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So it’s a new year

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Well, that whole return to blogging didn’t last long last year, did it? And to be honest, this one probably won’t either. It’s mostly because vlogging has taken over a lot of the role blogging used to play for me, but also just that usual loop of it’s been so long since I blogged anything, it’ll take me forever to catch up, so it’s easier to just set it aside for a bit longer. And then suddenly it’s 2021.

So I’m not going to try and properly catch things up (other than lots of photos of craft projects, mainly just so I’ve got something to link to for my annual round-up of what I made last year… which is a bit redundant, because it means this post and the round-up post will almost be identical…) Life continues in this weird what passes for normal (as long as you don’t look beyond the borders) state here in Aotearoa. We’re (except in the border isolation hotels) Covid free, and life has sort of returned to normal, except for not being able to leave the country, and always being a bit on edge waiting for the next community outbreak to shut things down again, and anything that needs to be imported being horrifically expensive or in short supply (that part feels like being back in the Muldoon years!). But otherwise, it’s easy to forget that the pandemic rages on everywhere else.

The being on edge thing has kept me in Christchurch for the Christmas break – I’d thought about going down to Alexandra, but knowing how stupid people can get around Christmas and New Years, and the inevitable huge parties, I was a bit worried that if there was going to be another outbreak, it’d be during the holiday period, and very likely somewhere like Queenstown. And much as I love Alex, the thought of being stuck down there if we went back into lockdown wasn’t tempting – especially if I’d end up working from home for months again, with the terrible internet down there! So I’ve stayed at home and had a very quiet Christmas – which has had the advantage of having plenty of time to get on with some craft projects (and some video projects – for once I’ve actually got a bit of a buffer of scheduled videos, so I don’t have to be scrambling to edit a video every week!)

And talking of craft projects, here’s lots of photos, in no particular order:

The project I’m most proud of is Birb, the wall-hanging I made for my niece. It’s a portrait of her pet cockatiel, and I was working on it off and on since sometime in the winter. It was a bit of a last-minute rush to get the binding sewn off so I could post it down to her for Christmas.

I based the pattern (very loosely) on a quilt I saw online somewhere that had a variety of different birds in a similar style, though I ended up changing a lot of the details as I went along.

I made a pieced back for it, because I had a few half-square triangles left over, so I decided it would be fun to try and incorporate them into the back. Even though when it gets hung on the wall nobody will ever see those details, I really like the idea that the back is interesting too – it’s like including a little easter egg 🙂

I’m really proud of the quilting – it feels like it nicely shows off how far my skills have progressed over the last few years 🙂 And I had a lot of fun coming up with quilting designs for each component.

It’s also the biggest quilt I’ve completed this year (I have made a couple of quilt tops that are bigger, but they’re still sitting on the pile waiting for inspiration to strike to get them actually quilted). Everything else has been mini-quilts – probably because they seem more manageable at the moment.

One you might have already seen if you follow Yetzirah’s blog is the mini-quilt I made to celebrate reaching 100 subscribers on my YouTube channel. I had a little competition where viewers could suggest a quilt theme, and I’d draw one out and make it for them. Yetzirah’s name came out of the hat, with the suggestion of hearts and batiks. She’d just been converting her chicken coop into a writing retreat room, so I had that space in mind when I made it. A gorgeous NZ-made batik ended up being the central fabric, so I called it Tūī in the Henhouse.

It’s another one where I incorporated a spare block into the back, this time as a label:

A mini-quilt that didn’t make it onto my YouTube channel was the one I very quickly made as a wedding present for two friends who’d converted their civil union into a marriage and threw a party to celebrate. They’re both major Star Trek and LEGO geeks, so coming up with a design to suit wasn’t hard 🙂

I had to Google the shape of the communicator badges on their shirts – I’m definitely not a Trekkie 🙂

And one that has already featured on my channel is a little Christmas tree that came from a rainy, I feel like starting something new, sort of day just before Christmas. I had a charm pack I didn’t know what I wanted to do with, so I just started playing, and this was the result:

Plus, I finally got round to finishing off the last of the Christmas mini-quilts I started years ago (I just checked – it was in 2017! That was when I finally learnt the lesson that making anything in bulk is boring, and I’ll give up half way through, so I really shouldn’t attempt it, no matter how much it seems like a cool idea to make loads of something so I can give one to everyone I know).

There were also lots of quilted things that weren’t actually quilts. Like the cushions I made as a housewarming gift for another friend. I half-jokingly said I should make her some cushions, and asked her what colours she liked. When she replied “rainbows”, I immediately had the (slightly over-ambitious) thought that doing something with a bargello technique would be fun, despite the fact I’d never actually tried bargello before (when has that ever stopped me?). I used bargello for one of the cushions, and then used the scraps from it to make a complementary design for the other one.

I also made a couple of hot water bottle covers, one for myself, and one for my niece (yes, I do make a lot of things for her – she’s totally spoilt 😉 )

This is my one,which started off as a mistake – I cut some of the pieces wrong for one of the blocks in the Sugaridoo quilt, so decided to use them for an improvised block, which ended up being a hot water bottle
And this is my niece’s – I basically just wanted an excuse to use that forest fabric 🙂

This very small mat was made at the request of Mum, who wanted something to put under her kettle to reduce the noise when it boils. Her request was for something very simple, and red to match her kitchen. But of course, simple is boring, so I ended up experimenting with an octagonal log cabin (with limited success – it’s really hard to keep the angles on an octagon accurate as you add to it!)

I really love this fabric I put on the back – actually, I think I like the back more than the front!

Mum loved it so much it didn’t actually end up doing the job it was intended for – instead of putting it under the kettle, where it would be hidden, she’s got it out on display, under the fruit bowl 🙂

Another request from Mum was for a cat bed for Raji. He’s been overflowing his existing one, so she wanted one slightly bigger. So I bought some fake fur and adapted a dog bed pattern:

It ended up very puffy in the centre – hopefully Raji is heavy enough to sink into it, and not float on top 🙂

I only finished it a couple of days ago, so I haven’t had a chance to get it posted down to her yet – I’ll do that once the post office opens on Tuesday. I’m looking forward to finding out whether it gets Raji’s seal of approval (Parsnips sniffed at it once, and hasn’t gone near it since).

In other non-quilting craft projects, I also made another big pile of bunting for the union, this time in Pasifika fabrics:

This is some of it hanging in the corridor outside my office – we had a competition in our building to decorate the hallways for Christmas, and our floor (which we share with the Pacific Research Centre) decided to go for a “Pacific Wonderland” theme.

And of course, like everyone with access to a sewing machine, made many, many, many masks for friends and family (and a few for myself).

I had to make at least one with cats on it 🙂

And finally for the completed projects, I made noticeboards for my craft room/study, so I can finally stop trying to stick pins directly into the walls:

Testing, testing… is this thing on?

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Yeah, so it’s been a while. But it seems that improvements have quietly been taking place with the DD site behind the scenes, and things that were broken are perhaps unbroken, and I’ve been prompted to actually write a blog post for the first time in forever.

Once again, I don’t even know where to start with getting caught up, so here’s just a random selection of news:

  • My surgery was successful, and I totally love my new improved body. There’s still a bit of swelling and lumpy scar tissue that’s slowly breaking down (and it’ll probably be a couple of years before the scars start to fade a bit), but I’m really happy. Totally worth it! (There are (of course) several videos if you want to see all the gory details: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLQCyCJrez23-1jrxigUGYKZyG0k8GZoCQ)
  • This weekend marks a year since I was diagnosed with diabetes. There’s been a few ups and downs (the downs mostly being around a bit of food anxiety I developed, thanks largely to the (I now know wrong) dietary advice I was given right at the start when everyone assumed it must be Type 2. I still have the odd moment of anxiety about what I “should” be eating, but I’m slowly learning to relax and believe my dietician when she says I really can eat anything, as long as I balance my insulin appropriately.
  • At work I’m now officially the Lab’s manager (as opposed to the sort-of acting manager I’d been for the last couple of years). I’m very much finding my feet still with the new role – it’s got a lot of those kind of challenges you’re supposed to describe as “exciting” but are more accurately called “stressful”, but it also has a lot of good bits.
  • The Lab was moved into a new (well, newly refurbished, anyway – it’s been closed for a year for the last of the earthquake repairs) building last month. And in the juggling of people and resources that moving always entails, it suddenly turned out that there was an office going spare. So I now, for the first time in my entire working career, have my own office! It’s taking a bit of getting used to, after having worked in open plan and shared offices for so long (it’s a bit lonely sometimes!), but it’s also cool having a space that’s all my own – I’m looking forward to decorating it!
  • At home, I’m going to have slightly less space of my own next year, because my eldest nephew and his girlfriend are moving into a caravan in my back yard. They’re both coming up to Christchurch for tertiary study (Nephew at the university, and Niece-Out-Law at the polytech), and all the accommodation options they were looking at were horrendously expensive, so Nephew came up with a plan: for a fraction of what a year’s rent would cost, they can buy a nice, completely self-contained caravan (for my American readers, think something more like a trailer), and he asked me if he could park it in the back of my section. In return, they’re going to tidy up the back of the section for me, and pave the area where the caravan will be parked (so when they’re gone next summer I’ll have a nice outdoor area where I can set up an outdoor table and chairs), and generally help out with things like gardening and supermarket runs. They came up for a visit a few weeks ago so we could talk it all through, and I think it’s going to work out really well. Because they’ll be self-contained, they won’t need to come into the house (except for laundry, which we’ve agreed they’ll do during the week while I’m at work), so it won’t be any disruption to my life, and I’ll have all the benefits of having family nearby (like feeding the cat when I’m away!). And I get to help my nephew in a really practical way to take his first steps along his academic journey. So win-win all round 🙂

(There’s lots of craft projects to catch you up on too, but that involves sorting through photos, so they’ll have to wait for another time.)

So welcome back! And hopefully I’ll do a slightly better job of sticking round this time…

It’s been a while

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Usual excuses – too busy doing stuff to write about it (though I did make a few more videos, which may have contributed to the lack of blog posts – videos are fun to make, but incredibly time-consuming to edit, and by the time I’ve sat at the computer for long enough to do that, I don’t feel like blogging…)

I can’t remember everything I’ve been doing since I last posted, so a few highlights:

Last weekend I went with Pieta to a craft workshop run by Rekindle, where we learnt to weave baskets from cabbage tree leaves.  It was a lot of fun, and I was pretty pleased with how my basket turned out for a first try.

They’re holding the Rekindle workshops in the Arts Centre now, instead of out in Ferrymead, which makes them a lot easier to get to, so hopefully I’ll be able to do some more.

In other craft news, I haven’t given up on my Block of the Whenever quilt, but I did set it aside for a while so I could play with some other ideas.  Most notably, learning to do partial seams (while also videoing the process, which mainly taught me that my craft room is not big enough to be a studio!) to make a herringbone-patterned cushion (actually, the bit of that cushion I’m most proud of is the quilting – I tried to emulate Angela Walters‘s “improv quilting” technique, with lots of feathers and swirls, and it turned out incredibly well.

There’s also been some D&D (both in the form of returning to Gwilk’s game, as well as being invited to join another game (made up of pretty much the same people as Gwilk’s game, but with different characters, which could be challenging), as well as going to another Dungeons and Comedians show the other night), and board games, and meeting all sorts of new and interesting people, and going to talks and dinners and even to watch a band (who weren’t that great, but the people I was with were fun, so that made it worth going).  And generally being excessively social (well, excessively social for me, anyway 🙂 ).  Oh, and being incredibly busy at work and learning all sorts of new skills that take me well outside my comfort zone, but that’s preferable to being bored!

I really must remember to post more frequently, so I don’t forget half the stuff I’ve done before I get a chance to write about it…

Home!

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Actually, I’ve been home for a few days, but DD was down.

I had an amazing time in France (and Spain) – had a million adventures, which I might even get round to writing up one day (yeah, I always promise that, but we know it’s never going to happen…)

I did manage to film a few videos though, so in case you’re not one of my 11 YouTube subscribers (yep, I’m totally famous now!), here they are:

So far

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Things I like about my new phone

  1. I can talk to it!  And it knows what I’m saying (mostly – there’s a few NZ vowel sounds it struggles with still (setting an alarm for 10 pm is something I’m yet to achieve – that lovely NZE [e] vowel in ten just confuses the poor thing…)) and does things when I tell it to.  There’s something so satisfying about waking up and saying “Hey Google, what’s the forecast” to find out what the weather’s like (yeah, I know I could just look out the window, but where’s the fun in that?).
  2. Google maps knows when my next bus is going to arrive.  And even better, it can tell where my nearest bus stop is, and tell me which buses will arrive there next, so I don’t have to try and find the bus stop number.   So I don’t have to do the “The timetable says a bus should have passed here 3 minutes ago, but they’re often late, so there’s a chance it could still turn up, so maybe I should wait, but if it’s already passed then the next one won’t be for half an hour, so it might be quicker to walk” calculation I’m constantly doing at stops that don’t have an arrivals indicator (which is most of them).
  3. I can download e-books from the library!  And audiobooks! (I could do that already, but I was limited to the ones that were in the correct format to play on my little mp3 player, so this opens up the range of audiobooks I can borrow enormously! Technically I could also download e-books before, but (because Amazon’s complicated licencing agreements) I couldn’t read them on my Kindle, so my only option was to read them on my computer, and you can’t cosy up in a comfy chair with a computer.)
  4. I had lunch with Jacq yesterday and they showed me a magic trick: you can write a text by swiping across the keyboard instead of typing each character individually.  I have no idea how it manages to figure out which word I meant from my vague swipey motions in roughly the direction of the right letters, but it does (mostly – it gets a bit confused if you like to make up words like swipey).
  5. My search for a protective cover (it took me about a day of carrying it around to realise the chances of me dropping it/banging it into something/crushing it by having too many books in my bag were very high, and that this would make me anxious if I didn’t do something about it) led me to the discovery that there are very many very cool phone cases out there.  I settled on this one for now (well I had to – it’s a cat wearing glasses and drinking hot chocolate (yeah, it’s probably supposed to be coffee, but I don’t like coffee), and as a bonus, the cat looks like Parsnips!), but I suspect my phone will end up having several outfits it can change into according to mood.  Who knew a phone would have so many options to decorate it?
  6. I can take photos (like important photos of my phone case to put in my blog) even when I don’t have my camera with me.  Which is a good thing, because my big camera is big.  And heavy.  So I only carry it when I’m going somewhere I think I’ll want to take photos.  Which means when spontaneous photo opportunities happen, I’ll actually be able to take photos of them (and yes, I know everyone who has a smart phone has been telling me this for ever, but it wasn’t a big enough reason to buy a smart phone.  But now that I have one, it’s a nice bonus.)  The photos aren’t as good as I could take on my real camera, of course (I would hope not, given how much I paid for it!), but they’re good enough for quick snapshots.  My big camera will still be accompanying me on my travels and to places I know I’ll want to take real photos, though!

Things I don’t like about my new phone

  1. It’s very distracting.  Because it can do so many things, the temptation is to be constantly using it – I can understand now why teenagers are constantly on their phones.  I’m hoping the novelty will wear off soon though and I’ll stop finding excuses to play with it.
  2. My pockets aren’t big enough.  I could carry my old phone (which was tiny) around in my pocket if I needed to, but this one won’t fit (or, it will, but it hangs out of the top and I’m scared it’ll fall out).  So if I want to take it with me, I have to either carry it in my hand, or in my bag, which means I always have to carry my bag (which I generally do anyway, because my bag is where I carry books, and being stuck somewhere without a book to read is my worst nightmare).
  3. It doesn’t understand the difference between ten and tin in a NZ accent (see above, although honestly, I’m impressed it can understand a NZ accent at all – voice recognition has come a long way!)
  4. Having an actual app to read library e-books and audiobooks means I have to return them on time.  I’m so used to uploading a few at a time to my mp3 player (which isn’t sophisticated enough to have DRM, so keeps playing them even after they expire), and only removing them once they’re finished, instead of at the end of the loan period.  I’m sure I’ll cope, though.
  5. If I have it too close to my bus card, it starts beeping at me (presumably it’s trying to read the RFID in the card?).  So I can’t use the card slots in the nice new case I bought for it as intended (because if I keep my bus card separate to my other cards, I’m sure to forget to bring it with me, and I never have the right change to pay cash on the bus).

Yeah, pretty minor complaints, really.  So on balance, I think the phone was a good purchase.  (All of you who’ve spent the last several years telling me to get a proper phone may now say “I told you so”)

But isn’t my new phone case cool? 🙂

And we’re back!

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DD was down for a couple of weeks, and it’s amazing how much the urge to blog strikes when you don’t have a platform!  Of course, now that it’s back, I can’t remember any of the stuff I wanted to write about, so I’ll have to content myself with pretty pictures of crafty things I got up to over the past couple of weekends.

First of all, I finished the banner of birds for the back of my Birds in Flight quilt!

Now I just need to add the rest of the backing, and then figure out how I’m going to quilt it…

In the meantime, I ignored all the other half-finished projects piled in the corner, and started something new. This one was a pretty quick project – I managed to sew the (lap-sized) top over the space of a couple of days.

The technique is called “disappearing nine-patch”. It starts with a “layer cake” of 10-inch squares (this is not strictly true, it could actually be made out of any fabrics, but the layer cake was one of the ones I’d bought on sale and wanted an excuse to use, and it happened to have exactly the right proportion of light to dark fabrics).

The fabrics sorted (approximately) by colour (to try and keep the distribution reasonably even) and cut into 5-inch squares:

And then arranged into sets of 9, alternating dark and light:

And sewn into nine-patches:

So far, so boring. But then, you cut the nine-patch into quarters, and get much more interesting blocks as a result:

Which can be put together in all sorts of interesting ways, but the one that most inspired me was matching the small corner squares to give the illusion of a third large square hiding behind each pair of bigger squares:

This was as far as I got the first weekend. It sat on my design wall for the rest of the week, and every time I went into the study I’d tweak the blocks a bit more, trying to move them around so the colours were well distributed, and there weren’t too many identical fabrics in close proximity. Finally last weekend I got it to a point I was reasonably happy with, and finished sewing the top together:

I’m quite pleased with how it’s looking. The fabric line is called “Holly Wishes”, so presumably it’s intended to be Christmassy, but it feels more like autumn to me (in person, it’s a little bit less yellow than in the photo – I took that late in the afternoon on a grey and rainy day, so it’s half artificial light). It was a really quick fun technique too – I might have to experiment with doing it again with other fabrics (I’ll add it to my very long list of quilt ideas I’m going to try one day…)

Of course, now I have to quilt it… or just add it to that growing pile of half-finished projects…

Off with their hair

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Those of you who know me in real life (TM) will know that for the past year or two I’ve been muttering about how one day I’m going to suddenly cut off all my hair.  Well, one day arrived…

Yeah, bit of a drastic change 🙂 (Although in photos it doesn’t really look all that different, because I always tied my hair back anyway, so you couldn’t really tell in photos just how long it was).  It’s still not exactly the way I want it – I’m going to go back in a few weeks to get the top cut even shorter, but the hairdresser wanted me to leave it at this stage for a few weeks while the follicles relax back into shape – having had it long for so long (and almost always tied back in the same way) has stretched them into weird directions, so I still have a very noticeable part down the centre of my head at the moment, which would be emphasised even more if the hair was even shorter – hopefully it will disappear as the follicles realign themselves.  But even so, I’m very happy with it.  And a bit nervous about what everyone’s going to say when I go into work on Monday… (I didn’t tell anyone what I was planning 🙂 )

Harvestbird accompanied me to the appointment (mainly to make sure I didn’t chicken out at the last minute 🙂 ), and documented the entire process (the hairdresser was having a lot of fun demonstrating various cutting techniques and hairstyles from the ages as he cut it steadily shorter), so once she’s uploaded the photos (and video!) I’ll post them here for everyone’s amusement.

Sorry it’s been such a long time between posts.  Work was stupidly busy for a while there (it still is, but at least I’ve got my two new staff now, which has taken some of the pressure off), so I’ve been getting home at night and just crashing, and haven’t been feeling inspired to write.  I really should try and get into the habit again though – I’ve actually been having all sorts of non-work adventures, but haven’t had time/energy to write about any of them.

Most recent was that last Tuesday Dana and I went to see a talk by Neil deGrasse Tyson, which was amazing (even if I did have the odd moment of wishing he was Carl Sagan instead (hashtag geek-child of the 70s)).  For a start, it was at the Horncastle Arena (where graduation was), which is Christchurch’s biggest venue, and normally reserved for big international music acts.  That a scientist was speaking to a sold-out audience in that venue was an amazing thought – rock-star scientist indeed!

He spoke very inspiringly and entertainingly too – I was so glad I went.  At the end, they had an opportunity for audience members to ask questions, but we were sitting so far up the back in the cheap seats (which were only relatively cheap – rock-star scientists command rock-star prices!) at the top of the arena that there was no way we’d have made it down to the queue for the microphone in time (not that I would have been able to think of a decent question anyway, even if I’d been sitting right up the front).  The first couple of questions were of that non-question “Here is a long rant about my favourite hot-button topic, what do you think?” type, but then people started asking really complex and interesting questions about astrophysics (some of the best questions came from kids!), and deGrasse Tyson gave wonderful answers that managed to be non-technical enough that everyone in the audience would understand it, without dumbing down any of the really deep and interesting stuff that made the questions so fascinating.  The Q&A part went way over time, because deGrasse Tyson kept saying he was going to make his answers briefer so more people would get a chance to ask a question, but then would get caught up in the complexities of the answer, and it would be just as long as the previous one.  The compère kept suggesting that maybe it was time to wrap things up, and deGrasse Tyson would agree, yes, just one more question, and then carry on 🙂   By the time he finished, the security people were herding everyone out the door almost before the applause had finished – I think they wanted to get home!

I haven’t made a lot of progress quilt-wise, for similar reasons to the lack of blogging (plus it being too cold in the study most evenings).  But I managed to get a few more rows sewn onto the little squares quilt:

Although I’m loving how it’s turning out (I think it’s my favourite one I’ve made so far), I’ll be so glad to get this one finished – matching all those seams is hard work!

So, about those photos

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Having been unsuccessful at figuring out which wire to wiggle to get my second hard drive working again, I gave in and paid a professional to look at it.  And it turns out that the reason my wire-wiggling wasn’t working this time was because the hard drive had entirely failed.  So, unless I want to pay vast amounts of money (like, nearly $1000) to a specialist data-recovery place to try and get the data off it, all my photos are gone 🙁

The good news is that I never got round to deleting the files from two of the three memory cards from last year’s trip to Greece and Italy, so I’ve still got those.  The third memory card I did delete (because I needed space on the card for graduation photos…), but the deleted photos should still be reasonably easily (and cheaply!) recoverable, so computer repair guy is going to try and get them for me.

The bad news is that all of those photos I never got round to uploading from America, and Ireland, and Australia are gone.  And even the ones I did upload to Flickr are only low-quality versions – I kept the original high-quality versions on the hard drive in case I wanted to print them one day.

There may well have been other things on the drive that I’ll regret having lost, but I can’t think of anything major – the software is easily replaceable, and anything really important I kept on the main drive (or, in the case of my thesis, on my computer at work, which is backed up to the university’s servers).  It was just the photos that I stored on the secondary drive, because they took up too much space on the main drive.

Oh well, a lesson in backing up my data, I suppose (and in not putting off sorting and uploading photos for years!).  And even though I’ve lost the photos from my travels, I’ve still got the memories.  Which is what’s really important.  So I won’t be paying vast amounts of money to get the data recovered – I’d rather spend it on another trip 🙂

Redecorating

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You might have noticed that things look a little bit different around here.  I’m still not completely happy with it – the background is just a random copyright-free one I downloaded, and the header image could still do with a bit of work, but for something thrown together over a couple of lunch hours, I reckon it’s ok.  (I just realised, I really should have taken a screenshot of the old design, for posterity, but too late now.)

I toyed with many different names for my blog re-branding, but in the end “The Cattery” sounded like the most likely place for a FutureCat to hang out in, so that’s what stuck.  It’s a terrible name in terms of Googlability, but I’ve never worried about that in the past, so why start now? 🙂

So, welcome to The Cattery.  The name may have changed, but it’ll still be the same random collection of posts about crafts, cats, books, travel, and life stuff.

Edited to add: The clever Discoverylover found a cached version of my old blog design and screenshotted it for me. So you can now do a proper before-and-after comparison:

We’re gonna need a bigger boat

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I basted the flower garden quilt yesterday.  Which is just a fancy way of saying I pinned the top, batting and back together so that it’s ready for quilting.  Which means you’ve got to spread out the fabrics somewhere you can lay them completely flat before you pin, otherwise you get wrinkles in the backing.  Except I made the quilt just a little bit too big for the biggest bit of floor space I have:

I think I need a bigger room. Or maybe I could just get rid of some furniture – I don’t really need a couch in my living room, do I?

I did manage to get it basted in the end, by leaving the edges until last and then moving it around a bit, but the thought of getting that massive quilt on my little sewing machine is a bit daunting!  (And as quilts go, it’s not actually that huge – it’s a bit less than queen size).

In the meantime, to get my FMQ muscles back in shape, I quilted the hedgehog.  I decided to try a spiky sort of quilting design, and I think it came out really well.

It even looks cool on the back. I used more of the orange fabric for the backing, and the spiky stitching on it came out looking like a cross between flames and an autumn leaf pile:

Just got to put the binding on, and it’ll be done (that’s the nice thing about mini quilts – they don’t take months (or years, in the case of the bird quilt!) to finish 🙂 )

I haven’t just been using my days off to sew (ok, mostly I’ve been using them to sew, but I have done some other stuff, honestly!).  Yesterday I met up with some old friends of Mum’s for afternoon tea.  They moved up to Christchurch a couple of years ago, and actually live in the next suburb over from me, but I hadn’t got round to getting in touch with them.  However, the other day I ran into them unexpectedly, so we made arrangements to meet up.  It was great catching up with them (I think I’ve seen them in person only a couple of times since I was at high school!), and they’re really lovely people – they kept insisting if I ever needed any help with anything to call on them, and they’ve promised to invite me to their next barbecue – you’d think it was me who’d newly moved into the area, not them! 🙂

And yes, Mum, I passed on your news, and they’re totally thrilled for you (though they’ve already probably rung you to tell you that – I think P. was going to ring you as soon as he got home!)

In other news, I think it’s time for a rebranding around here.  This blog stopped being primarily about bookcrossing a long time ago, so it seems silly that the name and theme is so bookcrossing-focussed. So I need a new name, and a new decorating scheme.

Except for I don’t know what to call it!  Any thoughts?  I’d like to get FutureCat in the title somewhere, but I can’t think of anything that doesn’t sound cheesy.  Maybe I should just follow Yetzirah’s lead and just make the title my name?  Any ideas greatly appreciated!