I got something done!

Swag quilt is quilted!

It only took seven episodes of Bones: roughly five hours. Granted, a lot of them were spent watching Bones. But progress is progress.

Actually, I only finished piecing it less than a week ago. That's not such a bad turnaround, but it's felt like a very long week with not much achieved.

Now I need to try go to sleep as quickly as possible, and hopefully wake up before Maddy goes to school in the morning so I can have a talk with her.

I have to ask my soon to be eight year old sister for permission to attend two protests in as many days. How odd life can be sometimes.

I also need to ask my bank balance for permission, but that's fairly normal.

I love it. But I hate it. But it's quite nice. But it's not really.

I no longer have any idea how I feel about the swag quilt.

Look at that picture, it's freaking gorgeous.

But...

I'm not sure in real life. Because the strips of drill were all cut in one direction, and assembled in whatever direction they came together in, the weave doesn't align. I can't get a photo to show what I mean, but from an angle, it looks like each fabric is two different ones. Like someone's knitted a jumper from two different dye lots. It's especially problematic on the short bits either side of the centre blocks, on the big blocks in particular, not matching the long sides.

So that's making me quite cross.

On the other hand (because I now have 3 hands) the fact that it can look so lovely and balanced without me ever having seen the fabrics laid out in their spots is amazing. Either I've fluked it or I'm just absolutely, massively gifted.

Let's go with the latter, shall we? :)

Hopefully making some progress on the quilting tomorrow before work. Also, I had an amazing revelation on how to do something that has been eluding me for a few weeks tonight while I was on the loo. So I'll be testing that too.

Swag Quilt: Progress Report.

So this is my swag quilt so far.

Columns 1 and 2 are finished, 3 is almost finished and I haven't yet started 4 or 5.

Silly me accidentally cut the missing piece of column 3 as a pink and green floral (the fabric I call handbag, because it's the fabric of my handbag) and then discovered when I went to assemble it today that I didn't have enough spare of the pink with polka dots to fill in the gap. So it was back to Spotlight for yet another small piece of fabric, which is now in the wash with a whole heap of sheetings I've bought over the last few weeks to use as backings when I can't be bothered piecing anything.

I've double checked my little ziplock bags with all my pieces for columns 4 and 5, and they all look right, so hopefully I can be all done by tomorrow night. I'm working till 8.30, but that's an early night by my standards, so I've got plenty of time after that.

Weirdly, I don't feel very connected to this quilt. I think the problem may be that at no point did I lay the fabrics out on the floor and shuffle them around before deciding where they were going to go. I just followed the computer. It's not that I'm not liking where it's going, I just feel like it's not mine. It's like I'm looking at someone else's work. I imagine this is what doing a quilt from someone else's pattern would be like - like I'm looking at an answer without seeing the workings. It went from abstract coloured squares on a computer screen to part-done quilt without the usual middle process of choosing fabrics, putting them in their right spots and being able to see it all come together. I know I seem to rush a lot of my quilts but I still follow all the right steps in the right order, usually.

Maybe it's just that I'm not assembling repeating blocks. There's none of the 'sew-press-lay on floor to check that its all coming along nicely' that I usually do.

That said, I think it's a good thing that I'm only fond of it, and not super super in love with it. It will get used, in a field, when I'm drunk, maybe once a month. It will barely be seen. It will probably get really really dirty every time I use it. As far as quilts go, it will have a much harder life than most. I don't know that I would ever put my delicately thought-out quilts through that.

It's strange beginnings will lead to a strange life. But that happens sometimes.

In completely random news, we discovered tonight at work that you would need to drink approximately 27 cans of Birell (the ultra light (0.5%) beer we can sell at Woolies) in two hours to be considered intoxicated (2 standard drinks in the first hour and 1 per hour after that should mean you are under 0.05% BAC - the legal limit in SA, so 4 in two hours should put you over.) Since this is about 10 litres, we don't think it's really do-able.

Saturday nights are quite quiet.

Isn't it nice, when things just work?

Good news, sports fans! The swag quilt is a go!

I wonder sometimes if I'm the only person who does their quilt designs in Paint? I know there's many, many better, cleverer, more specialist programs available, But I really really like it. It's like colouring in on graph paper, but you can easily change the colours, till everything's in the right spot.

Of course, I'm not doing it in solids. I'm using a variety of printed drills from Spotlight, bought a week or so ago with the shared spend-$100-save-$40 coupon.

Though I did have to go back today for another 20cm of third-from-the-right, because that's the white squares in the middle, and I needed one more strip from which to cut my three 11.5x21.5cm edge half-squares.

The black lines all over it are my assembly points, and I admit, it's probably only understandable to me. But that's okay, I'm making it.

Every square is a finished 10cm, making the total size 110x180cm, which, although it's an odd size, is exactly the size I need, and handily means I can just use some standard width fabric for the backing without needing to piece it any extra. The fabrics are all cut, except the blue which is the binding and the last 20cm, which is still in the machine, but I'm hoping to make a nice big dent in the piecing tomorrow once that's dried and ironed. It's all in bags of rows 1-5 (the thick lines) and the mid-thickness lines show me the various sized cuts of fabric from within them - it'll just be like a big jigsaw puzzle.

This will also be quilt #40. Obviously, as mentioned the other day, not all 40 have been finished, but it will officially be quilt top #40, and for about 8 months of quilting, that seems pretty good.