The big questions...

Much like the tree falling in the woods, if a quilt blogger does a bit of quilt sewing, but it's neither interesting, nor photogenic, is it worth blogging about?

I've sewn the long strips together to increase the size of the Cadbury Snack quilt. I haven't sewn the little bits together, because my brain is a bit... um... I can't even think of the word to use but that kinda just proves my point. There's some extra squares that I cut from the ends of the fabric before I cut the strips, because there's a half dozen blocks more than can be made from strips, and I can't remember what colours get paired together. Oh well, progress is progress.

Of course I haven't ironed it or cut it or anything like that. It looks as if I've slightly rearranged my piles. It took me two episodes of Angel to re-arrange my piles. Admittedly, half of the first one was spent looking for brown thread. I feel a little out of practice.

Happy Anniversary, Mum and Dad.

Once again, as it so often does lately, real life got in the way of sewing. But today for a change, as well as the usual deros dragging me to the gym, we went out for a lovely dinner to celebrate Mum and Dad's 27th wedding anniversary.

27 years is very impressive. I'm 23 and I haven't even kept an imaginary friend that long, let alone any real friends. The idea of having spent an amount of time longer than my whole life so far with the one person seems amazing - my best friends I've known for less than two years. And although I've got some friends from 10 years ago on facebook, I don't actually talk to any of them. It makes me a bit sad.

Even though past experience tells me I probably won't be, I really hope I'm still friends in 27 years with the friends I've got now. These are the first friends I've ever had where I feel like I'm storing my feelings and thoughts inside someone's brain other than mine. As someone who's always been very self reliant, it's an interesting feeling, but I'm rolling with it. Tomorrow, we are going out so they can form some opinions on shoes for me, and then we're making ourselves fish and chips and some jelly shots. It should be excellent.

But it won't get any sewing done.

PS. I'm gunna go with the squareish shaped quilt. More because it will make a nicer picnic rug shape than any other sensible reason, especially since I don't really have picnics. Maybe I will, once I have the quilt. I like the idea of picnics.

Hmmm...

I have bought more fabric and I have enough to enlarge it one of two ways - to a 10 block by 13 block rectangle (140x182cm) or a more square(ish) 11 blocks by 12 blocks (154x168cm)

The question is, which do people think would be a more practical size? A bit longer and narrower, or almost the same in both directions?

Heya, mojo.

My camera is refusing to focus and I can't find the pink one I bought as a backup, so the only photo I can offer is a bit fuzzy.

Still, lookie lookie, an actual quilt top.

Also, it's upside down in the photo. Oh well, just don't compare this to the diagram and we'll be okay.

The decision now is do I quilt is as soon as possible with an unpieced back (since it's pretty much right about 1 metre wide) or do I add more blocks to make it a big'un? It's nice, and because it's so simple it'd be a good one to take away and use in public without anyone judging me (I always worry people will judge my print selections but solids I have no such shame about* - does this make me weird?) but I'm not sure whether it would be better as a travel rug if it was bigger - my last traveling quilt wasn't much bigger than this one and I seem to recall thinking it was a bit too small, but I've never done add-on quilt math before.

Oh hell, the fabrics are $7 a metre and it only took two to do this much. I may as well make it bigger.


*though the purple is a bit darker than I'd like.

Feeling it.

Today I did some quilting. It felt really good, even though I didn't really make as much progress as I was kinda hoping I would. But to be fair, some cutting, strip piecing about 18 metres of seams, pressing it all, chopping it back into little bits and getting it sorted as I sewed those little bits in pairs is probably about what you would expect from 3 hours of work. Especially if you did some babysitting, cooked and ate lunch and watched TV as you were doing it. If I hadn't had to go to work I think I would have gotten the top done, but oh well. Now that I am feeling like quilting again, I' happy to wait till tomorrow to do some more work on it, whereas before I would have been bummed that the damn thing wasn't done already.

Of course, there is the problem of the two half done bags that I'm now feeling that way about. I'm not very good at balancing my passions. It's something I need to work on.