Finally

I was starting to wonder if this would ever happen, but here I am on the ferry. Despite all the problems (I left home at 11pm) I am now on my way. It's been a bit of a trip down memory lane for me as I lived in Portsmouth for a while. I was surprised how much I remembered. Now I am looking forward to the Isle or Wight and tonights talk.

Enough already

So as you will have gathered I have been working quite hard to make sure everything went smoothly for the trip. The van have been prepared and loaded so all I had to do this morning was drive to my regular class, from there I could head to Portsmouth. By the end of my road I knew the van sounded odd but only when breaking so it would probably be OK. A mile later there the noise was louder and there was a smell of burning rubber, home I went. I thought the noise was fan belt or alternator related as we fitted a new one recently. Indeed the fan belt was a little loose, so we tightened it, checked the van and I tried again. The noise was mostly gone but not the smell. Call me paranoid but I do not like driving a vehicle where something is getting hotter than it should. Fire is not a good thing in a vehicle. I was forced to cancel the classes and take the van for a second opinion. So far the answer is, that’s a bad smell, something’s not right. I have everything crossed that Doug will work his magic and find the fault, today. Then please can things go smoothly for a week or so? Please, pretty please.

Then the plans don’t even come together.

The plan for today was simple. Go to the storage unit, pay the rent get my quilts come home and quilt. See very very simple. It should have taken about half an hour out of my day. The first bit did work. I got to the unit and paid my rent. Then I noticed the van had a flat tyre (one of the maybe 3 week old tyres). Poop (no that wasn’t the first word that came to mind but I try to keep the blog clean). OK, I can’t change the tyre myself especially as I know the wheel nuts have just been put on by a garage. Maybe a pump will do the trick. The lady manning the storage place has one, but it didn’t want to work for me, so I set off for the nearest place I knew I could buy one. Fortunately just around the corner is a little tyre shop who charged me 10 pounds to change the wheel for the spare. I did consider letting them look at the flat until they said driving on a flat won’t damage the tyre. Really?! I also noticed the jack wasn’t rated to lift the van, but we got away with it so I paid up and headed some where with more of a clue. So far the half hour job had taken over and hour.

I don’t like vehicles doing odd things so I really wanted to know why I had no air in the tyre and ideally I wanted to get a new tyre back on to the van, I don’t know how old the spare is and I didn’t fancy doing much driving on it. There was a 15 minute wait to be seen but my regular type place quickly found the problem, a puncture. They had been fairly certain the tyre would have been damaged by being driven on while flat (I tended to agree) but after checking it carefully it appears I got away with it. It was less the 1/4 mile, slowly and very carefully so I didn’t bump the wheel or rub the tyre. They have repaired the puncture and the tyre is back in place. All in all a half hour trip took 3 hours. Ouch. On the other hand I would rather it happened here than out on a trip.

I did manage to get some quilting done today, and my machine seems to be settling down a bit now after it’s major surgery. It feels very strange, and sounds even weirder but it’s good to be back quilting. Hopefully tomorrow will go more smoothly, but I’m not holding my breath.

Planning take so much time.

Recently I seem to have spent more time on the computer than at the sewing machine. Mostly working, although some games have featured. I hadn’t realised how much time and planning goes into longer or more densely packed bookings. Other than coordinating several groups and dealing with many bookings at one time there are all the travel plans to deal with. I am sure the internet does make this simpler but it also gives you lots of options.

For a stand alone booking I generally know which service stations are on the route and I can work out quite easily how long I need to allow to be there on time. I get up load the van and head off, hopefully with a stop for food somewhere. Simple, well I thought that could be tricky until I tried multi booking trips. We seem to have spent a lot of time the last couple of the weeks working on getting the van up to spec. When we bought it we knew we needed to look at it’s electrics but so far I hadn’t been staying it in long enough to worry. It turned out to have a couple of problems and no circuit to charge the battery while driving. It has all that now and an inverter. I also knew I needed to clean the onboard water tanks. I didn’t know that the winter had broken the filter and thus meant I couldn’t get water from the tank to the tap. I couldn’t be sure if it was the pump or just the filter so I ordered both and I now have a spare pump when it does give up. We have also found some rugs for the van, a warm floor is much nicer than the laminate in the winter.

What I hadn’t really given much thought to was the gas supply. I’d bought a new bottle so I had plenty, of Butane which freezes in the winter. Yes now we’ve dealt with it, it’s clearly a problem but somehow I hadn’t really registered how serious it was. Made a lot trickier by having a very small locker for the cylinders to fit in. To say it’s tight would be an understatement, but it’s in and it works.

Other than sorting out the van I also needed make some travel arrangements. Flights take a lot of messing about these days to find the best deal, especially if you need to take luggage. The sites on the other hand don’t want you to check around and helpfully make you start again if you aren’t quick enough completing the booking. I think I took about 5 attempts after I had chosen which one I was going to go for! The ferry was much easier, although I did manage to get it wrong, the company were great about sorting everything out for me.

Next comes showers. Yes really. I want to be clean and fresh for all my bookings, and washing is great to a point. I find I really need a proper shower or bath regularly too. Whilst I am familiar with service stations food, toilets and parking I’m not so well versed in shower facilities. Fortunately it looks like next weeks trip works out very well. There are longer stops I need to make that will handily bring me to showers, but it took research to work that one out.

Finally I wanted to find something fun to do on my day off, and that was probably the easiest part. I have a list of places in the UK I would like to visit and as my work takes me to the right areas I will go and see them. This trip I should get to visit Ironbridge. I know it is rather touristy but heck, on my day off that’s what I am right? If everything goes to plan (yeah right) I should also get a chance to do some sewing and writing. I’m rather looking forward to that. I just wish the planning all did itself magically. Before anyone asks, yes the cats will be fine. I am going on my own so they will still have one of their humans. I am quite sure they will still be very cross with the reduced service though.

You know you’re a quilter when

you find yourself looking at the political propaganda that comes through the letterbox to find out who printed it. I will admit I did first poke fun at the headline, something about the VAT rise affecting everyone in my area. No you don’t say, I thought this region was exempt. Grrrr, I am really not that thick thank you very much. Then I noticed the paper was what I wanted to print my foundation patterns on. Of course being political the odds are that the printer gave them a discount in return for some advertising and I was right. There are contact details for the printer so I will get in touch and see what the cost of printing foundation papers would be. I’m not sure I really want to support a printer who does political campaigns but I’ve been struggling to find anyone to do what I need so I guess it doesn’t hurt to ask.

Quilting and travel

I finally feel I am getting back into a routine. I know it won’t last but for now it’s pretty good. Yesterday I managed to get a customer quilt done and sort out some of my travel plans. It’s always a bit og a shock how complex that becomes. It seems simple to just book a flight from X to Y right. Except I am looking for the absolute cheapest option. Of course that means you have to factor in baggage allowances and travel to the airport. By the time you start considering the cost of fuel and parking for a further airport against a more expensive flight closer it really does get to be an interesting problem. Once you’ve figured out the best plan (and frankly it it’s for your holiday go for easy your time is worth more than you will save with calculating all the different options) you need to persuade a website to take your booking. I think it took 6 attempts and 2 computers last night for that one. I do think I got the absolute cheapest option though, which is really important when you are spending other peoples money.

After that I moved on to trying to book a ferry. Again how hard can that be. It is simpler that flights, as there are less options, but you still have to weigh up cost, potential delays, and the timings of events. Then I had to state the size of my vehicle, in metric. Hmm, interesting. Did you know a tape measure that is great for quilts is not so good for motorhomes. Oh you did, well why didn’t you tell me. Or perhaps suggest I should have measured my van on a nice dry day just incase? Well I did need to measure it and I did know I should but I wouldn’t have picked late and night in the pouring rain. Still I’ve done it now and I can see exactly how tight the barrier at Pacific Plaza was. I’m glad I didn’t know that at the time.

I guess I should go and get on with the next quilt in line now. It’s loaded so I just have to make the sewing happen. I am trying to get all my customer work cleared as fast as possible, and at the very least before I start heading off all over the country.

I´m back

At last I am back on a proper computer. It´s even mostly working. It has still  got a few quirks though so bear with me. The van is also fixed, in fact better than it was. The alternator has been replaced and we have had habitation serviced. So in theory I have working hot water, oven and electricity. The latter still needs some work to get it to where I need it, but hopefully that will be done this week. We even got the van a new set of tyres!

Classes have restarted and seem to be going well. Another group are tackling my new mystery quilt and the first batch have nearly all finished it. Sadly I can show you any as that would rather spoil the mystery. However it will be being released as a pattern so if you want to find out what it looks like you could always make it.

Yesterday I had a return booking with Chiltern Quilters. I last saw them in 2007 so I was able to take a good selection of new work for them to see. It was great to have so many friendly faces for my first talk of the year. I  was shocked how rusty I was after a month off. I hope they enjoyed it, I know I did, thanks for lunch too, it was great to be able to eat between unloading and speaking. It was also good to see another Starr Designs quilt there as I took Holiday Starrfire with me this time. Next weekend I will be heading up to Nene quilters, hopefully I will be more in the swing of things by then.

As well as being rusty I found the talk yesterday really took a lot out of me. It may also be related to being ill last week, but today getting the tyres fitted to the van seemed like quite enough activity.

Virtue pays off

I could be taking this weekend off and playing board games up in Manchester. On the other hand I have a lot of work to do so I decided not to go. Even this morning I wasn’t sure I had made the right choice. Tet also decided to stay home and get things done. It turns out this was the right answer. We decided to brave Costco for cat food and new phones and took the van. It is easier to load than the car. On the way there the battery light came on. Yes we could believe the alternator was on it’s way out and decided that actually before I started out on the longer tours it would be good to have a new one, and a fan belt. As we left Costco there was a rattle and a couple of clonks. Not good noises. No sign of anything obvious though. We thought a bit and pulled over again. Could the nut holding the pulley on the alternator have fallen off? If it had how much damage could that pulley do when it came off? Yes and surprisingly little it already had. We were about to drive the last couple of miles home when the penny really dropped with me (what can I say I was feeling ill it’s why I wasn’t driving). The heater is usually good but was cold, no functional fan belt doesn’t just mean no electricity it means no cooling. We got the engine off just as it overheated. As we had chosen our spot to pull over we could wait safely for a recovery vehicle. However, if we had gone to Stabcon this would have happened on the motorway. We wouldn’t have had the chance to pull over and think to not only would we have broken down, on a motorway we would probably have done a lot more damage too. I’m really glad I decided to work today, even though I lost more of the day than I had planned.

Wow, that worked

OK, so I guess that is how you do it, you tell people there is a deadline and they contact you So the lucky winners were, Rafael’s Mum, Sally Westcott, and Joyce. I hope they will all have fun watching the shows. There are usually a few free shows you can have a look at at The Quilt Show if you are interested. I am often surprised by how much I learn from the shows.

In other news, today was the first day of term, which is always unreasonably tiring. It was fun to get back to it though. My students had kindly saved plenty of questions for me over the holiday. That’s kinda exciting as the questions are getting more interesting every year and their progress is much clearer when you haven’t seen them for a while.

Now I’ve had a chance to sit I have both quilting and unquilting to be getting on with.