First night

G'day all!

We are all set for our first night sleeping in our house.  It has only taken two weeks to get enough of the painting, etc, done.  We don't have a proper bed here but we do have a number of foam mattresses and linen and stuff.

It is much comfier than it looks!

There's a reason for that stuff taking so long - I've done most of it on my lonesome, including 3.5 of the four coats of paint needed to get the study to a reasonable consistency of colour.

I should blog all of this on the old house blog!  It really is house stuff.  I might well do that when I remember to.  This will be a modest manor II (II sounds much more formal and swanky than two does.  Dunno why).

What else has been happening?

Scrappy, quickly basted binding!

I managed to get two quilt tops sewn up, basted, quilted and bound into the one quilt in about three weeks.  I'm pretty pleased with how it came out.  It is the biggest quilt I've made so far, bigger than my favourite quilt, the blue sashed wonky block (not exactly featured on the bed in the pic above).  I managed to quilt it all on my big box store Singer.  It took quite a bit of wrangling but the extension table and the quilter's gloves helped a lot.

It is a binary quilt for the Seattle Modern Quilt Guild's Binary Challenge (two different links).  I started off thinking I'd just make it grey and green but well it didn't sing to me.  A number of people that I showed it to thought it was great however - they have a different aesthetic to me.  (Then again, I have a sunflower yellow going into orange study, a bedroom that goes from aquamarine to deep blue and a lounge room that is becoming lime, so it really does come down to different strokes for different folks.)

That would be the wrong side but it
gives you the idea!

The grey really wasn't cutting it for me so I made a second top with white and a much brighter lime green, cos that is what you do when you get a bit obsessive about something.  I never ever get obsessive about anything.  You guys know that, right?  LOL

I was so much happier with the white/lime side.  I even used white on white prints in the white blocks and two different shades of plain white fabric.  The block design is a bit different from the back as well.  The colour blocks float in their negative space rather than being sashed, and they are only four strips wide, not five, which means they are asymmetric in the way I've pieced the blocks together.

Sing my pretty!

Mmm, this one sings to me.  The colours are so much better for me.

Wonky all over.  Not one line is straight.  This does
not bother me - if all the lines bar one were straight
this would bother me much more.

Hopefully it will be part of the exhibit at Island Quilter in January.  I'm going on a road trip to Vashon Island - want to join me?  We have to take the ferry to get there and you know what I'm like on a ferry... :-D

What else has been happening?

It was cold.

Really cold.

Really really really cold.

Really really really cold for almost a week.  Like below freezing cold.

OMG, I can see sky from our new house!  SKY!
It was cold and clear.

A week ago it was -6C when we walked home from a meal after a day of committing mayhem on the old garage roof.  I don't care what anyone up in the Great White North (aka northern Canada) tells me, -6C is blasted cold and whilst it was novel, it did terrible things to my lungs, my skin and my throat.  I couldn't keep my face covered if I wanted to see (my glasses fog up) and I just could not keep my hands warm outside, not even in really well insulated gloves and mittens.

Wonder if the reindeer liked it?

Remember, my American readers, I'm effectively a Californian.  Not a Flahridan cos I don't come from a humid climate, just a warm, dry one.

But we did have sunny days for about half of that time, so that was very very welcome.  Normally December in Seattle brings lots of gloom and a few big storms, so the unusual, once in ten years or so cold was different.

She is a real reindeer.  She's at the local plant nursery.

I'm not sure if I prefer the return to gloom and relative warmth (hahahahaha, never thought I'd say somewhere between 7 and 10C is warm but compared to minus something, it is!  I've had to abandon my insulated jacket several times today!) or if below freezing and sunny is good.

Before the cloud set in again...

My voice is wonky again - between the cold, lifting things and exposure to paint fumes, it has gone a bit sad.   This is annoying because I was doing better.  However I seem to be able to walk uphill ok still, so I'm taking it as a temporary set back.

I would love to go to this, even with
my wonky voice.  Should see if
tickets are still available.

I am occasionally finding time to knit.  See that little lump in the top right corner?  That is the start of the second sock, the tip of the toe, as it looked on Monday night.  I'm doing the heel gusset now, so it is on target to be DH's Christmas present.  I think I've got a couple of other bits stashed away for him two, better find them.

Mmmm, Malabrigo sock.  Bag by Jessalu.

My phone stopped uploading to the cloud when DH deleted all the pics in the rubbish bin on it after I couldn't figure out why all the storage (14 gig!) was gone.  It turns out that I had taken over 10 gig of pictures over the years!  On the phone!   I never even knew it had a rubbish bin let alone that I had to empty it - I forgot that delete does not mean delete on it (I run a program on my computer that deletes forever without needing to empty the bin).  I haven't found the toggle to make it upload automatically - syncing is on, my account is linked, I've looked at my settings on the phone and online for syncing.  It just doesn't sync any more.  This is very sad.  At least it boots up quickly now and doesn't crash as often :-)

Nifty clouds

I had a weird moment recently when a friend of mine looked up what another person we used to know is doing these days.  That person just so happens to be my first boyfriend.  I brutalised him horribly, stupidly, and wish I hadn't.  I still feel guilty more than half a lifetime later.  I haven't seen him for quite a number of years but when I looked at him, I saw pretty much the same person I last saw.  He's still got the same manic grin.  My other friends though didn't see him at all at first - they just saw some middle aged dude.  (Middle aged, gah, how did that happen?)  Their memories are of him as a youngish uni age guy, I last saw him when he was finishing his PhD/doing post grad.  I didn't contact him, I don't think he wants me to contact him.

Moon and Venus.

I also realised that I have some traits that scream littlest sister.  I had not really realised it before.  I am the baby, five years younger than my next up sister, and somewhat younger than the oldest two.  Goodness I must be annoying on occasion.  I don't play well with others, I'm fiercely independent in many ways, I hate asking for help...  I'm blaming that on being the youngest because I either got smothered with help because I was the baby or I got picked on for not being as good as my siblings when I was sooooo far behind them developmentally (usually by my elders).  It trained me into not wanting others to help, not wanting them to butt into what I was doing in my own happy little world, wanting to show that I was good enough even though I was younger.  I got really good at copying things and extending them further (I still tend to do that now - I grab someone else's idea and run with it).  Plus I was (am) a klutz and short-sighted to boot.

Anyway, enough rambling.  I have another busy day of painting and packing ahead of me.

anon!