doodleblog.kaliane.com

okay, I’ve done it again with the deadline thing, so I’ve been trying not to panic about getting these two finished in time for the Sydney show. SIGH. Oh well. Firestorm is blocked and behaving (phew), and I’ve made its fugly velcro strap thingies ready to attach. Made Sentinel’s ugly strap thingies too, so I just have to finish it. Since it’s 4.33 am and I have to be up early enough to get el to preschool, I’ll leave you with an in-progress detail. Let’s all pretend we can’t see dangly threads and stuff, eh? :)

you know what I hate? I hate when your machine throws a whammy without telling you, so an hour or more’s worth of fussy quilting has to be unpicked because the back is a dog’s breakfast. Regurgitated even. And your unpicker has wandered off, naturally. And the fabric – which hey, I got cheap, but I thought Moda was pretty good quality – is the sort that despite being fairly coarse shows every needle hole and is inclined to pull threads if you’re not exceptionally careful. Blargh, give me poplin or sateen or somesuch every time.

Anyway. Lines & rocks in the dirt, and some invisible leaves in the border.

If you had an Atari 2600, you just have to go check these out.

Have not finished the fig tree yet. Spent Sunday evening & half of yesterday printing invitation letters & envelopes (never done a mail merge before, that was kind of fun, except for the bits where Word just can’t help sucking purely to keep you on your toes) & flyers & whateverthehellelse. Oh, a list of clubs, so hopefully people can confirm or make changes to their club details at the zone get-together today. I don’t understand why there isn’t a better register of clubs & groups, but I haven’t figured out how to go about it myself so I guess I should shut up. Well, not in the real world, anyway – in MY perfect world, at least one person in every club would have access to & basic understanding of email & the web & be willing to update a central db for her club. Real-world ideally, the NSW guild would have the comprehensive list, but lots of the little groups don’t join, and the guild seems a bit reluctant to share the list it does have. Hell, I suspect our club is no longer a member of the guild, and we are not a small group – “we” just have some peculiar ideas about what’s “worth it” and what’s not.

I was supposed to be going to the zone get-together, but I had one of those stupid canNOT sleep nights and I’m completely ruined – I could maybe get there ok, but I’d need a good nap before I had to drive back, and no. I’m kind of paying for stamping my foot to get E’s attention last night, too; ankle is very sore & tight, stupid bloody tendon. Guess I’ll take E to daycare as planned and either sleep or do some housework instead.

I stewed about it all night and went down to Connie’s today to see if she had anything suitable, and found something nearly perfect at only $11 pm (wonder of wonders – I definitely have champagne tastes lol; everything else I pulled off the shelves was at least $22pm). It’s Moda, Serendipity Circles by Sandy Gervais, and the colour scheme is almost perfect. I like that the combination of colour + dots kind of hints at Aboriginal dot painting without actually meaning anything that isn’t my subject.

The Swirls “Mocha Almond Fudge” I used in the bobbin is a perfect match for it – I obviously need to get the cone back from mum, because that bobbin is now empty & I’m really happy with how it’s disappearing into the pattern. Great thread btw; looks like cotton, but finer & without all the lint etc, the colours are beaut, & it works just as well in the bobbin as on top. Nowhere near the fineness of Bottom Line, obviously, but definitely less noticable than Signature (which I also love, but not for this purpose). I’m planning to use BL for the background so as not to detract from the holy fabric, but I may stick with the Swirls in the bobbin.

Oh yeah, and I keep forgetting to say: I think it was Tanya asked yonks ago how I liked the sidewinder: I do. It’s handy. It overfills for the Janome, but I just flick the sensor open to stop it before it goes too far – if I’d been designing it I’d have made the little green button a toggle so you could easily stop it at any level, but it’s not that hard to flick the little arm out of the way. It definitely tempts you to go and buy many many bobbins and fill one for every thread colour …

so I got the fig all sorted & ready to quilt* and when I dragged out the piece I’d intended to use as backing, it wasn’t big enough. It’s not special enough to warrant fartarsin about with to extend (it’s a piece i decided either had to be backing or needed overdyeing), and I’m a bit unsure re using bodgy stuff on the back anyway. I know the back of a wallhanging is rarely seen, but I have some sort of undefined concept about integrity as well as a sneaking suspicion that using ugly on the back = not thinking your work is “worthy” of anything better. Or at least that it might give that impression to others. I like things to have good bones and a good foundation as well as a pretty facade.

ANYWAY. So I dug out this really lovely bit of fabric I keep digging out and not using because it’s sashing.** Not quite enough to join up & use alone. Hrm. Dug out some yellow which also turned out to be sashing, split it into 3 random-width strips & the multicolour into 4 random-width strips, heaped them in a pile next to the machine and sewed them all together as they came to hand. Seeing if I could do the random thing, like, because not controlling the placement of everything is just alien to me (there’s a reason I have never and probably will never do a genuine scrap quilt heh). Anywho, so I did it, and I really like the way it looks. Having got it basted to the back of the quilt, in fact, I suspect I like it TOO MUCH to stick on the back of any quilt, even one I’m planning to be very happy with. I am seriously considering pulling it off & quilting it up as is. I’m boggling at myself even considering it, mind, because not my style of work at all (although it may just be exactly the excuse to do the quilted “drawing” I keep thinking about), but that’s what I’m thinking.

Which leaves me with either using the green backing I dyed for it (I think not; the same fabric in yellow on the back of FITH is an absolute bitch to quilt for some reason, just does not want to slide) or cobbling something else together (argh – I already wasted at least an hour auditioning stuff for what turned out to be the too-nice-for-a-backing bit today!) or going and buying something (SIGH) or dyeing something (no time, & come to think of it I think we’re out of PFD heh) or using the really nice black I was trying not to be boring by defaulting to lol. I kinda wanted to use something with a bit of pattern. Bah. I’m irritated with myself too, because instead of making these decisions earlier & getting anything useful done this arvo, I wiped myself out with a handful of El’s Smarties & spent most of this evening semi-comatose on the couch. Note to self: seriously, stop doing that shit, eat some protein, and go get a glucose challenge done.

* well, except that I need to unpick half the lefthand border & adjust some fullness in one section of the background before reattaching it.

** we used to cut fabric into ~38cm wide strips 2-4m long & dye up & sell for use in sashing & borders, so people didn’t have to join strips – also, width of the fabric is stretchier than length, which is often not a good thing for borders & sashing. Sold really well for ages and then not so much, so we stopped bothering

the new ground for the fig tree looks so very much better it’s no wonder I’ve just been looking at this piece off & on for 6 months instead of finishing it. Srsly. Changing the forward thrust of the foremost root helps too. I’m also really glad I didn’t have enough of the coppery brown, and that I branched out with the brown “opal” multicolour rather than using straight browns, because it really adds something (I love it when I’m right! heh). I can see a couple of spots where I need to add a bit more, but it’s pretty much ready for me to go back to stitching. I had a brainstorm about the quilting, too, so I’m kind of chomping at the bit. I may actually get this sucker finished on deadline after all!

busy fiddling around to change the base of the grandaddy tree (I thought I found a bunch more of the “ground” fabric I’d used, but no. Doing some cobbling & cutting & layering & fusing of various “almosts” to compensate).

Thought I’d share this incredibly nifty gadget, which my brother & SIL gave me as a birthday present. It’s the Smartcafe Hot Cafetiere Mug, and it rocks. It’s a personal coffee plunger (aka French press) – spoon your grounds in the bottom, add hot water, wait a couple minutes, insert the plunger & push down with your thumb, add milk/sugar/whatever & drink. Decent sized cup, even, and insulated, so it’s kind of edging out my old faithful bucket.

In other news, I seem to have a mouse. Sodding useless cats. Not that the ratsak (actually Mortein, I believe) is doing any better so far.

so, I made the changes I decided the big fig tree needed, and lay it out on the floor to decide between two options for the bottom, and … I still don’t like it. It’s wrong wrong wrong. So. I think I know what I need to do, but … that means I need to unpick AGAIN!!! Have I mentioned how much I hate unpicking? Well I do. Stupid unpicking. Stupid life, where’s my undo button, huh? Cos that would let me undo the trimming back of the side borders, too, which are now going to need lengthening in order to make the other additions & changes I’ve decided on instead.

This is the sort of thing that people who plan works don’t have to deal with, at least not so much. I just can’t do that kind of planning; the more I plan and work out ahead of time, the less likely it is that I will ever ever ever actually DO it. Because it’s done, pretty much, and once all that planning & problem-solving etc is done, committing it to fabric & thread (or paint & canvas, or clay, or stone & ink) is about as exciting as quilting up a preprinted panel like the one I did for ma. I suspect that I am going to need to start doing a little more planning though, because working like a painter just doesn’t cut it when you’re collaging & stitching lots of fabrics & you’re not even sure if there’s any of that gorgeous rusty brown left to make the desired changes …

not the best, however. The board I’ve been using to take photos against has developed a pronounced woop in it, which makes all my (nice & SQUARE thankyouverymuch, I fussed quite a lot to make them so!) stuff look all skewiff (bloody hell, wordpress’s spellcheck is arguing with me about skewiff. Woop, fair enough, that’s probably peculiarly Aussie slang, but skewiff? Up yer bum wordpress, it is so a real word!). Anyway, but, they’re pics, so until I get a new & improved board they’ll do.

here’s mum’s serenity prayer hanging:

Firestorm:

we’ve been sorting out some kits for the Bellanora bag, which I should be able to post in the next day or so. They’ll have the pattern (of course! lol), and all fabrics for front/back/gusset/lining. Since we’re putting only the required amounts in, all fabrics will be labelled so you know which pattern pieces are to come from which colour. I might have to absolutely insist that people send me photos of finished bags, in this case, because I’m totally in love with some of the colourways.

I’m quite chuffed – I just finished putting my first “peeper” on a quilt, and while far from perfect it does what I wanted and it’s pretty straight (esp for imprecise me heh). I was going to do a flange (BTDT), but I wanted it projecting outward not inward so that wasn’t going to work. I thought about it long and hard people, trying to figure out how to do an outward-projecting flange that wouldn’t extend all the way to the edge or wouldn’t have a really poxy fold where it met; it was that kind of day. Like “HEY BRAIN! SNAP OUT OF IT!” all day heh. I’ve been facing quilts a lot lately, but I really didn’t like the look for this. It took hooooooooours to figure out what I wanted to border it with – flat black looked like arse, blue didn’t work (which was kind of annoying since the phrase “[surging?] into the aching blue sky” had glommed into my head while I was doing the top section of quilting), green was ick. various greys and browns were meh. Found two strong possibilities (ie, the least “eh” of the bunch, and then tried this FQ of gorgeous darkdark brown with black crackle print next to it, and it was perfect.

And of course, some bugger(s) had bought all of it. Not even a FQ left. I just KNEW I should have got a half metre heh. Back to the drawing board, & I tried a new warm charcoaly black Connie got in recently, and it was pretty good. Not as good as the gorgeous brown, but good enough. I kept trying different blues & bluegreys etc for a flange or something, but nothing really grabbed me. Dragged out a sad little strip of a dark blue-green-tan fossil fern, & that was just enough colour to make the hints of blue & green & purple in the dyed centrepiece pop a little. None of that left on the roll either lol … Connie managed to find a FQ, but as it turned out I didn’t need it anyway; there was just enough in my scrap to get 4 1″ strips. And that was about it for the shop, although I did get the border strips for this & other pieces cut down there. I was a bit scared to sew tonight to be honest heh – I was sure I’d bollix something (oh never mind, I just remembered two things that were monumentally dumb but turned out ok; the universe can stay spinning on its axis). No way was I going to take to the edges with the rotary cutter though, that would just be asking for trouble: I’ll finish it tomorrow.

I have a handful of WISPs that I should get finished up for upcoming events (read: mum & Judy are both nagging heh), and I really don’t want to. I’m doing it anyway, in absence of the urgent deadlines I usually use to motivate myself. If I was playing that “7 weird things” meme I might mention that I’m not at all comfortable finishing things, which is one of the main reasons I skate up against deadlines so hard – panicking about a deadline is a pretty effective distraction from wigging about calling something “finished”. Luckily I don’t have high BP to worry about …

Amongst the “real” stuff, I’ve also been quilting up a cheater panel thing I completely forgot about until I unearthed it the other day. Mum saw it on ebay so I got it for her & it’s been lurking in my projects bag ever since. I’ve just to do the binding now, which I’d have done tonight if I hadn’t taken the roll of black fabric over to her place the other day (I knew I should have cut a metre or two to leave here just in case). It was both boring and oddly soothing to just follow the “leading” lines printed on the panel. El was entranced by it, for some reason – mind you, she usually is fascinated by anything to do with fabric & sewing. Somewhere I have photos of her at her first quilt show, sitting on a chair adoringly hugging a few fat quarters, lying on the floor gazing up in awe at a kid’s quilt, etc. She’s always nicking off with fat 16ths for her dolls, which she calls “cuh-wilts” but with which she shrouds every toy she can catch up, so the floor of my sewing room quite often ends up looking like one of those makeshift morgues after a natural disaster. If she’s around when we’re dyeing/painting, mum usually sets her up with a bit of fabric and either food colouring or fabric paints.

in other, truly boring news, my desktop has apparently carked it. I turned it on today so I could play some music and the stupid thing stalls halfway through the boot sequence. I changed a few things in the BIOS, including telling it not to halt on any errors, but it still clags so there’s obviously something serious wrong with one of the drives. SIGH. I don’t feel like doing computer surgery, I really don’t.