Oh yes, back to reality. The very funny Antonia, from "Yetanotherbloomingblogspot", or 'Whoopee', has joined Facebook. She swears, so if you suffer from delicate ears, be warned. I have actually snorted coffee through my nose reading posts on her blog, and am extremely jealous that I am not as funny, erudite, rude or clever as she is. But I know how to hammer in tacks, and she doesn't, so there.
Speaking of tacks, the very lovely Kate from Rapt! Upholstery, is in the the third year of the course I'm doing, and has her own blog, which is well worth a look - she's done some amazing things with furniture that was on its last legs. We only see each other once a week, on a Monday, when the third years venture in with these huge bits of furniture they're all working on - enormous chaise lounges, wing chairs, whole Parker sofas - incredible, really. Hopefully when my turn comes around next year I'll be able to find something equally fab to work on.
My Monday at Upholstery School was spent wrestling with red vinyl, and I managed to stab myself under the fingernail with a staple. I swore like a navvy, it bled like a stuck pig, and of course the only comment that's made, by anybody, is "Don't get blood on the work". Good thing I'm not the sensitive wilting flower some of us are, isn't it?
Anyway, here's some pictures of what I was trying to achieve, which was:
All the pleats in one direction;
All the pleats point towards the centre point;
All the pleats are the same size;
The start point for each pleat must be on the front, not on the top, of the arm.
Not sure if I succeeded:
Much soreness of fingers, after this lot. Vinyl is a real pain to work with... nice for stool tops, but thank the Upholstery Gods that nobody wants their lounges covered in it!
Last night I made a doorstop for a nice man who bought it through my Etsy shop - I used the beautiful Echino linen, and it went just fine, but the problems I had filling it have resulted in sand all over the sewing room floor, and the bathroom floor. Why the bathroom floor, I hear you ask? I had a brainwave about drying out the sand using the hairdryer. Aha, I hear you say. Yes, Gentle Readers, Miss Incredibly-stupid Isabella got the hairdryer a bit too close to the sand and it flew everywhere. Sadly, the finished result didn't even make a bit of difference to the bulk of the sand & it's still damp. Next time I send the boys off to the hardware store for a bag of sand, remind me to specify I want the dry stuff.
And that, Gentle Readers, could be it for me today. I have done the first slices into the Birthday quilt top, so I need to sew some sashing strips together so I can stitch the quilt top back up... I may emulate yesterday's effort by having a mid-afternoon nap, but my final set of Lumiere de Noel layer cake blocks arrived from Texas this morning, so I may be spending nap time thinking about how to make a double sided quilt... Inspirational ideas welcome, of course!
Ciao!
Beware, Gentle Readers, for 'tis confession time. I hope you're sitting down, and not in my favourite chair, either.
I have never looked at the stats for my blog before. I must admit (and don't I do a lot of admitting here, hmmm?) that I love it when people comment, so I know you're out there, and I also admit that the sole reason I got that feedjit thingy at the bottom of the blog was to feed my ego, but for some reason, I hadn't looked at the stats.
But today, I did. I was adding the updated Treasury to the page, and saw the tab, and a little light bulb went on. Gentle Readers, there are more of you than I ever suspected. Indonesia, The Netherlands, the US of A, the UK, here, of course... how gratifyingly international. (Did any of you ever see that film with Queen Latifah, Last Holiday, where she says "Make me... international"? Check it out, people).
In other news, it's just started to rain. Yippee! If I needed an excuse to have a nothing day, that's it. I love it when it rains in the middle of summer. Everything smells so... summery. Especially when the southerlies come through on a hot afternoon and cool everything down - the roads smell, the grass smells.. it's a real Sydney thing...
In other not quite so cheery news, whilst searching for the name of that Queen Latifah movie, I saw in Wikipedia that Pete Postlethwaite and Gerry Rafferty have both shuffled off this mortal coil... I loved Postlethwaite, his cheekbones always came into the room about 3 feet ahead of the rest of him, and he was magnificent in The Usual Suspects, which, Gentle Readers, if you haven't seen, you absolutely should.
Gerry Rafferty had a huge hit here in 1978 with an album called City to City, and the single from that album, 'Baker Street', had a fantastic saxophone solo - when I was a melancholy, moody teenager, that song, played with Jackson Browne's 'The Pretender' and Al Stewart's 'Year of the Cat', was musical heaven for me. No pun intended. RIP, Ger.
In other news, completely unrelated news, and in what Mr Golightly refers to as 'a quantum leap', I had a brainwave in the night about Momo's French General "Lumiere De Noel" fabric, (which I bought last year as a charm pack to make the Christmas bunting for My Best Friend) - I love those fabrics so much I'm going to make it into a quilt - using the pattern that I made for Miss Nelly - so now I need to go off & buy a metre of one of those beautiful fabrics to make the strips and a layer cake. Oh, joy. More fabric :-)
And now, the sun is coming out. That means it going to be bad Sydney today, where it's sticky, humid, yucky, and I have lost my excuse to do nothing.... so it's back to the sewing room, and goodbye to Lydiard Millicent. No, not somebody with a weird, backward sounding name, but a visitor from that nice little village just outside Swindon (where, completely co-incidentally, I lived as a child, no, no, Swindon, not Lydiard Millicent, but I did live in Latton for a while, are you totally confused yet?)
Me too. Ciao!
