keeping on keeping on

Yep. Still pregnant.

For a general pregnancy/quilting obsession update, see after the cut...



The final few days of pregnancy suck. (Oh please let it only be "days"!) I feel like I've been in the early stages of labour for about 3 weeks now - I get a couple of hours of proper contractions here and there - strong enough to stop me in my tracks and get the wheat-sacks out - but just when I'm thinking it might actually be ready to roll it all dies down and goes away. Very frustrating!

I'm not sure what's worse - worrying that when I finally decide that I am in labour I'll be 10 minutes away from pushing it out and have to give birth in the carpark - or the other nightmare scenario of turning up at the hospital thinking that I've been labouring well for a while and must have made some progress to find that I'm only 2cm and have hours and hours of work still to go! My midwife plans to do a 'stretch and sweep' on Friday (the 40 week mark) so I guess I'll find out then a little more about the state of play.

As far as 'schooling' goes, we've gone ultra-unstructured the closer we get to the baby's due date, so the kids' 'work' has mostly been colouring in, role-playing with dolls and puppets, reading, chasing the chickens around the yard, helping Daddy cook tea... just generally living life.

As far as 'what do you do all day?' goes, I've discovered hand-piecing patchwork and am now subject to a whole new craft addiction I had been carrying on with piecing a quilt that my Mum had only just started (having finished the other one), but found the paper-piecing technique to be tedious, and the colour-scheme she chose to be dull and boring. So I checked some quilting books out of the library for inspiration and found one which has step-wise instructions for hand-piecing using a running stitch (instructions are great - Jinny Beyer doesn't even assume that you've threaded a needle before). This is much much much faster, so I've set Mum's 'boring quilt' aside and am making a bright scrap-quilt using random bits and pieces from my fabric stash. I plan to use the 'Squares and Triangles' pattern from this book by Lynne Edwards (also from the library), but have just started by making the random-fabric four-patch blocks so there's room to be flexible with my final pattern if I change my mind!

I never thought I'd enjoy hand-piecing. But it really is more convenient than machine piecing. I'm sure the machine would be tons faster - but I just never get around to sitting down in front of it. Hand-piecing is easy to do on the couch in the evenings, and in odd moments here and there, so it actually gets done.

Other than that, we're just hanging around waiting for the baby to be born. It all feels a bit surreal, really. I've been organised and ready for almost too long now - I'm starting to un-organised again (taking things out of the hospital bag because I need them for something else, the bassinet is somehow not made up properly anymore, the 'baby' corner of our room has had a few piles of non-baby stuff stashed there 'out of the way'...)