Stash building

I bought some fabric today. Yeah, a bit of stash-building. Lots of people talk about stash-busting - hey, there are whole books written on the subject - but my stash is hardly big enough to warrant a bust. Therefore I can, without guilt, build it up.

Now don't go getting excited, thinking I'm about to reveal many bolts of designer fabric. I don't go for quantity, I go for variety. So I end up with lots of little pieces. That's in order to have just the right shade of whatever I need at the time.

Exhibit A

Exhibit B

A:
The orange is a remnant of polar fleece; the navy is a remnant of flannel; and the three prints are all from Moda, a half metre of each.

B:
These are "scrap packs": the shop bundles up five coordinating offcuts, folds them to look pretty, wraps them in cellophane and then somebody like me comes along and spends a good 5-10 minutes trying to decide which pack I want the most.
I compromised at these three.

They'll all go in the wash tomorrow (except for the orange and navy), then I'll press and fold and put them away in their colour-coordinated piles on my fabric shelf.


In other news, I have just finished the crazy-patch border on my quilt; but I'll have to go outside to take a decent photo of it. Which means tomorrow, as it's now night time and very dark outside. I'm thinking of pinning it to the fence. Because sizewise, it's now beyond the stage of standing on a chair and aiming the camera down. 41" x 57".
Photo tomorrow, rain or shine.


What I learned today:
Hot cross buns, while great for breakfast, are not so great for later in the day if you're in the height of summer. The icing tends to run and sink into the buns, which also go kinda soft.
But they're still yummy for breakfast!

Breakfast

I made hot cross buns for breakfast this morning. Yes, I know, there's no cross on top. I don't bother with that anymore. The recipe calls for the iced crosses to be piped on. I used to do that. But there'd always be loads of icing left over, so I'd end up decorating around the crosses, making spiderwebs and suchlike. Then one day I was feeling extra lazy, so I just added a glob of icing mix to each bun top. No more RSI from holding the piping tool too long, yay.
And the good thing about having hot cross buns for breakfast is that the girls actually ate some. They almost always skip breakfast, preferring not to eat first thing in the morning. But the aroma of baking buns was too much for them today; they just had to succumb.


Here's some sewing I did yesterday. It's for the round robin I'm doing. There's still some cutting and patching to do with these pieces.

(In case you're wondering, the zebra print fabric is my ironing board cover.)

Because nearly every crafty blog seems to have a feline mascot, I think it's time I introduced Tabitha.
She's feeling rather pleased with herself here, having found a dog to sleep on. The dog in question is actually a pencil case. The pencil case belongs to my 9-year-old, who at the time of receiving it collected dogs. She called it Pencil Dog. Nowadays he's just called Pencil, and his chief task is to transport the coloured pencils to and from school. He's very good at his job, and gets to rest every so often. But he looks rather surprised to have a cat plonk herself down on top of him!

And because I had to wait so long for my pics to load (Blogger is being somewhat temperamental today), I went down to my sewing room and chose some fabric for my next little project.

(Yes that is a xmas tree in the background. No, it's not too early. The stores are selling them, so we bought one. And used it straight away. I'd much rather have a real tree with that real-tree-smell, but hubby is tired of the hassle. And I'm tired of finding pine needles in the carpet for months afterward.)


Today I learned that cutting out fabric takes a LOT longer than you originally think it will.
Estimate a time. Double it. Then double it again.
And add five minutes on, just to be on the safe side.