Speed. I am speed.

I am not good with slow sewing.

I've done one tiny cross stitch, about a decade ago now.

Shown here sitting on a DVD so you can see what a truly epic achievement it's 651 crosses are.

No embroideries.

No, the image hasn't failed to load. There's really nothing to show for this one.

And I machine sew my bindings.

But even that takes too long, because even on the machine, you can't do it quickly. You have to go slowly, and concentrate.

You may be wondering at this point how the hell I manage to quilt at all. Well, I direct you to my Quilts So Far list, and you may note that in the last 10 months, I've made 48 tops. 48 very quick tops. Practically flung through the machine and under the iron.

They're all fairly simple ones too; I'm under no illusions about the lack of complicated, fiddly piecing in my repertoire. That stuff takes too long for my liking. Way too long.

Feel free to say it's a side effect of the "now" mentality of the younger generation. Alternatively, it's quite possible I don't like quilting it all, more that I like having quilted. Either way, anything that takes more than an hour without any visible progress is something I usually can't be bothered with. Usually.

So then why the hell have I spent the last day and a half hand sewing a binding down? Putting it through the machine may take an hour or so, once you've made your binding and pinned it and sewn it and ironed it and sewn it twice more,* but I've watched four movies (The Bounty Hunter, The Proposal, Blade Trinity, RED) in the course of attaching this binding. And an episode of Bones. That's a massive amount of time. And, after all that, I still had to slowly and carefully run it through the machine, because even though I've been careful, and it looks very nice, even nicer than the ones I look at at Stitch and Knit, I worry that it's not secure, and well, if I've invested half a weekend into this binding, I want it to stay down.

I did all this because I am in love with this quilt. A long time ago, before I was a quilter, back when I had a boyfriend, I had a dream of making a black and red chess board quilt. And I was going to make stuffed toy pieces and he was going to teach me how to play. He never taught me, and I didn't start quilting until long after he was gone, and most of my red fabrics I'd bought for it got used for making Mama Jan's Quilt, but I think this, my red and black and white quilt, is the rebirth of that mythical quilt that never was.

The weird thing is, this was never one I was particularly hyped about. I bought the bundle of fabric that I used for the top because it was $20, and I had already bought it in blue, orange and brown, and that bundle had turned into a quilt I love so so much, which now hangs on my wall.

I wasn't even super-psyched about the top - I put it away and left it for over 3 months.

But then I worked myself out a back, and it all came together. Just from looking at the photos, the back totally wins. But in real life, away from the flash of a late night camera, the greyer front is utterly snuggleworthy too. Normally, I have no trouble choosing a favourite, and therefore I have no trouble machine sewing the binding on (by that I mean I have no qualms about it, it's still a hassle) but for this one, having used wavy stitch for the quilting and not wanting to either mess up the back with a badly done standard machine binding, or mess up the front with a straight stitched double machine binding* I went for hand sewing it.

I'm glad, since it looks bloody gorgeous all round now.

I don't like having to choose sides. I also don't like hand sewing, but the latter you have to live with for a day. The former you have to live with forever.

*Tomorrow I'm gunna post photos of the Hawks Quilt and tell you all how I do my double wide binding. If you straight line machine quilt, it could be the thing for you.

No sex, some drugs, and no rock and roll either.

I really hate autumn. Not just because it gets cold, thought that sucks too, but for me, Autumn means asthma season. It means spending half the day barely breathing, and the other half vibrating.

It's very hard to explain the side effects of Ventalin and Bricanyl, and everyone seems to react a bit differently so when you bring it up you hear all sorts of interesting variations.

"Shaky" seems to be the main thing, for both Ventalin and Bricanyl, though there's agreement that Bricanyl is much, much worse, so I take Ventalin until it stops working (usually after twice in a day.) Ventalin at least is a very outward shake - if I don't have my feet flat on the ground, they bounce up and down really badly. And the longer I leave it for, the worse it gets. I'm okay while I'm actually sewing, but the times when I'm just sitting in front of the machine, not pressing down on the pedal? Bouncy Bouncy Bouncy. One of the girls at work gets a very bad twitch in one of her wrists, and she has to rest it on something so it doesn't make her hand flick back and forth.

But Bricanyl is worse because it's like all that shaking is going on inside. I actually feel buzzy. And my heartbeat goes kinda bonkers for no apparent reason. And the way it beats feels crunchy. And I can't concentrate, and if I try too hard to, I get quite dizzy. I try to time it so I use the Ventalin no more than twice during the day, and then if I have to have Bricanyl at nighttime I can just go to bed. But it means I spend a lot of time breathing very shallowly, because the harder I breath the worse my asthma gets.

I'm so glad I only get asthma 3 months a year. It would be utterly, utterly horrible to feel like this all the time.

And silly silly me has decided to garnish these feelings of crappiness with a bit of hand sewn binding. I quilted the Newsprint Mingle quilt (the top of which can bee seen as #37 in the quilts I've made list) with a wavy stitch, so my usual extra wide, double sewn binding would have looked a bit odd straight stitched*. I've only ever hand sewn one binding before - Maddy's Quilt, Quilt #2, before I worked out how to machine stitch it on (Quilt #1 had a folded over backing as binding)

It's boring. really really boring. And fiddly and slow and I wish quite badly that I could just do it on the machine, but I know that this time, I'm kinda in agreeance with a lot of people. I like the back better, and I don't want to drag it, or the front, down with a rush job binding.


So, in summation, the drugs both work, and make you worse, hand sewing is bloody boring, Gerard Butler is very very yummy, Jenifer Aniston can't act, and an entire share pack of maltesers eaten in one night will make your teeth hurt.

Life lessons: learnt.

*Okay, it probably would have looked fine. But I'm so so in love with both sides of this one, and since we all see nothing but our faults, I didn't want that to be all I would see, since it deserved better than it.

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.

*yaaawn*

I was making quite good progress. Sure, I stupidly decided that since I was using the Mingle fabric again (this time in the Newsprint colourway), maybe I should add just a little bit of wonk, like I used on the last one, and because it was quite a sudden decision (aren't all of mine? maybe it's something I need to work on) none of you had the chance to remind me that it was a terrible idea. Last time the big problem was matching the points, but I came up with a design that completely avoided wonky points, so this time, it's instead been the changing sizes of the blocks as I sew diagonals. I had to trim, which is something I really hate doing, because there's such a stupid huge amount of waste, both of fabric* and time. 

It will be almost a wonky version of the big block disappearing nine patch, but without the nine patch, or the disappearance. So that makes no sense, until you see it. Which unfortunately wont be till tomorrow, because I'm also watching Time Team as I sew, and someone mentioned a nice warm bed. So now I'm sleepy, and even though there's only an hour or so of work to go, I'm bowing out. My electric blanket is calling me.

*tonight's trimming - 1700 square centimetres, which is a bit bigger than a square 40cm each side - nearly a fat quarter of it's own)