obsesso

it's my day off! so happy. it coincides nicely with my complete and utter obsession with quilt-making. i'm consumed! it's been on my radar for the past year and a bit - i've been buying fat quarters on ebay and etsy, slowly envisioning the colour scheme, plotting it in my head...but it always seemed so daunting. there were always other crafts to do, stuff i could wrap my head around a little easier, that i already knew how to do. then i came across this quilt-along from oh, fransson's wonderfully inspiring blog and it kick-started me into action. at the end of it...i should have a quilt that resembles this:

except my colour palette is blues and oranges. tomorrow i'm having the dotytron drive with me to the quilt store so i can pick up my sashing fabric and coordinating fabrics for the back and the binding and some small supplies i need. oh joy! this is HOURS of entertainment right here, let me tell you. this will be my thrifty entertainment over the long months of not spending a single cent to come!

the big block was getting all my photos for albums organized. i printed off like, $400 worth of photos from the past 7 years with the dotytron and my goal was to put them all in chronological order in albums. i picked them up in the summer but then the pesky performance and move got in the way so they languished. until i decided to take 20lbs of photos on the road with us to montreal and sort them in the 5 hour car ride there. it was a brilliant idea as it provided endless minutes of laughter-fodder for the goosetang. i totally over-printed, though. big time. i realized this when i was editing and came up with a shopping bag full of photos that i didn't know what to do with. my idea was to dump them in the dumpster behind st. hubert's in cornwall, but dr. rei and her irrational fears of identity theft (from dumpster photos?) prevented me. lol! so i held onto them for the duration of the hamcamp in montreal excursion until i was given permission to dump them in the garbage can of a random gas station on the way home. lol!

anyway, i finally did the final sort last night so all that's left is a night in front of the tv when i can throw them all into albums and be done with it (minus the chronicles of 2009). so i can fully turn my attention to this:

it's a lot of precision work. i just started cutting my pieces last night. i've already complained to the dotytron, "making a quilt is so freakin' hard!" to which he replied, "well, you probably chose something that's way advanced for a beginner in typical you fashion." which is true. lol! i could have started with just a quilted square, or a napkin, or a placemat...but no. i'm diving straight into a 56" x 66" monstrosity. it's been pretty enjoyable so far. my friend J invited me to join another book club, and they're reading michael chabon's "manhood for amateurs." i didn't necessarily want to buy the book and the wait list at the library is huge so i used my audible.com credit and bought the audiobook. so enjoyable! so i'm listening to chabon's ruminations on masculinity and fatherhood and cutting out pieces and i'm happy as can be.

oh, fransson has all these rules about colour theory and whatnot...but i'm just making do with what i got. some of the combinations i'm not entirely pleased with, but i figure, once it's in a quilt, it's going to look pretty bomb regardless. i found the following tip in particular kind of handy. she has you put your cut out pieces for the blocks onto pieces of labeled and divided cardstock. so you can keep them organized. when it comes to piecing, you'll have block F1, F2, B1, B2 etc:


see? so logical and neat and tidy!

tonight we're heading over to my buddy L's place for dinner. he graciously decided to host the whole goosetang clan for film club, which is SUPER nice considering he barely knows them! lol! i'm in charge of getting the movie. i'm not sure what i'm going to get, yet. i want to get "the hurt locker" for tomorrow night when the dotytron and i are staying in (we're possibly having s-dawg over but i might just cancel him). the short list is: "jules et jim" (so we can finally put this french new wave stuff to rest), "total recall" or "willow" - film club is very inclusive! lol!

the other night i was regaling the dotytron with stories of miss ramona from my sister. apparently she's decided that she wants to be a clothes designer (heretofore, she wanted to be a very chinese-acceptable doctor). rico and my sis were trying to gently steer her away by telling her that she might not make enough money to go to disneyworld by being a clothing designer, to which miss ramona replied, "you can make MONEY being a clothing designer?!?" with big, surprised eyes. lol! the dotytron was saying that there's no point trying to steer kids away from a career path at that age and you shouldn't bother until high school. and i was like, "well, you kinda should if it means they're not going to be scholastically engaged, like if they say they don't want to do math because they want to be a poet" to which the dotytron replied, "well YEAH, that's when you say, 'f**k off, kid. poets suck!'" AHAHAHAHAHAHA! PARENT OF THE YEAR.

then we were talking about what would happen if we can't get preggos...and i was like, well, i don't really care, we'd just adopt a kid...same diff to me. i'm not so hung up on bio kids that i would want to drop mad scrilla on fertility treatments and whatno. and he was like, "yeah, me too" and then i said, "as long as i can get a black baby." lol! so basically it goes: bio kid, then black baby. those are the only two options i'm going to accept. they're just so cute! i know i'm being a racist fetishist. but they're just so damn cute!

last night i skipped dinner entirely because i was so stuffed from being treated to swiss chalet by G at work. i love my work girls. they make work so much more fun.

okay...back to quilting and audiobooking.

fin.