Because I forgot to post about these fuckers

This is a repost of my actual entry to the BQF, and the epilogue to this story here. If you want the middle bits of of the story, as well as a whole lot of swearing about postage companies and a touch of feminism, it's over where I posted my actual entry: my tumblr, saraquilts.

So, long story short, some friends in America decided to go to a Supernatural convention, I’m stuck on the other side of the world in Australia so I couldn’t go, then I had the bright idea of making a fan quilt à la the Ron Swanson. Then I procrastinated for 4 months, only to face a mad rush to finish them in just over a week and get them shipped to be there on time. Yes, them. I made 3. I’m not sure if it’s coincidence that my favourite character also resulted in my favourite quilt, design wise, but I feel that these were the 1200 squares that came together the best.

Unfortunately, I got a bit carried away with the shading so unlike the nice simple easy-to-adapt-to-pattern, 5-colour Ron Swanson, the Sam Winchester quilt has 11 shades of brown in it (The Dean and Castiel ones ended with 14 and 13 shades respectively).

The design process involved screenshots, photoshop, lots of time spent trying to get the colours on the monitor to match the fabrics in hand and the program PC Stitch, which I highly recommend to anyone who’s thinking of making any kind of pixel art quilt. If you love it, it’s worth the $50. If you just want to have a play around, the demo version does everything but save, and that’s what the printscreen button was invented for. It also involved a lot of pain medication, but I think I’d rather recommend regular dental hygiene over having teeth pulled.

This quilt now lives in Austin, Texas, while the Dean Winchester quilt lives in Atlanta, Georgia and the Castiel quilt lives… I don’t know, actually. It’s been donated to charity to be auctioned off, so hopefully it has a nice life somewhere when it gets its new home.

I entered this in the original design section but I wonder if I should have entered it into the art quilts section. idk, thoughts?

A story nothing to do with sewing, since I'm still just sewing ties.

About a month ago, my laptop, which I'd been using for about a year (having bought ex-rental for $200 as a temporary thing while I "found one I liked enough to spend a lot of money on") died on me, handily right before I was about to head off on a trip to Adelaide, which meant it was easy enough for me to find a temporary replacement laptop for my temporary replacement laptop. I bought a pretty decent spec Toshiba, for $390, but it's a brute of a thing with it's 17" screen compared to the 12" I had before.

A friend of mine is in need of a new laptop too, so when I went up again last weekend I told her I'd have a look at the ex-rental places to see what I could find her. Crazily, the ex-rental place that I had got mine from had gotten rid of their ex-rental part, so there wasn't quite the range I'd had last time, and unfortunately there didn't appear to be much in the ballpark that mine had been: it was either a lot less for a lot worse, or a bit more (about $450) for about the same. There was also a very cute little white thing in the corner without a price on it, but while I was off looking for a man who would ultimately tell me that it was already sold, the friend that I was with googled the serial number on his phone, and the reviews were pretty good. But I couldn't get a hold of Steph back home who wanted the laptop, so I didn't buy her anything.

I left her a message explaining the situation and when she called back that night she said that if I was okay with her paying me back over two weeks she'd have a decent one, since unlike me she doesn't buy a laptop just to tide her over till she buys a laptop. Weirdo. So we went back the next morning and, what do you know, the little white laptop has a price tag of $417 on it and that man that's there now says nope, no-one's bought it, and when I get all excited because the man had told us it was sold, and that we'll take it, he throws in a $50 HDMI cable to say sorry we had to come twice.

And yeah, you can get an $8 HDMI cable at Woolies, but it's the thought that counts. The thought might be: "Wow, Radio Rentals really overcharges people on their accessories" but I'm getting a six-month old laptop for $600 off it's RRP, so that's kinda irrelevant.

But the whole point of this kinda complicated computer shopping story is this: I had the big laptop, which I had named The Queen of Sheeba, for about a month. It was nothing at all like I wanted. It's big, it doesn't have a touch screen, it has a full numerical keyboard, which meant that whenever I went to scroll down I typed 00000000000 a lot. The power cable plugs in on the right hand side, which, for someone who sleeps on the left hand side of the bed, was really quite annoying. But in that month I'd gotten kinda fond of the big girl. I loved how fast she booted. She's twice as fast as the last laptop, and about 8 times faster than Steph's ancient piece of crap, so she's gunna be completely blown away. She felt solid, like you could invade a foreign country in her. Okay, that's a bit weird, but I liked her. Had I not found this one, I think I could have overlooked the fact that it was so damn difficult to photoshop anything without a touchscreen, and we could have hung out and made stupid facebook posts for the next three years, till her harddrive fried itself and I went into mourning. I didn't feel that way with my previous laptop, but I did the one before that, and it's a nice feeling.

So I've been quite slow in moving to this new one, the Baby Princess of Sheeba, it being the one size model down from the Queen. It was handy that I could use mostly the same drivers and that I still knew where all the program installers were, and Steph's quite glad to be getting a few thousand dollars worth of fell-off-the-back-of-a-modem software and movies and TV shows, but during this transition week, while I spent my nights moving ones and zeroes from one end of the network to the other, I kept on using the big one whenever I had to do anything. Maybe because it still has the mouse plugged into it: the black and red mouse not really coordinating with the shiny white. But the queen is moving out tomorrow, and I finally un-synced Firefox, and "obliterated history from the beginning of time" on Chrome. That is a web browser that takes it's deletions seriously.

I've only known it a month, and even though it's so lovely to be able to pick up the baby with one hand and fling it under my arm and know that, even though I probably never will, I can fit it into my handbag if I have to, and that it's almost as speccy as it's big sister, and that I'm sure that given another month I'll love it just as much, as of right now, I'll be sad to see the Queen go.

God save her, because I don't think Steph knows that much about antivirus software.

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.

And it's over...

As of 10 hours from now (8 hours of which will be spent sleeping) my holidays are over. Sad times, though, admittedly, considering it was only 5 days off, short times too.

I've spent most of the last 5 days sewing costumes for Halloween, from a whole heap of ears:

To a truly bitchin' Red Riding Hood cloak, that I don't even get to wear because I agreed to do it for Chantelle.

And a cow print onsie that's given me a lot of trouble because it's for someone who's a completely different size to me. And that doesn't matter with animal ears or badass crepe georgette (why did I pick that fabric? It was horrible to work with) cloaks. But on me, the crotch is almost down to my knees, and the legs are waaay too long, which stopped me from putting feet on it like she wanted. I've put some buttonholes at the ends of the legs though, so I can make her some button on feet later.

And a half dozen boring black capes that I'll probably insist management wear, since I like the idea that they can be the villains of the piece. I'm still going with being a cool cat. Brittni (who we often call Britta) is going to be one too, so I think that means that halfway through the shift I need to get myself some white wings and a halo and be the cool cat that had too many drugs.

Hopefully I'll meet some more Community fans in the process. The world needs more cool cats.

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.

#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.

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...

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.

Huh...

Kindly, in lieu of absolutely nothing, blogger has started working on the desktop again. Which is lovely. It might be to do with the new version of firefox. I'm not sure how I feel about it; the new tabs bringing up old tabs is a bit weird, but it pales in comparison to the changes on firefox for android, which left it pretty much unuseable to me today until I worked out that tabs were now at the top.

I'm dumb sometimes. Of course tabs are at the top. It was weird when they were on the side. This makes more sense. But it took me ages to figure out.

Still, it was easier than working out the maths for the whole HSTs-at-the-end-of-rectangles thing. But I've got it down pat now. For centimetres at least. When it comes to inches, I'm as useless as I was when it came to finding a new tab.

Boooooriiiing

I sit here tonight, moving 1s and 0s from one box to another. No wonder people think nerds are boring. Being a nerd IS boring.

Crossed some stuff off my to-do list.

It took me about 4 hours, but it may just turn out to be the single greatest thing I've ever made.

Oopsies.

Even though I've done it for all bar about 5 of my days on earth, clearly I still need more practice at this whole "going to bed" shtick.

Possibly reading the entire episode guide to Game of Thrones on wikipedia wasn't the best idea at 4am, but it was still quicker than watching it all. Since each season covers one book, I think reading the books would be quicker than watching it: I can read an unfamiliar 400 page novel in about 4 hours, whereas it would take me 10 to watch ithe first season.

Anyway, before I got distracted I (thankfully) got some stuff done.

Target had 40% of pillows today, so I bought myself a new one. It was referred to as "dual core" and I use a dual core. Actually, I use 3 dual cores - desktop, laptop and phone are all dual-core, but in the pillow's case (pun not intended) it means that there's a foam bit in the middle of the regular fluffy bit. I wanted to make it a pillowcase, but, after getting out a half dozen fabrics and then deciding against them all, I got to work on the next bag, with a zip and interfacing.

This is without vita wheats, and all I used was some non-woven 1600F on the lining. It was a bugger to turn out though, but I didn't have to hand sew it, because I cleverly recessed the zip over the top of the turning hole.

I lined it in the same beige ripstop as the outer of the other bag is made from, since I think a lighter coloured lining makes things easier to find.

That done, I auditioned some more fabrics, came to the conclusion that I really ought to use a whole yard, because having white on the back would look weird, and put all my choices to that point back on the shelf. I read an old Reader's Digest for a bit, resewed the armholes on Casey's shirt (she likes sleeveless workshirts, but they're hard to find, so I have to cut down long-sleeved shirts for her), ate some pineapple and finally admitted to myself that If I was going to go to bed tonight, I needed to get a pillowcase sorted out. I'm not ashamed to admit, I drool in my sleep a little bit.

Eventually I discovered a doubling up of this fabric, which I once used as my handbag for a while, so I figured I could miraculously use it while having it remain in my stash (because frankly, isn't that what we always want?) and so I went for it.

Then I completely forgot to go to bed anyway. Thank god I don't work Fridays :)

How dull.

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

The new ones are the untethered ones.

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

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

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

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

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

Warn. Your. Children.

Most of you are probably too busy having lives to know this, but if you play an MMORPG (those big online computer games) it lets you know if you've been playing it for a certain amount of time - a little popup ever hour or so to remind you that there's a world beyond your computer screen.

Why doesn't youtube offer this? I'm watching it on my phone - surely they could tell me after I've been running the app for more than an hour. Two hours. Three hours. Four hours.

Ah well, I hadn't made any progress on that quilt top in about 6 months... what's a few more days? And you would think I would have learned after I did exactly the same thing last night, except curled up in bed till 6am instead of standing at the kitchen bench with my cutting mat in front of me. It's still going right now. I've gone from Paley Panels to funny ads to beer ads to clips from the Melbourne Comedy Gala.

I actually came up with the term "Youtube Hangover" to describe it today. With people asking one another how they pulled up after last night, I was having to explain that I'd had 2 drinks, walked it off, eaten some delicious fairy bread, driven home at 2.30, gotten into bed... and clawed my way out at 11.30 after, confusingly, just 5 hours of sleep. But many, many Related Video tabs.

So please, for everyone's sake, lay off the youtube, kiddies. Just say no. 

Especially after the 4th hour.

The cake is a lie, but will give you +5 sexterity...*

I expect very few of you to recognise or get these. That's okay. I can respect that. Most of you have lives, and haven't wasted goodly portions of them on computer games and internet memes.

Lucky you, I guess. Because despite making some Weighted Companion Cube pillows from the game Portal, instead of having Still Alive stuck in my head, I've got (Do you wanna date my) Avatar from The Guild stuck in my head. And having theme songs to computer games or web series' about computer games stuck in your head is kinda sucky. Those buggers are cat-chy.

*Do you wanna know? Really?

I am a dull and uninteresting person.

I know that music aficionados say that the richest sound comes from vinyl. I know that the best method of digital compression and storage for audio is FLAC. I know that I much, much prefer being able to download an album in 17 seconds. I know that it took me 3 minutes, and the assistance of one of my sisters to work out how to merely open the one remaining cassette player in our house today.

I didn't know that cassettes ran two channels of audio. Or maybe I just hadn't thought of it. Cassettes were a dying breed when I was in my formative music years, but I was there for them. My first ever album was on cassette (it was Hanson. The ones that sang MmmBop. My favourite song was Yearbook.) I can remember friends bringing over their cassettes and CDs and making mix tapes. You couldn't do that in 17 seconds - you did it real time, having one play in slot 1 while you recorded in slot 2. 

Today I didn't make a mix tape. Today I did the reverse. Six weeks ago I wrote about a song called The Melbourne Cup which I couldn't find anywhere. My sister (the same one who can remember how to open a cassette player*) told me that it was on the Home Among the Gum Trees cassettes we had when we were little. I looked on eBay, and there was one lonely copy available. I bought it. "That's excellent," said Casey. "You can put it all on the computer for us and then give it to Nanna Joy for Christmas."

So it's on the computer, in 25 minute blocks of 7 songs per side. Digitized by plugging an audio cable from the headphone jack of the almost-never-used sound system in the lounge to mic jack of mum's laptop, and pressing record in my music editing software, and waiting 25 minutes before flipping the cassette. Each channel of audio is different, and I'm breaking it down into little bits by listening to the beginning and end of each song through my headphones, and yeah, one ear is hearing different things to the other.

It's not beautiful sound. There's a lot of noise in the background. Not actual noise, of us putting up our Christmas tree, which we finally did tonight at about 11pm because it was the only time all six of us were home, but the faint buzzy cracklyness of the cassette.

Weirdly, even though I'm listening to it through the sound card on a computer, it feels soothing. Familiar. Songs I haven't heard in 15 years, from a cassette 25 years old. I wonder if it's because of the cracklyness. I'm planning on having a go at cleaning it up some other day, but maybe I shouldn't. Maybe it's important.

Also, I have the worst Deja Vu of my life. Not just cause I'm listening to songs from when I was a kid - I don't think I ever listened to these songs at this house, just in Dad's ute or on the houseboat. But I feel as if I've sorted this audio before. Maybe just because it's taken me the last 4 hours to get halfway through.

Anyway, if any of you remember any of these songs, or maybe want them, or came here cause you too realise that, for reasons beyond your control, your identity is tied up in some songs sung three decades ago and now unavailable to anyone not lucky enough to do the right eBay search on the right day, message me and I'll send them to you.

Home Among The Gumtrees - Bullamakanka

Old Man Emu - John Williamson

Ridin' - Smoky Dawson

The Gondiwindi Grey - Johnny Greenwood

Click Go the Shears - The Hawking Bros

Redback on the Toilet Seat - Slim Newton

I was only Nineteen - Redgum

Downunder - Men At Work

Put Another Log On The Fire - Bill & Boyd

Little Boy Lost - Johnny Ashcroft

I'm The Sheik from Scrubby Creek - Chad Morgan

Theme from Picnic at Hanging Rock - Paul Lennon

Tenterfield Saddler - Peter Allen

And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda - The Bushwhackers

Our Don Bradman - (No artist listed)

The Wild Colonial Boy - Smoky Dawson

Waltzing Matilda - The Sundowners

Theme From Rush - Brian May and The ABC Showband

The Melbourne Cup - The Hawking Bros

Santa Never Made it to Darwin - Bill & Boyd

Flash Jack from Gundagai - The Bushwhackers

The Ettamogah Pub - Ray Kernaghan

Tie Me Kangaroo Down Sport - Rolf Harris

Come On Aussie Come On - Frankie Davidson

The Dog on the Tuckerbox/Road to Gundagai/Back to Yarrawonga (Medley) - The Sundowners

Theme From Cash & Co - The Bushwhackers

I Still Call Australia Home - Peter Allen

As for craft, today I did none whatsoever.

*The stop button is also the open button.

And what did YOU do today?

I, personally, believe that anyone who owns a vacuum sealer, and DOESN'T use it to vacuum seal themselves some clean undies for in case of emergencies, is being, frankly, quite irresponsible.

Blabbing, TV and Stubby holders.

I may be experiencing what feels to be the end of Thursday, but it's been Friday here in South Australia for four and a half whole hours now and I just ate a bowl of nutri-grain and that's a breakfast thing so I think I may as well do my fave things Friday now.

First up, some random good things.

Parents are on holiday, so to save on dirty dishes it's time to start drinking milk out of the carton. This makes me way happier than it should.



Improvisational scrap piecing. Probably not gunna be able to do it again anytime soon, since I'm not big on the scraps. Actually, this was pretty much all I could find.

30cm square, leftover bits from making the back of the Autumn Nutmeg quilt

Today, Spike got killed on Hawaii Five-0. That's not good, because they needed him to tell them about the Asian guy that the Aussie guy's dad may or may not have been having bad-guy collaborations with, but the point is I quite enjoy referring to characters on shows by the name of the character I most know them as. I'm sure James Marsters' character has a different name on this show, but I can't be bothered learning it. Also, I really just like James Marsters in general.

A long time ago, long before Team Edward and Team Jacob, us Buffy nerds were all in love with either Spike or Angel. I was only 15 at the time, so it was the dramatic, never-can-be love of Angel that I was sappy over, but now that I'm older, I must admit, I would like to have a house fall down around us while I did the dirty with Spike. It makes me sad that I've only just started re-watching season 2, and I have 4 more seasons to watch before I get to that storyline. Nonetheless, the fact that that storyline exists makes me happy. Aww hell, the whole show makes me happy. Except, you know, when someone dies. Then I bawl like a small child.

Anyway, back to good stuff. Strawberry and Lime cider. But it's a bit expensive. I also like the Smirnoff goon sacks, and they're much more alcohol-bang for your buck. But the nozzle looks like it may be a difficult one do inflate after I've gotten around to drinking it all.

Being massively bogan. And a massive geeky fangirl. All at the same time.

Having the coolest stubby holders around. And a tutorial to share too!

Stubby Holders: You will need (measurements are in cm, a rough conversion should work fine)

10cmx 24cm rectangle of insul-bright (the stuff that goes in quilted oven mitts)

9cm long piece of soft and flexible velcro (you can use the regular stuff, but this is way better)

30cmx12cm piece of pieced fabric (or whatever print you want on the outside) and 30cmx12cm of inside fabric, sewn together to make one long piece. Or a 60cmx12cm strip of fabric.

Lay the insulbrite on the wrong side of the inside fabric, with a centimetre or so overlapping onto the outside fabric.

If your insulbrite has one side that looks plusher than the other, put the plush side up.

Flip it over, holding the insulbrite in place, and sew the scratchy side of the velcro over the seam, about 5mm from the edge of the insulbrite.

The stitches can't be seen very well, but there's about half a centimetre on the three edge sides

Trim the overhanging end edge to 3cm.

Fold the outside down over the insulbrite, get the inside fabric out of the way and trim the outside fabric to 1cm beyond the end of the insulbrite.

Flip the outside fabric back over the insulbrite, leaving a couple of millimetres of overhang in your fold, so the insulbrite doesn't bunch at the end when you turn it right way out.

At the other end, fold your outside fabric back at about a centimetre from the end of the insulbrite.

Fold the inside fabric over the top of that, with the fold extending a few millimetres past the end of the insulbrite as before.

Sew down the sides. It doesn't matter if any insulbrite gets caught, it will just mean a slightly bulkier bit. Make sure to backtrack at either end or else it will come loose.

Turn right way out. The opening should end in a little pillowtuck type end.

Sew the soft side of the velcro over this to close it.

Quilt however you like. Vertical stripes make it curve easier. Sew a box roughly around where the velcro is at the other end. I also did random lines and an edge stitch.

This is designed to fit 375ml cans and standard stubbies. If you drink from different sized bottles, cut your insulbrite to the circumfrence of the bottle +3cm for overlapping velcro.

If you want your drinks to remain extra insulated, use two layers of insulbrite. Cut each to 23 cm and skew them to make a 25cm piece - it needs the extra length because it's thicker. If you can get hold of wetsuit material, that's really good too.

These really aren't that different to the coffee insulators that I've seen about a bit, only straight. And with the velcro helping you cheat your way out of tricky turning gaps needing sewing up.