It's a lovely cool, grey day today, a little bit too rainy to work in the garden, so I am sewing with a clear conscience.  It would be lovely to start something new, but I need to restore some sort of order to my sewing room before I pull out new fabric and start cutting.

I want to finish this top, as Seonaid likes it and would give it a home. 

The centre is in one piece, and now I need to audition a few fabrics for borders.  I bought half metres of these blue/green batiks to see if any would be suitable;

when I choose what I want it will mean a trip to Adelaide to buy the meterage that I need, but that's OK.  I think I can deal with another trip down to the city, even though the traffic is really hectic at this time of year.

I realised that I'm drawn to these colours so much because they are what I like to wear.  In fact I seriously think I'll get enough fabric for a couple of shirts, that way I'll get to enjoy the gorgeous designs in my wardrobe as well as my quilts.

I saw such lovely batiks at Trish's Fabrics, I'm afraid I'm going to have to start acquiring them. I'll always be a repro addict, but I think there's room to sneak a few batik quilts in as well.

The photo below shows two dogs trying to eat their own weight in dry food. 

We had two 8kg bags of food, one of a high-fat puppy mix which they love, and the other an older dog mix.  The brand was on special, but there was none of the junior mix they usually get, so by mixing the puppy and older flavours the nutritional levels were the same.  (Got to limit that fat content, they could be portly if we didn't keep an eye on what they eat.) Well!!  They thought it was brilliant to have all that food in front of them, and kept snacking while I mixed it together.  Note that Pippi, faced with expanses of food, is mainly interested in what Dolly is eating.  It's all the same, sweetheart!

They are so funny when we feed them together.  Dolly sniffs her plate, looks at me to ask 'Will I like this?', and having tasted it stops to say 'Thanks Mum, this is great!!'  All the while she's doing this, Pippi sucks up her share like a vacuum cleaner, then moves across to Dolly's plate and tries to polish that off as well.  And because Dolly is usually talking to me and not really paying attention, Pippi cleans up her dinner.  Mereth uses the excuse that she's a growing girl, but that won't work for much longer; Pips has done her growing up, now she's just going to get wider and heavier I think.