Hurrah!

I have finished quilting both Bob's quilt and the new one.

I had to take a break in the midlle to let my foot pedal cool down.

It's going to spontaneously combust any day now, but it's a good excuse to stop and go snacking.

Tommorrow daytime I'll be doing my bestest to get them bound, and then come late afternoon, I'm gunna get my drink on.

Here. At home.

Grumpy.

Harrow BnS has been canceled due to the weather, leaving me seriously bummed. I've been looking forward to it for probably a month now, but there's not much I can do. Apparently instead we'll be doing something for Casey's 21st, probably here, but who knows.

Our group of friends are pretty famous for randomly deciding to do or more often not do stuff, and it tends to snowball; if so-and-so isnt coming, then other people wont come, so other people wont come, etc etc, till noone's there, and the person trying to organise it (usually Casey) ends up all cross.

Bogans: turns out they're terribly fickle.

But anyway, if I'm gunna be home this weekend then I'll have time take part in the flood fundraising after all.

 
I'm almost finished quilting this quilt:

Which hopefully will photograph a bit nicer in the sunshine, if we get any, so I might put this one up if I get it done in time. I have a lot of brighter quilts but they're smaller: if you have a favourite let me know and I'll consider that one instead.

Why do people not stop me?

You know what I really need to learn how to do? I need to learn to not go onto youtube. Because it's after 3am now, and I've done nothing but watch videos for the last 2 hours.

What's worse, they're all quite short. I'm fairly sure, not that I've ever loaded anything on youtube, but I think there's a 10 minute max, which means that when you're watching it you can't really do anything productive, because you've got to click on a new video almost straight away. So although I was fairly productive till about 1am, as soon as I ran out of Time Team and got onto the internets, production pretty much ceased.

Buuuut, if I'm honest, I didn't mind. Because, really, straight line quilting is bloody boring. Still, I've realised that my work in progresses are fast becoming unfinished items, and maybe I should start turning all my lovely tops into quilts. Bob's quilt had a back and was all basted already, and I went into Spotlight to try to find a backing fabric for the new one but couldn't find one, but I did find a heap of sheetings for $3p/m, one of which went quite nicely with my second-last of 2010 so I basted that and got quilting on that too. Neither of them are finished, because that would be obvious and straightforward; instead I've done about half of each. But still, that's pretty good progress.

The other thing I got done today was the finishing off of my Newsprint Mingle quilt top.

When I planned it, I was gunna do it with a regular pattern repeat, but then I didn't like the balance so I've tried to even it out more. The fact that most of the stripey ones are across the middle is less obvious in real life; it's the brighter red that pops the most, and that's the one I've concentrated the most on spacing.

The handy thing about this is that the only points that match are the ones of the big blocks (well, in the middle of the all wonk block too, but they don't count) so there were no wonk-to-wonk points that I had to match up, as that was my big struggle with the last mingle quilt. I've still got 4 mingle bundles left, two each of the blue-orange-brown (what I used for the first one) and the purple-green-brown, so I'm not done with the fabrics yet, but this one's all done.

Unless I decide to give it a border. I've never given a quilt a border before, but all my trimming meant it ended up quite a bit smaller than expected (about 110 by 130) so this might be my first time.

Interesting... (or maybe not...)

I just posted in a comment that I have 5 USB sticks, two SD cards and a transflash in my handbag. This is interesting (to me anyway.) Four of the USBs (one on each keyring and two more) are 4gig and the Smiggle one with a ball maze on the back, which my little sister bought for me in Queensland is a 2gig. One SD card is a 4 and the other is a 2, and the Transflash is a 4 as well. So not including the Transflashes in my two phones (a two and a one) I have 28gig of data storage in my handbag.

Our pretty much useless home computer only has 20...

I have another two transflashes - and 8 and a 4 - for my tablet computer and three 2gig SD cards spread between my camera and two palm pilots. And I have two 750gig external harddrives that I know the location of, since there's another couple that have been lost to the mess of my room, and the tendencies of my father to drop trees on our storage sheds.

Not sure that there's a point to this, I'm just a bit shocked at myself. It's possible, just maybe, that I have enough.

Maybe.

Anyway, back to being a craft blog. I took my laptop to Crafternoon I - The Craftening (tomorrow will be Crafternoon II - Keepin' on Crafting) because I had to start work at 4 and knew I wouldn't get to really do much, so I figured instead I'd take the opportunity to pimp Helen's blog. I also got my neat 16ths cut for the first of my 3 bundles, and, tada!

The colouring looks quite strange in the photo, but I like the look of it in real life. That's the problem I suppose with taking photos in the middle of the night from directly above while standing on a chair, and it's why most of my final photos are of quilts lying on the grass.

There's also a big boo-boo in this quilt, but I think it's hard enough to see that noone will notice it. That's the great thing about this design - very few points have to line up, and the pieces are big enough that you don't notice when some of them are 2cm bigger/smaller than they're supposed to be. Yes, I could have shrunk them all down to the same size. But I'm lazy, and when it should only take two hours all up, you don't wanna add another 25% onto that fixing a piddly mistake.

So now I need to think of something to do at Keepin' on Crafting, the sequel to this Summer's smash hit "The Craftening" (because sequels to blockbusters tend to come out on Boxing day, and the public holidays this year are weird)

I think I'll go to Lincraft beforehand, since they still have 30% off, and maybe get another 8 f/q bundle. Then I only need to de-stash one more and I can make another quilt top.

Hopefully not fucking up this one. Even if it is only a little bit.