Yay Stuff!

So, friday. Well, Saturday now, obviously, since my timing tends to be a little skew-whif, but still, that means favourite things.

I had been thinking that what I would put as my favourite thing this week would be my sheer unadulterated awesomeness, since I managed to design, piece, quilt and bind a quilt for my sister's birthday this sunday in just 3 days, but then I realised if I was as truly awesome as I thought I was, then I would have decided to get started weeks ago, and I'd be getting in some sleepsies before the BnS ball tomorrow night, instead of sitting here having just finished. I'd have also remembered to take a photo before I put it in the washing machine, and I wouldn't have made that cutting error as I was finishing the binding.*

So, other things.

The fact that mum is worried about the ethical implications of my messing around with her netbook and using Daemon Tools to convince it that it has a DVD player when it doesn't just makes me laugh. "But you're lying to it..." she goes, while telling me that it's silly for me to feel bad about the death of my old laptop.

My phone. Still. Three months on, I'm still loving how it just does stuff. No faffing or fart-arsing about. It does everything I want it to do, except maybe print me money.

Having a real laptop again. Sure, the fact that it's running Vista is really irritating, as is the fact that the touch screen only works with the pen, but as a stop-gap till I decide what I actually want it's excellent. Look at me, blogging away on it. Nice keyboard, too.

The "slow" button on the foot pedal of my sewing machine. I thought it was pointless the first time I saw it, but it was very handy tonight, stopping me from rushing the binding and making a(nother) mistake.

Being indecicive about which ballgown to wear, because it means I have the kind of life where I a) occasionally wear ball gowns and b) have enough ballgowns to have indecision between them.

Having a CD burner. Saying "I need a new CD" and going and making one.

Oh, and the fact that I'm going to a BnS ball tomorrow night, and I'm taking along one of my best friends, who's never been to one before. Toats exciting!


*Fourtunatelly, although it shit me, it really only added about 5 minutes of work, and about half of that was just me despairing.

Progress.

Progress is, um, progressing. Casey's quilt top is assembled and the lines of quilting have been done either side of the vertical seams so tomorrow it should only take me an hour or so to fill it in and I can get on with the very nasty job of binding.

Progress on everything else BnS related hasn't progressed at all.

Bugger.

Remember when I said yesterday that it was a bad idea to try do any big sewing projects in the same week as a BnS ball?

I kinda forgot is was my sister's birthday this weekend.

Well, not really forgot. I know it's on Sunday, but my brain didn't really reconcile the fact that it was her birthday this sunday with the fact that it's her BIRTHDAY on SUNDAY.

My brain is dumb sometimes.

Anyway, I remembered remembered this morning and so I figured I'd better get on it. I haven't actually made Casey a quilt yet because she has an amazing ability to be both very picky AND very vague - she's always very specific about what she does and doesn't like in what you're doing, but then she'll go "Can you just make me (insert whatever here)... I don't care what colour/fabric/width/shape..."

So where does one go with that? Well, I've started with the back, which is the two yards of half-naked-cowboy fabric, added an altered version of what I was planning on doing as a top to test my new back arrangement and sacrificed to the cause a quite nice collection of solid Konas in the green to purple section of the spectrum.

The colours in this photo are all wrong. The purples are way darker and those yellows are actually greens.

Not yet actually assembled, but I got the math done, the colours picked, the fabric cut and the blocks sewn in 5 hours, so I'm happy to stop now.

If it looks like a bit of an off shape, it is - since I'm making this top as something to have on the other side of the back, which is what's actually featured, it's the same size as the back, ie long and skinny. 105x175 is what I've mathed to, which is about 42x70 for those of you that think imperial. I considered shortening it to make it a bit more or a normal ratio, but one of the girls at work pointed out that a long quilt can go across the knees of two people, so I took that as a decent reason not to chop it up.

It'd be a shame to lose any more hunky man-ness than I need to.

In related news, and in celebration of Harrow BnS being only 3 days away, this video made me laugh.