Last week’s project involved the merging of two sketches into a mini-quilt, using one of my most favourite fabrics, Cecelia from Ikea. It’s also my first foray into hand quilting. After visiting the V&A quilt exhibition, I really wanted to hand quilt something — I doubt this’ll be in the V&A in 300 years, and I’m not sure I ever see me hand quilting an actual full-sized quilt, but I love the effect so much more than machine quilting.

Energy levels are low at the moment, but everything’s still getting done.… eventually. Just a little bit more slowly. Still, at least if there’s an alien invasion and only the people who have cut out 208 cream 9cm fabric squares can survive, we’ll be okay:

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?

Admittedly, the reason you wouldn’t, and the reason I haven’t so far is because I just gave all of my money to the wonderful Fabricshoppe, but this will be my next purchase, alongside some of Heidi Kenney’s fruit and veg. Seeing as I fell in love with the Paperchase Food Friends range just that second too late to actually buy any, that fabric is the next best thing.

If you’re thinking anyway, think big

From What Logos Do and How They Do It

The bit at the bottom is a marked-off area which I totally did not go into in order to investigate how this was constructed. And I certainly wasn’t taking any photographs. Phew.

Living with someone who makes LEDs do things for fun, I wasn’t overly blown away by this, but the raw data, pasted on the wall, was much more interesting.