Not feeling the love

Maybe I'm just grumpy and sleep deprived. Trying a new sleep routine with my kidlets. Been trying it for a week. All the books and the experts say the time should shorten as you go on. Clearly they have not met my children. We went from taking 40 minutes to go to sleep to an hour for the 4 year old and infinity for the 20 month old. Argh. So last night I got tough! No eye contact, no talking other than saying "Sleep time" each I resettled them. Yeah hello super nanny with her crazy ideas.

Little Miss finally went to sleep after I had resettled her 47 times. Yeah I counted. What else was I meant to do while standing in there staring at the wall trying to ignore the tantrums (Little Miss) and the pleading (Mr 4)? Mr 4 kept going. Final count was 68. No joke. He had some funny tactics to get out going to of sleep - trying to spell his sister's name, having hot feet, conversations with his teddy about morning tea, having to tell me something important (needed a cuddle apparently - cute but still GO TO SLEEP!) and on and on and on. I'm exhausted. Plus sick. Hello grumpy mummy.

So i'm feeling in a bit of a sewing funk. Nothing seems to be coming together. My ideas look fabulous in my head, but in fabric, not so much. Here I am on a Saturday with some kidfree time and I have already wasted one hour of it watching silly crap on the telly, and playing Tiny Towers on my ipod. And now blogging. Ahh procrastination at it's finest.

Anyways here's why I'm not feeling the love...

I had this grand plan of a big scrappy paper pieced string quilt in rainbow colours. I planned for blocks of solid colours (and I just realised I placed two of these squares in this picture in the wrong spot... oops) with 'middle' blocks of blended colours. Hence the half triangles of mixed purple/blue. But I'm just not loving it.

Maybe looking at it from a different arrangement. Looking. Looking. No. No love still. So I think these squares will be put away for a bit while I think some more on how I want to continue this.

Next no love. And this time, it's not the block or the pattern. I LOVE that. It's my piecing. My precision seriously needs some work. I'm a bit embarrased about some of these pictures but they will serve as a reminder to follow the instructions exactly as written. (Remember that self - FOLLOW THE INSTRUCTIONS!).

This is my first attempt at the colour wheel star flower block from Ellison Lane's tutorial.(Go see hers for how beautiful it should actually look).

What? I need to square up each of the little HST blocks after making them into squares? Really? Huh. As a side note, this square reminds me of the characters on the Wii fit after it tells you you're ridiculously fat - goes from skinny to floomp! chubarama. This is my chub block.

And here's my skinny block. Oh I'm much happier with this! Points are still a bit messy but improving. I unpicked seams a few times to do this, and it still wasn't right but really, at this point I'm not going to nitpick (or unpick any further for that matter).

Oh and another reason beyond the chub/skinny look to trim your blocks to size! Look at this!

That's the difference in size in blocks due to me not trimming. Again self, FOLLOW THE INSTRUCTIONS.

Well I have a bunch more HSTs cut out ready to be made into some starflower blocks. Yes I have trimmed these ones to size. I learnt my lesson! I just need the motivation to make them into blocks. I don't think I have it in me to make enough for a quilt, even a cot quilt. So I'm thinking I'll make a mini quilt - and - dont' fall over here - I might use it as practice for some FMQ and maybe even a real binding! Surely I could do that on a mini? And if it's a completely disaster.. well.. Little Miss won't notice how wonky it is as a doll quilt I'm sure.