Geocaching.

Today was dedicated to geocaching. Well, I say today, but daylight savings is messing with me and it ended up being late this afternoon was dedicated to geocaching.

So I got up about 1.30 and we headed off about 3. Jolly good thing it was light until well after 6 or we would never have had time to find all eight caches we went looking for. That's right... 100% success rate. We had planned to geocache our way up to Kingston to see some friends but they went away for the weekend, so we did some of the more local ones. And because we weren't going too far or away half the night, Maddy came with Case and Jess and I.

We did the one behind the western entrance, the one at Buck's hill, the one on Pannells road (there was a geocoin in it, but we didn't have one to trade it out) the one at the Pt Mac lookout, the one under the watertank, the one at Racecourse Bay, the one at Ewens Ponds and the one at Caveton.

We stopped at Pt Mac for chips and I finally got around to taking the quilt photos.

Tonight when Case was about to go to bed she chanced to look under her bed, and found this.

A little paper geocache. Containing:

A log and a (paper) geocoin.

We wrote on the log and put into it all the things we've taken out of caches so far, so that she'll have them if she checks it.

I guess they're right, and despite my doubts due to her dislike of mint* Maddy is really my sister.


*Mint is obviously the bestest flavour in existence. How can someone with the same genetic sequence as me not like mint? Were it not for the fact that she's, you know, exactly like me in pretty much every other respect, I'd seriously think she was switched at birth. She's eight.

Bugger, Damn and Blast.

About a week ago I went and did some fabric shopping. I had no real plan in mind, just a Spotlight and a Lincraft catalogue, and a couple of vouchers. I came home with a dozen or so fat quarters, a few half metre cuts an 1.2 metres of fabric to use as backing.

One week, a quilt top and three quarters of a quilt back later, I discover it should have been 1.3 metres.

Bugger.

In slightly better news, I am officially on holidays for two weeks.

Indecisiveness.

One I'd assembled the bundle for my latest quilt, I was really happy with it. When it was out on the floor, I wasn't so sure anymore. But that could have been that it wasn't yet on point. It looked quite bland at right angles. 45ing it perked it up, but I was busy being glad that I could shuffle my corners into sides without having to unpick a heap of blocks and after 7 straight hours of quilting my sense of design had kinda turned to mush. It wasn't as briliant as the potential of the bundle had seemed, but it was nice.

Then yesterday I was looking at it hanging in front of the curtain and I really didn't like it. It was too bland, to pastel, a bit wishy washy and I'd decided I didn't like the darker stripe anymore.

Today I'm looking at it and I love it. Can't wait till next week when I'm on holidays, my legs are working again, I can piece it a backing, quilt it really densely and bind it in a nice bright green. Chuck it in the wash so it goes all crinkly and maybe hibernate under it for a week. Love it.

Does this happen to other people? Do you fall in and out of love with something every 45minutes or so? Or am I just hideously indecisive?

Gosh, I hope this doesn't happen if/when I have kids.

Spontenaity.

Today I am loving a spontaneous (if badly photographed) new quilt top.

This started Wednesday night; while I was waiting for Anna to finish work and come to the gym I sat in my car reading the new catalogues. Lincraft had some coordinated bundles of fat quarters for $13 so I went in Thursday and got one of them, and I mix and matched myself one of the regular bundles to go with. Spotlight's catalogue had a spend-$50-save-$10 voucher in it, and the new DS fabrics were already on sale, so they ended up under $10 a metre. There's about 1 1/4 metres in amoungst this quilt top, and the pink and green check is definitely my fave. For the back I've bought the green floral, and I kept enough of the fats to do a bit of piecing too.

Even though I've done this design (I'd hesitate to call it a patern) a few times before, it's always been for the back of a quilt, and set on point, because that way you don't have to match your quilting lines. This time I decided to make it for the front, and originally I sorted it out to not be on point - just a regular 4 by 4 square.

But for some reason that seemed kinda boring. The shift to being on point required only two small bits of unpicking - as of the photo above, they were just neatly laid out blocks - and by shifting and cutting in half the corner blocks to fill in some gaps, it all came together as a 15 block quilt instead. If you tilt your head, you'll notice the centre 4 blocks are the same.


I think I kinda needed to do something like this in an attempt to force myself out of my rut. For all that the Cadbury Snack quilt is very nice, it's a bit boring as far as the actual work goes... there's not much to inspire progress. This took a while to do - I started about 7pm, spent a loooong time staring at layouts and shifting them (everyone always comes and has an input. Sometimes there's fights) got distracted by the footy (Go Hawks!) got seriously stuck into it, changed my mind about the direction, and spent another loooong time staring at it, this time with the help of a bit of paper scribbled on and chopped up, and the second photo with bits cut, pasted and rotated.

Once the research was done and the theory sorted out, I promised myself chocolate when I finished and got it all done. I usually really struggle with the last few seams of getting it together, but it seems chocolate works as an incentive.

I do like chocolate.