Yum.

Oh. My. God. There's these doughnuts at Woolies. We only got them in two days ago. They are super fluffy. They have chocolate icing all the way around. Like, top and bottom. No, I don't know how they do it either. They have clumps of molten chocolate in the middle. I've ordered 12 to take with my to Myponga for the weekend, but really, I don't think it's enough. I need to borrow Dad's shotgun to defend them. They are chocolatey, doughnutty perfection.

Of course, if I had to pick one meal to eat for the rest of my life, it would still be the satay chicken sticks from Burnside Noodle Bistro. I'm making Casey go to Adelaide a day early just so we can have them. I'm thinking I might go easy on the drinking on Sunday too so I can drive up and get them again. I know it's a 2 hour, 120km round trip from Myponga. Care face?* Exactly. They're that good.

Change of subject now - I've had a play. It's not finished, (obviously, the white bits) but it shouldn't be too hard one day when I'm able to concentrate (ie, not at 3am when I'm watching QI and playing with google earth)

There is, so far, the same number of each colour of triangle. It's hard to remember it. Question though - does it still count as a pinwheel? Don't care. I like rainbows.


*When someone's whinging about something, or telling us not to do something, in our house, we put on our blankest expression, point to our face and go "Care Face?" as in "does this look like the face of someone who cares?" I don't know why it started, possibly with "see this. this is my care face" but we care face a lot in our house.

Love. Partnership. Pretty Colours.

I love Microsoft Paint. It may be simplistic and useless with photos, but if only more people gave it a chance they'd realise it's damn good for designing quilts.

I have a lot of graph papers I've drawn up, various sizes, some on point, some with every second line in bold, some with sashing. These are saved as bitmaps, so I can just paintfill in each square with whichever colour I want. Here's some I prepared earlier.

Sometimes I add bits to the squares. It's just straight lines and it's easy enough to copy and paste over the whole thing.

I have a touch screen so it's easy enough to write my workings on the document.

If you click on it you'll see that I have 2 more brown 10cm squares than necessary and 8 too many green and pink triangles. I promise I'll make it one day.

Alternatively, I can be nice and neat and tidy with typing.

But obviously, they're just instructions for me. And early ones too - I work out how to do it better later on. But I think Paint is a way better quilt designing tool than, say, a piece of paper (16 million colour options - the most Derwent will give you is 72, and you can change colours over and over again and copy and paste and rotate and move and layer and make bigger and smaller) and much much simpler than specialist kit like EQ. I can use it effortlessly and endlessly, and I do, and that's why I love it.

Includes Sara approved Porn :)

Patterns are, if I'm honest, what I love doing more than anything else in quilting. Picking the fabrics, and doing the math, and seeing if it all works when I actually do it; that for me is the fun bit. I like the piecing, because that's the only way to find out if I was right or not, but the actual quilting and binding is only done because otherwise I'd just have a useless stack of quilt tops. And yes, I could send them off to be done, but that costs money*, which I could otherwise use to buy more fabrics to make more tops. Don't get me wrong, I love the finished product. And when I have some back episodes to get through, a bit of sit-down-and-quilt is wonderful. But to go from a pile of conceptual numbers to an actual, pretty object, even a currently useless object like a quilt top, is my fun thing.

I have never used anyone else's pattern. What, for me, would be the point? I've looked at other people's stuff, and thought, I'm gunna do something like that, but then I've gone off and done some maths of my own, changed it to fit my fabrics or my sizes or my style.

For me, the big thing with designing a quilt is how the bits all fit into the piece of fabric so there's not too much waste. For a long time I used fat quarters, and after I'd moved on from simple 10cm squares, almost all of my designs worked on the base of what I called the "neat 16th" - the biggest size I could get of four rectangles from a fat quarter - usually about 22 by 26cm. Sometimes this would get chopped down to a square 16th - 22 x 22cm but later on I got more used to the rectangles and could do more and more with them. I branched out, trying neat 24ths (6 rectangles per fat quarter) and neat 12ths (3 rectangles)

But really, it's coming up with patterns using fabric off the bolt that I really like. My first ever attempt was for a quilt I still haven't made any progress on because of it's half square triangles, but it was worked out in it's entirety, with detailed piecing and cutting layouts, before I'd finished my fourth quilt. It's easy to get 4 rectangles from a bigger rectangle, but getting different sized rectangles, squares and triangles from one piece of fabric, without having big wasteful gaps, that's the fun stuff. It's like a jigsaw puzzle, but with no pieces. The Two Tyred quilt is the one I'm most proud of, since it fits so so so perfectly and uses exactly the amounts of fabric I had. And while, yes, I would love the opportunity to sit and do quiltmath and play with the pretty colours all day and get paid for it, there is a slight problem.

I believe that knowledge, especially in the internet age, should be free.

Yes, I understand that it takes people a lot of time and effort to design a pattern. I understand that having a proper website (ie. not a blogger/wordpress) costs money, as do the pretty instructional photos and copyright lawyers. If you've got a pattern that has fancy shapes, or curves, or things that people couldn't work out for themselves with a $3 calculator from the stationary aisle at the supermarket, you should go ahead, and get a proper website, and professional photos of how-to-do-it taken, and print out pretty, informative patterns with all of the pieces carefully numbered. Get it copyrighted, because if it gets posted online, all your hard work won't be paying off.

But really, to my mind, I do math. I fit squares on a bigger square, and write down how big those squares are, and how to get to them without hurting all the other similar squares next to them. I really do use a $3 calculator (okay, it cost $3.13) and pretty much everything is done in MS paint. I draw up some grids, and use the painfill button to colour them in. Then I pick the bit I like, and count the pieces, and work out the most efficient way to fit them into some pieces of fabric so they can be put together again. Using software that's been around since Windows 3.1 and a calculator with 23 buttons, one of which is off.

I worry that a lot of newbies are frightened off by some of what's out there. Simple things can seem intimidating - Helen was worried about the bit at the end where it says to join your blocks into rows and your rows into a quilt top until I did one my way at her house and it seemed so much easier (I need to put my way up one day, but it's a bit too confusing in just words.) A lot of pattens that I initially though would be totally hard I now look at and realise I could have the math done for in 20 minutes. It would be a different size, and different fabrics would be in different spots, but when it comes to geometric, straight line piecing, there's only so many patterns out there. If I was to say no to people who understand quilting using my math, they could go do their own. So all I'd be doing is frightening off the people who I like to think my patterns are for - The newbies who are looking for something that's fun and easy, and, unlike a lot of other patterns I see out there, doesn't need a million billion little scraps of different fabrics. I was weird that I had a massive stash before I started quilting. What if I hadn't? What if I'd started quilting by going into the shop and buying some fabric for an actual quilt? I think my patterns would be a good place to start - "two yards of each please and one yard of batting" - no stash required. I see the beginner quilt pattern leaflets in Spotlight and they need way more complicated amounts than that.

I'm going back over some of my earlier quilts and giving them a do-over in my mind before I get into writing them up, to see if I can streamline them or make them fit the fabric better so there's less waste. When I started I was less confident about this, so Helen and Kelsey had lots of scraps to do their tickertape quilts, whereas now I have almost no scrap left over at all. To my mind this is a good thing, though others might disagree. But I've started feeling guilty about the size of my stash (that's a lie, I feel guilty about the unruly state of my stash) so if I'm buying fabric now, I want the exact amount I need, lest I end up with another piece hiding in the corner. If you just want to make a quilt, not become a quilter, this seems about right too.

So I'll keep posting my rainbow coloured grids and occasionally their associated math here, between the proper instructions when I get down to them and the lame excuses as to why I haven't . And they'll be free, for everyone to have a go at, regardless of talent or stash size. Because that's what the internet's all about.

And porn too, of course. My preferred porn looks like this.

*Of course, the quilting itself takes time, but less time than it would take me to earn the money at my real job. Also, I can watch the telly on the lappy when I'm quilting, which I don't get to do at work

Because the world needs pretty colours.

I really baulk at the idea of paying $15.95 for 4 yards of fabric from fabric.com when fabricshack.com can fit 9 yards in a package and will only make you pay $6.

Not that I can get any fabric right now, since I have no moneys till next Tuesday. But since I'm working instead of making stuff, much to my chagrin, I shall have plenty of moneys on Tuesday night to have a bit of a shop-up.

Tonight, I came up with this.

Which is damn pretty, but can't be done without chopping each shape of colour into random bits, or, for balance but more effort, doing them all with individual squares.

I also haven't really done any proper piecing on point before - I make most of my backings on point so I don't have to match seams, but I've never properly pieced. I don't even know why I went with it, except that I was vaugely copying a much more intricate rainbow design which was in diagonals, and my blood-demazin reading is way over .05 so I'm too doped up to realise when I start doing something that it would work fine in either direction. But because the line always shifts one block to the side, it wouldn't go straight up and down just because my piecing did, so I think it looks better like this. That said, I'll probably never make it, but if someone wants to give it a go they're more than willing to try. I only did it becasue the new episode of White collar is taking forever to download, and it seemed like a good time for some pretty colours.

But then, what time isn't?