I could go naked... or get naked...

Now that Oprah and her little army of American tourists have gone home, I think it's time to ask; How about, instead of spending millions of taxpayer dollars and taking up countless hours on the news of them going "gosh, it's just such a lovely country" we just, I dunno, looked out the window? Seems pretty obvious to me that it's the best country in the world.

Anyway. Back to the point. No, I do not yet have anything to wear for the work Christmas show. I have firm plans about the quantities of alcohol I intend on consuming, and even firmer plans that I also be a little bit drunk for our unpaid Sunday night meeting, which is happening when I'm supposed to be having our friend's Christmas Day/Afternoon/Evening, and which I suspect will involve us all getting yelled at anyway, so we may as well make them be yelling at us for a good reason, instead of the usual incorrect and uninformed reasons they yell at us about. The teenyboppers are in, of course, and since it's the day after the work Christmas show, quite a few of the seniors are planning on powering straight through as well.

It's the silly season, after all.

What I do have instead, is this. I've made the new header too, but I've not yet put it up so you could all compare it to this.

I am in love. 

In the real world, the pale strips don't seem so pale - well, they kinda do, but the middle strips don't seem so dark.

I am in love.

The feeling of making a quilt is not dissimilar to the feeling of climbing under one...

It was such a nice feeling today to get up and not worry about having to sew stupid satin. It was so nice that I went back to bed after a half hour so I could do it all over again.

I'm cool like that.

But anyway. I pulled out the 6fq bundles I'd made to do mini quilts and had a go at pairing them with some metreage to see if I could work myself out a big quilt. And then I decided it was too much thinking for a Monday morning, and got started on a quilt I've been gunna-ing for a long time. Since mid August actually. And since I dont know if any of you read that far back, you might not have seen the story behind the page header.

Here's the thing. While I have no trouble installing a slightly shifty upgrade of Windows onto my Mum's laptop, I can't for the life of me work out Electric Quilt. Granted, I have a slightly shifty copy of that too (I think it's about version 5) but my complete uselessness with it makes me glad I didn't spend money on it. The problem I think, is that I am a proper nerd, so I use Paint. It might seem a bit less straightforward, downloading the .zip file of fabric swatches from Moda's archive, printscreening the icons and carefully cutting and pasting them into little boxes before assembling them into a jigsaw of perfection, but that's how I roll.

And the first one I ever did is the one you see above. If the words and the cute little sock weren't there, you'd see something like this.

This also has lines, but that should give you a better idea of what I'm actually doing. I've no idea why this has sat on my gunna pile for so long, since I love the fabrics and the design as it is above so much. It's looking different in real life, obviously, but the colours are so beautiful and rich, they actually remind me of these 4 pack food dyes. The blue especially, since it's almost the same colour as the little spots that have been on my boots since Longerenong.

Today I got as far as all the cutting (which of course I did wrong; if you cut it into 3 parts you calculate for TWO seam allowances, der) sewing the darker fabrics together and getting them ironed out. But since I also went on a tree stealing adventure with Batman, the Elf Princess and HighVis Girl (I'm not making that up) as well as doing a horrible nasty Monday night close (once we get the money out of the roof, I'm gunna set fire to that bloody airvac system) that's as far as I got.

But it was a lot more enjoyable than trying to sew a top.

And now, I have a confession to make. I bought one of those Tablets. $160 including postage, 7" screen, running Windows CE 6. It's not my fault, the guy reduced it by $35...