And now for something completely different

Tonight I wanted to do some piecing, but I didn't want to have to faff around with the whole choosing fabric/coming up with a design/doing the math/cutting the fabric bit.

So instead I had a rummage around in my scrap bag, and paired the off cuts of the fabrics I used for the top of the John Deere quilt with some other blues, greens and yellows, and sewed up this.

I'm quite proud of it, especially since I didn't really do any seam pressing till I was halfway through, and my trimming was done mainly with scissors, and squaring done only occasionally. It's turned out both fairly flat and fairly straight, though it's a bit too small to be useful, at about 65x70cm so far, and I'm pretty much out of scraps of those colours. I'm torn between just making it into a quiltlet or maybe bordering it up to about 100cm square, but in the meantime it's hanging up on my curtain rail with all the other stuff I'm indecisive about.

I've had a fairly big day:

I bought some fabric.

Half price, and then another $40 off of a $100 spend meant this $200 pile cost me $60

I bound a quilt.

I realised last night that it's easier to try out tricky stuff If you use boring stuff as a run up. I'd already made the binding, so it just needed attaching.

And I finished piecing the math quilt.

I quilted it too, but it didn't photograph well.

I also did some other shopping, ate quite a lot of food, had some spontaneous visitors, took about 1000 photos (I'm gunna write up properly how I do my binding) and, as I said above, I've quilted the math quiltlet - just boring, evenly spaced vertical lines. I've cut the remaining rainbow fabric into strips to bind it, and a bit of fabric to make a hanging tube.

I'm pretty happy with my efforts.

Bravery

Do other people write their blog posts in their heads while they're doing the sewing, only to get to the computer an hour or so later and find that it's all gone?

I had some brilliant thing going about throwing off the shackles of fear, and I was going to lead us all into a mighty revolution of zip setting, curved piecing and working with stretch fabrics. It was going to be a brave new world, but maybe some other day.

It came from an honest place though - tonight, I was brave. But first I finished the top of the Every Which Way quilt.

I ended up getting a slightly bigger bit of batting anyway, since I like to pull my tops pretty taught over the batting.

And once that was done, I decided to get into something I've been thinking about doing for a while, but have been too scared to have a go at.

It's not paper pieced. For that, you press to the sides, and I like my seams split. So I drew all my shapes on some paper, cut them out, traced them onto another piece of paper with .75cm seam allowances and then sewed them together freehand. There's currently 42 pieces there, and it still needs the brackets and the radical sign (The √ square root symbol) and the borders and such.


In case you were wondering, it's going to be the equation you use to work out how big your squares are if all you know is c - the length of the long side of your half square triangle.



I can highly recommend being brave though. After all, it's only fabric, and you might do a really good job with it.

Something.

I was going to get straight into sewing, but it was the final episode of Castle tonight (only for the season, thankfully) and it was so good I had to watch it twice.

But I got a bit of sewing done, making a start on another quiltlet, or possibly just a large, technically incorrect, orphaned block.

I rotated that bottom four patch again because I didn't like the fabric with the dots connecting with itself on the bottom edge - it's the more prominent fabric in the real world, though on my computer screen it looks to be the floral. I guess what I'm wondering though, is is it still a mistake if you thought about and did it on purpose? It's not technically correct, as I said before, but that's only the case if it's meant to be a repeating block. It was, initially, and the fact that the HSTs repeat themselves gives the impression of it being a mistake, but I liked it better this way, and I'm sticking with it.

But I'd kinda like to do a whole quilt with it repeating properly, in solids, cause I think it'd look pretty damn cool. Even two colours.

Sometimes, the internet makes me cross.

I've never liked tumblr. Not only is it spelt dumb, but a lot of people who use it pretend like they're actual bloggers, when really, all they're doing is re-posting pictures they've found on other tumblrs, with occasional twitter-length posts about how they don't have girlfriends. Yes, there are some brilliant ones out there (if you can read textfromdog with a straight face, I will send you stash) but so much of it just an endlessly reposted waste of server space.

Nonetheless, tonight I got one, because, as I mentioned the other day, Instagram doesn't like Picasa, and since it makes me cross when other people spam up my facebook news feed with Instagram, I'd not only have to get a sword, but also fall on it, if I started doing it too. So it was a choice between Tumblr and Twitter, and since Twitter falls off the face of the internet after a fortnight, I went with the longer lasting of two evils.

And longer is right. It's taken me 45 minutes to get it set up and the first picture loaded. And all I wanted to do was show everybody a picture of my empty box of chocolate.

Gah. What a hassle. 45 minutes is almost half again on the time it took me to do tonight's project.

I suppose the proper name for it would be a pram quilt, or a car-seat quilt, but since they are both a bit dull, I'm going to call it a quiltlet. It's a bit under 50x75cm, so it's about a sixth the size of my usual quilts, and I just sewed around the edges and turned it right side out before quilting it, so no binding.

It's also got polyester batting, something I'd never used before. Spotlight had all their bags of precut poly batting for $3.99 last week, so I bought 3 queen sized ones, figuring I could use them for bags, or for cushion covers, or just let Maddy use them for her quilting endeavours. But I'd also used it under the lattice quilt, so I could take some photos without the darkness of the lino underneath, and so that I could roll it up without getting creases in the top, and the trimmings were the right width, so I went for it. I was only using random bits from the stash, and I told myself I wasn't going to spend more than 2 hours on it (all up, including cutting, it took an hour and 45 minutes) so I figured, even if I turned out horrible, it wouldn't be too much of a waste.

I haven't washed it yet but it seems okay - I suspect it will be a bit loftier than cotton, but I'm cool with that. It's a bit less clingy, obviously, but for something this sixe, I'm happy so far. The actual design of this one is very blah, but I might churn out some nicer ones for the facebook page.