See, the problem is...

That the minute I sit me down to write a blog post, I get distracted by all the shiny things in our house (being the total geek-fest that it is), and I forget my original purpose... when I was much younger (in my feckless 20's), I used to have lists of things to do each weekend, so that when I found myself re-covering shelves with wallpaper just before guests arrived, the beds were already made and the fridge was full of food, instead of unmade and empty... but that good habit has gone by the wayside, sadly, along with the desire to do all my ironing on a Sunday night, and the urge to dust.  Twice a year is plenty, I think.  I'm sure I've mentioned before how one of my favourite authors, Sharon Lee, of "Lee and Miller" fame, also believes twice a year is not too often.  


Although, gentle reader, it must be said that after the Invasion of the Coffee Machine by the evil forces of Antdom, I did act quickly to locate the source of Ant Enticement that had appeared in my Small but Perfectly Formed room, this afternoon.  Apparently some kind supplier of 'something' in my dim and distant past had provided a lollipop, similar in shape and form to the sort consumed by Kojak, which was sitting behind my magnifying lamp... ants must have an incredible sense of smell, yes?  Anyway, after moving the small bookcase holding 237 years worth of Threads magazines (anybody want 'em?  Free to a good home, postage only), a small collection of buttons *snicker*, and a half-torso store dummy, I found said lollipop at the back of the bookcase behind said lamp, carried it with its attached lodgers outside, and left it in the wilds for nature to take her course.


So... shiny things.... I have ignored the clarion call of the blogs I have left unread all this weekend, in order to fulfill duties of the creative kind to my loyal and devoted audience.  Actually, I believe my mum (Hi Mum!) is about to start reading this, so I thought I'd better tidy up a bit first.  You know how mothers have that long-distance x-ray vision about the state of your house... 


I've spent this weekend sewing, having spent the week in some kind of whirling dervish trance-like state where the days from Monday to Friday just went in a blur... I was determined not to let this weekend go by without making some stuff, so here it is:


My lovely DSSIL*, Miss Mandy, had her birthday on Saturday:

 And she wanted a purple pencil case, with her initials on it, so that was easy.  Shame it wasn't there for Saturday, but after the week I've had, (which I am quite sure you don't want to hear about, seeing it was the same as the last week, and the week before that, and so on, ad nauseum), we should all be grateful I'm still crawling out of bed on Saturday mornings to sew, rather than just hiding under the covers like I wanted to!  


Then Miss E, Mr Golightly's middle niece, has her birthday tomorrow.  She lives in the fabled city of Melbourne, lucky girl, where there are markets galore, culture, lanes with bars, restaurants to die for and lots of lovely shopping. You've never been, I hear you say? Well, it's as close to Europe as you'll find in this wide brown land, so if you get the opportunity, go, for the love of craft!  This is what I made her:

It never ceases to amaze me how well the oddest combination of fabrics go together - whoda thunk that Erin McMorris's Pebbles in Lime would go with Echino's Scooters?  Well, after I went rummaging for something that particular slime green, I did!  Hope she likes it (I did press it before it went into the packaging, honest)!


And finally, for the lovely Jenifer in Massachusetts, some MoMo Wonderland jumbo lavender bags:

And now, gentle reader, I am going to lie on the couch and pretend I don't have a pile of clothes as big as a mountain on my spare bed waiting to be folded, sorted and put away (but not, you'll note, ironed!), that I don't have to go to work tomorrow, and that my big fat European holiday is only 9 working days away... oh wait!  It is!


Ciao!






*De-Facto-Step-SIster-In-Law

Sheer genius

What's this?  Two posts in one day - it's been a while, so I thought I'd spoil you all.


We got this beauty in the mail from my mum on Monday;

It matches the one she made us for a belated birthday gift:

I think she's so clever - I love the pair of them - but there were 'vigorous, full and frank discussions' around the fabrics that went into these - Mum is very traditional, and she really struggled with the bright modern florals that I love, but, she's a professional, and the job she did was fantastic - even to the extent of hand-dyeing cotton batting to make her own felt!

I love them both, I have to say.  What do you think?

Some animal encounters!

Firstly, the Puppy!  Susie from I just love that Fabric put a lovely post on her blog saying how much she liked the puppy - I have to say I was pretty pleased with it myself, but it's always nice when somebody else likes your work...


Second, we had a small insect incursion in the Golightly household - we bought a couple of pavlova bases at Christmas, for those of you who might think I'm talking about stands for ballerinas, you can buy 12"/30cm 'undressed' pavlovas from the supermarket, in a box.  You can then 'dress' them with whatever takes your fancy - usually strawberries, passionfruit pulp and masses of cream - and they are a traditional summer dessert... yummy.


Anyway, we forgot about one of them, and it sat in a box in the top of the pantry until very early in the New Year, when we noticed a few ants winding and wending their way into the cupboard... and upon investigation, rediscovered the errant pavlova, which promptly made its way into the food recycling in our garden (aka Mr Golightly's children, all 5000 of them [it's a worm farm, ok?]).


So, over the last couple of days I've noticed a few ants winding and wending their way back into our pantry, but haven't done anything about it - until this morning, when I opened the cupboard next to the pantry,where the ironing board lives, only to discover the entire ceiling and walls of the top of the cupboard covered in ants... very busily carrying food in from outside...


So when I dragged Mr Golightly out of bed to look at 5.30AM, he didn't exactly react how I thought*.  He went apesh*t, dragging out the cloudy ammonia, throwing the entire contents of the cupboard outside, and proceeding to commit genocide (ant-ocide?), all in the nude.  Oh, for the camera!  Anyway, luckily for us the neighbours didn't appear to be too perturbed by this racket, and tonight when I got home, and after I finished cleaning up all the ant corpses, I started to look at what they were so interested in.


Many many years ago, gentle reader, Mr Golightly was a partner in a software company.  It's a very long story, but when the company was wound up, we got the coffee maker.  Yep, along with a lot of [now] obsolete hardware and software, manuals, a couple of nice office chairs and a 12 seater boardroom table, some mis-matched glasses and a black plastic tray with a crack right across it... takers for the boardroom table, apply here.


It's one of those with a heated base, where you put coffee in a paper filter, pour in cold water and wait for the water to flow down through the machine, into the filter full of coffee, and down into your waiting glass pot.  So, guess where the ants were?  Right in the lid:

You know, we've owned this coffeemaker for more longer than we've been married, and I never knew the lid even came off.  What kind of housekeeping slob does that make me?  The best kind, I think.


Anyway, I've cleaned it all out, run a pot of water through it, and hopefully it'll give us another 18 years service.


Other news:


Even though it looks like a spotty turd, it isn't. It's a leopard slug & it's sitting outside our back door, waiting to work its way into Mr Golightly's shower - they love to sit in your shower & eat the mould - weird, huh?  But in a good way:

What else?  Well, I've started taking public transport to work, because the large company for which I work has seen fit to stop paying for our parking.  To be fair, we knew it was coming, and we can still pay for the parking ourselves, it's only $3.50 per day, salary sacrificed, which is only the same as a large flat white with two, so it's not the end of the world, but I hate driving to work every day.  I'm trying to work out ways to reduce my carbon footprint, not increase it!  

So, the large corporation for which I work also runs a number of subsidised buses all over parts of Sydney.  This is essentially because they chose to move 5,000 of their staff into three brand-spanking new buildings in a location which is, geographically speaking, the arse-end of nowhere, and which is chronically badly served by public transport.  One of those buses goes through a Slightly Further Away Suburb (17km) from me, at 7.15am, and it connects with the bus from the Slightly Larger Suburb next to me, which leaves at 6.35am.  Yesterday, I arrived at work at 8.50am.  That's two hours and fifteen minutes to go 40 kilometres.  Is it worth it to save $3.50?  Time will tell.

*I thought he'd go back to bed, leaving it for me to clean up!

No peeking...

So, what do you get if you take these, and work some magic?

Potential for a swap with lovely Susie, from "I just love that fabric", don't you think?  I worked a little magic this afternoon and turned those beautiful parts into a more beautiful whole...

She's pretty gorgeous, I have to say - I got to use some fabrics I haven't used for anything else before - here she is waiting to have her tummy scratched:

And here's the side view:

The colours are lovely, even though they might not be what you'd see running in the park... I hope she likes it! 

Busy, busy

Another couple of busy days doing not much - where does the time go, that's what I want to know?  Two hours of it went on four new tyres for the car on Saturday morning... when I came to put petrol in the car on Thursday morning for my regular 40k trip to the office, I noticed the left front tyre was looking a little low, so I popped air in it at the servo.  


Has anybody else ever used a digital air pump?  I was a bit intimidated, I admit, but being of sound mind and a thoroughly geeky girl, I thought "I can do this" - and so I could.  Instead of the old-fashioned gauge that shows your air pressure when you depress the lever, you just set the pressure to what you want it to be, stick the nozzle on the tyre end and 'whammo', it beeps when it's done.  At least, that's what the instructions said.  But they didn't say anything about "whammo", strangely.


So, off I toddled.  Friday morning, up with the lark (actually, it's quite dark at 5.30am now, so it was, strictly speaking, before the lark, and I had to go the Post Office to pick up our train tickets from Roma Termini to Venezia Santa Lucia (see, I'm getting right into the spirit of the holiday here!).  As I drove down the road, I could hear this noise, like a metal bowl being hit by a wooden spoon, or something similar - so when I got to the post office, I had another look at the tyre & it was flat as a tack.  Luckily, Newport being fairly small, I was able to limp down the road to the servo & fill it again, this time following the trusty old-fashioned method.  From zero to 30 in not many seconds, and on the road again... except...


I was a bit worried about getting halfway there and having the (obviously) slow leaking tyre go flat.  The roads between home & Homebush are very busy, maybe not quite so busy on a Friday as on any other day (because lucky bastards like Baino are off on their RDO*'s), and I just hate the idea of having to hold up 50,000 cars so I can have my flat tyre public humiliation moment...


Anyway, gentle reader, here is a shameless plug for the NRMA.  They are wonderful.  The woman I spoke to was nice and friendly (which is no mean feat at 6.30am), they sent me a text message to say the car was on the way, the guy was nice and not even a tiny weeny bit condescending when I asked him to change my tyre (and yes, I confess, I did, but I do know how to do it myself, but really, do you clean your own oven?  You do?  Oh.) but he did say that the Silver Flash's tyres were getting a bit baldy (just like Mr Golightly tee hee hee) and after I saw the deep grooved tread of the spare, compared to the shiney, smooth looking doughnuts I'd been driving on, I agreed.  So, that's where two hours of Saturday morning went.  Phew.


What else?  I made these, as a belated Birthday Gift for Miss Clare, over at Lulu Carter:

They're the jumbo size, cut from a 7" equilateral triangle, and stuffed to the gills with beautiful lavender... wait, stop.  I sound like I'm putting them in the shop.  They're nice.  That's enough.

And I made this, for Mr Golightly's niece, who's name, unsurprisingly, is Alex, and it's her birthday on Wednesday.  The idea is that I'm going to stitch the stars on to another ribbon of rickrak & she can hang it up somewhere.  She's going to be 13, I think.  Amazing.  They grow up!  Who knew?  That's a terrible photo, too, caused by us having a few household maintenance issues at the moment, with the halogen lights in the small but perfectly formed room working, but sporadically.  

The rain has done some interesting things to our lillipilli hedge, which keeps us out of sight of the neighbours (lucky them), and also gives us much needed shade from the western sun in the afternoon - check this out:

All that growth (the pink bits) happened since last Friday night, when we had the torrential downpour.  There's about four inches of new growth all over the hedge, and it looks amazing:

And that's it for me.  I need to go & watch some geeky TV (Startrek Voyager, for the umpteenth time), and dream in Italiano... 

Hope you all have a great week!  Ciao!

Curmudgeon!

That's me... I do think grammar and spelling are vitally important, especially in the day-job, and I refuse  to settle for the mis-spelt word, the misplaced comma, the badly worded phrase... However, I get the feeling I probably shouldn't try & drive change off the back of a piddly little some-time sewing blog... although I was sorely tempted for a week or so!


Anyway, now that my dudgeon is not so high, I'm back to normal, whatever that is.  I'm still doing the stupid hours, average 44 hours for the last month, and have started counting down the days until we go on holidays... only 6 weeks to go tomorrow!


Is it too early, do you think, to start planning itineraries?  I bought this great set of Rome Walking Tours, and I'm thinking that I'll take them with us, they're small enough to go in a day-pack... along with the digital camera, an umbrella and a bottle of water, although the water in Italian fountains is perfectly safe to drink... although from skimming through some travel sites, you'd think "that foreign muck" out of fountains and taps was the devil reincarnated....


As for Venice, maps and plans mean nothing, the best thing to do is to wander round taking in the sights - and I am aiming to see this:

Courtesy Wikipedia.


Betcha we just get to see the scaffolding - apparently it's being restored... just like the first time we went, when we saw this:

Compared to the second time, when we saw the real thing:

Bit of a difference, and well worth the 3 year wait.  Oops.  That's "three year wait".  And now, having fixed Blogger where it's has started doing that stupid thing again with the photo alignment again, my curmudgeonly gene is reasserting itself, and I am going to bed.  Up, up with the lark at 5.30am, and off to the office.    Yee haw!


Sewing Saturday, I have orders - dogs galore, and "Let's go Shopping" for Anne-Marie - fun all round.  And of course there's some nice fabric pics to show you, so don't go 'way now, y'hear?


Ciao!

Blogger ate my post.... again

Man.  I am so annoyed.  I just wrote a brilliant post criticising (hey!  Four eyes!  Sorry, bad Optical pun for those in the know) the growth in grammar illiteracy that seems to be on the rise - why is it that so many people who write for the public (and by that I mean anybody who can get to the internet) have no idea what they're doing? - and blogger ate it.  I am so annoyed.  Oh yes, I just said that.


Probably just as well, it was getting a little righteous, but when I see "Bored of Sewing" used as a title for a blog which is probably read by gazillions of people, it just makes my blood boil.  Just because you sew or quilt or whatever for a living doesn't mean that you should appear to be ignorant to the rest of the world.


Don't even get me started on those people who can't get "number" versus "amount" right.  For those of you who care, it's simple:  Amount is for money and things that can't be counted, such as "rain", "snow", "air", "time".  Number is for things that can be counted, such as "50 mls of rain fell in less than an hour on Newport last night & my laundry roof is leaking", "52 inches of snow fell on Washington DC last night", "the average human consumes 1 cubic foot of air per minute", and "look at the time, I have to stop writing this shit".  Just kidding.


And did you notice that I used "who", for people, rather than "that"?  That's one of the other ones I hate.  It's right up there with people who can't get "it's" and "its" right.  It's soooo simple.  


Also, I know that there are a few people out there who are going to say "you started a sentence with "and"... well, at least the rest of it is grammatically correct, and so is the spelling*.  


Anyway, rant over.  I got this in the mail this week, from here, one of my favourite Etsy shops:

and I'm going to give it a try - I've never done Sashiko embroidery before, but I'm sure it'll fun - and I'll post a picture of the finished article...

and these: 

which are going in the 'do not cut' box, except that I want to make lovely Clare over at Lulu Carter a birthday present, and these are ideal...


And, (there she goes again...) if you're like me and you love 1930's fashion and music, hop over to Gerald Gee, who does the most amazing things with music & photo montages...


Now.  Back to the damp ceiling!






*All you people in the Americas - we don't use the 'z', just like you apparently don't use the toilet.