Express Yourself

Haha!  No pictures today (maybe tomorrow), but I have been working on the round robin that's due back to my guild on Tuesday night.  Just two more leaves to hand-applique....

And I also realized I can't make the day guild this month. :(  It's Wednesday morning, which is when one of Jazzy's classes starts up again.  We're #2 on the waitlist, and I know the teacher will add us, but we have to actually be there for that to happen.  So I'll make the February meeting instead.

But!

Long before I ever started this blog, I was a fanfiction writer.  A relatively good one, I like to think, though never a BNF (Big Name Fan).  That mostly ended when I had children.  Leaving off in the middle of a seam to answer a child's need, it's easy to know where I wanted to go next.  Leaving off in the middle of a paragraph?  Not so much.  In writing, at least for me, momentum matters.

A few weeks ago, however, I got a review on one of my stories (left incomplete one chapter from finishing) that ended "even tho, ya know, this is never getting updated ever again and whatever".  Which, on one hand, it'd been four years since I updated it, so fair dinkum.  On the other hand, spite is a powerful motivator.  I pushed through, and in three nights wrote about 3,500 words, finished that last chapter, and posted it to both my Dreamwidth account and my Livejournal account.  I'll let it sit a few days, see if I spot any more errors, then post it to fanfiction-dot-net, and upload the whole story to my Ao3 account.

I've always been happy with my creativity, but it feels really good to have my oldest outlet for it (writing) active again alongside my newer one (quilting).

Sewing Days!

Realizing that guild is this coming week and I needed to get off my kiester and get my work done, I spent Friday working on Block of the Month.  I took inspiration from this quilt:

Which is an image I saved from a Goodwill auction sometime in the last couple years.  If you look at it closely, the blocks are made a couple different ways (and I can think of at least one more) but I needed to make it easy for my guildmates, so I drafted a uniform way to do it from 2 1/2" strips, stitched up a sample in red and another in pink, and wrote up the directions. Here's the red one:

Unfortunately, we're having printer problems at the moment, so while I normally get the color printout for the board done at Office Depot, I'm going to have to get the thirty handout copies printed as well... so I'm planning on stopping at the copy shop near my parents' place tomorrow.  It's roughly half the cost.

Blocks

No sewing done yesterday, though I did work some on the Endless Embroidery Project while Jazzy was in his speech therapy session.

Instead, I cut!  I got all the alternate rows cut for the spiral geese quilt, and didn't need to piece any of them!  Fortunately.  I also got the lights cut for another Wheel of Fortune block.  And I stopped at JoAnn's after Jazzy's speech therapy and picked up some wider elastic to make the waist of Wonderful Husband's Christmas PJ bottoms fit better.  I only had 1/2" elastic on hand at the time I made them, and he's said they don't stay up as well as past ones for which I used 1" elastic.

But I did trim and depaper both of the string blocks I made yesterday:

The one on the left is 5" and the one on the right is 8.5".

I also took a picture of the latest Wheel of Fortune block:

I'm somewhat snarkily proud that not only do all the lines on the light fabric run the same way, so do all the lines on the dark blue.

Baby Steps....

I did a bit of sewing last night.  I finished another Wheel of Fortune block, and got the last strip of the giant flying geese sewn together.  I also sewed the first Tiny Tuesday block for this year's Rainbow Scrap Challenge.  And then, since I had red strings strewn all over my sewing desk, I cut a couple 8.5" foundation squares and sewed a red strings block for the Moda String-Along.

I also wrote a couple hundred words.  Easing back into writing stories.  Baby steps....

Sewing-Free Day

Haha, I did no sewing yesterday!  The closest I got was using the ironing board to press the tablecloth.  Smart'N'Final had had turkeys on sale for $.99/lb, and I had a 10% off coupon on top of that, so I got the smallest one they had, and it was still 17.5 pounds.  So I invited my parents up for dinner and spent a good part of the day cooking.  Turkey, stuffing, roast veg, sweet potato biscuits, mince pies, steamed green beans, purchased cranberry sauce, and my mother took care of the gravy.  Leftovers for them and for us, for days!

And I did a wee bit of writing in the evening....

Wheels and Spirals

I'm currently working on two projects, using them as "leaders and enders," as Bonnie Hunter would put it, for one another.  The first is sewing the giant geese together into rows for the spiral quilt.  Here's a teaser picture of the layout, with the fabric I purchased to be the alternate row in the spiral:

I'm amused by the alternate row fabric.  According to the selvedge, it's called "Branching Out."  Which is the title of my guild's quilt show this year! :)  For this project, I'm on the second-to-last row of the spiral, and then I get to start cutting the alternate row fabric into strips and piecing the whole top together.

And while I've been working on that, I've also been working on these Wheel of Fortune blocks:

Can you tell that the blue one has two different blue fabrics in it?  I ran out of one, and this is very much a using-up-the-last-scraps project, judging by how many of the centers I've had to piece thus far.  I cut the light pieces out for the next block, and all that was left over was a 1.5" square for that project bag.  Gotta use it up!

Some Sewing, Some Fandom

No pictures today, but some sewing did get done.  I laid out the Giant Geese (4"x8") I received in the block exchange I ran with my guild today, and discovered that my counting skills are shite.  Rather than the 90 I needed for the spiral layout, I have... 111.  After weeding out as many duplicates as I could while still maintaining something of a light/dark/light/dark distribution, I figure I can use the extras on the back.  So I started sewing those rows together, as well as working on the Wheel of Fortune blocks.  I finished the first WoF block and cut the light pieces I need for a second.

AND I went to see Bumblebee.  I've been a Transformers fan since the 1980s, but I gave up Bayverse after seeing Dark of the Moon, because that was the tipping point when the series went from "not good, but interesting" to "this is bad, you cannot make me watch any further."  And I ended up with FEELINGS about this movie, because it was actually GOOD.  And a love letter to the cartoon series.  And a love letter to those of us girls who weren't supposed to like things that were for boys, but did anyway.

GAH.  I wish LiveJournal hadn't gone to heck after being bought by the Russians, because right now I am really REALLY missing the community of female Transformers fans who found one another there... I want my fandom friends back.  I want to talk with them about this film, and analyze and dissect it with them, and remake our community to what it once was.  I hate the diaspora.