Good.

One would assume, seeing as how I've watched THIRTY HOURS of True Blood since Sunday night, that I'd make that my favourite for this week. Or at the very least, that I would make last night's strawberry cider, breadsticks and True Blood night my favourite thing this week. But I'm not going to.

Nor am I going to go with my fantastic friends at work, or trashy romance novels, or Wrigleys Strongmint chewwies, or even the very pretty yarn I got with the $10 voucher that Lincraft sent me.

Even though I find the tingly sensation that I get in my legs when I sit down in my skinny jeans to be weirdly enjoyable, that's not it either. Nor is it the entertainment I get from trying to push repelling magnets together.

Nope, today, my favourite thing is the tiny tick of my watch. It's so quiet that I can only hear it in the really quiet moments, and I don't get them too often. So I like the fact that the tiny tick of my watch is there to remind me when they're happening, so that I know to enjoy them.

Oh, okay, all the other stuff can be a favourite too :)

Me: a work in progress.

Hopefully my existential angst for the quarter is over - I'm feeling better today. It's probably a combination of things: catching up with a friend I haven't seen enough of lately, a new watch coming in the mail, getting my bags from the weekend back (including the flannelette bundle I bought at lincraft Rundle Mall)

Marveling at the wonders of cyclonic vacuums (Shay, they use centrifuges, and centrifuges are interesting) Finishing season 3 of Buffy, devoting a bit of time to laying backwards over one of the big balls at the gym (when your thoughts are every which way, hang upside down for a bit, and they'll pool in the top of your head)

And knowing that if I keep on being glum, then I've got no hope of ever being awesome enough to rock shoes like this.

Okay, I might never be. But there's no point in not having a go, right?

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.

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.

Maybe maybe...

New Spotlight catalogue comes with a spend-$100-save-$30 voucher, which isn't as good as the old save-$40 ones were but is still very tempting. New Lincraft catalogue has some sweet looking precuts and it says you can buy online but their website is munted and apparently, according to it, you can't. Still, I have tomorrow off, so I'm feeling some shopping coming on. Bit of a shame really, since I'm feeling more and more like it's time to get a new phone. Which would leave no money for new fabric.

Decisions, decisions.

I just decided I'll go to bed and decide later :)

Cuts and new fabrics

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

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

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

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

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

Anyway, new fabrics.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"...Dah dah, duh duh duh dah, duh duh duh dah, duh duh duh dunnn..."

It was a day and a bit ago in a capital city 

approximately 4 and a half hours drive away,

when a young country lady went to a fabric 

store to meet someone she'd only 

ever talked to online before...

Sorry. The geek in me couldn't resist, especially after the last line of Shay's post. So here's my side of the story.

I left the backpackers early - about 9.30. I was hoping to be there at 10.30ish but I had no idea really how long it was going to take. The guy at the backpackers charged me 30 cents to print out another "Save $40" voucher, but you don't have to be a maths whiz to work out why I didn't mind that much. I got there a bit before 10, and then realised I only had Shay's home phone. I went in anyway, got completely overawed by the fabrics, and... well, I may have stood there open mouthed, possibly with a little drool hanging out, or maybe I went into an immediate fabric pulling out frenzy. I had a half dozen on my pile when I got an SMS from Shay, but by the time she got there, the pile had had to be moved to a bench with a little more structural integrity. It still insisted on toppling as soon as you stopped looking at it for a second.

Some backings - both 1m, the orange is standard 112 wide quilting and the green is a 144 wide cotton poplin.

You know what Shay's like on her blog? Well, in real life, she's pretty much exactly the same, except you can hug her. My pile was pretty comprehensive before she arrived, so I was quite happy to sit on the floor and do some maths for her while she picked some. It was for Bec the Sarcastic Quilter's pink version of the paper piecing quilt, except with 36 blocks instead of 20. So fabric requirements of 1.5 yards per colour, divided by 20 and then times by 36 came out to about 2.7 yards. Then, while Shay did some indecisiveness, I got properly stuck into some of the toughest quiltmath I've ever faced*. I've refined it since then, and some measurements have shot up once I actually read the information so far as to why extra is good, but really, I've just done it for the fun of the math. I know many of you think there is no fun in math, but if you poke and prod them long enough, the numbers really do dance.

They had some Flourish, which is what I used for Kelsey's quilt. I got a half metre of each.

Shay's assertion that it took two trips to the counter is not entirely accurate, as I had already dumped a couple of rolls there before she arrived, so it was technically three trips. Nor did I rugby tackle any little old ladies; a discreet turn while holding a long roll of fabric, which hits them in the guts and winds them would be more my fabric-store-fighting-style. But sadly it's not the first time I've had a little old lady come up to me and say "whatever do you need all that fabric for dear?"

Why doesn't my local store have any Riley Blake fabrics? There's a half metre of each.

It was all I could do to not wet myself as she went back to her friend and said "Ooh, she's a quilter. But not from around here" And then about a dozen women started talking about me while I was not 5 feet from them. They're just jealous.

Various other half metre cuts.

The ladies behind the counter called for some reinforcements. When I was working at Spotlight we probably would have fobbed them off to the furnishings counter.

Random 25cm cuts.

As always, but the time it was all cut, the pile that made all the ladies chatter was disappointingly small.

Just under two hands high once it's all folded neatly. But that's 10.5 metres there, and it cost me around $80, so I'm pretty pleased with that.

Shay wanted some browns too, so we went to the Lincraft up the road too. I got a couple of books for Kelsey to have a go with, but no fabric. Shay doesn't have a Lincraft card, so I scanned mine - it probably earned me enough points to go buy her another repro bundle from the local. We most have both psychically known we were going to get some stash from the other - Shay has given me my first ever charm pack.

Of course, I have no idea what to do with it.

So I've just laid it out and cooed over it for a bit.

After Lincraft we went to the KFC across the road and gasbagged about anything and everything for over an hour. I didn't eat my chips, because by the time I was done laughing and talking, they were cold.

In spite of the chips, it was pretty much a perfect day. I went to Marion on the way to the hospital to see if I could find a cable to play the laptop through the big telly, but noone had one, so I went to the Big W and bought my work shoes again. I went and got satay sticks, again, for tea, and I watched Tangled and drew up some soft toy patterns, while Kelsey sewed a cat and Areysha (not positive on the spelling, but Kelsey's roommate) felted a ball. I may have used up all the nice weather for my perfect day, because today was quite grey, and a bit drizzly. But Kelsey wanted some felts before I went home, which seemed like the perfect excuse to go to the Melrose Park Spotlight store.

25cm each of the top three and 1.5m of the rainbow diagonal. Small world - I was served by someone I went to primary school with.

And then, because my work shoes had only been $15 this time, I went to another Big W, to see if I could find them again. I did, and I also found this.

Doesn't look like much, and it was in amongst some real rubbish, but look:

Good find for $3 huh?

Even though that was my last bit of fabric bought for the trip, I still have the fabrics I got on Friday from Rundle Mall to show you.

These are fat sixths - weird cut I know, but they were a cute bundle for $10, minus what was saved with the voucher.

This is the rest of what I got from Spotlight - A metre of the yellow which never arrived at our store, as well as the brown batik and the rainbow flowers and leaves on brown, both of which I bought on the last trip too. There's a half of the two pinks and the green spot, and I got 20cm of the buttons for Helen, cause they're cute.

And a smattering of Lincraft purchases. 30cm of the cats and the pink stripe, and whatever was left on the bolt of the grey/brown check, which, again, I already have a heap of.

And now I'm home safe, with no money and more fabrics I need to find room for. But I still have 3 more satay sticks - I was waiting at the restaurant at 5pm for them to open so I could get some to bring home. It meant I did some driving in the dark, but so what? The thunder and the rain kindly waited till I got home and unpacked my car, but it's getting pretty heavy now.

I guess a whole lot of fabric isn't the only thing I brought down with me.


*Bec, if you want some more precise amounts, I may have them already worked out for you. They're not uber precise - I've basically worked out triangles to cover the long point and left the other edge with some right angled overhang. But I've kinda guessed your measurements, so it could all be a bit skew whiff.

On Top Of Spaghetti...

Quilting-wise, I'm finding it quite hard to get motivated this week. It could be that I'm getting masses and masses of internet and a new reset date, and as usual I'm desperate to use it all up before it resets a week early, so I'm downloading and watching new shows at a feverish rate. Or it could be that I've limited myself to quilting and binding, and boy is that a downer.

Good news though, Lincraft sent me a $10 voucher, though I'm gunna wait till thursday to use it just in case my beloved 8fq bundles go on sale next week. You never know. And Spotlight sent us out a Spend $100 Save $40, just in time for me to take it to Adelaide. I might even get Helen to print me a spare or two (did you know you can do that? if you get the special vouchers emailed to you, you can just print out a many as you want!) Just in case I feel the need to go off at more than one store. I've found 6 in Adelaide, though Gepps Cross has been established as a bit shite, Melrose Park is apparently all homewares and Munno Parra and Noarlunga are a wee bit out of my way. Still, with just Rundle Mall and Clovercrest, that's a 200% increase in apparently quite good Spotlight stores in Adelaide compared to the Mount.

See what I did there? That's how you make maths your bitch. You can make the numbers say whatever you want if you try hard enough. What I want them to be saying is "your dinner is ready" - they do this by sitting on my oven and reading 12.05. 3 minutes to go.

Apart from cooking myself some spaghetti, all I've really achieved today is one of my usual overwritten lists. I'm the queen of the lists; big, expansive ones with sub-lists and a tendency to get lost within 15 minutes of being written, but that's okay cause then I can write another one.

*short break to eat spaghetti*

*back, but with the meatball song stuck in my head, despite the fact that I have my spaghetti without sauce*

I've hung onto this list for nearly 3 whole hours now, which is jolly good, since it's got some useful stuff.

Up the top: "sculpey/fimo!?!?"

Because when you're not sure what crafts people want to do/have the tools/skills/space to do, sculpey/fimo (whichever I can get cheaper, since it's kinda the same) is the answer. Even if they don't have an oven, I can bring it home and bake it. I need to look up some easy tutorials online, but I think it's a winner.

Somewhere in the middle: "how to smuggle contraband into rehab???"

I'm not sure. I've heard others are doing it and I'd appreciate some tips, but so far it's either put it into a real coke bottle, at which point it goes flat, or be sneaky, and change the packaging on a regular bottle. This would seem fairly easy, but the bottle lids are different colours. So it will take a bit of pre-planning.

Down the bottom: "What in-cinema movies? Take on lappy or put on tablet? test formats on tablet. Would Bill have a projector? need speakers. What's policy on illegaly downloaded movies playing on the walls of government buildings? Is scoffing cinema food inappropriate? - stop in penola on way and get lots of raspberry twists"

The little writing is my sub-listing. As for the whole actual bit? Dunno. Last movie I downloaded for Kelsey (Black Swan) she said creeped her out. I'm thinking Gnomeo and Juliet and maybe Rango, if I can find it in the next couple of days, unless I get a request.

In other news, since it's stuck in my head, it may as well be stuck in yours too

On top of spaghetti, all covered with cheese.
I lost my poor meatball, when somebody sneezed.

It rolled off the table, it rolled on the floor,
And then my poor meatball, rolled out of the door.

It rolled in the garden, and under a bush,
And then my poor meatball, was nothing but mush.

The mush was as tasty, as tasty could be,
And early next summer, it grew to a tree.

The tree was all covered, with beautiful moss.
It grew great big meatballs, and tomato sauce.

So if you eat spaghetti, all covered with cheese,
Hold on to your meatball, and don't ever sneeze.

There. Happy? Good.

So today, to make you all happy, I went and spent about $60 on fabrics.

Actually, it was more to cheer myself up. I woke up feeling crap, my lower right wisdom tooth is making a break for freedom, and all the travel has caught up with me. So I went shopping, but instead of just going to Spotlight to just get some bright neutrals to pair with the tickertape fabrics, I ended up drifting, going to too many shops and spending too much money.

First up was spotlight. As well as some solids and some batik dots for the tickertape I got these.

The far left yellow was $4 clearance so I got 2 metres, the yellow dot has been designated as binding so I got a half metre and the rest I got a quarter each. I figure that together they're fairly gender neutral. That's something I'm gunna work for this week, along with boy stuff.

The other fabrics I got at Spotlight have already been used, and I've packed up the unfinished quilt for the night.

I went to Stitch and Knit because Mum had left her chequebook across the road and I went to pick it up and, well, I was there anyway. I only spent $10, on random offcuts.

But when I was there I saw some velcro - it was too expensive but it reminded me I needed to go and get some cheap stuff for my selvedge stubby holders. So I went to Lincraft, and there were some new bundles there. So I got one of those. And some velcro.

While I was at Spotlight I also got a pinking blade, since Helen said her scissors were a bit crap. I must say, it's quite weird to use - it's hard to line it up and if it doesn't cut through quite right, you can't just go over it. You need to do a whole new cut. That seemed like a lot of pressure. I learned the hard way that it can't cope with as many layers as a straight cut too, but fortunately it was on a solid that I had plenty of wiggle room with.

Honestly, I haven't loved doing the tickertape. I arranged my bits in neat rows and just sewed from side to side, but my lines have ended up a bit wonky in places, and I have caught a lot of corners under. Yes, it's very quick, what with it not needing to be pieced and quilted separately, but it felt like a chore, with all the corner tucking I had to try to concentrate on. At least the flannelette backing clung to the batting, so it didn't bunch up on the lower layers.

I'll finish and photograph it tomorrow. Hopefully the weather stays nice, I can finally get around to doing those outside photos I was hoping for last week.

Mwah Ha Ha *strokes fluffy white cat*

As promised, jealousy inspiring photos of recent acquisitions.

Only one of these fabrics is new, the top right stripe. I needed something to fill in as the 9th fabric for Helen's quilt and I got a few options, but I think this one jelled the best.

These were the other contenders, and I may still swap them in.

As well, I got a heap of pretty blue and green and grey ones. These are all quarter cuts (the above ones were too)

The top two are from the same range as a couple of the fabrics I got for my birthday, in variations we didn't get locally.

I really should have posted a picture of them earlier.

My only other quarter cut was this.

No actual plans, but it would make a damn cute tickertape.

Onto the half metre cuts.

The top two are part of a range we got locally, but these are my favourite of them and we didn't get them. How unfair. The loveheart trees match a panel of baby stuff I bought on fabric.com and was considering using for Esther's quilt (a long time ago.) The green umbrellas are bloody cute. The brown I picked because I want to do something brown one day, and the green because I think it would make cute monsters, and it was $6 a metre.

The stripe (60cm) and the blue (1m) came from Lincraft, who are still doing their 50% off fabric sale. I'm considering the stripe as a binding for the Soiree blog-header quilt, and the blue goes quite nicely with some of the fabrics from above. I think if Lincraft did 50cm minimums on their sales I would have bought a lot more - 60cm was all they had left of the stripe. The other two are Riley Blake fabrics from Spotlight, and make me cross that we don't get them in the mount, since they do consistently cute fabrics. The middle one with the flowers is one of my favourite fabrics ever.

All up that lot cost me some bum change over $100, and there was another $20 worth of bird fabric that I need to take to Helen tomorrow. In the meantime, I'm having an early (by my standards) night.


*Obviously I no longer have a cat, and if I did, it wouldn't be a fluffy white one. They shed something chronic, and no fabric would be safe.

Whoopsie.

So, like, I know I wasn't supposed to, but when I went to Lincraft before work to get some zipper I accidentally bought myself 5 1/2 metres of fabric.

It was half price though, and most of it is lovely and bright.

I know what you're all thinking - that grey fabric is sooo not me. But interspersed with all the thinking about a really big rainbow quilt, is the desire to do something really nice and grown up.

How weird is that?

I also got 20 bag magnets for no reason except that they were $11. Which is much nicer than the $2-$3 each they usually cost.

And tonight, after spending and hour and a half of my shift at work calling Telstra 10 times* in an effort to help a customer with a $10 music voucher, I came home and made this.

Which has photographed really badly but actually looks quite nice.

One more day and then I have a day off. Then I have to miss the rodeo (though there have been offers to call in sick on my behalf) and then it's three weeks of holidays.

Very much looking forward to it.

*First guy was great, but got cut off. Next 8 calls went to the wrong department, no matter how many times I said "music" or pressed 5 and then 4, and not a single person in ADSL or wireless could either help or redirect me to someone who could. Tenth lady took 20 minutes to eventually inform me that because it randomly generates voucher numbers, it would inevitably re-create one eventually, which is why the voucher that got printed today is registering as being expired 2 years ago. "Tell the customer to go to a real telstra shop." You know what? It's ten fucking dollars. I've been paid twice that in the time I've been on the phone to you. How about I just give the lady another one. And why didn't I just do that in the first place?
This is why people should just download stuff illegally. By wasting my time, you're hurting the economy more than torrenting does.

Crafternoon II - Keepin' on Crafting

So today was the epic sequel that everyone's been waiting for. I had planned to go to Lincraft before I picked up Kelsey at 1, but then I didn't get out of bed till 12, so that didn't happen. Lucky me she needed buttons too so I still go to go to Lincraft.

Even though I was only gunna get one bundle, I ended up getting 3. These are the two I brought home - the third I bought because I was suffering from Getitforestheritis, a horrible affliction caused by the knowledge that Helen's making a retro tickertape quilt for Esther, and an uncontrollable desire to unnecessarily help. I have no idea what I'll do with these though, since I don't really have a design on the top of my head of a 16 fabric spectral retro quilt.

Since I've no plans yet for that, I figured I'd get started on one of the other ones. The purple, green and blue bundle I assembled ages ago seemed to be preferred to the pink, white and brown bundle, so I went with that. I only got as far as cutting my big squares before the girls went home, but I got stuck in while they had tea, and it all came together around 8pm.

Ah, the joys of photoshop. This is cobbled together from a couple of photos because I took the photo at Helen's right after I'd finished, and I didn't have a stool to take it from. Here's a real life photo.

I got home about 10.30 but unfortunately, the speedway was still on. Tonight was the start of the season and because we live so close, it's annoyingly loud. I haven't gotten anything done since I got home (not including the consumption of yet more mini pavs with whipped cream) and I'm not planning on it, and tomorrow will probably be a washout too since I'm back at work.

More money = more fabric though, so I suppose I don't mind. And it's my last shift for 2010.

Interesting... (or maybe not...)

I just posted in a comment that I have 5 USB sticks, two SD cards and a transflash in my handbag. This is interesting (to me anyway.) Four of the USBs (one on each keyring and two more) are 4gig and the Smiggle one with a ball maze on the back, which my little sister bought for me in Queensland is a 2gig. One SD card is a 4 and the other is a 2, and the Transflash is a 4 as well. So not including the Transflashes in my two phones (a two and a one) I have 28gig of data storage in my handbag.

Our pretty much useless home computer only has 20...

I have another two transflashes - and 8 and a 4 - for my tablet computer and three 2gig SD cards spread between my camera and two palm pilots. And I have two 750gig external harddrives that I know the location of, since there's another couple that have been lost to the mess of my room, and the tendencies of my father to drop trees on our storage sheds.

Not sure that there's a point to this, I'm just a bit shocked at myself. It's possible, just maybe, that I have enough.

Maybe.

Anyway, back to being a craft blog. I took my laptop to Crafternoon I - The Craftening (tomorrow will be Crafternoon II - Keepin' on Crafting) because I had to start work at 4 and knew I wouldn't get to really do much, so I figured instead I'd take the opportunity to pimp Helen's blog. I also got my neat 16ths cut for the first of my 3 bundles, and, tada!

The colouring looks quite strange in the photo, but I like the look of it in real life. That's the problem I suppose with taking photos in the middle of the night from directly above while standing on a chair, and it's why most of my final photos are of quilts lying on the grass.

There's also a big boo-boo in this quilt, but I think it's hard enough to see that noone will notice it. That's the great thing about this design - very few points have to line up, and the pieces are big enough that you don't notice when some of them are 2cm bigger/smaller than they're supposed to be. Yes, I could have shrunk them all down to the same size. But I'm lazy, and when it should only take two hours all up, you don't wanna add another 25% onto that fixing a piddly mistake.

So now I need to think of something to do at Keepin' on Crafting, the sequel to this Summer's smash hit "The Craftening" (because sequels to blockbusters tend to come out on Boxing day, and the public holidays this year are weird)

I think I'll go to Lincraft beforehand, since they still have 30% off, and maybe get another 8 f/q bundle. Then I only need to de-stash one more and I can make another quilt top.

Hopefully not fucking up this one. Even if it is only a little bit.

The Sale Dilema...

Lincraft is having a 30% off sale for the next few days, meaning it's only going to be $16.10 for a pre-cut cot size bamboo cotton quilt batt. The thing is, do I go mental and buy up big, or do I think, maybe, or even probably, I will get bored with the whole quilting thing before I get around to using them, leaving them languishing in a tub for a few years, till the next cat to show up has a baby on them?

That sort of thing does tend to happen with me, because I think of myself as a "soft engineer" and I enjoy much more the process of figuring out the best way to make something, rather than the actual making. Once a design is worked out, sorted, easy to do, it becomes boring. Maybe that's why I wanted to do this blog, because I spend (waste) countless hours working out the best/easiest/quickest ways of making various things, then, once that is done, I make one or two to show people and move on. Usually leaving behind the dozen or so lots that I cut out to make, now that I had it sorted, as well as all the stuff I bought specially for them.

That said, I currently have 4 in progress projects that are about the right size...


The baby quilt (quilt#3) is now into its nine star-patterned blocks and will be made into one big bit tomorrow, and hopefully, basted and quilted immediately after.


Mama Jan's quilt (quilt#4) will be made that size, because my sister was quite blasè with regards to directions, and that is my biggest hate as a crafter, so she will be punished with a 120by150 quilt no matter what size she was expecting.


The retro quilt (quilt#5) is officially sized at 120x160cm, but I can shave a bit off of that without much hassle.


The PinkGreenBrown quilt has no number, because I'm still a bit nervous about it and its triangles... its official size according to the paint document I've been using to try and get my math sorted out is 136cm square, so I'll be holding off on that one.

The rainbow pastels quilt also has no number, but it might get bumped up and end up being a decimal placed number, because its one that's all squares, and totally for me. It's pretty much going to be a pastel coloured copy of quilt#1, which looks like this...


And which is way bigger than it looks in this picture - its actually big enough across for my queen sized bed, even if it is a little short on the up-down way, by about 3 rows. Each of those squares is a bit over 8cm, if you want some idea of scale. That one however was done completely randomly, and there are some fabrics only in there once, or only in there on the far right side (because it was originally going to be square, and made in 4 days for a competition - when I found out is was not that thursday but the next thursday, giving me an extra 7 days to do it in, it was increased.)

The pastel rainbow quilt though has been specially bought for, and as a result I have, for the most part, about 20 squares of each colour, so I could do it a bit more uniformly, although I cant help but think that that would kind of ruin it. So I'm gunna wait on that one for now. Also, since I already have about 350 squares for it, and the maximum number of squares for a cot sized precut is 270, I'd probably be doing it on off-the-bolt wadding.

Nonetheless, that's still 3 precuts that are pretty much definite, well, 2 that are definite and one that is highly likely, and since maddy's quilt (quilt#2) was done on a precut, and I really like that size for a casual couch blankie, I'm thinking I'll probably be aiming my sizing math at that it in the future too. But does that justify buying 9 or 10 or them? Should I just get 5 or 6 and maybe buy some meterage as well? It's the same price for a metre of the 2.2 wide stuff as it is for the precut, but for just one big bit, say, possible pastel quilt sized (1.8x2.2) its $30, and that seems so much more expensive, even though, by square metre, its about the same.

I've allowed myself $160 to stock up, which is either 10 precuts or 6 precuts and 1.8 meters off the bolt... I guess I'll decide when I get there.