So today I had a haircut, had lunch with my good friend & breast cancer survivor KR, where we agreed we never want to go back to the August Institution which employs us both, and I made some 'bend the rules bunting'. What exactly do I mean by that? Well, every other bunting I have ever seen has almost religious devotion to a single shape, cut precisely, corners poked out, trimmed off, ironed to within an inch of its life and in some cases, waaaaaaaay over-engineered:
Don't get me wrong, I loved making this for the wedding of Mel and Urby, but it's kind of amazing to think somebody believes they can hold the copyright on rectangles and binding, all stuff which has been around since Adam wore short pants... but I digress.
As part of the fun for Sunday, I made some bunting which was the easiest cheat-y thing I could come up with in a very short space of time - I took 4" & 5" squares, cut some flag/pennant shapes out of my scraps box, made some long skinny strips and used up the leftovers from the binding from this lot of bunting, and pinned it onto this, from Holland Fabric House, and this is the end result:
Quite a different look, isn't it? Kind of random, kind of messy, kind of funky. I didn't have to cut anything much except the pennant shapes, and in my spare *snort* time tonight between bouts of stuffing & stitching, I will pink the edges of everything to make sure it doesn't look too tacky.
And now, Gentle Readers, I am off to make Mr Golightly's favourite dinner, which doesn't involve the microwave, bread, baked beans or a raw onion.
Ciao!
Well, Gentle Readers, that didn't last long, did it now? Although the eagle-eyed amongst you may see the time and think "what in hell is she doing up at 2.57AM (ESDST)"? I'm thinking that too. I'm getting a little tired (absolutely no pun intended) of waking up in the middle of the night, so maybe I need some pharmaceutical help. Maybe.
Anyhoo, in other parts of the world, I have two lovely new followers, one of whom you may recognise (if, like me, you waste creatively spend time browsing your followers' profile pages and the blogs they follow), the very lovely Felicity, from All Toile and No Reward, and Carolyn, from somewhere in the wilds of NSW (that's New South Wales to you furriners), whose blog is called 'Ordinary World'. She has the most beautiful banner, all pink hisbicus (hibiscii? hibiscuses?) and ferns, and each page is graced with a butterfly and more hisbicuists [joke]. Gorgeous. And of course, like every blog, her world isn't really ordinary, it's special, because it's hers.
In other news, this blog appears to have been found by the [presumably] Chinese spammers, who left a message advertising:
"spy products, self defense products, gsm baton, spy pepper spray, spy gsm phonestun gun, Stun Baton baton, gsm bug for spy"
on my blog, and a link to something I didn't even go near, all of which I have promptly deleted. If this keeps up, I'm going to have to introduce comment vetting. Next thing you know it'll be Nigerians with offers of cash & Russian brides seeking husbands. I'm tempted to offer up Mr Golightly but I'm pretty sure he'd be sent back PDQ once they find out he can only cook three things, one of which involves baked beans, raw onions, bread and the microwave.
In happier news, work on the market stall produce races ahead, I spent a very happy & productive three hours with My Best Friend yesterday punching holes, tying ribbon, popping items into bags, arguing about prices and even a spot of sewing - I made one of these:
from Joel Dewberry's new book 'Sewn Spaces'... I didn't do the blanket stitch thingy round the outside the wings, and my pattern appeared to be missing half the markings, but the end result was cute enough - but making one of these took me the same time as it took to make two doorstops. All those curves to pin & carefully sew around, I s'pose, plus the individual-ette wings to be carefully handstitched on. I promise to post a picture after the market madness is over.
I've also made another christmas tree, this one jumbo size & decorated with bells, going off to a secret destination after the market (ditto on the photo). And now, I'm tired, which hopefully means I can go back to bed & actually sleep, as I have a busy day tomorrow involving haircuts, lunching, more sewing, more packaging and bunting!
Ciao!
Well, Gentle Readers, much excitement for me this weekend - first of all the Treasury thingy (and did ANY of you get the gratuitous Ferengi reference on my beautiful Treasury description, or am I shouting into the wind here with the sci-fi stuff, hmmm?), and now, my lovely Beautician, Kerry, has invited me to put some stuff onto her table at the Newport Market Day, which is being held on Sunday 14th November.
I have had numerous invitations to do markets, and I have investigated the effort required (huge, no, really) to have a stall at St Ives Heritage Craft Markets, and I'm sad to say I'm pretty much too lazy to do all that humping, lifting & carrying (actually, my back is so bad I get a backache just looking at lifting the groceries out of the car!). The sewing part is easy, but the thought of having to get a table, tablecloth, tent, chair, float, display thingys, arrange the stock, keep a supply of food & drink, not go to the toilet all day and be jolly and welcoming to all prospective browsers or those who just want to rub their dirty sticky fingers on my beautiful lavender bags, frogs, doorstops etc etc etc, just put me right off.
So this is ideal, the lazy person's market stall. Her table will be selling all those products required to keep us looking beautiful, and I will be selling things you don't really need but which make nice souvenirs, or nice christmas gifts, or hostess gifts [question without notice - is that an {shudder} Americanism????] or teacher gifts, at very reasonable prices.
If you don't have any plans, and it's a nice day (because, let's face it, who wants to go out in the rain???), pop on down & say hello. We'll be outside Rapport Beauty, on Barrenjoey Road. I'm the tall dumpy one.
And of course the other reason for me telling you all this useless information (well, let's face it, if you're in Bahrain, like the very lovely Felicity from "All Toile and no Reward", one of my favourite reads, you are not going to wander down to Newport, now are you?) is that I will be trying very very hard not to post any more this week, until I have made the doorstops, Christmas trees, pouches, sets of lavender bags, sets of clove bags, fridge magnets and Christmas badges, and packaged them all up, and priced them, and have something to show you. So, please come back on Friday, when all will be revealed!
Ciao!
Fame at last, Gentle Readers, fame at last. Autographs here, form an orderly queue, no pushing, there is plenty of me to go around (but considerably less than this time last year, I might add)... an item of mine has been included in somebody else's treasury - the very lovely Natalie, from Humblebea on Etsy included my Joel Dewberry Christmas pouch in her Christmas Gift treasury.
I'm under no illusions about the inclusion (so early, and yet so poetic), I think she might have felt obligated because I put her very beautiful linen napkin rings in my Smoke on the Water Treasury, but that was never my intention, you know that, Gentle Readers, I was just finding new and wonderful ways to fill my lonely empty days. *snort*.
However, if there is some kind of Etsy etiquette about telling people you're putting their stuff in a treasury, nobody told me. As each treasury contains 16 items, that's a lot of convo's. In the time it takes to write, copy the links & send all 16 convos to the makers, you could have made another treasury. Let them eat cake, I say. Off with their heads. (see, no breakfast yet, my efforts to push Mr Golightly out of bed & into the toast & tea-making machine have been entirely unsuccessful & I'm getting light-headed).
Oh, you want to see the pouch? Didn't I post a picture the other day? Oh well, here it is:
And now I can see that I didn't do a great job of pressing it after construction... oh well. I suspect it was the volume of Dickens and the reciprocation obligation that really did it for her.... oh stop it.
And today lovely AJ from "A Peppermint Penguin" is having a sale of items at her friend's Quilt Studio, which sadly I don't have the address for, but if you're in Glasgow, and you see an interesting looking place selling beautifully hand-knitted mittens and shawls, pop in & say "Hi"!
And that, for me, is it. I need to get up & do stuff. About which, more. Later.
Ciao!
Yesterday I had lunch with a former colleague, a lovely man who manages to combine keeping me informed of all the hatches, matches and dispatches in the former office, good works and living two hours from the office (by train), and still staying relatively sane. I have no idea how he does it.
Anyway, he floored me a bit by asking how I was filling my days, and you know what? I found it a bit hard to come up with a sensible answer. Then, this morning (note the time, Gentle Readers) as I was finding out a bit more about my last commenter, I saw that she had an Etsy Treasury displayed on her blog. And I had a Eureka! moment - this is what I've been spending my days doing!
I love that Etsy now lets anybody make Treasuries, they don't restrict it any more to some arbitrary number, but those of us with the urge to trawl the interweb looking for slime green budgie smugglers* can express their desires freely for all the world to see.
So, I will post some pics of the treasuries I have done over the last few days, if only I can work out how. Help! (but here's a link until I do figure it out!)
Also, yesterday I bought a new camera strap from here and I think I need a tutorial on how to work it, I resisted the siren song of new t-shirts for (hah!) summer, and I got a parking ticket. Shouldn't have spent all that money on the camera strap!
Anyway, it's time to get up now *snort* and get on with the day. I forgot to buy milk yesterday, along with putting the free parking sticker on the car (see, too busy thinking about the camera strap), and so I can't have breakfast until the corner shop opens at 7.00am - I highly recommend staying away until after that. Animals are always more placid after they've been fed!
Ciao!
*speedos
This is a gift for somebody, but I'm not telling who it is until a bit closer to the day. Also, I don't want to reveal the type of gift, because that would just completely give it away.
This is the second First Quilt I have made, I'm still working on the Sydney Pies quilt, but it's sooooo boring sewing round all those circles and I promised myself a little light entertainment after the tree adventure (being delivered today, any suggestions on pricing would be welcome, MGF Kaz had very firm ideas and I must admit she was probably right, there was a fair amount of manual labour involved in sewing on all those beads, buttons and bells... not to mention the stuffing!)... so this is where I'm at:
I love these colours, they're feminine without being too girly, young enough for a small-ish person without being childlike, and fresh enough to stand a few seasons worth of fabric in & out of fashion-ness (you know what I mean, some fabrics on the market are instantly date-able by their very design, and so become outdated very quickly).
I note here, Gentle Readers, that we are having a parenthetical and hypen kind of day, today. If your brain isn't coping too well with the grammatical strictures, come back later. It isn't going away.
Anyway, after much anguish about ways to ensure nothing was repeated (failed) and nothing was next to the same pattern in a different colourway (failed), I threw the whole lot in the air and just put them together as they fell. Kind of like divining using chicken entrails, but a whole lot less messy.
The progress:
The pattern calls for the quilt top to be 'slashed' (and just to clarify for some of our readers from other lands, I know that "going for a slash" has a whole 'nother meaning, but here we're talking about cutting out chunks of fabric), then you resew it together with the sashing (blue strips) in exactly the same positions it was in before. I thought that was a bit boring, so I took the opportunity to fiddle with the pieces, and moved some of them around to make it a bit more interesting.
Then, when it's all back together, you do the slashing thing again, except on the vertical, but in exactly the same places (2 1/2" either side of seams 1, 3 & 5, working from the left). This is what it looks like now:
A big pile of strips. I was going to rotate some of the colours again, but I've discovered that 2 1/2" can be bigger on one side than on the other, probably due to the fact that I was trying to cut it out on Mr Golightly's Über-precious Jarrah kitchen bench, the largest surface in the house (apart from the floor), and having to keep moving it to do so (plus I was cheating & doing it by eye, rather than using my ruler, and my eye is not as accurate as I had hoped. Unsurprisingly.) - I'm pretty sure the recipient won't have her ruler out checking.
So, I think it will probably stay as it is, but with the additional vertical sashing. I think it's going to be quite nice. Now all I have to is work out how to assemble it. See, this is where I need my mother, to help out - she's made a zillion patchwork quilts over the years & can probably do this in her sleep, but the downside is, she definitely will have her ruler out. Ouch. I can feel it on my knuckles now.
Ciao!
- Go to England with less than $1000 in my pocket when the exchange rate was $1:33p.
- Have Gastric Flu. Coming out both ends. TMI? You bet.
- Spend 6 months unemployed in the Midlands, UK, in the 1980's, where unemployment was running at 28%.
- Borrow money from a parent.
- Find out my new chap was married to a woman called Sharon who lived in NZ.
- Learn shorthand.
- Go skiing.
- Rupture my ACL skiing, hence #7.
- Wait 2 years for an ACL reconstruction because I didn't have private health insurance.
- ACL reconstruction.
- Second operation to fix something they missed in #10.
Get married. Have a wedding** - Put on 3 stone (19kg) after #12.
- Watch the arches in my feet collapse after #13.
- Have the police knock at my door to tell me a parent had died.
- Work as a Secretary.
- Start anything new in a year ending in -9.
- Lose a friend to Breast Cancer.
- Lose a friend to Lymphoma.
- Lose a grandparent to Emphysema.
- Lose a friend to AIDS.
- Lose a friend to Suicide.
- Go to a funeral. Any funeral.
- Take Mr Golightly shopping.
- Lose a beloved parent-in-law to Alzheimer's.
- Fart in the office.
- Have an accident of the menstrual kind in the office.
- Almost have an affair with a married man, in the office.
- Be sexually harrassed by a crazy ex-footballer.
- Move house. 22 previous addresses (that I can think of) is plenty, thanks.
- Do data entry for a living.
- Leave my camera in a taxi and never see it again, Olympics pics and all.
- Live in Leicester, UK.
- Work in a library. It really is like "The Librarians".
- Let myself be bullied.
- Convince a doctor I didn't want children. No, I really don't.
- Share a one-room flat with anybody.
- Live in a one-room flat with outside toilet & shower. Those winter mornings really bit.
- Fall off a motorbike at speed.
- Be a passenger in a car which rolls. Still got the dodgy shoulder from that one.
- Shoot a sitting duck. Shame on me (I was 16, does that ameloriate it a little?).
- Shoot anything.
- Drink too much white wine from a flagon.
- Vomit said white wine all over the bathroom floor.
- Cleaning up #44.
- Drink cider.
- Spend 9 weeks on crutches, courtesy of #11.
- Spend 2 weeks in a caravan on 'holidays'.
- Share a house with 3 unrelated blokes. Can you imagine the soap?
- Take a dog to the vet and come home alone, knowing you'll never see the dog again.
- Have a neighbour steal your dog when she left her husband and 6 fox terriers behind.
- Be poor.
- Live in a foreign country with no support network & no friends.
- Algebra.
- Statistics.
- Wait until I'm newly married before discovering the one thing I want to really do in life requires me to go & live in another city 300km away.
- Spend November and February in England. Freezing cold.
- Spend two years in pain waiting for the doctors to decide if I needed to have my gall bladder out.
- Have my gall bladder out.
- Vomit after smelling the vegetable soup somebody ordered for dinner immediately after I'd had my gall bladder out.
- Wet the hospital bed whilst vomiting after #60 (told you it'd be a good list, didn't I?).
- Go out on Christmas morning looking for somewhere selling wrapping paper, as Mr G had 'forgotten' to wrap his presents.
- Wrap Mr G's presents on Christmas morning.
- Spend a Christmas in Cairns.
- Spend a Christmas in 42°C heat
