Good.

Random factoid: I actually wanted to call Stuff I'm Liking (my other blog) Shit's Good Y'all. Cause it is.

Anyway, that's not the point. I'm home from an excellent night at Flannies Country Karaoke, and to celebrate, here's a picture I took of the pink batik quilt this afternoon.

It's very sparsely quilted by my standards - I've done either side of the long seams and that's it. It's self bound too, so that made it very hard to quilt in both directions, without lots of knot tying, and what lines would I go over anyway? If I only go over the direct ones, that doesn't seem enough. So it's only a little bit quilted, but I washed it (well, rinsed and spun it) and put it in the dryer for 45 minutes and it came up fine. So shit's good, y'all.

The top of the pink batik quilt is done.

And I really quite like it. But I don't know if I should use the dark shades to piece the back or just do a plain back. The original plan was to just assemble the big blocks of the other colours, so they'd fit on the diagonal, chopping off corners to fill in holes on the opposite sides. But the shades are quite different, and I'm not sure what colour to quilt it in, or what binding to use. So maybe a plain backing would be simpler. I'd still piece it a little bit - I have plenty of pinks, but it wouldn't be batik.

Decision will have to be later though, because I'm off to work. Again. but Simone is back form holidays, and it will be nice to see her again.

Back to the news now...

I did my random fast food rant, trawled the internet for a while to see if I could find myself one of these (and yes, I know I already have a heap of those fabrics, but I want them all. And these. And these. And these) and, once a new episode of Castle had downloaded (I forgot that it was starting, so I have a few back-eps still to get) I got into the sewing on the next project.

While they aren't particularly good representations of the fabrics, they were as good as I was willing to find in paint, since I still cant be bothered with the hassle of EQ5. It's the Artesian Batiks I mentioned the other day that I said I was gunna do like the BlueGreen quilt, but, well, here goes...

The math for that says you need to start with 22 by 24cm rectangles. But, having not prewashed these fabrics (since it's all one range) there were no fuzzy edges gong to waste, so I managed to cut 22 by 27cm rectangles. They seemed a bit big, and when I drew it up in the computer, 4 rectangles across didnt seem like enough, so I doubled it and zoomed out one. That looked much better, but, when I got to the real world, of course the rectangles weren't a scaled down version, like you would get if you cut a piece of A4 paper in half, they were a completely different shape. Too rectangular in fact, to nicely fit another cut on their narrow direction.

Thus, a plan change to wonk. Not the difficult wonk I wrangled with while doing the obviously named wonky mini quilt, but a matchless wonk, where points can be ignored (well, wonky ones can) in favour of maintaining my sanity. Before work I cut and laid out nicely all my diagonal pairs so I could string piece, and the advantage of having multiple cutting mats is that you can sit one on top of the other to protect your nicely laid out fabrics from the menace of the babycat. They've now been string pieced, but it's late for someone who's cut back on the Commonwealth Games since Sally Pearson didn't get to keep (or actually, never even got given) her gold medal, so I'll be waiting till tomorrow to iron them out. I'm not in any real rush with this one.