Help...

I'm in a bit of a conundrum. One of the girls from work is pregnant and, like Meagan, she doesn't want to know what the baby's going to be. I'm not super close to her but her boyfriend has been friends with Meagan since highschool. I have been invited to her babyshower.

Question: do you think she's expecting a quilt?

If she knew what she was having, I would probably do her one. Girl quilts are easy. Boy quilts aren't that hard. But gender neutral quilts shit me. Green is my favourite colour, but I don't like the fact that is the gender neutral colour of choice. Orange is very in right now, what with tangerine being the colour of the year, but that hasn't filtered down to our Spotlight, who only got half the oranges in the new DS range (and none of the greens - boo), and oranges are especially hard to compare on a computer screen. What's more, soooo many fabrics, even ones that aren't girly, have flowers on them.

I'm not a big advocate of if I could do it all again-ing, but in this case, if I could do it all again, I'd buy a dozen bundles of the aqua, orange and brown mingle bundles, back when I could get them for $15 each. And then not only would I have the perfect go-to bundle whenever I needed a quick gender neutral baby quilt, I wouldn't be so worried about the fact that I haven't seen what is still my favourite quilt I've ever made in almost a year.

Cause I could just make it again.

I think I'd rather just find that one though.

The quilts so far...

I just went through and re-tagged a heap of posts, since I stopped putting quilt numbers at around #6.

#1 is the big rainbow quilt.

#2 is Maddy's quilt.

#3 is Levi's (friend from work's baby) quilt.

#4 will be Mama Jan's quilt, which got a number when it was in planning stages - that's how long it's been on the gunna list.

#5 is the retro quilt

#6 is the BlueGreen quilt

#7 is the purple quilt (not yet completed)

#8 is Esther's quilt

#9 is Dad's quilt cover (quilted, but not assembled)

#10 is my wonky Mingle mini quilt.

#11 is what came to be known as the Bubble and Squeak mini quilt (which has also gone to live with Esther, not that it will ever get used because I tied a bow around it in matching fabric and Helen thinks it's too pretty to unwrap)

#12 is the Honeycomb quilt I finished today.

Now I need a way to put that somewhere I can remember it - on the sidewall or something.

A Good Day... Except for the Lawnmowing...

Now that I've gone back to facebook, and finished there, I am back, for real this time. I really need to discourage Babycat from sitting on the keyboard, but at the moment it seems more important to stop her annoying her mother.

Speaking of:

I don't know that there's still any milk in there, though I'm assuming there is since she stayed on the boob a while, which was annoying, and not only because I was getting shit done. Janelle from work was telling me about a cat that's 18 months old now and still on the boob so I am a bit worried, but Babycat is not even 11 weeks yet, and she drinks from a bowl and eats real food, so I'm sure she'll get over it/cope fine if the well runs dry.

As you can kinda see, I made progress on the mini quilt. Actually, around mowing the lawn, washing my hair and the cats sitting on it as I tried to put it through the machine, I actually finished it.

Despite the shoddyness of the second photo, there is some consensus in my house (well, Casey and Becky) that the back is nicer than the front. I will agree to a certain extent that the back is less for the brain to try and appreciate, and that the first retro quilt taught me the value of a simplified design with a solid colour to tie it all together, but I'm not keen on the layout of the back. They were the 8 blocks I had left, I shuffled them about for at least half of The View (it was the one with Obama on, that they have aired at least 4 times now) but I never came to a balance I was satisfied with, with regards to the spacing between the designs and the positioning of the browns, which appear quite high contrast on the back.

Final size is 80cm by 106cm, which is too small really for me to use, and the cotton batting seems much stiffer than the bamboo I have gotten used to. But it hasn't been washed yet, and that might make a difference.

I did my machine's wavy line quilting which I'm so fond of, and it ended up being even tighter than the BlueGreen quilt, about three rows to two, at 7 rows per block and one on the seam. But on flat batting I feel the more quilting the better, since the batting doesn't push out on the piecing and hold the seams flat, and I worry that it will all fall apart if the seams havent been sewn over or at least near to.

I would have done an over the seams quilt were it not for the fact that I couldn't match up the panels at the back, and I thought it would look a bit daft on that side if the quilting was a centimetre or so off the seam on half the blocks, and following some random line on the others. I tried my best to get the vertical seams at least to match up, devoting an entire episode of The Mentalist to it, but they're still a little bit off. There's so many lines though and it's the best thing about the wavy stitch, that it doesn't really matter like a straight int the ditch does.

Anyway, next up should be either finishing the boat quilt cover or the purple quilt, which is under a pile of stuff at the moment, and also Mama Jan's quilt which is due in 3 weeks, as well as a bag for one of the girls at work, which I am going to have to remember how to do. I've bought some foam a bit thinner that what I used for mine, so it shouldn't be as hard, but I suspect it will still take me a bit to get back in the swing of it.

Or I could have a go at another mini quilt, I'm liking them; they're quicker and easier than big ones, and you can try out more exciting stuff for them. But I haven't got a cohesive bundle of fabrics I'm willing to use right now, so it might have to wait.

Also coming us is Christmas quilting night at Spotlight on Thursday, which I may or may not do something for - on the one hand, I do like to get involved, on the other, I really dislike the idea of making a quilt to use for less than a month per year. But I bought some nice Christmas paisleys last year, that were just not-Christmassy enough to catch my fancy, so I might whip up a little something with them tomorrow after work, if I can remember where I put them.

Total sleep time still possible: 4hours 25minutes...

Casey has stolen my laptop to watch Psych, so I have scooped up Mum's tiny Dell to type this up, so that I can send it to myself, add the photos and post. Why the rush? Well, due to a flu that's going around Woolies at the moment, I'm the only open-trained supervisor available to work tomorrow morning. So I will be needing to wake up in about 5 hours or so.

How shit is that? The rules say that we need to be given a 10 hour break between shifts, but there's nothing about doing nights forever and then suddenly doing a morning. That said, the rules also say that if you are their only option, but you don't want to do it, but they need you too, you can demand double time and a half. It's just a shame I'm not a massive bitch, and that I understand that there's been 15% cut from frontend's budget in the last month, so I'm not gunna.

Anyway, I've got the top of the mini quilt done, and I freaking love it. Sure, there's quite a few points that leave a little to be desired, but I've already stated that wonkyness quickly turned out to be more difficult than it apeared in the paint document.

I ended up going for 4 by 6 because I scrapped the little end blue bits in favour of just adding them to the other fabrics, since that way I had 8 colours, and they could be split into four piles for 4 rows, so everything became easier.

I also realised tonight that I can get 2 clippy coathangers, and hang stuff on my curtain rod. Well, actually off my curtain hooks, since the rod itself is quite thick.

Yes, my curtain is a nasty browny-orange velour. No, I haven't trimmed the batting. But fuck me it's come out gorgeous. I wish I'd had more fabrics so I could do it bigger. I figure if you had 12 you could do an 8 by 6 fairly easy, since I still have enough 4-squares (well, 4-quadrilaterals, since they aren't right angled) to do another two rows down. I'll be using these for the backing, I think: I've got a piece of blue polka dot that I want to pair it with, but I'm still not sure exactly.

Probably won't get past my curtains for a few days though, as I only have tomorrow to finish the the boat quilt before father's day. I'm thinking of cheating and getting a strip of press studs from spotlight to do the bottom, since I kinda loathe doing buttons, but I'm undecided as yet. It'd probably cost me about $15, but it would save a lot of work. I probably will, since my bank balance has been strangely resistant so far to repeated fabric purchasing attacks.

Speaking of, here are the random bits that I only got because there's a couple there I want for Mama Jan's quilt, which I'm desperately in need of inspiration/motivation on.

Then there's the first batch I bought on the cheap from eBay.

I was looking for some more of the fabrics that matched the brown-bird fabric I posted about the other day and I found this seller who had 50% off a heap of her fabrics, ending the next day. So I bought 7 1/2 yards, cause that's what you can fit an an international pouch, but I didn't realise I had also put one of them in my watch list.

The next day of course, the ones that are left are 60-69% off. I'm not feeling bad about it, because 3 of the ones I bought the first night were her last bits, but of course I went and get another 7.

Most of these were between $3 and $4 a yard. 3 of them are Michael Miller, 2 Alexander Henry and a couple of randoms, but even if they were crappy fabrics that would be cheap*

And there's still a box making it's way from fabric.com to shipito, where I will have to pay some more to get it sent on to me.

I will be ready to marry the post office in a couple of weeks time.

*Should I maybe go buy more?

*yawn*

In lieu of an actual post, can I just say this: If I ever decided to do 2-way-wonkyness again, can someone please bash me over the head and hide me in a corner until I come to my senses?

I ditched doing more work on dad's quilt in favour of making a start on the first mini quilt. Should have waited, done more thinking, realised how much work it would be to line up all those wonky corners. But can I say it wasn't my fault, it was Spotlight's, because I discovered today they have 254cm wide bamboo in there for $20 a metre, and I bought 1.5metres, (because split down the middle that's two cot size, and at $30 for two, seriously cheap) and it made me sad about how little I have done with flat batting lately (quilt cover is battingless, purple quilt is a cotton eiderdown in the middle, Ester's quilt was such a rushjob I can barely remember doing it) and how little of it I had in my immediate plans (more work on purple, and Mama Jan's quilt is also planned as an eiderdown middle, though I may well change my mind)

So yeah. This was the only project I had that was at the "can be started right now" stage, so I did. 

Also, I've done a lot of eBay shopping in the past few days. But this wasn't meant to be an actual post, so piccies can wait.

Oddly though, it was the no-brand fabrics that cost more than the Kaufman and the Miller ones. Weird.

But it's not even late....

It was a long day at work and stupid me agreed to another long one tomorrow, completely forgetting that Big Bosses are down (which is the only reason they wanted more people on - when I'm in charge they can't seem to afford to give me even enough staff, let alone extras.)

As a result... can I possibly go to bed at midnight? I was gunna lube up the machine (I finally remembered to get some WD40) and do the second lines on the boat quilt tonight, but my levels of feeling it have descended into the negatives. Also, my right nostril has completely blocked itself off, which is very annoying, and makes the right-front corner of my head really heavy, which is even more annoying.

That said, today hasn't been a complete write off - as well as the 7 hours at work ($127 before tax) and the remembering to get WD40, I made an appointment for Honeycat to be desexed (Monday) and did the computer draft of the first baby sized mini quilt.

It's more of a "test the theory" kind of thing than a firm statement on what goes where, just to see that I could indeed do it without anything needing to touch. The theory holds, and leaves in it's wake the equivalent of 8 neat 16ths (19x21cm blocks), which I can put with the pale blue fabric I got today at Spotlight, to make the back. It's not a perfect colour match, but it's pretty darn close.

All that seems like enough achievement for one day, so I'm gunna make with the sleepage.