sunny, sunny, sunny days

Note: this entry was started on Monday but for some reason I didn't bother adding pictures and posting until Friday. Apologies!

1. The weekend was rather nice. On Saturday morning we got up early enough to grab a bite to eat at the market and sit in the sun to eat before Sean went in to work; I pottered about the house sewing all day (more on that later). When Sean got off work, we went over to the Brunswick St house to spend a loud and silly evening with Alaina (I'm sure I'm misspelling her name) and Mareia (probably hers too) and Greg (I think that one's right, but I couldn't really say anymore). We've been socializing a surprising amount lately.

• Lloyd's enormous cat:
• Greg, who is graduating this week from high school and works with Sean and Alaina:
• Sean and Mareia - note her pretty sleeve. Ignore the tabloid.

Sunday was a quiet day for the most part - cleaning, and reading, and painting my nails for me. Sean had a staff meeting in the afternoon (though it was technically a day off...) and then went over to Brunswick Street to teach the girls how to make a D&D character. It looks as though we'll have a new group soon, none of whom have played before... which means we get to run an absolutely by-the-book, stereotypical adventure, where a mysterious old man in a hood approaches you in a seedy bar and pays you to investigate disturbances in an abandoned mine, etc, etc.
In the later bit of the evening, Danielle came over and Sean taught her how to make carbonera (with sun dried tomatoes instead of pancetta, as she is vegetarian for the most part), and we had a nice visit.

2. So, as mentioned, I spent a lot of Saturday sewing. I had a large collection of t-shirts and tank tops that were precious for one reason or another, but no longer fit or were never going to get worn. Instead of throwing them out, which would have broken my heart (well, I wouldn't have enjoyed it) or keeping them as is, I decided to make a quilt out of them, for a picnic blanket or what have you.I like to sum up my style of sewing as "You cannot simply walk into Mordor", mainly because these endeavours usually take a lot of planning and measuring and ironing and care, but I usually just walk right into Mordor, so to speak. I cut up the shirts into roughly foot-wide panels:And then ran into a snag, namely that my sewing machine refused to work properly. It took an hour or so of tinkering to get it to behave enough to sew strips of "quilt". For some reason I didn't take a picture - probably the rage. But I'll take one before they get sewn together.
And that's as far as I got! Tune in next weekend for the exciting conclusion.