Wednesday.

Some nights you just think... Gosh life is weird. Gosh life is brilliant. I'm so glad I'm me, because this was something worth experiencing.

Or you know, maybe it wasn't. But the fact that I get paid to stand around and laugh with a half dozen of the greatest ladies in the world, for all that I occasionally have to sell someone some cancer sticks, makes up for the fact that my crazy Wednesday nights aren't actually super crazy, by the standards of, say, Charlie Sheen.

There was a lot of the usual boringness earlier on. Busy afternoon, dinner from the fish and chip shop and sitting in my car so my phone could eek out some charge for it's flat batteries from the car charger. A much quieter evening, and then a guy tries to steal some smiley fritz (it's a processed sliced meat with a smiley face on it in a slightly different coloured processed meat - yummy)

I mean really. It was maybe $3 worth. He had it in his pocket, he took his hand out of his pocket, the smiley fritz falls out, he realises and tries to nonchalantly walk away very quickly, except Lauren has noticed and is damn near wetting herself with laughter. I suppose it's difficult to be nonchalant when you've just had your dastardly plan foiled by a spot of gravity.

Still, that's not an unusual occurrence. You work in a supermarket, people try to steal stuff. It happens. Far rarer is a man walking in, one a Wednesday night, in nothing more than one of those borat style mankinis with another, still quite small, pair of undies on underneath. Raised some eyebrows that one did. And then a half dozen of his friends came in, boys and girls, in similar states of undress. Keep in mind that as well as being the middle of the week, it's also averaging about 7°C here in the evenings. We called everybody from around the store to have a look. I've no idea what they were celebrating.

While they were wandering around, another customer handed one of our checkout operators a small bag of weed she'd found down an aisle. Probably less than an ounce, but still.

Normally when someone hands in lost property we try to find any clues as to it's owner and reunite them. And although we were pretty sure we knew who it belonged to, I'm not sure how you go about asking a group of near naked people if the semi-illegal drugs someone's just found belong to them. Or, for that matter how they go about proving it. A wallet, we can match your license photo to you. A phone, we can call home. But a bag of dope, um, well, I'll need a microscope, and some comparative samples. So we waited till they'd left (they bought some chocolate) and called the policeman, who gave me a receipt and said that he would "destroy it"

I'm thinking I might just hide the receipt in amoungst Mum's tax paperwork - she'll find it in a month when she goes to do the GST and be all confused.

After we closed we decided to all go to maccas. So the four of us sat and ate chips and nuggets and bitched and laughed for about an hour, till it was time for them to kick us out.

And after all this, while I was busy thinking I love Wednesdays because of crazy people in mankinis and bags of weed in the supermarket and late night trips to maccas, I forgot that I love Wednesday because White Collar has started again, so I only started downloading it 15 minutes ago.

In crafting news, I have pressed 16 HST units of each print - 112 in total. Tomorrow I shall cut and sew another 16 of each print, but bigger.

This is going to be a very slow pair of quilts.

Confused, but not concerned.

So it would seem that, judging by the competition being run on Red Pepper Quilts, the fabrics that I'm using aren't actually the Australian ones. The green colourway is one of the Joann's ones, so I'm curious as to how I have ended up with it.

I'm glad it was what was at my store though. With the exception of one of the yellows, which I wouldn't have really been able to piece into a quilt all on it's own, I wasn't a huge fan of many of the other colours. Bit serendipitous that. As was my ability to spell serendipitous right first go. I don't think I've ever typed that word before, but maybe I'm just that much more awesome than I even realised.

Work tonight was typically quiet for a Tuesday that was freezing cold (well, about 4°C) and bucketing down with rain, so I got all my math done properly for my design revision. I need 13cm more of each print - thankfully Spotlight cuts in 5cm increments - and enough white to go with it. My big pinwheels will come out to 19cm and my little ones were always going to be 13cm - now they'll have 3cm borders instead of 5cm sashing. I'll have to make 112 more HST units but I should also be able to get away with - for now - only pressing and pinwheeling 112 of the little ones too. And all those other ones I've already cut and sewn - well, I'm going to make the original one anyway, just a bit smaller. 113x131cm is still bigger than many of the quilts I've made so far, so I'm thinking of this as my two for the price of one plan. Well, admittedly I keep going back and getting a little more of this or that, so it will no doubt be two for the price of two, but oh well. One of these days, when I get up the motivation to do more than just maths, it's gunna look awesome.

I get it.

Generally speaking, as soon as a quilt comes out of the washing machine, I am smitten. Even if I wasn't totally keen on it beforehand, the washing machine is like a make-it-good machine.

Those people who never wash their quilts don't know what they're missing. The slight boofy crinklyness that hides all your mistakes. The thing it does to your stitching so you can't tell anymore which thread was top and which was bobbin. The way the fabric becomes just a tiny bit softer - just enough that you immediately want to start wearing your new quilt like a blanketcape.

What's the point of chopping some fabric into little bits and sewing it all back together again? This is.

Um...

It took me almost four hours to pair up the 280 half square triangle units. I am not looking forward to having to press them. Might have to do it over a few nights. *shudder*

What's more, I'm considering changing the design. I really really like the look of the brown one with the smaller and larger pinwheels. I was just going to sash it but that's quite dull. 2.5cm extra in the initial square size still makes it 5cm bigger in the pinwheel - for all that lots is lost to seam allowances in pinwheels, it's a fixed 5cm over the initial double width squares, even though my brain feels like it should be a scaled increase. So all I'd need to do is buy 15cm cuts of each of the prints and the same again in the white and I could replace half the blocks - I'd still finish up the pinwheels I've started - half would go in and the other half I could put on the back. Yes, technically, it would increase the amount of pinwheels I'd need to make by a half, but whatever.

Maybe I'm talking myself into just doing more work. But I figure, I'm going to be putting in a huge amount of work anyway. By a fair way, this quilt has the smallest pieces I've done so far, the most points and the most complicated piecing I've ever done. I don't want to have put in a huge amount of effort and get to the end and think to myself, well, that's a bit boring. I could have made that plenty more interesting. I don't even like sashing. I think it's too traditional for my tastes, and I'd really only chosen it because it meant I wouldn't have to match up the corner points. But it wasn't that hard to do the brown quilt.

I could come to regret it, trying to piece dozens of uncooperative pinwheel corners together, or I could end up regretting not doing it, and putting my most labour intensive quilt yet into a box because I'm not totally keen on it. I'm not sure which just yet.

Course, I may get a quarter of the way through ironing my HSTs, realise I still have over 200 to go, and fake my own death. That is always an option.

Love.

You know how some days you achieve a lot and some days you just write off in the knowledge that you're not going to achieve anything more quilty than popping one over your lap as you bum about on the couch?

Today was somewhere in between. Dad's been chopping down a lot of the trees around the yard in the past few days so my first few hours were spent helping haul branches onto trailers and utes, and since then I have been terribly stop-start-ish. I finished piecing the falling pinwheels quilt, in 15 minute spurts of effort that were about an hour apart.

And I bound the Mingle Star quilt, which is in the wash. I also ate 4 rolls of peppermint chocolate, quarter of a cheesecake, a can of tuna and two frozen apple fruit juice boxes, watched about a dozen episodes of QI, one of Hawaii 5-0 and two of Johnathan Creek, and read a novel. Which means even though I achieved a fair bit in quilting terms, I achieved far more in bumming about wasting time terms, which completely nullifies what I actually got done.

Think of it as a reverse of the "I've saved more money than I've spent" theory we've all used when justifying fabric purchases.

In other news, I would like to formally introduce everyone to the single most divisive rug in the whole of human history.

Is it the most awesome thing ever to be bought for $6.95? Or a hideous monstrosity? Does it look like brussel sprouts? Or broccoli? Or sea urchins? Do I love it more, or does Maddy?

Because Kelsey was the one who actually processed the sale of it from the local Lincraft store, I had decided that she couldn't get the ten points. But calling it a shag - well, that's genius, even if it is technically a mat and not carpeting. Ten points to Kelsey. Although I still don't know what I'm going to do with it - there's no bits of floor in need of a very unusual mat and I don't have the wall space to hang it, which is a shame. Even so: Love.

Brilliant

Well, it's still in bits but I've made progress to the point where it looks like a pinwheel quilt.

It was still at blocks at that point and I haven't made a huge amount of progress from there, as it turns out that it's really quite difficult to quilt and watch some truly excellent late 90s murder mysteries. You keep getting distracted looking for the clues, even when you've seen it before.

Nonetheless, if you're not quilting, I highly recommend a show called Jonathan Creek. Go for the earlier seasons though, they're a lot more fun - well, as fun as people dying interesting and unusual deaths can be.

Anyway, the quilt should end up at about 135cm square. And for the first time in ages I pressed a seam to the side - I've always been a seam splitter, I just think it looks so much nicer, but on the corners of the blocks with the borders it made a nasty bump where it folded over and over on itself, so there's two seams on each of the bordered blocks that are pressed differently. I just have to keep telling myself over and over that literally thousands of quilts are made every year with the seams pressed to one side, and they don't spontaneously fall apart, or acquire unsightly lumpen bits.

Speaking of lumpen bits, 10 points to whoever guesses what this is:

Whatever it is, it's bloody fantastic.

It's late.

I have ummed and ahhed about this for about 16 hours now - to the point where it is no longer Friday, and causing reference to the post a did a few weeks back about my love of procrastination. Hell, I could have even turned it into a post about my love of indecision (or could I?)

But, I have decided not to. It's not even going to be a post about QI, which is going to be tough since it's also been in my head for the last 7 hours or so, excluding times I went to the loo.

Nope, It'll be about sewing in the middle of the night, in a pretty much empty house. I don't know why I struggle so much with sewing in the presence of others, but it really makes it difficult. Much better to sew while everyone's abed, off at the pub, or on a boat somewhere.

I once said that having sex was like doing the dishes - that it was much more difficult to do if there was someone watching*. Maybe it's like a sliding scale, with dishes grudgingly doable in the presence of others, quilting only doable in the presence of others if they're not only not in your way but also not interested in you, and members of the opposite sex really only doable if there's either no-one around, or you're really, really drunk.

Anyway, tonight's sewing was the first I've done in nearly a fortnight. Half square triangles too, because I'm a freaking idiot and decided that the way I really wanted to get back into it was with some bloody pinwheels. And not just one pinwheel quilt, oh no, I need to prove I am much, much more hardcore than that, so I'm doing two pinwheel quilts at once. Different designs, measurements, fabrics and even thread colours. The second of the two, which I have so far only cut, has 240 half square triangle units, although admittedly, only 224 of these will be used - I sold out and bought six fabrics from the Denise Schmidt ones at Spotlight today. I only went in to see if they had a dark brown that could go with the Michael Miller Falling Leaves that I now have more of**.

20cm cuts don't get you that many good selvedges

Initial square sizes were 20cm and 17cm

Much preferred to the size of these - just 10cm

I must say, I really like the primo homespun they have at Spotlight now. It's so much better quality, there's almost twice as many colours at the local store and best of all, I go look at the colours in the store, and I get them home, and they're the same colour! For all that I love internet shopping, and yes, at $6.95 a metre it's technically more expensive than kona from fabricshack even with the postage, the fact that I can just see the colours, and buy the fabric, and take it home right then and there, that's good. And if sometimes I accidentally buy some fabric that I can't help but think to myself will spontaneously turn me into a sheep, well, that's a small price to pay.

Actually, for the 6 cuts of prints, 2.4 of white to go with them and the 1.5 of brown (which now that I've gotten home and refined the math for is about 30cm underestimated) the actual price to be paid was about $41. And that's forty one strong, robust Aussie dollars there too.




And now, I've spent almost 45 minutes without the reassuring, dulcet tones of Stephen Fry in my ears. I must be getting back to that.

*I really cannot explain why, but I really don't like doing dishes in the presence of other people - possibly I worry that a) they will think less of me or more likely b) they will now know that I can indeed do it, and expect me to do it again.
**Speaking of, if anyone wants a $5 coupon for fabric.com that needs to be used by the end of the month, message me - I really don't think I need it.

Just thinking... Or maybe going crazy...

I really like thinking about stuff. All sorts of stuff. Weird stuff. Some stuff I think about for a long time, some stuff I go at for a few seconds and then move on.

Working at Woolies is surprisingly conductive to thinking about stuff. Not so much during the day when it's busy, but after 8pm or so, especially on the smokes counter, there's plenty of time for pondering pointless things.

I also really like recursing. Tonight, at Woolies, I did some thinking, about Woolies.

Now, for reference, Woolworths is an Australian supermarket chain. There's lots and lots of them across Australia. There's thousands of staff across the country. There's friendship groups and in-jokes and rivalries between departments. Pretty much everything I can think about it, you can think about wherever it is that you work.

Today I joined a facebook group. One of those "Taking off your (thing) after a hard day of (thing)" - in this case, taking of your woolies uniform after a hard day of being fresh*. It's a really interesting page to read. It's mainly employees quoting their store number and whinging about either the Margaret Fulton** promotional tee shirts we're wearing or the Chips Ahoy*** adverts that play on the instore radio every 10 minutes. But it changed my earlier thinking, which was much more focused on our local store being a self contained living organism, to a notion that maybe working at Woolies is like being in some strange religion, maybe even a cult. What the hell, we wear silly shirts, threaten to kill ourselves when anyone starts singing "don't you want me baby" (the song in the Chips Ahoy adverts), hook up with one another and go out partying together on the weekends.

Yeah. Pretty cult-like.

Or, I don't know, maybe I've gone a bit crazy because I haven't sewn anything in over a week.

*Woolies slogan is "the fresh food people"
**Grandma-esque celebrity chef
***New brand of chocolate chip cookies/biscuits

P.S. I think posts like this need a label like 'really random shit' to differentiate from the normal, everyday 'random shit'  -actually, no, I'm going to go with 'seriously random shit'

Mornings.

I am sooo not a morning person. I wish I was, because I do like dawn, and I think it can be a magical time of day, when noone's awake and there's interesting light and time moves a bit weirdly. But really, I'm only ever up at that time of the morning when something interesting is going on, like I'm going on holiday, and it's much more likely and also much worse that I should have to be up at a mundane hour of the morning like 8 or 9am.

This happened today. My hatred of mornings is well known by my colleagues, and because of it I'm never rostered before lunchtime, but we've agreed that if they've called everyone else, and I'm their last option, I will say yes. And there's a bit of a bug going around Woolies at the moment, and I got called. They were kind enough to call at 8, and since I was meant to be working my usual shift of 2.30 till 10.30, I tried to haggle an 11am start, since that would mean that whichever schoolkid worked till close could do 7 till 10.30 and then they wouldn't need a teabreak* but it's hard to haggle at 8am when you're still pretty much asleep, which is why I had to start at 10.

It was horrible. Really really horrible. I'm very happy with my bodyclock, for all that everybody else thinks it's whacked, and I really don't know how everybody else does it. My parent's have been informed that if anybody calls for me tomorrow morning, I'm dead, and will continue to be dead until 2.30, when I'll be at work. That should suffice. Any more than one morning a week would probably kill me.

*Which may seem mean, but it's very annoying to have to give someone a teabreak at 8.30 when there's only one other checkout chick, so they try to roster 3.5 hour shifts at night.

Pfft...

I'm afraid I shall have to give up quilting for a bit. I'm far too busy watching my way through 8 seasons of QI to do anything else right now.

How terrible is that? I have new fabric. The binding for the Mingle Star quilt is here. I have found a dark green that will slot nicely into the quilt I've made no more progress on whatsoever. I've got a pretty rainbow pinwheel all drawn up.

Buuut...

I can't say no to the prospect of Stephen Fry telling me interesting things. It's much easier to say no to quilting, and sit bemused in front of my laptop.

I feel a bit bad that everyone else is having proper quilting crises, while I'm sitting here with a milo and learning that friendship is like wetting my pants - everyone can see it, but only I can feel it's warmth. You can't quilt and learn stuff like that at the same time, so I'm not even gunna try. And I'm not gunna feel guilty about it either, because I'm five deep in quilts on my bed right now, and that's plenty in spite of the -2° temperatures we've been having down here lately.

Don't worry, I'm sure my ability to talk crap will in no way be diminished. If anything, watching two or three hours of people talking crap each night before I go to bed should leave me in peak talking-crap condition.

It's like exercise, but you can do it in bed. While eating chocolate cake.