camera failing now

Sorry about the photo in my last post...  I have no idea what happened.

Told you i have a weird laptop.

No cycling this weekend, I went horse riding instead with the noisy one for her 16th birthday.  Had a great ride but I did miss riding my beastie.

 Until I get a new SD card for the camera I am now without photos.... here is one of cookie.... he is a beautiful cat as i have said before but boy does his fur get everywhere!!

Milly sat nice and still for a microsecond and I was able to capture a photo of her.... the black and white chicken fabric is the back of my country sampler that I have been hand quilting for several years.... I think I should try to get it finished this winter!

How many UFO's do you have?!

computer woes and bragging rights

So i get this new computer, it seems great at first but now its giving me problems.  I open websites and it tells me that they cant be opened, or the Internet isn't connected... poppycock.

then the photos!  I get a little icon that looks like a little green hill with blue sky and a corner cut off.  sometimes I can click on them and they open, sometimes they don't.

Its running windows 8 so its all different and no one else in the house knows anything about this system.  

I spent good money on a new laptop and now I am having different issues to what I was having on the old laptop.  Anyone with any ideas?  who should I see or should I contact the Asus helpline?

On a good note though I rode from Mansfield to the top of Mt Buller on Saturday morning.  The climb itself took me 1hr 50min.  I was very pleased with my time as I had hoped to get under 2 hours.  The descent only took me 30mins.  This is a 15km continuous climb with the last 3km being rather nasty.

Then the icing on the cake.... it wasn't a race but there was placings for the top women and men in various categories,  I came under the over 45 women and I placed 10th!!!!  so my name was up there in lights for all to see. Think I earned a few bragging rights.

New quilt to be made.  My friend Donna is turning 50 in May so I decided to make her a quilt, thinking of going with the design I used for the boyfriends quilt, in purples with some butterfly fabrics... need to pull out some boxes and see what I need to go shopping for!

Random stuff

 This was the tattoo' I gave the noisy one a few weekends ago when she had a birthday party to attend which was dress as your favourite  character, so she chose Abbie from NCIS. She studied her character and through the technology of google we got great pictures of her tattoos which I was able to reproduce onto her flesh using a good old sharpie.

 The cats decided to sit on the ironing board while I was sewing the other day, Lil has the evil glowing eyes and Cookie looks a little startled for some reason.

 I have now made 3 cushions, only 2 pictured here.... the froglet has stolen the camera for the weekend as she is celebrating her first anniversary with her boyfriend.. solider boy.

 We had a bit of a heat wave here a few weeks ago and I decided that enough was enough we needed a pool.  There was of course none left that I really wanted so it was this or nothing...  I took it :)

 The girls thought it was hilarious, but soon realised how great it was to lie in, they then jumped on board with decorating the pool area with a pool side bar, DJ, a lifeguard (a drawn stick figure!) and slide.

 The fisherman thought it was a hoot when he came home from work and found us lounging in the new pool.

 I received for Christmas a lovely diary in a cover that was made by one of the girls from the gym, she has a business making bags and bits and pieces.  Her bags are mostly baby tote bags, beautiful bags!

And for those who think I am super healthy with all my riding, swimming, running and gym workouts.... this is what I eat when i ride!  or something like this.  I'm off to ride up to Kinglake in the morning.  I have 3 weeks to go until I ride up Mt Buller.... I'm getting a little excited.  The new laptop/notebook is going well, I now have my photos on my external hard drive and Im starting to get the hang of windows 8.  Im sure there is loads more for me to learn... who else is a bit of a technophobe?

why did I wait so long?

exciting news.... I got a new laptop.

well its actually a notebook according to the box.  Its an Asus, and I'm quite pleased with it so far.

Its windows 8 so there is a challenge :)  but seeing that my old laptop takes over 10 mins to turn on and connect to the Internet and at least that to shut down... plus it used to tell me scripts where running and it would just freeze up for no reason for hours.

In the last couple of hours I have turned this on, started it up etc and been surfing the net i realise how much I had been putting up with... its SOOO fast!!

saved all my photos onto my external hard drive, my music etc so stay tuned for my next post.

hoping for good weather in the morning to go for a ride into the local hills. got Mt Buller in 3 weeks!!

why did I wait so long to get a new laptop?  money of course lol..... and I got an incredible deal... the froglet also bought herself a new smaller notebook to take to uni.. shes going to pick hers up tomorrow.  wonder if windows 8 will disturb her lol

cushions and driving tests

 So the froglet conned me into making the boyfriend a cushion to go with his quilt.... I was thinking bout something along these lines, just going to quilt this to make it a bit more sturdy and then turn it into a nice cushion.

 My biggest news though and really scary too, is that the froglet after 135 hours of driving with me passed her driving test on Friday and is now a fully fledged red P plater!  omg.... I knew she would pass but now I have the worry of her out on the road on her own.  She is on her maiden solo trip into work in the city.  She called me when she got there and had parked, she was worried she would be fined but we had sussed out the parking weeks ago and I reassured her she would be fine.  Its now 11pm, she text me to let me know she is on her way home.

Most of you will recognise the hungry Caterpillar fabric, the froglet loves this story and asked me for a cushion a while ago.

 I decided that passing her driving test was good enough to reward her with her prized cushion.

 I used a pattern that I bought from gumvalleypatchwork.typepad.com a few years ago and made for my mum.  Obviously this isn't the fabric or design but I was able to convert it without much trouble to utilise the fabrics.

I also managed to finally turn a project that I started at our guilds symposium into a cushion.  this was kellie wolfson of dontlooknow.typepad.com who seems to have fallen off the Internet... I hope that she is well and just taking a break from the pressures of blogging etc.

Was a busy weekend with the noisy one going to a party and dressed up as Abby from NCIS, she had to dye her hair black and I used a sharpie to give her tattoos... something is wrong with my photo card and it wont download my photos eeekkkk!  hope that I can get them onto the pc as she looked great.

quilt top complete

I'm very pleased with how the quilt has turned out and how quickly it came together

 The boarders went on like a dream and then I was able to take it to my guild night and baste ready to quilt.

 I laid it on my bed to see how it looked.... quite suits my new wall colour....

 I sat down on Friday and quilted it using a nice simple stipple.  I like to think about the recipient of a quilt when I am working on them, I also think about the label and what needs to be said.  I'm a little stumped with this label but I'm sure I will figure it out while I am stitching down the binding.

still sewing and riding

 oopps... these photos are sideways!!  oh well will give your neck a stretch to the side heheheh.  As you can see I have finished the blocks and sewn them together.

 The boarders need to go on... they are the dark blue and I believe will frame the quilt nicely.

 Ive been on 2 weeks annual leave and been trying to sew in between some stinking hot weather.

 On Sunday I rode up Arthur's Seat as part of Amy's ride.  I have done this climb 2 years ago and i had hoped to see some improvement in my time as I had done very little riding 2 years ago.

 I knocked off nearly 10 minutes on my climb, gotta be happy with that! 

 The climb is actually quite short at just shy of 3km.  But there are some brutal corners with some very steep gradients.

 There was another descccent further into the ride, it had a warning sign saying caution steep decent... I couldn't see the road as I approached it and then when I got to the crest it just plunged down and had 2 hairpin bends.... I must say I really enjoyed the decent, didn't really bother with the brakes and got my top speed ever..... 68.8kmph  I didn't know at the time I was doing that but my friend said I just disappeared over the edge woo hooing.

 Unfortunately it was 30degrees when we started at 8.30am and that took its toll on many many riders.  We got to the 41km drink station only to find that there was no water for us... I can tell you we weren't impressed, along with nearly 1000 other riders.  We went into a farmhouse and got water from them... but a little further up the road we were informed that due to the high temps (now into the 40's) and the high winds (up to 70kmph) the 100km ride was cancelled and we had to turn off to do the 60km ride.  It was bitter sweet as we were looking forward to doing another 100km ride but it was getting rather hairy with the wind and debris on the road.

This is the view from near the top of Arthur's Seat, looking down towards Macrae... we went and had a well earned coffee and date scone there before going home.  The Jayco tour was supposed to have their final race on sunday after we had finished our ride, but it was also cancelled... so we drove up to take the photos, we couldnt quite believe we had ridden up there a few hours earlier :)