A flash in the pan! And quilts

Well, as Ron Burgundy said, that escalated quickly... I pumped out some epic blog posts, got really involved in it, and then dropped it like a hot potato that took 3 months to cool down to an acceptable temperature by which point it could be picked up again.

There's been a few things happening. But I guess when you have active stage IV cancer, there are always things happening.

In late April, my friend Britta and I went to Quiltcon. Britta is a quilter par excellence and has crafted many beautiful gifts over the last couple of years. I don't know what I did to deserve such beautiful and thoughtful gifts, but one of my most treasured possessions is a garland of photographs of special moments and people from my life.  She made it for me last year before the transplant and it has pride of place hanging on my bedside dressing table now. Anyway, we had a fabulous time at the quilting convention, and because I think very deeply about time management and planning and so forth, I bought a pile of 'fat quarters' and then plunged headlong into the painstaking, time-sucking vortex activity of making quilts for the kids.

'Um, sweetie, don't they have quilts already?' Hunter very diplomatically queried as I madly snipped out literally hundreds of identically shaped diamonds. To which I replied that yes they had quilts, but they didn't have MATCHING quilts, the quilt that my friend Rowan had made for Koen when he was born was really more for us (it sits on our bed, not Koen's) and really, you can't have too many quilts. I also made a quilt for the family before the transplant last year, when I was in quarantine down at the beach house (more on that later). It's a simple patchwork job which mainly consists of patches from scraps of sewing projects I've completed over the years. My wardrobe in a quilt, basically.

Fat quarters of wondrousness. You can see glimpses of these
fabrics in the new quilts I made.

Last year's 'family quilt'

So this year, for no apparent reason, I embarked on an even bigger quilt project - more than twice the work really, and much less energy and dexterity. Yesterday I finally hung up Saskia's quilt on the clothesline after a final rinse out when I realised that one of the diamonds had a big texta mark on it.

Saskia's 'harlequin' quilt

The yellow diamonds are turmeric-dyed and the final wash rinsed out its 'zestiness' but I kind of like how it now looks 'antique'. It's so far from perfect - the corners don't match up most of the time, there are some seams which are pouchy or crumpled, but I actually kind of like that about it too. 

Koen's quilt is very close to being finished - I just have to finish off the navy edging - it's got a more classic diamond-star pattern which was painstaking but fun to work out. Because I am not following instructions (why make it easier for myself??) I worked things out the hard way. I started by piecing random diamonds together and it took some time to work out that I needed to make star formations, and how to do this. 

Anyway, I am nearly ready with my next instalment of the blog 'story' but this is just a quick catch-up of the last few months.

The kids had their 5th and 2nd birthdays! We had a lovely party at home. Here we are singing a song about how wonderful it is to have paid for catering from 'The French Lettuce' rather than slaved over sandwiches since dawn.

STEROID-WATCH. My head continued to expand as my steroid dose pushed to the max to take the fight to a new tumour pushing on my trachea.  The dose went all the way up to 75mg and I became very self-conscious about my puffiness. So what do you do in that scenario? Why, dye your hair pink, of course.

Activewear. Activewear. Going to radiation therapy in my activewear.
Paying homage to the ACTIVEWEAR trend, I donned my retro floral Bonds tracksuit for the radiation therapy which laid waste to that nasty throat tumour (and one or two more).  The activewear was also a shout-out to Ruby Cruz, a friend of a friend who was undergoing Total Body Irradiation in preparation for her stem cell transplant in London. She has now had the transplant after an extraordinarily protracted international search for a donor.  A reminder that we don't all find matches that easily and plenty of people never find one. It's a particular problem if you are from an 'ethnic minority' - the wealthy western countries that have comprehensive donor registries are bursting with donors with Anglo-Saxon-Celtic genes, but are a lot more scanty by way of say, Polynesian ancestry. Ruby, being of Salvadoran ancestry, had a long, anxious and involved search.  Her friends rallied their resources, and metro stations, billboards and the internet were bombarded with posters asking for potential matches to come forward. It was amazing. Donor drives took place across England, the States and Canada. Eventually a donor was found with Brazilian heritage and the transplant could go ahead.

My hilarious little nugget Saskia continues to keep us laughing and sane.

Koen continues to amaze with his styling of beanies and detailed interest in Nexo Knights Lego.

My work was included in the Art Gallery of Ballarat's beautiful publication 'Stories from the Collection'. 

My wonderful husband Hunter started up his own podcast 'Two Shrinks' with colleague and friend Amy Donaldson. He he is having a babychino with Koen at A1. The photo and the news are unrelated. But he has nice eyes in this photo.