Redeemed by Rolls

I started my weekend with the best of intentions. Tidying of the sewing room and finishing the quilting on Mr. P's T-Shirt quilt were both on the agenda. Once those things were done I planned to move on to dragging out the triangle quilt and seeing if I could make some progress on that. With the whole weekend stretching ahead of me I felt confident, motivated and determined. 

Friday morning I had an appointment and then met up for morning tea with the lovely Sue who blogs over at Mother Patchwork. It was our first meeting so I was on my best behaviour and didn't do anything to disgrace myself. I ate my cheesecake with a fork not my fingers , and managed not to swear (much). The best thing about meeting up with blog people is when they don't turn out to be axe murderers and Sue was just lovely.  I also managed to finally find the perfect handbag to match all my aqua /blue clothes and 3 new books at the bookshop. I think that was fate at work because I've been looking for a handbag in this colour for about a year. Isn't the bottom cute? 

Later, I knocked it out of the park for dinner with my take on an open faced BLT with hash browns and avocado and tomato salsa.  I went to bed feeling all was right with the world and that my life totally rocked. 

It all went a bit pear shaped on Saturday when the mood took me to go back to bed at 8.30 am after a mere 30 minutes of sewing(and not on the T-shirt quilt) Ostensibly I went back to chat with Mr. P who likes to lay in on weekends. The next thing I knew it was 11am, and I decided I was going to stay in bed all day, reading, playing on my Ipad, and chatting to Indy and Lola who decided to join me. So Saturday was a bust unless your definition of achievement  includes playing Hay Day and spending hours on Pinterest. 

Sunday, I was distracted by shiny things. After a promising hour of Facetime sewing with Little Miss Sunshine (again on the postage stamp quilt- not the T-shirt quilt - that thing is destined to be a WIP forever ) I wandered off to do some really exciting things like washing, and a spot of grocery shopping.Then, completely out of the blue I decided to make cinnamon rolls. Kirsten posted a recipe she uses for these last year and I decided I'd procrastinated enough.   

All was going swimmingly until the second rise when Lola decided to limp in holding one of her front paws up and crying. I'm sure Lola could have been more accommodating with the timing of her injury since we were just at the vet on Friday with three animals having annual checkups and vaccinations...plus I had rolls rising. It took about three minutes for me to decide we had to get her to the emergency vet. I figured the worst that could happen was that my rolls would rise to be the size of boulders and who doesn't love a massive bun?

An hour later Lola was dosed up to the eye balls with anti histamines and anti inflammatories having been bitten by "something" (probably something lethal like a bull ant for crying out loud) and my rolls went into the oven. And came out looking pretty darn fabulous. Voila!

After all that excitement I went and had a nanna nap for 4 hours on the couch. And the only thing I achieved for the weekend was to eat cinnamon rolls to excess. But they were bloody good ! 

Eating humble pie

You'll notice I'm woefully late in putting up my "look what I did in February" post. I had a plan for February. An ambitious plan. A plan that somewhere along the line went dreadfully awry. 

Since I don't want to accept personal responsibility for my own shortcomings I'm blaming February for only having 28 days, the bag that got stuck in my head and wouldn't leave until I made it and the fact I wandered off and cut out a bajillion triangles when I should have been quilting for my lack of progress on  my list last month.  

And since I'm all about focussing on the positive I'm not going to re-cap what I didn't get done because the "didn't get finished" list is longer than the "Nailed it" list and that's just too embarrassing. Thanks goodness the girls helped me pull all the bits of paper out of those damn hexies because left to my own devices I'd still be pulling frigging papers out at Christmas.  

So let's just say I had a 50% success rate for February finishes and move on to March shall we? Here's what I'm hoping to get done. 

1)Re-do that blasted lounge chair. The fabric finally arrived yesterday.  I went to buy a tack remover from the hardware store last weekend and they looked at me as if I was a crazy lady but that may have had something to do with the fact that I had a tack hammer in the other hand. Or perhaps I looked like I was going to batter them to death with the tack hammer when they said they didn't have a tack remover? Whatever . The chair needs to be finished and it's going to be a bitch of a job. Maybe I'll save that for Easter weekend. It might stop me from swearing so much given the significance of the holiday and all.  

Auditioning the fabric. It would have been too bad if I wasn't happy with it because Mr. P almost died when I told him how much I spent on this lot.  

2) Finish the last 10 shirt blocks. Words cannot convey how utterly sick I am of those blocks at the moment. 

3) Make a baby quilt. I dobbed myself in to make this for one of Sister of Pyjamas friends who is expecting. I figure a baby quilt wont take all that long to put together...famous last words?

4) Finish Superheroes 1 quilt. Yep -I've spent a month procrastinating on the quilting. I'm so ashamed I'm not even going to show a picture. 

5)Put together superheroes 2  top for Little P . All the blocks are done, and I've bought border fabric so that should be an easy job.  And again Im tempting fate with over confidence!

I've learned my lesson about over ambitious lists so this months has far less on it . Maybe I'll be able to get everything crossed off that way. The big list thing doesn't seem to have been wildly successful for me so far this year. And ummm- yeah ...I've yet to finish a quilt for 2013. 

We've got an impromptu family brunch here this morning so I'm off to make coffee cake and cut fruit for fruit salad. You're welcome to drop in if you like . I always over cater. This afternoon's plan is to tackle that long avoided quilting!

60 minutes

It hasn't been as wildly productive round here as I'd hoped. What I've learned this week is that two hours of sewing usually takes me about 5 hours. I wander off and check my emails and then go play three games of fruit link and then decide I'm hungry and make something to eat. Then I go back to sewing for 20 minutes and then the cycle repeats itself. I keep telling myself that since I manage to hold down a paying job where I'm at the beck and call of pretty much everyone all week that I'm entitled to be flighty on weekends. 

This morning I decided an hour of sewing means 60 minutes of actual sewing time and that I was going to spend an hour working on a project and then change to something else to keep it fresh.  I reasoned that the added bonus would be progress on pretty much all my existing projects. 

Something I've learned today is that sometimes an hour looks like you didn't do anything much even if you aren't jumping up to challenge inanimate pieces of fruit on your I Pad. 

The first hour yielded this. So far so good.

 Hour 2 saw me whipping up 10 little lantern blocks. 

I started hour 3 full of enthusiasm and decided to sew the hourglass quilt blocks into a top. Half way through the quilt top , at the 45 minute mark, I realised I'd somehow managed to sew two bits together wrong. Very grudgingly I set about doing some unsewing. Once that was done I realised that I've managed to stuff up a couple of other bits which means a whole load more unpicking to get to them. The quilt top got thrown on the ironing board in disgust. I spent the remainder of the hour swearing. 

You can almost finish 8 selvage squares in 35 minutes. 

At this point after three hours and 20 minutes of effort , I decided to reward myself by reading a bit more of Sense and Sensibility. 

Oops!4 hours goes by in the blink of an eye when you accidentally take a Nanna nap.

My word for this week is focus.

Excuses., Excuses...

You all know the sorry saga of how I left quilting the Flying Dutchman quilt until the last minute. I made a big song and dance publicly about having to do it all in a mere six  days. 6 days is a pretty tall order even for me, especially since I've cornered the market on avoidance lately. I'm seriously considering changing my blog name to Procrastinating in My Pyjamas. 


Straight up I'm going to confess I didn't touch it Wednesday or Thursday.

I ended up working all day Friday so I was shattered by the time I got home. Not so shattered that I couldn't make this though instead of doing what I was supposed to be doing. 4 days till deadline. Tick, Tock, Tick , Tock.

Saturday I planned to work on that quilt all day. Really. Miss P phoned at  10.15 am begging for help to move to her new house as  all  her friends had piked on helping her and she needed us to come with a trailer to pick up a "few" things. A few things turned out to be 3/4 of her house most of which was not yet packed. Three trips later with a cage trailer (and a lot of frenzied packing) and we finally got home at 6.15 last night. I was shattered. Not so shattered that I couldn't finish this though instead of what I was supposed to be doing. 3 days till deadline. Tick. Tick. Tick.

Today I woke to the certain knowledge that I had 41 hours to complete this quilt before D day. I was shattered. Not so shattered that I couldn't sit at the computer commenting on 30 blog posts and responding to about 20 emails this morning though. 

Finally at 9 am  I knew I could procrastinate no more....Nothing like a little bit of pressure to get your motivation going. And at 4.52pm I'm pretty sure I heard victory trumpets and angels singing to herald the finish of the quilting. I'm not showing it yet because it's the lint-iest quilt ever and I haven't brushed it down yet.

Now I just have to do the binding ...sigh...I hope your Sunday was full of crafty times.