Zig zags appearing

The zig zag effect between my shoo flies is taking shape! There are no seams to match ... which is great in some ways but in others it's really hard because you can't tell whether it's aligned or not just from the seam that you're sewing. So I have to pin, which I very very rarely do.

But it's a slow old business as the tedious banality of my life takes up a ridiculous amount of time, considering how little fun it is. Cooking, shopping, driving kids from place to place, cleaning up ... work at least is diverting although there are a couple of really interesting trips I can't make because I'm needed at home (see "tedious banality" above). I think I need to extend my brain in some way but it's proving a challenge finding something that fits into the schedule - I can see why the continuing education courses are stuffed full of retired people! Something to look forward to.

D-d-d-d-dyeing

I took advantage of the rain storms the other day to put my greens out to be rinsed once more, by Mother Nature. Green both literally and figuratively! (I take my jokes where I can find them, trust me, there's not a lot of hilarity round here at the moment).

Normally I just get the unmixed colours but I bought something called "bright green" with the last batch of dye powders, and here it is. Looks like bright green to me! Dye that does what it says on the box, ain't that something.

This is number two son hacking into the beautiful and treasured newly-dried and ironed green hand-dyes for some dodgy craft project (involving moshlings I think).

This is me trying not to mind.

I hate farmers' markets

Going to the local farmers' markets really gives me the shits. I love the concept of course. Locally grown seasonal fruit and veg direct from the producers. Who can argue with that? I also enjoy eating it - the quality is definitely better - and cooking seasonally. It takes some of the decision-making anguish away (always the most tedious part of cooking).

But the actual experience of shopping at the damn place? Drives me bonkers. Crowded with people moving very slowly and dragging enormous roller shopping trolleys, or dogs, or kids, or mountain bikes. Or all four. Fossicking through marginal stone fruit to put in one of those grotty baskets so you can carefully squash it into your earth-friendly calico bag. None of the scales they use to weigh it lets you see what the weight is, and every price is a suspiciously round figure. Do they round up or down? Who would know.

I'm only going because my husband's not driving yet and he LOVES it. He chats about tomato growing techniques with elderly nonnas who probably learned it on Umbrian slopes under the fascists. He remembers when the avocado people have driven down, if the nectarine man has started his picking, which grower has the best cherries. I cannot even begin to imagine how he finds this stuff out.

So this morning he's patting the dogs and chatting to the neighbours and sipping his freshly squeezed watermelon juice ... I drop the bags, stand on the plums, fall over the dog leads and say terrible things like "two dollars EACH?" and "why are these lemons covered in brown spots?". Over twenty years we have developed an excellent balance of who does what and who should avoid certain activities, and now I remember why.

Trimming the flies

I've finished my 100 scrappy shoo fly blocks, and trimmed them all up to a [roughly] equivalent size. This was made much easier by my excellent christmas present from my dad - a rotating cutting board! How cool is this? I'd wanted one for ages for exactly this type of trimming, and it's brilliant. Yay.

I've cut the setting quarter square triangles - ten different fabrics to make the zigzags. I'm just making it up as I go along, but I think I've got it right, and it should look sort of old and scrappy-ish. The maths are slightly doing my head in, but I'm used to that.

Looking forward to the weekend! This drop-off kids / work / pick-up kids / cook / clean / go to bed business really eats into your sewing time ... back to sad reality for me.

Not nearly enough sewing

I can hear the siren call of the sewing room as I walk past it, with arms full of laundry, or filing, or stagger my way exhausted to bed ... I'm exaggerating terribly of course - it's just the last few days of holiday and there seem to be a million things to do and it's SO hard to get back up to speed! The boys are back at school tomorrow which everyone is really looking forward to. They went and saw the class lists this morning, and they have almost all their friends in the same classes with them, which is lovely.

The one-armed man is managing to beat me at table tennis, even with the injury. How humiliating! This is at our friends' house, but we're thinking this might be a very good idea for us. We can park the cars on the street .... Yesterday was a lovely warm day for a change so we went over for lunch and a swim. And what's good to do after a dip in the pool ... chasing chickens!!!! They were very docile little chooks and the kids completely fell in love.

But we're not getting any - one morning this week my husband opened the curtains downstairs and startled a fox on the pathway with a very dead chicken in its mouth. We haven't asked the neighbours, but the foxes rarely stop at one, so I think someone had a sad morning in the suburbs. And here's a good photo to post on the last day of the holidays!!!

Dyeing quietly

I've been working my way through the white homespun I bought a while back - it's taking a dye really well. I find the fabric I buy wildly variable, even when it is labelled the same and costs the same from the same place. I haven't had any real failures - but some seem to take the colour with more intensity, and there is definitely a big difference when you go to sew them! But the variety is part of the fun I think.

When I folded my dyed fabric I realised that what I used most of are the saturated colours. I thought I might find a preference for yellow, or blue, but it seems that I have equivalent amounts of pale and muddy in every shade. So I'm trying to rebuild the dense colours with oodles of dye and letting it go down the drain (gasp!) rather than keeping on making paler colours. Sometimes I can't help myself though.

An oldie

Unsurprisingly, I haven't been doing a lot of sewing since we got back from the beach! Between looking after the boys, and the house, and hospital visits, and making a cameo appearance at the office, my time has been well and truly taken up. The good news is that my husband had his surgery on Monday and they put him back together (with eleven pins in his arm, gulp).

And now he's back home; a bit sore but given everything he's gone through he's surprisingly alert and managing the pain well. We grumbled a bit about him being bumped off the surgery list on Sunday by some emergencies, but given that it was all done in the public system (i.e completely free) and he was looked after so well the whole time, we feel pretty happy with his treatment and very lucky about where we live.

I took this quilt over to NZ in the suitcase of quilts that I left with the whanau - I blogged about the piecing but never showed a picture of the finished product. So here it is! I followed the circles with big stitch and it's a very soft finish. So now it's sitting in Dad's cupboard rather than mine. Is this progress?