (the sewing through three layers thing) is that it's something you can just do. If you're designing and piecing, you need to get out the iron, and clear off your cutting mat, and find a rotary cutter and all that stuff. If you've got some quilting to be done, you baste and you get going.

Unfortunately, what you do need is batting. And I appear to be all out. It's been a while since I've done any actual quilting (as evidenced by all the un-quilted tops hanging from my curtains) and I had forgotten that I was pretty much out. And Spotlight is persisting in not having it on super amazing special.

So clearly, it's totally not my fault I just watched 7 DVD commentaries instead.

Shit story, needs more unicorns.

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

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

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

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

I think I want a boyfriend.

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

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.

WARNING!

So, when I drink, I usually drink cider. Strawberry cider is my favourite but it's expensive so I usually stick to pear cider, which is known as perry. But my brain of course hears that and starts sing that subway jingle, the peri peri chicken, peri peri chicken, peri peri chicken chicken sub one.

I'd just like to warn you all, in case you ever end up drinking with me, and I end up singing this. Also, I'd like to apologise to anyone who knows that ad and now has that stupid damn jingle stuck in their head. Me too. Sympathy, dudes.

Is there a word for wrinking your nose up at something?

Sometimes, you come up with a nice pattern, and you pick a nice bundle of fabric, and you sew it all together, and it looks like shit.

We were discussing at work how it would be expected that if you had two people working, twice as much work would get done, when actually, two people are going to be too busy having fun, resulting in half as much work being done. I don't know if that's how it is with what I'm trying at the moment, but so far, it's a psychadelic mess.

Still, I'm learning the tricky quiltmaths of a HST at the end of a rectangle. So I'm quilting for Science!

And sometimes, Science isn't pretty.

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.

No, Sara.

Since I had to go back to Spotlight today for more hobbyfill, I figured I may as well get some fabrics too. And since everyone's been saying how nice the blue and grey is, well, I figure I'd do it again. But betterer.

I've taken out the prints with other colours in them, taken out the solid blues, added a lighter grey and some more DS blues. Apart from the solids, there's three non-DS fabrics in there - the black, grey and white hashed fabric, and the two greys with dots, which are actually the same fabric. I used the wrong side on the original, and I'm going to use both the wrong and right sides on this one. There really aren't that many grey fabrics to choose from, but I'd like to do this one bigger again, so I'll keep an eye out.

I also went to Lincraft and Stitch & Knit today to get some more monster fabrics.

The purple spot is a flannelette, and it and the two batiks came from Stitch and Knit, the blue hashed one was from Spotlight and the other two dots were from a mixed Lincraft bundle, which was half price.

Meagan and I had a bitch sesh after work so I don't get home till 1.30, and then it seemed like a good time to change the background on my phone. I like to use photos of fabrics, and have decided to go with the plaid from the Teddys Garden range.

Dammit, now I want to buy more.

Video crack.

Yes, I did have to tidy the end of my bed somewhat to take this picture.

But it's all sewn now (not pressed, but yay progress) even though it didn't get done till after 4am becasue I got distracted by youtube.

Damn you youtube!

Bribing myself.

Tonight after I got home from the gym I told myself that I had to at least sew the strips of the blue and grey quilt before I started sketching 2D handbags.

It worked. But my clipping it up didn't, really. I need more coathangers (what look like the across seams are sewn.the down ones aren't, but the threads between the strips are still attached, so it's like a big net at the moment)

And I've started sketches too.

Bag with flap won't need a zip = yay, but single handles make me sad.

And now that I'm going to bed, I'm not going to draw any more bags till after all those seams are pressed out, at the very least. And pinned too, preferably.