My First Treasury!

I have been featured in someone else's Etsy treasury for the first time.

So exciting! You can see it online here. My Etsy shop is here.

Ways I have been Saving Money in 2012

This is not a sponsored post. I just can't believe others aren't doing some of this stuff.

There are three things I've been doing this year to reduce what I spend on things. None of these have caused a change in my spending habits - they've just let me shop as I normally would while not paying as much. But it does rely on my being, by preference, an online shopper. Sure, I occasionally have a blow out at Festival of Quilts or in a shop but generally I buy online. So let us begin.

Quidco

I keep telling people about this and they don't believe me or think it's a scam. But look at this image of my dashboard and where it says it has paid me £211.81. That's since January.

That's money I either got back as a percentage of what I spent or that I was given by companies for trying their service for a week or even by standing outside a high street shop and pressing a button on a phone app.  This is how it works:

If I want to buy something online - a pair of shoes from Clarks for example - I first go to Quidco. I log in and type Clarks into their search. They tell me I get 5.5% cashback on whatever I spend at Clarks and I click their link to visit the site. I shop on Clarks website as usual and in a week or two I get 5.5% back. I bought a pair of shoes on their recently which were £49. I had a 10% off voucher from elsewhere so that made them £44.10. I get cashback of £2.43 from Quidco. So I've got my £49 shoes for £41.67. It's not a massive saving but it's better than nothing. Another example - I was out of contract on my phone. I found a deal I wanted. I checked it on quidco before buying. On quidco I get the same deal but with £60 cashback. You can see I just got paid the money from Tesco phone shop on my last payout. £60 for doing what I was going to do anyway. Nuts right? Same on holidays. Expedia will give you back about 10%. And I've never been spammed or anything like that.

I'll be honest - if you click this sickly green banner below and sign up I'll get £2.50 the first time they pay you £5. But then you'll have saved a fiver on what you were going to buy anyway. It is seriously money for nothing.

My Survey

This is one of those sites that pays you for filling out surveys online. 

They tend to be about toilet paper or music or other such wonderful things and are very boring but you earn points for each one you complete and what do points mean? Paypal money or amazon vouchers or a ton of other things. You can see from the image that I've got a stack of surveys they've decided I fit the profile for. Each will take between 10 and 30 mins to complete online and earn me between 20 and 150 points. I've only got 46 points there at the moment because I just cashed in 540 of them for a £5 amazon voucher. I think in the six months or so I've been a member I've earnt about £30 of vouchers and I only do the surveys while I'm waiting for something else to happen. Like running a bath or in a boring phone conference. 

There is a referral service where I get 100 points if someone I refers signs up so if you are interested email me and I'll send you an invite. 

Groupon

This last one can be deadly - I'd suggest opting out of receiving their newsletters once you've signed up and only using the website tactically. 

Personally I only use this for haircuts. Otherwise it's just too easy to spend money on rubbish. If you need something you know Groupon tends to offer (haircuts, waxing, massages, steak dinners, exercise equipment, teeth whitening) stalk the website for a week. Look at not only your area but places near your area. Deals can come and go in 24 hours so set a reminder on your phone to visit once a day to see if any relevant deals have come up. Since I became aware of Groupon I haven't paid full price for a haircut. Of course those who know me will know that someone with Cousin It hair doesn't need to visit a salon very often but when I do, I get a bargain. And people - groupon is on Quidco so for every groupon you buy you get 5% cashback. Double discounts. Nice. 

There is also a referral service for this where I get £6 if you buy a groupon but I would suggest you sign up to Quidco instead and get your own cashback for buying a groupon so you go ahead and start benefiting straight off. However if you'd rather not email me and I'll gladly get the £6!

Now I do believe I am due for a haircut AND at £19 with 5% cashback it will only cost me £18.05 and at London prices that is one sweet deal. 

Fairly Fairisle

In a recent post, the one with the testicles in, I shared the chart I was using for a fairisle and said it was melodic to be swapping between the two colours. Well screw that. The music died. Trying to do fairisle in about eleventy three shades of blue green when the evenings are getting darker turned out to suck so I changed it to swapping the main colour but keeping the contrast as light grey.

This is definitely going to be one of those ones where you see the pattern best from a distance. It may also become cat blanket in about 5 years time when I finally give up but I'm going to hang on with it for a while longer and see how it develops.

While I continue to ponder the charm square swap (4 votes in favour) there is a "Scrap Vomit" Swap taking place on Swap-Bot. You send 3 people a bag of 49 x 2.5" squares. So that's 147 x 2.5" squares I need to cut. Thank god for my rotary cutter and quilting ruler. Anyone can join so click on that link to find out more.

Meanwhile....uptown...

Source: 3.bp.blogspot.com via Alex on Pinterest

Source: imgfave.com via Alex on Pinterest

Source: tumblr.com via Alex on Pinterest

La, la ,la...

Any Interest in a Charm Square Swap?

I have been searching all over for a Charm Square Swap and I can't find one. I've been umming and ahhing about whether to run one and then I came across this post...

Source: ellisonlane.blogspot.co.uk via Alex on Pinterest

...which basically decided it for me. But I'm still not sure how much interest there would be. Hence the poll at the bottom of this post.

A charm square is basically a square of fabric. That's it. For swaps they are usually 5" square but other sizes can be used. Swaps can have a theme (i.e. reds or i-spy) and usually have a few rules (like only using new, unwashed fabric from a named designer).

Everyone in the swap cuts their fabric into the required number of charm squares then sends them to the host with a stamped addressed envelope. After the deadline the host shares out the squares between the swappers and sends them back to them in the envelopes they provided. The only cost is for the fabric and the postage.

You can get 24 five inch squares out of half a metre of fabric which for a designer brand is usually about £10-14 a metre so I reckon you could do the whole thing in the UK for about £10.

So what do people think? Would you be interested in joining a charm square swap?

While you ponder I wanted to share this cunning way to get four half square triangle patches out of two charm squares. There are some nice examples of quilts you can make from them on Flickr. 

Ooooooo, sooooo many....

Blog Hopping

I've been searching for charm square swaps recently and can't seem to find any in the UK. Do UK quilters not swap or am I just looking in the wrong places? While looking though I came across Sew We Quilt which hosts blog hops. I'd missed signing up for Dot on Dots (you know how I love those polka dots) but have been visiting all the blogs taking part this week. You can see them all here and see the blogs involved on the Sew We Quilt website.

I was in time to sign up for the U'R Priceless Blog Hop though.

I enjoyed the few I've made since doing a course last year and am looking forward to doing a few more for xmas presents.

Huge Woolly Testicles

Little bit of urban wildlife for you today. I went to Mudchute Farm which is all of about 10 mins walk from my flat and right by the DLR station I've been using for 18 months. First visit since I moved here, naturally.

Walking down the paths it's easy to forget you're in London. The Farm is tucked away, separated from the main park. It's pretty big with lots of animals. It being 28 degrees they were all fairly droopy.

It was hot enough to want to stretch out with them but there were all these signs about not snogging them and so on for hygiene reasons so I held off.

This was probably the third largest pig there. The biggest was a big pig. About 7 feet stretched out on the floor with it's head away from me. As I contemplated it, it farted.

Then I saw the largest pair of woolly testicles I've ever seen. Here they are.

Nice horns.

Just when things were getting weird I saw a chicken with a saddle.

Now of course you can't have a race with just one so sure enough her gal pal had one too. The male was enormous.

I didn't see any tiny riding hats so I guess there was no race today. Well it is Sunday. Everyone's relaxing on a sunday.

The return back to real life had an element of Narnia about it. The gateway between two realities.

As it has been so hot this weekend it seemed only right to cast on a fairisle steeked cardigan in shetland wool. I have accumulated a fair old stash of Jamieson's from various projects and from buying a ball which turned out to be not quite the right shade about 20 times. So I've chosen a conventional all over pattern from Alice Starmore's "Charts for Colour Knitting" and divided it up into blocks of rows.

I'll change between all the colours I've got fairly randomly depending on my mood. I've done about 2 inches but it will take longer to work out whether it is working. I do love fairisle though. It feels quite melodic, swapping between the two colours as you progress smoothly round and round. It's all good.

Patchwork Puzzler

I have finished sewing the Kaufman jelly roll that my Mum bought me at Festival of Quilts. I'm just not sure what to do with the strips now.

I could sew them to each other, or I could add a white or off-white border between and around them. It's going to be an inbetween size though unless I add more and that would involve buying more fabric which I don't want to do.

I've also been working on a hat based on a couple I saw on Ravelry but don't want to pay for.

I like part of the brim being turned up but I want a flattish top. This one worked pretty well (the eventual one will have buttons on the brim where the ends overlap) but the turn up isn't quite right so I've cast on another. Afterall it's just the weather for hats.

Weekend Patchwork

This weekend, as well as turmoil, brought two firsts.

First First

I have begun sewing my first quilt made from a jelly roll. It's the one I cut a week ago and it is coming together rather nicely.

I've done two out of five of the plaits and have been wondering what on earth I'll do with it afterwards. But then I have had an idea about that. People seem to be adopting babies suddenly so maybe there's some use it could be put to in one of those cases.

I don't usually use coherent ranges of fabric but I can see the benefits. The prints all look lovely together.

Second First

I finally bit the bullet and got out the CurveMaster Presser Foot I got two years ago from Cottonpatch. I'd like to think I didn't pay that for it though. I'd printed out a template at work so carefully cut four sets of pieces.

I watched a how to on youtube and I was off.

I should have kept track of the order I sewed them in but overall they're not that bad.

I'm putting the mismatch down to my loose approach to seam allowances.

If you're interested in patchwork and quilting then there is a free course on Craftsy for a Beginners Block of the Month. Even joining now you get access to all the videos and patterns going back to January and it is all beautifully free! I watched the first one and the quality is really good.

For the future I'm pondering something like this:

Source: quiltmaker.com via Alex on Pinterest

But with some house blocks like these mixed in.

Source: allsorts.typepad.com via Alex on Pinterest

It's all paper piecing. I'm actually wondering about entering a quilt into the Festival of Quilts next year and this would fit into the pictorial category. The entry form goes up at some point this month so I'll be able to see what the requirements are. I've never entered a quilt competition before and it would be rather a kick to see my quilt hanging up among all those other beauties.

Breaking Up Is Hard to Do

I am not very good at being single. Bleh, even as I type that I can feel generations of women lib-ers shaking their bras at me in disgust. 

But it's true. 

Sadly I don't seem to be too good at relationships either. Although sometimes I think it may be the equipment I am given to work with. 

But then only a bad crafter blames her tools. 

Someone said to me a week ago that Pooch and I were going out again so that was all OK and I was sorted and loved up again. That gave me pause for thought. 

Is it generally assumed that, if you divorce someone, then 18 months after you left them start going out with them again, everything will be straightforward? 

I am not in a terribly good mood this morning. The topic of Relate counselling came up. I may be accused of oversimplification but the gist is that if the problem is on my side then there's no point both of us going to counselling. Afterall, there's no point just endlessly going over what happened. 

I once had a boyfriend, a long time ago I hasten to add, who uttered that now immortal phrase. "I'm going to have a shower while you finish yourself off."

I did say I wasn't good at relationships. 

A Little Knowledge Can Be A Dangerous Thing

Have you seen the film from last year called "21 Jump Street"? It's hilarious. I'd recommend it. Don't be put off by Channing Tatum. He's actually very funny. One of the scenes is where they go into a modern high school and to their amazement find it's quite cool to be clever and environmentally responsible and so on. I couldn't help doubting that this is the case in many modern schools but I was reminded of it again at work last week when I mentioned that my Gamification course was starting yesterday. Immediately the criticism begins.

"Ewww, why you doing a course on that? It's all about mind control"

"Don't believe what they tell you on the course. It's all the government trying to control how we think."

"You should watch this documentary on youtube before you do anything."

"I've seen loads of documentaries about it and you don't realise what you're getting into."

It reminded me of when I was in Year 12 and a Hari Krishna guy gave me a book during a lunchtime outing to McDonalds and the Head Girl confiscated it in Maths because she'd "heard stories" about people who read their books. 100% uneducated bollocks.

Some of you may be wondering what Gamification is. To be brief - it is taking game features and game design elements and putting them into non game situations. For example, you ever driven past one of those speeding signs that lights up and tells you your exact speed as you drove towards it? You usually realise you're driving a tad too fast and slow down a bit.

Well in Stockholm they added a license plate recognition camera to one and it took a picture every time someone was under the speed limit. Under, only. Then they entered them into a lottery and the winner got a portion of the money raised from speeding fines in the local area. During the pilot the average speed in the area dropped by 30%. They gamified their anti-speeding strategy. You'll notice that in this example no one got their mind controlled and, to my knowledge, no documentaries have been posted on youtube about the subsequent annihilation of Stockholm's residents by some speed crazed freak.

I'm doing the course through Coursera, which is an interesting experiment to watch if you happen to be a learning and performance professional, which I am. University led training courses delivered completely online with certification at the end and all completely free. I'm halfway through the materials for week one of my course and I am very impressed. I've seen a lot of online resources, especially free ones, and the quality can be a little dubious. This course, coming from the Uni of Pennsylvania, is very well put together and the Professor clearly knows his subject.

Excellently researched and informative. I may only be a week in but I like it. As do others, clearly. Thousands of people from 147 countries have signed up to this one course and because of the delivery method it is entirely accessible to all of them, provided they are fluent in english and have an internet connection. Online delivery of training is an area I've long been interested in hence my decision to actually take a course rather than merely read industry articles on how it is all going.

Which brings me to my second gripe. When I was at school it was not cool to study. It was cool to be intelligent without studying but that's not something I ever managed, if in fact did the cool intelligent people. In 21 Jump Street it was slightly cooler to study but still not much. At the age of 34, in the comfort of my own home, during my evening free time, after a full day at work, I am told I'm a "geek" for watching an online lecture instead of an episode of Lewis which I can see anytime. I get called a geek quite a lot because I can fix photocopiers, know how to wrangle Microsoft into doing what's needed and remember BODMAS. I see it more as a lazy label to recognise a skill-set others seemingly lack but in this case it was meant as a definite insult and seems completely unwarranted.

At a time when employability is everything, knowledge means power, intelligence is key and people draw lots of graphs that show higher qualifications mean higher earnings, how can anyone be criticised for learning? How is it bad to increase your knowledge? In fact how can that ever be bad, not just during a recession? Would it be a better use of my time if I just sat there, mesmerised by the picture box, letting the inevitable wise cracks and homely morality wash over me? We all relax in different ways. Some people relax productively and others relax unproductively. That's fine. But no one will convince me it's a bad thing to relax productively. And certainly no one would ever convince a knitter of that either. What does seem a bad thing is people who sit around saying "Oh, I don't need to know about all the geek stuff. I'll just get a geek to do it." You know how every time you say "there's no such thing as fairies" a fairy dies? Well every time someone even thinks that sentence about 'geek stuff' a new Tech starts working on how to automate their job out of existence. And even in the worst case scenario I'll be the one who developed the online redundancy training they're watching as they head out the door.   

This post started out very sweary but having got it all out of my system I've cleaned it up. Perhaps that bodes well for another course I've signed up for called "Think Again: How to Reason and Argue" which I dare say will not be in favour of the respond-angrily school of communication. It's also a Coursera course and there are lots of other ones so if you are interested in expanding your mind from the comfort of your own home and for free I'd recommend going and having a look. I am not sure of the finance model behind the website but suspect that they will have to start charging at some point so you might as well sign up while it is all still free and easy. The "Think Again" course starts in 3 months while I've also got "Intro to Philosophy" pencilled in for the New Year. You can even sign up for the Gamification course for the rest of this week if it has tickled your fancy since you still have time to catch up.

Personally I have always found knowledge in whatever quantity to be rather useful. Feel free to quote me.