Still Alive.

Hi everybody. I just wanted to let you know that I'm not dead. Nor have I joined the circus, or a cult, or the French Foreign Legion. Nor, contrary to what you may have heard, do I have a new boyfriend, and, especially, I have not gotten back together with my ex boyfriend. Really.

Actually, the reason that I haven't been posting anything is because, quite simply, I haven't been sewing anything. Until before a couple of nights ago, my sewing for the last month or so had consisted entirely of me hemming jeans and adding ribbons to kids sized shirts to be waist ties. Kids sized shirts aren't that flattering to the waistline.

A couple of nights ago though I remembered that it was only a couple of days till christmas, and more to the point I realised that, even after buying pretty much every single red and green checked fabric in the Mount, that I at no point had bought the right one to make myself a replica of the stocking from the the season 3 Community christmas episode, but then I realised that that it didn't matter because the pink and green on-point-check from the DS range (I think) before last that was chilling in my stash was kinda perfect in every way except that it was pink instead if red, but whatever, no-one cares. So I made a couple of stockings in the fandom-y spirit.

Not that anyone really gets it. But for those who do, yes, they are big enough to wear as a hat.

And then, of course, yesterday, I realised that I knew exactly what to make a couple of my friends for christmas, but, in pretty much the story of my life, I had like 5 hours to make them all.

First up I made another stocking for EmmStaff. It's ever so slightly smaller than the green ones, and she forgot to come in and get it in time for christmas, so Annalise and Hamish held it up tonight after work while I took a photo after work. But it's made with some Birds Of Norway fabric (it's a Kaufman from a few years ago) and it's one of the most innately cool fabrics I've ever bought, without at any point giving away the fact that it knows it's an innately cool fabric. Which pretty much sums up Emm => very cool, doesn't realise it yet, and cause it's not actually a christmas fabric, and because she turns 18 in eight days, she's gunna use it as a birthday stocking.

And then I also made some tumblr things into plushies. And didn't take photos. Annalise took a photo of hers though: a pair of plusies comprising the message icon and the notification icon.

I made two of the other girls plushies too, I just need to wait for them to put them on the internets. In th meantime, happy christmas everyone, from me and the 6 ciders I drank earlier.

Arty Artness.

Ah, long weekends. The perfect opportunity to get seriously stuck into working on some of your long-neglected WIPs.

Unless of course you're like me, in which case you work all three days as well as drinking on two of them.

And I was kinda happy, because this weekend was intended to be our last hurrah until the show, which is 4 weeks away, meaning that we would have some time to recover. Then I remembered that I agreed to go to Adelaide with Casey and Jeffy for reasons I'm not entirely sure of. Probably mainly to do with Chinese food, which I've just realised I get to eat in 4 days time. Now I'm keen.

As for stuff that I've been making, well, I did some Sherlock Texts From Last Night for the Tumblrverse. Does that count? I used mspaint...

P.S. Lets not talk about the footy. I'm still too full of feels.

Little victories

Four hours ago I thought to myself, "I might have an early night tonight..."

Clearly, I didn't, but I fixed Casey's pants for her, so I'm still declaring tonight to be a rousing success.

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.

So, this happened...

Tonight I went looking for stripey fabric, found a really old demo Kindle and pulled it apart with a butter knife. I found it very interesting, but I realise that such antics are not particularly good blog fodder. Also, I cut my finger. Not like, bad, but it hurts. Kinda like a paper cut, but on the inside of a Kindle.

That's only fair, I guess, since I was prising out it's innards with a kitchen utensil.

Whoops

Earlier tonight I randomly picked a whole heap of games for mum's new tablet. And we could say that I sent the last 4 hours thoroughly testing their suitability, checking that they ran okay without too much lag or bugginess, and turning off all the annoying music and sounds. And while that would be true, it would be more accurate to say I got distracted flinging marbles at one another, exploding little blobs of goo and joining rainbow pipes together, and lost track of time.

Thankfully, I made the case first... But I forgot to take a photo, and it's too nice here in bed to get out and go and get it.

Genius.

Today at work, I saw a lady wearing skinny trackies. It was a revelation. Trackies fabric, skinny jeans cut. How genius. I have tracky fabric, it's what I've been making my jackets out of. I have a pair of skinny jeans that were in too bad a condition to give to the salvos, or I did until I chopped them up for a pattern tonight. I haven't actually made them yet, because the big bad internet got in the way, but I have hopes. They are on my tomorrow to-do list, along with not drowning in the puddles in the yard. It's been a bit moist out tonight.

Shame

I've spent the past few days waiting for the urge to clean out my closet to hit. I've known it was about to arrive since mid last week, though I couldn't tell you how or why. I just knew that I was about ready to do it, and that when it was going to happen, it would.

Tonight it happened. I was going to make a start on the back of the striped lattice quilt, using more of the blue as well as the 9cm strips of striped fabric I'd cut way more than necessary of for the binding. But then I couldn't find said strips, and bam! Suddenly it hits, and I'm pulling everything out and trying it on to see if I should keep it or not.

I accumulate clothes like something else that accumulates a whole lot of things without noticing it. I cant think of a good simile for that one, so I'll say this: every time I clean out my cupboard, I can fill at least two big garbage bags worth of clothes and shoes to give to the salvos. Without realising it, I end up with a couple of dozen pairs of jeans, and twice that in shirts, and then all my piles topple over, because I'm not very good at folding things that aren't quilt fabric.

And even though I feel bad that I have so freaking much stuff, I don't know if it's okay for me to be ashamed (because oh boy am I a victim of capitalist consumerism) when I'm giving all this stuff to charity. Not to mention the fact that probably half of it came from the Salvos to begin with - I think the fact that it's so cheap there is a big part of how I manage to accumulate so much.

Maybe the Salvos should be ashamed?

Wait, what?

Tonight I found myself only wearing one sock, after I got an itchy foot a couple of hours ago and took my sock off to scratch it. I hadn't realised how long it'd been - I must have done it all the time a couple of years ago, since I named my blog after my tendency to end the evening wearing only one sock. I'm not sure why it's not happening much any more, except possibly that my heels are a bit more callused these days, and maybe that helps them grip socks better.

What's more I've passed both 2 years of blogging and 850 posts without noticing. In much the same way, it's already the wee small hours of Monday morning and my weekend is all gone.

How did that happen?

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.

Grrr

The power going out has put a serious cramp in my night. I had plans man, and sure, I probably would have ended up playing bubble breaker all night instead of actually following through on them, but now even the chance has gone, and I feel robbed, man, robbed.

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!

Here I go again on my own...

Man, I have got to stay off youtube - that was 5 hours of my life I'll never get back.

Just as well I actually got stuff done during the actual day bit of today. There was the getting the car serviced, and the sorting out more car food, and the repacking of the under-the-seat-box-of-everything, and the repairs on my fur coat.

It's kinda crazy to think I've had my coat for nearly 3 years now. That said, when you look at it, you can kinda see. There's a lot of food dye on it still, and when that bloke at Longy that year put it on he split a lot of the seams at the back and I had to re-sew them, and I kinda lost it between the last time I wore it an now, and it hasn't fared all that well. A lot of the fur at the top of the back was just tearing, so I had to sew it all back together with some old towel (the one I'd cut up to clean some of the food dye off) underneath it to stabalise it, and then I even ended up just cutting out a heap of the weak stuff and filling it in with a patch of the scrap from the faux-fur roof lining of the new ute. It's not quite the same, but since quite a lot of it is still blue, and it's mainly under the collar anyway, I don't think it matters. Also, by the time I'm wearing it, everyone will be shitfaced anyway.

Tomorrow is my second roadtrip in a week. I think I'm keener for this one - afternoon travel, lone-wolfing, CDs instead of radio, my own car, no definite plans. Should be fun.

My first new fabric in ages.

Keeping in mind that I basically grabbed whatever caught my eye in the first 3 minutes, this is what I ended up with.

The two greens are to go in my pile that started with DS limes but now includes quite a few other green fabrics as well, and the orange is much the same, but, well, orange. The rainbow stripe and the jade and pink I bought because they're puuurdy, and the yellow because they had it locally and I bought a quarter thinking it was quite lovely, and then when I went looking for more suddenly it was nowhere to be found. But it's hard to find a nice yellow, so I got some more for stash.

The brown-y fabrics I bought because I'd love to make myself another Autumn Nutmeg quilt. It's remained one of my favourites since completion and I'd like to have a go with a bit of the spring colourway (that would be the greens and the blues) thrown in too - I still need to find myself a few more blue and green co-ords before I get going on it.

And sewing motivation. I'll be needing that too.

It's so nice to be home, on my own bed with it's electric blanket, in my own bedroom where I'm not worried about the sound of my typing waking people who actually sleep at night, driving my own car, and having enough powerpoints for all my tech.

And, since I'm warm and happy and content, I may as well break out a couple of whinges.

Why do all the motels in Adelaide make you check out at 10 when nothing opens till 11 on a sunday? I think it should be like how maccas does breakfast till later on a sunday. In my world, motel checkouts would be at least a half hour later on sundays, maybe a full hour. It just makes sense.

Why on earth do people still listen to the radio? I mean, yes, it's a handy way to learn new songs, but if I'm honest, most of those new songs are shit. Even Call Me Maybe, which I adore, is admittedly, lyrically quite weak. And the jingles, oh, the jingles. My travel companions wanted to listen to the actual radio as we were going through the hills, and the stupid ads were so insipid and annoying that I wanted to pull the car over. I lost the will to live, let alone drive. If I'm gunna be stuck in a car for five hours, I want to be feeling pumped, having fun... not listening to a cheesy rhyme about shower screens. And the fizzy sound. kzzzzztch...Really science, it's 2012. Haven't you fixed that yet? I don't want to have to find a new station every 45 minutes, but the fuzz at the edges of range gives me a terrible headache.

Why does Spotlight have their sales on weekends when I've only got 10 minutes to shop? Why can't they have 30% off fabric next thursday and friday, when I can get to a whole lot of stores, instead of popping into one quickly and grabbing a half dozen random fabrics while everyone else looked at baby stuff? (I'll take photos tomorrow, they've pseudo-assimilated into the stash already, so I need to fish them back out)

Why do I get an overwhelming urge to quilt when I'm stuck in a car 300km from my machine, but as soon as I get home I'm like naaaah...

Nah Uh.

The great thing about quilting (the sewing through three layers thing) is that it's something you can just do. If you're designing and piecing, you need to get out the iron, and clear off your cutting mat, and find a rotary cutter and all that stuff. If you've got some quilting to be done, you baste and you get going.

Unfortunately, what you do need is batting. And I appear to be all out. It's been a while since I've done any actual quilting (as evidenced by all the un-quilted tops hanging from my curtains) and I had forgotten that I was pretty much out. And Spotlight is persisting in not having it on super amazing special.

So clearly, it's totally not my fault I just watched 7 DVD commentaries instead.

Naw, damn...

I've been in a bit of a quilting rut lately, and since even though Comic Con's over, the internet is still getting fuller every day with interesting new videos and articles, any attempts at having a play around at designing something new in Paint got repeatedly sidetracked by my "maybe I'll just check google's new video feed..." attitude.

So I broke out the graph paper and textas. After a couple of goes with nothing lining up I got the sizes of the rectangles sorted so that the edges of any potential quilt would be fairly level, and went to colour it in, and was doing the very bottom right hand corner...

And fucked up the colouring. On Paint I could just ctrl+z and then make the bottom corner rectangle pink, and then colour in the white square green, but in real life, I don't even have wite-out...

Also, to make it without doing T seams, you'd need to put a seam through the centre of the rectangles, and I don't want to do that (nor do I want to do T seams) so unfortunately, I can't actually make it either.

Still, it's kinda pretty.

Brrrrrr...

I tried. I tried really hard. I tried scribbling some stuff on graph paper. I tried shifting fabric into little piles. I tried doing little lines on the computer. I even crocheted for a bit, resulting in a pointless, pathetic little square. And now its time to face facts. It is ONE DEGREE ZERO DEGREES*outside. My creativity is probably hibernating for the winter.

I'd like to join it. I've had enough of being cold. How do I go about hibernation? I think I just eat lots and lots and then hop in bed for three months? Is that right?

It sounds nice.

*I checked the weather on my phone before I started typing, and then again after I pushed publish; this is an edit. Also, apparently humidity is at 100%. does this mean that if I go outside, I will be swimming?

Crap...

When did it become 6am? Why are there birdies singing? How did that happen?

I only started clicking on random internet gossip articles 15 minutes ago, surely...

YOLO.

Some days I get why most bloggers don't post every day, because, truly, not ever day has something happen. Some days, you get up, buy some boring stuff (undies, chocolate) go play with some babies, have dinner, have a couple of drinks, get encouraged to go into town with your sister, realise you really don't feel like going out tonight, read a few very interesting pieces on feminism while sitting in a bar packed with 20 somethings wearing not enough clothing and too much heel, and then you get maccas and come home and laugh till you cry over some random funny photo pages.

And sadly, that isn't really blog-worthy, though at least by having done it, I'll be able to find out in the future, relatively quickly, what I was doing on the eve of the new financial year 2012/13. That really for me is the handiest thing about this blog, since I'm a bit shit with the whole "remembering" thing - earlier this year I had to look up my post from my birthday last year, because it was a complete blank.

Anyway, for my new financial years resolution (which, as a personal rule, has to be non-financial) is going to be to put more effort into wearing my pretty clothes on my days off. I have a pretty big wardrobe (contents, not physical space, sadly) and a lot of it only gets worn on a potential 2 days a week when I'm not working. So it's a shame that I so often just go with a pair of daggy jeans and a long sleeve tee. YOLO, as facebook would say, so I'm gunna dress purty.