Blocks on the Floor

Blocks all assembled, everything but the corner triangles spread out on the floor:

At this stage it is roughly 1.3 x 1.8 metres. There is meant to be a narrow blue border, then a wider grey one. Now I have to decide whether to sew it together like this, or make more blocks to make it square. I probably need to look at the photo for a while to decide, because I can't leave the blocks on the floor!

Very Happy New Year

Mystery reveal! At around lunchtime today, Bonnie Hunter posted the final instalment of Allietare, this year's mystery quilt. And I didn't even realise, as I hadn't expected the next clue before 4:00pm at the earliest.

Her final quilt looks spectacular!

After completing last week's clue I did some calculations, and this is pretty much the layout I was expecting. I discovered I needed to make a few extra of various previous units to have enough to complete a layout of 4 x 3 of those star blocks, so I made all of them earlier this week. I considered doing enough for a 4 x 4 layout, but decided to wait and see what I thought after the reveal. I'm still not sure. I need to see how my 3 x 4 version looks first.

I cut out the block centres (it was surprising that they didn't have to be pieced) and jumped in to assembling the blocks. It didn't take long to completed my six "middle" blocks:

Not showing them yet!

Then the "star" blocks - I carefully selected units so that no fabric appeared twice in any block:

Clips holding the components for each block so I don't get them messed up.

Started webbing them together:

By dinner time I had all but two of them webbed together:

Piled up, ready for pressing. Once I've got these all assembled, I'll lay them out and decide if that is enough or if I want to add an extra row to make it square.

When we were out walking the dogs this evening we met a teeny-tiny horse:

Is it a pony or a miniature horse?

A flock of yellow-tailed black cockatoos flew over:

It was a very nice start to the year!

Finishing Christmas

This was one of my Christmas gifts:

They have grown and started flowering since Christmas, so really needed to be planted out. So what about today before sunrise?

 I hope they'll be happy!

We also planted some belladonna lily bulbs dug up from the old house. They were just starting to grow roots, so should be sending up their flowers in a few weeks.

Another of my gifts was the Mr Ed door for my sewing room:

which as of late this afternoon, is installed

and keeping my sewing stuff safe from dogs! Particularly from Dot, the pin-cushion thief.

So then I took down the tree, and our first Christmas in this house was over.


Happy New Year, everyone!

Time to Stop

You know it is time to step away from the sewing machine when something like this happens:

Not looking forward to pulling out those tiny stitches.

Annoying Pop-Up Malware

A couple of days ago I managed to have my browser (Chrome at the time) hijacked by malware. I'm not sure exactly which site I was on when I picked up the malware, as I had several open and at first I thought it was just a slow internet connection causing the problem. I realised that wasn't the issue when a pop-up message appeared, and rendered the browser unusable. I swapped to a different browser (Microsoft Edge) and installed a malware scanner. The scanner found a few things that my regular virus and malware scanner hadn't caught. However Edge annoyed me because it shows all the ads I'm used to blocking. And then today Edge fell victim to the same thing:

If you ever get one of these, do not ring the number! You will get someone who will want to get remote access to your computer to get rid of this for you, and charge you big dollars. And you can't trust that they aren't actually installing much worse stuff on your computer while they are there, because this is not any official "Support".

I killed off the browser in Task Manager, and re-ran a malware scan:

And then when that was finished, I downloaded Firefox and installed that. Third browser in two days! As well as ad-blocking, I installed a Firefox add-on that has a nice button you use to stop scripts running on websites you visit.  Hopefully that will help me avoid future pop-ups. Although I did discover that with scripts disabled I can't look at Bonnie's link-ups, which is a bit of a shame! Might have to re-enable them carefully just for the link-up.

If you are interested, have a look at this page that explains how the "pop-up tech support"scam works, and how to get rid of it.
Tech Support Scam

House Today

A friend on the other side of the world asked me about the house this morning, and when I went searching for a picture to send her, I realised I have not taken a picture of the house since moving in! I had to go out and take one for her immediately.

So here is the house this morning.

Surprise Step Five

Just as well I put that water-holding mulch on the garden the other day! Look at it this morning:

Actually the mulch did a good job in the heat and wind yesterday. The plants looked much less stressed by the end of the day than they have in recent similar days. But then we had 18mm of rain over night!

I had heard that Bonnie was going to release the next mystery clue a day late because of Christmas, so I wasn't expecting to get any sewing done on it today. But at about 4:30 this afternoon I discovered it was up already! And there was no cutting this week, just stitching together pieces we have already cut or made. So I got the whole lot done today after all.

I'm not a fan of  the "stitch and flip" method, so I used this ruler, which is my metric version of the Easy Angle, to trim off the corners first, then sewed the pieces as if they were half-square triangles:

You may notice in the photo above that the stitching is already there. That's because I didn't think to take a photo of that step until after I had sewn them all. Below, I've pressed the triangle back.

Perfect! And much faster for me than drawing a line, then stitching, then cutting. Actually looking for a pencil sharpener probably would have taken me the  longest time!

Here's a few of the other unit for this clue:

And one way that this week's two units could interact:

This week's clue throws all the playing I did the other day out the window! This is a fun mystery, with Bonnie keeping us all guessing. I wonder how many more clues there will be? Next week could be the big reveal, or just give us more puzzling pieces to play with!

When the link-up is activated on Monday, I will add a link here so that you can easily go and see what everyone else has done. Here it is!