Shoes

Tonight in the car on the way home I decided that what I really needed to do was sew myself some shoes. Most of the free tutorials were baby shoes and those that weren't were, for the most part, just scaled up versions, and I want something that looks less like an overcomplicated sock and more like a shoe. I really dislike most of the flats you can buy at the moment, simply because they don't cover your toes, and that makes me really cross. So I had a look on etsy for some patterns - no doubt I'll change them anyway but it seamed easier to pay the six bucks than waste time measuring my shoes. 

I have gone with:

http://www.etsy.com/listing/71430645/everyday-loafers-sewing-pattern-computer

and 

http://www.etsy.com/listing/83272991/no-217-olivia-women-shoes-pdf-pattern

And hopefully tomorrow when I wake up (first day of holidays: squee!) they'll be in my inbox waiting for me to have a go.

Also while I was looking on ebay I found this pattern:

Which I don't need to buy since it's blindingly obvious. But what's also obvious (to me, anyway) is how awesome that would look if you gave it a green zip and surround and pink sides. Watermelon pouch!

I may need to buy some black sequins for seeds.

P.S. the potato and gravy offensive seems to have succeded so far in staving off the sore throat. What's more, today sucked in a Thursday way (ie, late night shopping really busy running behind staff are hating on one another war is imminent kinda way) as opposed to a Tuesday way.

Have any of you seen the latest episode of Castle? I was wondering if it was possible for 42minutes of televison to erase the pain of the week of Tuesdays. Actually, I was thinking that maybe the new episode of White Collar could do it, since Sara's back, and you gotta love a character that shares your name. But the 40's noir flashbacks, narrations and funny accents, coupled with my ability to work out what was about to happen (on average, just early enough to say out loud, to myself, "oh, oh...") made for an episode I was very nearly about to wake siblings up to watch at 2am.

And a quick catch up on the progress of the week of tuesdays: Dad made me help him rake up tree-bark and leaves and my throat's doing that horrible "pre-sick" thing, two days before I go on annual leave.

Day 3 of the Week of Tuesdays.

Last week was blue week. We wore blue at work and generally had a good time. When you work in retail, casual days are the best, because you get to be a ninja. Customers think you're just like them when you're not behind a register, and when you are behind a register (especially if you're one of the few and/or the only one in casual) they feel bad for you, assuming for whatever reason that it's so desperate in store that they're forcing employees to come in in casual and help out. It's lol-worthy. Last week was lol-worthy.

This week, not so much. I've been refering to it as "the week of Tuesdays" after the fact that bad things always seem to happen in our house on a Tuesday.

On sunday I was hungover and I lost a battle (but not the war!) against microsoft copyright protection and my wallet broke. Unrelated incidents.

On Monday I spent 2 hours going around the mount trying to find a replacement wallet. I pretty much failed, eventually buying an iphone hardcase because I like hard shell cases. It'll suffice for now, since I'm not much of a cash carrier - I really only needed it for cards and bum change. Then I went to Red Rooster and got denied my request for 8 nuggets (apparently now they can only sell me six) before going to work to find that Meagan has neo-natal classes now on mondays, so she's switched nights. I got Maccas on the way home, and they put mayo on my wrap. I hate mayo. Also, I couldn't use my kitchen or my bathroom, since handymen were coming in the morning.

Morning. Tuesday morning. The actual Tuesday in the week of Tuesdays. There were guys coming to install a new oven and get rid of the old bathroom vanity and replace it but through my sleepytimes and my closed door, it sounded like they were removing it with a hammer. And maybe light explosives. Loudly. During what is, for me, the middle of the night. I was a half hour late for work (actually, this Tuesday 4 weeks ago I was late too. I have 4 week rolling roster and my brain has obviously remebered it wrong) and we were a tad understaffed. When I went to the post office, instead of a funky new phone case or a bag of fabrics, there was a speeding fine. From Victoria. 106kph on the highway. There should be an exception for South Australians. I was under MY speed limit (110), isn't that more important?

Tonight, in spite of the fact that it is the week of tuesdays, I had a go at quilting the sunset quilt. I bought a spool of varigated pink a week or so ago so I filled the bobbin with hot pink thread for the back and threaded this expensive stuff through the machine.

Guterman Sulky Cotton 12 doesn't work well as a top stitch thread... Actually, it goes okay so long as you don't stop. If I could quilt the entire thing edge to edge in one smooth movement I'd be okay, but I can't, so I'm not.

On the bright side, It's very easy to unpick.

I like zips.

Size 7 (standard chunky) zipper from Spotlight is available in black, white, navy and cream for (I think) $1.99p/m.

If you buy a zip around pencil case from Neds it costs you $4 and you have to do a bit of unpicking (but they use a very long stitch length, so it's very quick) but you get 2.5metres AND it's in pretty colours.

From this:

To this:

You only get 2 zipper pulls per pencil case, but they have rainbow ones with lots of short zips for $3 and you get about a dozen pulls from each of them.

Be not afraid of the zips, people. They can be your friends. 

Except the ones with the metal teeth. They chip your fingernails.

Even blogging is too much.

After 4 not-particularly-fun hours, I'm sick of computers.

...

22 years ago, Bon Jovi sung that he "...don't know where I'm going, only god knows where I've been...."

These days, it's not just god, but anyone who can follow your places tagging on facebook.

As for me, it went: Work, Home, The G, The Commersh, The South Aussie, The G, Shads, The G, Shads, Maccas and Home.

Weird fact: when I'm drunk, I can't feel my nose.

I need a supersoaker.

Tonight I had a look through an old harddrive, and if I'm honest, what I found ranged from amusing to horrifying, and that was just in the photos. 

Me, Casey, Glenn and Lisa, 16th Nov, 2005, Vansitart Park Playgrounds. Blowing off school with my sister, my bestie and his girlfriend.

I haven't even looked through the documents yet, though fortunately back in high school I password protected quite a lot of files, and I can't remember any of the passwords 7 years on, so that at least ought to protect me from reading the musings of 17-year-old me.

Me, 16th Nov, Vansitart Park playgrounds. After mucking about for a bit, we got fish and chips for lunch, then walked to coles and bought a bulk pack of icypoles. We couldn't eat them all, so we gave the rest to random kids.

Still, it's left me feeling a bit bummed and nostalgic and, frankly, irritatingly existential.

Out the front of the 2nd driveway of our house, 19th Nov, 2005. This was the week my camera arrived in the mail - A no-brand 8MP I bought on ebay for about $80, when to by a 4MP locallly was a massive, and expensive, deal. It took beautiful photos in sunlight, but was a piece of crap indoors or at night.

I'll be honest, I don't really know what I'm doing with my life - I live in an eternal now that I am, for the most part, pretty okay with.

Sunset from the back shed, 1st Feb, 2006. Possibly the only bad thing about working evenings is that I no longer get to take a million photos of every single sunset.

Did I think I would have done more with my life by this point? Well, frankly, I'm not sure. I have a really shit memory of everything except song lyrics and credit card details, but then I'm often unconvinced that reality even exists, and go through life in a bemused state of wonderment that life seems to be pressing on without me really doing much to facilitate it except eating and pooing.

Ignore the date shown - Mum never set the date on her camera but I know it was 22nd Jan 2006, because it was my 18th birthday.

Do I now, at 24, have a pressing urge to get out there and do something?

The Blue Lake, 14th Nov 2007. I was trying to be "artsy" with my framing.

Well, not really. Even though, in the words of Five for Fighting, I've "only got a hundred years to live..."

Me, Sports Day, 13th Feb, 2006. Big Red, the bear I am laying on, was the mascot I made us - He was essentially a massive bean bag. We would throw epic parties on sports days, bring in heaps of food and drink and have a wow of a time - we once got told off for having "too much fun" - apparently we were not respecting the importance of the day.

Life is going to continue whether I know what to do with it or not.

Inside the Cave Gardens, 15th Nov, 2005. The actual day the camera arrived in the mail, and the 14th picture taken. Since then I've had two other digital cameras that I've used a lot, before moving to mainly using my phone now, but I don't think any of them have taken as nice a photos as this one did.

In the meantime, I'm just going to get on with living it as it comes.

Me, 28th August, 2006. Judging from outside the window, I think it must have been taken at Potters Point. Judging by the date, the car was Elsie (LC), the little corolla.

Missing this little guy.

Ralf, 20th Nov 2005. I still have this picture in my wallet.

And wondering what happened to this little guy...

I made him as a present for my then-boyfriend, and we always joked that if we ever broke up we would sell him on ebay (similar ones have sold for over $500) and split the profits, but I haven't seen any money, and I really don't think he deserves to keep him. I just hope he didn't get incinerated.

Indecicively definite.

It's very rare for me to have a go at a non-repeating quilt design, but that's what I did tonight.

First I did some scribbling on paper. This is rare for me, but it's back-to-school season, so I had some graph paper.

Then I put it into the computer for the colours. I had EQ on my old laptop but I never used it. I'm a bit unused to old-style MS Paint (mainly the fact that you have to go through menus to zoom) but it's still nice and uncomplicated.

Shift colours and diagonal lines on little squares for about 3 hours.

Write colours on little diagram.

Finally, work out maths. This is, as always, the easiest part. After 3 hours of colour indecision, it was so nice to get into the bit that had definite right answers.

You know what else is definatelly right? Day off tomorrow! Yay!

First, I wasted 3 hours on etsy...

Due to sudden-onset-extreme-anxiety over the previous bundle not being gender-neutral-y enough, tonight I went back to fabric shack and ordered another 9 yards of solids - 4 1/2 yards of bright oranges, blues and greens as an alternative, 4 yards of very (really very) dark colours* for a quilt for me and a couple of quarter yards to add to the not quite gender-neutral-y enough bundle, because just because I'm worried that those dusky purples and reddish-browns are too girly, doesn't mean I'm not a girl, and would just maybe like the quilt for me. And that isn't the reason I'm doing this - If it was I'd instead be buying all the same fabrics as last time and making me and Meagan's baby have matchies. We'd be toats cute.

I'd suggest someone needs to take my credit card off me, but I didn't even have to get it out tonight - I know my numbers off by heart...


*angst = emo, emo = dark colours. Stop judging me. If I ever actually get around to making it it will be gorgeous, trust me.

Maths. So much maths.

If it's hard knowing at what point a scrap is big enough to keep, it's even harder working out at what size a scrap is worth going to extra effort to make.

The quilt that I'm currently mathing out is for Meagan's unborn baby. Today I went to Spotlight and added 3 more solids to the pile, making a total of 15. Two blocks of each colour makes 30 blocks (a number I like because it's 5x6)

More to the point though, each of these blocks will generate a scrap piece measuring 3x7cm, but, if I cut the two blocks of each fabric at once, I can make a combined scrap of 6x7cm, and that seems like a useable size. But is it useable enough to have to warrant measuring out a 64cm long piece of fabric, and then cutting it into strips, when I only have a 57cm long cutting board and a 60cm ruler? At what price effort?

Well, actually at this price effort:

91x110 (aproximate number of square cm of fabric in a yard) = 10,010

6 (dollars, rough price of a yard of fabric) ÷ 10,010 = 0.0006 (dollars per square cm)

0.0006x6x7=0.0252 (price per scrap, each will be 6x7cm)

0.0252x15 (number of scraps) =0.378

Less than 40 cents? That's the value of the fabric I'm saving by going to all that extra cutting effort? I was wrong. That decision isn't hard at all. 

Want to have a go at working out the value of some of your scraps? I've forgotten how to use visual basic (sad face) but instacalc works fine too. Just change the numbers in rows 1, 3 and 4, and remember that number 3 needs to be in centimetres.