Ad's Birthday Quilt.

I took these photos last week but have only just remembered to blog them. When this quilt was presented to its new owner, my camera batteries died so I didn't get any shots of it finished, I was sewing the label on the back as we drove down to her house! Must say I was quite proud of my stippling, the flowers were fun to do, and I think you can just make out in the below photo, I "wrote" around the corners. "Happy Birthday Aunty Ad" and then all our names on the other corner.



It looks wavy here as I was trying to be a bit artistic taking the shots outside. Bumpy grass = bumpy quilt! Anyway, quilt no #2 finished and blogged for the year!

Four Seasons Dolls Quilt Progress

Well I have managed to squeeze 3 loads of washing and some dishes in the last 24 hours. But still worked madly on my 4 Seasons Dolls Quilt. I'm getting excitied! All my strips are coming together, its falling into place. I'm not following a pattern, sort of sewing a bit then lining it up, tweeking it. Does this say Spring to you??

WIP Wednesday - Week 11 - 3 projects!!

My house is a mess at the moment. Washing folded in the basket, waiting to be put away. Another 2 loads of washing sititng in the dirty clothes hamper. Dishes from last night sitting in the sink. The tiles needs a mop and the carpet needs a vacumn. The ironing! Don't even want to look at that basket! And the reason for all this household chaos? I have 3 WIP's on the go! 3!! I feel almost giddy! I'm usually a 1 WIP at the time sort of girl, don't even think about the next quilt till I am sewing down the binding of the current project.

A girlfriend's EDD has crept up on me sooner than realized so the other night I sewed these charm squares together. Just a simple, 6 rows of 6, I think the charms are 4.5 inches. A simple 2 inch border of fabric left over from this quilt and wolah, all ready to sandwich. Its just a quick little simple number, but the prints are sweet. From the Moda range, Sweet Baby Jane that I got back here in October.

And my squid eyes..... Well I have sewn a narrow 1 inch border of white and black around it, and now its just pinned up on the wall deciding what to do next. I'm torn between 3 options, a 4 or 5 inch plain white border with scattered dots over it in the same style as the squid eyes. Or maybe smaller squares with just two dots in each square. Or maybe just rectangles of the different red/black/white prints. Unsure. Going to have to do some sketching to see which would work the best.

And amungst all this, I thought it was time to start my 4 Season's Doll Quilt. I have done a cute little pencil sketch to remind me of the direction to take. I'm taking the above box of scraps and have cut and sewn them into strips. Thats all I'm revealling now.

Phew! A mammoth WIP Wednesday here. Hope all is going well in your sewing rooms too.

Dolls Quilt Swap call out.

It is on again! I remember last year admiring the quilts as they were arriving to their new homes and kicking myself that I didn't get involved. So call outs for round 3 has started. Details can be found at the flickr group here. About 20 people have signed up so far, its going to close at 50 people!

Happy Easter!

Not only can I create magic with fabric, I think I do alright with a sheet of cellophane, some sticky tape and fluffy chicks and a length of boa feather! As thats all it took to create Grace's easter bonnet for the school parade this year. Extra ticks for me for recycling the yellow boa feather from last year's bonnet!! This was constructed at 11pm the night before the parade, I was stapling that cellophane down with great determination to just finish the thing. She woke the next morning and was thrilled.

Happy easter everyone!

WIP Week 10 - Squid Eye quilt top progress.

Well, here we have all 9 blocks sewn together. Not the best of photos sorry, I took two and then my camera battery died, always the way hey? I trimmed the blocks down to 11.5 inches, so my seams are spot on exactly. Which feels nice that I am not out for a change!

I'm liking it so far, its working. And I think it will be staying in this house. Which will be also be a change. A lot of changes in the air in my sewing world at the moment. :)

Lost with a giant squid eye!

Must admit, I have felt a bit lost with my quilting recently, lacking some oomph. I look through other people's blogs in the evenings and see all sorts of beautiful, inspiring work and think how boring my quilts are. The two I have made this year were made with love and have gone to appreciative homes, but they just haven't been works of pizaaze. The work I am producing is nothing like the work I would like to be producing. I don't want to make quilts that are works of art, just quilts that are stunning and make you drool. I've been a reader of Sam's blog for awhile, and seeing these photo's the other night of this quilt of her's here and here, just got me thinking about it all. So I mulled over how stricking simplicity and effective colour can be combined, I think sometimes I try and make my quilts too colourful.

So I decided to stick to a few strong colours and have been leaning towards red, white and black lately, so out they came from the stash. There was an edition last year of Patchwork and Quilting that had a similar dot on square type quilt on the front cover and I remeber buying this copy without even opening the plastic to check out the rest of the mag to see if it was worth purchasing! I brought it on the wow factor of the cover alone. So suitably armed with that I set to work.

The background squares are 11.5 inches, so big! I think I used about 2 metres of vizeofix! Each circle has vizeofix (how do you spell that word!? I never know where to put the z or is it a x?!) on the back to hold it in place. When its assembled there is a lot of material underneath that isn't seen so I was a bit sneeky and cut another circle from those layers to keep as if it looks really cool I could make another or rather I was thinking of adding a boarder of smaller circles. The ones below are what I have put aside.

I felt terrible cutting into my precious Prints Charming black snowflake fabric. So new! But hey, its better being sewed into something than just sititng in my stash unseen, right?


I have made up 12 of these blocks, above are just two, its going to be 3 rows of 3. I'm going to do a simple blanket stitch around each circle in a matching thread colour. I have had them hanging on the design wall, I think they look like giant squid eyes! When I showed Daz, he commented that they look like giant bloodshot squid eyes! He did throw a WOW in before that, isn't he fab?!

I'm happy with how its looking so far and hopefully this little project will be the start of a path of pizaaze!

Milly's room!

I have had this on my "to do" list for ages, "hang quilts in Milly's room" and at last yesterday, I finally got to cross it off! Ages ago I sewed a pocket on the back of Corrie's fabulous dolls quilt organized through a swap with the EB Quilters, so thats the pale pink one above the blue bunny. Next to that on the the left is a painting done by a dear friend Ariane for her first birthday. The cow mirror I painted in my Feral Ceramic days. And the chook quilt I made back in the time before I blogged! It is a perfect cot size, but now she's in a big girls bed, well I had to find somewhere to hang it. So its a colourful corner of her room and yes, the walls are really that bright!

WIP Wednesday - Week 9 - Log cabin finshed! Mystery Quilt, nearly finished!

Two WIP's this week, go Helen! I have had this log cabin quilt for Grace's bed, all folded up with just the bottom row of little log cabins to sew on. So this week, I unfolded it, pinned it and sewed it! At last, finished! Its hard to photograph as its quite big, 128cms across by 210 cms long. I was thinking about a pink marble backing but after doing some searching on the net, I found this deep red paisley backing here. So once that arrives, off to the professional quilters for this one! Its too big for me to attempt to do it, so I'm going to get it professionally done, only the second time ever, sound be exciting to pick out the pattern!

And then with that one out the way, I turned my attention back to AJ's Mystery Quilt. I have sewn all the rows together. I'll admit, some of my seams are way out, and others match perfectly, how does one explain that?! I've drapped it over the ironing board to hide its imperfections! All it needs is the borders and I haven't any more of the Valori Wells print I used for my feature square, so I have just had to order a yard from the same place I got the above backing from. And just to fill up the satchel, I got some charm squares, just as a treat!

Our Trip to Sydney part 2 - Material!

Firstly, there are lots of photos in this post! I hope blogger is behaving and lets you see them all! Okay, Tuesday was the big day! The fabric shopping trawl/crawl!! Ingrid braved the buses into the city and meet us at our hotel where Cass came and picked us up. First stop was The Remnant Warehouse. *sigh* A lovely choice indeed. The girl cutting the fabric was really nice too, she was amazed that we had all meet on the net!

Ingrid asking Ads if I had taken the shot yet, was it safe to turn around??!

The girls pausing, still deciding.....

All of us holding up our wares! I seem to have a little pile but I got all the below fabric.

This is from Prints Charming. It is soooooo soft!

These FQ's and a few half a metres of Moda's Chez Moi range.

These FQ's from unsure, but at $12 for the 4 I wasn't leaving them there!

Then back in the car to Spotlight. No snaps of our adventures there. We do have SL in Perth of course but just wanted to go to s Sydney one! Same crazy, crap service across the county we noted! It was in a group of "discount shops" so we snapped up some bargains at Pumpkin Patch too! We had some lunch to recharge the batteries then off to Material Obsession. I've wanted to go to this shop ever since I discovered their blog. Their style is always a riot of colur, just love it! We were too caught up in all the lovely fabric to snap any photos of the buying action.

I brought half a metre each of these prints. And because I had been such a good shopper all day, I treated myself and brought this book from Kaffe Fassett. Lots of eye candy in there to make some stunning quilts with all my new material!

And that was the end of the day, only three shops, but we piled a lot in there! Cass then drove us back over the Harbour Bridge, I took these shots out the window of the car, feeling very much like a tourist. The bridge always amazes me. The whole toll charge thing still has me scratching my head, we don't have tolls in Perth.


I managed to get a parting shot of Ingrid as we dropped her off at her bus stop! And I know she is just going to kill me when she see's this shot! But I think its great! See ya soon Ingrid!

After we got back to our hotel that night, Ads and I spread all our fabric purchases out on the bed too ohhh and ahhh and Ads then declared, she didn't have enough! So we arranged the next day for the patient and lovely Cass to take us to the Craft Depo. And I got these metre lots from there. Prices were quite good here, ranged from $10 to $24.00. Of course we like the ones at the $10 end of the scale more, these ones were in the middle at $15 a metre.

We then spent our last night in Sydney at Cass's place for tea which was lovely, nice and relaxed, yummy meal and a great sing along to the Sound of Music! Can't wait till Cass comes to Perth so we can take her on a Perth version of a fabric trawl!


Then on Thursday lunchtime we flew home. This was the view from my seat on the plane, stunning view. It was a great trip. Fantastic to catch up with both old and new friends.

Our trip to Sydney! Meetings and Monorails!

We are back from Sydney! Flew back to Perth yesterday afternoon. After booking this trip in August last year, it seemed so far away and now its all over! It was such an action packed 5 days, I thought I'd better divide it into a few posts. So this is the first two days, meetings and monorails!

Our flight was very late departing, try 2 and a half hours late departing but thankfully the lovely and paitent Cass was still there at Sydney airport to pick us up! It was fantastic to meet her in real life after being blogging buddies for over a year and a half we worked out. She whisked us away to the Queen Victoria Building where we had High Tea here and where the equally as lovely and sweet Ingrid was waiting for us. Ingrid commented on my first ever blog post and we have been blogging buddies since. High tea was dainty sips of champagne, yummy tiny sandwiches and sweet treats. And of course real tea! We exchanged pressies, Cass made us these stunning bags, every time I carry it out, I get a comment of "where did you get that bag?" I'm working on Cass to enclose a dozen business cards in one of the pockets of each bag she makes, good idea??

Ingrid and I pausing in our tea.

Cass and Ad about to start their serving platter of goodies.

And afterwards we had a group shot taken, as you do! The girls made me sit on the chair!

Then on Monday I went on a train ride down south of Sydney and spent the day with a very dear old girlfriend Kelly and her children. Last time I saw Kel her daughter was 6 weeks old and Milly was a 2cm dot in my tummy. Time flies..... I get teary thinking about how far apart we live and how much we have missed out on each others children growning up from living at different ends of this country. Still, we had one lovely day together and will hopefully catch up again in a few more years. She used to live in Perth and we worked together in those crazy 1990's in the advertising and graphic design industry. She's always telling me to move to Sydney and I'm always telling her to move back to Perth!


After I arrived back in the city from visiting Kel, Ad and I set out for dinner. We ended up at this restaurant called Blackbird Cafe, in Cockle Bay. Ended up eating this pizza! MMMMMM! Pizza and beer! As we were sitting there we watched the monorail go by every few minutes, after our meal we thought, why not? So we put on our cheesy tourist grins and went around twice!



Then we went back to the hotel as Tuesday was the big fabric shopping day! This was the event we had travelled for! I'll pop back tomorrow and post photos of all the action!

Baby T's quilt finished.

We are back from sunny Sydney. *sigh* Crashed back to the reality of washing, school lunches, breaking up fights over Little Ponies, dishes, you know the drill! Also back to huge hugs, sloppy kisses and "I love you Mummy, do I have a present from Sydney??!"

I posted this quilt to its new owner last week before we left and it arrived safely while I was away so I can post photos now of it finshed. I have over 100 snaps to go through from our time away, and so much to tell, so am going to put a mammoth post over the weekend. Meanwhile ohhh and ahhh over how cute Baby T is. I love this label more than the quilt maybe, it looked great I thought. Printed onto fabric that you run through the bubblejet printed, amazing quality.