Science fact: all of the best interiors photos have indistinct piles of stuff in them in the background.

After what feels like a million years of having the many stages of quilt evolution lying around my living room, the quilt is finally done! As of this morning it is bound, washed, and waiting to be used. It is wonky, it is random, and — if I may say so myself — it’s wonderful.

Disturbingly, given how much I was dreading it, I think my favourite part of the whole thing was handsewing the binding. I started last night, and finished this morning — a good few hours of work, but slightly addictive as you watch the quilt really form in front of you. Because we go away later today, my obsessive part kicked in once I’d started and wanted it all finished before I left and, courtesy of a lousy night’s sleep, it was.

What’s that? You want a wonky, badly framed bird’s eye view of the whole quilt top? Well, that’s lucky…

You can see in this photo the corner of the quilt not bound in yellow, but by scraps of the top — there wasn’t quite enough yellow to go round, and I was loathe to go out and buy more fabric, so improvised with what I had left. I actually quite like it; it’s makeshift and unplanned, much like the rest of the quilt.

The toughest part for me was manhandling the whole thing through the sewing machine during the quilting process — it was surprisingly physical work for me, though I’m a feeble weakling at the best of times. I was pretty anxious about making the binding — after a failed attempt, I finally sat on Tuesday night and measured out. Just having Al in the room while I did so helped me to keep it all in perspective -  I really hope all nervous quilters have helpful live-in engineers to calm them down and show them how best to use a ruler.

For now though, I’m just excited with the finished product and immodestly impressed with myself for actually finishing a project! I have very much been taken with the quilting bug, and want to get started on my next project as soon as we’re home. Luckily, someone has been spending all of her money on quilting fabrics for the last while, so there’s no end of options for Quilt II!

The idea of working from a pattern seems a bit dull to me, not to mention ever-so-slightly scary, so I’m improvising with freeform, seat-of-your-pants stitching. This bird is a regular doodle of mine, roughly drawn onto some cotton with a fabric pencil and then even more roughly drawn in with thread and fabric scraps from EL Quilto (which is slowly getting there..!)

Once bird was done, I moved onto my next plan, which was a raincloud. Roughly inspired by a collograph I made at Edinburgh Printmakers, this was going to be a happy raincloud, but I guess he (or I) just got a bit overtired during the stitching.

For some reason, I only seem able to embroider at weekends, but i’m hoping that might start to change as I draw some stronger dividing lines between work and play. I’ve grabbed a place at Edinburgh Screenworks for June and July, with a view to extending into forever, depending on how it works out. It’s still an exciting novelty to set out for work in the, well, afternoon — we’ll see how long that lasts!

The difference between how the women’s jobs are portrayed in the TV show and the films is perhaps the best example of how low the latter have sunk. In the show, we repeatedly see Miranda working in her office as a partner in a law firm and, yes, the job is hard and time-consuming but she loves it and her success is a badge of pride. Ditto Samantha as a PR. Even Carrie, who works as a newspaper columnist, a job I can personally assure you is not physically taxing, derives real satisfaction from her work, to the point that her willingness to quit it for her Russian boyfriend in the last series is an ominous sign. There is a whole episode about the women’s difficulty in accepting Charlotte’s decision to quit her job when she marries, and boyfriends who don’t take work seriously are seen as immature freeloaders.

Cut to the films. In the first one, not only do we never see Miranda working (because that’s obviously less relevant to women’s lives than watching Carrie have an orgasm over her new walk-in closet), but her job is the reason for Steve’s infidelity, because he wasn’t getting enough attention from his wife, who was working to support him. In the second film, guess what? She leaves the law firm! How could she resist after Steve suggested she could “be at home [more] and help out around the house”? Sorry, I think I just burned my fingers while retrieving my bra from the fire.

Random notion of the week, and something I’ve spent most of the week fighting against, is the urge to take up embroidery. For a start, I don’t like embroidery, and I really don’t want to spend any time decorating tablecloths with pictures of little blonde girls picking tulips. Then I spent a night sewing binding onto my tiny quilt, something that was strangely enjoyable. And then last week I found this blog, featuring this and this and this, and for the first time in my life realised that my life wouldn’t be complete without an embroidery hoop and a huge array of bright, multi-coloured threads.

One trip to John Lewis later, and I’m the proud owner of a hoop. And absolutely nothing else.

Ahem.

However, the true highlight of the day was a quick visit to Paperchase, just as they were closing for the night. I only managed a quick whizz round, but DO YOU SEE WHAT THIS IS?:

Food friends! Back in stock! How could you not actively fall in love with the little orange guy on the keyring loop?

My fence was not ideal. For a start it had holes through which the chickens could – and did – squeeze. I had the bright idea of tacking on chicken wire, but as I stood back to admire my handiwork, the chickens scrabbled up and over the top.

Fowl play: one man’s year keeping chickens

Sugar, fat and salt make a food compelling. They stimulate neurons, cells that trigger the brain’s reward system and release dopamine, a chemical that motivates our behaviour and makes us want to eat more. Many of us have what’s called a “bliss point”, at which we get the greatest pleasure from sugar, fat or salt. Combined in the right way, they make a product indulgent, high in “hedonic value”.

And yikes:

But it was thinking creatively about how to attract more consumers that led Starbucks to the Frappuccino, the venture capitalist told me. Although its stores were crowded early in the day, by afternoon “they were so empty you could roll a bowling ball through them”. The creation of a rich, sweet and comforting milkshake-like concoction utterly transformed the business. A Starbucks Strawberries & Crème Frappuccino comes with whipped cream and 18 teaspoons of sugar: all in all, this “drink” contains more calories than a personal-size pepperoni pizza, and more sweetness than six scoops of ice-cream.

Coming up tomorrow: the chocolate chunk shortbread has crack in it.

At some point in late October,deep in the midst of post-viralness when the most active thing I could do was think, I realised the strangeness of months and years: how could a group of days be so easily categorised as September or This Week or 2009, and how could I spend so much time blaming that month or that year for everything going wrong, when the days, the years, really have no more in common than the sunrise and sunset? It was no more October’s fault that I had been constantly ill than it was the people next door’s, and I wasn’t crying at their front door each night, ruing the day they moved in. So I’m finding myself trying really hard not to blame 2009 for the catalogue of general lousiness that has been 2009, trying hard not to pin my hopes on waking up on January 1st 2010 we a sense of focus and clarity and boundless energy. But if I were to look at 2009 as a whole, to lump the days together into one neat bundle: wow, 2009. You sucked.

The biggest measurable challenge? Easily my dissertation, complete with overambitious, overcritical, underqualified, underhelpful supervisor. No, really, did I ever tell you that story about how she only sent me the first draft feedback at 7pm the night before the dissertation was due in? And how that feedback included a huge list of things she wanted in it that she’d never mentioned before? I cannot let go of the whole thing. Spending six months having to answer to the every whim of a slightly crazy person will do that to you.

The biggest challenge to my faith in the world? Either my purse being stolen (I know. It sounds so… petty.) or the random stranger Waitrose incident. Taken alone — even taken together — these seem like such relatively minor incidents, and you know, I am fine with replacing bank cards and watching bruises subside: I’m both alive and I’m grateful not to be in the headspace that makes attacking people in supermarkets seem like a good idea. But I’m increasingly realising that both incidents eroded something in me: I’m leaving 2009 with much less trust, and most less conviction of the goodness, of the world around me. I’m aware of how overdramatic that sounds, but that person who reaches around me to pick up a loaf of bread? I don’t think I can trust them anymore.

The biggest me-challenge? Trying to find out who to be when uni ended. I left university knowing two things: 1) I didn’t want to be a linguist 2) I didn’t want to jump onto the graduate career treadmill. It turns out that rules out very little and there is still so much hanging in space, undecided. I’m lucky enough to have a marketable enough skill to pay the rent while I work as a (sometimes very) part time freelance web designer, and for someone with no design background whatsoever there have been victories — I somehow managed to brand an awards ceremony, got two very conservative organisations to adopt social media policies, have yet to be arrested for the shoddy filling in of a tax return, and I’m currently disproportionately excited about being on some Creative Review Twitter lists as an actual designer. [That’s just crazy. There are real designers on those lists!] But I don’t know if this is really the direction I want to take, don’t know if this is really what I Want To Do and whether I shouldn’t just go and do what my family suggest and get a “proper job”.

But the biggest challenge of 2009, the one I will look back on and go I can’t believe I did that? Just keeping one foot in front of the other and keeping going. It has been so ridiculously hard at times, but I’m starting to regroup and starting to look forward. You have been a lousy arbitrary collection of unconnected days, 2009, but I’m looking forward to the next lot.

[Note: I wrote this, which is less of an entry and more of a collection of random thoughts, as part of the Best of 2009 Challenge. I’m struggling to find any “bests” this year. I’m just going to go ahead and assume that the next decade can’t get worse than the last one.]

If you’re wondering, the image is from a copy of the Sunday Times Magazine wherein Mariah Carey describes her music as “hardcore, but not too hardcore.” I love this. It proves you can say anything, and as long as you believe it — even if you are the sort of person so deluded that you want a million white kittens to serenade you as you enter a room — people will print it without questioning. Okay, so it probably helps to be both extremely rich and superbly famous, but if Mariah Carey can claim to be hardcore without anyone so much as raising an eyebrow, I should be able to get away with more.