It's working... *cries*

 

Two weeks ago, a man from telstra called my mum and told her that he could upgrade her internet plan. We were going to be getting 500gig of internet a month, at higher speeds, and a bonus free wireless dongle to use if we were away from home.

What we actually got was a 75 hour internet dropout and a new, separate phone bill for $30p/month for the wifi dongle. Data usage not included.

I've spent the last 3 days either on the phone to tech support or waiting for them to call me back. Someone today finally told us that the upgrade was actually a cancellation of the old plan and a commencement of a new one, so all our usernames and passwords were different, and that got us back online for all of 10 minutes (basically, enough to say thankyou so very much, we love you, bye and for it to die again) before the modem went aargh, I can't cope with ADSL2+ I don't wanna and gave up.

Tonight I borrowed a modem from Steven and smashed the keyboard until it took pity on me and worked. I tearfully hugged my mother and she went to bed (it was 3am by this point. She was working at the pub tonight) and I moved it all to my room and smashed the keyboard again until it all started working down here as well.

I'm so over tech support. And I still don't know what a DNS is, or why it was so hard for all these things to find it, but I don't care right now.

ZOMG!

Not only did I finish quilting AND bind the quilt I was working on last night, I also improv pieced another whole quilt top!

It's mainly a bundle of 30cm cuts of Groove from Robert Kaufman that I got for $10 a metre at Stitch and Knit a while back, with another Kaufman (Iota) and a stripe that I bought the other week in Adelaide thrown in. I decided that what I didn't want to do was stand around for 2 hours ironing and cutting all my bits, making me bored with the project before I'd even started, so I cut a half dozen 10cm squares from each fabric, as well as a 7cm and a 10cm strip, and a few random other rectangles. And then I sewed, and sewed, and ironed, and sewed, and cut some more bits, and sewed some more, ironed and trimmed a little, and sewed and kept on going till there was a quilt top there.

Actually, I lie, about halfway through I stopped and got KFC. There was nothing else to eat.

Anyway, it's about 110 by 140, judging solely on the 33cm lino squares underneath. I've no idea what to back it with, nothing in the stash is suitable which is a shame, and even once it is backed I've no idea how to quilt it.

Still, it was a nice different thing to do to (hopefully) kick start me into sewing again.

Shit story, needs more unicorns.

So, tonight, I've got a story. It's not a great story, unlike that one about the time when I woke up still wearing pants, actually it's a bit dull; the basic plot is about a girl who watches a romantic comedy and subsequently re-evaluates her life. It's fairly par-for-the-course, and if it's anything like the movie within-the story (because I like to be meta like this) then the funniest scene will be at the end, after the credits, but if that's the case then I should have injected a little bit more hilarity in going out to the woodshed and filling up the wheelbarrow just now. Whoops.

Anyway, yeah, tonight I (the protagonist of this story) watched Any Questions For Ben, an Australian movie that just came out on DVD. I went and hired the DVD and everything. It's about a guy (Ben, the protagonist of his own little story) who's living the high life, working in advertising, footloose and fancy-free in a Melbourne that's a lot prettier than I remember it being. But then he realises that his life is kinda empty, and there's a girl, and it's all very hard, and then they end up together. I'm fairly confident that's not a spoiler, since the bit before the brackets coupled with the second sentence is pretty much the plot of every romantic comedy ever, just with the option to switch the genders. But it gets there in a lovely way, with some nice heartfelt/funny/touching sentiments in there, and yeah, it was, for me, a bit of a ...yeah... moment.

I have loved loved loved the last 2 1/2 years of being single. Well, okay, maybe the first five or six months weren't great, but since then, I've been rocking it. Queen of the single ladies, corrupter of colleagues and regular dancefloor gyrater. But I've been saying "I'm so in love with their love" a lot* lately. And just maybe I've been saying it out of jealousy. Or, not jealousy, but a milder version, not envy either, and longing is also too strong of a word. I think I'm starting to feel about the idea of a relationship the same way I feel about the perfect slim jacket sleeve design. I'd quite like that. It'll be hard to find, but whenever I'm about, in a place where it might be found (in the case of a nice sleeve, I've been looking for a coat to chop up, since it's proving quite difficult to find an actual pattern) I'll be keeping an eye out.

So you heard it here first, because I'm still not quite ready to post it on facebook yet, but I, Sara, am looking for more than just an epic fabric collection and six part-done quilts hanging from the curtains.

I think I want a boyfriend.

*Usually, it's about actors who are real life couples - Bill and Sookie in True Blood are married and expecting real life twins, and the lead actors in this movie are going out too. But I do it with real people too, just cruise around going "oh, good for you guys" quite sincerely, a totally different tone to my normal sarcasm. The signs have been there.

Naw, damn...

I've been in a bit of a quilting rut lately, and since even though Comic Con's over, the internet is still getting fuller every day with interesting new videos and articles, any attempts at having a play around at designing something new in Paint got repeatedly sidetracked by my "maybe I'll just check google's new video feed..." attitude.

So I broke out the graph paper and textas. After a couple of goes with nothing lining up I got the sizes of the rectangles sorted so that the edges of any potential quilt would be fairly level, and went to colour it in, and was doing the very bottom right hand corner...

And fucked up the colouring. On Paint I could just ctrl+z and then make the bottom corner rectangle pink, and then colour in the white square green, but in real life, I don't even have wite-out...

Also, to make it without doing T seams, you'd need to put a seam through the centre of the rectangles, and I don't want to do that (nor do I want to do T seams) so unfortunately, I can't actually make it either.

Still, it's kinda pretty.

Question:

If you sew something, but didn't blog about it, did you really sew it?

I only ask because in the last couple of weeks what little sewing I have done has been clothes. My so-bad-it's-good formal mullet skirt, which will be saved for an actual BnS ball, and a gathered-front circle skirt in a brushed, yarn dyed plaid cotton, that makes me want to become artsy and hipster again, and start wearing roll-neck sweaters and trench-coats with skirts and tights and tall boots all the time, like I did when I was 19, even though those things don't really feature very much in my wardrobe anymore.

The problem is, clothes are hard to photograph. I am not good at selfies, and even worse at whole-body selfies. There is no big, full length mirror in our house, just a curious assembly of smaller ones, and you jigsaw together an idea of how you look between them. Also, as somewhat messy people, any picture featuring waist height or below is bound to have an... interesting background. But, because these things were made and worn fleetingly, without any record of them shared with the wider world, I find myself forgetting their existence, feeling like I've done no sewing in about 3 weeks, when actually I have; it's just been... ethereal is too artsy a word, but it's the closest I can think off. I made them, they were there and then they were, sort of, gone. Quilts I see on my bed every day, but skirts end up hiding in the cupboard.

Maybe I asked the wrong question, maybe I should have asked: If someone who does a lot of quilting sews some other stuff, does it sate the urge to quilt, in the same way that someone wanting garlic bread's hunger will be sated by spaghetti?

I think the answer is no, but I can't decide what it is that I want to quilt, and my fabrics are all a bit disorganised at the moment. And also, I couldn't find any garlic bread in any of the freezers, and even though my spaghetti made me full (to the point where I looked a bit pasta-pregnant) I still find myself at 4am, having just brushed my teeth, wanting garlic bread.

Me: a work in progress.

Hopefully my existential angst for the quarter is over - I'm feeling better today. It's probably a combination of things: catching up with a friend I haven't seen enough of lately, a new watch coming in the mail, getting my bags from the weekend back (including the flannelette bundle I bought at lincraft Rundle Mall)

Marveling at the wonders of cyclonic vacuums (Shay, they use centrifuges, and centrifuges are interesting) Finishing season 3 of Buffy, devoting a bit of time to laying backwards over one of the big balls at the gym (when your thoughts are every which way, hang upside down for a bit, and they'll pool in the top of your head)

And knowing that if I keep on being glum, then I've got no hope of ever being awesome enough to rock shoes like this.

Okay, I might never be. But there's no point in not having a go, right?

Woe is me

I think that one of the big reasons I've been crocheting instead of sewing is that it doesn't take any time to set up. To sew something, I have to get the fabric, iron it, cut it, clear space around the sewing machine, and then when it's finished I have to pack it all up again. To crochet, I find a needle, guess some numbers and start. It also helps that I can sit in bed and re-watch White Collar in it's entirety while I do it.

I'm so excited that it's only a month or so now till the next season starts - I watch a fair few TV shows but it's probably my favourite. I always thought I would make an excellent con-woman: I can lie pretty well, fake sincerity with the best of them and I'm an excellent painter, even though I haven't done it in over half a decade, but I'm pretty sure that if I had to I could forge an artwork or two. Also, I could pretend to be whoever I wanted to be, and I would love that. I get angsty about all that life out there that I will never live, the books I will never read, the movies that I will never see, experiences I will never live through. I got genuinely sad tonight when I said "see you later" to the lady in the foreign callcentre and realised that only will I never "see" her later, I'll probably never talk to her again. 7 billion people on this earth and I'll never talk to even 0.001% of them. There's a whole world out there, backed up by 200,000 years of human existence, people thinking great thoughts, learning amazing things, and life's too short and too mundane to learn them all.

Plus, I'm quite lazy, and tend towards whatever is safest, and warmest, and usually also the most rainbow or the sparkliest. First world problem-ing, yet again: "woes is me, my life is boring, and I'm too lazy to make it more interesting"

Thank god for escapist TV, and a job that lets me sleep in till lunchtime.

Spontaneous Wholecloth

Tonight I got home and the idea of having to either start on bindings or finish the awkward quilting on the falling pinwheels quilt didn't exactly fill me with joy. Nor did I really want to do anything with fussy back and forthing from the kitchen to the sewing machine, so that ruled out either making a bag or starting a new quilt. I probably should have just gone to bed, but having not sat at my machine in 3 days, I was feeling a need to sew something.

So I got an about 1m square scrap of batting, a couple of metres of Kona Black and spool each of rainbow variegated Guterman Sulky in 12 and 30.  I basted in 10cm squares with dressmaking pins, and I sewed a consistent wave, with a left and a right between each pin. Then I sewed the same wave between the two, and reversed it between them.

I probably should have done a pillow before committing to an entire quilt, but really, it only took me a couple of hours. I'm not sure what I'll do with it, since it's a baby sized quilt in the least baby-ish of colours, but I like being able to say I've now done a wholecloth quilt.

Unfortunately, it's another thing now that needs binding, and even more unfortunately, it will have to be done by hand. I got all guilty about the fact that I'd caused myself to have to do more binding without having done any work on the other bindings, so I got the binding for the blue and grey quilt, which had been sewn but not pressed or folded, and did that with the black binding of the new one.

I've made the black binding very narrow (cut to 5.5cm, sewn .75cm wide) but I'm not in any hurry to get it finished. It's only small, so I'll do it over the next couple of weeks as new TV shows come out.

Got ahead of myself again...

I'll be honest - I'm not a fan of sashing. It's a lot of extra effort for not much extra, and also, if feels a lot like binding.

Still, it can make a simple design a bit more interesting. Make a sashed 9 patch, and then make it dissappear, with a bit of extra sashing, and you've got a very lazy leadlight style quilt, unless you use white for the sashing, in which case it doesn't look like leadlight at all.

By my standards, it's big. 165cm each way, which I know isn't that big by other people's standards, but it's still too big to quilt doing wavy lines on my little old machine. It was on my finish list, but I'm actually seriously considering getting it properly quilted. If I could free motion I'd do that, but for that I'd need to send my machine off to get serviced, and, you know, learn how to free motion, and then get confident enought to do a big project, so maybe I'll just pay the lady at Stitch and Knit $90 and tell her to do whatever. I'd be happy with a stipple really.

Does anyone have a therapist they can lend me?

I find myself getting more and more anxious before beginning a new project. I don't know if I got it before and just didn't pay any attention to it, or if it's just a recent thing, but I've been so worried lately that if I start something I'll only screw it all up and waste all the fabric, that I just... don't. I get out a heap of fabrics, come up with a bit of maths, and then demure, and look at super magnets on ebay, and watch comic-con panels on youtube until it's too late to start, and then I put my fabrics away and go to bed. It just seems easier.

Couple my newfound unwillingness to start anything with an apathy toward binding anything, and I'm a bit stuck. The monsters have provided an alternative, but I'll be honest, I'm not a lover of machine applique, and the fact that they need it is what keeps me from doing them more often. I find I'm better at starting something if I use freshly bought fabrics (probably because they can be replaced if it does all turn to shit) but I still get worried about the amount of money I just spent on them.

Still, there are things that need making, and tonight I sucked it up long enough to make a strap. For a bag, which was a bit too much to ask of myself tonight. It's for a gift, so I want to get it right. Except I haven't actually decided what it's going to look like yet, and that's never been a good start to a project. Hopefully it'll be a quiet night at work tomorrow and I can sort it to my liking. I'm using new fabric at least...

Oh, and last night's post was #700. I knew it was coming up, but I forgot to check exactly when, and now we've missed it.

Angst

Once upon a time, I could quite confidently throw together a bundle of fabrics, safe in the knowledge that the quilt that came out at the other end would be wonderful. Now, in the words of Eric Carmen, those days are gone. It takes me a day, maybe two, sometimes as much as a week before I'm sure of the choices I've made. Lately I've even been needing to chop bits up before deciding if I like them or not. What's worse is that back in the day I was mainly doing nice simple stack and slash quilts, that were solely about the fabric choice, without even a nice pattern to distract from a bad choice. And yet, most of them turned out pretty well.

So here's what I'm currently angsting over.

Some of these fabrics have been in stash since I started quilting. It's a huge variety - therse's some from the early Fabric Traditions bundles at Spotlight, before the quality turned to shit, there's some from Lincraft's mixed bundles, there's some mid 2000s Moda, a bit from the remnants bin at Stitch and Knit, a couple of bits of one of the  the new DS ranges and some random internet purchases too.

The plan is to cut them into 20cm squares and HST them into another, quite a bit more random version of the second baby quilt I made for Meagan.

Probably the middle one on the left.

As well as that bundle, today I bought some (well, a lot) of the new DS line, which went on sale today. Unfortunately, our store didnt get a very complete selection of the range - none of the greens and only about half the oranges, so I had to add in some solids when I (naturally) got angsty about having the blues and oranges together.

I'm bummed about the orange especially, because I'd love to do an orange quilt. Still, we're apparently going to Adelaide sometime late March so I might be able to find the rest then. These are 20cm cuts, and there's two more lighter oranges and two more darks, and that would give me almost enough to do the 7 by 9 quilt (top row) which is at least a decent grown up couch size, so I could use it instead of fobbing it off on a random child.

It is possible that I am sewing too much. 

Last night my dreams were full of me having to hurry up and do whatever it was I was doing (stealing chewing gum from a hospital(?), smuggling my inflatable horse out of my hotel(?)) so that I could get back to sewing some more. And then this afternoon I found myself thinking, after I had gone to Spotlight to get some binding, that I wanted to go have a browse at Kmart, even though I didn't actually need anything, and when I asked myself why, I had to admit, grudgingly, that I was stalling on going home, because there was yet more sewing to be done.

Really, apart from going to the gym last night, and then to see Meagan at maccas, all I've done all holidays is sew. And yes, I know that was the point, and yes, Baby Shower gift is all done now, But I really really had to stop for a bit.

So while I was at Kmart, I bought a novel, called The Girl in the Steel-Capped Boots. It was... well, it was everything I thought it was going to be. Cliched, mainly, but that's not to say I didn't enjoy it. Main character, a newly graduated engineer, gets sent out to the edge of nowhere to help 350 blokes build a big jetty, overcomes all their sexist prejudices to win the affection of all and the heart of the gruff, sexy, mysterious head of the company that owns the jetty. Yay!

Still, for all that I knew the ending by page 24, it was a nice three hours away from the machine, and, time suitably taken off, I got to binding.

But, a step back in time. Had my internets not chucked a hissy fit last night, I could have shared with everybody the tribulations of Baby Shower Quilt #2.

See that missing triangle? It is supposed to be blue stripe. But you can only get 8 triangles from a fat quarter - not a problem with the red spot, since I had a spare 3 metres of it, but I needed 9 of the blue too. I had a similar stripe that I had put in there, but it was more aqua, and too close to the green, and I tried a red and blue spot, and a yellow stripe, and a blue check, but I didn't like any of them.

Solution? Change the direction the stripes faced and drop off the corners.

My first ever octagonal quilt. Bound in a yellow, terracotta and blown stripe that I absolutely adore for it's unashamed retroness. Backed in a red and white narrow seersucker stripe I had originally hoped to use for the front, but was too crinkly after washing. About 105cm at the wide bit.

And there's the back for the bright baby quilt - more HSTs.

I'm really loving HSts at the moment, clearly.

But which one do I actually give to Meagan? She said when I showed her the big bundle of pastels that she liked the idea of having a very babyish quilt, so that she could put it away when the baby got a big bigger in order to bring it out when it got a lot bigger. But she also liked the bright bundle, because it was bright.

I don't know.

Settling.

So I've had my new (old) laptop for a few days now and we're going okay. Sure, Vista double and occasionally triple-checking if I want to do stuff is a tad annoying, but all I have to do is pretend I'm my mum and I feel the urge to install codecs or updates or add-ons drop right away. And yes, the touchscreen doesn't actually respond when you touch it with your finger, but I can still scribble myself a quilt pattern in paint using the pen, so that's okay. And while I haven't gotten used to the little nodule in the middle of the keyboard that you're meant to use instead of a touchpad, I've plugged a mouse in and that feels quite familiar, after using one with mum's laptop for the last month.

If I could work out what I actually want, I would buy it in a heartbeat, cause a lot of what goes on with this laptop isn't really what I'm looking for. But since I don't know what I'm looking for, I'll concede that what I'm looking at isn't doing too bad of a job.

Why do I keep doing this?

The hardest thing about dressmaking is fabric selection. Fabric selection for a quilt can be tricky, but that's purely a design thing. Even if you've got the most horribly clashing prints imaginable, as long as you're using 100% cotton with a shrinkage rate of less than 5%, you'll end up with a functioning, if not necessarily aesthetically pleasing, quilt. When it comes to making clothes though, fabric selection is waaay more tricky.

It's all about drape, see. I hate drape. Partly cause I don't really have the figure for it (ie. I'm a boobless stick) and partly because it's pretty much impossible to economically design an item of clothing with drape without a mannequin. Ever tried to pin clothes around yourself? It doesn't really work. And making the same item over and over again doesn't work either, because fabrics with drape are usually about the same price as quilt shop cottons, and the cheap stuff you use for making your practice muslins doesn't drape.

I remember now why I didn't go off and do fashion design. That next batch of monsters might get made sooner than planned. At least they always work.

And again...

The nice thing about corduroy is that it's cotton, so you can interface it and make it into a bag.

The nice thing about this particular corduroy is that it's really, really pretty.

Problem is, I'm struggling to find a fabric for a lining or a nice ribbon for some straps, but when I do it will be my new pretty bag.

This is some kind of furnishing fabric that is also 100% cotton, but it has the unusual distinction of looking completely, completely different in photos. None of the colours look like that. It's actually quite nice, as a potential bag, though I imagine if you used it for curtains or to cover a couch or something it would look horrible. And in real life too, not just in photos. It's a bit, um, gaudy. Still, cute summer bag, for the beach.

I'm so ready for Summer. These sorta-nice spring days we've been having have been like a nasty, nasty tease before we get into the good stuff. I know people hate it, but I am so ready for 35 degree days, going down the river, doing stuff all and not feeling a need to justify it cause, hey, it's the middle of summer and laying down under the trampoline for 6 hours is kinda the done thing.

I guess what I'm dancing around saying is that today I didn't really get anything* done and I feel bad about it.

*I got my harddrives sorted though, and that took about 5 hours. Most of the rest was sitting on the couch eating fairy floss.

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.

Hiding

There are some people that desperately want the name of this blog. It makes me laugh, because they have sooks that they can't get to it, but type in my name and the word "quilting" (cause I've told them it's a blog about quilting, even though lately it's been about everything but) and it comes up on the first page.

If I was writing a report card on their detectoring skills, at the bottom I would put "must try harder"

And then I would white-out the word "harder" because really, they're not trying at all.

Anyway, what I must try harder at is making time to sew. I was going to tonight, having come home on time and all, but Casey was on my bed watching Miranda (fantastic BBC show. highly recommended. Reminds us very much of ourselves) so I sat on my bed and watched it too. I could have sewn the strips for the extension of the brown quilt (I like to think of it as the "snack" quilt, because it's like Cadbury Snack, with the brown chocolate and all the different colours of goo) or I could have done some work on the bag of pockets from long long ago. I could have cut the binding for the black and rainbow zigzag quilt, which has been waiting for a few months. Now though it's too late, because I ate two rolls of peppermint chocolate and now I'm pinging on a massive sugar high instead. I'm no longer allowed to operate heavy machinery. Or a rotary cutter. Or a laptop it would seem.

If anyone wants me, I'll be the one over here playing bejeweled and waiting for the rush to go away so I can go to sleep.

Parents, warn you children: massive amounts of chocolate at 1am is not, and never will be, a good idea.

Really.

I'm all adrift tonight. I did an extra shift at work but I finished at 8 instead of 10.30, did a bit of late night shopping, came home and people were still all up. The strangeness of the situation threw me completely off kilter and I haven't recovered, spending the night sitting in front of the fire looking at dresses on ebay for when the weather warms up again.

Of course, you may point out that sitting down shopping online is pretty much par for the course lately. I really haven't been sewing much - between work, holidays, and going to the gym till the wee small hours, I'm struggling to get in the vicinity of my sewing machine, much less use it.

I've been wondering if I should take a break from blogging too, because for a craft blog, there's been a distinct lack of that going on. But inertia once again prompts me to continue blogging every night, so I suggest that if you're getting bored, assume that posts don't contain anything crafty, just the usual pointless rambly shit with an occasional affirmation thrown in. When I do something crafty, I'll put it in the title.

In the meantime, I'm off to do some maths. Not quiltmath, but something quite similar to the other quiltmath; the one you use for justifying fabric purchases. I'm going to go and talk myself into, and then back out of, and then into again, a half dozen new dresses. And then down to maybe three or four, once I'm convinced that those ones are an absolute perfect bargain and so much better value than anything I could find in the mount. That I so totally, absolutely need. Really. To go with the other dozen dresses in my wardrobe that I have never warn either, but may need to, one day...

Never seem to find, what I'm looking for...

I'm feeling so impatient that I could have a jumpy uppy downy foot stomping balled fists tantrum right now.

Buuut... I have no idea what I'm impatient for. Whatever it is, I want it, and I want it right now.

Maybe it's for the webpage with the song lyrics I was going to post between lines of actual typing. That's taking bloody forever, but I don't think that's it.

I think it's that my life still hasn't picked up from after the new carpet. Just because there's bookshelves, doesn't mean they're attached to the wall, and just because I have lots and lots of fabric, doesn't mean it's not stuck out in the shed still. Just because I have planned stuff, doesn't mean I can get started on it. And it's driving me insane. I'm struggling to find time for sewing between work and two social lives and when I do find time, I think to myself "Do I want to go out to the shed and find the fabric I need?" I really don't, and I know I don't. It was hard to pack up, and I found myself regularly wishing for it to just be done already, but putting it all back is feeling like it might almost be an insurmountable task, like maybe all those times I took holidays with the intent to clean my room I was doing it the wrong way around, and I really need some holidays just to put my room back together. To put myself back together.

God, that sounds pretentious. Imagine though, how much worse it would have been with some 80s rock lyrics in there. Here I Go Again by Whitesnake. My "new" song of the moment. I'm really really loving it. Like, on constant repeat in the car, loving it.*  

"I don't know where I'm goin, but I sure know where I've been..."

"An' I've made up my mind, I ain't wasting no more time, but here I go again..."

And a bit where it transitions from soulful, clenching your fist power ballad to epic 80s rock by means of a nice little drum solo... It really is fast highway driving perfection.

(But a word of warning though, if you get a little too into the drum solo and start banging on your steering wheel, your horn will toot. If you do this in the driveway, even if everyone in the house is asleep, you will feel epically embarrassed.)


*I discreetly turn repeat off when someone else is in the car, lest they think me weird. But I know it's folder 4, track 28, so I can find it again.

Found it.

Tonight, for the first time in ages, I found myself wanting to get home to do some sewing. And then I got home, and found that my room was still torn to bits like I'd left it six hours before when I'd gone into work. Including 2 big tubs, a really old travel bag and a suitcase full of handmade toy monsters squarely in the way of my sewing machine.

Oh well. I found a lot of other things today too.

Lots and lots of socks. Literally dozens. That's the advantage to buying pretty much the same socks over and over, they all match one another, with very few odd socks remaining. All the socks that I found were black size 2-8 Bonds ankle socks with the padded soles. The look kinda like the one in my header, but in need of a wash.

Lots of zippers. Some individual ones, but quite a lot on rolls too. Over 20m of zipper all up.

Quite a few packs of blank CDs. Four USB sticks and two external harddrives. Five 3-pin-clover cables with Australian plugs. One with a US plug (I threw it out).

My Pandora bracelet with the blue beads on it. I had just assumed that one of my sisters had taken it.

The pattern for the ballgown that I threw out the instructions for yesterday. Thankfully, I am a smart cookie, I shall just figure it out.

Lots of hairties. Even more bobby pins. Half a dozen nailfiles. A box of pore strips.

A quilt cover that will make some really nice bags once it's chopped up.

Some blocks I made out of the blue charm squares Shay gave me when I visited her in Adelaide that I never got around to assembling into a second pillow*

Quite a lot of foreign coins.

Some carpet that hasn't seen the light of day in a couple of years, and will, sadly, be torn up in 5 days time and replaced.

Tomorrow I need to find myself another half a dozen tubs, and then by Thursday night I suspect I will find myself sleeping in an empty bedroom.

In the meantime, I need to find myself some hand sewing projects. Or I could set up the sewing machine out in the bar, maybe do a bit of quilting, drinking and listening to late 90s music out there.

*weird fact, I made the first pillow in yellow and now cuddle it more than I cuddle either Mo (the sheep) Alex (the monster) or Eleanor (the elephant). I figure this can only be a good thing, as it means I can remove my toys from the bed should a boy decide to spend the night in it, without depriving me of an inanimate object to cuddle as well as him. For an update on the boy situation - he's sick with tonsillitis, so nothing is happening. I find this as boring as you no doubt do.