Top dog...

The competition entry top is nearly finished.... all the dog sections are stitched together now. There's a few bits left to sew that I added on afterwards when I found I left ridiculous gaps. That's what you get when you're trying to be thrifty and at the same time guess how something should look just by eyeballing it. Not clever. So I have a few bits I'm going to hand sew, then I'm going to sew the big applique on and then- hold your breath- I'm going to try and wash it on a gentle wash to get all that glue out, which will no doubt make it all fall apart.In preparation for this (I struggle with monofilament to stop it coming unstitched- is that just me or everyone?) I have ironed some featherlight interfacing over the problem areas on the back. I should maybe handwash it but I'm not convinced it will get rid of the fabric glue- yes I didn't use glue stick because I couldn't find mine and I was being impatient!So anyway, this took over an hour just to square the sides up and get the thing flat. It then took 15 minutes to stick it to the wall without it falling down. THEN when I came down this morning it had fallen off again so balls to it, it's been folded with all the nasty pins sticking out of it, ready for when I confront it again. Fear not, it will be thread sketched as I quilt it to give it more detail where needed. Not sure about all of the patchwork at the bottom right now though, there's almost not enough negative space. Any thoughts on this would be most welcome.***In other news, have you noticed my blog looks a lot different? It's nowhere near finished, Matt is helping me sort out a much neater horizontal nav bar and I will be having links to my Etsy shops once I've actually put things in them, but what do you think so far? I think I will do a little fabric giveaway to celebrate "the new me" once it's all done. And some more free tutorials. Cos I want bazillions more followers as a result of all my hard work messing with custom CSS templates without really knowing what I'm doing :P***Dentist after work this evening and I feel like a zombie right now, plus work is painfully quiet and there's only so many games you can play on your phone to pass eight hours.  In quilt wrestling last night I neglected ran out of time to clean out the hedgehog so I will have to do that when he wakes up tonight too. Not good things.  However I am going to Nandos tonight which sort of semi makes up for it.