Happy Halloween.

It was so nice to come home tonight and not have to make anything. I think I was so excited by the fact that I could just spend the night on facebook and tumblr and youtube that I got a bit carried away, which is why it's now 5.30am.

Anyway...

A cool cat, a cow and little red riding hood. All made by me.

A cool cat and a cow holding tails, and getting photobombed by the boy who couldn't be arsed doing a costume, so we made him wear teddy bear ears.

The ears of the cow... she didn't wear them because they kept flopping over her eyes.

Group piccie.

As much as I was sooooo sick of working on this stuff by last night, I'm also so glad I did it. Only two of the daytime staff did anything, and only two of the people in this photo (the witch and the bloodsplattered guy) aren't wearing at least a little something I made. But we had a fantastic night, got quite a few compliments (a couple were skeezy, but they were balanced out by the adorable ones from little kids) and generally enjoyed ourselves.

The fact that I can now, still, 7 hours on, still feel the ghosts of the sunglasses/headband combo pressing against the sides of my head seems like a small price to pay.

So there...

I've done a pretty good job with the clothes, haven't I? Not to toot my own horn or anything, but I'm quite happy with what I've done in the past few days. I've got my coat perfect (and I can wear it to the gym after I wore it out on the town) and I made a fluro drapey top with some unknown fabric that had sat in my cupboard for years, and still had tags on it from the salvos, so I figure it probably sat in someone else's cupboard even longer. The fact that I took it off after 10 minutes isn't the point - I was just feeling like rednecking in my white tank top and jeans tonight as opposed to dressing like a wanker in a fluro top.

Seriously, fluro? A party where the theme is fluro is a good idea? Did we learn nothing from the 80s? I suppose most of the people at the fluro party weren't there for the 80s. Most of them didn't come till halfway through the 90s.

I wanted to smack some of them in the head. And then set fire to them. Instead, I came home and played in the dark with a ball made of glow sticks. Because I'm a grown up, and I can do that if I want.

I'm calling it "lattice," but only because I'm not great at names.

Even though I had planned on resuming hermitting, it hasn't really worked. And even when I am hermitting, other people have parties here, and it's difficult to hermit when there's peeps sleeping in your lounge. It's also difficult to cut and press fabrics, which is why the quilt top I made last night doesn't have a back, despite really needing to be all finished in about 3 days.

It's another square quilt, similar to the back of the pavement quilt, but made partially with the few stragglers of a layer cake that didn't fit into my idea for the design for the rest of them.

As a result, it's a bit bigger than the other one, so I didn't bother with the wide border, but I think the fact that the squares are bigger makes it look a bit too white. But that could just be because it was hideously overcast this afternoon, and I couldn't get a nice photo.

Still, it's considerably less pink than the Pink Pavement quilt, and that's what I was going for, so yay my mad skillz!

Everything's a thing...

Today I did both a lot, and nothing very much at all. I washed and dried the new quilt.

The front, unwashed

The back, unwashed

The front, washed and dried

The back, washed and dried

I got a package from Thea in the mail, including some uber-cute flannelette, and I need to buy some more thermal interfacing to make this into a new stubby holder.

And in case she was wondering, this was the watch she forwarded to me, saving me $30 in stupid, OTT ebay postage.

And when I got home I finally worked out how to sync firefox across my two computers, I made a little pouch to check I still remembered how to do it, I packed some clothes, I found some car chargers, and I ate half a box of breakfast cereal. As I said, a lot, but not very much, and tomorrow will be more of the same, what with lunch for my dad's birthday, and going off to Adelaide to sew some zips and spend a whole lotta money.

NYE lessons.

It's not that bad working till 10.30 NYE. There'll be very few customers, and most of them will be drunk co-workers coming in to say hi. If one of them is your manager, and she's drunk, ask her if you can slack off. Mine said yes...

5 inch heels are bad. Pretty, but bad. Mine were pretty enough, and only slightly bad enough, that I forgive them. This rarely happens with heels. I have a small blister. This happens often. Pack bandaids.

If you happen to be out and about on NYE with the only good friend of yours who would recognise your ex-boyfriend, at a distance, from behind, and you happen to both spot him in the same instant, laugh uproariously for the next 3 minutes. The kind of laughter you'd do if there was only 3 minutes worth of oxygen left in the world and you wanted to use it the right way. This may need to be explained to the guy you're with, who won't get why the slightly lame joke he just made got the best response ever.

Fireworks are pretty.

Groups of people (especially drunk people) are terrible at making decisions. It's much easier if you just tell them all what to do. Cheerful drunk people appreciate direction, especially if the directions lead them to more drinks. Grumpy drunk people should be left at the kerb.

Sad songs are good. "I know this room, I've walked this floor" from hallelujah, when walking past your old high school, slightly tipsy, in the middle of the night, is particularly good. Angie Hart's "Blue" is good no matter the occasion. Sad songs in the presence of one of your best friend's exes, when she's off making out with someone else and he's not over her, are bad. Except Angie Hart's "Blue" since it's about accepting being alone. Unfortunately, while it's very good, it doesn't have magical powers, so you'll still have to listen to him go on about how he can't get over her.

Holly Williams' "Sometimes" (I wish I was a fine wine, I wish I were a good drug, and hey if I were Jesus, maybe I could heal all of us..) would be a good song in this occasion. "Empty Chairs" by Don McLean is a bad choice.

Gutters are for sitting in while looking at the stars and quoting Oscar Wilde on facebook. This gives the drunker members of your party time to catch up.

Just because it was in the low 30s during the daytime doesn't mean it's going to stay warm into the nighttime. Pack a nice cardi, or you'll have to wear the hoodie in your gym bag. Pack a quilt too. Everybody loves quilts.

Oh, and if I could tell the world just one thing, it would be, that we're all okay. Thanks Jewel.

Happy New Year Everyone. It doesn't look all that different to the old one, but the fireworks at changeover time were pretty.

Liar.

This lying about the gym thing is getting hard. But I am a surprisingly good liar, and last night's reason for skipping the gym (sitting on Meagan's floor talking about the finances of a small trucking operation) worked fine as a cover when I got home at 2.30 this morning to find my Dad in the kitchen. And my Mum not home, because she'd taken Becky into the hospital to get drugs because her wisdom teeth are coming through.

So there you go, another talent to add to my list. Quiltmath, fabric buying excuses, lying.

Speaking of quiltmath, I'm quite looking forward to this last shelf getting put in, because then I can unload all my fabrics, take a photo (because really, they'll be good for all of a day) and then I can start getting inspired. I haven't done any quilting in what feels like months, and I miss it. I know there's a serious lot of seriously nice fabrics out in those tubs, and I wanna start working my way through it, so I can tell myself I can buy some more.

So many people...

What do other people think of someone talking about themselves in the third person? It's something that, in day to day usage, makes me want to stab the person doing it in the face. Repeatedly. And then set fire to them. The variety of personal pronouns in the English language isn't so vast that you should be confused by them, not when English is the only language you've ever spoken. And it's not like your being a literary genius by saying "can Kyal go upstairs and get a drink?" - I can't even be bothered dignifying the douchebagginess of that statement with a well written, bestseller novel type alternative where third person is the best and therefore most used of the personal pronouns.

All I can say is this - as much as I hate it when people speak in the third person, I'm quite okay with them doing it on facebook. You'd think that now facebook no longer demands you use is as the first word of your status (which forces you into third person), and now that your name and your status are clearly defined as separate things, I would be thinking that people should stop doing third person statuses and revert to the first person pronoun they learned before they were even in kindergarten, but actually, I'm okay with it.

Does this make me a hypocrite, or just a bit weird?

I have learned...

Apparently, sometimes, being a best friend means sitting on the floor of someone's lounge till 6am when they've had a fight with their boyfriend, at 2am when he leaves for work at 2.30am. That's okay though. If there's one thing I consider myself to be particularly good at it's being. And I can be anywhere. So I'm quite happy to be where I'm needed.

In other news, apart from the food poisoning scene* Bridesmaids is quite a good film, and includes many good discussion (re)starting points (after you've done the nitty gritty of the talking about it stuff earlier on in the evening/we small hours of the morning). Also the scene where she breaks all the traffic laws she can, freaking hilarious.


*especially when you just spent half the day out with it. Note to self: pita bread gets mouldy really fast, and check the whole pack, don't just trust the top one.

Talking

I think it's easy to forget, when you spend time without close friends who think the same thoughts as you do, with whom you can hold a conversation using only a few words, who feel to you like maybe they are you, but stuck in a different body: it's easy to forget how awesome having friends like that is.

I have long blabbed on on this blog. A year of blogging came and went a few weeks back and I will confess, I didn't notice it, probably because I was off having far ranging, 3 hour conversations with Meagan or Anna. The amazing thing I think, is that talking to them isn't much different to doing a blog post, because, although it's being read by you guys, to a certain extent (as it is with actual on-paper diaries) what we are doing here is talking to ourselves. But when you're talking to another person but it feels as if you're talking to yourself, it's even better, because people don't look at you like you're crazy. Not even when you talk loudly about the kind of things that are inappropriate to talk about in front of strangers, but, to be fair, the only other people in the gym were this girl that I went to high school with but was never friends with, and the guy that always comes when she's there and sits next to her and chats to her even though they arrive separately leaving us wondering what's up with them.

Maybe they're just two people who found each other and realised that talking to each other was like talking to themselves. If that's the case, I suspect they don't even hear what we're saying about work and boys and sex. It's easy to forget the rest of the world exists when you're talking to yourself*.


*you know what is a fantastic distraction from talking to yourself (in a blogging context)? The little dunk sound that facebook chat makes when you're chatting with a boy... The same boy you spent an hour or so talking to yourself (in an actually-talking-to-your-bestie context) about earlier at the gym.

Words.

Is it possible that we have a finite amount of words per day? Wednesday nights after work we usually go to maccas for girl chats and two hours of lots and lots of words has left me all out. I'm struggling to think full sentences, let alone write them. It's taken me 25 minutes to get this far. But it's nice to chat. It seems like a worthwhile use of my words.

Relativity.

So a gym membership, all up, is gunna cost me about $600, for the startup fee, the keycard and a years membership*. That's a lot of fabric. That's a new sewing machine. That's entry to 4 BnS balls. That's 5 new pairs of really good boots. That's 6 weekends out on the town. That's 7 weeks payment on my car loan.

I already have too many expensive hobbies. Do I really want another one?

I should explain that I'm not getting this because I think I'm fat. Clearly, at under 50kg, I'm not. But dancing at the pub the other night left me utterly exhausted because I'm very very unfit right now. The most exercise I get lately is climbing up the stairs to the staffroom at work. The weather is far too shit to start walking, and anyway, the only time I could be doing that is the middle of the night, which probably isn't the best option. Nor, obviously, is getting out of bed earlier.

Plus, lately when I have been dropping Meagan home after work we have sat in the car for ages and talked, when really, we could be better utilising that time. Not that talking isn't important, and admittedly, we may scare some some people away with our raucous laughter, but whatever. She has a gym membership but doesn't go there often enough because she is bored on her own. We do two nights a week together at least, so we could pop in after work together.

Also, the nightfill boys go there.

And it's a good excuse to try designing/sewing up a gym bag.


*pay by the week and it comes up to about $1200. I think I will pay by the week for the first couple of weeks still anyway, just in case simply being in the presence of a treadmill gives me a heart attack. It might.

I can't wait to get the chance to fall in love with it...

Tonight, I told myself to suck it up and work on the quilt.

So I did. Not particularly happily, or efficiently, since I was having a movie night, but progress was made. 56 nice, neat pinwheels are all sewn, pressed and sitting prettily in a pile. Half of them have even been trimmed.

God I hate trimming. It just makes me so cross, like, "why couldn't you have just done it right to begin with?"

The little ones now need borders and then it's time to put it all together. Hopefully this is the bit where it all magically speeds up, because it's been bloody slow so far. 392 lots of sewing and pressing, and that doesn't include the ones I screwed up and had to unpick and do again.

If ever you are making pinwheels, the knowledge that you need only times the number of pinwheels by 7 to arrive at the number of seams you have sewn and pressed won't actually come in handy, but hey, quiltmaths cred.

I guess the problem I'm having is that I really have no idea how it's actually gunna look in the end. I could lay it out on the back of the first retro quilt because that had a white back that could pretend to be the not-yet-done-bit of my bordered blocks, but that quilt it somewhere near the bottom of the pile I sleep under every night, so I figure I may as well just wait.

And because it's the right day today (for her) even though it was also the right day yesterday (for me), a big happy birthday to Thea :)

EDIT: I feel really bad now, because when I said it was the right day for me yesterday, I meant it was Thea's birthday for me yesterday, in that facebook said it was, but I am 18 hours ahead, so it was Thea's birthday from Thea's point of view when I was writing it. My birthday was in January, and instead of keeping quiet about it, I did a blog post entitled "Happy Birthday to meeeeeeee" because on the 22nd of the first, I'm even more attention seeky than usual.

Well, I feel as if I should do a post.

Seven drinks in eight hours left me free to drive home, which was jolly good, since everyone's asleep, and although my sisters may find no shame in waking us up, I would. Sleep is important.

I must say, for a night when we weren't going as hard as we could have, it was damn fun. We went to dero-oke at the federal, but Mel wasn't there so even thought I put us down for some songs, none of us sang. And then we went to the G*, and then dirty shads**. Where there was much gyrating to be done, and, I'll be honest, I didn't recognise ANY of the songs. I haven't listened to the radio in over a year, and it only shows when I'm at the pub. Or dirty shads. Still, it's possible to gyrate to a song without knowing it. It's all stupid doof doof crap anyway, but I suppose it's tough to gyrate to "take me home, country roads"

But yeah, damn fun, when there's five girls in your group and one boy. Who's so out of his depth it's not funny, but hilarious. He's adorable though, and the way he reacts when Meagan and I dirty dance is utterly priceless, for all that you can't laugh in front of him in case we hurt his feelings. I'd kinda forgotten what it was like to take teenage boys to the pub.

Can one be a cougar at 23? Nah, I didn't think so. Nevermind.

Anyway, here's a bit of Joe Nichols that Meagan and I were singing between the Federal and the G.


She can handle any champagne brunch, bridal shower with Bacardi punch, jello shooters full of Smirnoff, but tequila makes her clothes fall off...

Well I guess it's a good thing I didn't have any tequila then, isn't it?

*The G is the Gambier Hotel, where one may get their drink on till 2am, after the Federal Hotel has closed at midnight.

**Dirty Shads is what everyone calls Shadows, which is a kinda crappy nightclub you go to 15 minutes before the G closes, because so long as you're in by 2, they let you stay till 4am.

I love these guys.

I have, I suppose, a fairly mundane job. I work at a supermarket. I work afternoons and nights, because I'm very much not a morning person. Because (at 23) I'm old by the standards of a lot of my fellow night-working (ie. after school) colleagues, I get to do supervision or work the front counter, which involves dealing with whingey-poo customers and selling cancer sticks, since South Australian legislation says they can only be sold from a designated counter within the store.

And while I think a might maybe like to work at the DMV because I'm curious about certain peculiarities of South Australian car number plates, that alone is not reason enough to give up my job. Because I love my job. Or more specifically, I love my co-workers.

You know how you're not supposed to have favourites? I have favourites.

Meagan and Anna work in the cash office. I used to, but the store manager and I don't get on, and in there, you have to deal with him way more than when you're just at frontend. Also, 5am Saturday starts. *shudder* But Meagan and Anna are my homies, since I've been in their boat, and we're all in our 20s. We're going to Lonegernong BnS ball together in August.

Lauren and Tegan make me laugh. And it's easy to make them laugh. It's especially easy to make them laugh when they're using the instore intercom. Lauren's just turned 18 so she can come to the pub with us. Tegan watches all the same TV shows as I do, so I give them to her once I've downloaded them.

Sarah has the same name as me, which is quite annoying. She goes on the smokes counter when I'm supervising. She likes saying mean things about people she is friends with, which is funny.

Janelle is the other night supervisor, and she's in charge when I'm on smokes. She's been at woolies 15 years, and she (like me) gets that the attitudes of the 16 year olds who work after school isn't gunna be the same as that of the managers who have made a career of it, and that you need to treat them differently. This is why Janelle and I are liked, and the juniors spend a lot of time bitching about the other supervisors.

Ellie gets really excited about little things and jumps up and down squealing, which is adorable.

Emily is tall and pretty and athletic and nice, which annoys us because if she was just tall and pretty and athletic we could hate her, but she's so nice and sweet and funny that we can't.

Simone's ex was my ex's little brother. We go to karaoke together sometimes. She can sing a lot better than I can.

Louise lies convincingly and often, but not about important stuff. She'll make us believe that there was two midgets fighting in the carpark, or that she's actually only 14.

The boys in nightfill make us all laugh. Correction - we all laugh at the boys in nightfill.

In a year or so, there will be a new Woolworths store in town. Apparently, they want to take a lot of the more senior staff from our store to the new one, so last night Tegan was philosophizing that it would be like the end of high school and that we would never see each other again.

I got that song from the end of Grease (We Go Together) stuck in everyone's head, becuase it seemed like the most appropriate response.

Tonight, a half dozen of us are hitting the town a little bit. Saturday night, we will hit the town properly. Backing it up, Woolworths style.

I may not have the best job, but I have the best friends, and I get paid to spend time with them. I'm pretty happy with that.

Ummm..?

Before I leave for any major drinking/partying/standing in a field type even, I always have a few nasty moments of misgivings. Isn't there better stuff to spend my time on? Don't I have dozens of unfinished projects? Do I realise it's cold outside? Do I realise it's not my house, so I can't sleep in my bed? Shouldn't I just stay at home, in the warm, with a high speed internet connection, and a sewing machine? Because after the second drink, that's no longer an option.*

I know I'm not a particularly social creature. I know I don't like being outside in the cold, and I know I like it even less when I've chosen to do it. I know I pick fights when I'm a bit drunk. I know that if I don't get terrible indigestion then I'll get bored after an hour or two and want to go to bed.

But...

That moment comes after a week or so of looking forward to it. And it tends to get overwhelmed with misgivings I can do something about, such as "Do I have enough drinks, Where is my bitchin chair, Should I take a spare coat, etc?"

I suppose I should go work on those non-metaphorical questions, huh?

See you all tomorrow night! Wish me luck!


*It's about 2km away, this party, but there's a blitz on this weekend and I've seen 6 cars pulled over by the cops in 2 days. I could walk it, I know, but that seems too much like exercise, and that's not something I'm fond of either.

"...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.

Change of plans.

So I'm still in Adelaide. Kelsey's dad got here about 4 and said I could stay with them if I wanted. And Kelsey seemed to be enjoying the company so I stayed too.

Now, what I should do next is tell you all about my day. But I'm worried it will be a bit of a spoiler of Shay's big post tomorrow. Suffice to say, she isn't a creepy old guy in a trench coat, but is instead everything I was expecting. Nice and funny and completely ready to blame me for all her fabric purchases. I've devised a cover for her "Yes, but you should see how much Sara bought" though she's probably worked that one out for herself. When all the ladies in the line start gossiping about "what ever can that girl need all that fabric for?" you know you're shopping right.

But now I've run out of money (Though to my mind, still having a couple of hundred is broke - I like to be covered for any emergencies that crop up) so it's a) a good thing I didn't go to Lucindale and b) a good thing my car is full of petrol, and very efficient. When I filled up today it read an average of 6.1L per 100km, and that was the city driving as well as the distance stuff. $33 I put in, I filled up in Naracoort, which is about 100km past my house, so it's probably used about 30 litres for the whole trip.

Which meant I had more money to buy fabric. So I did.