Pathetic whinging post.

I have a cold.

I woke up feeling okay, even managed to get in a half hour of actual sewing before it hit. Since then I've had tissues shoved up my nose whenever I'm alone and I've been shooting back Demazin like it's $4 shots night at the pub (including saying "nostrovia" or sometimes "za vas" as I do it)

Worst of all, it's my full weekend on, and, short of throwing up all over a customer, I don't have much chance of getting to go home sick tomorrow. Like Sundays aren't bad enough when you're feeling good.

Maddy was home from school yesterday (with "sniffles") so I assume I've gotten it from her. Only good thing is I made a doctor's appointment for Tuesday for something unrelated so if I'm still feeling crap I'll see if I can at least get a few weekdays off work. I don't even remember the last time I had a sick day, but then, I also don't remember the last time I felt this sick.

I can only hope all the cough meds make me fall asleep instead of lying about feeling sorry for myself for the next 4 hours.

Favourite things (in bold)

Friday! It's a pretty good day, what with how I usually don't have to work and all, and today it was my last day off till next Saturday, and since I'm driving to Adelaide then, and back the next day, I'm not sure that it counts, so it kinda felt like today was going to be my last day off in forever.

But I got to go see this guy again.

And if I had to pick one actual favourite, it would probably be him. But I don't want my pseudo-nephew to grow up in a world where he can only have one favourite thing, so let's have more.

In honour of our hostess with the mostest, I'm going to go with some very mundane things;

The scroll button on my mouse. It is the unsung hero of all the input keys. While everyone's all rightclick/leftclick/spacebar/enter I'm just leisurely scrolling up and down. Using a mouse without one is horrible, and I feel that laptops would be greatly improved if they had one as well.

Those pop-up lids on drink bottles. You can open the drink with only one hand. And your mouth, obviously. But rarely am I laying on my other mouth. And they're less likely to spill all down the side of your face.

Little watchband adjuster tools. So much easier than trying to shove a pin into the little holes with a pair of pliers.

Chocolate Croissants. Croissants, with chocolate bits on top, and chocolate ganache inside. $2.40 from the bakery section at woolies.

Don's Salami. I don't know why it's so much better than Han's, but it is.

Getting your waxing done by a friend instead of a professional stranger, because the converstion is much better.

Having really long showers on days when it rains, because that's the whole point of having a rainwater tank.

CD burners. Remember when, to make a mix tape, you had to do it in real time? I do, but thankfully only barely.

Finding a fabric at lincraft that you've been looking fo the likes of on ebay for months.

Paying half price for it.

Babies, Trucks, Crappy Poetry and Head-Devouring-Moss.

Meagan had her baby (around 4.30pm, Thomas James, 8 pounds 1, 51.5cm) and cause he's a boy, I'm getting started on my "if it's a boy" quilt - based on this pattern called On The Road Again, since her fiancee is a truck driver. It needs a fair few changes though - the bonnet is too long (trucks have shorter heads here - many have no bonnets at all) and the gap between the truck and the trailer is too big and in Australia semi-trailers need to have at least 3 axles, so there's not enough wheels for it to be road legal.

And that led to this:

Scanned copies, so I can draw all over them.

Which led to this:

Trucks are big,

Quiltmath is hard,

If you expect a rhyme,

You'll be disappointed.

Having done the basic math, if not the cutting layout, I spent the rest of the night sitting in front of the fire crocheting. I even finished a beanie.

Unintentional crimes of fashion. Whatcha gunna do?

It looks horrible - like a killer moss is eating my head. Still, it helped me get a good idea of how much decreasing to do to get a nice curve, and since the next one I've started is using a fluro-pink and white 8-ply, I have somewhat higher hopes. I mean, you've gotta love a fluro and white combo.

Brrrrr.

It's so cold here tonight. Bordering on too-cold-to-function. My phone says it's 4 degrees out, and I know that there's plenty of places about that get way below that, but I'm used to the mount's 8-15° winter temps. 4° is the temperature my fridge is set to.

So this is, yet again, another night of me not doing anything. I am too cold to function, so I'm gunna try for an early night, and put my phone on loud, just in case I get a call. Because any minute now, my best friend Meagan could be squeezing out a baby.

She's already 12 days overdue, so they induced her tonight, but since the baby hadn't been in any real hurry before this, I figure it could be a while.

More pictures in place of actual crafting...

Another day, another night spent not really feeling like crafting. It may be the crotchet's fault, since I can do that while watching youtube and BBC news guilt free. You can't tell for looking at it, but I'm totally making something there...


Fortunately, earlier today I decided to get out and take a few more photos out at the woodshed. For some reason my camera was absolutely refusing to flash, so the ones in the actual shed all came out dark at the top. So I shifted out to the big bits of wood outside.

And discovered the fundamental flaw in making quilts that feature a lot of white. Curiously, the really white side (above - remember, this is all the one quilt) was fairly clean, which meant I could spread it out nicely...

..but this shot isn't so much "trying to be artistic" as it is "positioning it so the two big stains don't show."

I've re-washed it, so it's good again for now, and I chucked the green quiltlet in with it, to see how the poly batting washed up. Honestly? You can hardly tell the difference between washed and unwashed. It looks fine, but I like the way a cotton quilt suddenly becomes super massively crinkly when you take it out of the dryer.

Because I haven't done anything exciting tonight, either.

The Blue and Grey HST quilt, bound and washed, chilling out in our incredibly photogenic woodshed. I'm thinking I might photograph all the quilts I still have out here over the next few weeks.

Detail section of the back of the math quiltlet - I sewed the first night's work with white cotton, because the only black thread I had was poly and I didn't want to risk it melting, knowing how much ironing I had to do on it.

What I've been doing tonight: crocheting in my unique, cackhanded way. Clarification: I'm not a lefty, instead, I'm SOOO righty that I can't even have the thread wrapped around the fingers of my left hand, because it all gets tangled and stuck. I'm going to try make myself a beanie, when I get to the point of decreasing, I'll just skip a stitch occasionally.

A sign from the universe...

Today, I did nothing very much, and tonight, my internet is chucking a hissy fit and won't let me post. It's like it was meant to (not) be, or something...

I've had a fairly big day:

I bought some fabric.

Half price, and then another $40 off of a $100 spend meant this $200 pile cost me $60

I bound a quilt.

I realised last night that it's easier to try out tricky stuff If you use boring stuff as a run up. I'd already made the binding, so it just needed attaching.

And I finished piecing the math quilt.

I quilted it too, but it didn't photograph well.

I also did some other shopping, ate quite a lot of food, had some spontaneous visitors, took about 1000 photos (I'm gunna write up properly how I do my binding) and, as I said above, I've quilted the math quiltlet - just boring, evenly spaced vertical lines. I've cut the remaining rainbow fabric into strips to bind it, and a bit of fabric to make a hanging tube.

I'm pretty happy with my efforts.

Bravery

Do other people write their blog posts in their heads while they're doing the sewing, only to get to the computer an hour or so later and find that it's all gone?

I had some brilliant thing going about throwing off the shackles of fear, and I was going to lead us all into a mighty revolution of zip setting, curved piecing and working with stretch fabrics. It was going to be a brave new world, but maybe some other day.

It came from an honest place though - tonight, I was brave. But first I finished the top of the Every Which Way quilt.

I ended up getting a slightly bigger bit of batting anyway, since I like to pull my tops pretty taught over the batting.

And once that was done, I decided to get into something I've been thinking about doing for a while, but have been too scared to have a go at.

It's not paper pieced. For that, you press to the sides, and I like my seams split. So I drew all my shapes on some paper, cut them out, traced them onto another piece of paper with .75cm seam allowances and then sewed them together freehand. There's currently 42 pieces there, and it still needs the brackets and the radical sign (The √ square root symbol) and the borders and such.


In case you were wondering, it's going to be the equation you use to work out how big your squares are if all you know is c - the length of the long side of your half square triangle.



I can highly recommend being brave though. After all, it's only fabric, and you might do a really good job with it.

Favourite Things Everywhere

A couple of nights ago I paired together a four-patch block with a quarter-square-triangle block (is that its actual name?) and quite liked the results. And today before work I picked 4 colours on my Kona Card (Pear, Mango, Peacock and Taupe) and did some very basic preliminary maths, figuring that I could get a baby quilt from 50cm of each and a decent lap quilt from 75cm of each. And then, because it was Thursday late night shopping, I went to Spotlight in my meal break. And they had 50% off all their quilting fabric (till Sunday, apparently).

I'm putting favourite things in bold. It's 5am Friday now, and that seems Friday enough for me.

I only got 50cm each of the solids I picked, and the green is the only one that comes close to it's Kona counterpart. The orange is more melon-y, the blue more aqua-y and the grey - well, taupe is a light brown.

Back at work tonight, and I got some huge angst going on over my quilt math. How do you calculate how much bigger you need to make a square if you're going to make it into quarter square triangles and sew them back together? Is it two lots of your diagonal seam width (because if you did a half square triangle, and then did it again in the opposite direction, wouldn't it get the same amount smaller both times?) or is it only one (because each seam is measured one way, just like they are with the regular four patch?)

Turns out it's only once (yay knowledge!) but I only found that out by actually doing it, and having all my blocks be 1.8cm too big. But I took a pretty picture of my trimmings with Instagram.

Doesn't it look like delicious, rainbow linguine?

Because I got held up trimming, (and also with reliving the music of 1999 on youtube) I didn't get all my blocks sewn together, which is why in this photo, none of the points appear to match up. My batting should fit exactly to the top once it's all joined together, but at the moment, it needs 6cm of overlapping.

I'm calling it Every Which Way because even though they're not technically arrows, they kinda look like them. And once I see one of them as an arrow, I start seeing them all as arrows, pointing in every direction. I just don't know what good stuff they're telling me to pay attention to next.

Based upon the position of this on the floor in the lounge, the green is pointing to the kitchen, where today I ate some delicious chicken rice, the grey is pointing to the couch, where tonight after work I had garlic bread and watched the season final of New Girl, and the blue points to my bedroom, where I'm currently sitting on my bed eating some cadbury fingers.

Maddy (little sister) claims the white ones "changed her life" which is probably a bit superlative, but I will admit, they make my tongue very happy.

And there's a slew of things to keep the rest of me happy while my tongue's occupied, from books on my phone to clicky pens to nail clippers to funny, funny tumblrs.