It's the weather, you see

So, there's no excuse now, except for the slightly pathetic one that it's too cold in the study, where my big laptop lives, and it's too hard in the living room/loungeroom, because the keyboard on the small laptop is so small I can't type properly.  Oh, life is so hard.


Also, a busy few days had me rendered immobile by Saturday night (Sydney traffic, yum cha, Archibald Prize, more Sydney traffic, bed by 8.30pm)... Sunday was Mother's Day and we had a delicious lunch at Mr Golightly's elder sister's house, along with the nieces and nephews... Miss Cathy did try to talk us into a cat, but Mr Golightly demurred, saying they didn't really have enough flesh on them to warrant eating... I'm not sure if she believed she'd heard him correctly, but needless to say we didn't come home with a cat.


Upholstery continues apace.  Yesterday I got stuck in to stripping a drop-in seat which Miss Cathy had - I counted 60 old tacks, three lots of webbing, some very nasty looking flock and coconut fibre and some dodgy fabric... the frame is actually quite nice, with a lovely bevelled edge, but it needed an application of new glue, and I had a good time taking to the frame with the wire brush, redrilling  the holes and getting it into a stonking big clamp to leave until Thursday, when I intend to take to it with elastic webbing, vinyl, foam, linters and that evil of evils, calico (remember?  Calico has no stretch!), and finally, some fantastic fabric from KA International, which Miss Cathy has had tucked away in her magic storeroom for about five years - no pictures yet, but soon, I promise...


And speaking of other fabric:

I confess to buying 2 metres of the last fabric here - the other two did not quite meet the 'PrettyDog Test for Redness', which it needed to pass to be considered for the footstool I'm going to make for Az - however, the two fabrics I bought on Etsy also have failed the test, one is the same red as tomato soup with a can of half milk & half water in it (the usual Golightly tomato soup recipe), and the other one is just raspberry pink...

So I'm still looking...

What else - I'm learning more about what a pain in the arm vinyl is to work with, having made absolutely no progress on this from last week:

and how much fun traditional method upholstery is - a sprung footstool, with coconut fibre and flock - very dusty, prickly, irritating, but very satisfying...

And the class is shrinking, we had a whole five people on Monday, considerably down from our original 11.   Madam Late is apparently quite unwell with previously undiagnosed gall stones.  Having had my own gallbladder out some five or so years ago, I don't quite understand how you can have them and not know - I only had to look at a piece of blue cheese for mine to start howling from the rooftops, but then... 

In other news of unparalleled excitement, the doorstop man didn't leave any feedback on Etsy to say he'd got it - hopefully it turned up OK.  The postage on a 900g/1.9lb doorstop was, surprisingly, $10.00 - is this good, do you think?  Oh yes, and I'm making good progress on the surprise (for he who cannot be named), but more on that later.

And now, Gentle Readers (and hello to the lovely Peppermint Penguin, who has escaped the tangles of Ravelry to catch up on the ultra-thrilling world of the Golightly household, and also to my other new followers - I'm very happy to see you on my list, hope you're not too disappointed by the reality of it all...) I'm going to bed.  I've got a lot happening tomorrow, but more on that... later!  Yes, you guessed it.  Later.

Ciao!