Isn't this why it's supposedly sold "pre-shrunk"?

I didn't mention it the other night, but the Prima Natural I used for the back of the pink pavement quilt has some shrinkage issues. Spraying with water (I'm not a fan of steaming) and ironing caused shrinkage of about 5mm on a 10cm square. I'm not too concerned about how it will look once quilted - since there's so much white on the back, and I'm quilting fairly densely, shrinkage should be fairly even and, hopefully, result in much crinklyness. But it is a bitch when I'm just trying to press the creases out of my blocks and they keep changing sizes on me, so tonight I decided to pre-wash the rest of it, as well as the white I found at Lincraft today.

As quilters, we tend not to deal with large amount of fabric. A couple of yards at most, for a backing. And I for one am glad of this. Because trying to iron eight metres of fabric is a bitch of a job.

Swag Quilt: Progress Report.

So this is my swag quilt so far.

Columns 1 and 2 are finished, 3 is almost finished and I haven't yet started 4 or 5.

Silly me accidentally cut the missing piece of column 3 as a pink and green floral (the fabric I call handbag, because it's the fabric of my handbag) and then discovered when I went to assemble it today that I didn't have enough spare of the pink with polka dots to fill in the gap. So it was back to Spotlight for yet another small piece of fabric, which is now in the wash with a whole heap of sheetings I've bought over the last few weeks to use as backings when I can't be bothered piecing anything.

I've double checked my little ziplock bags with all my pieces for columns 4 and 5, and they all look right, so hopefully I can be all done by tomorrow night. I'm working till 8.30, but that's an early night by my standards, so I've got plenty of time after that.

Weirdly, I don't feel very connected to this quilt. I think the problem may be that at no point did I lay the fabrics out on the floor and shuffle them around before deciding where they were going to go. I just followed the computer. It's not that I'm not liking where it's going, I just feel like it's not mine. It's like I'm looking at someone else's work. I imagine this is what doing a quilt from someone else's pattern would be like - like I'm looking at an answer without seeing the workings. It went from abstract coloured squares on a computer screen to part-done quilt without the usual middle process of choosing fabrics, putting them in their right spots and being able to see it all come together. I know I seem to rush a lot of my quilts but I still follow all the right steps in the right order, usually.

Maybe it's just that I'm not assembling repeating blocks. There's none of the 'sew-press-lay on floor to check that its all coming along nicely' that I usually do.

That said, I think it's a good thing that I'm only fond of it, and not super super in love with it. It will get used, in a field, when I'm drunk, maybe once a month. It will barely be seen. It will probably get really really dirty every time I use it. As far as quilts go, it will have a much harder life than most. I don't know that I would ever put my delicately thought-out quilts through that.

It's strange beginnings will lead to a strange life. But that happens sometimes.

In completely random news, we discovered tonight at work that you would need to drink approximately 27 cans of Birell (the ultra light (0.5%) beer we can sell at Woolies) in two hours to be considered intoxicated (2 standard drinks in the first hour and 1 per hour after that should mean you are under 0.05% BAC - the legal limit in SA, so 4 in two hours should put you over.) Since this is about 10 litres, we don't think it's really do-able.

Saturday nights are quite quiet.

Swag Quilt Fabrics.

Washed but, admittedly, not ironed.

Various printed drills bought today at Spotlight on a shared Spend-$100-Save-$40 voucher. Thanks Helen.

Still got no idea what I'm gunna do with them.

This is not a blog from the bog either, but I'm headded that way shortly...

Honeycat went in and got speyed today (who knew it was spelt with an e?) and now, annoyingly, she an Babycat are hissing at each other. I'm hoping it's just because Honeycat wont play like she usually does, so instead of letting Babycat attack her she's just telling her who is boss in cat-speak. She's also licking like crazy, which I guess is good in that she's gotten rid of the patch of blood that was around the stitches, but I'm still a bit worried that she'll either tear them out accidentally or worse, on purpose.

Tonight, from what I know (I did work tonight, but I bought her home a few hours before I started, and also from watching them now) Honeycat has pretty much refused to do all of what the vet said. She said to only give her a little bit of food because she'd be nauseous from the anesthetic, but she wolfed down a pouch, then drank the rest of Babycat's milk, then ate what was left of Babycat's food. The vet said that she would want to be in a quiet dark room on her own, but she's in her usual spot now, and she was out in the lounge before I went to work. The only difference is in what she and Babycat are doing, with regards to her very much showing Babycat who is alpha-cat, and Babycat doing a lot of hissing about it.

Thankfully, I have tomorrow off, not only so that I can keep an eye on them both, but also because I didn't really achieve much today. I got a couple dozen fabrics washed including the blue polka dot I'm using for the back of the baby quilt, and I came up with how I'm gunna do it as well, but as for actual sewing, it was a bit of a bust. 

I feel good about getting prewashing done though, because I have massive fears that one fabric will shrink more than another when I wash them and ruin all my good work, especially since I set the machine to 40° and dry them in the dryer. I figure there's no point having something you cant use, and that means easy-to-wash. But it also means I cant get something started (or in this case, finished) till I've put a load in, put it in the dryer for 20 minutes, and ironed it all out. It's probably a waste of time for the most part, but it's one of those things where you know it's working by the fact that you don't have any problems. It's annoying, but I'd rather waste 2 hours prepping my fabric than waste 20 hours on sewing something that shits itself as soon as I wash it.

Anyway.

Time for a couple more episodes of The Mentalist. Hurrah for American TV, who can make an hour pass in just 42 minutes. British TV takes much longer to watch, which is good in that I get more Top Gear for my download, but bad in that I can watch less episodes in a night. Not that there are any episodes of Top Gear I haven's seen (okay, I haven't seen Top Gear of the Pops, but it's debatable whether or not this counts) but there are still 2 DVDs of The Mentalist season 1 I havent watched yet, so that's where I'll be if you need me.

Days off are more tiring than workdays...

I ended up getting 6 cot sized ones (that was all they had) and one queen sized one, total cost $130.

Quilt # 3 is bound but not quilted, because spotlight had sold out of the stripey fabric I was going to use for the binding, so I had the most pathetic strop in history, and did the cheat fold-over-the-backing binding thing. It still looks nice, if a little more boring, and it means that I'll have to do a neater job of my start/finish points of the quilting, but I'm feeling good about the progress I've made - even if it isn't finished, it almost looks it, but for the pins.

I also concluded that my current setup of sewing machine on shoebox on dresser is killing my back and is generally bloody inconvenient, so I've started the process of getting a bit better setup, by bringing the proper sewing cabinet, with the height adjustment and stuff, to my bedroom, not that I really have room for it. I've had to tub a whole lot of stuff, and those tubs are going to have to be shedded till I can get rid of the dresser, which I can't do till honeycat is willing to let babycat move out, and put the tubs where it is currently. I've considered and quite quickly disregarded the idea of going back to a single bed now that I no longer have a boyfriend to share it with, but as soon as honeycat leaves the nest and goes back to sleeping exactly where I want my knees to be, the extra bedspace is necessary.

The only problem with having the sewing cabinet on the other side of the room is that of course there is no powerpoint on that side, so even though I've done the heavy lifting and would like to celebrate by getting this quilt finished so I can stop stressing over it,* I cant finish it because, of course, we have no free extension cables at the moment.

So I'm thinking I might instead go and finish the last of the prewashing... I put it in the machine before I went in to do my shopping and haven't got around to putting it in the dryer yet, but it would probably only need 20 minutes before it would be fine to iron... or, I could sit here, and go on facebook and ebay, and waste yet another night off.

Haven't decided yet.

*Not that its bad, in fact, I'm actually worried that its too good to give to someone I've never met, who's already been bought $100 worth of presents by the rest of the staff... Should we be sharing the babylove instead of spoiling this one particular baby?

Most of... No, wait, SOME OF my prewashing is done...

So I just set myself up a googlesites, because the internet told me it was the best way to host some files for free. It's only 100meg, but hopefully, until I work out something better, it will be enough.

I have prewashed, ironed, and folded neatly all the fabric I have so far. Actually, that's not entirely true, its actually more like 95ish% of the stuff that I am planning on prewashing. Which doesnt include the stuff I'm not prewashing. Anything bigger that 2 yards wont be prewashed, and nor will anything definitely set for toys. So, maybe, if you're going by yardage* anyway, cause remember that the big bits aren't getting washed, some 45% of my fabric has been prewashed. But as for fabric I intend to prewash, but havent yet... not very much at all.

There's a piece I got from the Salvos which is very vivid and apparently, according to the selvage, made in Brazil, and my grubby little quilting soul, the one I keep in a jar in the bottom drawer of my sewing cabinet, says that it will run, and not to put it in with the rest.
There's the stuff I got for the PinkGreenBrown quilt I designed one night, but am too scared to do because it contains proper triangles. Ones that line up and everything. Washing that fabric would put me a bit too close to actually starting it, and I am not quite ready.
There's the stuff I'm still waiting on, of course, because its hard to wash something before its even made it to the post office on its way to you.
And, there is the stuff I have lost, in the upheaval caused by the birth of babycat in the epicenter of my stash. But I have bought some big rolly tubs, and many new sizes of ziplock bag, and one day, I will make a start on tidying this place up.

Not tonight though, because my sister has fallen asleep on my bed, and is taking up most of it, snoring loudly. Seriously, she is the only one I know of who can out-snore Honeycat.

Gah. I need... I was gunna say to move out, but that's not right. I need some of them to move out.


*which we wont be because we are Australian, so its metreage, which looks especially stupid when you do the r before the e, which is of course, the correct Australian spelling. So maybe we will stick with yardage.

New project... Maybe...

Okay, so in and around work, being sick and becoming a grandma, I may have snuck into Stitch and Knit yesterday... mainly to look at the fabric I had just bought on the internet in all its real world glory, and feel smug at the fact that I had got it for half the price, but also because, well, I was down the main street and, frankly, I am weak.

While in there, I had a look at the top being machined and felt good that even though I may have thus far only done squares, it least they all line up. Then, while shamelessly perving on all the gorgeous machine-quilted-and-perfectly-cornered-and-comprised-of-very-expensive-fabric-that-I-really-couldn't-afford-to-buy-from-there quilts, I got inspired.

There was one of those "supposed to be wonky within the perfectly aligned block" ones there, in brown and blue, and, I will admit, maybe a little bit of drool came out. Or maybe it was snot. I do have a cold at the moment, but I'm not sure which would be more embarrassing.

Here's a rough sketch, without colour.


And, today while sitting in my nice warm car before I had to get out and be miserable and fluey and at work, I did a little sketch that was the precursor to this, which I did once I had a nice handy touchscreen laptop to work with, instead of the back of a receipt.



A quick bit of Quilt Math (which definitely deserves the capitals because its sooo much harder than real math) tells me that it can be does as a 160cm quilt, with squares of a finished 20cm and star blocks of a finished 40cm, with 8 half yards of fabric, 4 each of 2 tones.

That's 16 fat quarters.

Most of the ones at spotlight are $2.10 this week.

That's $33.60 for the top.

Or, I could go back to Stitch and Knit, where the fat quarters are $3, even though they've got a pretty limited range, and do it for $48.

I have tomorrow off, if the slightly psycho honeymummycat will let me leave the house...

In other news, I used up all my energy putting my fabric into the washing machine and pushing the 33 million buttons you need to press to get it to work. Hopefully tomorrow it will get dried and ironed. Hopefully.

To sew, or what to sew... that is the question...

It's a weird conundrum, isn't it... I don't want to use my good fabric on a new or experimental design, because if it doesn't work then it's nice fabric wasted, but I dont wanna use crappy fabric, because if it works, then its time and effort wasted, and now I have something I've worked really hard on, but don't like.

What I need is more mid-range fabrics... or nice fabrics that I have a lot of, or didn't pay too much for... actually, I do have quite a few fabrics like that, because I buy a lot of cheap ends of bots at clearance time, but none of them coordinate.

In other news, Honeycat appears to only be having the one kitten, who we have given the honorific "he" and are thus far calling "Babycat." He is grey.

In other other news, my pre-washing remains undone.