Sunday, March 18, 2012

Organising, bats and geese


Im going to get on my soap box and whinge. I know it's wet season here, and in the last few years, March has been notorious for a lot of rain, but I'm over it. Well and truly over it.  In the last couple of days we've had another 110+ mm of rain, yep that's another 6 inches. That takes it to over 400mm (almost 16 inches) in 13 days. Sunshine? Paradise? my @ɹ$€, no sunshine and it's definitely not paradise when everything is damp and going mouldy.

OK off my soap box now.

I've been de-cluttering, and will be for the foreseeable future, as it's slow going.  More photos to come eventually.
My sewing room.

A partial tidy up. So far, my yarn stuffed in the shelves, fat quarters in Samla boxes and yardage jammed carefully placed in shelves, and Karma, surprised that there is carpet in this room, not just fabric and crap all over the floor.
It's going to look crap again very soon, as this room is going to be painted this week, so I have to move everything to the centre of the room and cover it with drop cloths and then move it all back again, yuck!

During the week I had a visitor. I had one of these last year too, lucky aren't I. I'm glad I'm not the type to freak out at having a bat flying around my house.

Sorry the photos aren't great, I may not have been screaming like a girl when the bat came in, but I wasn't about to get up close and personal with it either.  This time the cats and dog didn't notice it, so I shut them in the bedroom, opened all the outside doors and crossed my fingers that it would find it's own way out. It did, phew! You may remember that last year I woke up in the middle of the night to the gentle noise of a bat flying into the rotating ceiling fan above my bed and being flung across the room into the wall. No harm was caused to the bat. This time it was because I forgot to shut the screen doors before dark.

On the sewing/crafty front, I worked on another block for Foundation Paper Piecing For The Terrified. Katy has posted some fab tutorials and I can genuinely say I'm no longer terrified of paper piecing. I'm still not sure whether I love it enough to make a whole paper pieced quilt but I'll certainly feel confident to give it a go to make smaller things like potholders or pincushions. On the other hand I've wanted to try a pickle dish or New York Beauty quilt for awhile now. Maybe just a mini quilt later this year.
The Circle of Geese is my latest attempt. It was not without problems, like forgetting to check that the piece I am about to sew is sitting in the right place and not folded over so that I sew it all wrong. That happened twice. Also not checking to make sure I haven't picked up the next couple of pieces along with the piece I am sewing, because they were sitting too close to the machine and as I sewed, they came along for the ride.
That would be the two white strips hanging from the bottom of the block, after being sewn in to the seam of the white piece pinned diagonally across the block. This may have happened more than once. 
Yes, I'm a slow learner.
Anywho, despite a couple of setbacks and seams unpicked, I'm very happy with the result.
FPPFTT circle of geese
I used some scraps of Amy Butler Soul Blossoms, the fabric I'm using for the Starflower quilt. Amazingly, some of the geese even worked with fussy cutting. Now that's a minor miracle!






15 comments:

  1. thanks for the heads up on the foundation tut....next on my list to have a go at...love these x

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  2. I'm only up the road from you in Maryborough and like you am so so sick of the rain and we are expecting another 4 days of constant rain.

    Dryer constantly going on 24 hours a day, nothing is dry, dogs feet all dirty....and just yuck yuck yuck.

    But your blocks look lovely and bright and I just love your colour choices.

    Adele xx

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  3. Damp days make me knit sweaters, but then I often set them aside when things clear up. I hope it clears soon and you can have your paradise back. I love your block and good work on bat patrol.

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  4. Love your flying geese, but not your flying bats!

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  5. Sorry you are having such bad weather! We have been having unusually lovely weather this month. It should be cold and rainy but it's been warm and sunny - we know it won't last :)

    Love your ring of geese and your sewing room looks wonderful! Mine desperately needs painting - maybe this summer.

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  6. Paradise obviously has its downsides - I would have shrieked like a girl. As for the rain, sounds like the West of Scotland, our feet are webbed here.
    Glad to see you mastering foundation piecing, look forward to seeing those FP Mystery Blocks next..lol

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  7. Yuck, bats! I know they are really important to the ecosystem, but they give me the willies!

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  8. Haha Sheila! Send the rain to the south of England as we don't have enough to fill our reservoirs again! Love your geese and I have had many of the same problems paper piecing teeth! Still don't love pp either but am unpicking less!

    Bats are lovely enough creatures but better outside than in! I get crows falling down the chimney - the upside is that they seem to clean the chimney while they do!

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  9. You are doing a great job of de-cluttering. Nice to see the carpet again I'm sure. Your block is beautiful. I live in sunny California where it has been not so sunny of late. They say we need rain, but I think it should only rain at night. I guess we're blessed that the sun is out today, but now it's cold .. good job getting the bat out without incident. I can imagine with cats and dogs that could be a real chore.

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  10. Thumbs up for the flying geese, down for the bats and rain! Crazy weather!

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  11. Love the geese...you are doing well. I need some shelves like that for my sewing room....bats...eeek! Glad it was at your place. we had more rain overnight...it has been soooo wet!

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  12. It didnt sound like you were Miss Calm and Collected when you emailed me to tell me you had a bat in the house...Im just sayin'.

    Having been privvy to the clean up - I can attest to the fact it looks wonderful.

    And I still think you're nuts for the flying geese but they turned out well and with minimal swearing.

    The weather here is still good. Wanna come for a visit?

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  13. I noticed your wool stash straight away, very nice! I am swimming across the lawn to the chook pen and the poor chooks are up to their armpits in mud....oh don't even mention the horse paddock and that wind we had today, very eerie and cyclony feeling. Seems to have eased now but not the rain. Cairns had 12 inches in two days so I may not be escaping down to my friends house on the weekend as all the roads are blocked. I hope it eases as I need a break, Billy has been flat out for a while and I haven't had a break since the beginning of the summer school holidays...I am so over cooking,cleaning and tidying up! Love that flying geese, are you doing a big quilt in those? It will look amazing :-)

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  14. well, I'm sorry about the bat and the needing to clean up, but that circle of geese is just fantastic! And I love the AB fabric in it, very tropical to me. Hope the weather improves soon. Nothing worse than mould, yuck!

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  15. Agreed, that is WAY too much rain. Send some here, would you?

    Fabric really doesn't compress as easily as yarn, right, and takes up way more space than it should. Hope the painting goes well. I well remember the bat story from last year--glad you learned how to deal with it, but I would have been screaming a bit too! Love, love the geese. Operator error is a serious problem but luckily you didn't get too far before you realized you had extra bits stuck on.

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