Still Alive.

Hi everybody. I just wanted to let you know that I'm not dead. Nor have I joined the circus, or a cult, or the French Foreign Legion. Nor, contrary to what you may have heard, do I have a new boyfriend, and, especially, I have not gotten back together with my ex boyfriend. Really.

Actually, the reason that I haven't been posting anything is because, quite simply, I haven't been sewing anything. Until before a couple of nights ago, my sewing for the last month or so had consisted entirely of me hemming jeans and adding ribbons to kids sized shirts to be waist ties. Kids sized shirts aren't that flattering to the waistline.

A couple of nights ago though I remembered that it was only a couple of days till christmas, and more to the point I realised that, even after buying pretty much every single red and green checked fabric in the Mount, that I at no point had bought the right one to make myself a replica of the stocking from the the season 3 Community christmas episode, but then I realised that that it didn't matter because the pink and green on-point-check from the DS range (I think) before last that was chilling in my stash was kinda perfect in every way except that it was pink instead if red, but whatever, no-one cares. So I made a couple of stockings in the fandom-y spirit.

Not that anyone really gets it. But for those who do, yes, they are big enough to wear as a hat.

And then, of course, yesterday, I realised that I knew exactly what to make a couple of my friends for christmas, but, in pretty much the story of my life, I had like 5 hours to make them all.

First up I made another stocking for EmmStaff. It's ever so slightly smaller than the green ones, and she forgot to come in and get it in time for christmas, so Annalise and Hamish held it up tonight after work while I took a photo after work. But it's made with some Birds Of Norway fabric (it's a Kaufman from a few years ago) and it's one of the most innately cool fabrics I've ever bought, without at any point giving away the fact that it knows it's an innately cool fabric. Which pretty much sums up Emm => very cool, doesn't realise it yet, and cause it's not actually a christmas fabric, and because she turns 18 in eight days, she's gunna use it as a birthday stocking.

And then I also made some tumblr things into plushies. And didn't take photos. Annalise took a photo of hers though: a pair of plusies comprising the message icon and the notification icon.

I made two of the other girls plushies too, I just need to wait for them to put them on the internets. In th meantime, happy christmas everyone, from me and the 6 ciders I drank earlier.

Too Much?

How close to the end of a project will you stop? An hour of work left? Half an hour?

Of course, it's hard to know how long something's actually going to take. I have rounded (by about a centimetre) the last corner on the binding. I started it in the middle so there's probably less than 50cm to go, but I'm not sure how long it would actually take. And I'm ready for bed, so it can wait. It's not like I can't do it anywhere, right? Wasn't that the whole point?

Admittedly, I did kinda want to have washed it before I took it to Stonies, not just to (hopefully) crinkle it nicely, but mainly to get rid of the glue residue. When Casey and Jess got here tonight, the first thing they did was whinge that the room smelled a bit funny. I had meant to leave the window open today while I went shopping, but I forgot.

Nice little segue there: Shopping! Today I did a whole lotta op-shops, and thank god for my GPS. Yesterday I got from Parafield (mid north east) to Marion (mid south west) with no GPS, just to prove to myself that I could, but today I happily went wherever it told me too. I had to start in Port Adelaide since Dad needed me to get something for him from there, and I'd worked out a route that got me most of the stores down the west side of the city, all about 10 minutes or less apart. There was one I couldn't find, but I also found two surprise bonus St Vinnies stores and a Red Cross one too.

After 5pm I went to Rundle Mall because late night shopping in the city is on a Friday. And I bought some more stuff. A whole lot of it is basics - a half dozen each of bras, singlets and tees, to go with the four coats I've bought op-shopping, two ballgowns to stash (in January, for a friend's 18th, we're all wearing ballgowns to Dirty Shads, and these were $3 each, so the fact that they're to big for me was irrelevant) two kids rugby jumpers on end of season clearance, two long sleeve tops,  six printed tees, a checked shirt and a white jacket.

And the same shirt dress three times in two colours, because I really like it and it was only $10, and two handbags, and some DVDs, a few fat quarters, and a bit more booze too.

Because, like singlets, socks and fabric, you can never have too much booze.

My first new fabric in ages.

Keeping in mind that I basically grabbed whatever caught my eye in the first 3 minutes, this is what I ended up with.

The two greens are to go in my pile that started with DS limes but now includes quite a few other green fabrics as well, and the orange is much the same, but, well, orange. The rainbow stripe and the jade and pink I bought because they're puuurdy, and the yellow because they had it locally and I bought a quarter thinking it was quite lovely, and then when I went looking for more suddenly it was nowhere to be found. But it's hard to find a nice yellow, so I got some more for stash.

The brown-y fabrics I bought because I'd love to make myself another Autumn Nutmeg quilt. It's remained one of my favourites since completion and I'd like to have a go with a bit of the spring colourway (that would be the greens and the blues) thrown in too - I still need to find myself a few more blue and green co-ords before I get going on it.

And sewing motivation. I'll be needing that too.

Yay.

I have a disappointing lack of yellow in my stash. I didn't realise it till tonight, when I needed some. I found two nice yellows, that worked okay in my bundle, but I only had a fat quarter of one, and 30cm of the other. I chopped and changed my bundles, trying to make it work with one of the brighter yellows that I had enough of, but they all looked weird. I needed a dusky yellow, that wasn't too lemon-y. And I needed to be able to get sixteen 10cm squares and eight 15x17cm rectangles from it.

Eventually I found two matching straggly bits in my corner pile of random bits, and - Yay. It took a diagram for me to work it out, but you can get the bits I need from a 50cm square and a slightly-more-than-15cm strip. Hurrah for the quiltmaths :)

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.

Working with what I've got.

It turns out, there's a lot of rainbow stripes in my stash - two thirds of this bundle were just sitting there waiting, and there were 6 more that got taken out and replaced for a variety of reasons.

I'm thinking of doing the Lattice quilt with rainbow stripes and a blue background, just because I'd like to see what it would look like. I'm also thinking of doing it with 4 repeating solids, on a very dark grey, but I'm very slowly writing up a list of solids that I need next time I do a fabric shack order, and frankly, it's not urgent. The light blue of the background is a Prima from Spotlight, and it's a near perfect match to Kona Aqua.

Oh, and if you thought yesterday's maths was hard to understand, this is how it was actually worked out - on the bottom of a cardboard jewellery box, 2 square inches, because I couldn't find any paper handy.