Playing with my stash

I'm back to doing what I love the most - playing with my stash.
I like nothing better than to sit on the floor in my sewing room, search out my fabric and play. I love finding fabrics that work together. It takes time, partly to find what I'm looking for as I'm not a very organised person, and partly because each stack evolves. I add fabric, I cull it, and it's so satisfying.

My latest playtime produced


a possible wall hanging for BP's room.

and

the beginnings of a baby quilt for a boy.

Quite often nothing eventuates from my playtime, but I don't mind, it's just nice to be able to play.

Starflowers are coming along too..........slowly but I'm making progress.


I'm now trying to sew in pieces individually or in small groups to make it easier to attach. I gave up making a star and then adding it as it was very difficult. I wish I'd thought of this sooner. This piece will slot into the gap on the bottom left hand side in the photo below.

The papers in the back are becoming more and more crumpled as it has become bigger and I'm working on it.  I've pressed it a couple of times but it's a losing battle and I've pulled some of the papers out already but honestly it's almost easier with them left in. I'm just going to put up with it until I finish it. I am loving how it looks though. Can't wait to show you the finished panel.

Keeping it simple

I've been slaving over WIP's on and off for weeks.  Working hard on two swaps, which I've finished, yay, and I just needed to make something that wouldn't take too long and didn't need much brain power. A change of pace to quick and easy.

Sorry, bad lighting, it's much brighter in real life.

The change of pace involves 1 metre (just over a yard) of this seriously cute flannel by Valori Wells for Free Spirit, some luscious baby pink Heath binding and a search through my stash.

Stay tuned.

Favourite Things Friday

This week my favourite thing is that I sorted out my fabric stash.

I bought some lots of Samla tubs from my favourite shop Ikea and used them to contain my ever growing stash of fabric that was threatening to take over every horizontal surface in the house.

           

These contain mostly half yards and fat quarters.
It took a few hours to contain it all, well most of it.  I have squeezed all my solids into the cupboard that most of these were in and I have a shelf in the study where I keep yardage (anything over a metre) and I also have a big plastic bin where I store my scraps.
I now know I have lots and lots of pink and yellow/greens, not very much purple and hardly any blue.

The cupboard isn't exactly tidy, but at least all my bits and pieces fit in here, solids, a couple of boxes of threads, and one of ribbons and notions, some doilies and boxes of fabric that I'm using in WIP's. I now have a nice clear side board in the dining area, and a spare bed that I can see.

Now I just have to find somewhere to store my ever growing piles of WIP's and UFO's.

As usual I'm linking up with Shay at  Quilting In My Pyjamas  who is hosting FTF. Check out all the other favourites this week.

Love

I love polka dot binding.

Friday Night Sew In

Check out Handmade By Heidi for other FNSI participants.

Friday night, and I sat down with my seam ripper, a pair of tweezers and a pin, to start unpicking  10 "circles of doom" on the Champagne and Strawberries quilt.

It's the raw edge circle quilt, pattern from Cluck Cluck Sew that I started some time ago and began free motion quilting a few weeks ago. The original plan was for a circle pattern on the circles but after I started I didn't like it because I quilted it too heavily and I think I'm going to change the pattern to circles/bubbles within the circles, after all the quilt is called Strawberries and Champagne. The pic below is probably one of the better ones, I'm too embarrassed to show the worst ones.

I unpicked one on Thursday night and it took me an hour, that's why they are now nicknamed the circles of doom.  So Friday evening, four hours later, I had unpicked three more circles. I really really dislike doing this, but I'll dislike the quilt even more if I don't do it. As someone pointed out to me, now that I've unpicked four, I'm over 33% of the way through. At least I can do it sitting in front of the tv, not that I can watch the tv as I'm too scared that I'll cut a hole in the quilt top, but I can listen to the programme.

I took a break from unpicking and went through my stash to find eight orange fabrics for the next block in the Monochromatic Challenge. I've also picked out the embroidery pic for the centre of the block, sorry,  you will have to wait for that to be unveiled at the end of the month.

So not much sewing, in fact no sewing, but I made a dent in the number of circles to be unpicked and I'm that much closer to it being finished.

Tuesday ?

I need a change, I think ADD is kicking in again, I'm over Tuesday Tidbits. Umm........ no I'm not over the idea of Tuesday Tidbits, I'm just over the title. I've been thinking on and off for a few weeks to change the title but can't come up with anything that sounds interesting and possibly slightly flaky, because we all know I don't take myself at all seriously.
I really like having a post each week where I can post about lots of little things happening at Chez Sunshine that don't necessarily need a whole post to themselves. So if anyone out there can come up with an interesting and of course extremely witty title, please feel free to help me out. Sorry no give aways in it for you.  I did say feel free!  :P

This week has been busy at Chez Sunshine. To cut a long story short, I'm having the wardrobes in my bedroom and Bitchypoo's bedroom re-vamped.  I was told that they wouldn't be able to fit them until the end of this week, possibly next week. We had a phone call Friday to say that they would be able to come on Tues and Wed, that's today and tomorrow. Panic ensued at Chez Sunshine as we realised the enormity of having to remove 12 years of accumulated crap in our wardrobes.  Saturday was already booked up and Bitchypoo works Saturdays so Sunday we spent taking everything out of our wardrobes and putting them into piles - rubbish, give away, and keep.  It was a very cathartic experience as I do tend to hoard. I keep lots of stuff  - just in case. Hopefully I will never get bad enough to star on an episode of The Hoarders.

While I was on a roll, throwing things out, I made inroads into the linen cupboard as well. The above pic is what came out of there, (not what my house looks like normally with piles of crap everywhere, I'm not quite that bad yet.)

This is a before shot of my wardrobe, well technically it's a before the wardrobe was revamped shot, as it's definitely NOT before I took most of my crap out of there.

On to far more exciting things.

Yesterday I had a lovely day at Patchwork Angel. Jenny was running a class on a quilt "French Roses".

I'll post pics of that in my next post.

Last night I made myself sew on the binding to dad's quilt. Today I'm I was going to start the hand sewing to finish the binding, but it's stinking hot here, it's possibly one of the warmest days we've had this year. I just checked the thermometer out on the verandah and it's showing 36C (97F), so much for being Autumn. 

Trying to think about Autumn in this heat, here's the fabrics I've gathered so far for the Autumn in Paris quilt. I find that my fabric choice changes as I progress on the quilt, I like to see how it's going and sometimes I add more and sometimes I take some away as they just don't look quite right.  That's what I find exciting when using lots of different designs and fabric ranges from my stash rather than sticking with the one range. If you have any trouble in trying to pick what "goes" together it's always safe to use fabrics from the same range as the designer has already done the hard work for you, but if you like to try to choose your own, the fabulously brilliant Kerry from VeryKerryBerry has guest posted on Lily's Quilts on how to choose fabric.

P.S. Still haven't heard from George, yet.

Tuesday tidbits

The last few months have seen natural disasters one after the other, in the last week the scenes of devastation in Japan have been heart wrenching. My thoughts go out to all of the people both in Christchurch and Japan who have suffered from such terrible destruction and the end of life as they knew it.  I am hoping the future will bring hope and renewal for them.

I'd like to let you all know I am still in one piece and have had no further injuries despite going back to aquarobics, twice.  Unless you count getting water in my ear and having a little discomfort with that last night. Keep your fingers crossed that I survive for a few more weeks!

This is where I go to aquarobics.  We use the pool at the back of the photo. They're replacing the sails on the children's pool in the foreground so there is a lot of construction happening at the moment.  I'll take photos when it's all finished.

This isn't a pic of me or any of the people that I know.

Now for some mail that arrived.

Make Life by Sweetwater from Quilt This.

Lots of books from the Book Depository.

Not that I'm going to be making anything from any of these any time soon as I have a list of projects a mile long, but these are great for inspiration, and learning new techniques. Good bed time reading!

Finally this gorgeous picture on the front of the New Zealand Quilter magazine,  It's a great photo, the sky, the dress, the colours in the quilt and the car.

Larkspur lilac

This is what I've been up to this weekend.
Do you remember these?

I've been cutting into them and working on a design, the one that was in my head and scribbled in my note book. Some of these made the cut, a few were shown the door and some more added.

A little fussy cutting here and there.

Excuse the loose thread.






It's coming together nicely. Pieces for 25 blocks cut,  12 blocks sewn, 1 row finished (to see if I was on the right track. I think I am.)

Tuesday trumpets, not just tidbits! (and tails)

I have to tell you that I am so very proud of my "baby" (Bitchypoo). She finished Year 12 last year and applied to a number of tertiary education providers to continue with her studies and she was accepted into her first choice. 

Woo hoo. Way to go !!!!!

Even though she was accepted, she has decided to take a gap year this year. I think it is a wise decision as it would have meant moving to Brisbane to study and I don't think she is quite ready to make the big move yet. There's also a complication with moving to Brisbane now, as due to the recent flooding, rental and share properties are in very short supply and it would have been insanely difficult to find accommodation. So she is going to be staying here for another year, working part time and doing some short courses of interest to her.

How time flies!

After my post on Saturday about finding it hard to be productive on the sewing front and spending way too much time enjoying all things bloggy, I woke up on Sunday aiming to spend the morning sewing. The weather helped, as it was cool, well cool for here anyway, (which probably means warm to very warm in the rest of the world), overcast and not too humid. A perfect sewing day.

I started off with a jelly roll of this from the Fat Quarter Shop

Some co-ordinating fabric picked up at one of my local quilting shops, Patchwork Angel.

I didn't use the fabric at the bottom as I thought it looked a bit too "dirty" once I had all the fabrics together, and found a clearer duck egg blue in my stash as an alternative. The chenille is for the back.


Add in some inspiration from here.

It quickly became this

which grew - aren't these just too cute

and grew to this

This part was the tricky bit. I have never done sashing before, or corner stones or blocks on point. 

Fortunately for me the Quilt Pro programme was very useful at this stage, even though I really didn't have a clue what I was doing. I mean that, I was flying by the seat of my pants. I made the block and designed the quilt in the programme by sheer luck, not genius, after I had already pieced and sewn a few blocks. 


I would show you the design here but I can't work out how to get it into blogger, grrrrrrrr.


Quilt Pro came in handy when I needed to find out if I had enough of the yellow It's a Hoot fabric for the sashing, and when it came to working out how to do the triangle thingy bits, (technical term), around the outside. I was originally going to do solid triangle thingy bits but as I had no idea how to use the programme I couldn't change the blocks that had already been placed in the quilt design. I also had no idea how to work out the template/size of the triangles to fit so I eventually decided to go with what I had accidentally designed and just followed the pic when making the triangles, and miraculously it worked.


So after all that, I finished it this morning and here it is

and I have to say I think it's pretty darn good for a first attempt at sashing, corner stones, and blocks on point. I was........ loving myself sick..........., this morning when I finished it. Woo hoo I'm on fire!!!!

If I was to do it again I think I would have attempted a more 3D look to it, but as I had already made a number of blocks before I worked out I could do that, and I hate unpicking unnecessarily I didn't go down that road this time.

Lulu doing what she loves, just hanging around!

Any screen door will do.

Tuesday tidbits (and tails)

Another two of my orders arrived this week. The first one, I had been looking for some yardage of Pashmina for some time and thanks to Shay who was so kind in helping me spend my money by directing me to Quiltshops.com where I found these gorgeous prints. I don't have a project in mind for these but I love the designs so will add them to my stash.

I also saw and ordered these fabulous brights before the end of the year, Sugar Pop these came from Pink Chalk Fabrics along with some solids, no photo of those! So these definitely don't count as fabric purchases for 2011!

Whilst I was emptying out my bank account to keep the world's economy kicking along I also bought this, on sale, yay. Quilt-Pro 5 for Macintosh.

It came in the mail today, I've yet to load it and play with it but expect fabulous designs from me in the future. On second thoughts don't expect anything, I'd be kidding myself if I thought this was going to make me any more productive.  At least it should be fun designing things, much better than scribbling on graph paper and trying to work out mathematical stuff in my head.

I've slowly been working on the crochet, no photos yet, and I finished the top of my dad's quilt.

Sorry the photos aren't the best i was planning to take them this afternoon but we had a thunderstorm and then drizzle for the next couple of hours so I had to take them late in the day and the light wasn't the best.

I'm really happy with this one. It's not fabric I would normally choose for my father but they asked for something to match this quilt I made for my mum. So here it is, now I just have to make the backing. I HATE making the backing for quilts. Yes that is a strong word to use but I really really don't like making them.

A slightly blurry shot of the boy, he wouldn't keep still for a photo, but I love that look on his face, look at those big sad eyes.  Every photo we took of him this week was either blurry or only part of him made it into the shot.

I woke him up, he wasn't happy, not that you can tell, and he has bed head fur.


Oh, and thanks very much RAF.