Apologies for the cheese induced delirium.

Do you ever wonder what happened to those people who dropped out of the blogosphere? The ones that used to post all the time, that you followed the lives of, who one day just... vanished? I always hope they're doing fine, living their lives without sharing them with the world but sometimes I worry. I worry that something happened to them, that there's a reason they're not online anymore.

There was a thing on facebook a while ago that said "After I die, I give you permission to hack my account and change my status to is chillin with jesus" - I'm not at all religious and nor do I believe in an afterlife, but the point stands. Should something happen to me, I expect someone to hack my account* and let everyone know. And for someone to finish up my half done quilts.

Speaking of half done quilts, I now have four less. That still leaves one unfinished top, five quilts than need a back and basting, two that need quilting, and two that need binding. But that's ten of a total fifty, or an 80% completion rate. I'm happy with that.

I've also realised that if you must bind, bind lots. Binding feels like it takes forever, and forever takes just as long if you do it four times as if you'd done it once. Admittedly tonight I only did the second (and third, because I bind in my own special way) lots of sewing - I'd sewn them on and done the join and ironed them around and pinned them down last night. It would seem that what I've actually decided is that if you must suffer through multiple eternities, make them all different.

Or, possibly, what's really happened is that I've eaten too much cheese and become a bit delirious.

Anyway, back to the point. Four more quilts are now all bound and ready to wash and crinklify*

45, 39, 36 and 18

Two are in the machine now, and I'll put the others in when they're done, and hopefully we'll get 5 minutes of sunshine tomorrow for me to do the photos on the grass thing.

The other thing I've gotten done is the top for quilt # 50.

I love the fabrics and the colours, but I have to admit, they're not right for this pattern. The Falling Leaves fabric having both pink and green in it means that depending on how you're looking at it, the background either merges into the rings or pops to the foreground. I can't help but think of it as my Escher quilt, even though that's really not what I was going for. I'm gunna have a do over - I've had some fabrics in my stash for at least a year now, a pink, blue and green with flowers that should work - it's been in an envelope in a box and I can't remember how big the flowers actually are, but if they're fairly small (I recall them being a bit under an inch across. I could be wrong) then it should be fine.

Parent's should be home tomorrow night, so that should cheer up my dog, prevent my house from making any more threats upon my life, and curb my until-4am sewing seshes. Still, it'll be nice to see them again, as much as it has been nice doing our own thang for the last fortnight.



*if shouldn't be hard - firefox knows all my passwords.
** my submission to the quilting lexicon for 2011.

The title of this post can only be expressed through interpretive dance.

I am plugging away at quilt # 50. It's coming together slowly, but I've stopped for really, really late tea. It's in 5 pieces at the moment - a big middle piece and the one-square-wide edge strips. Technically, it is a good design idea, since it meant all my blocks were the same size and fit together very easily, which they wouldn't have had the edge been made part of them, but in the real world it means that I now have 4 long bits of stitching to do, which is a problem for someone who usually has to force herself to join the last two big bits together.

Why does the hardest part have to be at the end? If it's not binding it's joining 43 billion points together in a row. I should give up and go to bed, but it's all laid out on the floor so I'm just gunna suck it up and get it done.

My high from earlier has dissipated. Meagan was working tonight and once again we did the laughing so hard we ended up on the floor crying thing, and then while driving her home we discovered we've spent half our lives in the same place and never even realised it. And we're so looking forward to going to the Myponga BnS in less than a fortnight with Anna, but about 2am I move my handbag because it's in the way of my ironing and it gets a message. Service is patchy at my house and it had been trying to come through for a couple of hours at least: it's from Anna and it says "I have bad news"

The bad news I suspect will be that she's not gunna come. She'd been worrying about the money and the prospect of getting a new place at around the same time, but really, if there's one thing that shits me more than anything, it's people who are um-ah about plans. Especially big, 1000km round trip roadtrip plans, with a group, in convoy. That I've already bought her stuff for. And which have $130 prepaid tickets, which, thankfully, we aren't getting till Thursday.

Nonetheless. I'm kinda pissed. I've also run out of Spicks and Specks episodes and my fire has gone out.

But: My mug is here

As are my boots

So it's not all bad. And I've just made an executive decision. I'm gunna go to bed. Put it up on the bench, do it later.

My lightbulb moment.

Tonight,  had a lightbulb moment. And while everyone else gets good, inspirational or creative lightbulb moments, I got a lightbulb that blew up in my face as I was trying to take it out.

And this was after the power had been out for 3 hours in the evening, which seriously gets in the way of any sewing that needed doing on the machine, so I took it as a sign, and took the night off.

Stuff like this always happens when Mum and Dad go away. It used to be that the gas bottle would be empty the day after they left which is more a hassle than something scary, actually it just means I deep fry everything instead of oven baking it. But a light has blown up before while everyone's been away: that time it was in the kitchen, I flicked the switch and it fully exploded with glass blowing everywhere, so I ran away to my boyfriends till people came home, convinced that the house was possessed. This time fortunately it was only a teeny bit of corroded metal that showered over me, which is especially better since I was holding onto it at the time, as opposed to flicking a switch across the room. It had blown out about a minute before when I went into the bathroom for a shower, I'd taken off the big cover and gone to take it out (I had the passage light on, which streams in fairly well) and "pfft" followed by darkness and a spray of stuff from over my head. Not fun, but at least all the torches were out from the power outage earlier. Casey pulled the base of the bulb out of the hole for me with a pair of pliers and we put a new one in.

My lightglobe blew (in a much more polite manner) last week, blogger went down, the power went out, half of Mt Gambier lost mobile phone coverage, and then this. All those in favour of my parents never going away again, please say aye.

"Aye."

But just because I've taken the night off doesn't mean I only have a broken lightglobe to show off. Yesterdays efforts, which I did too much off, leaving me with no energy to get my camera with it's photos for the last post, are (obviously, considering the last statement,) yet to be shown.

I didn't talk about it but once I'd cut all my bits I decided I'd sew the offcuts into some pinwheels, because I hadn't actually done anything with halfsquare triangles before. While there is plenty of information on the internet about how big a square needs to be in inches, there's not much with regards to metric, and since I couldn't do the math, I couldn't do a full project, and I wasn't really willing to sacrifice time and fabric to a curiosity. But I had a big pile of 8cm triangles in one fabric, and two small piles of various scraps that could be cut into 8cm triangles, so I decided to go for it.

Pinwheels have been moved from the "untried" list to the "easy" list. But that list is only to do with making them, when it comes to using them, I can't really think of that much, especially not in this configuration. I'll probably make one more green one and then nine-patch them together with some sashing for a cushion. Actually, that's a lie. They'll probably go into my little pile of "blocks that never got used"

If I had actually thought about it instead of just getting into it, I could have better paired up my triangles so the ones with more pink leaves went with the green and vice-versa. But oh well.

And them having kicked some pinwheel butt, I got into the big one. My math, freshly done with some diagrams on graph paper to boot, worked perfectly. My fabric selection, done on impulse almost a year ago, not so much.

Of course, it's still all in pieces there. The problem I think is that the leaves, meant to be the background fabric, are popping forward when it's meant to be the rings that do that. I picked those fabrics because the print meant that any wonky points would be less noticeable, but in a sea of perfect points, you can't see the design.

Well, you can see a design. Sometimes I see the rings, sometimes I see a 5 strand plait with some beads and sometimes I'm seeing roundabouts. I just tilted my head and saw barbed wires.

If I do it again, I'm gunna make the rings narrower, or more likely, make the background bits bigger.

I might also get brave, and do it in solids. Well, at least the background.


Two more quick things, I decided to get the fabric.com stuff anyway, but if they don't refund my $2.24 there'll be hell to pay. And I'm gunna do my 400th post as my blogger's quilt festival post, because it all comes together so nicely.

Warm.

I had momentum. I had stuff done, and I took photos to prove it. It wasn't good stuff, but hey, stuff. Everybody loves stuff.

And now, it's nearly 4am, and I'm sitting on the couch because I cant be bothered going to bed. But Rhinestone Cowboy's on, so things aren't too bad.

Anyway, #50 is half done, but looks a bit crap*, the house is still a mess, we're still out of plates, the fire's still going and I still haven't made any progress on any of my bindings.

Particularly proud of the fire. It's 28 in here right now, and I'm sorry American friends, I've no idea what that translates to. "Fall asleep on the couch warm" I think, as opposed to the "bloody hell it's cold" 9 degrees outside.


*blocks are sewn but need to all be put together. I'm not sure if it looks bad because all the points don't match yet or if it's just bad, so I'll assemble it and try again tomorrow.