Is that the time already?

Got called in to work today which kinda ruined it for me - they wanted me to do 10-6 but I told them I could only do 10-3 because I had Spotlight's Christmas quilt night to go to, only for me to show up at 6 and find out that, as with last time I was planning for one of these things, it's next week. Still, the spend-$100-save-$40 voucher I got in the mail was useable, so I bought enough fabrics, batting, and cotton to do another 4 baby quilts, as well as a heap of other random stuff. Then, because I was cross at myself for being so shit with knowing what the hell is going on, who am I, where am I etc etc, I wandered around town scowling at people and buying more shit I didn't need.

Helen, I have a heap of hairclips for you. They were on chuckout for a dollar a pack at the reject shop and they're plain goldtone snapclips. They don't have a hole though, so they might take more gluing than normal.

As well as hairclips, I bought a copy of Portal, because one day I might get around to playing it, and also because it made the guy behind the counter come up and flirt with me (I scowled at him) and an mp3 player, despite the fact that I got one for $10 on eBay last night, and this one was $30. I was feeling bummed, and cant be held responsible for any purchases made. I held back from going into Cotton On, because 75% of the stuff (all the clothes and shoes and accessories) in that shop make me scowl even on the best of days, but I simply cannot resist the fact that they have notebooks for $2, especially as I have bookmarked a tutorial for a really cute quilted cover, which has already led to me purchasing 12 of the damn things for one day when I get around to it. So I went to the plaza instead, and I wandered around Kmart, scowling at people, then I went to KFC, where I was going through drivethrough, so there wasn't too much human interaction. Which was nice. 

But I did learn something interesting tonight - if you push the tip of your tounge on the back of your top teeth, you cant really smile. It's not so much a scowl as a "you are too unimportant for me to bother with any expression at all" face, and it's good for walking past the mobs of teenyboppers at the plaza. Also, being better than them in every single way helps too. See, even when I'm feeling bummed I manage to still feel awesome. That kind of multitasking can only be achieved by someone who both quilts and owns a small kitten.

However, before all my self loathing/moral superiority kicked in, I decided that what I really needed to do tonight was make another baby quilt. I picked some stash (I know, Oh my god, Are you okay, etc etc) and started chopping 10 squares at 21.5cm of one fabric and 20 each of two fabrics at 11.5cm. I think it's called a disappearing 4 patch or something but basically every second one is a 4 patch. Final squares are 20cm so its 80cm by 100cm big.

I didn't really think through which blocks go where - there's not the hugest amount of contrast between the two fabrics in the 4 patch and the big stripe blocks unfortunately have become a bit wonky during quilting - I did either side of the seam on the 4 patch but I had no actual line to follow when it hot to the wrong way of the stripe, and the pins I put in to help with the guesswork have made it bunch up a bit. Still, I got it designed, cut, pieced, basted and quilted in about 6 hours, but I cant really be bothered binding it tonight. Instead of watching stuff on the laptop as I was working I had the new mp3 player on, and due to the absence of a clock on it, I didn't realise it was 1am already, so that can be done tomorrow.

This is the back and I really like the diagonal line. I would have done it straight but then I would have had to try line it up with the other lines - now I've found out I actually prefer the effect created by having it on the angle. I think next one I might try something even more along these lines - a kindof freeform assembly of the blocks instead of right angles in a grid. Wasn't that the point of these little ones? To try shit out?

An ode to the classics...

I've put the Retro and BlueGreen quilts in the wash so that they're nice and clean to take into Spotlight tomorrow, as well as the pretty little new one, so for the first time in ages I can see my first quilt again. I'd forgotten how pretty and bright and rainbow it is, and how well most of the corners match up, and how good my in-the-ditch was, especially considering that it was my first and that I did it in 10 days, or more specifically nights. Yes the smaller ones may look more conventionally quilt-y but the rainbow one is, and always will be, so very me. But I didn't pre-wash any of it, so it cant go on the top of the bed where it will get all dirtied by the cats, and so I don't get to admire it as often as I should. Maybe when I do my room re-organise next week I'll try and work out a way to fit it up on the wall instead.

I have to go to work now. Only a short one, thankfully, and then I get 2 days off before the weekend, so it's not all bad.

A Good Day... Except for the Lawnmowing...

Now that I've gone back to facebook, and finished there, I am back, for real this time. I really need to discourage Babycat from sitting on the keyboard, but at the moment it seems more important to stop her annoying her mother.

Speaking of:

I don't know that there's still any milk in there, though I'm assuming there is since she stayed on the boob a while, which was annoying, and not only because I was getting shit done. Janelle from work was telling me about a cat that's 18 months old now and still on the boob so I am a bit worried, but Babycat is not even 11 weeks yet, and she drinks from a bowl and eats real food, so I'm sure she'll get over it/cope fine if the well runs dry.

As you can kinda see, I made progress on the mini quilt. Actually, around mowing the lawn, washing my hair and the cats sitting on it as I tried to put it through the machine, I actually finished it.

Despite the shoddyness of the second photo, there is some consensus in my house (well, Casey and Becky) that the back is nicer than the front. I will agree to a certain extent that the back is less for the brain to try and appreciate, and that the first retro quilt taught me the value of a simplified design with a solid colour to tie it all together, but I'm not keen on the layout of the back. They were the 8 blocks I had left, I shuffled them about for at least half of The View (it was the one with Obama on, that they have aired at least 4 times now) but I never came to a balance I was satisfied with, with regards to the spacing between the designs and the positioning of the browns, which appear quite high contrast on the back.

Final size is 80cm by 106cm, which is too small really for me to use, and the cotton batting seems much stiffer than the bamboo I have gotten used to. But it hasn't been washed yet, and that might make a difference.

I did my machine's wavy line quilting which I'm so fond of, and it ended up being even tighter than the BlueGreen quilt, about three rows to two, at 7 rows per block and one on the seam. But on flat batting I feel the more quilting the better, since the batting doesn't push out on the piecing and hold the seams flat, and I worry that it will all fall apart if the seams havent been sewn over or at least near to.

I would have done an over the seams quilt were it not for the fact that I couldn't match up the panels at the back, and I thought it would look a bit daft on that side if the quilting was a centimetre or so off the seam on half the blocks, and following some random line on the others. I tried my best to get the vertical seams at least to match up, devoting an entire episode of The Mentalist to it, but they're still a little bit off. There's so many lines though and it's the best thing about the wavy stitch, that it doesn't really matter like a straight int the ditch does.

Anyway, next up should be either finishing the boat quilt cover or the purple quilt, which is under a pile of stuff at the moment, and also Mama Jan's quilt which is due in 3 weeks, as well as a bag for one of the girls at work, which I am going to have to remember how to do. I've bought some foam a bit thinner that what I used for mine, so it shouldn't be as hard, but I suspect it will still take me a bit to get back in the swing of it.

Or I could have a go at another mini quilt, I'm liking them; they're quicker and easier than big ones, and you can try out more exciting stuff for them. But I haven't got a cohesive bundle of fabrics I'm willing to use right now, so it might have to wait.

Also coming us is Christmas quilting night at Spotlight on Thursday, which I may or may not do something for - on the one hand, I do like to get involved, on the other, I really dislike the idea of making a quilt to use for less than a month per year. But I bought some nice Christmas paisleys last year, that were just not-Christmassy enough to catch my fancy, so I might whip up a little something with them tomorrow after work, if I can remember where I put them.

F]FKLDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDFFQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFY=7

This is not a blog from the bog either, but I'm headded that way shortly...

Honeycat went in and got speyed today (who knew it was spelt with an e?) and now, annoyingly, she an Babycat are hissing at each other. I'm hoping it's just because Honeycat wont play like she usually does, so instead of letting Babycat attack her she's just telling her who is boss in cat-speak. She's also licking like crazy, which I guess is good in that she's gotten rid of the patch of blood that was around the stitches, but I'm still a bit worried that she'll either tear them out accidentally or worse, on purpose.

Tonight, from what I know (I did work tonight, but I bought her home a few hours before I started, and also from watching them now) Honeycat has pretty much refused to do all of what the vet said. She said to only give her a little bit of food because she'd be nauseous from the anesthetic, but she wolfed down a pouch, then drank the rest of Babycat's milk, then ate what was left of Babycat's food. The vet said that she would want to be in a quiet dark room on her own, but she's in her usual spot now, and she was out in the lounge before I went to work. The only difference is in what she and Babycat are doing, with regards to her very much showing Babycat who is alpha-cat, and Babycat doing a lot of hissing about it.

Thankfully, I have tomorrow off, not only so that I can keep an eye on them both, but also because I didn't really achieve much today. I got a couple dozen fabrics washed including the blue polka dot I'm using for the back of the baby quilt, and I came up with how I'm gunna do it as well, but as for actual sewing, it was a bit of a bust. 

I feel good about getting prewashing done though, because I have massive fears that one fabric will shrink more than another when I wash them and ruin all my good work, especially since I set the machine to 40° and dry them in the dryer. I figure there's no point having something you cant use, and that means easy-to-wash. But it also means I cant get something started (or in this case, finished) till I've put a load in, put it in the dryer for 20 minutes, and ironed it all out. It's probably a waste of time for the most part, but it's one of those things where you know it's working by the fact that you don't have any problems. It's annoying, but I'd rather waste 2 hours prepping my fabric than waste 20 hours on sewing something that shits itself as soon as I wash it.

Anyway.

Time for a couple more episodes of The Mentalist. Hurrah for American TV, who can make an hour pass in just 42 minutes. British TV takes much longer to watch, which is good in that I get more Top Gear for my download, but bad in that I can watch less episodes in a night. Not that there are any episodes of Top Gear I haven's seen (okay, I haven't seen Top Gear of the Pops, but it's debatable whether or not this counts) but there are still 2 DVDs of The Mentalist season 1 I havent watched yet, so that's where I'll be if you need me.

This is not a blog from the bog...

I must say, I'm loving The Mentalist right now.

I'd hired it a few months ago and put it on the laptop (shifty I know, but I did technically pay for a weeks viewing of it, and at no point did they say when that week of watching was) but hadn't gotten around to watching it because of shiny new episodes and DVDs of Psych and a whole host of other to-watch shows. But since the plot and synopsis for the two is the same (except that Psych is a comedy and The Mentalist is a drama) and yesterday my brain was all mushy but I thought it would be daft to fall asleep when it was only 5.30, so instead of putting on old Psych, which I can fall asleep during because I've seen it all already, I loaded the mentalist into Daemon tools and watched the first 8 episodes.

A few points - Simon Baker looks better with brown hair, so I've no idea why he's blond in this. Their big boss guy is played by the guy who was the dodgy president in 24, so even though he seems to be a good guy, I still find him shifty. They don't give enough time to the supporting characters. But that's a comparison to Psych, and therefore quite unfair. Apart from the lack of hilarity, it's pretty good.

Other things that are good include Jelly Tots, Kinder bars and Peppermint Dairy Milk rolls, but not the blocks, because the green-goo to chocolate ratio is wrong. Other things that are not good include my complete lack of motivation, my indecision about the backing for the mini quilt and the fact that the labels on the tubes of mini m&ms don't peel off cleanly.

Anyway.

Didn't get the boat quilt finished but Dad's have long been known to be distracted by the shiny wrappers of Turkish Delights and Crunchie bars. Spent the afternoon wandering around town looking for a very basic mp3 player, but the only basic (non ipod shuffle) one I found was $50 at Harvey Norman, and I'm not paying that much. Then it was an evening playing with (well, feeding) Ester, who is ludicrously gorgeous, and flicking through old quilt magazines with Helen. And now I'm home, and Honeycat is cross with me cause I wont feed her cause she's going to the vet tomorrow.

And my laptop is running svchost twice, so the coretemp is around 95°C when it should be in the mid-sixties, and I don't know which one to turn off.

Deep breaths now, come on...

I think I'm gunna fall asleep. I got 2 hours last night, and work was stupidly, ridiculously busy, and I stayed back for an hour, and then Mum and Nan were in shopping, so I was wandering around with them, then I had to go to Spotlight, to get some more of the blue spotty fabric and a long bit of zip, because I've decided to put a zip at the end of Dad's thing, as the press stud thingies are too expensive and I actually can't stand velcro. Don't know why, it just irritates me. And then Mum wanted me to get her some plastic tablecloth while I was there, but she was a bit vague with what kind so I just got a roll in case it was the wrong stuff so she could take it back, then I went to Nanny's cause it's across the road from netball and I was hoping that Casey's game was nearly finished so Mum would come over and tell me whether or not I had the right stuff so I could take it back, or not, and Nanny gave me a quilting magazine so I read it and then it was 4pm and Mum wasn't there and there was no point me hanging about any more because Spotlight would have been closed (actually now that I think about it it's Saturday so they are open till 5, silly sleepy brain) so I went to KFC because it's the weekend so it's okay and then I came home and ate it and now I'm (still) sleepy.

Yeah.

Um, trying for coherency now, I doubt that dad's quilt will actually be finished, since my brain has too far out of my ear for me to be able to finish a sentence, let alone a quilt. There's probably only 2 hours to go on it (an hour or so to do the second quilting, and another to set the zip in the bottom and sew and oversew around the edges. But it's all a bit much right now. I need sleep.

Total sleep time still possible: 4hours 25minutes...

Casey has stolen my laptop to watch Psych, so I have scooped up Mum's tiny Dell to type this up, so that I can send it to myself, add the photos and post. Why the rush? Well, due to a flu that's going around Woolies at the moment, I'm the only open-trained supervisor available to work tomorrow morning. So I will be needing to wake up in about 5 hours or so.

How shit is that? The rules say that we need to be given a 10 hour break between shifts, but there's nothing about doing nights forever and then suddenly doing a morning. That said, the rules also say that if you are their only option, but you don't want to do it, but they need you too, you can demand double time and a half. It's just a shame I'm not a massive bitch, and that I understand that there's been 15% cut from frontend's budget in the last month, so I'm not gunna.

Anyway, I've got the top of the mini quilt done, and I freaking love it. Sure, there's quite a few points that leave a little to be desired, but I've already stated that wonkyness quickly turned out to be more difficult than it apeared in the paint document.

I ended up going for 4 by 6 because I scrapped the little end blue bits in favour of just adding them to the other fabrics, since that way I had 8 colours, and they could be split into four piles for 4 rows, so everything became easier.

I also realised tonight that I can get 2 clippy coathangers, and hang stuff on my curtain rod. Well, actually off my curtain hooks, since the rod itself is quite thick.

Yes, my curtain is a nasty browny-orange velour. No, I haven't trimmed the batting. But fuck me it's come out gorgeous. I wish I'd had more fabrics so I could do it bigger. I figure if you had 12 you could do an 8 by 6 fairly easy, since I still have enough 4-squares (well, 4-quadrilaterals, since they aren't right angled) to do another two rows down. I'll be using these for the backing, I think: I've got a piece of blue polka dot that I want to pair it with, but I'm still not sure exactly.

Probably won't get past my curtains for a few days though, as I only have tomorrow to finish the the boat quilt before father's day. I'm thinking of cheating and getting a strip of press studs from spotlight to do the bottom, since I kinda loathe doing buttons, but I'm undecided as yet. It'd probably cost me about $15, but it would save a lot of work. I probably will, since my bank balance has been strangely resistant so far to repeated fabric purchasing attacks.

Speaking of, here are the random bits that I only got because there's a couple there I want for Mama Jan's quilt, which I'm desperately in need of inspiration/motivation on.

Then there's the first batch I bought on the cheap from eBay.

I was looking for some more of the fabrics that matched the brown-bird fabric I posted about the other day and I found this seller who had 50% off a heap of her fabrics, ending the next day. So I bought 7 1/2 yards, cause that's what you can fit an an international pouch, but I didn't realise I had also put one of them in my watch list.

The next day of course, the ones that are left are 60-69% off. I'm not feeling bad about it, because 3 of the ones I bought the first night were her last bits, but of course I went and get another 7.

Most of these were between $3 and $4 a yard. 3 of them are Michael Miller, 2 Alexander Henry and a couple of randoms, but even if they were crappy fabrics that would be cheap*

And there's still a box making it's way from fabric.com to shipito, where I will have to pay some more to get it sent on to me.

I will be ready to marry the post office in a couple of weeks time.

*Should I maybe go buy more?

*yawn*

In lieu of an actual post, can I just say this: If I ever decided to do 2-way-wonkyness again, can someone please bash me over the head and hide me in a corner until I come to my senses?

I ditched doing more work on dad's quilt in favour of making a start on the first mini quilt. Should have waited, done more thinking, realised how much work it would be to line up all those wonky corners. But can I say it wasn't my fault, it was Spotlight's, because I discovered today they have 254cm wide bamboo in there for $20 a metre, and I bought 1.5metres, (because split down the middle that's two cot size, and at $30 for two, seriously cheap) and it made me sad about how little I have done with flat batting lately (quilt cover is battingless, purple quilt is a cotton eiderdown in the middle, Ester's quilt was such a rushjob I can barely remember doing it) and how little of it I had in my immediate plans (more work on purple, and Mama Jan's quilt is also planned as an eiderdown middle, though I may well change my mind)

So yeah. This was the only project I had that was at the "can be started right now" stage, so I did. 

Also, I've done a lot of eBay shopping in the past few days. But this wasn't meant to be an actual post, so piccies can wait.

Oddly though, it was the no-brand fabrics that cost more than the Kaufman and the Miller ones. Weird.

But it's not even late....

It was a long day at work and stupid me agreed to another long one tomorrow, completely forgetting that Big Bosses are down (which is the only reason they wanted more people on - when I'm in charge they can't seem to afford to give me even enough staff, let alone extras.)

As a result... can I possibly go to bed at midnight? I was gunna lube up the machine (I finally remembered to get some WD40) and do the second lines on the boat quilt tonight, but my levels of feeling it have descended into the negatives. Also, my right nostril has completely blocked itself off, which is very annoying, and makes the right-front corner of my head really heavy, which is even more annoying.

That said, today hasn't been a complete write off - as well as the 7 hours at work ($127 before tax) and the remembering to get WD40, I made an appointment for Honeycat to be desexed (Monday) and did the computer draft of the first baby sized mini quilt.

It's more of a "test the theory" kind of thing than a firm statement on what goes where, just to see that I could indeed do it without anything needing to touch. The theory holds, and leaves in it's wake the equivalent of 8 neat 16ths (19x21cm blocks), which I can put with the pale blue fabric I got today at Spotlight, to make the back. It's not a perfect colour match, but it's pretty darn close.

All that seems like enough achievement for one day, so I'm gunna make with the sleepage.