For a while now I have been ogling Karen K Stone's Cinco de Mayo, and I decided that I would buy the EQ5 software for myself for Christmas. I thought about buying the book as well, but decided I didn't really need both. Well, the software arrived last week and I got started:

I am pretty confident with paper piecing - but! - there are Y shaped seam lines in some of the blocks (on the little frames around the pointy triangles in this block). I don't get it. How am I supposed to do that with paper piecing - and I'll bet the answer is in the book, which I didn't buy. Oh well. I have worked out a solution that I am happy with - my points have a little tuck in them, which you probably can't see in the photo, and isn't really all that noticeable on the actual block.

I am using some of the wilder pattern prints that I have acquired over many years and subsequently found very difficult to use. I tend to buy for prints for texture now - there might be few little patterns, but for the most part the fabric can be classified as a purple, or a green etc. So the multicoloured novelty type prints that I have don't get used much, and neither do the various bali batiks that I have been buying for years and rarely use.

I'm averaging about 3-4 hours to make a block, and they are working out pretty well so far.

I am all finished with Christmas preparations - nothing else to buy, wrap or pick up. Which is just as well as we are having a heat wave - 36c!! - and I do not want to leave the airconditioned luxury of my loungeroom. But now I can't decide whether or not to cook on Christmas day - we don't really do traditional Christmas food (because we don't like it), but I was going to make roast pork for dinner with baked potatoes and gravy, and a baked cheescake for desert. (My arteries are clogging up just thinking about it!) The kids won't care one way or another - there is plenty of other junk food for them to eat, and we have a ham as well. Decisions, decisions..........

On the job front......

I originally applied for a job with a v. v. large government department, went throught the assessment centre process and didn't make it to the next round of interviews. OK. I then interviewed for another job with a small private company. Which I got last week and am due to start on the 4th of January. Yesterday, the recruitment agency rang me back and asked if I was still interested in interviewing for the first role. On the 4th of January. ARGH!!!! What am I gonna do? I really want the government job - it is more money, better conditions and much better career prospects. But - it is only an interview, not a definite offer. I think the recruiters slipped up a bit - the girl who rang me didn't know about the second job I had been offered (via their agency). But I have told her I definitely want to interview for the government job, and I am hoping to negotiate a later starting date with the other job if it doesn't work out, because I don't want to muck them around either. And it's CHRISTMAS and everything is closing down for a week, so I will get no answers for a while. Bugger.

Although, on the corporate wardrobe front, I did manage to buy a pair of shoes that likely won't slice my poor feet to ribbons when I walk in them, so that's a bonus.